The Truth About The Deep Blue Sea

We've all had those moments (haven't we?) where, unwittingly, you manage to cast yourself into the role of the Bad Mother. Oh you know the ones I mean, where someone finds out that you plonk your child in front of the TV in order to get the chores done or that you haven't read to your baby every day since they were born or that, shock horror, you haven't given your baby tummy time today. (Let me just pause and qualify that I have been guilty of all of the above to a greater or lesser extent. I'm not perfect and sometimes life isn't either). My point is that regardless of how good a parent you are, there is always someone or something that makes you stop and question yourself.

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For me, it was the moment when we were singing The Deep Blue Sea at playgroup. Now, in the version I was taught, it goes "When I was one, I'd just begun, the day I went to sea. I jumped aboard a pirate ship and the captain said to me - We're going this way, that way, forwards, backwards, over the deep blue sea. A bottle of rum to warm me tum and that's the life for me". Only it turns out that, nowadays, they skip the part about the rum. And no, I didn't know that when we started singing. You can practically see the tumbleweed can't you?

So there's me, singing away to a different hymn sheet, so to speak, and unwittingly falling into the Bad Mother pot. Obviously, my child will grow up as an alcoholic miscreant or something because I sing about pirates drinking rum. The thing is, I don't mind if other people choose not to sing about rum. Equally I don't mind if they choose to sit their children in front of the TV for 12 hours a day. And to be honest, I doubt any of the lovely ladies at my playgroup would judge me for singing the rum version but I feel bad nonetheless.

I suppose the point of my post is that our perceptions of what society deems to be good and bad and right and wrong impact the way that we parent our children. Sometimes those perceptions can be healthy and motivate us to do some things differently. But sometimes we worry too much what other people think. The question is, will I sing about rum next week?