Play me a tune. Photo: Thinkstock Source: news.com.au
There's a beautiful sound in our house - a riff of soft strumming, snaking down the hall and into the kitchen where I stand rolling meatballs.
Then a song: I belong with you, you belong with me, you're my sweetheart.
Either The Lumineers have moved into our front bedroom or my daughter has taught herself to sing. I dry my fingers and find her cross-legged on the bed, leaning over a ukulele that, hitherto, has served as a science project into dust particle accumulation.
"Play it again," I urge. "And sing. You're so clever."
"Er, Mum, no disrespect to the band, but it's only four chords."
My child is clearly gifted. I should have known. Her grandfather was a chorister at Eton - well, until his voice broke. Her aunt is the mellifluous voice of the BBC and her Dad sings in the shower. Damn, I've been raising the next Adele and I've failed to notice. Infuriatingly, she's already 12. And they've canned Young Talent Time.
What? You didn't realise? Yes, I'm a tiger mum – the only one in the country, apparently, since no one else will own up. Those classes full of kids doing Kumon? "I use them for babysitting while I nip through Coles," one mother tells me. The eight gymnastics sessions a week? "Oh, Seraphina's got to burn her energy off somewhere."
I call them the cheater, sorry, cheetah mums because, as I discovered during the mammal project (we got an excellent), cheetahs do not roar. Unlike the big cats, cheetahs only purr. They are the stealthy version of the tiger mums, advancing their children through secret tutoring and 6am jogging sessions in the lead up to the athletics carnival. "Oh Josh darling, what a surprise," they feign when the ten-year-old in his box-fresh Skins takes out the 200 metres. Except Josh has told his mates about the training. And the mates have told their mums.
Anyway, tiger or cheetah, it's time to fess up because only by acknowledging you're a hard-driving, over-invested, talent-grooming mum can you see how moronic that is.
Me first: She was our first and I only wanted the best for her. In spite of the questionable gene pool, she seemed reasonably co-ordinated. So, of course, we fostered her talent: Gymbaroo, Nippers, swimming lessons and some bonkers $200-a-term music lessons half way across town which we could have replicated with some pots at home.
"She's very good," said the swimming coach, stirring a pride within me that felt as unsavoury as it was beguiling. I could see how effortlessly her skin slid through water, but my child was telling a different story: "Just because I'm good at it, doesn't mean I like it."
Then she overheard another parent offer her child $50 to break her personal best. Disgust rolled like thunder over my daughter's innocent face.
She gave up swimming. Fortunately, there was a panoply of other activities to excel at. So I drove her – in both senses of the word - to zone, regional, state. She seemed happy enough but everything felt frantic, squeezed; we weren't a family, we were a schedule. There was no time for normal childhood chores; no larking with the hose.
Then therapist Lori Gottlieb's article How To Land Your Kid In Therapy dropped like a face slap into my inbox. Lines jumped out: "Our children are not our masterpieces" and "parental overinvestment is contributing to a burgeoning generational narcissism that's hurting our kids".
Gottlieb was seeing a new generation of kids who felt lost and unsure of themselves despite having loving and encouraging parents. "What if the parents," she asked, "are too attuned? What happens to those kids?"
That was more than a year ago. You've never seen a tiger back off faster. My daughter, I now know, will love what she will love. Every day she plays that ukulele; every day she sings. She's seen the school note about the choir; she knows they're going to Rome in 2016.
But, for now, she wants neither stage nor showcase - just to be a girl in her bedroom singing a song. I don't know where I belong. But I can write a song. It softens the whole house; draws smiles out of all of us. Ho Hey.
Find Angela Mollard on Twitter: @angelamollard
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