If The Powers That Be Can’t Behave, How Can We Be Expected To?!

My three-year-old decided to show off how much pasta he could fit in his mouth during a family meal out last weekend and promptly gagged forcing him to throw up. Over the table. In front of about 5 other dining families… While the young couple next to us switched places with each other, I assume (and don’t blame her) so that the woman wouldn’t have to keep looking at the toddler who was now sitting in just a nappy (eating again), pretty much everyone else turned a blind eye and no one said a thing. Almost like it didn’t happen, like for the rest of the meal I could pretend I didn’t have a hand-bag full of restaurant napkins, clothes and vomit under my chair. I can only assume they were all parents and therefore understood!

Once you have children you become accustomed to the feeling of wanting the ground to open and swallow you whole and though it’s not ideal, when they’re little it kind of has to be accepted because that’s how kids learn. They make mistakes, embarrass the heavens out of us, we teach them how to do things better and then the next time… Well, when they’re three perhaps not the very next time, but eventually, you catch my drift…

It’s good to muck up when we’re little, far better to get those lessons under the carpet before they really matter, before they mean something, before the whole restaurant runs full pelt out the door in revulsion at such behaviour. So we accept bad behaviour from children as we should (often with a hiss, “what were you thinking?” and a “silly boy!”) with grace, humour, love and acceptance and a smidge of annoyance because we’re only human as we clean them up, turn them around and set them off to try again. A great teacher friend of mine has a board in her classroom for all the “wrong work.” She says if you’re not making mistakes then you’re not learning so she likes to celebrate, highlight, laugh and discuss. That sounds like great learning to me, great teaching and parenting all in one. She holds them accountable in an age appropriate way without shaming them and uses their experience to guide them going forwards!

Hopefully, by the time we make it to being adults we pretty much know how to behave, we’ve done enough learning and by the time we start to teach others we should have enough mistakes under our belt to make us really good at being the authority. Always learning of course but hopefully not doing anything too disastrous. Stakes are higher after all, people far less willing to forgive, no less forget once we’ve grown. The consequences are much steeper. We don’t, and we shouldn’t, accept terrible behaviour from adults in the way we do children because we know that by “now” they should have learned.

However, the powers that be in our government, the leaders, the people we are supposed to look up to and keep learning from (even as grown-up voting adults), don’t seem to have got the memo about how to behave themselves. One particular of our leaders behaved perhaps criminally. We then look to see how the person who needs to show backbone and give a good example has dealt with it all and I think we are all shocked and appalled.

A government member who’s made a mockery of our laws by not following his own rules? Well that would be Hancock. The supposedly responsible person is of course Johnson. And in Johnson’s world there certainly is no expulsion, he doesn’t even have a board of “wrong work”, he’s far more a sweep-the-vomit-into-a napkin-and-try-to-pretend it’s not there disciplinarian and while that works for a threen-ager, I’m sure it has insulted all of us who do stick to the rules and ruined trust in his government.

 You see trying to get away with vomming all over the dining table of a restaurant when you’re three isn’t really trying to get away with anything. It’s just learning. But if you’re the prime minister, you really need to keep your regurgitation of unsavoury behaviour at bay, because otherwise you can’t be trusted to be a leader in life at all!

I easily cleaned out the bag I kept under my chair last weekend and my boy probably won’t make that mistake again. I’m glad I’m not in charge of cleaning the bag of sick owned by the PM though, as I’m not sure there’s a dry cleaner in the world who could get those stains out. Of course if his reaction had been to show everybody in his government how to properly behave from the start, getting rid of the dirt immediately, then they might have come out better.

As it is, we are left with just a nasty smell of the most unpleasant kind.