My daughter – Jade – is 5 years old and is starting to get invited over for sleepovers by her school-friends. She has a very good circle of friends at school and she desperately wants to spend as much time with them as possible.
The problem is that I’m paranoid and maybe a little overprotective. I’ve met most of the parents of Jade’s friends and they seem nice enough but I’ve learnt the hard way that appearances can be deceiving.
We don’t live in the wealthiest of suburbs – we’re not exactly in a rag-tag suburb either – but you come across the occasional story about certain parents engaging in questionable behaviour and some of the kids at Jade’s school have Daddies in prison which makes my mind race with worry.
The first couple of invites, I just made up excuses on the fly. I said that we had plans for the weekend or something similar.
After I realised that the whole sleep-over / after-school play-date thing wasn’t going to go away in a hurry I started formulating more long-term ways of brushing these people off.
I did a little research online and leafed through a couple of booklets at our Doctor’s surgery and came up with the mother of all excuses.
The next time Jade was invited for a sleep-over, I very solemnly explained to the parent that Jade had Chronic Bladder Myopathy.
I explained that CBM was a rare condition (so rare in fact that the bemused parent hadn’t even heard of it) and that it made sleep-overs an impossibility.
The parent was slowly convinced as I explained more about the mythical illness.
I’m sure that there are similar conditions in the real world but none so specifically targeted towards wheedling out of sleep-over invites.
Soon I was getting out of all manner of invites – not just sleep-overs but dinner invites and the like (which I’m also none too keen on with the exception of close friends and family).
I patiently explained each time that Jade’s symptoms weren’t simply bed-wetting but also very painful spasms which were treated with very specific medication that I always had to be on hand to administer.
I had a couple of bright sparks suggest that I come and stay over too but I shrugged this off by saying that I had too many things to do at home. I did allow Jade’s friends to come and stay over as often as they wanted but I had to stage some ‘medicine administering’ by calling Jade into the bathroom.
Behind closed doors, I gave her some lollies as incentive and told her that she must tell her friend’s she’s having her medicine and not lollies. I figured that the parents of Jade’s friends would quiz them on their return home about what went on.
Jade sometimes asks why she never went over to her friend’s places and a couple of times she did get upset over it which broke my heart. I told her that home was ‘safer’ very emphatically so that if she told her friends that and they told their Mums then it would sound as they this was just how I had to explain things to my young daughter.
I also made it clear to the parents when I brushed them off that I hadn’t really explained the details of Jade’s illness to her as she was too young and it would be too upsetting for her.
One day I will have to come clean with her and I hope she doesn’t hate me. I just want to protect my child. Who doesn’t?
Your say: Have you experienced a similar situation? How did you deal with it? Tell us your story below…
