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CHILDHOOD WORRIES - A DARKER PLACE? We are on the move. At last! We've been trying to sell this house for ages, intending to return to Australia. Our current intentions are to rent in England for another six to twelve months and then go Home! In the midst of the excitement we didn't really stop to think about the short-term effects on the children. We knew that moving is always hard for children, but we were confident that it would happen easily enough. Tamsin was only six months old the last time we moved, and I doubt if she even noticed. We are prepared for Angus to be a bit funny about the changes, but given his age we rather hoped that they would just fit in with the general toddler problems and not cause any extra worries. It never occurred to us that Tamsin would be particularly affected. We have talked about going back to Australia for ages, probably for most of the time that she will remember. We have always made much of the fact that it's where her grandparents and cousins live. The thought of moving to a rented house for a while worried me a bit, but more because we weren't sure that we would be able to find anything in the town we live in now. I was more worried about moving to another town and having to move her to another school for six months. As it turns out, we are considering two possibilities here, both of which would mean that she could stay at the same school and see her friends. She is particularly keen on one of the houses, so that's all right. And she seems excited about going to Australia, and keeps talking about the airplane, and about her grandparents and cousins. So we were a bit slow to pick up what was happening when she started wetting the bed. Tamsin is five. Admittedly she was a bit slow on the uptake when it came to being dry at night, but she's been fine for a year or so, with of course the very occasional accident. Now it has happened a few times, and not just at night. Eventually I realized that something might be going on, and tried to talk to her. We are always very calm and matter-of-fact about accidents, and never tell her off, so they were being dealt with as they happened. The trouble with five-year-olds is that it's easy to lead the witness. They often don't answer an abstract question, and in order to extract information from them, you run the risk of planting ideas into their heads of what you want them to say. Asking Tamsin if she was worried about anything produced nothing other than that she was worried about wetting the bed. I reassured her that we weren't cross, and that it happened sometimes. I stopped short of saying that we did it too, though! She often wants to know if the same things happen to us as happen to her, but I drew the line at that one! It was, eventually, like getting blood from a stone, but I got her to admit that she was worried about going to Australia and leaving her friends behind and having to make new ones. Tamsin is extraordinarily good at making friends, and I cannot actually imagine that she will have a problem in this regard. She is confident, outgoing, talkative, and relates well to everyone, older, younger or the same age. She is everything I wasn't at the same age! I know that she will be all right in the long run, but she doesn’t know that, and that's the problem right now. I have a big advantage over Graham when it comes to dealing with this particular situation. My parents upped sticks and moved out to Australia from England when I was just seven. So for once I really can say, truthfully, that I know exactly how she feels. However, I know that she will cope even better than I did. I managed well, I made some friends quickly enough and was very happy in my school. Tamsin has the advantage over me in several ways. She is innately good at making friends, where I was shy. We know lots of people in Australia and she will be introduced to lots of cousins and friends, not necessarily destined to become her own best friends, but at least people to know. My parents knew no-one and remained very snobbishly English for many years, not mixing a great deal, so we had no social life as a family. The trouble with childhood, at least one of them, is that adults know that everything will be all right. A child cannot know that, because the adult's grasp of the future is based on extrapolation from known facts and experiences. The well of childhood fears is a very deep and dark place. We have all been there, but how many of us can remember what it is like? I can, if I try very hard, but the concentration required is so intense that I forget it all when I am juggling my daily life. I find myself saying to Tamsin that everything will be all right, because I know that it will, but I know that she doesn't have the experience to know that. The best that I can hope is that she will trust me enough to believe that I know what I'm talking about. Grimms Fairy Tales have long been popular with children because they are so scary and dark and, well, grim. I remember a copy I had when I lived in England, just before we emigrated. It had a dark red cover and a black picture on the cover, a sort of silhouette effect, of goblins and witches. It was terrifying, but it was fun to be terrified. I haven’t thought about it for years, but now that Tamsin's fear is bringing my old fears up to the surface again, I can remember how scary it was and how I associated it with what was going on in my life at that time. We must never denigrate a child's fear, whether it is based on solid fact or childish fantasy. One of Tamsin's cousins would not sleep in his own room when they moved to a house big enough for the three children to have a room each. He needed his older brother in there with him, to scare off the monster chickens that frightened him every night. It sounds hilarious, but I expect that David and Lloyd found the experience as real as anything else in their lives.
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