Category: Life

Moving On

I wasn’t intending to do a Friday Flash this week but there you go! Hope you like it.

Moving On

I turned and looked at the hospice I had just left. A family were also leaving, huddled together. The women were openly sobbing, the men had tears coursing down cheeks that were as tense and hard as rock. I heard their cries, but the sound all around me was muted and faint. I left them behind and walked down the road.

The buildings here were old, craggy, moss-covered. They showed their history and age in every crack and every dusty window pane. Foliage ran a little wild, and there was a smell around here of damp and mildew, mixed in with a faint memory of old wood polish and Brasso. In one, I saw an old lady cradling a newborn baby with the care she would show to a precious ornament, trembling with age and worry in case she dropped him. An empty seat beside her had a worn and faded dent, where a shadow played instead of the man who should have been there. I moved on, and the old, tumbledown buildings began to give way to more modern ones.

These also showed their age, though. Doubtless the architects had called them ‘modern’ at the time, but now they looked as dated as faded colour photographs, down to the grey uniform materials they wore. A wedding party was leaving a church here, and I saw the mother of the bride standing to one side, watching her daughter over the distance that separated them; a proud father frantically photographed and chroniclled every minute. The woman was smiling through her tears, as a video tape of memories played in front of her eyes. I knew she wasn’t seeing a bride but a little girl in her mum’s shoes, with a net curtain fastened on her head. I smiled, and moved on again.

A small row of shops reflected the sunlight merrily. The street was deserted, but the shops were full, as if I was the only living person out and the others were trapped behind the glass facades, looking out. Except they weren’t interested in what lay on the other side of the glass, they were too busy filling their shopping baskets. A woman had a trolley with two small children in. The boy turned his face up for a kiss, the girl reached for her mum’s hand. An instant later they both screwed up their faces and began to cry for some niffy-naffy thing. I shook my head at the same time as their mother, and we both moved on.

At the end of the shops a set of park gates stood open, beckoning passers-by to stop and rest in its shade. A heavily pregnant girl sat on a bench, resting her hand on her stomach and reading a book. She looked so tired, but her face was smooth, unlined, still an empty slate ready for life to write on. The sunlight winked off a brand new, shiny ring and she put her book down and closed her eyes, inhaling deeply. I copied her, drinking in the cut grass, the roses, the traces of cigarettes. I could have watched her all day, poised at the threshold of her life, but I moved on.

The houses now were newer, solid brick residences with smoking chimneys. One front door opened, and a young man came out, leaving a girl who, tearstained, slammed the door behind him. He stood a moment, head bowed, then turned and ran to the door as she opened it. They clung together, apologies and forgiveness and love tied up in one wordless embrace. I looked away from their private moment and moved on.

Towards the end of the street a girl and boy were standing together, shuffling feet and shifting heavy schoolbags from one shoulder to another. They swapped a book, fingers lingering a split second. They turned to part, then the girl dropped everything and planted a kiss on the boy’s cheek. He stared, touched his cheek, and I mimicked every gesture reverently, reliving the moment as if it were yesterday. He turned and ran, and I moved on.

On the pavement a small girl pranced along the path behind her mother, in too-big shoes and a piece of netting pinned to her head. Lost in her daydream, she tripped over a pothole and stumbled to her knees. Her cries drifted towards me like a whisper in the breeze, clear but weak, other-worldly, and as she revealed a graze on her knee her mother scooped her up and kissed away her hurts. My eyes stung as much as my knee. I moved on.

In the last house of the road, a comforting, cosy house built of bricks that looked as though they had just been freshly laid, a faintly familiar woman cradled a newborn baby, cooing and beaming. I stopped a moment and savoured the warmth stealing over me, then looked ahead to a figure standing, waiting. And I moved on for the last time.

Wheee! There goes today…

At the weekend my children passed two small but significant milestones.

Emily, not quite three months, is now too big for her pram. It’s a Silver Cross that converts from a pram into a pushchair, so I’ve had to convert it. She loves it, she can still lie flat when she needs to but now she can also sit up and watch the world. And she has the heart of a writer, she is taking everything in and processing it before my eyes.

That’s not really significant for anyone other than us, I guess. But it means it’s the last time I will push my babies in a pram, and another reminder that my babies are growing up way too quickly. I wasn’t quite ready to relinquish the pram yet.

Daniel, on the other hand, achieved a big milestone in anyone’s book, and I was very proud of him. He learned to pedal a bike! He didn’t go too fast, and he couldn’t keep one foot on the pedal while the other pushed, but he pedalled. He had forward (and backward) momentum. Good boy!

I do love that my children are growing up. Every stage is magical, and they constantly amaze me (well, while they’re not driving me round the bend). But the forward momentum that they have in themselves is also quite scary, and sometimes, just sometimes, I wish they also had that backward momentum, that I could pause and rewind like Sky+. But no, there goes today. Whoops! I blinked, and nearly missed it.

Finding Me, Now

So, our daughter has been with us for over seven weeks now, and seems to have fitted into our family so well it is difficult to remember life BE (Before Emily). Our son is nearly three and is becoming a happier, cleverer, more confident little boy day by day. He’s also more challenging day by day, but that’s part of him and we love him too much to quibble at the odd quarrel. My husband is settled into a new job that finally seems to stretch him in all the right ways, matching his talents to challenges, and he’s thriving on it. We’ve had some tough times over the last few months, but things are looking up and we look set to be a happy, secure little family.

Except I’m not, quite. I can’t put my finger on anything specific, but it’s like I haven’t quite found my groove. In lots of ways I’m happier than I was, say, six months ago. I was pregnant, uncomfortable, and suffering from hormones (although probably not as much as my husband was suffering from them), and felt very conscious of all my shortcomings as a wife and mother. Lately I’ve started to get over lots of these. I get the odd moment when I feel like I’m losing the plot, and get a bit freaked out by the state our home gets into. But overall, I’m getting a grip. I’ve started to cook properly much more often, I’m keeping more or less on top of the mess and laundry, and thanks a great deal to a book I’ve been reading lately I’m feeling far more chilled about my parenting skills (This is The Parenting Book by Nicky and Sila Lee, I will probably put a review up when I’ve finished).

Trying to focus a bit more precisely on the problem, it’s me. I have the usual issues – I need a hair cut, I could do with new clothes, I need to lose weight. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Girls reading this know what I’m talking about, guys reading it also should as they have OBVIOUSLY been listening attentively to their partners and reassuring them appropriately. Those things I can deal with fairly easily, little by little. The issues run a little deeper and are probably a sign of some mid-life crisis (ok, mid-life-ish, I’m only 29).

I’ve always had self-esteem issues, right from my early childhood. It helped, having a plan at school. I was going to be a top-class Interpreter, walking straight into a job at Strasbourg or Brussels for some obscene salary. That plan kind of went off the rails after the first year of university when real life entered the equation. A few years down the road, and I am lacking a goal, a focus, and my confidence issues are flooding back. I am aware of every one of my shortcomings, my lack of achievement. There’s kind of a hazy figure where a defined Becca shape should be. So I made a list in my journal the other day of things I needed to do to get control of my life back and that’s kind of helped. Now I need to decide what that life needs to look like.

So here’s a few things I think should go into the Becca-shape, things that I know are part of me, and hopefully these things can act like a kind of road map for finding me.

I am:

  • A wife and mother. Maybe those two things should be separate? After all, as a wife I am still Becca. As a mother I am Mummy, and there should be parts of me that should be separate from Mummy or I will lose myself completely. I know a lot of mothers worry about losing their identity when they have children, and I sort of envy the ones with a career, as there is a separate life there that is only them. I know they probably envy me, being able to spend as much time as I like with my children. I guess the grass is always greener.
  • A writer. Yes, I am not published (although I have a children’s book out doing the rounds at the minute, keep everything crossed for me!) and I don’t write as often as I would like but I am gaining the confidence in myself to call myself a writer. This is the closest thing I have to a career goal, although I’m not sure it counts as I will keep writing even if I never get published. Not that it’s a ‘hobby’ but it’s something more than a career too. Goodness me, this is a whole blog post in itself so I’ll cut it short here.
  • A Christian. Atheists reading this, feel free to skip ahead. I am still struggling with my faith, it will be a life-long process to put God as firmly at the centre of my life as I know He needs to be, but when I do I feel so much happier and more settled. There is a song by a group called Addison Road that I try to remember as it was written for situations like mine:

My life comes from the one who made the stars and brought the sun

He loves me more than these, so I don’t need another identity

I do believe that I am given some specific gifts by God, as well as some specific ministries. I think my writing is a gift, and I know my family and my life with them is a gift. I am still wondering what my ministries are, yet not spending enough time praying or thinking about them to get any answers.

Ok, Atheists, welcome back. I am also:

  • A person with hobbies and interests. This might sound obvious or even irrelevant, but a) some people genuinely don’t have any particular hobbies or interests and b) I have lots, which I always feel a bit guilty about when I move on. I need to realise, I think, that it’s fine to have an interest in various different things and to keep coming back to them. A hobby doesn’t mean a vocation, and I sometimes have trouble remembering this.
  • A bit of a hypocrite. I talk a lot at home about the injustice in the world, I have several large soap-boxes which I stand on at regular intervals. But I do very little about it. I need to practice what I preach a little more and focus on one or two causes that I really care about passionately and can espouse wholeheartedly, to the extent of taking action and spreading the word about them. It takes 2 minutes to send an email to an MP or Tweet about a campaign.
  • I am very definitely in need of a challenge. This may seem absurd when I am still getting to grips with caring for two young children etc. I mean more of a mental challenge. I like puzzles, I like using my brain, and while writing feeds that to a certain extent, I need to stretch myself more. I want to do a degree. I want to expand my horizons – I guess that’s one reason for me having so many hobbies and fads, at various points I’ve looked into astronomy, mandarin chinese, aromatherapy, history, amateur dramatics, the list goes on.

There’s a start. I think it’ll take a while. But it’s time for finding me, now.

Letter To My Children

Dear Daniel and Emily

At the minute you are nearly 3 years old and just over one month respectively. You are still my babies. You will always be my babies, although I will try to stop myself calling you that when your friends are round from school. Probably.

But at some point you are going to grow up. You will go to school, then secondary school. You will go to university, and/or get a job. You will make friends, fall in love, and fall out again. One day you will meet the person you are going to spend the rest of your life with; you might know this as soon as you see them, or the realisation might grow on you gradually.

And you might have children of your own. I hope you do – there is nothing like the feeling of holding your baby in your arms. It isn’t all joy; like the rest of life you have times when you think it can’t get any better but also times when you feel you can’t cope. No other experience in your life dominates your day to day existence in the same way. As I type this, I’m using one hand because you, Emily, are suffering from wind and need the comfort of being held constantly. I’m using half my attention because you, Daniel, are talking to me and expecting me to have answers. I suspect that’s the way it will be forever – some part of me, physical or mental, will always be on high alert for when you need me. (Do remember that, by the way? We will always be there when you need us.)

So, your time won’t be yours anymore. You will have many days, like today, when you feel so tired you are actually disconnected from the world, running on a very primitive auto-pilot through a thick fog. You will be exhausted and emotional, impatient and intolerant. You will have days of fondly remembering a time when you didn’t eat a cold dinner or sit up with a sick child all night. Your heart will ache when your children are ill or in pain – again, I have a feeling that will never change. You will feel dread at that first squawking cry, followed immediately by guilt for feeling the dread. You won’t want to close your eyes, because opening them again in ten minutes will feel so much worse.

You need to know these things. You need to know it’s normal to feel this way, because when you’re in the middle of it you won’t feel normal, and you’ll be afraid that you’ll never be normal again. And you need to know when you are going through it that we went through it all with both of you, and we’re waiting right there with a cuddle and a cup of tea.

But then your baby girl will give you her first smile. Your little boy will put his arms around you and tell you he loves you. You’ll look at your child and see all the aspects of your partner that you love the most. And you wouldn’t have it any other way.

With all my love
Mummy x

Horseless Carriages in the 21st Century

I’m in a reminiscing mood at the minute. It could be new-mother-hormones, or it could be due to the fact that this year I’m officially old (in October I turn 30 – I shall be posting a gift list soon). Whatever it is, I got to musing on technology this afternoon.

I daresay every generation thinks this, but it seems to me that there have been not developments in technology during my adulthood, but explosions. Things are part of our everyday life that would have been unimaginable, to me at least, when I was finishing school. And no, I don’t just mean an oven or an iron. Computing, for example – I remember a big, cream computer when I was in my last year of primary school, with a black screen and big, black square floppy disks, and you had to type in instructions in a certain format. This was replaced by a PC which used diskettes; still called floppy disks for some obscure reason. I would never have thought of the capacity that our computers today have, even the most entry-level netbooks. Entertainment – I grew up with VHS, and CDs were just taking over from tapes when I was a teenager. Now they are antiques, and space-age-like silver discs store not only the programme or film but hours of extras, interactive features, trailers…it’s really quite bizarre when you take a step back.

Mobile phones have taken a huge step forward. Towards the end of my teens, slightly behind everyone else as usual, my parents got a family mobile phone which was a large black machine pretty much the size and weight of a regular household cordless phone. It was for emergencies only, I knew that there was something called SMS messaging but never used it (you had to pay by the character for Pete’s sake!), and the first time I tried to make a call I got extremely frustrated because I didn’t realise you had to use the dialling code. Things advanced a couple of years later in my first and only year at university, when my boyfriend (now husband) and I got a mobile each instead of a landline in our flat – little Ericsson ones, I think on BT Cellnet? They were still only used for calls, though, and we started to text a little. Now I have a lovely Sony Ericsson with a 5MP camera and my husband has an iPhone. IPhones! I admit, I was sceptical when my husband got his. How could a phone do all the stuff it claimed? It would be more like a little computer. Well, yes, it is like a little computer, and that was definitely my Luddite brain talking when I tried to convince him that the iPhone wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. I’m now, needless to say, a convert. It’s one of the things that irritates me a little about a certain kind of iPad sceptic, to be honest. No, it’s not just a big iPhone. No, it’s not just a funny kind of laptop. It’s a new product, in the same way the iPhone was a new type of mobile phone, or even more so. Maybe in the same way a car isn’t just a horseless carriage. Yes, it’s difficult to get your head around, and you can try to place it into the categories we already know, but at the end of the day it’s a new invention, and well done to Apple for it. It takes a certain kind of arrogance to assume we’ve already invented everything there is to invent and therefore anything new must fit into a pre-existing category.

I think the thing that really got me started on this theme this afternoon, though, was thinking about the internet. I remember being in Sixth form and hearing about the internet. If we were lucky and the teacher had spare time in an IT lesson, we could access the internet, although it was a little secret anti-climax as although it was amazing to think of connecting with someone on the other side of the world, there wasn’t really much interesting to see. I remember getting my first email address, at university. I don’t think I got more than ten emails on it. But over the course of the ten years since then, the internet is not only a regular part of everyday life, it’s essential, and in ways that would have just seemed weird ten years ago. Yes, research and information are a huge part, and that was always on the cards – isn’t it why it was invented, after all? Maybe it’s taken off more than expected – self-edited sites like Wikipedia for example. And ‘ordinary’ information – things like cinema listings, directory enquiries. Council services. Online learning. These are all things for which you would turn to the internet without a second thought despite not even having access to the internet a decade ago. But I would not have dreamed of things like BBC iPlayer. Or sharing links via Twitter. When did it become intuitive to think “I missed that programme, but never mind, I’ll just catch it on iPlayer”? Cue shaky voice: In my young day…we would have set the timer on the video recorder. And that’s after we got one with a timer – before that you either checked if you had enough time to just set a tape away recording then painfully fast forward till you found the thing you were looking for. Or you missed the programme. What about “I want to know what people thought of [insert reality TV show of choice] – I’ll check on Twitter”. Because Twitter gives you the chance to search for concise opinions on specific subjects from people all over the world from almost any walk of life. But you aren’t even conscious of that thought process, because, well, it’s just Twitter. We all know what it does.

The internet has even created thousands of new careers. Web designers, hosting companies, programmers, new media gurus…and thousands of other jobs that I don’t even know exist. It’s now at the stage where people plan holidays based on their destination’s internet access, and practically go into meltdown at the prospect of the ‘net being down for any length of time. I’m not passing comment on this, I’m one of these people myself. I even Tweeted when I went into labour with my second child. But it’s strange, on reflection, that something that seemed almost futuristic when I left school a blink of an eye ago is such an integral part of life.

The internet, and things like the iPad, are the horseless carriages of my generation. I wonder what the horseless carriages of my children’s generation will be?