One day a year our daughter does as she pleases and it’s always great fun… and a good education for us all
Donna Ferguson
Sun 17 Oct 2021
We call it her “in-charge day”. A day when our nine-year-old daughter Flora is in charge, and we are, effectively, hers to command. A day when all the traditional hierarchies between parent and child are reversed, when she can fulfil her fantasies, refuse to do anything she doesn’t want to and experience a taste of power, authority and absolute freedom.
OK, not absolute freedom. There are some ground rules. She can’t do anything we deem to be unsafe or illegal. She can’t ask us to buy anything “too expensive” (we keep this part deliberately vague). And, this year, we realised we needed to add one more sentence of small print to our contract: she cannot purchase any new pets.
Every year, we give her a “gift voucher” for this day on her birthday in January . We set the time and the date ourselves: 24 hours in charge, from 1pm on a Saturday until 1pm on Sunday, usually at the end of spring. It is something I know she greatly looks forward to through the winter. And it is a reminder, to us, that her childhood is passing – that one day she will be an adult, in charge of her own life, able to do as she pleases every day. That each day we spend with her, when she is still our little girl, is precious.
There is a song in
Matilda, the musical, where the characters sing about how, when they grow up, they will have treats everyday and watch cartoons all the time and go to bed late every night. The irony, of course, is that when they do grow up, they will probably no longer be quite so keen to do those things. This idea that childhood wishes are destined to fade away, unfulfilled, has always seemed a little sad to me.