Strange Things to Be Proud Of

Madeleine Thompson - 28 Feb 18

This week I found myself feeling incredibly proud of my daughter.  This isn’t unusual as I feel proud of her all the time, and my son – I think it just goes with the territory.  But this was a particularly obscure ‘feeling proud’ moment.

I felt proud because she has developed a love of bad movies.  Not just ‘crap at the cinema’ bad, but full-on, made-for-TV badness.  And I’m so proud!  My husband and I went through a phase of appreciating bad movies a couple of years into our relationship.  We would go to our friends’ house and have ‘Bad Movie Night’.  Amazing.   Thing is, I’ve never really come out of it.   A bit like the mum in the film Joy who watches the awfully-acted soap opera day-in and day-out.  I think if I’m honest, I’ve loved them since I was a kid too.  Growing up with a VHS player in my room, I was privileged to own such delights as ‘Trapped in a Purple Haze’, ‘Too Young to Die’, and ‘She Fought Alone’.  If you know any of these films, I will be mightily impressed, you can be in my club and we can talk about Brian Austin-Green whilst we eat chocolate brownies.

So, I have previous.  But I never in my wildest dreams imagined that my daughter would feel the same affection for horrendous films that I do, especially as she’s had no encouragement from me.   Her current favourites are Australian gymnastics competition films.  Mostly they feature the same cast, terrible acting, cringy love scenes, and air-punching finales for the competitions.  Awesome.

Having digested my feelings of immense and weird pride, I began to consider whether I had experienced other moments of weird pride with the children and whether there are others in this world who would admit to moments of pride for things nobody else would think of as special.

And because everybody loves a good list, here are the ones I thought of:

• The moment when we were having a discussion with the kids about whether I was a girl or a boy (too long to explain) and my son said to his Dad, “Mummy is not a girl, she is a lady.” Air punch, right there.
• The moment when my son said he wanted to be a ‘Doctor Chef’ when he grew up and it was just the best hybrid career invention ever.
• When my daughter drew a cat that actually looked like a cat and followed it with a rabbit that looked like a rabbit (she’s five).
• The fact that both of the kids love the song Hold On by Wilson Philips and they request it at night for bedtime songs.

These are a few of mine but I wonder if you have them too?

There are moments in every day that make us proud of our kids; that’s as it should be, but it isn’t just the mainstream things that should be embraced, let’s celebrate the weird and quirky things our kids do that make us proud.

Madeleine Thompson

I am mum to my little chicks, Aisha, 6 and Abel, 4. Originally from Yorkshire, UK, I now live in a little town in the North West. By day, I work for myself as a freelance PA. By night, I indulge my passion for writing.

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