Motherhood – Page 2

Objects in the Rear View Mirror

11th June 2018 · Leave a Comment

There’s a term in writing, sometimes coined to describe the latter stages of a novel, and it’s called ‘telescoping’. This is where all the strands of the story come together, into a focused, climactic rhythm, driving the narrative forward, and to a close, ideally with the reader clinging on, page-turning and breathless. To do this well requires huge dexterity from the writer; to be able to hold the threads of the story taut.

I could apply the notion of ‘telescoping’ to life right now, specifically to the end of my son’s time at his particular school. His attendance at that school has been pivotal in our lives, in ways that I never could have imagined, not least because it inspired me to write a novel. The school setting being the single best microcosm of female society I could’ve hoped for. A veritable melting pot. I see now that so much of writing my novel was about deciphering my feelings about the school mothers, and more generally, the role women perform when their children grow older. Especially if they’ve got time on their hands. I now look to the last few weeks there, before some much-needed space and time away over the summer, before he starts somewhere fresh in September. So far, so good.

I used to observe the mothers of the eldest year group with interest, when I was a rookie. They had a wry and knowing smile, and flitted in and out of school life like unordained prefects; some attending every single school event, and some opting out entirely, so that on Prize Giving, at the end of term, I’d realise I hadn’t seen them for six months or more. That wry smile is the one I now exhibit, as I reach the end. Exams are done, futures are mapped out, the children stuck in the unnatural holding pattern appropriated by British prep schools, where boys of 13, whose voices have dropped and whose shoulders have broadened, are still in short trousers, surrounded by much smaller kids. And the girls; who mature at such an accelerated rate to boys, look about 16. I smile as I observe the younger mothers, those with toddlers on their hips, who have so much ahead of them; years of nativity plays and easter bonnets and summer picnics. Of team selection (another stalwart of the prep school system) and parents evenings which resemble your worst speed-dating nightmare, but where your child getting an ‘A’ in Latin is apparently the measure of success.

There was a school summer ball a few weeks back – Gatsby-themed – in which money was raised for charity. There were no half measures in dress; most mothers looking as if they stepped out of the BBC costume department, and some probably had. There’s always someone who knows someone, who knows someone. Or they are in fact the someone themselves. There’s a curious vibe when women are in costume, each arrival provoking an up and down glance – a summation – the type of which we can all recognise as checking out. Exclamations of ‘you look amazing!’ as they pull at their headdresses, and adjust uncomfortable straps. Then glance over the shoulder of the person they’re speaking to; you know why. It’s like our own school days, but all over again. That wry smile is because I know I don’t have to do it anymore. School, when you have a teenager, is a place your children go to, that you rarely frequent. Gone are the days of daily drop offs and pick ups. Of mothers’ tongues clacking in the mornings, before the bell rings. No longer the hub.

But the hub, for all its complexity and conjecture, has been a source of solace over the years; the mothers are my tribe and I wouldn’t dispute that. But my time there has reached an end. I shall piggyback my sister in law’s school experience from now on, as her kids are younger than mine, and I am fairly certain I will encounter the same cliques and clichés that existed at our school. I might find, after I leave, that I am no longer interested in ‘the mothers’, in the same way that I am now no longer interested in having babies. It’s a thing I did; an incredible rite of passage, which is over. With two teenagers I now face more serious studying, driving lessons, choosing universities, relationships, parties, and more parties. Dropping off and picking up of a different kind. Maybe all of this will shrink in the distance as I leave it behind.

Or maybe not…let’s see!

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This ain’t no disco

26th April 2018 · Leave a Comment

School is back! The manacle of school holidays thrown off! I reflect; something about the cessation of the term is always bittersweet, mornings spent in pyjama’d free-fall, with too much TV and a messy house. It’s necessary and well-deserved for all of us, but after over three weeks, I am longing for routine again. I now have two teenagers in the house as my son turned thirteen this month. Hormones run high; theirs as they surge towards adulthood, mine for different reasons. Moods fray. Creative work does not get done. It takes a week or so to reacclimatise once they’ve gone back, and now I am alone in the house once more. Order restored.

Who’d have thought that my life would be so closely linked to term time, even though I am no longer an academic? Who’d have thought – and I texted this sentiment to one of my old university friends just yesterday morning – that our lives would have become interminably busy? I don’t recall this busy-ness being an issue in our twenties and thirties. I was the first of our group of friends to have children; the pioneer, a trail-blazer. I now look at women who are 26, as I was when I had my daughter, and I think: I was a child. Twenty six. It’s no age! Not for this sort of serious shit. Parenthood loomed up with a banner that said ‘it’s not about you (anymore)’ and I spent the best part of seventeen years absorbing that new and all-encompassing fact.

I hear adults talk about their childhoods. I have a particular penchant at the moment for listening to couples counselling on podcast – utterly fascinating, and makes me want to retrain as a psychologist. Oh no, wait, I’ve already retrained once *grimace emoji face*. The last thing any toddler wants is for their parent to tell them his or her problems. Double that for a child, quadruple for a teen. For teenagers, adult problems are just embarrassing and awkward and the last thing on earth they want to deal with. Feelings are the domain of the young. Is it that my contemporaries and I are expected to navigate life without having feelings, as feelings have become treacherous territory? I therefore make a point of asking people ‘how did you feel about that?’ in conversation, in the style of the podcast psychologist, a gentle lilt to my voice, and I find people surprised, wrong-footed; ‘what do you mean how do I feel?‘

The teens and I sit each night and eat dinner, a table set where I am often the only adult. My son plays offensive rap music during the meal and we argue daily about who is going to wash up. They do it. I assert the rules. We discuss injustices and daily events and the need to develop strategies for managing the future. The future feels awash with the great unknown and I wonder if they regard me with interest. I dispense advice and opinion and they look at me clear-eyed, dispassionate. What do they see? A woman who inflicts too many vegetables on them (chickpeas, aubergines, cauliflower and broccoli in one sitting), and wears slogan sweatshirts that she finds ironic, but they don’t understand. Woke up in Paradise. Give a Damn. This Ain’t No Disco.

I smile to myself and feel grateful. Life is good. I get to wander around in the daytime and ponder my writing. I get to browse the web without limit. I get to make plans and make beds. When driving, my son comments that I have a free life and I agree. I explain to him that I have many responsibilities, it’s my job to hold everything together. He nods and says sagely; ‘it’s like you’re in a cage, but you have the key.’

Yes, I say. It’s just like that.

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Steady selfish

20th March 2018 · Leave a Comment

My parents divorced when I was a child, leaving me fearful of abandonment. This, compounded by my father’s profession – an airline pilot – meant that in my young mind, I worried about plane crashes too. Meanwhile, my brother, who is seven years older than me, navigated the treacherous waters of being teenage with a single mother. Despite my Mum’s best efforts, our home was not always calm. I would climb into her bed some nights, listening to her breathe and she would allow me to sleep there, safe in the knowledge that she was not going anywhere. As I write this, I sense the faint fingerprint remaining from my childhood. Divorce can be misunderstood by those who haven’t experienced it. It’s not that I didn’t understand my Dad had to go, and it’s not even that his leaving impacted us so much in the day to day; after all, pilots are away a lot. But the bedrock on which I relied was no longer sound. It remained, some semblance of its former self, but it was jagged and uneven, and there were gaps where steadfastness used to be. I wonder now if I have fabricated this perception because I have reflected on my own childhood and cross-referenced it with that of my own children? Isn’t that what being middle-aged is all about? Looking back and looking forward; stranded midway.

My children walk on steady bedrock. That is because my husband and I provide it for them, and I particularly, as I don’t ‘work’ for a living, devote myself to ensuring bedrock stability. That sounds as if we lack selfishness. I note in the media the recent preoccupation with ‘self care’ – and how we should all practice it. I wonder: is self care just selfishness, its thinly disguised cousin? I resolve to put myself first more. The happiness of everyone depends on it. But self care can feel like a little-used habit from the past. I remind myself I spent 25 years with just myself, no children to think of, how hard can it be?

I watched a documentary about Joan Didion on Netflix which was fascinating but also tragic, and I was struck by a comment she made about her ill-fated daughter, who died in her late thirties. She said her daughter found her remote. When I watched the cinematic footage of Joan in earlier years, writing prolifically, immersed in her craft, surrounded by other creatives, it’s clear that the life she strove for did not feature bedrock stability. It featured something else entirely; the pursuit of her own needs, her own compulsion to write. And as such it makes me wonder, as most people my age do, what’s it all about? I don’t write for a day or two because I do mother stuff, kid’s stuff, house stuff. The ‘pursuit of my own needs’ comes low down on the the ‘to do’ list.

When my own sixteen year old daughter sleeps in my bed, as she did so for a brief spell recently, it was for comfort, but also to draw strength. There was something in her own life that required bravery and clarity and she took that from me, her mother life-force. I didn’t see this until after it had ceased happening, and all that was left of those nights she slept next to me was the memory. This time round though, I listened to her breathing and recognised the same in-breath and out-breath of her babyhood, the same snuffles, the same sleeping sighs as she made her dream-led twists and turns. So elemental yet also incongruous, as when your child emerges in to young adulthood, you loose that sense of oneness with them. Their scent, their skin, that extension of yourself. She is me. I am her.

It’s curious but it is from these everyday inconsequential human nuances that I notice my writing gets richer. To me at least. It is there that I find words. I put off the pursuit of what I desire and aspire to because what happens in between is every day life. So these moments have to be lived and enjoyed and even, at times, endured, as from them comes the goodness.

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The Education of Adults

17th January 2018 · Leave a Comment

It’s a curious thing, being nearly 44 years old. The shenanigans of middle age continue to bring new and exciting dimensions to life. I find myself noting the behaviour of my elders and wondering, as I’ve alluded to before; why the grump? Why the know-it-all? Why the backward-looking attitude? I heard a British social commentator say – in reference to the demographic of Americans who voted for Trump – that they were looking to restore the past. Rather than looking forward, the impetus was to go back, to make it like it was. They rue the day when the future encroached. But, as all humans (and most animals) know, there is no stopping the future, it’s going to come whether we like it or not. I notice too the passing of time – another Christmas, another new year’s eve, another cold and gloomy January. Time tick-tocks, and I see I am straddled between two places; what was and what will be. There may be an esoteric truth to this which can only be understood by the over-40’s. Am I the only one whom until my mid-thirties, had no thoughts on this topic? Sentimentality and nostalgia were not my constant companions then, as they are now.

I also notice the behaviour of the young, my children, their friends, the cohorts of youth, where everything is ahead of them and not behind. My children look back on their younger childhood and regard it fondly. I can isolate each event in memory and recall the effort involved in making it lovely. This activity is grossly exaggerated now I ‘don’t work’. I use that term reluctantly, as I feel like I work every damn minute of the day, until I fall into bed exhausted, but it assists me in making my point. Motherhood can be distilled into a series of efforts, some minuscule and some Herculean, all of them combining, we hope, to make up the whole: to raise a happy child. In amongst it, there are efforts that are misguided or just plain wrong. The times when not enough effort is made, or there’s too much and it overflows in an ugly spill.

I then look to my peers, the beleaguered 40-somethings! I regard my friends with insatiable interest; how are they doing it? Do they feel the same as I do? Is this what we signed up for? Why are we so guarded? Decisions of others are dissected and turned over in my hands, trying to see the angle.

I conclude it’s all a whopping, great big overthink.

Meanwhile, I am lecturing next week at the college where I did my MA. I am returning to spend time with the under-graduates to talk about writing and blogging. I’ve written a blog for eight years this month. Eight years!! Blogging has become almost unrecognisable to itself in that time, so much has changed.

I get asked, pretty much on a daily basis, ‘how’s the book?’ as if it’s a living, breathing thing, like ‘how’s the garden?’ or ‘how’s your mum?’. I pause, and reply that it’s going slowly. For all the momentum of an educational qualification and a publisher’s meeting, the fact remains that work still needs to be done to refine the book. What I produced was a first draft, and what I need it to be is a final draft. There can be fifty iterations between those two points. I notice this statement makes me feel like a fraud. Writers write; they might write every day, but the end result may not change that much. It feels like that now. I persevere. And fret about how hard the perseverance feels. Did I mention that writing, much like motherhood can be distilled into a series of efforts, some minuscule and some Herculean, all of them, we hope, combining to make up the whole: to create a book. The irony of my choice of pursuits is not lost on me.

January always was the pensive month, for all the talk about Blue Monday (to me; a perennial favourite of the 1980’s by New Order), the weather, the post-Christmas slump, the crazy, short-lived bursts of healthy eating and exercise regime, it remains a sullen, after-party sort of month. A time to endure whilst we wait for something better. Roll on the future.

Solstice

21st December 2017 · Leave a Comment

Forgive my addled mind; I blame it on my three-week enforced quarantine, as both of my children have systematically exchanged cold and flu viruses, and I have resembled a Florence Nightingale figure, day and night, ministering to them. Nothing like a sick child to halt proceedings. It happens this time of year as we face the shortest day and the sky darkens in mid afternoon and slides into night by 4pm. I curse it, and wonder how I spent so many years of my life not noticing, not caring about this frankly antisocial, anti-happy, antithesis of summer! We all muddle through in darkness and cold, waiting for respite: ‘it makes me grumpy’ I retort to my children, when they ask if I am alright, (and I clear the next round of soggy, used tissues to a soundtrack of coughing, and wash my hands for the millionth time). Find the joy, find the joy, find the joy!

In a looping, multi-faceted WhatsApp chat between myself and a dear friend, we comment on ‘noticing’, on how we now so aware of everything. The small things and the large. Poverty, crime, the environment, nature, weather, how everyone looks so damn old. We wonder if this is a 40-something trait, something that comes home to roost after our years of self-centredness? Were our twenties the same, or our thirties? I couldn’t tell you one major news story from my thirties; I was knee-deep in nappies, my ‘career’ and my own self-regard. Me, me, me. I consider that career now, which seemed so vital then, and wonder what it would have been like to have held on. Kept my toehold in the corporate cliff-face? Three weeks of sick children would have posed a Herculean challenge and I would be bathed in mother’s guilt by now, struggling. Isn’t this why I gave up? I gave up for many reasons, some of which I can’t even recall now, but wasn’t it to be able to respond to the demands of my family, when they arose? And to write…

Another good friend, who sensed my isolation, made an impromptu visit this week, and we shared glasses of wine. When we met, our children were four and now her son is seventeen and my daughter is sixteen. The preoccupations of the past no longer occupy us, and we have new ones; wild and varied ones that relate to the life of the modern teen and how to parent them. It’s something I’ve written about before in articles here and here. To break it down, it’s along the lines of parties, illegal substances and our abject fear of them somehow infiltrating our teenager’s well-briefed sphere of reality, university places, extracurricular activities, whether they should earn money (and where’s the time amidst studying?), are they OK? Is it all going to be OK? If I contrast this to ten years ago, the preoccupations would have been Phonics, dexterity, reading Jane and John books, learning their spellings, head lice outbreaks and was their friend mean to them at playtime? All said and done, and bed by 7pm.

Oh how things change! And that is what I notice now. Experience is a peculiar thing. The recognition of something similar to something you’ve seen before. What I find interesting is that even things from a year ago seem facile now. As your child accelerates towards adulthood, there are a litany of milestones that make the last milestone seems less significant. Where does it end?

Meanwhile, Netflix has been my best friend as I watched Alias Grace (absolutely spellbinding). And then, with my twelve-year-old son, who is bored with his kid’s TV after days of bedrest, watched ‘Anne with an E’, a revisiting of the classic ‘Anne of Green Gables’. I made chicken soup. I plumped pillows. I escaped to the hairdresser for the afternoon and in an act of rebellion, had my hair cut short and now feel slightly traumatised, but in a good way. I cleaned and sorted and did what the housebound do! I haven’t written a word of the novel for weeks and weeks and this weighs a little heavy. Can I get you a drink? Something to eat? But this is how it goes; the ups and downs. The light and the dark. Happy solstice…

Painting by my favourite, Jessica Cooper, ‘Red Apple’

Generational feminism: a mother’s view of her daughter

16th November 2017 · Leave a Comment

I notice the preoccupations of my daughter and her friends. They’re sixteen. They like the Kardashians and vintage clothes. Outfits that reek of 1990’s throwback, but do so ironically, as if the 1990’s were a long-lost age, not the one their parents have so recently emerged from, blinking into the light, murmuring ‘Wonderwall’. They consider themselves to be equal counterparts to their male friends, yet they regard much of what teenage boys do as alien, to be excused, dumb. I think: still? Boys, it seems, have no filter, no pause button, no method through which to edit their behaviour. Like puppy dogs. Teenage girls meanwhile, are clever, sassy, smart but also vulnerable, insecure and foolish. There’s a quagmire between the sexes, but it’s one they’re happy to wade through. For girls, the focus is on hair and even more on eyebrows; the application of eyebrows being the most important component of the day. Without them, there is a possibility that Instagram photos will be somewhat off; under-dressed. There are acrylic nails and lacy bralettes and beds that don’t get made. Dirty plates and smeary, two-day-old banana milkshakes, and crumpled Maccy D’s wrappers.

I notice the mothers of said teens, in contrast. Forty-something, sometimes fifty-something. Those who had late babies face the teenage reality as they simultaneously contemplate menopause. We like ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ and ‘Big Little Lies’ and shop online as if the world depends on it. We wear outfits curated in the hope we don’t look dowdy, curmudgeonly, old. The dichotomous striving between too little and too much: is this too much? I ask my daughter. She replies ‘no’ and I am grateful for her tacit solidarity. We worry and fret and try to bridge the gap between the many prongs of our lives; husbands, in-laws, teens, pre-teens, parents in their 70’s, friends we haven’t seen for a year, but whom we email with fervour. There’s focus on grey roots and how to disguise them, on a slippery slope to becoming platinum blonde, we dye our once-healthy, lustrous hair until it’s straw-like in the onslaught. There are houses and cars and Nutri-bullets and electric toothbrushes. We own stuff. And we clean stuff up. We work and then we fantasise about not working. But mostly we try to decipher the future and observe in our daughters the next generation of women we’re raising; we are the planets and they are satellites entering our orbit. We intuit their behaviour, staving off the next demand, we try to respond appropriately and assuredly. Yet despite years of life experience, we feel as if we are winging it. Every. Damn. Day.

I refuse to see the downside. This is the way it goes. No matter how evolved I thought I was – dammit I was an early adopter of Snapchat; I am down with the kids – there is now weighty evidence that I am an entirely different generation to that of my children. Even though I thought I’d strap that baby girl to my back and carry-the-hell-on with my fabulous life, parenthood did eventually dig its heels in. Now I am a beleaguered veteran; I’ve done some time. I have a sixteen year old! And the road is not even at an end. It stretches ahead over the brow of a hill I haven’t even started to climb.

I remember the summer I graduated like it was last week, I am Generation X. I grew up with John Hughes movies and later, tried to gather the gall to cut my hair like Winona Ryder in ‘Reality Bites’ (I never did). My daughter does not even qualify for Generation Snowflake, but will morph into some as-yet-undefined grouping with worrying social traits, to be reported by the media. I ask her if she is a feminist, which is, on my part, a covert exercise to establish if the doctrines underpinning my own have rubbed off. She looks at me quizzically: is this a trick question? When I was a teenager, circa 1989, I recall feminism in my corner of rural England as synonymous with trouble-making, women who complained, left their husbands, messed up the status quo. Joined CND and camped out in Greenham Common. The status quo was fine and dandy, why change? My daughter regards the status quo but the drum-beat of societal change has been deafening during her life.

Is a feminist innate or is she (or he) made? Can you opt in or out? I feel like my generation opted in. For years, the ground on which feminism stood seemed steady. Sure-fast. It was simply a matter of building it up, adding to it, making it stronger. Now it feels different; a shift in perception. Gender fluidity means all accepted standards can and should be challenged in the name of equality, to enable those who feel marginal to feel less so. I sense threat when writing about this topic, I acknowledge the ease with which I could offend, how I may appear misinformed, blinkered, and note the misjudgments of others who inadvertently stray into the dangerous territory of gender politics. There’s a temptation to remain anodyne. It leads me to question how easily and seriously my daughter might form her views in such a volatile environment. Attitudes previously deemed to be acceptable by society have become the opposite.

I am not sure she knows what all the fuss is about; should women and men have equality? Errr, yea? Dummy. Her generation doesn’t really get the distinction; the glass ceiling is something which, at 16, they haven’t tapped a tentative finger on. Constructs are in place to ensure that, at least in her school experience, she does not perceive disadvantage. Can girls excel at Science and Maths? Of course. Can they play rugby and cricket? If they so wish. On the one hand they are empowered – absolutely so. They don’t consider they are segregated; the world is for the taking. Yet simultaneously, my daughter witnesses modern politics and seems to regard it as not directly relevant to her. Brexit. Trump. A woman Prime Minister in our country. A quiet rage might ignite in the face of injustice, but on the whole, I don’t see her demographic exercise activism. They haven’t worked out what they need to fight for. Yet.

Amongst her contemporaries, there is the perpetual invitation to comment, to ‘like’, to pass judgement, in a way that did not exist in my teenage years. Any attitude I might have fostered had time to grow strength and validity, to form part of an inner dialogue, stress-tested in my mind. Whereas in her connected, social-media enabled age, one false move can lead to a trolling on Twitter or a comment-fest on Instagram. When driving in the car, after the news has aired, I explain the Weinstein allegations to her, what happened and what women had been subjected to in his industry. I explain to her the righteous outcry, the abuse of power, the sexually motivated harassment that existed. I expand on the #Metoo concept; there is solidarity in knowing there are others and there is freedom and strength derived from exposing one’s oppressor.

But where does it all lead? What happens next? Will she be exempt when she takes her first job and someone in a position more senior to her abuses his power? Following decades of this systemic behaviour, do we now face a Brave New World? I consider: do men in 2017 feel brave? Do women? There’s the clear and obvious good that has come from recent events. Emma Thompson spoke eloquently about ‘the crisis in masculinity’ and how we must address that first, and she’s right. Like all newly identified and frightening facets of society, once they are exposed, we reel from the exposure – the rapid and unexpected pulling back of the curtain – but it takes time, humility and intelligence to define how to use that exposure for good. In this instance, it will take a whole generation, years and years of subtle (and not so subtle) change to alter the way a man perceives a woman as she enters the room. This must start with our sons as well as our daughters. It is mothers like myself who have the work to do now.

There will be those who may secretly wish things wouldn’t change. There will be men who overnight have become relics, dinosaurs, defined by their inability to recognise they belong to another era. The world has moved on. How should they behave now and must we acknowledge the fall-out of deriding a generation of men as inappropriate? They are fathers, husbands, brothers, colleagues, friends. As a seismic change takes place underfoot, the tectonic plates of gender are on the move and now a new landscape is discernible, complete with gaping crevasses between what was and what will be. And what of the accused? There’s instant judgement and castigation. Weinstein flashes across our screens. We imagine the manifestation of the sexual predator; the middle-aged, paunchy, powerful man. But it surely must apply to younger men, boys even, who are now navigating these waters? What of the accused teenage boy who thought he had consent but, it turns out, his perception differs to hers? So treacherous is it that my head spins at the prospect of guiding my daughter and my son through it and I, like every generation before me, think back with whimsy to my teenage years when we bought ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ by ‘The Cure’ on 7 inch vinyl and didn’t really question things. I see that era is gone. As it ever was, the older generation – my generation – will define the route forward, but it will be her generation who take the journey.

The beleaguered mothers

13th September 2017 · Leave a Comment

We sit amongst frothy-topped coffees and comment on our ailments. We are the beleaguered mothers. There’s self-deprecation in the morning confessional; we know it’s not the done thing to admit impediment. Yet a string of non-specific, self-diagnosed symptoms emerge: migraines, muscle tension, throat constriction, heartburn, abdominal pain, palpitations, teeth-clenching (my personal favourite). We laugh at ourselves, admonish our frailty and say in unison: ‘it’s the stress!’. That seems to cover it, the catch-all explanation for so many physical manifestations that afflict modern mothers.

It’s not the stress of the new mother; the sleep-deprived, life-curtailed fog that descends after you take the baby home, and lodges for the first year. It’s not the stress of shepherding them through toddlerhood; the fingers in plug sockets, falling down stairs, drinking bleach phase. Nor is it the middle years, where mothers face the reality of not being able to fix everything; no-one to play with at playtime, not being picked for the team, not taking to a sleepover. No, what affects my mother friends is something else. We are now veterans, we have been mothers for many years and are even starting to focus on that empty nest, somewhere discernible but hazy, on the horizon of the distant future. Parenting teenagers offers up a new type of stress. A vapid version of its predecessors; we are on the sideline of our children’s lives, looking in but no longer able to influence, wondering why this all feels so damn weird. Worrying as a job. Professional worriers.

There’s an obscenity to it and that is not lost on me. Here we have a group of women most of whom have not faced real hardship, not real stress, although for each of us there has been a fair share of challenge. No one is exempt from the reach of the conversation that continues, staccato, as we sip too-hot drinks and wonder how long we can steal away together before we really ought to get back to our lives, our commitments, our jobs.

We discuss the need for self-care and tell each other about obscure supplements (Slippery Elm and Ashwagandha), making a mental note to read up on, or acquire said pill. I inwardly fret I’ve shared too much. I suspect we all do. There’s that curious British need to maintain the stiff upper lip. We all say it’s been a great summer and lament the new school term, but secretly love it because it means we can function/work/socialise/be free again. There’s nothing like a group of school mums come September. Those first weeks of term – the freedom! The knowledge that your off-spring are where they are meant to be, learning, and being cared for by other, fully trained adults.

I sit and observe. It is this group of women in whom I am interested. It is these about whom I wrote my novel; the forty-somethings trying to make sense of the mid-life crevasse they find themselves avoiding. The sandwich generation who, once they stop discussing their teenagers, start right in on discussing their older-generation parents. Or the affairs of our peers. Oh the irony! But of course we are also the ‘grateful’ generation. We acknowledge that we have it all. We are the women who were brought up to smash the glass ceiling and many of us gave it a good tap, and still do. It’s just that the stress involved in doing so causes migraines, tense muscles, throat constriction, heartburn, abdominal pain, palpitations and teeth-clenching! Haha!

It seems that what it all boils down to is ability to chill out and not take ourselves all so seriously. We look to each other to see who has mastered this. The ideal reaction is to not react. We agree to work on that, until next time…and enjoy the solidarity of not feeling alone. We are a tribe.

Burger

20th April 2017 · Leave a Comment

I’ve been underground; that is, I’ve been otherwise engaged. School holidays spell distraction for me and as I near the blessed end to each one, I secretly relish the prospect that they’ll go back to school and I get to be alone for a moment. I am sure I write the same sentiment every year after Easter. That slightly guilty, slightly wayward feeling intense parenting provokes, when I am in the company of my children so much I wonder where they stop and I begin. Friends have doled out advice in recent weeks as I’ve hit a spiral of self-doubt; part professional (will I ever finish this damn book?!) and part personal (life feels like awfully hard work right now). I need to take a step back and put in place all the usual measures: yoga, good food, better sleep, walking, planning, trying to calm my worries. Turning the amplifier down.

It never comes naturally to me, but I persist.

The season shifted and the wisteria on my house went from tight, unfurled buds to near bloom in a few days. My son turned twelve. My daughter got to grips with her exam revision and we all breathed a sigh of relief. Can I just say that trying to learn ten subjects intimately when you are just fifteen years old is brutal?! She persists.

My peers and I refer to ourselves as the ‘sandwich’ generation; teenage children and parents who are getting older. We are the burger in the bun of life. Everyone’s peddling and wondering how life got so complicated. I find myself looking at women with young children and for the first time ever, feeling a curious wave of envy. Why? I didn’t even like that stage. I suppose what prompts me is the knowledge that when your children are small, everything is ahead of you. Now, as my daughter approaches her sixteenth year I find myself reaching for the memories of her birth like they have been filed away in a dusty box on top of a high shelf. Lid on.

And the book, well it’s on hold whilst I finish all of the academics now required to graduate. One essay down, one to go (the epic, big boy one). Bear with me, I’ll be back.

Broken sleep

21st March 2017 · Leave a Comment

There’s a sense that time is passing at an uncanny rate. I remind myself: no, this is just what happens in midlife. As a child, time was an impenetrable barrier, nothing sped up an hour. As a teen the same but with some consciousness. As a newly formed adult in my twenties, I was too busy being fabulous to notice. In my thirties I was neck-deep in caring for my babies. Time was something I never had enough of. Not on my own at least. I constantly had these happy campers with me. Years slipped by like pooh sticks under the bridge; fleeting. Bittersweet. Then to my forties, where I am now. Two types of time. When I have it – still a phenomemon that unnerves me, my children might be at school – I am free-wheeling, should-be-doing-something-more-useful but instead I am suspended, truanting. Then not enough time; watching them grow up, wishing to press ‘pause’. I notice that my commentary here refers to them and not me. Everything I think about myself is in relation to them. I commented to a friend yesterday that I spent 26 years on this earth as an individual before I became a mother. Why then won’t it be possible to shift back into that status when my children grow up? We looked at each other perplexed as we know: it doesn’t work that way.

I’m not sleeping well. I have deadlines looming, there’s a change coming. Decisions need to be made. Life – in its funny, imperceptible way has tilted on its axis and now I look forward and see uncertainty where before there was structure and form. My Masters will end this summer and I shall graduate. I will have achieved the objective; a book written, an academic mountain climbed. But then what? I am not sleeping well! It starts off alright but then I wake in the no-mans-land of 3am and am wide awake with ‘to do’ lists. I dreamt I was a ballerina and got the principal role. I then – due to a wardrobe malfunction – arrived late for the performance and the director was not happy. This smacks me as typical! I woke with questions: who was the director? Nameless faceless person I wanted to impress. Why did I not have the right ballet clothes? A tutu does not feature in my life. Why late? Because I was scrambling around trying to find ballet tights; an item of clothing I have not possessed since I was eight years old. During the 3am thought-fest I concluded that I was worried about missing my own show. This feeling of time slipping by and the instinct to pipe up and say: I’m not ready!!

Make of that what you will…

Meanwhile, it might just possibly be the end of winter some time soon and there might just possibly be a day where the sun shines all day and people smile. When daffodils are out, anything seems possible.

The mother’s stare

9th March 2017 · Leave a Comment

For those readers with children, you might be familiar with or recall a time when you stood on a pitch sideline and watched your child take part in some sport or another. This applies too to instrument players or singers; parents nestled in the audience watching a recital or a performance. The idea of mothers in rows fascinates me. After all, it was the mothers who were the starting point for my novel. My son changed schools when he was eight; in his first week as a new boy there was a swimming competition where all children competed. Parents were crammed in, that low-ceiling’ed, echoing bass of the swimming pool building, along with the smell of chlorine. I sat amongst the mothers and looked about the sea of faces and recognised barely one child. These contemporaries of my sons would become his trusted friends. It’s a strange thing when your child is at a school. Their group of peers will become your yardstick for most things over the course of about ten years. Ties to them may stay long after their time at that school has ended and your child has moved on. And the mothers, who you will stand next to daily, will become part of your life in a way you could scarcely imagine when you had a newborn baby.

Now I am seasoned, the school mothers have been a part of my life for over ten years and amongst them I have made some deep and lasting friendships. I have also observed the human condition in all of its intricacy; the plight of divorce, illness, the joy of younger siblings, success and failure, the gaining of jobs and money and the loss of them too. I take my place on the sideline, be it football or rugby or hockey and I stand there conversing. If you were to watch us what a curious sight we’d make. A distinct community of clones for in time, school mums all morph into looking the same, there’s a unspoken uniform. We look out to the pitch, standing in a line and the conversation ebbs and flows as dogs sit patiently, where mud is a regular feature. We rarely make eye contact as we are there to watch the game, so it’s hard to gauge the body language and occasionally we break from form and look to each other, laughing maybe and our kids probably think we haven’t been watching them all along. It always happens right at the time they score a goal or make a break. In some schools this rigamarole is a twice-a-week endeavour; Wednesdays and Saturdays. The working mothers can’t generally make it midweek but occasionally do. The stay at home mothers treat it like a job. This is the mother’s equivalent to the coffee machine in the office. Fascinating and curious and the basis of so much book material I could hardly detail it here!

Maybe because they know this they regard me with suspicion, my friends often joke: ‘you could put this in the book!’ and I wonder if they think that would be a good outcome or a bad one? To recognise oneself in print? It all depends I suspect.

I wonder now what will happen when these days of match and play watching will end? Will there be a void? What has become the underpinning to the mother’s week will start to float away as teenagers say they’d rather their parents didn’t watch or stop playing altogether. And after that, what? They go to university and parents visit for Sunday roasts or to move them in and out of whichever student house? Where will the mother’s stare rest then? Not to mention the time when there’s no real reason to visit – maybe until there are grandchildren? This future of mine spirals ahead in a blur because – a bit like when you have a new born – I can’t even envisage what that will feel like. The parental journey keeps its allure by providing an never-ending series of outcomes that you hadn’t expected. As one of my very clever mother friends said; parents are always in catch-up mode, their children are and will always be at least five steps ahead. Often what is ahead is what simply has not occurred to us yet.