Posts Tagged "growing up"
Memories of a 2nd House
Image by © Jutta Klee/CORBIS
The lovely Mr Dotteral over at ‘Bringing Up Charlie’ tagged me on a new meme - to write about a memorable ‘second’.
So I’ve chosen #5, the second house I ever lived in, which is very timely as for some reason I’ve been dreaming about it lately, a lot. Maybe it’s all this thinking about moving, a yearning in me to make a real family home of our own where Kai can grow up safe and free with space for play and adventures and growth. A place which Kai will remember and dream about and that will influence his feelings about what feels like ‘home’ for the rest of his life.
We moved into my second house when I had just turned five, in the winter of 1987 and for the next fifteen years that house was my world. The place where I dreamed and cried and laughed and played and grew.
I loved that house. My memories of it are vivid and fierce and very precious.
So, if you’ll forgive the indulgence, I’m going to take a break from the jokes tonight and share some of them with you. After all, in three weeks my Creative Writing course starts and I’m going to have to get used to doing some ‘serious’ writing for a change! It’s a bit of free-association which I’ve not really done before so bare with me…
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I am 6 0r 7. Sitting on the top step of the stairs in the dark when I should be in bed asleep. Listening to the murmer of my parents conversations, the hum of the television, the sounds from the kitchen as they boil the kettle or tidy up. Sounds of home, of safety and familiarity. I inch down, silently, one step at a time, wanting to get closer to that feeling.
I am 16. I am lying in bed listening to the rain hammer on the flat roof of my bedroom. I’ve decided I want to be an interior designer and mum and dad have given me free reign to decorate my room however I like. I often dream of a beach-hut hideaway so have crafted my room to make me feel like I’m by the sea. Holiday beach scavenges gift driftwood shelves, twisted sea-smoothed branches and endless stones and shells with which I fill my space. I’ve painted my favourite quotes from books and poems that I love straight onto the walls in meticulous, curving script. Tea lights twinkle – I must remember to blow them out before I fall asleep. I lie under the sail canapy I have hung over my bed, drifting on a sea of dreams. The world feels huge and full of possibility.
I am 9 or 10. The passageway down the side of the house is my own secret hideaway. In the hollowed out centre of the big shrubs that grow against the fence I have made my den. I can smell the damp earth, the peeling paint on the fence panels, and feel the rough prickle of the branches as I push my way through. There is a tin there, hidden under the foliage, full of secret things. In it is a piece of paper with the name of the boy I like at school. I haven’t told a soul, not even my best friend. I hope my brother hasn’t found it.
Christmas morning. Endless Christmas mornings. The rule is not to wake mum and dad before 7am. It is early but I am awake. I stick out a probing foot to prod the sack of presents at the foot of my bed and get that familiar rush of excitement and anticipation. There’s no way I’m going back to sleep now. I sneak into my brother’s room with my duvet wrapped around me and there he waits, equally awake and wide-eyed. We put our sacks of presents by the door and try not to look at them, filling the time till the promised hour playing games and talking in urgent whispers, muffling our giggles through our fingers.
Long summers in the garden. The paddling pool and water-fights with empty washing up bottles. Being given my own little patch of earth to plant seeds and forget-me-nots in. The heat of the greenhouse and the smell of the not-quite-ripe tomatoes and the compost heap. Swirling my fingers in the jelly soup of the frogspawn and watching the tadpoles in the pond grow legs and loose their tails. A plant by the Buddleia which was always, unexpectedly, covered in ladybirds. Writing in chalk on the patio slabs. Worrying that the initials marked in the cement by the previous owners meant that one of them was buried there. My shrine under the apple tree to Tabby, my cat, with the stone I had painted with her name on and jam-jars full of faded flowers and green water.
I am 19. It is September 11th 2001. I have come home from college and fallen asleep in a haze of fatigue. My Fibromyalgia is beginning to worsen although I don’t know this yet or what is wrong with me, only that I am tired and I hurt. My brother wakes me. Something has happened he says. We sit together and watch the TV in silence, shock and horror. I can’t believe what I am seeing. I cry but I can’t look away. Ant comes over after work and the three of sit and watch the same clips repeated over and over. Time stops. Pain and fatigue is forgotten. All I can feel is their pain, their loss. I do not sleep that night.
I am 7. We are sat eating tea. My brother will not eat his food. He is chewing the same mouthful of meat over and over until it is grey, tasteless ball that he cannot swallow. Mum is cross, “Just swallow it!” she says in her best pretend ’I'm not cross’ voice. But she is cross, and we both know it. She tries to get David take sips of water but still he will not swallow his food. He cries and has to spit it out. We have been here many, many times before. I kick my legs under the chair and feel smug that I am not the one being told off. We finish at last andI recite by rote “Thank-you-mummy-for-my-dinner-please-may-I-get-down” in one long drawn-out breath.
It is raining and the water is dripping through the bay window. We spring to action with tea-towels and margarine tubs to catch the drips. Christmas Cacti adorn the window sill. I have an overwhelming urge to twist off the tops, and draw smiley faces in the square panes of the window. Both are expressively forbidden. But thinking about it makes my fingers twitch.
We have been playing out in the snow and have come inside damp and rosy cheeked and smiling. I sit in front of the fire to thaw out. I can’t feel my finger tips and my ears buzz with cold. I rest the edges of my double-socked feet on the marble surround. Getting as close as I can without burning. A black and white ceramic cat shares the fireplace with me. When it’s my turn to dust I am extra careful with it, scared I will break it and get in trouble. It has yellow, glass eyes.
It is Sunday afternoon and I sit and doze on the sofa. Dad has the cricket on and the soft lull of the commentary makes me sleepy. I am full of dinner and memories of Sunday school.
I am 19. The contents of my room are packed into boxes and are being put in the removal van, ready to be unpacked in my new room at my mum’s partner’s huge and beautiful house. I sit and say goodbye. Dad hasn’t lived here for two years and somehow that makes it easier. This house isn’t home anymore – I am ready to say goodbye. After all, I am an adult now. Already dreaming of a home of my own with my boyfriend of nearly two years already. Thinking about him makes me burn with a fierce love and longing. He is my home now, somehow I know this. But still the tears come as a thousand memories tumble forward.
Goodbye 2nd house. Thank you.
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Read MoreThe Ordinary Child and a Mashed Potato Moment
First of all, a HUGE thank you to Potty Mummy for naming me the British Mummy Bloggers’ Blogger of the Week – what an honour! Welcome to new folks joining the sleep deprivation party here at SIFTW (acronyms mean I’ve totally made it!) This does of course now put me under immense pressure now to come up with something vaguely entertaining for you all. Which no doubt means, according to the ‘rules’ that I will end up being dull and weird. Oh well. Popularity was nice while it lasted!
There seems to be a bit of a theme running through my blogging at the moment. First we had a post about my average accomplishments, then it was my average blog, and today, well, today I want to talk about average babies.
You see, now Kai has hit the big 1 the inevitable baby race seems to have taken on new and infuriatingly pervasive proportions. Of course, it’s always been something. Can he smile yet? Can he roll? Sit up? Stand on one leg while singing ‘I’m a little tea-pot’? (ok, not the last one. At least… not yet)
Right now it’s walking and talking. It’s all anyone seems to care about.
And as Kai is doing neither (apart from the odd random word and strange animal impersonation) nor, in fact, showing the slightest interest in doing so, I find myself once again the recipient of a multitude of wonderfully reassuring and self-affirming comments such as “Well, I’m sure he’ll get it EVENTUALLY *sympathetic look*”, and (my current favourite of the week) “It’s ok, some babies just have more ‘physical’ intelligence than others” (what does that even MEAN??! If you’re reading, person who said that – FOR SHAME!!)
I’ve talked about the infuriating affliction that is competitive mum syndrome before on here. It’s something I try very, very hard to avoid. Mostly because I think it’s a huge big pile of bull crap.
But I’m going to admit it. A teeny tiny part of me cries as I watch Kai’s peers confidently run around reciting the alphabet backwards while Kai himself sits in a corner randomly pointing and laughing at inanimate objects and trying to bark like a dog. I am forced to face the fact that, despite my best efforts at parenting, my child hasn’t been gifted with supernaturally advanced powers of development.
Yes Josie, it’s bad news I’m afraid. Your child is *gulp*… average.
Why does it bother us so much? Cause I know it’s not just me, I bet you, mummy readers, have all had such moments of fleeting disappointment and vague feelings of failure which seem to rise, unbidden into our minds, every time your child’s friend does yet another extraordinary thing.
Saying that, I think this is mostly a first-born thing. Parents with two or three, or even (as in the case of some friends) , five or SIX probably don’t give a damn at what age their child decides to do something, or what anyone else thinks about it, too busy as they are trying to end the day with as many children alive as when they started. So parents of multiples – you have permission to take a smug position of superiority here – no doubt you learned these lessons long ago.
Anyway. Where was I? Oh yes…
Common sense tells us that obviously the rate of our child’s development has nothing whatsoever to do with our relative merits or failures as parents, or is, in fact, any indication of their future intelligence or success but far more likely down to random genetics, personality and well, chance. Despite what the competitive mums seem to infer, the fact that my baby is not walking and talking at the grand old age of thirteen months old, does NOT mean he is destined to become that man that walks around our town with a robe made of a sacking, sandals, and a straw hat shouting at the pigeons.
So why do we take it all so personally? Why DOES it bother us, if only a little?
I think the reason it seems to strike a nerve is due, in part, to a journey that began back in our teenage years. When we were forced to come to terms with the fact that no, we probably weren’t going to be a model, and that we weren’t going to ‘grow into’ our noses and magically wake-up looking like Angelina Jolie. Or that we were going to randomly bump into Robbie Williams in Starbucks one day and, looking mysterious and alluring (as, of course, we would), and being given his skinny cappuccino with extra foam in a hilarious coffee shop- misundertanding, cause him to fall head over heels in love with us because we ‘got him’ and didn’t care about the fame thing.
I’ve STILL not quite got over that one.
And guess what. Our children probably aren’t going to be space men either, or prime minister, or nobel peace prize winners, or pirate ninjas, or a horse, or any of the of the things we ourselves dreamed of becoming as children. Unconciously we long for them to live extraordinary lives, the lives we did not lead, the lives we had to let go of.
Ok I’ll admit this is all sounding rather depressing in a kind of let me take your dreams and stamp all over them kind of way.
But the sooner we realise this as parents the better. The sooner we can let go of our need for our children to be so damn extraordinary, the sooner we are freed to see just how incredible they already are. Maybe if we can just stop worrying about the big stuff, the stupid milestones and the whole ‘my baby should’s, we’ll be less likley to miss all those teeny tiny subtle moments of everyday extraordinariness that our children show us just be being alive. Those moments that show us that sometimes it’s the ordinary and unremarkable that can be the most beautiful and precious of all.
Like eating mash potato with their hands. Or how watching a dog running round the garden can be the single most hilarious experience of their little life. Or they way their head seems to fit so perfectly nestled into your shoulder.
Not clever. Not exceptional. But just magic.
So let go Competititve Mums. Please. Because I can’t take this crap anymore.
Stop asking me if Kai’s walking yet and let us get back to rubbing mashed potato in our hair. Cause it’s ten million times more fun.
