10 Things You Don’t Know About Me…

…or maybe you do?

This post is response to one posted by Mr Uku at his blog, Will Write For Cake. If you don’t follow him on Twitter, you should, he’s great fun. If you’re not on Twitter, why not?! I will have to point you in the direction of my recent post, Ode To Twitter. Anyway, the point of the post is apparently to tell you things about myself you won’t know from reading my blog, or, I guess, from following me on Twitter. I’m not going to tag anyone to do this too, but please leave a comment with a few things about yourself or do your own post on your blog and I will read it!

Anyway, it sounds like a lot of fun, so here goes…

  1. Hmm, this is trickier than I thought. How about on the outside I appear to be mild-mannered Englishwoman, born and bred, but inside am Irish Republican? I was born in UK but when I was about 12 my parents got me an Irish passport as my mother was Irish by nationality and my father was Irish by inclination. If you know my family it’s made even more confusing by the fact that my mother has a cut-glass English accent that almost puts the Queen to shame.
  2. I live in a church. Not a conversion of a Victorian gothic building but a thriving church that doubles up during the week as a popular local conference centre. And very nice it is too. To cut a long story short, it used to be the caretaker’s flat, then was used by students and became available exactly when we needed a new place to live. Very handy on a Sunday, and to top it off during the week there’s a cafe downstairs which does lovely home-made cake and cheap cappuccinos.
  3. I speak French and Spanish. Neither of them as well as when I did my A-levels ten, no, eleven, years ago, but enough that I could count them as ‘special skills’ on my CV. Look, the title of the post doesn’t say “10 Interesting Things You Don’t Know About Me”…
  4. I am one in 4000. Yes, I know those who know and love me think I’m one in a million (don’t all rush at once to agree), but what I’m actually talking about is hypothyroidism. This is a condition where you don’t produce enough thyroid hormone. A lot of people have this (about 1 in 50 women and 1 in 1000 men) but develop it as adults, often in their twenties. I’m one of the freaky ones that’s had it since birth. It hasn’t been a problem until this pregnancy, but it’s fun (in a weird, twisted kind of way) watching a new doctor or nurse’s response when I tell them my dosage of thyroxine. This is usually 250 micrograms, but currently 350 because of the pregnancy. A normal adult dose is generally not more than 150 micrograms. A predictable reaction is to raise their eyebrows, go quiet for a moment to make sure they didn’t mishear, then say casually “That’s rather high, isn’t it?”. Heh, heh. Simple pleasures.
  5. I can speed read? I do read pretty quickly so if you have something you want read in a hurry I’m your girl.
  6. I play a couple of instruments, all fairly poorly but well enough to say I play. Strongest is probably the piano. But I do the best imitation of a dying cat on the violin that you will ever be privileged (is that the right word?) to hear. I thought about uploading an audio excerpt but didn’t fancy sending people’s speakers into meltdown.
  7. I used to have a freakish memory for numbers. Telephone numbers, car registration plates, addresses and postcodes…I was a walking Yellow Pages. That talent seems to have been lost along with the other brain cells I’ve shed since becoming  a mum. What a loss to the world.
  8. I have absolutely no spatial awareness whatsoever. Seriously. Do not throw things at me, do not expect me to park anywhere near the kerb, do not describe something to me as ‘half a metre’ and expect me to understand what kind of size you’re talking about. I can barely walk in a straight line, and that’s without any alcohol for seven months.
  9. Nearly there. I have a teensy, weensy problem with apostrophes. I get ever-so-slightly worked up when people abuse them. I am by no means an expert on grammar (so please don’t rush to point out all of my mistakes in this blog!) but apostrophes do wind me up something rotten. I mean, it really isn’t that hard to get, people! Let’s take ‘it’s/its’. Its is when something belongs to it. It’s is when you are really saying it is. Ok? Ok. Deep breath, and move on to the last bit of Becca Trivia.
  10. Which actually leads in quite nicely. Nothing ground-breaking, just a little quirk. I do not like being called Becky. It winds me up even more than the apostrophe thing. Well, maybe not, but close. I don’t mind Rebecca, but overall prefer Becca. Unless you’re going to give me a multi-million pound book deal, or just millions of pounds out of the goodness of your heart, in which case you can call me whatever you want.

And that concludes our fascinating programme for this evening, Ten Things You Didn’t Know About Me. We hope you enjoyed reading, and look forward to seeing you again next time. Please feel free to leave your ten things (or one, or twenty) in the comments, or just say hi!

Our Daughters’ Daughters

More Life Lessons from Mary Poppins

Anyone who read my post Sand Through A Sieve and thought it was inspired genius (well, who can blame you?) may realise that I am quickly coming to regard Mary Poppins as a Parenting Bible.

Today I put the DVD in and went about my business, tidying up and generally being housewifely (in other words, quite unlike myself) and heard the Suffragette Song come on. You know the moment – and if you don’t I suggest you watch  Mary Poppins urgently, there are valuable lessons to be learnt. Mrs Banks comes home after a day’s campaigning for votes for women, and launches into song. Among the many wonderful lyrics (I particularly like ‘Though we adore men individually / We agree that as a group they’re rather stupid…’) the chorus goes like this:

“Cast off the shackles of yesterday

Shoulder to shoulder into the fray

Our  daughters’ daughters will adore us

And they’ll sing in grateful chorus

‘Well done, Sister Suffragettes!'”

This set me off thinking. If my last scan was right, I am expecting my first daughter in approximately 57 days and 7 hours, and it would be nice to think that she will have daughters of her own some day and so on and so forth.

I have had all sorts of nice little fantasies about having a daughter. We’ll go shopping together – she’ll probably teach me more than I will teach her in that department – we’ll have girly moments, painting toenails etc like in Mamma Mia! We’ll finish the dollhouse I started when I was a teenager. She’ll have the voice of an angel and the grace of a ballet dancer. I’ll buy her girly dresses and dolls and she’ll ignore them all and go for the monsters and aliens. I’ll introduce her to Georgette Heyer and Jane Austen and she’ll devour Stephen King and Terry Pratchett. She’ll adore her big brother and be a real Daddy’s girl and the four of us will go out and eat ice cream on the sea front at Whitby in October.

I haven’t really stopped to think about the more profound things I want to teach her. I want her to be strong and assertive, two things I have failed at miserably so far. I want to pass on my faith, but leave her the freedom and conviction to figure out her own beliefs. I want her to think about the world and how she can make it better, so that her daughters’ daughters can look back at her and her generation and think “Wow, what can we do to build upon that?”

I don’t know about you, but I, to my shame, very rarely think about what our ancestors had to fight for to get to where we are now. The whole movement for women’s suffrage in England, for example, fought against the tide of popular opinion and went through arrest, force-feeding, torture, ridicule and even death because they believed it was wrong to deny women an equal say in how their country was run. Do we ever think about those women, and ‘adore them’? As we would like our daughters’ daughters to adore us?

They are, of course, a tiny representation of the people throughout time who have fought for what they believed in. Our own lifetimes throw up a handful of names – Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela. Mother Teresa, fighting against the poverty and injustice she saw every day in India’s poorest. Nameless campaigners out right now, protesting against war and injustice and human rights.

I want my daughter to grow up with a social conscience and awareness. I want her to not be afraid to fight for what she thinks is right. Our ancestresses have left us a legacy of being able to vote, to speak out and be heard. They have given us a platform to speak from, on behalf of women, men and children all over the world who are still being oppressed, and I know I don’t do their efforts justice.

Mary Poppins has reminded me that we also have a chance to leave a legacy, that we will have descendants who will look back at our generation. They can ignore us, despise us or adore us. I would like to think that I and my daughter can still do things that will make our daughters’ daughters adore us after all.

Ode to Twitter

From www.iconspedia.comA bit of silliness for a Sunday morning!

I wandered lonely through the crowd

And lurked behind the twitt’ring birds;

Their clever tweets and nimble words.

But, to my shame, I ne’er allowed

Myself to join that bustling horde.

But fled to Facebook, where dwelt my friends

Away from hashtags, RTs, Trends.

And sang out loud, with joyous chords,

Of photos and of frivolous apps.

Till one day somehow I returned

To Twitter, where I slowly learned

To leave behind those real-time chats.

For far more lies in such small measures

Than at first appears to untrained eyes.

From links posted by those more wise

To marv’llous tips and witty treasures.

I find new blogs I must peruse,

And #followfridays, that weekly curse!

Choosing who to commend to the Twitterverse.

And catching up on daily news.

But the highlights of my time spent tweeting

Are cosy chats with new Twit friends,

The comfort, support, when I’m round the bend,

The jokes shared at each virtual meeting.

Alas! Poor Facebook lags behind

Its Farmville follies and ‘Friend of the Day’

Are all too sadly leagues away.

And time spent there grows less, I find.

Though one day I may once again roam

Now I’ll nest in my Twitter home.

Sand Through A Sieve

A lyric that gets me every time I hear it is from Mary Poppins, when Bert is cleaning up his chimney sweep gear and listening to Mr Banks. He comes back at him with this:

“You’ve got to grind, grind, grind at that grindstone

Though childhood slips like sand through a sieve

And all too soon they’ve up and grown

And then they’ve flown

And it’s too late for you to give…”

Generally, I find it really exciting when I think of Daniel doing new stuff like going to school or reaching a new milestone – this morning I did a post on his blog about potty training, which we’re hoping to start at the weekend. My husband (who’s as soft as muck!) gets quite sentimental and likes to hold on to the moment; he’s dreading September when Daniel starts school nursery. Probably the ideal is somewhere between the two of us.

But this afternoon, I found myself wanting desperately to freeze the moment we were in. He was sat on my knee, cuddled in while we watched his In The Night Garden DVD together. He was stroking my arm and I was stroking his hair, and it’s a rare moment now. He prefers to laugh and run away than sit and cuddle. He likes to be up and playing, and I take advantage of that to do – well, actually, I don’t know what I do. Writing and housework in theory. But our time together this afternoon made me realise how true that lyric from Mary Poppins is. I don’t grind, grind, grind at the grindstone, not by a long shot, and maybe if I did I would realise the true value of time at home. I do, though, let Daniel’s childhood slip through the sieve without fixing it in my memory properly, and today I was truly regretful of that, because it’s not sand, it’s more precious than gold dust.

We haven’t got much time left as just the three of us. Baby is due in 10 weeks, and while that will bring its own moments to treasure, I will never get this time back. I know how much I love Daniel, and I’m pretty sure Daniel knows too, but I mustn’t take any of it for granted.

I need to catch some of the gold dust before it slips away forever.

To err is human…

…to forgive divine. Alexander Pope

I’ve been thinking a bit about this quote lately. Taking it literally, it works out well for me. Especially since most people focus on the first part and use it as justification for something they’ve done. Or not done. Or said, or not said. You get the message.

“Well, I know I shouldn’t have done x, y, z, but you know, to err is human and all that.” Uh-huh, and at this point the other person is supposed to be divine and forgive, just like that. That’s not going to happen, realistically. So it’s a win-win situation – I can err, because I’m human, and that’s what humans do, and I don’t have to forgive because that’s God’s job.

The problem is, I’m not let off the hook that easily. First off, forgiveness is important. I think that’s a fairly unarguable statement, whether you believe in God or not. If you know you’ve done something wrong, you like to know that the person you’ve hurt has forgiven you. If you’ve been the victim, you need to get some closure from the hurt, and draw a line under that chapter of your life. That’s basically forgiveness – letting go of the offence so it can’t hurt you any more.

If you do believe in God, forgiveness is taken to a whole new level. There’s the ultimate forgiveness, for all human sin. Yes, to err is human. Sin is essentially turning away from God, choosing self over God, and humans do that on a spectacular scale. We all have free will, and the best of us uses it at some point to do what we want to do, not what God wants. There has only ever been one perfect man who unfailingly chose to put God’s will over his own free will, and that was Jesus. And let’s be honest, we should pay for that. We are hurting God every time we sin, in the same way that we are hurt when people betray us or let us down. If we need forgiveness from each other, how much more do we need it from God? But God does not have to forgive us – He does not have to do anything. Which makes it even more amazing that He does. There is a whole other discussion here on sin, redemption and salvation, but I’ll save that for another time. The relevant point today is that God forgives us  – and, by the way, that means for the bitching x did about y last week, as well as the pack of cigarettes z nicked from the corner shop last week, as well as the countless innocents killed by wars, and the wife killed by her husband for not cooking the dinner properly. God’s forgiveness does not have criteria or a cut off point, it is there for all sins, even if we personally think they are unforgiveable. In His eyes sins are not graded, they are all equally bad, so it’s a good job it is up to Him to forgive them, not us.

But on the other side of that, He is also calling on the part of Him in each of us to forgive each other. This is hard. To forgive is divine, and since we are made in His image it is a standard we are asked to aspire to. Forgiveness may be important, as I said earlier, but not necessarily imperative until you bring God into the equation. He directly commands us to forgive when He gives us the perfect prayer to use:

Our Father in Heaven,

hallowed be Your Name,

Your Kingdom come,

Your will be done,

on earth as it is in Heaven.

Give us today our daily bread.

And forgive us our debts,

As we have also forgiven our debtors.

And lead us not into temptation,

but deliver us from the evil one.

(Matthew 6:9-13 NIV). Most people know these two lines as ‘And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us’. It’s hit-you-over-the-head clear that forgiveness is not optional, and it ties in with the rest of Jesus’ teaching to love our neighbours.

Now, confession time. I find forgiveness a real struggle. Even as I am writing this, I am painfully aware of offences against me both long-term and recent, and I am bitter and hurt. It’s the reason I wrote this post – I know what I need to do, I know what God calls me to do, and I do struggle. I take things very personally and very deeply. I invest a lot in relationships and when those relationships let me down I grieve for a long time. It’s not so bad when people apologise – I can move on. But there is no sub-clause saying “as we have also forgiven our debtors [*as long as they’re really, really sorry]”. Jesus says, again unequivocally, that you have to love your enemies. Forgive anyone who has wronged you. And this is one of the many places where I fall down. I’m naturally clumsy, and never more so than on the road to God. But I have to learn, slowly and painfully, that I cannot have the whole-hearted, joyous relationship with God that I want while I am carrying this burden. It is a real, heavy burden, that twists your heart and colours everyday life with bitterness. I suspect there are thousands, maybe millions of people under similar burdens, of varying shapes and sizes. Luckily, Jesus knows we are human, with failings, and He’s got a lifebelt for us.

Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. (Matt 11:28)

If we call on Him, He will help us. The only way I will get rid of my burden is to offload it onto Him. I need to pray for the strength to leave old wounds behind and look ahead. And when I’ve done that, I can have hope that my own sins (against God and others) are also forgiven.