If your heart sank
I’d gladly walk the plank
and dive 5 fathoms
into your sea of troubles
- John Hegley
This Amy and her best friend Cameron. He was born on the same day as her, in the same hospital. Kerry and Sam, Cameron’s mother, were in opposite beds in the recovery ward and struck up a friendship that has lasted to this day.
Cameron aside, there was a time when Amy found it very difficult to make friends. The will was there but the social skills were not. She would stand on the outskirts of groups of children, looking longingly at them jumping, laughing and playing but never making the steps necessary for her to be invited to join them.
These days she is quite the social animal. Whenever I drop her off at nursery she is always enthusiastically greeted by a small tornado of little girls. Kerry is able to identify individuals within this maelstrom, but all I can see is a bewildering array of pink and hair bobbles. Similarly she has a number of friends in her baby ballet class, from Kerry’s old ante-natal group, and the children of various friends of ours.
While I am overjoyed that she no longer feels the pangs of loneliness, sometimes her newfound sociability can be a little frustrating.
Our house is on a private street/drive we share with 15 other houses. This provides a wonderfully safe environment for kids to ride bikes and kick a ball around, with very little risk from traffic or random passers by. There are no other children of Amy’s age actually living here, but there are a number who frequently visit grandparents or aunts and uncles on the street.
We live right at the end of the terrace and so whenever we drive up or down it Amy gets an eagle eye view of any child related activity going on. At the first sign of Owen peddling furiously on his tricycle, or Eve trundling her dolls up and down the street, Amy is demanding to be allowed to play with them with all the conviction and skill of a highly paid lawyer.
Invariably this results in either Kerry or I having to stand outside for two hours supervising her while making stilted small talk with whomever is watching over her playmate. This isn’t too bad for Kerry, who is yet to meet the person she isn’t able to have a lively conversation with. But for a socialphobe such as myself it is pure torture.
I try not to let Amy pick up on my shyness, the last thing I want is for her to feel the anxiety that I do when faced with people I don’t really know. Fortunately it looks like Amy has inherited her sociability genes from her mother. It is my theory, taken from careful observation of four generations of females in Kerry’s family, that each generation is precisely half as talkative as the one previously.
So by my careful calculation I have worked out that the husband of Amy’s granddaughter may one day be able to get a word in edgeways.
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Dudelet is the same – chat, chat, chat…I empathise with the excrutiation (is that a word?) though – I have the same issue at the football group we sometimes take him to (“So. Chelsea fan?” Blank look of uncomprehending horror on my part. Ah – the shirt. But it’s a German shirt a friend gave us? “You know, Ballack? Chelsea?” Huh?). My boss is a football fanatic who’s promised to give me a cribsheet for next time. If there’s a next time. Dudelet did his father’s genes proud though. He put the ball back in the pram, got in it, refused to get and demanded to go for icecream.
I’m told the real torture kicks in at school…