Of course people don't mean to be nosey and insensitive. But this stuff does get to you, and it's important to let off steam about it sometimes. I'm sure I've said stuff just as duff myself, probably still do, but that doesn't mean that we and our children should just endlessly suck up without occasionally offering the odd bit of feedback.
OK, so here's my whinge. I live in a very, very undiverse area (as you know, Kew, it's like the Truman Show come to life). The other mums at school are a lovely bunch, but I do feel very aware of the multiple ways my family is different to theirs. So you can imagine how excited I was to discover some other lesbian mums who are adopting a sibling group who will be at my dd's school. She won't be the only one anymore! Anyway, they told me a funny story about what happened when they met the headmaster and asked him if there were any other lesbian mothers at the school. I was just telling this story to a couple of my schoolgate friends when another mum - a really, really nice woman, which made it worse - jumped down my throat and started demanding why on earth was I going on about this and what did it matter and why did I want to make my child so different.
She had actually misunderstood what I had been saying, but it was really hard to get her to stop going on at me because she thought I was saying the head should have been telling her proudly about my dd, whereas all I was doing was laughing at how everyone involved in the conversation was squirming with discomfort.
She did make big efforts to make it ok afterwards. And she is a lovely woman so I'm prepared to give her many benefits of the doubt. But I felt shaken. I suppose it made me think that I skate on quite a thin layer of acceptance. and that others may see my rainbow family as this Thing that I Go On About, and what do I think makes me so special etc. Whereas actually I think I bend quite far to make them all feel comfortable with me. Sometimes too far. When my eldest started school, and when my youngest started pre-school, I raised with the teachers the issue of their family background, thinking there would be some (brief) discussion of what this might mean. In both cases, the subject was dismissed, and I accepted that, but I think now I shouldn't have. And things get said all the time that I do just grin and bear - like another, very nice, woman recently made a couple of jokes about my 'PC child with her PC doll'. I was so tempted to turn round and say, "This is not a PC child. She is a black child. She is my child. And she has a black doll. What part of that is a problem for you?" But I wussed out. And it feels hard when all that biting my lip just doesn't seem to buy me any slack, that I'm still accused of special pleading the minute something gets misunderstood.
That was a really long and self-pitying whinge. It made me feel better. Now, has anybody read 'Cheer up your teddy bear, Emily Brown'? Genius book. It's about this miserable, self-pitying teddy who responds to every effort to cheer her up by moaning this refrain:
"Pooooooor ME.... poooooooor ME......
Poor little sad little wet little ME
I'm a lonely only bear and I'm feeling very blue,
I've got no teddy friends and there's nothing here to do,
I'm bored and it's raining and raining is no fun,
There are no other teddybears, I'm the lonely only one."
EVERYBODY in my family - even the 2yo - has taken this up as our mantra when we're feeling sorry for ourselves. It never fails to turn a whinge into a laugh.