I am a mother of two amazing daughters who love books, crochet, their family, their friends, birds and... the rules.
They freaking love the rules.
My 15-year-old will comment “50” when the speedo sneaks up to 53 on the drive to school. My youngest once refused to go through a door in New York because it said “No Entry”. (In my defence, it was propped open, there was a public toilet on the other side and I had four children with me all busting for the loo.) But the six-year-old adamantly wouldn’t allow herself, and therefore the entire group, through it. Did I mention they like to read? I distinctly remember cursing myself for encouraging literacy as she stood there enforcing the sign she’d just read.
Just this morning I just had to do a secret drop-off for my eldest because she didn’t want to go through the main gate at school without her blazer on lest she be caught breaking a rule. Where was the blazer? Inside the damn school. She’d left it there after drama practice the night before.
I don’t know where this love of rules came from. Maybe because their dad used to be a police officer. But even he knows there are rules that are absolute and rules that are more like guidelines.
Me? I’ve always been a rule bender.
Not in a dangerous way. More in a “there must be a more efficient way to do this” kind of way.
When I was a mortgage broker, if a bank told me no to something I wanted to do for a client, I mostly took it as them saying, “Find another way to make this a yes.” Looking back, I think that was one of my superpowers in the job.
At school, I worked out pretty quickly that end-of-year marks mattered a lot more than what happened early in the year. So I focused my effort accordingly. Was it exactly what the teachers intended? Probably not. Did it work? Absolutely.
Which is why I think part of my job as a parent is helping my girls understand that not every rule deserves the same level of devotion.
It’s also one of the reasons I love travelling with them.
Travel is brilliant for showing you that things we think of as absolute rules are often just local conventions.
Take Vietnam for example. There doesn’t seem to be any right of way, at least not one that Australians would recognise. Want to cross four lanes of scooter traffic in a van? You just head on out, merge your way in and trust that everyone else will make allowances for you. The traffic keeps moving like one big throbbing bloodstream.
Or try crossing the road on foot in Ho Chi Minh City. If you stand on the kerb waiting for a gap, you’ll be there all day. Instead, you step out, walk steadily and confidently, and somehow the scooters flow around you.
The first time you do it, every Australian instinct tells you this is completely wrong. The tenth time you do it, you realise there actually is a system. It’s just not your system, not your rules.
That’s one of the things I love most about travel. It reminds us that many of the rules we live by aren’t universal truths. They’re simply the way a particular place has figured out how to function.
The more my girls see that, the more I hope they’ll learn the difference between rules that genuinely protect people and rules that are simply habits dressed up as absolutes.
Some rules matter enormously. Speed limits, for example (yes, I hear you 15-year-old!!).
Others deserve a little healthy questioning.
Because sometimes the people who get the most out of life aren’t the ones who follow every rule. They’re the ones who understand which rules are worth keeping and which ones can be bent without breaking anyone in the process.
Hey there… Liking what you’re reading?
Please like, comment or share with a friend - it honestly means the world and I do a little happy dance each time you do :)
Also here are two other ones I’ve writen that you may not have seen.
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