A weekend camping meant I'm joining late. But I so appreciated this prompt, thank you Deborah and Lindsay!
---
Four minutes thirteen seconds. I hope it’s not waffle, may these words offer a glimpse of how I saw him. How I see him? The memories and moments remain present to me, although he’s gone.
79 years. I know he would have liked more. He was filled with compassion the last time we met, his heart stretching towards the struggles of others, longing to listen. We once chatted about people watching as a spiritual practice. I want to adopt this ritual in his memory: a warm drink, a wide window and a moment to appreciate the glorious scope of humanity.
5 books stacked. His suggestions for my reading after I mentioned I’d like to read more classics. Did I take a photo of them? It was one of his favourite questions: ‘what are you reading at the moment?’ He recently introduced me to a youtuber who shared his love of literature. I’m halfway through The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng, one of the many books he enthusiastically gifted me, I’ll miss his debrief after. His generous legacy lives on scattered across our congregation’s bookshelves.
30 months ago. We started meeting regularly, although hospital stays, family commitments and appointments often got in the way. I’d carry his coffee through to the meeting room of our little church, close the door and light a candle on the table between us. We’d share a contemplative quiet to begin, and then he’d talk. As the Spiritual Accompanier I listened as he shared about his prayer, his emotional landscape, his life. Of course he also wanted to listen, to hear my thoughts and experiences. He was abundant in his gratitude, but it was my honour to witness his tenacity, his curiosity and his courage.
23. The Psalm I’ll read at the Crematorium tomorrow. It was there on his wall, next to the kitchen door. He trusted that goodness and mercy followed him. May I know their kindred company, at 10:15 tomorrow morning and all the days of my life.
This is beautiful, Debbie. I love the idea of a book legacy / link with those love. I asked my father, near the end, what his favourite book had been and - for someone who'd read thousands of books - was amazed when he promptly announced, without any hesitation, 'The Seven Pillars of Wisdom'. I had no idea! And I am so glad I asked.
There is such a dignity and grace about your prose, Debbie. I feel the loss but the support that both ritual and community offer in these times. Thanks so much for writing this and sharing it with us. So sorry for your loss. X
We were cruising down the motorway when the call came. On our way to my son’s graduation in Brighton. It was my sister to say that my father had been taken into a hospice in Leeds. My thoughts tangled together, should we turn around and head straight to the hospice and miss a very important day for my son and our family? He had done so well and received a first class degree, especially remarkable as he’d been so ill with sepsis whilst doing his assignments and ended up in and out of hospital which culminated in an operation that possibly saved his arm. My sister kindly said that dad would definitely want us to go to the graduation and so it was decided we would.
I sat in the auditorium and put on a brave face for the happy ceremony but as they called out my son’s name, he is named after my dad, the lump in my throat that I had been holding onto suddenly melted into sobbing and floods of tears. My husband grasped my hand and held it tightly as my son waved to us from the stage and my heart was a confusion of love and grief.
We were smiling in the photos and when I look at them now I appear happy but when I look deeper at them now I can see the pain in my eyes. We’d booked a restaurant for a family meal to celebrate and I sat through it with the thud of a loud ticking clock pounding inside me. I had lived far away from my dad for many years and barely saw him and I can’t say that we had a close relationship but I loved and respected him. He and his three brothers were brought up dirt poor by a single mother and he had worked hard and ran his own business and was very proud of all he’d achieved. I felt an incredibly strong pull that he wanted me to be with him.
We set off early the next day and made it to the hospice by lunch time. It was a beautiful summer day and we were greeted with hugs and tears by my brother and his lovely wife. Dad was asleep lying in the hospice bed wearing his favourite purple golf tea shirt. He never did wake up again but I got to spend a few days with him, stroking his hair and talking about memories. I’ve heard that hearing is the last thing to go so maybe he was aware of me being there. I like to think he was. My sister and I took it in turns to stay the night beside him with mum and I remember joking that it had been many years since I’d slept with my mum and dad. I was in my sixties at the time and very lucky to have had my father until he was ninety two. When dad died, it was on his and mum’s sixty fifth wedding anniversary and a card stood on a table beside him. He had all his five children together which was a very rare event and the room was filled with so much love, he surely must have felt it. I know I did.
I really feel that sense you were trying to keep your emotions in check for the graduation, which on its own sounds like an emotional enough day given what your son had been through to get there. Thank you for sharing the intimate moments with your dad and siblings. There is something about the way you describe the time between when you last slept in the company of your parents that feels so poignant. Looking forward to seeing where this week's prompt takes us.
I really feel pulled to the intergenerational themes you’ve brought up in here: your son named for your father, the kids all around him, his passing on his anniversary.
My grandmother had decided she would be ready for when the time came and started preparing for death quite early, probably about ten years before the event. First was the circular bed she bought, no sharp edges or pointy corners, nothing to scrape yourself on or bang into. She wanted to be at liberty to roll on and roll off from anywhere on the mattress and from any position; she wasn’t a tidy sleeper and liked to spread out, turn this way and that, kick covers off when she felt like it. She was raised a catholic, and married my grandfather who was devout in his practice and beliefs. I remember when she told me naughtily that she had never been happy with the idea of lying neatly on her back, piously restrained by a politeness and consideration to others expectations; missionary, with hands crossed over her chest as if in prayer. She felt it was sacrificial and a position ready for the coffin – she wanted to be freely available for flight. He thought she was mad and sent her for psychiatric assessment.
I on the other hand, while under a lot of stress mainly to do with a stalker who was female so the police took their time in taking it seriously, on the night when the regular panic attacks reached another level, and acute chest pain floored me and radiated down my left arm convincing me that I was having a heart attack, put on a white Victorian style lace nighty and lay on my back breathing with the pain, ready and hoping to be beamed up. I didn’t die and woke pain free with a renewed desire to live every day as if it was my last. I let my daughter borrow the nighty for a school play and never saw it again.
Growing up, I knew how much my grandmother loved images of Mother Mary and would go down the Portobello Road on Saturdays with her to see if Mr Lewis had any ones of interest on his stall. She was a regular and reliable customer and they took up much of the wall space in her bedroom, there were also statues and carvings of Mary on most of the furniture surfaces, the largest a carved wooden black Madonna on the windowsill. She began to sell her jewellery and exchange it on the market and started wearing rosaries as necklaces.
Surrounding her bed hanging from the ceiling was a company of angels, each with the same cherub face and pale blue garb painted around their midriffs. They were winged with chubby arms some holding musical instruments, a trumpet or violin, others gestured as if in welcome.
I wasn’t there when my grandmother died although I was for several dress rehearsals and we had a few sad and loving farewells. I heard that her preparation paid off, and when eventually she was ready, my grandmother spoke of the angels taking her home and let go with a smile.
This is so rich in sensory detail, Marika, and also you render the emotional complexity of facing death when life itself doesn't stop. You going through your own experience that sounds stressful and all-encompassing in terms of energy. Thank you for sharing these words with us, and I'm so glad your grandmother got the ending she wanted.
Thanks Lindsay, I wasn’t sure where it would go as I found it hard to stay with it on Sundays’ session for some reason, and kept wriggling and changing focus.
Totally get that feeling - I felt the same in the morning session but it came good in the end. Funny, isn’t it, how the sessions can have such different feels?
Wow, you’ve brought so much much of your grandmother to us in such a short space! I already wish I could have a coffee or tea with her. And the concept of saying good bye at one of the dress rehearsals, considering how long she’d been preparing, is striking.
I really like this. In the simplicity of the form it becomes very powerful . There are very deep undercurrents in this that resonate with me. Childcare years and the. years when they’re grown up .
I was so struck by the stillness within the stillness the reference to the poem creates Deborah. I’ve come back to re-read your beautiful writing this morning and again stopped at this point for a few moments, the image of you sitting on the bed so clear in my mind alongside that sense of a need for movement but not being able to leave. It brought to mind how the language of travel and death can overlap too, with the word departed coming to mind in particular. Thank you so much for your generosity in sharing such a private experience with us and for the inspiration of your words 💕x
I missed the boat due to a broken down camper van (!) but here's my offering anyway, written today under the same conditions.
_________
Then the room is all sound and movement, me bending my head to the bed, still holding Mum’s wrist, sobbing, there’s a hand on my back and when I raise my eyes the hospice nurse is beside me and my brother leans back in the chair he’s not moved from for hours, his body slack, crying, my sister standing crying and someone going out to find our other sibling. The nurse we hadn’t met before today, who has stood silently with us for hours as if on guard, as Mum’s effortful breaths eased to the smallest, lightest sighs, darting to our sides with new tissues when old ones dropped from our hands, bringing us water, lays his arm around my brother’s shoulder and holds him for a moment.
We are all here now, taking it in turns to hug each other, and the nurse and the carer and the hospice nurse tell us how sorry they are, and I’m so thankful that the hospice nurse, the one who visited last week and told us gently what to expect, arrived in time to tiptoe into the room, to meet my eyes in Mum’s drawn out pause, and in the lengthening, impossible silence to give an almost invisible nod.
And then it’s life again, ordinary life, with decisions to make and tasks to complete, and a difference like a yawning hole between us, which we circle timidly. Mum is then, not now.
We talk about dates, make phone calls, negotiate a compromise. My sister and I sort through the thin checked blouses and skirts and linen trousers we’ve bought for Mum in the last few years, asking ourselves if she would have chosen them, until we have a little pile which we slip into a plastic bag for the undertakers, and it’s a dull surprise that this that feels like the worst thing of all, not the final letting go of Mum’s soft wrist, not her stillness.
We are led to a room downstairs, filing into and out of the lift, and the manager talks to us as if she has nothing else to do for the rest of the day or week. She says we have done everything we could. She says she has seen people choose their deaths, over and over, choose who will be there when they let go. She tells us again what will happen next, and I feel as if I have already forgotten, and hours pass, and we remember to call our partners, Mum’s brother, Mum’s best friend, and then we are alone, the four of us, and I wonder what day it is and what time it could be, thinking, it has happened at last, the enormous thing. And one of us says they are hungry, and it’s true, we’re ravenous, so we take a taxi to a pub nearby, one we’ve sat in with Mum and her partner, and we order food which is the most delicious food we’ve ever tasted and gulp wine like water. We make stupid jokes and laugh, because that is what we’ve always done, as we begin to spin outwards, separately, into our release, our grief. ‘I’m the matriarch now,’ I say, exactly as it occurs to me, and they laugh as I thought they would, and my head lurches and swims to catch up with the words.
Again, in this piece, your use of spare dialogue is so revealing of character and family dynamics. I love thinking of this piece beside last week's and what you might write next, maybe play about with the order and juxtapositions that moving them out of their chronology might bring. Thanks, Sasha. X
You really nailed the moments of odd dissonance that accompanies grief. The clothes and the pub and saying words that your mind has to catchup with all resonate for me
Para 2 is very powerful, Kate. I learned about 'ambiguous loss' earlier this year - it's such a difficult emotion. Your description of the choke-hold of grief is 👌
You have made me hungry. Your descriptions of the steak is brilliant, I can see it, smell it, taste it. I like the way your writing slows down in the final section to mirror the pace of the meal. I write a lot about food ,it has a special place in my history and can tell us so much.
Single mother, lone parent, single parent family. These are just some of the phrases that were common to my childhood, as familiar to me as a throw back track on the car radio. Looking at them now here on the page it is easy to see how I felt so emotionally detached from my own circumstances. It feels like a well kept secret that everyone around me was colluding on, maybe with the best of intentions, maybe not.
Fatherless, child abandoned by father, half loved, half wanted, half orphaned. These are word that feel more appropriate to describe how it was, how it is and how it felt without the sugar coating. In brutal honesty. In full acknowledgement of the truth. For me this would have been better than skirting around the edges, tip toeing around and walking on egg shells. These descriptions of lone, single, only one. The focus on what is there rather than what is absent simply reinforced what I was encouraged to do with most of my less desirable childhood emotions. Push them down, bury them deep, don't dwell on them. I was actively told by a range of adults in my life that it didn't matter. I didn't need a father in my life. Particularly as I was a girl. I was made to believe it was only my brother who would suffer without a father figure. Teachers and neighbours would openly comment on how well my mum was doing “all by herself”. I was told my mum had enough love for two, like she was superhuman and could make up for a whole other person. We don't need anyone else, like it was selfish and greedy to want more than we need.
Other things filtered through too. “You wouldn't want him around anyway,” “good for nothing,” “waste of space,” and the ever perplexing to my tiny mind “fly by night”. What did all of this mean for me and who I was and where I came from and what I was made of? Other words like “maintenance” and “benefits” also fluttered in and out of my young consciousness. What we were “entitled to” in the absence of this person, what “help” we would be given to fill a man sized hole.
So I left childhood a bit dazed and numb, not at all sure what I had missed out on, still a little embarrassed when anyone asked about “mum and dad”. The collusion had worked, I felt adamant I didn't ever want to meet this father and I had been better off without him. A line I would repeat vehemently whenever gob smacked strangers exclaimed “you have never met him?!” I remember clearly telling one high school friend “I don't have a dad” and her bluntly saying “well you obviously do you just have never seen him.” Never before had anyone so brutally scraped off the sugar coating in my presence. However, even this was not enough to break the spell. I was nearly grown up and nearing the end of needing any parent. I was fairly confident if I did ever meet him it would be to briefly give him a piece of my budding feminist mind. This is how the situation hung for the first 40 years of my life.Then I had my own daughter. I witnessed daily her growing relationship with her devoted, loving father. This is when slowly but surely the illusion I had been sold became the delusion it was all along.
From just minutes after birth my daughter seemed to stare lovingly into her fathers eyes. This was not just in my head, I have the photograph to prove it. I remember looking at them both from my blood soaked bed and saying she is going to be a “daddy's girl.” Words that had never been said around me or I had ever said myself. I saw a shift in him too, it felt like I saw him become a father to a daughter, something I did not see or feel eighteen months before when our son was born. Maybe it was just he was more relaxed second time around but their connection was palpable and deep. I would witness this several times over the coming years in millions of little ways. Gradually each time it was like a piece of my heart slid along like one of those puzzles with tile pieces until I saw the complete picture and I could no longer turn away from, all the love, care and tenderness I had missed out on.
Leanne, it's incredibly effective the way you've used the sorts of comments others might have made at that time, and also used the words of people closer to you to paint a picture of the kind of messaging that we absorb as children that we really shouldn't. Stylistically it really works to expose the tropes that are so damaging. Thank you for sharing this, and I can't wait to see how this Sunday's prompt moves us on. X
You have expressed such complex emotions so well. I love your style of writing it’s as if you’re in the room with me sharing a cup of tea. Thank you for sharing.
The way you’ve braided yours and your daughter’s differing experiences together is really effective - and honest and painful. I love the metaphor of the puzzle tile pieces slotting into place.
Oh, this is so interesting and beautifully expressed. I am sure people meant well when they said your dad was worthless but it's never the right thing to say to a child, because a parent, absent or present, is half herself. And I absolutely understand that you became aware of this loss in a whole new way when you saw your father's response to his daughter. I experienced it myself. I also learned that there is a whole lexicon of feeling in the way a daughter learns to interact with men through her relationship with her father. Lacking that, or a suitable stand-in, she is far more vulnerable. I could write a lot more about the way adults, even when well-meaning, don't really perceive a child's loss of their parent.
There are so many profound and eloquently expressed feelings in this piece Leanne - 'This is when slowly but surely the illusion I had been sold became the delusion it was all along.' is one of my favourites.
Having children of my own made me look at all sorts of things through a different lens - you really capture the essence of that here.
Thank you Kate for such a thoughtful comment. I really wasn’t happy with it last night, but posted anyway so it’s nice to hear it’s not a total emotional wreck on the page!! Xx
Ohhh, this is a sore one, Leanne! Societal mores. What a shitshow they create! So much damage from the false perfection of a family unit. a 2.4 blueprint. You bare your bruised heart here with so much courage and grace x
In the months after my father died, when I was feeling most keenly the loss of the last of my birth family, I went looking for them on the family tree that Dad had so carefully crafted during his retirement. A meticulous researcher, tireless photo-scanner and dedicated note-maker, he had created a rich archive of my roots that dates back to the 1700s. It provided a window onto a heritage I had long neglected, even rejected - too Scottish, too dull - but one that gave me all the familial support I could ever wish for.
Family trees are fascinating things, even if they are of someone else’s family - don’t you think? Firstly, the ‘tree’ thing. And ‘branches of family’. Where did that come from, I wonder? The tree of life? The tree of knowledge? (And its apple? Apples don’t fall far from the tree!) Mighty oaks and acorns? I know it used to be custom to record family names in The Family Bible, but those that I’ve seen are just in list form, so I am not clear where and when trees came into it. Did the form suggest the name, or vice versa?
Although I do love trees, I like to think of these archives in more hydrologic than dendritic terms, less family trees more waterways, showing the ebb and flow of family along major river courses, tributaries, ox-bows and meanders, occasional dams and even culverts. A lazy-river ride of my ancestors as they curve and bend, wind and wend from source to sea, from them to me. These water courses of my relatives tell of the social, religious, economic and political tales of times gone by, through their numbers, through their names and through their places.
NUMBERS
The numbers of children that were born to each generation offers a commentary on religion and societal norms. All four of my grandparents were the younger children of broods of 9, 11 and 13 living children, plus a smattering of dead. My great grandfather described his family of nine as “two boys and seven tragedies”. The tragedy was that both sons died as young men: 21 years old at the Battle of Loos in WWI and 31 years old in a mugging that went wrong, as he headed home from the pub after wetting his last-born’s head). The girls, stubbornly - defiantly, even - went on to live well into their eighties… These numbers were to replace losses and provide workers, for farm and factory and fishing boats. But, whilst they were extra hands to help, they were also extra mouths to feed. A generation later, when my own parents, born in the 1930s, were the youngest of 4 and an only child. A sign of the times..
A hundred years ago, in 1925, when my mothers’ parents had their first child - a son - it was between the wars.
What if?
NAMES
My forebears are all Scots. Scottish names. From Gaelic and traditional to showbiz and hyphens. Meanings and aspirations, social and economic.
What if?
PLACES
Where - movement of people
My father’s major river systems found confluence in Glasgow but have their sources in Lanarkshire and Lewis. My mother’s relatives are all from the Isle of Skye.
I love this piece, Deborah! Such a different angle, and it works great. Stirred my curiosity and made me wonder about mine. Especially love the idea of water courses instead of trees. 💗
Loving the way you use these titles to orient us in the piece, Deborah, and the way the sections weave together a complex picture of identity and lineage. It feels stylistically brave to have worked in this way so quickly as well. Looking forward to how we'll collectively respond to prompt 3 on Sunday!
Great writing. Family trees tell us so much don’t they and like you I found research into family a comfort after mum’s death. Discussing the flow of water describes it so well .
Family trees are fascinating, even the ones, like my own, where there are no exciting or exotic discoveries. I’d love to read more about your discoveries.
I love the reframing of family trees as waterways - a fresh perspective on all those stories of known and unknown ancestors! I would love to read more of this piece, hope you continue it.
You've got some really interesting themes to develop here. Census records and family trees reveal so much - the casual recording of an "imbecile" relative, the proliferation of lodgers that working class people took in to their homes (you can't help wondering about vulnerable daughters), or the gap between 1915 and 1919 in my father-in-law's ten siblings - reminding us that for all its horrors war could be a respite from constant child-bearing for many women.
This is fascinating Deborah. I will need to read it several more times to absorb all of the detail. Are you going to come back to the names and places sections for your TBC? My father too is an avid researcher and creator of family trees - it is only as I get older that I begin to study them with more interest.
(My mother's father's side was also from Skye - we are probably distant cousins!)
And thank you - I will fill in the blanks when I get a chance. I settled on the water theme too late in the session, but I like how it feels so will work on it some more x
On the frontline of mortality l felt flayed, stripped of my outer skin, raw and exposed to the elements. No parents as a protective layer to absorb whatever life threw at me. A motherless mother.
Mum had been in hospital for 6 weeks, a frail 85 year old with a weak heart who grew ever more confused in the busy hospital ward. The mixed ward was dominated by rule breaking men who just wouldn’t do what the nurses said and constantly fell out of bed or called for attention. Mum was a very private person, didn’t like to make a fuss and now was exposed both to her own fragility and that of others. When the end came it was expected yet unexpected. No one could give you an indication of when so l wasn’t there.This fact remains with me like a barb constantly pricking you.l was at home having an end of week glass of wine, watching a film when the hospital phoned.Of all the emotions that crowded in after the phone call guilt was the strongest and pushed all the others away.
Day by day it got easier, the anniversaries passed and a new normal began to take shape. As I tearfully tried to recreate our family Christmas my children commented
You don’t have to do it like this anymore, you can create your own Christmas
Such wisdom , they were mothering me.
The bond between mum and l was close ( dad had died when l was 17) there were just the 2 of us.A bond that was stretched to breaking point at times but still remained.
So how did l navigate the last 20 years as a grown up? I’d like to say l stepped into this adult role gracefully with the dignity befitting a 50 year old but I’d be lying.
When my grown children had left home and came back to stay they reverted into teenagers , lying full length on the sofa, eating the contents of the fridge, getting up at noon.Where could l go now that l could absolve all responsibility like that?
Mum had moved to be near to us in the final year of her life, a flat at the end of our road, a perfect solution we thought.But with it she had lost her independence, her friends from the town she’d lived in for 50 years. I realised how hard this must have been for her afterwards but at the time the juggling of looking after mum, a teenage family and a career left little emotional energy .
Time became a gradual healer, as you piece your life back together bit by bit you can reflect on what’s happened.After mum’s death l started to look into her life before l was born and found a resilient woman who had lived through immense hardship. She had lived in Hong Kong and been imprisoned by the Japanese during the war. She had met my father during the war and after a period as expats they had come back to England . She had to build a life here, a half Chinese woman with a small baby trying to fit into 1950s small town England.She didn’t talk about her life in Hong Kong or what it was like adjusting to life in England.
l had lost mum and yet l was discovering her as a stronger, more colourful person one that l wished l had known.
I have grown a new skin but it is thinner than before.
That opener is so powerful, Barbara. What a paragraph, and that you have managed in the time to pull the threads together by the end of the piece, making it really feel "done". And as others are saying here, you have been able to connect with your mother in death in ways that you hadn't in life. Thank you for sharing this with us - here's to where Sunday's prompt takes us.
So lovely, that difficult time when we are stretched between our children and our parents and the lack of time to ask questions about their lives before us.
Love how you open with the skin and return to it at the end - also the repeating F’s in the first line “On the frontline of mortality l felt flayed…”. Recognised so much in this piece Barbara - the motherless mothering, and the way it feels like you can almost learn more about someone after their death - or learn about them as a person rather than as your parent.
Again, so many points of connection. Was it James Baldwin who said that you think your sufferings are unique in the history of the world, "and then you read." This little group is growing into something very profound and I'm sure by the end of it the urge to be together in RL in the same room for a few hours will be overwhelming!
There is such a lovely sense of intimacy in this Barbara and I really like how you have structured this - honouring the memory of your mother by returning to the story of her origins at the end of your piece.
This is beautiful, Barbara. Rediscovering your mother as a person in her own right is a lovely way to honour her. Isn't it baffling how little we know of them 'before us'? And thinner skin lets in more light x
I watch the bubbles travel up my glass of sparkling water. The small ones move quite slowly until they gather others up on their way and then they pick up speed. The big ones move quickly, from bottom to top, on purpose. I’d rather be reading, I think to myself, or sleeping. But watching things together; shows, movies, previews of upcoming shows and movies, means something to him. There’s a comfort to be found in sitting next to a loved one on the couch, not talking or interacting, staring at a big screen of moving pictures, together. For him, not for me. I don’t find it comforting, or comfortable. I would rather be doing almost anything else.
But I’m sat here, beside him.
“What would you like to watch, honey?” he asks, his eyes not leaving the screen.
I’ve been writing love stories lately. It’s not my usual genre to write, but I have moments complete in my mind, vignettes of connection and romance and sexiness, of want and desire, of knowing and unknowing. They fall onto the page, playful and coy, mysterious and curious. Arousing. Not sexually, but arousing interest. Arousing my wonder and letting my mind wander: into moments between people who haven’t been in love with each other for 27 years, into the feelings of people who aren’t already sure what every single touch on every single part of their body feels like because they’ve been touching only each other their whole adult lives. I know I can’t ever have another first kiss, but can there be newness in the known? Can I be surprised?
I have a deep contentment with our family life. Our children are happy, most of the time. We’ve built a beautiful life together, intentionally and with care. We have been through the trenches, hand in hand. He loved me through the hardest losses that hollowed me out and stood alongside me as I rebuilt myself. He fell in love, again or anew, with who I became. And he’s part of the foundations, of me and my life, and the future I rarely think ahead to. I don’t want to burn everything down, destroy my marriage or upend our lives. I don’t want to have an affair, either emotional or physical. I don’t want newness with someone new. I want newness within the known.
“Honey?”
I look over. His eyes are still fixed to the screen, and I take him in. Objectively it’s a beautiful profile and, perhaps less objectively, more appealing as we get older. His long hair, released from its man-bun strictures, lays lank against his shoulders. Thinner, but noticeably less grey than mine. His deep eyes, what caught me in the very first place, are as vivid as they’ve ever been regardless of the faint lines fanning out from them. I’ve always loved his jawline for its strength and defiance. There’s a softness under his chin that wasn’t always there, but it takes nothing away, that softening. He’s no less attractive to me as we begin our fifth decade.
I reach out and run my fingers along his jaw. There was a time when the idea of having him within reach, mine to touch at will, was more than I thought I deserved. The notion of being loved by him, of having been chosen by him, was a reality I couldn’t quite fathom when I found him. I thought it would be enough to have him just for a little while. I didn’t need him forever (as if I could keep him forever), but I could be content for a pocket of time. And somehow, it’s been a lifetime.
He turns at my touch and smiles, waiting. Always waiting.
A voice that isn't mine whispers in my mind. Be content. Look at all you have. It’s enough. It’s more than you dreamed for yourself. What are you even looking for?
I smile back. I drain my glass of lukewarm water, snuggle in closer, and turn on my Kindle. “You watch whatever you feel like, love. I’m going to read right here next to you.”
This resonates so much for me…so much time spent(wasted) watching football, rugby, films with hobbits or spacecraft in them and so on! Luckily I too might be reading or sewing to pass the time. Thank you for writing so candidly about your relationship.
Really looking forward to what tomorrow's prompt piece throws open for you, Ingrid! I absolutely love the sense of ambivalence in this piece, tempered with long-term love. The way your work is leaning into certain areas of life that, perhaps, speak to needs and wants we have been asleep to for a long time owing to circumstance.
Oof, I recognise that midlife wondering! Love the line “I want newness within the known” which says so much in so few words. Such a tender piece but also so clear eyed and honest.
Thanks so much Ellen! Yes it’s a real question at midlife, isn’t it! I think we’re not the only ones grappling with these questions and wonderings. Thanks so much for your lovely feedback!
Oooft. You looking in my living room windows, there Ingrid?! ;-)
Such a lovely, compassionate piece of writing. I really love the pondering in this piece. And the warmth as you find your way back to him. Thanks for sharing it x
Haha I think a lot of our living rooms are playing out similar scenes 😉 thanks so much for reading and for your feedback, and also for your beautiful prompt piece!
I rather agree. It's rather unusual to see an examination of a long-term relationship in this way, the sense that you no longer want to be a part of their world at every moment but you still love them deeply. How we spend those times that we think of as "our" time can reveal so much. Your pen-portrait of your partner is really vivid.
Thanks so much for reading and responding Miranda! This is actually the first time I’ve written about my marriage, and it’s opened a door to lots more questions I need to write.
The lavender frothed in the dwindling sunlight. A golden slant dowsed the street. I dropped my bike on the path outside the squat house and tucked my small backpack inside the bush, disturbing the bees as I did. I had broken the twenty-pound note at the corner shop buying an armful of sweets and my bag – a gift from my mother after another trip away, fuchsia and royal blue with a printed Minnie Mouse face – rattled accusingly. Minnie’s large white gloves protruded either side, flailing madly when I peddled through the estate, and I had already asked for them to be removed – then resewn – once. I was caught between unblemished joy at their silliness and pre-teen embarrassment.
The bag stowed safely, I ventured to the side door and pushed it open quietly. I found my father inside, counting the stack of notes that had earlier been sitting on top of the microwave, high red patches on both cheeks. His girlfriend lounged on the overstuffed pleather sofa looking disinterestedly at her nails. Her name was Karen. So many of my father’s girlfriends were called Karen. She had short brown hair and wore crop tops that showed her flat stomach which she could do, my mother said, because she was only twenty two and had not yet had to suffer the indignity of pregnancy. On my second meeting with her she told me I could call her mum if I wanted.
The cash was his lottery money. £100 set aside every week to take to the kiosk where another woman with whom he had shared a brief fling worked every Saturday afternoon. That one had started and ended while he was still married to my mother. Short by twenty he said, his Scottish accent more pronounced in his annoyance. Karen sighed and gave me a conspiratorial eye roll. I felt my cheeks burn but he didn’t look at me as I unlaced my trainers. He frowned at Karen a moment longer and I watched the cogs turn behind his eyes. He chose peace for once, slipping a hand into his pocket and withdrawing his wallet. He added another crisp note to the pile.
Let’s go then, he said. Karen stood and set her strap back on her smooth shoulder. She didn’t need to wear a bra, according to my mother, for the same reason she could wear crop tops. We’ll be back in ten, he told me, ruffling the top of my head a little too hard. The sun had dropped below the horizon and they walked out of the house hand in hand.
The cramped kitchen was painted mint green and my father had stuck old CDs at intervals across the walls, one amongst them had been engineered into a clock. I listened to its creaking tick. Ten minutes passed, then thirty. By the time the darkness blanketed the lavender, my bike, my bag full of stolen money, I climbed into my nest of blankets. There were no real bedrooms in the house, only a mezzanine occupied by my father’s bed and a single clothes rail. I slept on the sofa next to a window without curtains where sometimes the girl from across the street would knock early and I would climb out to meet her, spending the whole day riding our bikes around the warren of streets, all named after trees.
I curled up beneath a scratchy duvet cover – he had bought it for me but hadn’t washed it when it came out of the pack like my mum always said you should – and tried to sleep. I would be woken in the early hours as he and Karen stumbled through the door and up to the public gallery of their bedroom. As I tried to lull myself to sleep in a house that wasn’t mine, I rolled another word gleaned from my mother between my teeth. Alcoholic.
Many years later I stood in my garden and watched him disappear into our garden shed to drink a bottle of wine. He had arrived to meet his new grandson pale, shaking, sick. He emerged from the shed with colour and a sense of humour. His wife did not speak for the rest of the visit. He had married when I was eighteen and, in a twist that surprised everyone, her name was not Karen. It would have suited her though.
Ten months of breathing space after that day allowed me to pick up the phone. His wife answered, told me that he had been sober for half a year. I didn’t think you deserved to know, she said after a pause. I didn’t ask why but she told me anyway: You didn’t have to live through any of the hard parts.
Emily, I absolutely fell in love with this piece at the start of the week. Each of you is so well drawn and the way you create a sense of reluctant camaraderie with Karen which feels in some ways both a betrayal of your mum and your dad is so very true. I love that sucker punch of a last paragraph. I had no idea quite what to expect from the piece in terms of an ending, quite happy to be alongside young Emily in that teen home, but I was bowled over by the way you closed it. Tha k you for this strong, evocative and stirring scene. It made me want to write something of my own straight away. More of this tomorrow, I beg of you!
Such powerful writing.i love the phrase “ l rolled another word gleaned from my mother between my teeth.Alcoholic”. You pieced the story together so well, there is so much more l want to know.
Some lovely lines- I particularly liked “A golden slant dowsed the street”, and the final sentences. The way you’ve built the tension by revealing by a little, then a little more, in each paragraph, works really well.
Wowser Emily, this is incredible! It works very well as a stand-alone piece of short writing, but I can also imagine it as something longer and part of a larger work. Your descriptions evoke clear images, helping us be with the little girl in the story. So many layers and so much feeling, and you touch on the trauma without sinking into it. So impressive (and I’m really glad I didn’t see it before I posted mine because I probably wouldn’t have, this is so good!).
The details here are spot on - a whole maternal relationship captured in a scratchy duvet. and many apparently trivial things that unlock a whole world of feeling when they're examined more closely. You're also really good at capturing personality through reported speech.
There are so many excellent lines in this piece delivered with such precision. Amazing that you can get this all down in this shape in a first draft. Wowsers.
‘We were taken out to the common for a walk. It was Easter Sunday and we”d been promised hot cross buns when we got back, but I got lost.’
‘How, didn’t anyone notice?’
‘I wanted to look at the flowers.’
‘But you were so young when you were there weren’t you?’
‘Four, I was four.’
We were watching Mum’s garden hoping the red kites might fly over the field behind her house, or even land on the garden wall as they sometimes did. Occasionally lifting my hand from where she held it against her heart to kiss, we sat side by side, the scars on her neck left by tubercular meningitis as a baby visible.
‘I don’t know how I got back. They made me get in my bed and pull the sheet over my face. They wouldn’t let me join everyone or have a hot cross bun.’
We were watching her slowly starve. Unable to eat or drink as the cancer in her liver, undiagnosed, undetected until a few weeks earlier, poisoned her body. A few days later at 8.10am the call from my brother came.
I went to the Dorn Valley after speaking to my sister. An ancient road leading once to the Palace at Woodstock and used by the Tudors, the track led to a long barrow, now covered by a beech wood that looked back towards the monument keeping watching over Blenheim Palace.
It was a thin place, the voices of women long gone seemed to whisper in the tree canopy, their laughter shimmering on the stream. I was looking for red kites.
Mum first took me to Wales to stay on a farm owned by a neighbours family in the Elan Valley, and we had visited the centre were the kites were breed to be re-introduced across the UK.
Recently widowed, and a new qualified driver it was a challenging drive for her, made so much harder by sweltering heat and a hot water bottle jammed against her back to ease the pain that so many years later masked the cancer in her liver.
As the beech leaves tinkled in the breeze I heard one then another kite call. Across the decades they had slowly spread up the motorway corridor, as my own family had moved from the other side of the Chilterns into Oxfordshire, and now two were whirling above me on the air currents.
A few weeks after Mums funeral, while I was still half asleep she had whirled into my awareness laughing, then joined by my dad, they seemed to dance a few steps before disappearing.
Eleven years older than me my sister remembers them both, in their early twenties, laughing and dancing together in the living room, and having parties. One of her earliest memories is of being scooped up and held between them as they laughed and waltzed around the living room.
They are so much older in my own memories. My father died when I was fifteen, and all of the years since my birth had been filled with work for them both, running a business, building a house.
There were still parties, but I never saw them dance, rarely saw them hug, have no memory of being hugged by my dad, only of his hand holding mine once as we crossed the road outside Buckingham Palace. Square, strong and rough, it anchored me in the world, and once gone left my mum untethered. Lost.
This reads like a braided essay, Jaimie, you moving between different strands of the same story, weaving them together tell the whole but in parts. The way you begin with a conversation about a memory you have carried close, before bringing in the wait for the red kites as you sit with the knowledge your mother is dying... The use of food as metaphor as well. The hot cross bun you were denied. The fact your mother at the end of her life could not eat. You, with the white sheet over you as a child, being lost to your mother and then the reverse, we anticipate is coming. Powerful and arresting. Thank you, Jaimie. Can't wait to see how you respond to tomorrow's prompt. X
Powerful writing Jamie. I love the image of your dad, his hand anchoring you in the world untethered such a powerful word. It brought back so many memories, l lost my dad at 17 and definitely mum and l were untethered.
I’m so sorry you had this experience too Barbara. It is so impactful on ever level. Thank you so much for reading something that brought back a painful time for you 💕
Thank you so much for reading Meaghan, it’s interesting how the time constraint of the 40 minutes shapes the writing within this shared experience isn’t it 💕x
I like the parallels between your family and the red kites Jaimie, and the memory/dream/visit from your dancing parents is beautiful. The final sentences too - chef’s kiss!
The scars a previous generation carried, from the casual indifference to the inner world of a sensitive child, to the bodily scars from living in close proximity to illness and death, where it was more usual than not to lose a sibling or two. And the way this makes you the sort of person who suffers years of pain and doesn't bother anyone with it until it is far too late.
Intergenerational trauma interests me so much and I really appreciate you identifying it in my piece Miranda. My mum was hospitalised at 9 months old and only saw her parents once a month. The hospital founded by a woman influenced the way TB was treated, and saved many lives, including my mum’s but … I grew up with the emotional and psychological damage it left my mum with, and my sister and I took the brunt of her rage. Her treatment was pre-penicillin, pre-attachment theory, pre-anaesthetic for babies (which alone is horrifying). Unfortunately most of the hospital records were destroyed but as a psychotherapist as well as her daughter, it’s something I feel very drawn to write about. Thanks so much for reading and sharing your thoughts.
I have a friend who's a death doula with a particular interest in intergen trauma. Such a fascinating - distressing - thing. This is a really compelling piece, Jaimie.
And those days of institutionalised care (oxymoronic to the max) are so horrific, in hindsight. My grandfather went to collect his 3yo daughter post-op and, in his bus-driver's uniform, was mistake for the undertaker. 'She's already in the mortuary' is not how you want to learn your child is dead. I've no idea how they found 'normal' after that.
It’s unimaginable isn’t it…. I’ve been looking at my DNA results again this morning after watching ‘Humans’ on the BBC yesterday and the resilience of our species (and ability to destroy too) is genuinely extraordinary. My father’s mother died on his 2nd birthday, and when he died his slightly older sister had a complete break down. So much deep healing is possible at the two ends of life. It’s an area I wanted (still want) to explore more as a Transpersonal psychotherapist but it’s such a huge subject.
It’s heartbreaking isn’t it. I was hospitalised as a teen with suspected meningitis during a whooping cough epidemic. All I could hear were crying babies. It still haunts me but I rarely talk about it as it’s such a painful thing to even imagine let alone go through as a parent and child. Our grandparents had no choice about having to leave their children. Thankfully now parents can stay.
In the 1930s my mother, then about 9 years old, was hospitalised as a diphtheria carrier. She didn't have it herself but she had nose and throat swabs every day. It was 6 weeks before she was judged infection-free and able to go home. But what she remembered was that in the adjoining ward (she was isolated) "every morning they took away one or two little children that had died in the night."
“I am enough”. What does this mean? “I”, me. ”Am”, a statement of being. “Enough”. Enough of what?, to whom? As I sit on my bed with my laptop perched on my knees writing this, I look around the bedroom I decorated in the flat I bought for me and my son last summer, the first home I have ever purchased on my own. The honeyed herringbone parquet spills out from under the yellow Louis De Porter rug and sweeps up to the dark wood sapele doors with black ironmongery, chosen to compliment the black two column radiators and bedframe with a French style rattan headboard. The linen on the bed is crisp white and everything is perfect. My life is unrecognisable from the one I was living five years ago. I was in an unhappy marriage to a man who was depressed and addicted. I was an angry, overweight, middle aged wife and mum and I didn’t feel enough of anything. I am one of the percentage of the population who has a constant inner dialogue running at all times. From what I have read, there are others who think in images but I narrate my life in an endless talking mind track. Not just shopping and to-do lists but also conversations, imagined scenarios, or even how I might explain to the women at my child’s after school care that his uncle is picking him up the following day as I have a late work meeting. I carefully choose the words I will say and practise my tone and what might be the appropriate level of detail. All of this to ensure I sound responsible and to manage the perception of the listener so that I am thought of as trustworthy and together. I now know this is about a need for control and is the perfectionist In me still gripping on tightly, all related to the feeling of not enoughness. This inner dialogue, while it can be exhausting, also saved me. I have come to realise it speaks in truths, and five years ago it was stuck on the same truthful refrain. "This is not my life, this is not my life, this is not my life". Like fluff caught in the needle of the record player. It wanted to stop me to free myself from the same groove I had been living on a repetitive loop, asking me to wake up from the drunk haze of the day after the party, pick my way through the empty cans and overfilled ashtrays and gently nudge myself on to the next track. A Killer, as it turned out, but there was much to put to death before it would resonate.
An authentic excavation and challenge of what we mean by the self, Donna. The comments on this speak to the sense of interiority you offer in this piece and I think it works incredibly well as monologue before you segue into the more reflective section in the final third.
Your piece resonated with me as I too have this internal dialogue you expressed so well. It can be exhausting as you say but sometimes worth listening to.
Solidarity ✊️. I am re-reading “The Power of Now” and it's liberating to know I am not my thoughts but practicing switching off the mind chatter is hard!!
I really like the way you describe your inner dialogues. It resonates with me.The image of the fluff of the needle of the record player is very effective.
I like how you’ve caught the inner dialogue on the page, but are also reflecting on it Donna, really interesting to read. I agree with the others - the fluff on the needle of the record player image is 🤩 and the final sentence too.
Thanks Kate, I found last night's write a tough one, after seeing all the accomplished offerings from others. I know my work is in coming to the page more often to practise writing.
This is superb, Donna -- love the use of a single block of prose to add to the intensity and what a line: '"This is not my life, this is not my life, this is not my life". Like fluff caught in the needle of the record player.'
Here's that post from Harriet I was talking about below! https://moorlifewriting.substack.com/p/can-i-hold-that-for-you
A weekend camping meant I'm joining late. But I so appreciated this prompt, thank you Deborah and Lindsay!
---
Four minutes thirteen seconds. I hope it’s not waffle, may these words offer a glimpse of how I saw him. How I see him? The memories and moments remain present to me, although he’s gone.
79 years. I know he would have liked more. He was filled with compassion the last time we met, his heart stretching towards the struggles of others, longing to listen. We once chatted about people watching as a spiritual practice. I want to adopt this ritual in his memory: a warm drink, a wide window and a moment to appreciate the glorious scope of humanity.
5 books stacked. His suggestions for my reading after I mentioned I’d like to read more classics. Did I take a photo of them? It was one of his favourite questions: ‘what are you reading at the moment?’ He recently introduced me to a youtuber who shared his love of literature. I’m halfway through The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng, one of the many books he enthusiastically gifted me, I’ll miss his debrief after. His generous legacy lives on scattered across our congregation’s bookshelves.
30 months ago. We started meeting regularly, although hospital stays, family commitments and appointments often got in the way. I’d carry his coffee through to the meeting room of our little church, close the door and light a candle on the table between us. We’d share a contemplative quiet to begin, and then he’d talk. As the Spiritual Accompanier I listened as he shared about his prayer, his emotional landscape, his life. Of course he also wanted to listen, to hear my thoughts and experiences. He was abundant in his gratitude, but it was my honour to witness his tenacity, his curiosity and his courage.
23. The Psalm I’ll read at the Crematorium tomorrow. It was there on his wall, next to the kitchen door. He trusted that goodness and mercy followed him. May I know their kindred company, at 10:15 tomorrow morning and all the days of my life.
This is beautiful, Debbie. I love the idea of a book legacy / link with those love. I asked my father, near the end, what his favourite book had been and - for someone who'd read thousands of books - was amazed when he promptly announced, without any hesitation, 'The Seven Pillars of Wisdom'. I had no idea! And I am so glad I asked.
There is such a dignity and grace about your prose, Debbie. I feel the loss but the support that both ritual and community offer in these times. Thanks so much for writing this and sharing it with us. So sorry for your loss. X
*May I know their kindred company, at 10:15 tomorrow morning and all the days of my life.
The Chain - Week 2
We were cruising down the motorway when the call came. On our way to my son’s graduation in Brighton. It was my sister to say that my father had been taken into a hospice in Leeds. My thoughts tangled together, should we turn around and head straight to the hospice and miss a very important day for my son and our family? He had done so well and received a first class degree, especially remarkable as he’d been so ill with sepsis whilst doing his assignments and ended up in and out of hospital which culminated in an operation that possibly saved his arm. My sister kindly said that dad would definitely want us to go to the graduation and so it was decided we would.
I sat in the auditorium and put on a brave face for the happy ceremony but as they called out my son’s name, he is named after my dad, the lump in my throat that I had been holding onto suddenly melted into sobbing and floods of tears. My husband grasped my hand and held it tightly as my son waved to us from the stage and my heart was a confusion of love and grief.
We were smiling in the photos and when I look at them now I appear happy but when I look deeper at them now I can see the pain in my eyes. We’d booked a restaurant for a family meal to celebrate and I sat through it with the thud of a loud ticking clock pounding inside me. I had lived far away from my dad for many years and barely saw him and I can’t say that we had a close relationship but I loved and respected him. He and his three brothers were brought up dirt poor by a single mother and he had worked hard and ran his own business and was very proud of all he’d achieved. I felt an incredibly strong pull that he wanted me to be with him.
We set off early the next day and made it to the hospice by lunch time. It was a beautiful summer day and we were greeted with hugs and tears by my brother and his lovely wife. Dad was asleep lying in the hospice bed wearing his favourite purple golf tea shirt. He never did wake up again but I got to spend a few days with him, stroking his hair and talking about memories. I’ve heard that hearing is the last thing to go so maybe he was aware of me being there. I like to think he was. My sister and I took it in turns to stay the night beside him with mum and I remember joking that it had been many years since I’d slept with my mum and dad. I was in my sixties at the time and very lucky to have had my father until he was ninety two. When dad died, it was on his and mum’s sixty fifth wedding anniversary and a card stood on a table beside him. He had all his five children together which was a very rare event and the room was filled with so much love, he surely must have felt it. I know I did.
I really feel that sense you were trying to keep your emotions in check for the graduation, which on its own sounds like an emotional enough day given what your son had been through to get there. Thank you for sharing the intimate moments with your dad and siblings. There is something about the way you describe the time between when you last slept in the company of your parents that feels so poignant. Looking forward to seeing where this week's prompt takes us.
Thank you Lindsay. There’s some beautiful writing coming from the prompts. x
I really feel pulled to the intergenerational themes you’ve brought up in here: your son named for your father, the kids all around him, his passing on his anniversary.
My grandmother had decided she would be ready for when the time came and started preparing for death quite early, probably about ten years before the event. First was the circular bed she bought, no sharp edges or pointy corners, nothing to scrape yourself on or bang into. She wanted to be at liberty to roll on and roll off from anywhere on the mattress and from any position; she wasn’t a tidy sleeper and liked to spread out, turn this way and that, kick covers off when she felt like it. She was raised a catholic, and married my grandfather who was devout in his practice and beliefs. I remember when she told me naughtily that she had never been happy with the idea of lying neatly on her back, piously restrained by a politeness and consideration to others expectations; missionary, with hands crossed over her chest as if in prayer. She felt it was sacrificial and a position ready for the coffin – she wanted to be freely available for flight. He thought she was mad and sent her for psychiatric assessment.
I on the other hand, while under a lot of stress mainly to do with a stalker who was female so the police took their time in taking it seriously, on the night when the regular panic attacks reached another level, and acute chest pain floored me and radiated down my left arm convincing me that I was having a heart attack, put on a white Victorian style lace nighty and lay on my back breathing with the pain, ready and hoping to be beamed up. I didn’t die and woke pain free with a renewed desire to live every day as if it was my last. I let my daughter borrow the nighty for a school play and never saw it again.
Growing up, I knew how much my grandmother loved images of Mother Mary and would go down the Portobello Road on Saturdays with her to see if Mr Lewis had any ones of interest on his stall. She was a regular and reliable customer and they took up much of the wall space in her bedroom, there were also statues and carvings of Mary on most of the furniture surfaces, the largest a carved wooden black Madonna on the windowsill. She began to sell her jewellery and exchange it on the market and started wearing rosaries as necklaces.
Surrounding her bed hanging from the ceiling was a company of angels, each with the same cherub face and pale blue garb painted around their midriffs. They were winged with chubby arms some holding musical instruments, a trumpet or violin, others gestured as if in welcome.
I wasn’t there when my grandmother died although I was for several dress rehearsals and we had a few sad and loving farewells. I heard that her preparation paid off, and when eventually she was ready, my grandmother spoke of the angels taking her home and let go with a smile.
This is so rich in sensory detail, Marika, and also you render the emotional complexity of facing death when life itself doesn't stop. You going through your own experience that sounds stressful and all-encompassing in terms of energy. Thank you for sharing these words with us, and I'm so glad your grandmother got the ending she wanted.
Thanks Lindsay, I wasn’t sure where it would go as I found it hard to stay with it on Sundays’ session for some reason, and kept wriggling and changing focus.
Totally get that feeling - I felt the same in the morning session but it came good in the end. Funny, isn’t it, how the sessions can have such different feels?
Wow, you’ve brought so much much of your grandmother to us in such a short space! I already wish I could have a coffee or tea with her. And the concept of saying good bye at one of the dress rehearsals, considering how long she’d been preparing, is striking.
Thanks Meaghan x
What a wonderful character your grandmother was. I enjoyed reading about her and glad to hear you have now come through very difficult times.
Thanks Angela, yes she was a great character x
I really like this. In the simplicity of the form it becomes very powerful . There are very deep undercurrents in this that resonate with me. Childcare years and the. years when they’re grown up .
I was so struck by the stillness within the stillness the reference to the poem creates Deborah. I’ve come back to re-read your beautiful writing this morning and again stopped at this point for a few moments, the image of you sitting on the bed so clear in my mind alongside that sense of a need for movement but not being able to leave. It brought to mind how the language of travel and death can overlap too, with the word departed coming to mind in particular. Thank you so much for your generosity in sharing such a private experience with us and for the inspiration of your words 💕x
Thank you, Jaimie - that means a lot to me x
I missed the boat due to a broken down camper van (!) but here's my offering anyway, written today under the same conditions.
_________
Then the room is all sound and movement, me bending my head to the bed, still holding Mum’s wrist, sobbing, there’s a hand on my back and when I raise my eyes the hospice nurse is beside me and my brother leans back in the chair he’s not moved from for hours, his body slack, crying, my sister standing crying and someone going out to find our other sibling. The nurse we hadn’t met before today, who has stood silently with us for hours as if on guard, as Mum’s effortful breaths eased to the smallest, lightest sighs, darting to our sides with new tissues when old ones dropped from our hands, bringing us water, lays his arm around my brother’s shoulder and holds him for a moment.
We are all here now, taking it in turns to hug each other, and the nurse and the carer and the hospice nurse tell us how sorry they are, and I’m so thankful that the hospice nurse, the one who visited last week and told us gently what to expect, arrived in time to tiptoe into the room, to meet my eyes in Mum’s drawn out pause, and in the lengthening, impossible silence to give an almost invisible nod.
And then it’s life again, ordinary life, with decisions to make and tasks to complete, and a difference like a yawning hole between us, which we circle timidly. Mum is then, not now.
We talk about dates, make phone calls, negotiate a compromise. My sister and I sort through the thin checked blouses and skirts and linen trousers we’ve bought for Mum in the last few years, asking ourselves if she would have chosen them, until we have a little pile which we slip into a plastic bag for the undertakers, and it’s a dull surprise that this that feels like the worst thing of all, not the final letting go of Mum’s soft wrist, not her stillness.
We are led to a room downstairs, filing into and out of the lift, and the manager talks to us as if she has nothing else to do for the rest of the day or week. She says we have done everything we could. She says she has seen people choose their deaths, over and over, choose who will be there when they let go. She tells us again what will happen next, and I feel as if I have already forgotten, and hours pass, and we remember to call our partners, Mum’s brother, Mum’s best friend, and then we are alone, the four of us, and I wonder what day it is and what time it could be, thinking, it has happened at last, the enormous thing. And one of us says they are hungry, and it’s true, we’re ravenous, so we take a taxi to a pub nearby, one we’ve sat in with Mum and her partner, and we order food which is the most delicious food we’ve ever tasted and gulp wine like water. We make stupid jokes and laugh, because that is what we’ve always done, as we begin to spin outwards, separately, into our release, our grief. ‘I’m the matriarch now,’ I say, exactly as it occurs to me, and they laugh as I thought they would, and my head lurches and swims to catch up with the words.
Again, in this piece, your use of spare dialogue is so revealing of character and family dynamics. I love thinking of this piece beside last week's and what you might write next, maybe play about with the order and juxtapositions that moving them out of their chronology might bring. Thanks, Sasha. X
Thank you Lindsay. That’s an interesting idea and something I’ll explore x
I really felt the sense of surreal it is how life still goes on when it somehow doesn’t seem right as we’ve lost someone we love.
You really nailed the moments of odd dissonance that accompanies grief. The clothes and the pub and saying words that your mind has to catchup with all resonate for me
Thank you, that's really kind of you. It's such a strange time, unexpected in so many ways
Para 2 is very powerful, Kate. I learned about 'ambiguous loss' earlier this year - it's such a difficult emotion. Your description of the choke-hold of grief is 👌
You have made me hungry. Your descriptions of the steak is brilliant, I can see it, smell it, taste it. I like the way your writing slows down in the final section to mirror the pace of the meal. I write a lot about food ,it has a special place in my history and can tell us so much.
Single mother, lone parent, single parent family. These are just some of the phrases that were common to my childhood, as familiar to me as a throw back track on the car radio. Looking at them now here on the page it is easy to see how I felt so emotionally detached from my own circumstances. It feels like a well kept secret that everyone around me was colluding on, maybe with the best of intentions, maybe not.
Fatherless, child abandoned by father, half loved, half wanted, half orphaned. These are word that feel more appropriate to describe how it was, how it is and how it felt without the sugar coating. In brutal honesty. In full acknowledgement of the truth. For me this would have been better than skirting around the edges, tip toeing around and walking on egg shells. These descriptions of lone, single, only one. The focus on what is there rather than what is absent simply reinforced what I was encouraged to do with most of my less desirable childhood emotions. Push them down, bury them deep, don't dwell on them. I was actively told by a range of adults in my life that it didn't matter. I didn't need a father in my life. Particularly as I was a girl. I was made to believe it was only my brother who would suffer without a father figure. Teachers and neighbours would openly comment on how well my mum was doing “all by herself”. I was told my mum had enough love for two, like she was superhuman and could make up for a whole other person. We don't need anyone else, like it was selfish and greedy to want more than we need.
Other things filtered through too. “You wouldn't want him around anyway,” “good for nothing,” “waste of space,” and the ever perplexing to my tiny mind “fly by night”. What did all of this mean for me and who I was and where I came from and what I was made of? Other words like “maintenance” and “benefits” also fluttered in and out of my young consciousness. What we were “entitled to” in the absence of this person, what “help” we would be given to fill a man sized hole.
So I left childhood a bit dazed and numb, not at all sure what I had missed out on, still a little embarrassed when anyone asked about “mum and dad”. The collusion had worked, I felt adamant I didn't ever want to meet this father and I had been better off without him. A line I would repeat vehemently whenever gob smacked strangers exclaimed “you have never met him?!” I remember clearly telling one high school friend “I don't have a dad” and her bluntly saying “well you obviously do you just have never seen him.” Never before had anyone so brutally scraped off the sugar coating in my presence. However, even this was not enough to break the spell. I was nearly grown up and nearing the end of needing any parent. I was fairly confident if I did ever meet him it would be to briefly give him a piece of my budding feminist mind. This is how the situation hung for the first 40 years of my life.Then I had my own daughter. I witnessed daily her growing relationship with her devoted, loving father. This is when slowly but surely the illusion I had been sold became the delusion it was all along.
From just minutes after birth my daughter seemed to stare lovingly into her fathers eyes. This was not just in my head, I have the photograph to prove it. I remember looking at them both from my blood soaked bed and saying she is going to be a “daddy's girl.” Words that had never been said around me or I had ever said myself. I saw a shift in him too, it felt like I saw him become a father to a daughter, something I did not see or feel eighteen months before when our son was born. Maybe it was just he was more relaxed second time around but their connection was palpable and deep. I would witness this several times over the coming years in millions of little ways. Gradually each time it was like a piece of my heart slid along like one of those puzzles with tile pieces until I saw the complete picture and I could no longer turn away from, all the love, care and tenderness I had missed out on.
Leanne, it's incredibly effective the way you've used the sorts of comments others might have made at that time, and also used the words of people closer to you to paint a picture of the kind of messaging that we absorb as children that we really shouldn't. Stylistically it really works to expose the tropes that are so damaging. Thank you for sharing this, and I can't wait to see how this Sunday's prompt moves us on. X
You have expressed such complex emotions so well. I love your style of writing it’s as if you’re in the room with me sharing a cup of tea. Thank you for sharing.
How perfect would that be?! I love a cup of tea xx
The way you’ve braided yours and your daughter’s differing experiences together is really effective - and honest and painful. I love the metaphor of the puzzle tile pieces slotting into place.
Oh my…so raw, thank you for sharing this.
Oh, this is so interesting and beautifully expressed. I am sure people meant well when they said your dad was worthless but it's never the right thing to say to a child, because a parent, absent or present, is half herself. And I absolutely understand that you became aware of this loss in a whole new way when you saw your father's response to his daughter. I experienced it myself. I also learned that there is a whole lexicon of feeling in the way a daughter learns to interact with men through her relationship with her father. Lacking that, or a suitable stand-in, she is far more vulnerable. I could write a lot more about the way adults, even when well-meaning, don't really perceive a child's loss of their parent.
Thank you for such a lovely comment. Oh I know that learning too Miranda of relating to men and them to you, that could be a whole other chapter!
There are so many profound and eloquently expressed feelings in this piece Leanne - 'This is when slowly but surely the illusion I had been sold became the delusion it was all along.' is one of my favourites.
Having children of my own made me look at all sorts of things through a different lens - you really capture the essence of that here.
Thank you Kate for such a thoughtful comment. I really wasn’t happy with it last night, but posted anyway so it’s nice to hear it’s not a total emotional wreck on the page!! Xx
Ohhh, this is a sore one, Leanne! Societal mores. What a shitshow they create! So much damage from the false perfection of a family unit. a 2.4 blueprint. You bare your bruised heart here with so much courage and grace x
Thank you xx
WATERMARKS
TBC ;-)
In the months after my father died, when I was feeling most keenly the loss of the last of my birth family, I went looking for them on the family tree that Dad had so carefully crafted during his retirement. A meticulous researcher, tireless photo-scanner and dedicated note-maker, he had created a rich archive of my roots that dates back to the 1700s. It provided a window onto a heritage I had long neglected, even rejected - too Scottish, too dull - but one that gave me all the familial support I could ever wish for.
Family trees are fascinating things, even if they are of someone else’s family - don’t you think? Firstly, the ‘tree’ thing. And ‘branches of family’. Where did that come from, I wonder? The tree of life? The tree of knowledge? (And its apple? Apples don’t fall far from the tree!) Mighty oaks and acorns? I know it used to be custom to record family names in The Family Bible, but those that I’ve seen are just in list form, so I am not clear where and when trees came into it. Did the form suggest the name, or vice versa?
Although I do love trees, I like to think of these archives in more hydrologic than dendritic terms, less family trees more waterways, showing the ebb and flow of family along major river courses, tributaries, ox-bows and meanders, occasional dams and even culverts. A lazy-river ride of my ancestors as they curve and bend, wind and wend from source to sea, from them to me. These water courses of my relatives tell of the social, religious, economic and political tales of times gone by, through their numbers, through their names and through their places.
NUMBERS
The numbers of children that were born to each generation offers a commentary on religion and societal norms. All four of my grandparents were the younger children of broods of 9, 11 and 13 living children, plus a smattering of dead. My great grandfather described his family of nine as “two boys and seven tragedies”. The tragedy was that both sons died as young men: 21 years old at the Battle of Loos in WWI and 31 years old in a mugging that went wrong, as he headed home from the pub after wetting his last-born’s head). The girls, stubbornly - defiantly, even - went on to live well into their eighties… These numbers were to replace losses and provide workers, for farm and factory and fishing boats. But, whilst they were extra hands to help, they were also extra mouths to feed. A generation later, when my own parents, born in the 1930s, were the youngest of 4 and an only child. A sign of the times..
A hundred years ago, in 1925, when my mothers’ parents had their first child - a son - it was between the wars.
What if?
NAMES
My forebears are all Scots. Scottish names. From Gaelic and traditional to showbiz and hyphens. Meanings and aspirations, social and economic.
What if?
PLACES
Where - movement of people
My father’s major river systems found confluence in Glasgow but have their sources in Lanarkshire and Lewis. My mother’s relatives are all from the Isle of Skye.
What if?
I love this piece, Deborah! Such a different angle, and it works great. Stirred my curiosity and made me wonder about mine. Especially love the idea of water courses instead of trees. 💗
Loving the way you use these titles to orient us in the piece, Deborah, and the way the sections weave together a complex picture of identity and lineage. It feels stylistically brave to have worked in this way so quickly as well. Looking forward to how we'll collectively respond to prompt 3 on Sunday!
Great writing. Family trees tell us so much don’t they and like you I found research into family a comfort after mum’s death. Discussing the flow of water describes it so well .
Family trees are fascinating, even the ones, like my own, where there are no exciting or exotic discoveries. I’d love to read more about your discoveries.
I love the reframing of family trees as waterways - a fresh perspective on all those stories of known and unknown ancestors! I would love to read more of this piece, hope you continue it.
Thank you Ellen - will do.
You've got some really interesting themes to develop here. Census records and family trees reveal so much - the casual recording of an "imbecile" relative, the proliferation of lodgers that working class people took in to their homes (you can't help wondering about vulnerable daughters), or the gap between 1915 and 1919 in my father-in-law's ten siblings - reminding us that for all its horrors war could be a respite from constant child-bearing for many women.
Skeletons galore, so much to explore ;-)
Cheers Miranda. Will develop this, for sure.
This is fascinating Deborah. I will need to read it several more times to absorb all of the detail. Are you going to come back to the names and places sections for your TBC? My father too is an avid researcher and creator of family trees - it is only as I get older that I begin to study them with more interest.
(My mother's father's side was also from Skye - we are probably distant cousins!)
Hey Cuz!
And thank you - I will fill in the blanks when I get a chance. I settled on the water theme too late in the session, but I like how it feels so will work on it some more x
On the frontline of mortality l felt flayed, stripped of my outer skin, raw and exposed to the elements. No parents as a protective layer to absorb whatever life threw at me. A motherless mother.
Mum had been in hospital for 6 weeks, a frail 85 year old with a weak heart who grew ever more confused in the busy hospital ward. The mixed ward was dominated by rule breaking men who just wouldn’t do what the nurses said and constantly fell out of bed or called for attention. Mum was a very private person, didn’t like to make a fuss and now was exposed both to her own fragility and that of others. When the end came it was expected yet unexpected. No one could give you an indication of when so l wasn’t there.This fact remains with me like a barb constantly pricking you.l was at home having an end of week glass of wine, watching a film when the hospital phoned.Of all the emotions that crowded in after the phone call guilt was the strongest and pushed all the others away.
Day by day it got easier, the anniversaries passed and a new normal began to take shape. As I tearfully tried to recreate our family Christmas my children commented
You don’t have to do it like this anymore, you can create your own Christmas
Such wisdom , they were mothering me.
The bond between mum and l was close ( dad had died when l was 17) there were just the 2 of us.A bond that was stretched to breaking point at times but still remained.
So how did l navigate the last 20 years as a grown up? I’d like to say l stepped into this adult role gracefully with the dignity befitting a 50 year old but I’d be lying.
When my grown children had left home and came back to stay they reverted into teenagers , lying full length on the sofa, eating the contents of the fridge, getting up at noon.Where could l go now that l could absolve all responsibility like that?
Mum had moved to be near to us in the final year of her life, a flat at the end of our road, a perfect solution we thought.But with it she had lost her independence, her friends from the town she’d lived in for 50 years. I realised how hard this must have been for her afterwards but at the time the juggling of looking after mum, a teenage family and a career left little emotional energy .
Time became a gradual healer, as you piece your life back together bit by bit you can reflect on what’s happened.After mum’s death l started to look into her life before l was born and found a resilient woman who had lived through immense hardship. She had lived in Hong Kong and been imprisoned by the Japanese during the war. She had met my father during the war and after a period as expats they had come back to England . She had to build a life here, a half Chinese woman with a small baby trying to fit into 1950s small town England.She didn’t talk about her life in Hong Kong or what it was like adjusting to life in England.
l had lost mum and yet l was discovering her as a stronger, more colourful person one that l wished l had known.
I have grown a new skin but it is thinner than before.
That opener is so powerful, Barbara. What a paragraph, and that you have managed in the time to pull the threads together by the end of the piece, making it really feel "done". And as others are saying here, you have been able to connect with your mother in death in ways that you hadn't in life. Thank you for sharing this with us - here's to where Sunday's prompt takes us.
I love how you are finding your mum after losing her.
So lovely, that difficult time when we are stretched between our children and our parents and the lack of time to ask questions about their lives before us.
Yes, so many questions left unanswered.
Love how you open with the skin and return to it at the end - also the repeating F’s in the first line “On the frontline of mortality l felt flayed…”. Recognised so much in this piece Barbara - the motherless mothering, and the way it feels like you can almost learn more about someone after their death - or learn about them as a person rather than as your parent.
Totally agree, so different to view your parents as people not parents.
Again, so many points of connection. Was it James Baldwin who said that you think your sufferings are unique in the history of the world, "and then you read." This little group is growing into something very profound and I'm sure by the end of it the urge to be together in RL in the same room for a few hours will be overwhelming!
I agree, it would be amazing to meet up in RL.its so good to fine that others have experienced similar feelings.
There is such a lovely sense of intimacy in this Barbara and I really like how you have structured this - honouring the memory of your mother by returning to the story of her origins at the end of your piece.
This is beautiful, Barbara. Rediscovering your mother as a person in her own right is a lovely way to honour her. Isn't it baffling how little we know of them 'before us'? And thinner skin lets in more light x
Thank you for the encouragement. Your piece was truly inspirational. Yes it is amazing how little we really “know” our parents.
I watch the bubbles travel up my glass of sparkling water. The small ones move quite slowly until they gather others up on their way and then they pick up speed. The big ones move quickly, from bottom to top, on purpose. I’d rather be reading, I think to myself, or sleeping. But watching things together; shows, movies, previews of upcoming shows and movies, means something to him. There’s a comfort to be found in sitting next to a loved one on the couch, not talking or interacting, staring at a big screen of moving pictures, together. For him, not for me. I don’t find it comforting, or comfortable. I would rather be doing almost anything else.
But I’m sat here, beside him.
“What would you like to watch, honey?” he asks, his eyes not leaving the screen.
I’ve been writing love stories lately. It’s not my usual genre to write, but I have moments complete in my mind, vignettes of connection and romance and sexiness, of want and desire, of knowing and unknowing. They fall onto the page, playful and coy, mysterious and curious. Arousing. Not sexually, but arousing interest. Arousing my wonder and letting my mind wander: into moments between people who haven’t been in love with each other for 27 years, into the feelings of people who aren’t already sure what every single touch on every single part of their body feels like because they’ve been touching only each other their whole adult lives. I know I can’t ever have another first kiss, but can there be newness in the known? Can I be surprised?
I have a deep contentment with our family life. Our children are happy, most of the time. We’ve built a beautiful life together, intentionally and with care. We have been through the trenches, hand in hand. He loved me through the hardest losses that hollowed me out and stood alongside me as I rebuilt myself. He fell in love, again or anew, with who I became. And he’s part of the foundations, of me and my life, and the future I rarely think ahead to. I don’t want to burn everything down, destroy my marriage or upend our lives. I don’t want to have an affair, either emotional or physical. I don’t want newness with someone new. I want newness within the known.
“Honey?”
I look over. His eyes are still fixed to the screen, and I take him in. Objectively it’s a beautiful profile and, perhaps less objectively, more appealing as we get older. His long hair, released from its man-bun strictures, lays lank against his shoulders. Thinner, but noticeably less grey than mine. His deep eyes, what caught me in the very first place, are as vivid as they’ve ever been regardless of the faint lines fanning out from them. I’ve always loved his jawline for its strength and defiance. There’s a softness under his chin that wasn’t always there, but it takes nothing away, that softening. He’s no less attractive to me as we begin our fifth decade.
I reach out and run my fingers along his jaw. There was a time when the idea of having him within reach, mine to touch at will, was more than I thought I deserved. The notion of being loved by him, of having been chosen by him, was a reality I couldn’t quite fathom when I found him. I thought it would be enough to have him just for a little while. I didn’t need him forever (as if I could keep him forever), but I could be content for a pocket of time. And somehow, it’s been a lifetime.
He turns at my touch and smiles, waiting. Always waiting.
A voice that isn't mine whispers in my mind. Be content. Look at all you have. It’s enough. It’s more than you dreamed for yourself. What are you even looking for?
I smile back. I drain my glass of lukewarm water, snuggle in closer, and turn on my Kindle. “You watch whatever you feel like, love. I’m going to read right here next to you.”
I found this beautiful and touching
This is such a tender and beautiful portrait of love in real life Ingrid. That last line… perfection! 💕x
I love your thoughts on this, especially the phrase l want newness within the known.
Thank you so much Barbara, for reading and for your support!
This resonates so much for me…so much time spent(wasted) watching football, rugby, films with hobbits or spacecraft in them and so on! Luckily I too might be reading or sewing to pass the time. Thank you for writing so candidly about your relationship.
Really looking forward to what tomorrow's prompt piece throws open for you, Ingrid! I absolutely love the sense of ambivalence in this piece, tempered with long-term love. The way your work is leaning into certain areas of life that, perhaps, speak to needs and wants we have been asleep to for a long time owing to circumstance.
Haha yes Helen so much time wasted!!! But thankfully no more. Thank you so much for reading and sharing your thoughts!
Oof, I recognise that midlife wondering! Love the line “I want newness within the known” which says so much in so few words. Such a tender piece but also so clear eyed and honest.
Thanks so much Ellen! Yes it’s a real question at midlife, isn’t it! I think we’re not the only ones grappling with these questions and wonderings. Thanks so much for your lovely feedback!
Oooft. You looking in my living room windows, there Ingrid?! ;-)
Such a lovely, compassionate piece of writing. I really love the pondering in this piece. And the warmth as you find your way back to him. Thanks for sharing it x
Haha I think a lot of our living rooms are playing out similar scenes 😉 thanks so much for reading and for your feedback, and also for your beautiful prompt piece!
I just love this!!
Thanks so much Leanne, that means so much to me!
‘I know I can’t ever have another first kiss, but can there be newness in the known?’ 💕
already hoping that your piece is chosen for next week’s prompt. 🤞
I loved the candour in this.
Ahh thanks so much Kate, that means a lot! And yes that line has been bouncing around in my head for a while, and really landed with this piece.
Seconded!
Thanks so much Ellen for reading and for the endless support!
I rather agree. It's rather unusual to see an examination of a long-term relationship in this way, the sense that you no longer want to be a part of their world at every moment but you still love them deeply. How we spend those times that we think of as "our" time can reveal so much. Your pen-portrait of your partner is really vivid.
Thanks so much for reading and responding Miranda! This is actually the first time I’ve written about my marriage, and it’s opened a door to lots more questions I need to write.
So tender and such gorgeous details and the last line has it all :)
Thanks so much for reading and replying Jan!
The lavender frothed in the dwindling sunlight. A golden slant dowsed the street. I dropped my bike on the path outside the squat house and tucked my small backpack inside the bush, disturbing the bees as I did. I had broken the twenty-pound note at the corner shop buying an armful of sweets and my bag – a gift from my mother after another trip away, fuchsia and royal blue with a printed Minnie Mouse face – rattled accusingly. Minnie’s large white gloves protruded either side, flailing madly when I peddled through the estate, and I had already asked for them to be removed – then resewn – once. I was caught between unblemished joy at their silliness and pre-teen embarrassment.
The bag stowed safely, I ventured to the side door and pushed it open quietly. I found my father inside, counting the stack of notes that had earlier been sitting on top of the microwave, high red patches on both cheeks. His girlfriend lounged on the overstuffed pleather sofa looking disinterestedly at her nails. Her name was Karen. So many of my father’s girlfriends were called Karen. She had short brown hair and wore crop tops that showed her flat stomach which she could do, my mother said, because she was only twenty two and had not yet had to suffer the indignity of pregnancy. On my second meeting with her she told me I could call her mum if I wanted.
The cash was his lottery money. £100 set aside every week to take to the kiosk where another woman with whom he had shared a brief fling worked every Saturday afternoon. That one had started and ended while he was still married to my mother. Short by twenty he said, his Scottish accent more pronounced in his annoyance. Karen sighed and gave me a conspiratorial eye roll. I felt my cheeks burn but he didn’t look at me as I unlaced my trainers. He frowned at Karen a moment longer and I watched the cogs turn behind his eyes. He chose peace for once, slipping a hand into his pocket and withdrawing his wallet. He added another crisp note to the pile.
Let’s go then, he said. Karen stood and set her strap back on her smooth shoulder. She didn’t need to wear a bra, according to my mother, for the same reason she could wear crop tops. We’ll be back in ten, he told me, ruffling the top of my head a little too hard. The sun had dropped below the horizon and they walked out of the house hand in hand.
The cramped kitchen was painted mint green and my father had stuck old CDs at intervals across the walls, one amongst them had been engineered into a clock. I listened to its creaking tick. Ten minutes passed, then thirty. By the time the darkness blanketed the lavender, my bike, my bag full of stolen money, I climbed into my nest of blankets. There were no real bedrooms in the house, only a mezzanine occupied by my father’s bed and a single clothes rail. I slept on the sofa next to a window without curtains where sometimes the girl from across the street would knock early and I would climb out to meet her, spending the whole day riding our bikes around the warren of streets, all named after trees.
I curled up beneath a scratchy duvet cover – he had bought it for me but hadn’t washed it when it came out of the pack like my mum always said you should – and tried to sleep. I would be woken in the early hours as he and Karen stumbled through the door and up to the public gallery of their bedroom. As I tried to lull myself to sleep in a house that wasn’t mine, I rolled another word gleaned from my mother between my teeth. Alcoholic.
Many years later I stood in my garden and watched him disappear into our garden shed to drink a bottle of wine. He had arrived to meet his new grandson pale, shaking, sick. He emerged from the shed with colour and a sense of humour. His wife did not speak for the rest of the visit. He had married when I was eighteen and, in a twist that surprised everyone, her name was not Karen. It would have suited her though.
Ten months of breathing space after that day allowed me to pick up the phone. His wife answered, told me that he had been sober for half a year. I didn’t think you deserved to know, she said after a pause. I didn’t ask why but she told me anyway: You didn’t have to live through any of the hard parts.
Emily, I absolutely fell in love with this piece at the start of the week. Each of you is so well drawn and the way you create a sense of reluctant camaraderie with Karen which feels in some ways both a betrayal of your mum and your dad is so very true. I love that sucker punch of a last paragraph. I had no idea quite what to expect from the piece in terms of an ending, quite happy to be alongside young Emily in that teen home, but I was bowled over by the way you closed it. Tha k you for this strong, evocative and stirring scene. It made me want to write something of my own straight away. More of this tomorrow, I beg of you!
This is so good! The details are beautifully rendered and the last line made me boil in empathetic rage x
Such powerful writing.i love the phrase “ l rolled another word gleaned from my mother between my teeth.Alcoholic”. You pieced the story together so well, there is so much more l want to know.
Wow, Emily, this is stunning! I was transported. Incredible writing, especially the last few lines.
Some lovely lines- I particularly liked “A golden slant dowsed the street”, and the final sentences. The way you’ve built the tension by revealing by a little, then a little more, in each paragraph, works really well.
Wowser Emily, this is incredible! It works very well as a stand-alone piece of short writing, but I can also imagine it as something longer and part of a larger work. Your descriptions evoke clear images, helping us be with the little girl in the story. So many layers and so much feeling, and you touch on the trauma without sinking into it. So impressive (and I’m really glad I didn’t see it before I posted mine because I probably wouldn’t have, this is so good!).
The details here are spot on - a whole maternal relationship captured in a scratchy duvet. and many apparently trivial things that unlock a whole world of feeling when they're examined more closely. You're also really good at capturing personality through reported speech.
That last line is a killer.
There are so many excellent lines in this piece delivered with such precision. Amazing that you can get this all down in this shape in a first draft. Wowsers.
What an amazing story and it's so well told -- I love how each new piece of information is so perfectly paced so the tension is there all the way.
‘I was lost.’
‘Where, what happened?’
‘We were taken out to the common for a walk. It was Easter Sunday and we”d been promised hot cross buns when we got back, but I got lost.’
‘How, didn’t anyone notice?’
‘I wanted to look at the flowers.’
‘But you were so young when you were there weren’t you?’
‘Four, I was four.’
We were watching Mum’s garden hoping the red kites might fly over the field behind her house, or even land on the garden wall as they sometimes did. Occasionally lifting my hand from where she held it against her heart to kiss, we sat side by side, the scars on her neck left by tubercular meningitis as a baby visible.
‘I don’t know how I got back. They made me get in my bed and pull the sheet over my face. They wouldn’t let me join everyone or have a hot cross bun.’
We were watching her slowly starve. Unable to eat or drink as the cancer in her liver, undiagnosed, undetected until a few weeks earlier, poisoned her body. A few days later at 8.10am the call from my brother came.
I went to the Dorn Valley after speaking to my sister. An ancient road leading once to the Palace at Woodstock and used by the Tudors, the track led to a long barrow, now covered by a beech wood that looked back towards the monument keeping watching over Blenheim Palace.
It was a thin place, the voices of women long gone seemed to whisper in the tree canopy, their laughter shimmering on the stream. I was looking for red kites.
Mum first took me to Wales to stay on a farm owned by a neighbours family in the Elan Valley, and we had visited the centre were the kites were breed to be re-introduced across the UK.
Recently widowed, and a new qualified driver it was a challenging drive for her, made so much harder by sweltering heat and a hot water bottle jammed against her back to ease the pain that so many years later masked the cancer in her liver.
As the beech leaves tinkled in the breeze I heard one then another kite call. Across the decades they had slowly spread up the motorway corridor, as my own family had moved from the other side of the Chilterns into Oxfordshire, and now two were whirling above me on the air currents.
A few weeks after Mums funeral, while I was still half asleep she had whirled into my awareness laughing, then joined by my dad, they seemed to dance a few steps before disappearing.
Eleven years older than me my sister remembers them both, in their early twenties, laughing and dancing together in the living room, and having parties. One of her earliest memories is of being scooped up and held between them as they laughed and waltzed around the living room.
They are so much older in my own memories. My father died when I was fifteen, and all of the years since my birth had been filled with work for them both, running a business, building a house.
There were still parties, but I never saw them dance, rarely saw them hug, have no memory of being hugged by my dad, only of his hand holding mine once as we crossed the road outside Buckingham Palace. Square, strong and rough, it anchored me in the world, and once gone left my mum untethered. Lost.
This reads like a braided essay, Jaimie, you moving between different strands of the same story, weaving them together tell the whole but in parts. The way you begin with a conversation about a memory you have carried close, before bringing in the wait for the red kites as you sit with the knowledge your mother is dying... The use of food as metaphor as well. The hot cross bun you were denied. The fact your mother at the end of her life could not eat. You, with the white sheet over you as a child, being lost to your mother and then the reverse, we anticipate is coming. Powerful and arresting. Thank you, Jaimie. Can't wait to see how you respond to tomorrow's prompt. X
I really enjoyed reading this Jaimie and feel the lostness. The thin place and your mum and dad whirling into your awareness - you saw them dancing
Thank you so Marika, it was really lovely to see them dancing and happy 🥰
Powerful writing Jamie. I love the image of your dad, his hand anchoring you in the world untethered such a powerful word. It brought back so many memories, l lost my dad at 17 and definitely mum and l were untethered.
I’m so sorry you had this experience too Barbara. It is so impactful on ever level. Thank you so much for reading something that brought back a painful time for you 💕
You really pulled a lot of richness out of a short period of time. I felt untethered myself as it came to an end!
Thank you so much for reading Meaghan, it’s interesting how the time constraint of the 40 minutes shapes the writing within this shared experience isn’t it 💕x
I like the parallels between your family and the red kites Jaimie, and the memory/dream/visit from your dancing parents is beautiful. The final sentences too - chef’s kiss!
Thank you! That means a lot 💕x
The scars a previous generation carried, from the casual indifference to the inner world of a sensitive child, to the bodily scars from living in close proximity to illness and death, where it was more usual than not to lose a sibling or two. And the way this makes you the sort of person who suffers years of pain and doesn't bother anyone with it until it is far too late.
Intergenerational trauma interests me so much and I really appreciate you identifying it in my piece Miranda. My mum was hospitalised at 9 months old and only saw her parents once a month. The hospital founded by a woman influenced the way TB was treated, and saved many lives, including my mum’s but … I grew up with the emotional and psychological damage it left my mum with, and my sister and I took the brunt of her rage. Her treatment was pre-penicillin, pre-attachment theory, pre-anaesthetic for babies (which alone is horrifying). Unfortunately most of the hospital records were destroyed but as a psychotherapist as well as her daughter, it’s something I feel very drawn to write about. Thanks so much for reading and sharing your thoughts.
Wow!
I have a friend who's a death doula with a particular interest in intergen trauma. Such a fascinating - distressing - thing. This is a really compelling piece, Jaimie.
And those days of institutionalised care (oxymoronic to the max) are so horrific, in hindsight. My grandfather went to collect his 3yo daughter post-op and, in his bus-driver's uniform, was mistake for the undertaker. 'She's already in the mortuary' is not how you want to learn your child is dead. I've no idea how they found 'normal' after that.
It’s unimaginable isn’t it…. I’ve been looking at my DNA results again this morning after watching ‘Humans’ on the BBC yesterday and the resilience of our species (and ability to destroy too) is genuinely extraordinary. My father’s mother died on his 2nd birthday, and when he died his slightly older sister had a complete break down. So much deep healing is possible at the two ends of life. It’s an area I wanted (still want) to explore more as a Transpersonal psychotherapist but it’s such a huge subject.
It’s heartbreaking isn’t it. I was hospitalised as a teen with suspected meningitis during a whooping cough epidemic. All I could hear were crying babies. It still haunts me but I rarely talk about it as it’s such a painful thing to even imagine let alone go through as a parent and child. Our grandparents had no choice about having to leave their children. Thankfully now parents can stay.
I can imagine why you're still carrying this with you, Jaimie. It sounds tremendously challenging and you must've felt incredibly lonely
In the 1930s my mother, then about 9 years old, was hospitalised as a diphtheria carrier. She didn't have it herself but she had nose and throat swabs every day. It was 6 weeks before she was judged infection-free and able to go home. But what she remembered was that in the adjoining ward (she was isolated) "every morning they took away one or two little children that had died in the night."
We don't know the half of it, do we?
My God, Ruth. This is shocking and heartbreaking
ooh -- love that circular 'lost' and the way siblings have such different childhoods in the same family.
Absolutely agree. And the return to the swooping kites overhead is also a lovely motif to return to at different points in the narrative.
“I am enough”. What does this mean? “I”, me. ”Am”, a statement of being. “Enough”. Enough of what?, to whom? As I sit on my bed with my laptop perched on my knees writing this, I look around the bedroom I decorated in the flat I bought for me and my son last summer, the first home I have ever purchased on my own. The honeyed herringbone parquet spills out from under the yellow Louis De Porter rug and sweeps up to the dark wood sapele doors with black ironmongery, chosen to compliment the black two column radiators and bedframe with a French style rattan headboard. The linen on the bed is crisp white and everything is perfect. My life is unrecognisable from the one I was living five years ago. I was in an unhappy marriage to a man who was depressed and addicted. I was an angry, overweight, middle aged wife and mum and I didn’t feel enough of anything. I am one of the percentage of the population who has a constant inner dialogue running at all times. From what I have read, there are others who think in images but I narrate my life in an endless talking mind track. Not just shopping and to-do lists but also conversations, imagined scenarios, or even how I might explain to the women at my child’s after school care that his uncle is picking him up the following day as I have a late work meeting. I carefully choose the words I will say and practise my tone and what might be the appropriate level of detail. All of this to ensure I sound responsible and to manage the perception of the listener so that I am thought of as trustworthy and together. I now know this is about a need for control and is the perfectionist In me still gripping on tightly, all related to the feeling of not enoughness. This inner dialogue, while it can be exhausting, also saved me. I have come to realise it speaks in truths, and five years ago it was stuck on the same truthful refrain. "This is not my life, this is not my life, this is not my life". Like fluff caught in the needle of the record player. It wanted to stop me to free myself from the same groove I had been living on a repetitive loop, asking me to wake up from the drunk haze of the day after the party, pick my way through the empty cans and overfilled ashtrays and gently nudge myself on to the next track. A Killer, as it turned out, but there was much to put to death before it would resonate.
An authentic excavation and challenge of what we mean by the self, Donna. The comments on this speak to the sense of interiority you offer in this piece and I think it works incredibly well as monologue before you segue into the more reflective section in the final third.
Your piece resonated with me as I too have this internal dialogue you expressed so well. It can be exhausting as you say but sometimes worth listening to.
Solidarity ✊️. I am re-reading “The Power of Now” and it's liberating to know I am not my thoughts but practicing switching off the mind chatter is hard!!
Inner dialogue expressed so effectively - loved this.
I really like the way you describe your inner dialogues. It resonates with me.The image of the fluff of the needle of the record player is very effective.
The last line, ooof!
Thank you! I tried to put my spoken word poet hat on to add some interest..
I like how you’ve caught the inner dialogue on the page, but are also reflecting on it Donna, really interesting to read. I agree with the others - the fluff on the needle of the record player image is 🤩 and the final sentence too.
Thank you! A late addition to add some imagery 🤭
As with Jan’s observation, this line about the fluff caught in the needle of the record player really jumped out for me. So effective.
Thanks Kate, I found last night's write a tough one, after seeing all the accomplished offerings from others. I know my work is in coming to the page more often to practise writing.
This is superb, Donna -- love the use of a single block of prose to add to the intensity and what a line: '"This is not my life, this is not my life, this is not my life". Like fluff caught in the needle of the record player.'
Thank you for taking the time to read this 😊