There are times as a parent that I feel like my heart will leap out of my chest with pride for something that my kids have done or said. Yes, there are also times that I want to wring their necks too! Making this move to the UK, as you can all imagine, was a massive undertaking. So many pieces of the puzzle needed to come together in order to make this a reality. Sometimes it feels very surreal, when I am standing in line at the grocery store and listening to a shopper next to me chat on her cell phone in a British accent, or when I look at the menu board in a cafe and they have a "Chip Butty" for a pound. Until that moment, I was under the impression that my mom made up my favourite sandwich of warm chips tucked inside a slice of bread and butter.
This move has shown me that the words, "can't", "impossible", "intimidated", and "never going to happen" don't exist in Channing's world. As my friends, Sophie and Stan like to say about someone that approaches a difficult situation with a strong mental attitude, "He's a 100 percenter". In the short time that we have been here he has eagerly attended his classes and makes a genuine effort to be social, friendly and fit in. He made a friend Tom, a tall athletic lad in Year 11, who now calls for him in the morning and I watch the two of them head off looking so handsome in their school uniforms. At night he goes to movies, rides the buses, plays soccer (sorry football) in a nearby park, and goes for 4 km runs with a group so he can stay fit.
Since we are still without a TV, to entertain us he does skits in the living room such as dancing with the umbrella while half humming and half yodeling "Singing in the Rain", sticking a pillow on his head and clucking like a chicken in a performance of "Mr. Pillowhead", and finally taking three sticky notes and drawing a right breast, a left breast, and the makings of a moustache, sticking them on himself and saying, "Hey look, I am Rick. I like math and I have man boobs." Rick’s straight-faced response is, “Chan, I don’t have a moustache.”
On weekends, he willingly tags along with us as we tour around. He brings his camera to make his next interesting video to go along with the techno music that he has been working on in his spare time. He is producing what I call a Bollywood Techno style song that is excellent and I hope to be able to share this with everyone once he gets his video edited.
I think as adults we like to believe that we have all the answers. It isn’t easy to show our children that sometimes even we struggle in some aspect of life. But I have learned that it is okay for your kids to teach you something. For me, it meant discovering that I want to be a 100 percenter too.
