So I am in lockdown with a teenager.
You should have a little bit of background history here. She is almost 16, but I have been separated from her father for most of her life. She lives with me, rushing up to her bedroom at washing-up time to do her homework, and dashing off to see her father in a nearby village just when the weekend house-cleaning chores begin. Her ability to dodge any system imposed on her is worthy of her Basque smuggling ancestry; for almost all of the Basque mountain people in these parts were into smuggling in one way or the other. But that is another story. She is, however, a ‘good girl’ and a good student which makes her particularly difficult to nail down.
But she has been nailed.
Now, it is just the two of us in lockdown, nowhere to go and excuses run thin. After we have littered the house with tufts of hair and broken teeth she has, finally, buckled in and started to help. (Please read poetic license into the past lines and do not call the social services, not that they (like courier drivers or police cars) would be able to find the house in any case!).
She has learned to cook, and we have had some OK meals, even some good ones, and with this we have reinforced the concept of ‘reaping what one sows’. As I envisaged long, lonely nights of cleaning up the carnage in her wake, I managed to incorporate ‘the cleaning of kitchen surfaces’ into the cook’s duties, and hence slipped in the lesson of ‘you make your own bed and you lie in it!’. My sweetheart has also started to make the odd biscocho and, with great excitement, we awaited the results. However, another ‘emergency’ phone call with her boyfriend rather diverted her attention and, as she scraped layers of its charred carcass into the bin, there was definitely a whiff of the ‘don´t count your chickens before they hatch’.
She has also started mowing the lawn for the first time, which has become her bi-weekly chore. And, surprisingly, she actually enjoys it (I secretly suspect it is because she can put on her headphones and avoid me and earn a brownie point at the same time). Having encouraged her to give the lawn a quick trim yesterday before the rains began, rather than waiting another week and some 40 cm more of growth, I am sure she will soon be realising the advantages of a ‘stitch in time saves nine’ or even a touch of the ‘make hay while the sun shines’.
Now school has started up again this week, the homework excuse has been dusted and polished once again but, at some point, and to her great delight, I will sneak in some window cleaning chores for her to enjoy. As we all know, window cleaning is not just a matter of spraying large amounts of product at the glass, and actually demands a fair amount of elbow grease, (well mine do .. maybe because I hardly ever clean them), so it will be a wonderful opportunity to introduce the adage ‘no pain no gain’.
I am now trying to find another household task to teach the wisdom of ‘a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush’ so, please, any ideas are most welcome. And, talking about birds, when I got up this morning, some 6 hours before her pale Basque skin saw first light, I did spy the last of the strawberries in the fridge – and an opportunity to reinforce ‘the early bird catches the worm’!
But I didn’t. I left them for her.
Actually, we are both happier now, and those bald patches on her scalp are growing back nicely 😊. She always knew that she should pull her weight a little more and she is now living in congruence with her own core values, and it shows.
At night we curl up together on the sofa in front of the TV and, as her patience with the remote control is far better than my own, we only really get to see what she wants to see. At the moment we are watching the horrifically bloody serial of The Vikings, which means I spend most evenings with a blanket over my head, peering out occasionally between one massacre and the next.
But I don’t mind. It means I have a whole wonderful hour sitting on the sofa, cuddling her feet.
