Posts Tagged "childhood"
Brave
For some reason I’ve been really missing my Grandma this week. Not Grandma just before she died so much, but the Grandma from my childhood. Missing her meat pie, and the smell of her old sofa. Missing the rocking chair with the little cushions she’d sewed under the feet. Missing the rough grey of her woolen cardigans and her shooing us out the kitchen, and sitting at the breakfast bar on high orange-topped stools watching cartoons on the tiny television.
I was very very lost when she died in March this year. It brought home a lot of other loss and grief and fear, fear of growing up I guess. As I found my way through, I would hold words of her close like a talisman. She would tell me often how she had lived a good life and held no regrets. She was fearly fearless, my Grandma, very self-reliant, practical and yet full of kindness, and moving forward I vowed I would be like her – no regrets. So I have been holding my head up and taking leaps. Project, ideas, plans. I have been trying to make the best of every day, trying to not wait till a tomorrow. Living spontaneously and fearlessly and creatively. Grandma would be most proud of a bold and daring grand-daughter, a heroine, not a damsel in distress, and I want to be someone she would be proud of.
I’ve been feeling a bit scared again lately. Just overwhelmed really. The responsibility of guiding two lives in the right direction weighs heavily some days. I don’t really know what I’m doing but I’m doing my best. And so because I was missing her, I ordered a pot plant and sent it to myself, from her, and it’s just arrived.
Thank you Grandma, for my plant and your words. I’m getting there you know, I promise. x
Potential
If there is one word that I wish I could erase from my past and from my identity and the way I see myself, it is the word POTENTIAL. It was pinned to my chest as a school girl and I’ve been carrying around ever since.
In some respects I was lucky, very lucky. I have always had people that believed in me. They would tell me over and over, “you have such a bright future ahead of you, Josie”, “you could do anything you wanted to do”, and at 17, with a string of A’s and A*s and the gift of the gab and smile that people warmed to, you’d have thought it true.
But potential is about what’s possible, not about what’s actual. And although my possible perhaps might have meant a first degree somewhere prestigious, and an exciting career, or something else notable, my actual ended up being more about illness and disability and false-starts and many disappointments.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t change a lot of my past. It has made me who I am and, when I can get a sense of her through the self-doubt that’s always been a bit of a curse, I like the girl that is me, I do. I think she’s interesting and quite cool and I like how she sees the world, (although saying all of that in first person would be a bit of a stretch for my self-esteem).
But, whatever I do, when I embark on something, it is expected that I will run with it, that I will shine, that I will take that long-promised potential and do the thing that everyone has been waiting for. And when I don’t, when I am just human and average and frequently flawed and failing, I cannot shake the sense that I am a disappointment, somehow. That although what I’ve achieved is okay, there is left the feeling that I have not fulfilled this glittering could be. I have written about this before on here, and I am more than aware that it is far more about my own perception of myself than about others – I doubt many people that care about me see me as a disappointment, but still, the feeling is remains, and as I watch Kai grow I am becoming more and more conscious of it.
Read MoreWriting Workshop: The girl with faith in her hands
My childhood self sits, bum balanced on the kneeler in front of the pew on which her mother sits, wriggly brother on lap, as she listens to the voice of her father from the front of the church.
In her careful, cupped hands sits the round orange of her Christingle, which she had helped the women of the church assemble that afternoon, one of hundreds, one for everyone, her tummy full of sultanas and raisins that she had spent the time popping into her mouth when no-one was looking. Her nose is filled with the smell of hot wax and the sharp tang of citrus as she watches the flame burn and flicker. Her father’s voice tells what each symbol represents: the orange is the world, red ribbon the blood of Jesus and others that she now forgets. But she doesn’t hear, doesn’t need to, the meanings as familiar, then, to her as the grainy wood of the church pew and the rough, worn fabric of the hymn books, more lost in the candle’s burn, for there seems to be some meaning in that, though she can’t fathom it.
She is six or seven. Utterly safe. Utterly loved. Her world is as certain and steadfast as her father’s confident sermon. That’s what faith is, I guess.
There aren’t many times where I miss the religious aspects of my upbringing. As someone that can find meaning in a dirty puddle these days, or the way the trees move, I never feel like I ‘need’ to believe in a specific religious teaching. Well, it’s more fundamental that, less that I need to believe, more that I just don’t. I’m quite happy enough feeling my way on my own and enormously grateful for the freedom and the sense of peace shaking off most of childhood beliefs has brought me. But as the daughter of a Baptist Minister, my dad later becoming a lay reader in a busy Anglican church, religion has always been something very firmly entrenched in my experience and in my memory.
Christmas is the one time I miss it. I almost ache with it. It’s not a spiritual longing, more a deep-set nostalgia, but I find myself drawn to the churches and the choirs, the candle-lit vigils and the nativity scenes. It makes me feel like a child again. Yes, I think that’s what it is. It makes me feel safe, held in a familiar blanket where everything is certain and predictable, where the sheep always follow the shepherds down the aisle to be placed in the straw filled stable, where you primary concern is whether or not you’ll be chosen to carry one, maybe even one of the more important ones, cradling the the tiny, swaddling-wrapped Jesus solemnly past the rows of the congregation to place him in the manger.
I almost wish I could believe again, maybe even just pretend, just to have that feeling back.
So this Christmas I have a feeling that a girl, now long grown, may be found sneaking back into churches to light a candle and listen to soar of the Christmas carols, her mouth still shaping the words, all of which she remembers. Not to believe, but just to remember.
Yes, I think I would like that a lot.
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This post was written for this week’s Writing Workshop, a mix of childhood remembering and traditions.
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Homeward Bound
I sit, in the almost-black. Head nestled deep into my pillow, positioned carefully between the edge of my seat and the window, periodically turned to transfer the cool window’s freshness to my rosy face. I am, perhaps, six years old, and we are in the car, cruising through the night at a steady seventy. I don’t know where we have been but I know where we are going – home. Back to familiarity and light and solid ground, my inner compass pulling us along the motorway to my waiting bed.
My body is warm under its duvet cocoon, my bed-from-bed. The close, womb-like feeling of the car heavy around my body; its thick air in my hair and permeating my skin. The only light comes from the glow of the dashboard, the comforting silent figures of my parents looming large in their seats. My mother nods sleepily in the passenger seat, her hands lying gently on her lap, my brother’s still form, huddled and soft at my side. If it wasn’t for the appearance of my father’s hand from time to time as it reaches into my field of vision to change gears I would think that I was the only one awake. My limbs are heavy, lulled by the momentum of the travelling car, but my eyes, my eyes are wide, every sense on fire.
Outside my window I watch the laser display of the passing cars. Twin star-flares fly past in the opposite direction, floating in inky black, dazzling and bright. The glare from their lights shoot up and out into the night in thin, sharp pencil lines; the silhouette of their propelling vehicles vague and gray. Motorway signs loom dimly and then are gone, their blue and white flashing in my vision with only seconds to register unfamiliar sounding names and places. The trees alongside, ghostly and dark with only the occasional flicker of a streetlamp on an adjacent road or the sudden view of tiny square lights in distant towering flats to hint at humanity outside of this long, gushing river of light and not-light and heat and sound. The noise of the engine is strong and steady. A hum that fills my ears and my head, punctuated with the sudden rush of the cars approaching, crescendo to sudden diminuendo. Sound with pressure somehow, pushing on my ears with heavy enveloping force.
The fact that we are moving at such high speed, so vulnerable in our fragile shell of metal and glass never occurs to me. I feel so safe, so warm, held safe by the close feel and smell of my duvet, by my unflinching certainty and faith in the man behind the wheel. I know I should sleep and yet I can’t close my eyes, transfixed by the sights and the sound and intoxicating sense of being an invulnerable spectator in this intergalactic light show, although I would never be able to verbalise this feeling as such. And yet I know, I plan in fact, that once our journey has come to a gentle, halting stop on our drive way I will pretend to have been asleep all along. Faking heavy, mouldable limbs and closed eyes to ascertain my transfer from one carrier to another. To my father’s strong and gentle arms, to bed and inevitable sleep, lights still flashing under my eyelids.
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There’s going to be a bit more of this creative stuff coming your way in the future I think. Hope that’s ok with you reader. Let me know your thoughts… Are you happy with my creative spewing in with the main feed? Or should I just hide them on a page somewhere for you to find in the menu bar…
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