Sometimes I like to parent like someone is watching.

Oh, not in the Instagram-ready, photo-story, Facebook Life way.

I haven’t posted pictures of my kids on my personal FB account for years. (I haven’t been on it for years, to be fair). I don’t even TAKE that many pictures. I stopped in silent protest when I realised my now ex was living a life on FB I didn’t recognise – our life – but he was a person, husband and father in pictures and pithy sentences that I didn’t know – that he couldn’t be in reality.

There’s a lot that’s been said about the social media fakery, the presentation of the perfect life, perfect family, or perfect body. About how disingenuous that is – how dangerous. And about how refreshing an antidote warts-and-all is, the cellulite bikini shot, the tantrum; the exposure of the art of posing and posturing.

But the truth of the matter is that we all repackage what’s happening to us all of the time to make sense of it – to make it more palatable. To ourselves or to others. And the warts-and-all stuff is as much a virtue-repackaging as the perfect picture is.

We all choose how to tell our stories. How to present ourselves. In many ways that’s what this blog is… processing. Repackaging on the way.

And sometimes it’s a good thing.

One of the ways it works for me is by DELIBERATELY repackaging my parenting in the moment – especially in the difficult moment – by the act of PRETENDING someone is watching it. Thinking forward about how I want to report it, to present it. How I want to have behaved. How I want to feel about myself afterwards. How I want my kids to feel about me…

So I pretend that it’s all being recorded, that someone is watching – that it IS going on Facebook – that I will have to watch it back and feel okay about it. I find it helps me keep my cool when the smalls are pressing my EVERY SINGLE DAMN BUTTON.

Someone IS always watching, of course. They are. And I am often conscious of the Small Gaze, what they’re learning, how I might be inadvertently finding new and subtle ways of messing them up, as all parents do. But the Small Gaze isn’t the one that helps me keep my temper. It’s that Imagined Gaze.

Dance like no one is watching – parent like someone is…

Of course sometimes other people ARE watching. The gaze is REAL. And that throws me off my gaze-game because I find I’m also reacting to THEM, to their approval or disapproval.

Like all socially awkward people, I have always been aware of eyes on me, and while it is a good thing on occasion, it mostly trips me up and over myself. Sometimes I perform for gaze; some MORE times I crumble under it…

Sometimes, I wonder who I am when I’m NOT being the person I want people to see, or myself to be. When gaze, real or imaginary, doesn’t define me or shape my actions. Is true authenticity even possible with other people? With myself when I want to like myself? AM I STILL ME IF THERE’S NO ONE IN THE WOODS TO WATCH ME FALL OVER????

This of course is all on my mind because the person who has most recently had the dubious felicity of watching my parenting is Boynotquiteonthenetheredge, who escorted me and the Smalls on holiday to the little village in Devon I’ve been to every year since I was a kid.

This is a person who’s gaze I’m particularly keen to keep admiring, in a place with lots of echoes, spending an unprecedented amount of time in confined, close, rainy quarters with me and my Smalls… and my parenting. And my sister.

I would like to be able to repackage this experience as an unprecedented success, but life is rarely that neat.

Blending different people together, and the different MEs I am under their different gazes, is HARD. And the Smalls are watching too, reacting to the changes, gazing themselves, gauging.

There was some challenging behaviour – mostly from the children and not me, I’m pleased to say. The Boy was sanguine and supportive, which is not the Male Gaze I have been under in the past, and weirded me out in it’s own way. Possibly being under a disapproving gaze for so long has changed me in ways I haven’t noticed until this time, this same place, with different eyes on me… Meanwhile, the Big Small was discombobulated, territorial (‘Do you love BNQOTNE more than you love me?’), and unwilling to share our family, all to a backdrop of the Small Small’s never-ending and entirely self-serving monologue (centered around the enduring paradox of ‘this is the best/worst day of my life’).

There were some lovely moments, and some memorable ones, but a lot of it was sheer hard bloody work – the navigation of expectations, and of gazes.

Since getting back, I have had several long, long naps.

Sometimes the only way to escape from eyes, including my own, is just to shut them.

[TOP TIP for rainy day holidays: bring googly eyes and the hot glue gun].