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GUIDE TO ROMANTIC LIVING

Chapter Eight | Chapter Ten

Chapter Nine: Starting Early: Giving Your Children A Sense of the Romantic

It was Bertrand Russell who wrote, "To kill fancy in childhood is to make a slave to what exists, a creature tethered to earth and therefore unable to create heaven."

As a parent, I believe one's greatest duty is to bring up a child who can create heaven on earth, someone who has the imagination and hope to be happy.

That is what my parents gave me-imagination and hope.

Our washing line, hung with sheets, used to be the curtain behind which we would prepare our shows. A raised area in the attic was another "stage." We had a dressing-up box full of funny old hats and dresses. My mother used to collect bits and pieces from garage sales and charity jumble sales for the box, because she remembered one from her own childhood, at a country house she used to visit. I can still remember the heaven of plunging my hand into the seemingly bottomless trunk full of necklaces, hats, velvets, and satins. Now Katie has one too, so she can turn herself into a Spanish lady one day, a Hawaiian girl the next.

My parents took us to museums, to art galleries, to ballets, and to the theater. They showed us the world and its wonders. When we were very young they took us to the immense opera house at Covent Garden, all three girls dressed in red velvet cloaks with silk lining. My parents were, I think, inspired by the romantic looks of their three girls, with our long hair and pretty faces, all close to the same age, like the Brontes, like the Little Women, like Chekhov's Three Sisters, like Botticelli's Three Graces. Our looks and our ages and the unconventional nature of our parents set us all a little apart, in a world of our own, of plays and dances and dreams. With them, no one day was like another. We never knew what to expect. Skating one day, the theater the next, ten people to dinner, fifteen to stay the night. We are still all a little like that. Anne follows her dream of a happy family life, Sally hers of travel and adventure. They are both as unconventional as they've always been; exceptional, entertaining, beautiful girls. Sally played my double in the film Dark Mirror but disliked the world of acting and was happy to return to her life of travel, turning up anywhere in the world at a moment's notice.

I used to feel, as I sat in the theater in Covent Garden, that I belonged up there on the stage, with the music and the movement and the color and the beauty. My parents sent these dreams spinning through my head.

If I go to ballets nowadays, I watch the faxes of little girls: they're wide-eyed, full of amazement, entranced. And then I look back at the ballerinas and I still see what I used to see: that other, fairy-tale world out there on the stage. That is the world my parents showed us-and I wish to show my children. I want to instill in my children zest, hope, wonderment.

My parents involved us in their lives. We used to go to the hospital with my father when we were very young, and be given special nursing outfits and particular tasks to do, such as making cotton swabs out of mounds of cotton wool. We were always introduced to guests, taught to converse properly with them, altogether brought up as important people in the household rather than nuisances to be hidden away when grownups arrived. I think this respect our parents gave us built up in us a self-respect which is a great help in difficult times.

My parents gave me the strength to be romantic, to follow my dreams, because they made me know they would always be there, even if I failed, loving me, encouraging me. And I know I still have that safety net. Whatever happens, they'll be there.

I want my children to know the same feeling. I want them to have the courage to try, and to pick themselves up if they fail. A warm, loving, secure background matters more than anything for a child. The family should be the base that frees them, the security that allows a child to be strong and free. Make sure your children grow up with a proper sense of security and wonderment, so that they can become romantic adults who have innocence and adaptability.

The moment your child is born, relish its independence. The child isn't you or your husband. He or she is another person, someone you're going to live with. Allow him or her to be an individual.

And don't push your children too hard. Don't turn them into overachieving, stressed children without a proper sense of youth and creativity. Give them something to look back on. Don't just give them memories of desks and paperwork.

Friends of ours found a little chest, bashed it up so that it looked old, and filled it with rock crystals and cheap and cheerful bits of glitz and junk jewelry. Then, when they were on holiday, they wrote to the children that they had found a Treasure Chest sticking out of the sand. They brought the box home, and the little girls were over the moon about it.

The father then said: "You know, I was looking through some old books in our house...and look what I found...it seems to be a map." Their mother had burned the edges of a piece of paper so that it looked old. She had written on it a guide that said there was treasure actually buried in their house.

The father took the children down into the cellar of the house, and there, in an old sherry bottle filled by the mother with playmoney, trinkets, rocks, and mother-of-pearl shells, was the treasure. The little girls were thrilled.

That's a lovely, secret, romantic thing to do for a child at an early age.

The same friend said that when his son was two years old, they went for a walk, and he explained that the son should pick a flower for his mother. So the boy picked the flower he wanted and presented it to his mother, who put it in a special vase. If you start children young with that kind of gesture, it's something that stays with them forever and ever.

A good party also helps to bring out a child's imagination. Mine always have a theme of some sort. The last one turned everyone into Easter rabbits, and my father became the Easter Bunny. The children went into my bathroom, and I smeared clown white on their faces and painted on red noses and whiskers; they all became rabbits and had great fun. When the parents came to pick them up and saw the children in the pool with gray-white faces, they thought they had been freezing to death for hours.

Our first children's party was "Wild Things and Fairies," based on a book my Maurice Sendak. Each child turned up as a wild thing or a fairy. They loved it. The disguises freed them, filled them with excitement.

Another party turned into a game. I hadn't ordered a big party cake, so I rushed off to Safeway to buy some small plain ones, and decorating them became the central party game. Five children decorated them, using icing from tubes, M&Ms, raisins, and hundreds and thousands of sprinkles.

Why not have making the cake be part of the party? Ask the children to help make the cake, then organize plenty of games. When they return, the cake will be ready to eat. You can also do this with large cookies.

Encourage the children to make their own hats by providing basic party hats and brightly colored stickers, or else provide pieces of gold and silver cardboard that they can cut up and glue together to make crowns. Buy a cheap sun dress and let your child decorate it with stickers. I did this for Katie's birthday and she loved it.

The best time of all for children, in America especially, is Halloween, when they all dress up and act out their fantasies. I feared I might not have brought up a romantic child when I asked Katie what she would like to dress up as one Halloween. I said she could be anything in the world and assumed she'd want to be a princess. But she wanted to be a shark!

Help your child to be creative and uninhibited, to appreciate the beauty in the world. Make time to ready to your children, to invent games with them, to go for walks, guide them toward some understanding of the marvels of the world and their own minds.

Most people stumble through life using only a tine segment of their minds. Let your children be different. Free their minds. But always, behind the freedom, provide the security. Let them know that the world is a safe place because you are there.