The (im)perfect student
I wrote an article about my quest to learn French for this week’s You magazine (it actually went up on the Mail Online too, so you can read it here). The quick version of this feature is: I realised I was rubbish at French and started taking classes via video, and have therefore become a bit less rubbish. Or at least, I thought I had, until a bunch of French people got on the tube yesterday and I could decipher about 10 words of their entire conversation.
When I embarked on my mission, every French person I know laughed and told me “by the way, French is impossible”. And they are not wrong. I’m still having weekly lessons now, and each time the teacher mentions a new grammatical case that “we will look at more closely next week” I wonder how my brain will possibly retain another ounce of information. Also the fact every single noun has a gender, with no rhyme or reason for remembering them, feels like a particularly unnecessary joke (and I can’t even blame the flipping French because it’s a Latin thing, sigh).
Despite all this, I am enjoying the process of learning a new subject. That cliché about education being wasted on the young is unfortunately true. I can’t believe I spent most of my school years simply counting down until I could go home to eat chocolate digestives and watch The Simpsons, instead of appreciating the enriching experience I was having. But as well as being a golden opportunity to expand and challenge my brain, there has also been another benefit to learning French for an impatient soul like me: a reminder that it’s okay to be bad at things.
This is not a principle I’ve held firm to for most of my life. In general, I hate not being good at things straight away. There were those the tennis lessons I tried when I was 11, where I turned out to be exceptionally bad, even amongst a group of giggling schoolgirls. I haven’t touched a tennis racket since. And that time I went along with my husband and his mates to Flight Club (which is basically hipster darts) and discovered I was crap, then had to pretend I was having fun and not completely seething all afternoon. Other things I have been shit at and therefore almost immediately ditched include playing the flute (ended up on the much less sexy clarinet, sigh), assembling IKEA furniture, any and all team sports, learning the guitar, writing a novel, baking, meditation and reading War and Peace.
Mainly it doesn’t matter, but sometimes this tendency to avoid any sign of incompetence can be quite embarrassing. I once had a tantrum at work because someone asked me to direct a video and I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, so instead of taking constructive feedback, I basically just walked out halfway through the recording. Not okay.
Luckily, parenting has come along to teach me that sometimes you simply must carry on with a project, even if you feel hopelessly inadequate and like everything is frequently going awry. When you have a kid, you don’t really have the choice of saying “Oh excuse me, I appear NOT to instantly be the perfect parent, could I hand this one back?” Instead, it’s a messy process of trial and error. You must accept that you’ll get it wrong all the time, and simply cannot control or be brilliant at everything. And for people like me, that’s a hard pill to swallow, but gulping it down is simply not optional.
Right now I’m five months pregnant with my second child, and I foresee a whole new chapter of ‘learning how to parent’ on the horizon. It seems unlikely I will ever master either French or the parenting malarkey, but I’ll keep plugging away regardless. Because that other cliché is true too: it’s about the journey, not the destination. And they’re both a really good excuse to eat loads of croissants.