I’m trying to be a better person, because of my children. It’s partly that I love them and I want to set a good example, of course. But it’s also because I have the feeling that they’ll tell on me if I don’t behave, and I’ll be in trouble with someone.

Take the seven-year-old. She’s always been the kind of child who worries about the state of her soul because she stole two sweets from the cupboard; who prays before bed every night (and hopefully mentions me because I could use a good word). But recently she’s become an eco-warrior, and our home has become her battleground. Quite frankly, she’s insufferable.
“We mustn’t waste electricity,” she frequently says at dinner, before lighting a tiny leftover Christmas candle and plunging us into near darkness.

Recently, she spent an afternoon holed up in her room with a book about endangered animals. It was a trying time for the rest of the family. As we went about our business, her outraged voice boomed down on us every now and then with upsetting pieces of information like, “The Hector’s dolphin is almost extinct” and “We’ll probably never see a Javan rhino.”
I wanted to lighten the mood, for all our sakes, so when she bellowed, “Do you know there are only about 300 Cross River gorillas left in the world? What are we going to do about that?” I bellowed back, “Tell them to cheer up!”
And … just a word of advice here. Don’t make jokes about endangered animals. Seven-year-old eco-warriors won’t think you’re funny.

The four-year-old, thank goodness, is still mostly a reprobate, but I’m starting to suspect that the Morality Police might have co-opted her into some sort of surveillance role.
“You certainly like that game,” she’ll say casually, popping up behind me when I’m supposed to be working but am actually playing Candy Crush. “You play it a lot.”
“You do enjoy your wine, don’t you?” she’ll observe, appearing from nowhere at my elbow, as I pour a (tiny, tiny) pre-dinner glass.
Or, “Napping again, I see,” as she stands, shrouded in shadow, at the bottom of my bed. “Always. Napping.”

I really got worried last week, though, when she sat watching me in the bath for a while, eyes narrowed, before asking, “Do you think the other mommies have also got tattoos?”
I was blinded by a sudden vision of myself as she might report me: a tattooed wino who plays Candy Crush during work hours and sleeps all afternoon.
“I don’t know,” I answered, trying to sink beneath the bubbles. “But if you mention mine at school, could you also mention that I get up early every morning to cook you a hot breakfast?”

At the moment, I’m the only one being judged – for the near-extinction of the Sumatran orangutan and for my own bad habits. But soon the little girls will grow up, look further afield and start taking the rest of the world to task.

I’m happy to say, our future is in excellent hands.

Robyn Goss is a South African writer, recently moved to Switzerland. You can read her blogs at www.robyngoss.com.

The Good Witch of the North once said, “Age is something that doesn’t matter, unless you are a cheese.”

As much as I like the sound of that, I’m not convinced. Physically I’m in great shape, having played competitive netball in primary school. But I must admit, I’m already starting to miss my once-firm young mind. Because my mental elastic is gone; my brain is baggy. And nowhere is this more evident than in my relations with my seven-year-old.

My mind, like a battleship, needs a lot of time and effort to change direction. I like to focus on one thing, and just keep going. My daughter, on the other hand, has a speedboat mind: it’s fast, it’s agile and it makes a lot of noise.

A few weeks ago I stood in the dairy aisle of the supermarket, my battleship brain pondering the mysteries of organic butter and whether it really is CHF 7 a kilo better than normal butter, when my daughter’s sharp little voice broke into my thought.

“Mum, how many teeth does a turtle have?”
“I don’t know,” I said, dragging my mind out of the butter. “I need to think about that.”
Teeth on a turtle. I tried to picture Crush, the turtle in Finding Nemo. Hadn’t he smiled a few times? Had there been teeth?

When we got to the vegetable section of the supermarket, she asked, “Mum, what exactly happened at Pompeii? And who wrote Mary Poppins?”
In the bread aisle, “What’s the name of the Egyptian king who isn’t Tutankhamun? Can I ride my scooter on the highway? What’s the most endangered animal on earth?”

In the checkout queue, “How do you say, ‘My little sister stole my boots’ in French?”
“Well,” I said, as I loaded the groceries into the car. “I’m not sure they have any. I think they have a sort of beak.”
“What?”
“Turtles. I don’t think they have any teeth.”
“I’m not talking about that any more!” she shouted, almost hysterical with impatience. “I’ve just asked you if I can invite everyone I know for a sleepover this weekend.”

I can’t keep up, honestly. If I followed every single thing she said, my brain would overload and I’d go mad.
I tried just vaguely muttering, “Yes, darling” for a while because that works very well on my husband, but the child soon caught on to that and tried to compromise me.

“You said I could!” she wailed one night, as we wrestled over the goldfish tank.
“I did not!”
“Yes you did! We were driving home and I said, ‘Can I put the goldfish in the bath with me?’ and you said, ‘Yes, darling’.”

I haven’t solved the problem of my speedboat child but at least I know how to rebuild my damaged self-esteem: the four-year-old still thinks I’m wonderful. Her mind is like an inflatable dinghy, bobbing awestruck in my wake.
“Mummy,” she breathed in wonder the other day, “How did you know I wanted to read a book about dinosaurs?”
I did not point out that dinosaurs are all she ever wants to read about. I just shrugged nonchalantly and said, “It must be because I’m so clever.”

Her eyes filled with admiration. “Will I be as clever as you when I grow up?”
I thought of her speedboat sister, and how she was also once a dinghy. And how I was once a speedboat. It’s the Regatta of Life.

“No,” I said. “You’ll be much cleverer.”

Robyn Goss is a South African writer, recently moved to Switzerland. You can read her blogs at www.robyngoss.com

“I think I ski better than you,” my daughter told me the other day.

“What makes you say that?” I asked, attempting to discreetly remove the icicle that had jammed up my left nostril a few moments earlier, when I ploughed into a snow drift.
“You fall down more than I do.”
It’s true. I attribute it to spending the first 40 years of my life somewhere very hot and very flat. But I’m trying hard to overcome that early hurdle and, when we arrived in Switzerland, I went all out to set an enthusiastic example for the children.

“How much fun is this?” I whooped through gritted teeth, as we snowploughed down mountainsides.
“Was that great or what?” I trilled at the bottom, hoping my rictus of fear would pass for an endorphin-drenched smile.
And it worked – on the seven-year-old, at any rate. She loves skiing and she’s good at it. But unfortunately I never fell for my own propaganda, and skiing still gives me the horrors. So why on earth I agreed to go down a blue slope with the child last weekend, I have no idea.

“You have been on a chair lift before, right?” I asked, as we stood waiting in line for one of those wretched chariots of death.
She looked bored. “Lots of times.”

“Just make sure you don’t lean forward on the bar,” I warned, keeping an anxious eye on the progress of the chair. “And lift your skis when you get to the top. And tuck your scarf into your jacket so it doesn’t catch on anything. And definitely don’t fall over when you get off because I can’t help you.”
“I’m not going to fall over. And I don’t need help.”
“Also, don’t get in front of me. I can’t steer that well and my braking is unreliable,” I went on, positioning my skis properly and bracing myself for the speed-waddle to the chair’s runway.

She wasn’t even listening. She was facing the wrong way, helmet unbuckled, poking icicles off a railing with her ski pole.

“What are you doing?” I panicked. “Why aren’t you getting into position for the chair?”
“Mom,” she sighed. “We’re not even at the front of the queue yet.”

Well, we made it to the top with no mishaps, and the child hopped off the chair and pointed herself straight at what looked like a precipice.
“I’ll be fine,” I called after her. “See you at the bottom.”
And as I lay there in front of the lift, trying to disentangle my skis from my poles, I thought, this is what parenting is, isn’t it? Giving them wings so they can fly away; putting an enormous amount of time, money and emotional effort into growing them up so that one day they’ll leave you behind, in a crumpled heap, with everyone pointing at you.

“I do ski better than you,” she said again, when I met her at the bottom, but this time the look on her little face told me that she felt the same way about this fact as I did: proud and anxious, in equal measure.
“That may be true,” I said. “But you’re still my baby. When we get to the car would you like me to take your boots off and make you some hot chocolate?”
“Yes, Mama.”
And after she helped me back onto my feet, that’s exactly what I did.

Robyn Goss is a South African writer, recently moved to Switzerland. Read her blog: robyngoss.com

Luggage is what you make of it, not the customs people. Robyn Goss writes on what it means to return home with things that your husband may resent carrying. But then, he really doesn’t have a say, does he?

NYON The day we came back to Switzerland from our Christmas holiday in South Africa, I opened my toiletry bag and a bucket’s worth of beach sand fell out onto the bathroom floor.

“Oh,” said the smaller child, eyeing it sadly. ‘It was a sandcastle when I put it in there.”
She wasn’t the only one who had issues with her luggage.

“Why do we need seven packets of powdered jelly and three litres of Dettol?” my husband had asked, surveying our suitcases the night before we flew back to Europe.

“I can’t get them in Switzerland,” I answered.
“And the nine notebooks? Can’t you find paper in Switzerland?”
“These feel nicer to write in than other books.”
“And all those giant balls of red wool? Can you explain those?”
“I could. But as you can see, I’m busy trying to fit a plaster mould of an impala’s hoof print into this suitcase,” I replied patiently.
He looked forlornly at the pile of bags that he was going to have to drag through three airports and two train stations.
“Why can’t we just smuggle in wine and biltong like any other South African?”

Frankly, given his heritage, I expected more from him. His father: now there’s a man who isn’t afraid of baggage. He has distributed to the corners of the earth, among other things, a beaded wire sheep (large), a decorative baobab tree (small but inconveniently shaped) and a bolt of shweshwe fabric (starched and completely unyielding). And my mother-in-law is no suitcase slouch either; the last Christmas cake she brought over was so enormous that we enjoyed a slice with tea every day for months.

Anyway, I pointed out to my shirking husband, I wasn’t the only one to blame for those bulging suitcases. With a joyful disregard for Lufthansa’s weight limitations, our South African friends and family showered us with gifts, including 18 books, two bath towels, a full set of table linen and a music box. And a violin.

All of this was in addition to a ridiculously large toy monkey that the bigger child never leaves home without, and all the heavy jackets and snow boots we’d need back in Switzerland.

My husband did lug it all home, albeit with very bad grace. And I’m pleased to report that last week he was proven wrong by my dear friends, the ladies of the High Mileage Nordic Walking Club: it turns out that I was, in fact, not the only person bringing home what he so unkindly termed “random crap”.

Laura From England flew back with 30 plastic Disney plates, and the entire M&S lingerie department. Sandy The Other South African imported several boxes of beeswax lip balm.
“It’s the only one that isn’t addictive,” she told us. “I can’t live without it!”
But it was Elsa From Germany who surprised us the most. She brought a month’s supply of Lindt chocolates. Back to Switzerland.
“You do realise…” I began.
“Yes, yes, I know. I can get it here. But … it’s not the same.”

And that’s the truth of it. No matter how it may look to the customs officials, it’s not really the jelly/baobab tree/five kilogrammes of mosaic tiles that matters so much. It’s what it represents: home; something familiar; something we loved and didn’t want to leave behind. Just like my daughter, sitting with her friends under a hot South African sky and stuffing sandcastles into my suitcase.

Robyn Goss is a South African writer, recently moved to Switzerland. You can read her blogs at www.robyngoss.com

Since becoming a parent, there are a few things I’ve had to wave goodbye to: my size 8 jeans and late night tequila parties come immediately to mind (motherhood has made the hips more robust but weakened the constitution dramatically). Also, I’ve had to give up my fantasy of perfect family life. No matter that the fantasy was based primarily on a montage of mother-child photos from margarine ads. It was deeply held and painful to part with. But real children are nothing like the margarine children, and I am clearly no model mother. For example:

Fantasy 1: The smaller child must dress up as an alien for school. Her costume, hand-made by me, is adorable and convincingly alien. She earns recognition from her peers, her self-esteem is boosted and she knows she is loved and prioritized in our house.

Reality: I forget all about the costume until the day before dress-up. We’re busy that afternoon, so by the time I think about it again it’s 22h00 and I’m too exhausted to hand-make anything except a glass of wine.

The next morning the child runs into school, late, with a badly cut out alien mask. There’s black felt pen smudged everywhere and, in an attempt at antennae, I’ve tied some little water balloons over the ears. The result looks more like Kali the Goddess of Destruction than an alien. This is entirely in keeping with the smaller child’s character, but it’s not what the school asked for.

Fantasy 2: On winter afternoons we come home from school to a pot of vegetable soup, before going back outside for a forest walk. We collect dead leaves and twigs to make a collage because we’re creative, in touch with the world around us and we walk 10,000 steps a day.

Reality: The smaller child refuses to eat my vegetable soup because it has vegetables in it. The bigger child starts motivating strongly to watch a DVD.
“No,” I insist. “We’re going for a walk.”
After some shouting the bigger one gives in but the smaller one does not. I have to catch her and force her into her boots, gloves and scarf. She threatens to tell the police that I’m making her go outside “in the freeze”.

I finally get them both outside and march them up to the forest, where we collect handfuls of dead foliage. Back home they fling off their jackets and glue some sticks to a piece of paper. It takes about three minutes and they’re clearly just doing it to humour me.
They watch Tangled while I wipe up puddles of glue and pick bits of crushed leaf out of their gloves.

Fantasy 3: I’m a caring and thoughtful home chef, who always dishes up something healthy but appealing to the youthful palate. I gently shape their table manners as we make conversation and bond deeply over good food.

Reality: I’m a short order cook who stands at the stove while the children shout instructions from the dining room: “More cheese!”; “I’m taking out everything that’s a vegetable”; “I’m really thirsty.” Then they pour a cupful of tomato sauce on everything, without tasting it first. The entire dinner conversation consists of my husband endlessly repeating his mealtime mantras: “Don’t talk with your mouth full”, “You’re going to knock that over” and “Eat nicely.’’

After dinner I clean up a sea of tomato sauce and juice. I make a quiche out of the pile of rejected vegetables and feed it to my husband the next day.

He thinks it’s delicious.
It may not be the dream … but it’ll do.

Robyn Goss is a South African writer, recently moved to Switzerland. You can read her blogs at www.robyngoss.com