Free A Tiny Bit Marvellous by Dawn French Page A

Herculean attempt is in progress, that she is really trying, in her own reluctant, grumpy way, to take part in life. To invite herself in from the cold. To include herself. From our point of view, this is a seismic shift and we are hanging out the bunting to celebrate. In fact, I decided to make some bunting myself and send it to the rather sardonic Mr King, her Head of Year, to encourage him to also celebrate her astonishingly few attendances rather than admonish her for her failure-fuelled withdrawals.
    So finally here we are, in her last year, and Dora has given up the fighting and is much more engaged. Better late than never. I sort of wish she could start again at Year 7 and this time believe that school isn’t a hell where demons perpetually prod you with hot irons called SATs. Or exams. Or coursework. Coursework has replaced leggings at number two in my list entitled ‘Things that are unnecessary, evil and plain wrong’.
    Anyway, enough bile. Dora’s Parents’ Evening was the usual joyless standing about, waiting your turn to be slightly patronized by a series of various Gorgons and dragons. Of course, for me in particular, there is always an added pressure. I am a kid-shrink. They teach kids. It goes one of two ways:
    Their utter delight and schadenfreude about the fact that I have an imperfect kid. A kid I can’t ‘save’ or ‘treat’. They savour that. That’s a lovely chewy treat.
    OR
    They feel threatened by my analysis of the way they misunderstand my kid. In other words, they think I can psychobabble my way up my own arse. They believe I overthink my kid and her problems.
    Probably a bit of both is quite accurate, but a lot is NOT. When it comes to Dora and Parents’ Evenings, I am just her mum, and that’s what renders me helpless with emotion. I can’t bear for her to be attacked. I definitely take it too personally, because I see the effect their careless undermining has, and I feel it for her.
    It wasn’t as bad as it’s been before. The usual lemon lips and rather pitying tone from most, but they had to acknowledge that she was putting in more effort than before to the A levels. The labyrinthine complicatedness of deciding which subject to do only ’til AS level, and which to continue on with totally baffles me, as it does every other parent.
    Eventually Husband and I were both repeating the simple phrase ‘I see’ just to make them stop explaining. We don’t ‘see’ at all. Dora and the teachers will have to make those decisions. As long as she keeps up her art and gets the grades she needs to get into the uni she fancies, I don’t mind. Currently she is thinking of going to Manchester Metropolitan to do Food Tech. That’s fine by me. Cooking. Yes please. At home, she has only ever made one omelette – with an unfortunate anchovy filling – but if she thinks this is her destiny, so be it.
    The five-minute window we had with her music teacher was revealing.
    ‘Hi there, Mr and Mrs …’
    He looked down at his list, scanning furiously:
    ‘Battle. Ah yes, the lovely Dora. What a friendly, very musically talented girl.’
    Husband chipped in with, ‘Yes. We think so.’
    I shot him a do-shut-up glance, which worked.
    ‘This term, Dora’s set have been asked to compose an original song. Dora was slightly late with hers but she did do it. So let’s not forget a big hurray for that. Hurray!’
    We were transfixed by the sheer optimism of the chap.
    ‘Admittedly the song is a tiny bit … how should I put it folks? … erm … bland. Yes, a bit, generic, with lots of “ooo baby’s” in it, like they do, ha ha, erm, but it certainly shows promise, so a big whoa for that. Whoa! Yes, bags of promise, that is, until verses two and three, which go as follows:
    Sweet dreams are made of this
    Who are we to disagree?
    Travel the world and the seven seas
    Everybody’s looking for something.
    Some of them want to use you
    Some of them want to get used by you
    Some of them want to abuse