So I have a background in anthropology, which has sweet fuck-all to do with my current job. It does, however, mean I’m a Class A geek and like everything from the etymology of words (my current reading material) to the feminist and socio-economics of modern (or post-war, really) society, which means that I am officially That Person You Do Not Want To Be Stuck Talking To At a Party. I’m ok with that.
On top of all that, I’m an -ist. An -ist of many types, in fact – I’m a feminist, a pacifist, an eco-ist, and yes, I am a socialist and I don’t feel like a bad person for saying that. I’m not after stealing money, but I do support the idea (and the fact) behind paying higher taxes to provide health care for all. I like knowing that people can get treatment, and I’ll give up more salary to help out. I know a lot of people don’t concur with it, and that’s cool, we can’t all hold hands and sing Kumbaya, now, can we?
I’m a bleeding heart and always have been. We adopt rescue dogs and cats, I have a monthly bit of change that goes out each month to various charities (including the NSPCC and the World Wildlife Federation), and I’m trying to convince Alastair that re-homing a few battery chickens to our humble abode is what the world needs (Jeff is helping encourage. We’ll see.) I have a vegetable patch which seems to be growing in spite of my attempts, as opposed to because of (I find growing vegetables to be so stressful. I know this flies in the face of the activity, but I can’t help it.) I support renewable energy sources, and would be delighted to see a wind farm go up nearby.
And yet…
There was that Boden Camping Debacle of last weekend. Poshy poseur from a non-posh background elbow-rubbing with women named Miranda, their well-dressed husbands Henry and their three perfect children, Poppy, Olivier and Tad. And there we were, camping with the posh tent and the funky dog and the children (one of whom has, it turns out, a name that has become popular. When we named her, we were the only ones we knew with that name. Now, it’s everywhere. Were we trendsetting, or just naive I wonder…)
But it gets worse. I’ve long been an advocate of assisted housing. It was a system that worked well in Sweden – everyone who needed a home could have one. This was reassuring to me as I had grown up with the not-unfounded fear of being a paycheck away from homelessness (now we’re only two missed paychecks away from homelessness. Progress!) Knowing that there was a safety net – even one paid for by the tax payers – made me feel warm fuzzies.
And then a neighbor knocked on the door.
He had info. Info the council hadn’t revealed to everyone and to this date, none of us are sure how this is. But the info wasn’t brilliant.
In England, it’s incredibly hard to get a foot on a rung of the property ladder. If you’re a young couple then buying your first place is near impossible. We were lucky in that we rented, saved a chunk of money, and Alastair had his former marital home in Brighton that he sold (the Swunt, obviously, keeping their palatial former home in Stockholm). Many young couples have to live with their families to accumulate time and money to move out. It’s a sad situation – people need homes. There are homes. The homes cost too much money. People don’t get homes. Home prices continue to go up. I’m no economic expert, here, but even I can see this is untenable.
Said neighbor came by with a leaflet, see, which resulted (no kidding, here) in a number of our neighbors immediately listing their houses for sale. This leaflet showed the massive fields just off to the right of our homes, land that is marked as conservation and a small portion of it listed as farmland. The small farmland has been sold to a property developer, who is going to turn it into 9 low-cost houses (also called “affordable houses”, and in this instance we believe they would be part-owned by the property developer and part-owned by the buyer, however they could also be council-associated housing which is where the crime rates do come into play). The neighborhood is up in arms.
And I thought: My god, we’ve worked so hard on this house and now we have to do things like lock the doors.
Our neighborhood went straight to their House of Commons Representative, and almost overnight I became a NIMBY.
Then came the outcry in my head: Our house price took a nosedive during the crash and still hasn’t recovered, it’ll further go down! We’re going to not even recoup what we’ve put into the house, including the blood, sweat and tears! This is my dream home! There will be an increased crime rate! Our small, not busy neighborhood and our small, not busy country road will become a proper thoroughfare and the children could be at risk from traffic incidents!
Then came the shame: For fuck’s sake! You snobby pretentious shit! People need homes, people need homes they can plant flowers at and feel safe at, and you’re stirring up shit in your head for nothing! Who do you think you are, Princess Di? Stop making things other people’s problems! You care so much about causes, can’t you care about people, too?
Then came the rationale: I know it’s right. We’ve worked hard on our house, and I’m sure other owners will work hard on theirs. It’s what’s right for people.
Then came the finale: I’m troubled by my own reaction. I don’t know what it means, this affordable housing, but in the end maybe that’s not the relevant part. It won’t adjoin our property, it won’t really affect us. So how about supporting it and letting people come in?
And while I’m at it, accept that maybe not locking the doors wasn’t a brilliant scheme anyway.
We bought a great big fuck-off tent, which we assembled in the back garden prior to going because we didn’t want to look like newbie assholes.
(That’s Jeff in the background. Jeff is fab. Jeff’s face is also not going to be shown here, which you probably also know.)
It’s a good thing we did erect the tent at home, because holy hell was it complicated.
I booked a ferry trip to the Isle of Wight (a little island off the southern coast of Hampshire), where we have been camping for the weekend. After an uneventful ferry ride, we arrived at the campsite – 2 adults, 1 teen, 2 toddlers, and one very excited dog, plus a car packed to the gills with all kinds of camping gear.
Luckily we had some supervisory help while Jeff, Alastair and I pitched the tent.
We chose the site because it sounded lovely – in the travelling scheme of things, we’re Rough Guide people, and the Rough Guide to Camping in Britain recommended this site. The site did not disappoint, which is why we chose a pitch with the best view ever.
And our tent had the best location (luckily that’s not a straight cliff edge just there. I have a paralyzing fear of losing all the members of my family, and as a result am not ok with cliff edges, as one who is both paranoid and – let’s be honest – practical – behaves.)
Inside, we had three “bedrooms”.
And inside, we made ourselves at home.
And two little people had their own “bed in a bag” – inflatable mattresses complete with sewn-in sleeping bags. Their excitement was indescribable.
And the time there was fabulous. We didn’t do much apart from what we wanted, including time in the sea.
For all of us, that is.
Sunsets.
Sleeping when we needed to (for the record, sleeping with a snoozing Nora is wonderful. Honestly.)
And driving the occasional tractor.
You know – as you do.
And I walked to the reception every day with my washing up bowl of dishes and my thoughts, and as I walked I realized something – we were on a campsite full of families. Families with children of all ages, families with dogs of all breeds, just lots of families. And as I walked to the dish-washing site, I would look at the people around me. I realized something pretty fundamental there, actually – I realized I had hit a new stage in my life.
There I was, camping with my gorgeous family and my gorgeous dog in our gorgeous tent. The tent was from eBay, in fact, it was rather horrifyingly to those in the know a 2009 model, but it was brand new, never used, and it was a great deal. And I bought it because it was a great deal and because it came with an additional groundsheet and – I’ll be honest here – an indoor carpet. That’s right. I bought a tent with a carpet. When we toured a showroom, we found the carpets to be miles more comfortable than tents without one. So I saved us a packet by buying a complete set online for a ridiculous price that made me wonder initially if it was a mistake, but I bought it.
There we were, with our three kids and a dog (mutt, adopted from the RSPCA). We came in our posh (eBay) tent. We went to the nice Isle of Wight. I watched the other mothers march to the kitchen washing up place, with their quirky Wellies and their Boden cardies and their make-up free faces with casual short hairstyles, and I realized that I was camping amongst the Sloanies, the type of women who had posh educations and now drive Chelsea Tractors, the women who have children named Sage and Oliver and Isabella, whose husbands have curly hair and rugby shirts and linen shorts that never seem creased that hold iPhones with speed dials to work and to the garage that houses their company 10 Reg BMW.
I thought about this, while I washed dishes.
I have a number of Boden clothes myself (their sales are fabulous as are their clothes, although I hate the fact that they run one size too small, it always makes me feel like starving myself again.) I have quirky Wellies. I don’t drive a Chelsea Tractor, we in fact have a company car and a 10 year old minivan, but still. There I was, doing the washing up in my Abercrombie sweatshirt (eBay again), with my Gap flip flops and my Calvin Klein shorts (yes, those were real, bought 12 years ago in NC when I was making money hand over fist. Those old shorts, sadly, didn’t make it back home again, they gave all the life that there was to give.) Here were women who typified Sloane – families, monies, posh camping (called “glamping”), sparkly children and immaculate lives, and here was I – a few levels down, that’s for sure, but swanning around in this same world. It troubled me, a bit, but then I took it for being what it was – I was simply camping. Camping is, perhaps, the new black.
So I relaxed and enjoyed it. I was not alone in enjoying it.
We pet goats, we went on trains, and one very excited little boy got his first trip on a double decker bus.
I decided not to dwell on what my decidedly red inclinations meant. I went with it. We have a tent. We have two little people who love the tent.
And we have all returned greatly knackered, with a small case of gastroenteritis, and the small wonderings of what a girl who grew up fairly poor with a military background and a life she doesn’t quite understand but she tells herself that sometimes, a tent is just a tent. That’s maybe for another day. The socio-economic angst-like navel gazing can wait. For now, I need a new pair of Wellies.
I’ve been quiet because of being crazy busy with some things I can talk about, and some I can’t. We have something going on that has taken a fair amount of my mental capacity lately, and I can’t write about it, not right now. It’s fine – I’m ok, Alastair’s ok, all are ok, there’s no domestic disharmony in this house – it’s just a little bit energy-consumptive.
Jeff is over for a few weeks. He arrived on Monday, a tall weedy teenager with an adult’s voice and the ability to consume great quantities of food that disappear into the ether. He’s brilliant fun, and last night he and Alastair and I set up our new arrival – we bought a tent to go camping with, and its first run is this weekend when all 5 of us (including two very wound up toddlers who have their own airbeds, one covered with dinosaurs and one covered with Disney Princesses, because we don’t do stereotypes or anything). It’s not just a tent, it is a great big fuck-off tent. It has bedrooms, skylights, and – I shit you not – an indoor carpet. It’s not camping so much as glamping.
We had some guests over the other night, old friends of Alastair’s. Someone asked the question of where we would want to spend the rest of our lives, and we went around the table listing our top choices. A discussion broke out before they got to my answers. The discussion veered left and went into other garrulous topics. It was set to go to a new round of questions, when Jeff piped up.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “We didn’t hear Shannon’s answers yet. We need to let her have a turn.”
I think my heart caught on a little hook inside, and I reached over and ruffled his hair. “Thanks, man, “I said. “I appreciate that.”
First, they shared the same bassinette in the Labour and Delivery Unit (while swaddled in many blankets and wearing preemie baby clothes).
Then they shared the same cot.
Then they went into two separate cots four months after they arrived – this photo is the last day they shared a cot.
Almost two years ago we lowered their cots.
And now more changes. We tried it before. In January we removed one side of their cots, and gave it a shot.
They weren’t ready, though. Nick in particular was keen to have the cot back. There was something about the security of it, some kind of soothing effect it had on him. We turned their beds back into cots, and they – and I – were happy.
And then a change came. It came about due to a sale on beds we found, toddler ones that would be toddler sized and would be really loved. Toddler beds that had a toddler distance from the ground and have a guardrail just in case.
On Saturday, Alastair assembled the bed with Nick’s help (if by help you mean conveniently relocating various important bits for it).
Ahead of their room renovation (which is to come in the next few months), we put their beds up. It was time. Nora has finally cottoned on to the fact that one can actually climb out of the cots, and in addition noises are being made by them about potties. The cots had to go.
A part of me felt like crying for days.
A part of me rejoiced.
Mostly I feel like that scene in that cheesy movie Starman, where Jeff Bridges goes from a newborn to an adult in 5 minutes. That’s how fast it’s going. One minute (or maybe it was twenty years ago) they were born. The next minute (or maybe it was my entire life) they are walking and talking and laughing and real. I want to stop every moment and I want to advance them. I want them to be soft, comforting infants and I want to travel with our laughing children. I want to clap as they sit for the first time and I can’t wait to see their reactions this Christmas, when they know that Santa is coming and they know what presents are.
I want to celebrate and cry. I wish I could describe how this felt. I wish I could have been prepared for feeling this way.
The twins love their new beds. Of course they do. They were ready, it was me that wasn’t ready, it was me that was being selfish. The twins have slept brilliantly and perfectly and hopefully that continues. They love their “red beds” and will love their room renovation and I know they do, I’m glad they do, I really am.
They’re growing up and of course they should. I just sometimes wish it didn’t ache so much. It feels like something happened on my watch – I was watching them and it changed and what does it mean, this change? Someone once commented that every stage is the best stage ever, and I think I agree with that. I love that they talk and giggle and sing and “want to help Mama”. I guess I just feel like a spectator along for the ride, and the ride is so wonderful and exhausting and perfect and hard that I never want it to end.
In a little over two months, the Lemonheads will turn three.
Staggering, isn’t it? Three. Three. Years. Old. I can’t believe it. I think it was yesterday that they were born. Or, more likely, they’ve been here for eleven hundred years, since the dawn of time or invention of the rock. The bad news is they’re growing up. The good news is they’re growing up, and in that growing up comes a reduction in nursery fees (pause for a whoop).
They’re proper people now. Proper chatty, laughy, totally random people. They are so different it’s amazing and I love seeing these facets of their personality come out now.
Let’s go ladies first.
Nora has become something of a bossy stroppy cow. She’s miles ahead of Nick in language, and when she talks I swear she’s the poshest little girl this suck of Buckingham Palace. When she tells you she can’t do something, it comes out: “I cahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhn’t do it, Mummy.” She’s so posh she’s bypassed plum and gone straight to uber-Sloane. She also likes to boss Nick around, get him to be her personal slave, and is generally a slight primadonna.
She is also very loving and her smile can blind you.
Nora continues to be a ham. She’s extraordinarily interested in arty things like music and drawing. At nursery she’s prolific to the point that we’ve donated paper she’s such a fan of drawing. At home she loves to make noise on everything and does mess around with their toy piano (which, for reasons best known to Nick, was here in the naughty corner as Nick had declared “Music, time out! Musn’t bite Nick!”)
She turns everything into a musical instrument, including an inflatable England hand we bought them to play with during the World Cup (in those naive early days when England stood a chance, you know.)
She continues to love very girly things like dressing up, as seen here while drawing on their easel. She’s wearing a bandanna, a pair of pink fairy wings, and her “pretty dress”, which in this instance in an England flag.
Somewhere Winston Churchill is wincing.
What’s so amazing to me is that she is so imaginative – she was given a hand-me-down of a pink Disney princess castle and a sparkly necklace/tiara set (which, as you can see, went down like the Titanic with her).
I bought her a few dolls to play with inside of it, and at almost three she has them talking to each other inside of the castle, pretending to read books and walk around. This amazes me, this early foray into imagination. I absolutely love it.
They both are very imaginative. I had a box out from some things I’d ordered, and the two of them thought it was Christmas. Nick flipped the box over and decided to “drive.”
Of course, when the engine died he had the woman get out and push while he steered. Typical.
And this is the two of them inside their “falling cave”, aka the cheap tent I got them which more often than not winds up upside down, as the two of them giggle and use it as a virtual hamster wheel.
Nick has left the horrid tantrum stage (for the most part) and become a little heart. He doesn’t like to draw but he loves to sing. At any opportunity that boy will burst into song. I love it, though – it’s not self-conscious in the least, which is one of the reasons why I love it (also, because he says “Old MacDonald, how’s your farm?” What’s not to love about that?) This is him laying back singing “Baa Baa Black Sheep” (his favorite) wearing questionable fashion choices (aka toddler clothes).
He’s keen on things looking right, lining up just so, and is key to have patterns done. He’s still into lights in a very big way, as evidenced by him playing with two fairy wands which light up.
But his real love is transportation.
The boy loves his trains.
Last weekend Alastair suggested a day out, and we all went on the Watercress Line, which is a steam train line that is not far from us, and which runs on lines that were abandoned but are now maintained (as are the trains) by train enthusiasts (and Alastair is joining them as a volunteer. You may see where Nick gets his train love for here.)
To say it was a hit was an understatement.
Nick was mesmerized.
He was in his element, not even a bit frightened by the noise and commotion of a giant steam train (when he saw the train driver during a break, he even shouted “Hello, man!” to him. That’s our boy, the not shy type when it comes to trains.)
It was a brilliant day out.
His joy was infectious, and he was on full alert during the entire day, passing out almost instantly when he was strapped into his car seat.
And I’m always so amazed at the two little people that we share a house with. They’re still babies, I’ll always call them babies, but they’re people now. Cheesy little fuckers sometimes, but people.
Walking the dog this morning, I thought about my life. I thought about my job and my marriage and my family and my lot in life. And I say this only because it’s how I felt then and how I feel now, not as any kind of “nose rubbing” or anything like that – I am the luckiest woman in the world.
Sometimes it’s intriguing, this idea that you can lift the lid on the past and breathe in.
It’s easy to do when you’ve been blogging for over 7 years. You can lift the lid off the archives and see who you were at any given point in time, because at no point in time have you ever been the same person. Despite the (over) confidence people think you have, the truth is you have always been deeply confused about who you are. It’s not insecure, everyone is insecure to a point.
I’ve had an eating disorder for years because I hated myself and, in hating myself, I hated my body. I took things out on it, I loathed it, half the time I could hardly look in the mirror. I dress only in black at work, always have done.
But things have started to change.
I got my first bikini in February of this year. I felt it was a slight challenge, this little strip of lycra. I felt like I had to step up to this flashy bit of purple, I felt that it didn’t have to defeat me. I didn’t have to bury it in the drawer I could – believe it or not – wear it and feel good about it.
I wore it once in Australia.
Last week I wore it every day.
The amazing thing about being there among so many other women was this – there were many women with bodies with lumps like mine. There were many women who were skinnier than I am. But there they were, this parade of women who were larger than I am and who embraced their curves, who wore a two-piece swimsuit and seemed to love themselves and their exposure to the sun. They were amazing and I wanted to be like them. Then I realized that there, in my two-piece, I was one of them. My body’s not perfect…but no one ever said it had to be.
My face has lines. I am heading towards the downhill slope of “late 30’s”, of course I have lines. My face has always felt too round and fat. My eyes are slanted and have Epicanthic folds. I have never understood my face and in return, never really worn make-up because of it. Easier to not bother. Easier to not make an effort.
Only recently I have realized that my face isn’t beautiful…but no one ever said it had to be.
(This isn’t me pimping for praise here, either. This is me being straight. I know a second-hand car when I see one. Beep beep.)
I’ve always had long thick hair. My hair was the one triumph (apart from my rack, which is spectacular. I’m just calling a spade a spare here.) I have thick dark hair that I have always worn long because it is my security blanket. It hides my face, it hides my appearance, and I can’t have short hair because of my Asian chipmunk-like cheeks. Short hair brings your face out. People notice you with your short hair. Life is better with the long hair and the black clothes and virtually no makeup. It’s better than I hide, it’s better that I am not noticed.
Only, why is that?
Who was I really hiding from?
All these years of my life I’ve been whatever people wanted me to be for so long that I never figured out what I wanted me to be. I’ve got that now, though. The past year of my life has shown me things I am and things I am not.
There are many things to be afraid of, ranging from the more serious things like disease, job loss, and losing a loved all and moving all the way down the scale of fear to fear of Katie Price and the possible return of the shoulder pad. What I am not is afraid of not being perfect. Not anymore. I’m not perfect, I’m not beautiful, I’m not special…but no one said I had to be.
What I am is me. I think I’m beginning to like me, and I am fortunate enough to have a man who thinks I am beautiful and sexy, just as I am. I have faults and am still a bit screwed, that’s for sure, but there are things in there that are good. I have started wearing just a bit of makeup. I have given myself the solemn vow that the wardrobe, it shall have colors and it will be good. Turquoise, purples, oranges, yellow – I want to wear color. My figure isn’t a cover model’s but there’s a man I share a life with who tells me that I am sexy and have the perfect figure, and I like being that for him. I like it so much, I might as well like it for me.
And today I cut my hair off.
I love it.
It’s a crazy ride, this getting to know yourself. But if it’s just a bit of hair, a bit of slap on the face (and no, I won’t be wearing that red, red lipstick!) and the ability to say that I’ll put on the bikini, faulty body be damned, then I have to believe that I’m being true to myself, and I have to believe that in being true to who this person is that I am, that two little people in my life will follow and never have to know what it’s like to hide.
-S.
PS – if you’ve been around this blog for any period of time then you will know Teresa. Teresa has been commenting here for many years, she’s an absolutely incredible woman and someone I call a good friend. I trust her and I love her, too. Her brother and sister-in-law had twins on December 31, 2008. They were micro-preemies, and one of the little guys Dominic isn’t doing well and is in St. Louis awaiting a lung transplant. Teresa’s brother is in St. Louis with his son, while Teresa’s sister-in-law is at home in MI with the other twin and the family’s daughter. Her brother is struggling to find accommodation and the whole situation is so serious it hurts me to read it, let alone know someone I care about is going through it. Teresa’s set up a webpage to help defray the costs that her brother faces in trying to stay in St. Louis with their sick son, as well as requests for info for places to stay (he’s on the waiting list at both a local hostel and the Ronald McDonald House). I know times are hard, but if you have a spare bit of cash, there’s a Paypal page here, along with some of the story of what’s happened and photos of Dominic. Love you, Teresa. Hang in there, gorgeous.
The last of the great “wedding and honeymoon” posts from me, then I’ll leave you alone with all the romantic shit, ok?
We left last Monday, the 5th of July, on a flight to Antigua – we had been booked to go to Croatia, which remains high on the list for us both, but we had a change of plans. We booked it as it flew from Gatwick thus, if there were any further BA strikes, it wouldn’t get cancelled. We also booked it because we had points and a business class voucher that we knew that if ever there were a time to burn them up, this would be it – a wedding is surely the one time that using those is worth it, yes?
(OK, yes – historically I have a bad track record on this whole matrimony business, but let’s move on from that, yes?)
We had booked a honeymoon room at the Sandals Resort in Antigua. Neither of us has ever been on an all-inclusive holiday in our lives, but we thought that having everything taken care of would be a good idea. It didn’t hurt that Antigua’s down-season is now as well, and rooms were 60% off. We found out that all food, watersports (heh), diving, and drinks were included. When we found out that included alcohol we figured they hadn’t seen us coming.
The place was beautiful.
Tropical and warm (my allergies bailed completely! My Reynaud’s was without a trace!) and gorgeous.
And the first night we were there we both larged it on the champagne and we slept nearly 11 hours. This might seem like nothing to most, but to two chronic insomniacs with toddler twins, this was amazing. Truthfully, we spent a lot of time sleeping – naps, 10-11 hours of sleep a night…it was heaven.
Since we’re both keen divers we got right to it. The first day we were there we had an orientation dive where you basically have to prove that you’re not a total tool and know what you’re doing and earned the dive certifications that you have. We did so under the watchful eye of the Divemaster there, a man called The General who took no shit, did not fuck around, and ran a tight dive ship.
We proved we weren’t total assholes and then went diving with a handful of others, with the assurance that if we didn’t fuck up the dive we’d be allowed to dive two tank dives the next day.
Diving is a curious thing – there is one solid truth that I have learned over my 15 years of diving experience and that is this: the more poncy dive gear you own, the more of an asshole you are. No really. Particularly if you are newly certified and have gone out and bought everything. Do that and you’re guaranteed a spot in Dickhead Hall of Diving Fame. I have had more dives shortened or even aborted due to people mucking about with their dive gear. It’s as The General said himself – he’s been diving with people with a veritable Dell Laptop strapped to their arms, it doesn’t make their diving any better. We dove with people with the poshest gear who were the worst divers, including one woman who crashed into absolutely every single piece of coral in her path, which therefore meant the coral was dead and couldn’t recover. When we go places we bring our mask and snorkel and borrow everything else from the dive shop. This almost without question means we are first in the water as we’re not busy fussing with kit we don’t understand, we just get on with it. So if you’re a newbie diver, don’t buy all the kit. No really. Take it from a long-time diver. Rent and enjoy your dive instead.
The days kind of blurred. If we weren’t diving we were sleeping, hanging out by the pool bar, or relaxing in one of the restaurants.
When I dove I wore a tankini. When I wasn’t diving, I got a bit brave and wore the bikini that Alastair bought me last year. I felt quite brave doing that, a 36 year old woman with her first bikini. I read by the pool. I read in the pool.
And I naturally mis-heard Alastair when he told me I was getting burnt all over, thinking that I needed to top up the sunblock on the front only.
We had sunsets.
We had dinners where we talked and laughed and ate too much.
And that’s not even mentioning the ocean, with it’s sugar beaches and crystal blue waters.
We flew back with the same crew that out with we flew there with, the honeymoon was that short (the BA crew said we were the shortest amount of time on honeymoon in Antigua they’d ever met), but then we have two small people, my folks had to get back, further honeymoon time would both bankrupt us and mean that we’d have to dry out our soggy drinking/sleeping/scuba diving asses, and I don’t have permission for leave from work (hi tough project!) and we had to get back. It was good, though. Relaxing and warm and perfect. I don’t think we’d ever be interested in a Sandals-type of thing again but it was nice to have everything included. In general we like to get to know a place, explore, get ingrained in the culture. Not this time. I confess we spent the entire time on the resort and the dive boat – all we did was sleep, eat, relax, read, drink and yes, shag like bunnies. Neither of us are very good at relaxing and just being, but we gave it our all on this trip.
We’re home now.
And I’ll stop boring you with wedding and honeymoon stories from here on.
And it has all been very, very good.
- S.
PS – the songs kept playing during the reception, and the song we finally got our first dance to was Eric Clapton’s “Wonderful Tonight”, as recommended by fellow twin mum Hopeful Mother. Thanks for that, I owe you one!
We’re home after three days at the Sandals Resort in Antigua.
More shortly – for now laundry, more aloe vera gel (why yes I am an asshole and got sunburnt), going through photos, and in one hour hugs from two little people that have been missed very much indeed.
A quick one, as we’ve only just finished the last load of dishes from the party yesterday – 85 people showed up to celebrate our getting hitched, and we partied into the night.
Friday was lovely. After spending the night with my stepmum and stepdaughter in Winchester (the hotel screwed up our reservation and my stepmum managed to wrangle an upgrade, free minibar, free breakfast, and half my money back), I went to a nearby spa and had my hair and makeup done because I’m rather crap at doing such things myself.
I then went back to my room and got myself dressed while the ladies fluttered about getting themselves ready.
Then we drove to Winchester, where the ceremony was due at 1130am on the 2nd of July, 2010, in the Winchester Register Office.
The ceremony was solemn.
It was also mostly about laughter.
And I am in love with the rings.
Nick and Nora were turned out perfectly, as were my dad and stepmum.
And after the ceremony my stepmum – who had the forethought to bring things she somehow knew Nora would want – provided our daughter with a tiara of her own, as she requested.
The entire extended family then went to the restaurant we’d booked for the wedding lunch, the amazing Chesil Rectory, which was built in 1450.
Nick was gorgeous.
And I even got a moment with Nora.
We went home as a family of eight, opened some bubbly, had a Pad Thai and watched the footie. As you do on your wedding day.
The next day was the big, less formal party. We used Alastair’s massive barbecue pit to spit roast six huge pork loins and a million oven-roasted Indian chickens.
She even made the top, which I have kept because I’m so in love with.
I think my gorgeous friend doubted herself, but her cake – a layer of coffee, lemon, and chocolate – was so beautiful and so fabulous to eat that people talked about it all night long and I cannot thank her enough. She is a great friend, an incredible cook, and her little man Harry is utterly dashing in a waistcoat.
The following photos are as taken by the most fantastic May’s also fantastic husband H, as he was on the ball with the photos and I was not, spending my night running around doing dishes, doling out food, and making sure people were ok. I even got a moment for a cuddle with the new man in town, and he’s a real honey, all gurgling baby. I think the party went well – the cake and food was a hit, the alcohol was drunk, people proclaimed it A Really Good Party Indeed.
The party started at 1500 and went on until 0130. The sunlight and screaming children were displaced by adults with wraps and scarves and anecdotes by candlelight.
We even lit off a number of sky lanterns.
The stepkids have gone home now, the guests are all gone, and the party has been tidied up a while now. Tomorrow Alastair and I leave for a few days in Antigua – not very long, but long enough – and then we’ll be back. It has been an extraordinary week, but the funny thing is it doesn’t feel like the anti-climax – it now feels like life as we get to live it. It’s not about being on the roller coaster, it’s about being here.
The house is hot and the briefest flutter of wind sneaks in through all of the open windows, making its way illicitly in the house when it’s not supposed to. My eyes snap open at the feel of the wind and I rub my eyes, rubbing out the allergies. I sit up and slide my feet over the side of the bed. I open the bedroom door and go out to the landing.
“I wasn’t going to come here any more.”
“I didn’t think you were.”
“There was a bump along the way and I got held up. How are you?”
I sit down. “I’m fine. Someone sent me a package of photos of you a few weeks ago. You and I, many years ago. I’m not sure when, the photos weren’t dated, but maybe 15, 16 years ago.”
“What did we look like?”
“We were young.”
“What did I look like?”
“You looked like you were alive.”
“I was, then.”
“I know,” I sigh.
He looks over at me, that sideways glance through his enviable thick lashes. “You’ve changed. You’re older, and you look a lot thinner.”
“There’s no such thing as too thin though, really, is there?”
“I don’t know about that, Buddy.”
I smile at that. That name, that familiar pet name, nearly forgotten in the holes in my memory.
“I am older,” I say with a rueful smile. “Maybe I’ve lived past my sell by date.”
“At least you kept on living.”
“Yeah, about that – when exactly do you actually pass on in death? I’m just wondering because I’m thinking your death is way past its due date. I’m thinking your death and rebirth is the longest project plan I’ve ever come across, I just want to know what I’m up against here.”
“I don’t know what happened there, no. I was…hell I just have no idea, you know?”
“I don’t know. But it’s ok. I guess in some ways it’s nice to see you again. Again again, I mean, considering I got those photos a few weeks ago.”
“Were you surprised by them? What did you think when you saw them?” he asked quietly.
“I thought yours was a life wasted,” I say bluntly. I slap my hand over my mouth. “Oh, fuck, sorry. I said that without thinking. I’m sorry, I don’t think I meant that.”
“I think you did.”
I pause, thinking before speaking this time. “You were fairly extraordinary, you know. I just think you could’ve touched a lot more lives than you did before you died.”
“Maybe I touched the ones I needed to.”
“Maybe,” I acknowledge.
We sit there and I fold up my knees, tucking my hands under the folds. He looks around the freshly painted hallway at the dozens of photos on the wall.
“You’ve been everywhere,” he breathes, looking at photos of Iceland, of Santorini, of Australian diving boats and South Beach lifeguard huts. He takes in the family photos, too. “Your son looks like you.”
“I think so too.”
“Particularly in the eyes.”
“Yup. I think I’m the only one who thinks that.”
“Do you like it? Being a mom?”
I smile. “You know what? It’s one of the best things in the whole wide world.”
“I could never see you as a parent, but I guess I can now.”
“It’s funny though, it also fills you with fear. I never feared death but now I do – what happens if I die before they can start to remember me? And even more so I am filled with fear for them. No one ever tells you how fearful you become. Every news story makes my heart bleed out through the pores in my feet with fear. I would die without my lovely family, if anything happened to the children, any of them, or Alastair parts of me would break and I would rot to death with loss. Fear, you know?”
He looks at me, pausing, weighing something up. “You’re getting married.”
“Yes.”
“Are you happy?”
I lay my head on the crook of my arms, still tucked under my knees. “No. It’s not happy, it’s not as simple as that. It’s different, it’s better than happy – it’s like a contentment that I can feel in every part of me. People say contentment is a bad thing but to me it feels like a bath. A big giant warm bath that you can stay in forever because the water never gets tepid. A big giant warm bath made for me, with fingers and toes that never go white and a heart that’s flushed out the fear and has only light.”
“And so this is you? This is really you?”
I smile. “This is really me. This is years-of-therapy-me, this is I’ve-let-go-and-moved-on me, this is calm, this is love, this is family, this is a place and a feeling that I am so happy to be in. Honest. And if in the next years I run the twins to swimming lessons and attend school fêtes and continue to work and continue to write and continue to love and continue to work on this pain in the ass house…well then it will all have been for something. I will have been for something. I have four children that I love like a house on fire and a man who I know has my back. Christ, listen to me – I’m like a walking advertisement for psychotropic drugs or something. Life’s not perfect but I love the bones of it, you know?”
“Happily ever after, then.”
“No. More like life. This is life. I am finally living. I think I took my first breath in the recent years and have been weaning off the gills ever since.”
“Maybe your life will be a life wasted, too.”
“Maybe. Or maybe I touched the people that I needed to.”
“Touché.”
We sit in silence, and I hear the silent movements of babies shifting in cots, of a cat coming in the flap downstairs, of the deep sleep sigh of the dog in his bed.
“And me? What of me?” he asks.
“You’re tucked up inside somewhere. You’re a part of me, or maybe I am who I am because of the people I’ve loved, and you’re in that group.”
“Do you think about me daily?” he asks quietly.
“Not anymore,” I say honestly. “You’re a light that once was. We always remember the light, even if over time we don’t turn it on all the time.”
He smiles. “I always liked your honesty.”
“I always liked your bravery.”
“Is your life perfect, then?”
“No. Whose life is? My life, though, has a degree of pulchritude which knocks my breath out. Eyes that sparkle when they’re happy, and I love when they’re happy. The curve of a toddler’s shoulders which still smells gorgeously of lingering baby days. A house riddled with imperfections but with a spirit that I can’t believe. I’m still screwed up, but at least I’m finally me.”
“Have you forgotten who you were?” he asks softly.
“Never,” I saw swiftly. “Every incarnation of me is imprinted with who I was before. And the cocoon is gone, now. This is it. Every part that came before is part of what made me who I am, right or wrong.”
“I never thought that I would see you content.”
“I never thought that, either.”
He nods and smiles in a soft way that reaches up to the corner of his eyes. “Take care, ok Buddy?”
“I will do,” I reply. I feel enormous sadness and yet absolutely right about this. “It’s kind of you to check on me, but you don’t have to do it any more. I’m ok. I’ll be ok.”
He stands, and starts to head down the stairs. He stops and turns to me, his eyes level with mine. “Will I be forgotten?”
“You’re the kind of person that’s impossible to forget,” I reassure with a smile.
He nods and turns to go downstairs. “Sometimes I miss what’s gone. In my mind you’ll always be young and angry and redheaded and beautiful and lost. But I honestly hope the rest of your life is what you need and hope it to be.”
“Thank you. I mean it,” I say with a calm that surprises me. “And in my mind you’ll always be smiling and cheeky and aloof and tilting at windmills.” We take a moment looking at each other, and when I smile a bit his lips echo the smile. “I’ll see you, Kim.”
“No you won’t, Buddy,” he replies, vanishing at the foot of the stairs, “and that’s the hell of it.”
I keep opening this tab to write something and then walking away from it. I meant to write something earlier but got caught up in time (which I always get snagged in, you know). We have a to-do list a mile long. This is perhaps what happens when you decide to host your own wedding reception.
The wedding is this weekend, and as of this morning it was the snowball starting down the hill. I went to work (Alastair is on leave). Tomorrow I go to work for a half day, then it’s off to the doctor’s (hello allergies!) and then on to a waxing of various bits and pieces. Then I’m off work.
Tomorrow night Melissa and Jeff arrive, thereby accelerating the snowball. Melissa turned 18 last week, and she has gifts waiting from us. I’m happy for her – she’s level-headed and sorting out that whole Rest of Her Life deal with aplomb. Jeff’s been struggling in Sweden and so will be here for a large chunk of the summer. I like to think that we can be this stable place for him, this place where he can trust that he’s safe and loved and listened to. I think he knows that, I just want him to always know it in that place in his heart where he holds all things he knows to be true. Both of the kids are very involved in and happy about the wedding, I just want him to know that I’ll always be here for him in the same way I’ve always been. Kids need families. These kids in particular.
On Wednesday the American clan arrive, thereby filling up the house and making the snowball into an avalanche. My Dad and stepmom land and are bringing with them toys, laughter, hope, and 3 dozen bagels. Laugh if you want but the bagels here, they don’t hold a candle to the good stuff from the US. My folks are beside themselves waiting to see “their babies”, as they call them.
I love my family so much it knocks my breath out.
The rest is coming together. As far as Bridezillas go, I’m the polar opposite. I’m so laid back about it I’m nearly comatose – Alastair’s mum asked if she could do the flowers, which I readily agreed to. She then asked me what kind of flowers I wanted and I told her that in all honesty I wanted whatever flowers she wanted to make. Similar lines for the cake – when asked by the world’s greatest baker what kind of cake, it pretty much came with little direction apart from “From the love of god, no fucking fruitcake!”
(As an aside, what’s up, my beloved second home country, with this loving of the fruitcake? Can we work this out, can we get this out of our systems?)
My dress is ready. I have an appointment booked for makeup and hair and, when asked how I wanted it done, I came out with “I have no idea, you tell me what you want to do.” I imagine I must be maddening in the extreme, but there are several things at play here:
1) I have no sense of style
2) I can’t decorate/arrange flowers/do makeup or hair to save my life
3) I’m sure people who can do items 1) and 2) know best and will do a better job if I don’t interfere
4) I’m pretty relaxed about the whole thing.
Alastair’s had some moments of stress but in general we’re all keeping it together. For me, I’m just so happy that the family is all together – parents are meeting parents, all four kids are here and happy, and the sun is out. What’s not to love?
The one thing I did have a strong opinion on is a silly thing – music. The place we’re getting hitched is very near and licensed for weddings, but they don’t have any access to musicians or music save for a CD player, which is being operated by my niece (niece-in-law? Soon to be niece-in-law? You know what I mean.) I have always, always loathed “The Bridal March”. To my ears it sounds creepy and sinister. I have never played it and never will.
I went for something very, very untraditional but which (when I stumbled upon it) knew in an instant it’s what I wanted.
When I walk down the aisle this weekend, surrounded by family, it will be to the song you can listen to here (beside “Music Download” you can click the box that says “Listen”. You won’t regret it.)
I’ve been watching True Blood, the first series. I’m a bit behind the curve in terms of both time and cool factor so have only just gotten into the series. I enjoy it although am tiring of this whole shrieking female needs constant saving by true love-y lusty man who cannot be in the sunlight, but it’s got my attention.
There’s a part to the show that I look forward to, that I relate to.
There’s a part of the show that I miss.
That part is the heat waves of summertime in the South.
When I lived in the US I lived all over the place, courtesy of a childhood as the daughter of an Air Force pilot. With the exception of 8 years of my life in Washington State and Colorado, I spent my entire childhood, teen, and early adult years in the southern Midwest and the south. In some parts of my early years I was in the deep south, the land of collard greens and barbecues and summers so hot you’d melt.
I live in England now, a country which summer has only just woken up and rubbed its eyes in, realizing that it overslept and it’s time to get the heat on. The past weekend we were in sweaters and jeans it was so chilly. I love living here, if given the choice of a sunny browned out Texas Christmas or a cozy overcast and freezing cold English Christmas, I’ll take this side of the Atlantic, thanks. I get to enjoy lush explosions of Autumn colors and my allergies endure the lime green of psychedelic Springs, but it’s summer that has me nostalgic. It’s ironic, in that bittersweet way – I was so keen to get away from those hot, hot summers and now I miss them so much I can close my eyes and think of them with no small amount of gratitude.
I remember the heat rising off the pavement in waves you could almost touch. I remember the screen doors on slamming shut, the small mesh of the screens bending over time and getting flakes of rust in their corners. I remember the sound they made closing, a kind of metallic clash that reverberated when the door wouldn’t shut properly because they never did. The feel of feet brushing along on the hot tarmac, where you’d step with the top of your feet and then rub your feet along in the grass, the cool to the heat.
If you had to go somewhere you edged carefully onto the seat as it’d be so hot. If you were unlucky and had no air conditioning then chances are you’d left the windows open “to let the heat out”, you’d say, as though it had option for escaping. You’d make sure you’d park under a tree when you got to where you were going, just so you could get some shade on the steering wheel, the dash, the seat.
I remember sun tea jars on porches, the Lipton squares dangling from the top like a veil. Later in the day it would be lemonade in a glass with sweat droplets that you’d hold to your face, your neck, your chin and would simultaneously shiver from and love any errant drops that fell onto your chest. Crickets would be singing the afternoon away, their legs possibly the only motion that anyone could bear. The air would be full of bits and pieces of dandelion, dust, and sunlight that you couldn’t shake off. Walk inside and the house would be so dark, your eyes too adjusted to the sun. The day felt like the inside of a Van Morrison song and sometimes you were aware of every single pore of your body opened up in the light.
Children would be outside with various stages of dried popsicle and sticky Kool-Aid. If you had a porch swing you’d sit back into it, using your toes to move the swing backwards and forwards. I remember lazy blades from the ceiling fan, the smell of a barbecue or – if you were lucky – a good shrimp boil all afternoon and into the evening. The evenings were made for lightning bugs if you could still find them, dozily making their way around the yard. There would be baseball on someone’s TV, the sounds of a Budeweiser commercial on someone else’s. At night you’d sleep with just a sheet covering you because if you were like me, you couldn’t sleep without some kind of cover, and you’d lie still under the blanket of heat and enjoy the movement the fans made in the air.
These were the summers I remember. The younger summers held Slip ‘N Slides and sticky bomb pops. The older summers had wine coolers and picnics in the parks. But they all held heat and memories and haze and that beautiful, magical slam of the screen door that I will never forget as long as I live.
I’m feeling introspective right now. It’s not due to being down or sad or anything negative, just feeling a bit inward. Writing that post about my dad has lengthened the tunnel as well. He and I have had a few heart to hearts about the past and about our regrets, what we would do differently, what we wish had never happened. It’s not an unfamiliar feeling to me, this “I wish I’d zigged instead of zagged” feeling. All of which has me thinking about the idea behind forgiving and forgetting and moving on.
Oscar Wilde: “Always forgive your enemies – nothing annoys them so much.”
I look back on my life and think of mistakes I’ve made, of people I’ve hurt. The list in both categories is substantially longer than one would like. The irony is I try to do what I can to not hurt people, I’d much rather hurt myself than hurt anyone else and have proven to be something of a pro in that area. I think I can come across as quite hard and uncaring, when the truth is I am mired inside by different things and I can’t figure out what it is I really do feel. In those instances the kindest thing to do is to let people go, else they twist and turn in the washing drum of what they perceive to be my emotional machinations. And that’s not the case, but it’s better to let someone think you’re a bad person than a person who can’t figure things out.
Mark Twain: “Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.”
IWhen I was a child I was wrapped in the egocentrism of childhood and words came out as thought, barbed in the way that honesty can be. As a teenager I became angry and moody and difficult and said things designed specifically to hurt. As an impatient and fiery woman in my 20’s who spoke her every thought I struggled with the person I was and was keen to wound, to draw to the quick and ensure a quick death to the relationship. My 30’s came along and I have continued to injure, mostly out of ineptitude, occasionally out of cowardice.
I would love for every person I’ve ever hurt to know that I am truly sorry for it, and that karma will pay me back. But if I’m honest, I hope that people I’ve wounded aren’t thinking of me anymore at all. I hope they’ve moved on and moved up, moved into beautiful and better things and with relationships that leave them sated and happier than they ever could have been. I may hurt people but I never mean to.
Mahatma Gandhi: “The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.”
And the truth is I have long struggled with forgiveness. I could argue it’s a result of my black and white condition of BPD. I could argue it’s because I had an upbringing that enforced that people were either good or bad, there was no in-between. I could say all of those things but the truth is I maybe struggled because I am human, and humans aren’t brilliant at letting things go. You want to forgive and forget but you don’t want the party that wronged you to forget that you forgave them. Wear your epaulets of pain with pride and all that – my human condition may be suffering and if that’s the case then you must recognize it. If you hurt me then I won’t give you another chance to hurt me because I can accomplish that just fine on my own, thanks. If I forgive then it means that what happened is inconsequential.
But it’s as my lovely German therapist told me – forgiving doesn’t mean you condone it. It just means you no longer need to hold on to it.
And she’s right.
She often is.
It’s like taking a hand and running it down the side of a sideboard, taking everything to the floor with it. Why carry shit around with you, when we all make mistakes? Huge fuck-ups, little mistakes, tiny aches, big pains – there’s no point to it. If I want other people who I have hurt to be happy, maybe there’s a chance that someone who hurt me wants me to be happy, too.
Not too long ago I found an old contact on Facebook. I sent him an email apologizing for all that happened between us so many years ago, and he replied back that he was sorry, too. We’ve had very infrequent contact but we hear from each other from time to time and I am honestly just happy that he’s moved on. He’s happy I moved on. And yes, he’s this guy.
That was then. This is now. And I have enough of a history to know that everything that I have done and had done to me can be let go as they happen. It doesn’t always mean it’s easy, but it does mean that my baggage is just a little less heavy.
Lewis B Smedes: “To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.”
There are many things that I put out here and write about. There are thoughts, feelings, observations, hurts and successes. I talk more here than I do to most of my friends, which means either I am hideously repressed or – more likely – you are my friends in some kind of way. I talk about things I would be paralytic about telling others about.
Here is such a thing.
When I was 7 years old, we were living in Washington and my family was already fracturing. I don’t have a lot of memories from then and I don’t know if that’s usual or not – all of my memories tend to consist of snapshots that I know reside between the adhesive pages of albums in my mother’s home. I do remember this event and it’s not the event itself I remember, but feelings around it. This in itself is unusual because I don’t have a lot of emotions from the past, they’re all wrapped up in my former 8mm feelings.
Back then I idolized my father, I would’ve done anything for his affections. I had a shoebox that I duct taped shut and had cut a slit in the top to keep items. I don’t remember much of what was in there, I just remember a heavy chunky silver identity bracelet that was my father’s (well this was just over the ridge of the 70’s, after all). I kept it because it was like having him there – my father was an Air Force pilot, and as such it meant he was always gone. TDY would beckon and I’d wake up in the morning and he’d be gone. I knew better than to bother him when he was home, too, because he would be tired from all the flying. Moments with my father were few and far between and, likely unhappily for my lonely mom, I had my dad on a pedestal. I just wanted to spend time with him, even though I was the firstborn and I was a disappointing girl, even though I couldn’t in the long haul sustain interest in the things he was interested in.
My local school was having a father-daughter day. Father-Daughter Picnic it was. It was a day to bring your dad to school and have a crappy little picnic at the crappy little school. And the funny thing is, I knew my dad had a terrible temper and could be incredibly anti-social, it wasn’t a good idea to have expectations. But I did. There it is, I did have expectations that my father would go. He committed to going, too, my dad did. Father-Daughter Picnic would have him there.
I was so excited. People would meet my dad and I would have a day with him. This is the funny thing, I remember this feeling. I don’t remember a lot from the past but I remember that. I remember thinking that my dad would be coming with me to the school, to see my friends and my class, to actually spend time with me.
Just before the Father-Daughter Picnic my father disappeared. He had chosen a voluntary trip somewhere doing god knows what. I don’t know why I remember that but I do. My memory is fragmented and missing but I remember the events around this perfectly. An optional trip came up and my father went…instead of coming to my stupid picnic. My best friend at the time, her dad felt so sorry for me that he offered to be my pretend dad for the day.
And this is where my memories go into the third person and I see myself. I don’t feel anything anymore, I just see it. I was jilted by my dad and another dad took pity on me. I even remember his jaw working as he offered to be my fake dad. My real dad didn’t want to deal with this pathetic picnic, so someone with a heart and some sympathy would do. I turned him down and skipped the picnic. I remember acting indifferent. I am sure that’s not how I felt.
My parents split shortly afterwards.
I threw my shoebox, with its precious ID bracelet, into a dumpster.
In life, an afternoon school picnic doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t and it’s petty and embarrassing even writing about it now, nearly 30 years on, when my mouth tastes of corduroy and dust and my heart is nothing like it ever was. But it’s like that, isn’t it? Life, I mean. It’s part and parcel for the small events that you need to hold on to, in order to change the future instead of needing to repeat it.
My father was a terrible father. He was absent, he was angry, he was painful. I was never quite enough to be loved by him I felt, I just wasn’t right. I was awkward and stupid and clumsy and unathletic and bookish and, above all, a painfully white female. He was a dreadful father.
Then.
He was a dreadful father then.
Now he is one of the best dads in the world.
It’s not his money or his access or his travels. It’s not the estrangements in the family or the torn loyalties or the assumed “I’ll show you” feelings. It’s not his stigma or his style or his airplanes.
It’s him.
My dad is sometimes still emotionally unavailable to me – you can talk about sensitive things for only so long before my military dad has to switch off. He is stubborn and set in his ways (note: Dad, if Nick wants to wear a “pretty princess dress” then in this house, he can!). He is occasionally stuck in a fog of anti-socialness.
But he holds Nora with a light in his eyes that you wouldn’t believe.
He gets on the floor with Nick and plays with cars.
He insists on being part of every feeding and every bathtime and every book-reading bedtime.
He has changed and so have I and if my sister is reading this then you should know that you should let him in, because he is wonderful.
My dad has become like this dad.
Even if my dad’s advice might not always be brilliant. I know my dad would be there for me now. It’s like a grown-up version of a Father-Daughter Picnic, and my dad would show up this time in his flightsuit looking tired but handing out the Oreos all the same.
I took my past and I changed the future – on Thursday I took the afternoon off of my hectic work schedule and Alastair took a few hours off and the two of us went to the children’s nursery and helped with their Barnardo’s pirate-theme Toddle for Tots and being there doesn’t make me better, it doesn’t make me different, it just means we all walked an insignifcant pirate-themed walk (our second of such walks) and that we will be there for them through walks and picnics and school fundraisers. I want them to consider our presence as a given, not as the exception.
They’re not only my chance, they’re his second chance. And if now or in the future there’s a Grandparents’ Picnic Day, I know my dad will be there. I know he won’t miss this one. It’s ok now that he missed all of my events growing up. I regret things in my past (and present) and I know (he has said) he regrets things in his. But he loves his grandkids. They love him. My dad loves me. And I love him.
My dad has become one of my best friends. It only took 36 years to get us there.
When I lived in Dallas I had a neighbor who had a Dalmation. Dalmations, due to so much inbreeding, now are prone to deafness. My neighbor’s dog was such a specimen, and he used to invariably get out and go running and she’d stand outside, shouting for him. When she saw me staring at her one afternoon during such a session she shrugged. “I can’t just stand here and think his name,” she said airily. “I look dumb shouting at my deaf dog, but I feel even more ridiculous just standing here thinking his name.”
I think parenting is a lot like that. You spend a lot of time shouting at Dalmations even when you know that your spotty dog isn’t catching what you’re throwing at him.
Children are cool.
They’re also a complete and total fucking mystery.
Particularly, as seen here wearing her “pretty dress”, crown and sunglasses with only one lens in it, when it comes to fashion choices.
I like that they make me think outside the box a lot, as they do having an impromptu picnic in the middle of the kitchen, after spreading their babyhood Taggies blankets out and raiding their play kitchen.
They both can play very well together and adore each other, as seen here moments before they were furious and Alastair and I were on the ground, wheezing with laughter.
But like all siblings, they also clash a lot – and when I say a lot, I mean every other second. We’ve found that on weekend it’s great if one parent runs an errand and takes one twin with them while the other parent stays at home with the other twin. They behave like normal children. Normal children, who don’t spend every moment plotting how to make each second-by-second existence of their siblings a living hell. Normal children, whom you don’t want to hand to a stranger in exchange for a tin of corn and some mismatched socks.
Nick has gotten over his rough period. He is fabulous now, and I really mean that. The screaming raging temper tantrums are largely past and he’s a charming and engaging little man, a little man with a mild speech impediment. He can’t say the letter “l”, as it comes out “n”. So all the England flags hanging around for the World Cup right now are “fnags.” It’s the color bnack, the color yennow, it’s not a plaster, it’s “canasta”, which makes me worried people will think we are nurturing gambling addictions in this house. He loves to sing and will prompt you 100 trillion times a day to sing “Ba batchi”, which is not a type of springroll as you might expect, but “Baa Baa Black Sheep”. He’s a serious boy with a cheeky streek. He loves the color pink and thinks that trains, buses, lights and cars are the bees’ knees.
(Yup, those are bruises on his head. Whereas Nora has scary joint flexibility like her mama, Nick has the tendency to walk straight into anything that’s not actually in his path, much like his mama.)
Nora, on the other hand (seen here running and yes that is how she runs, as though any minute she’ll either take off into the stratosphere or will leap into her gymnastic floor routine) has become a real handful.
She has picked up where Nick left on in the Toddler Tantrum routine. She is willful, stubborn, challenging, and obstructive.
In short, she’s a toddler. But we got through it with one little one, we can get through it again (she writes, with a lightheartedness that does not quite penetrate).
And yes, I know June is National Potty Training Month. I also don’t care one little bit. No really. I don’t. We’re doing well just as we are, thanks.
I would tell you how very much I love and adore them, but that’s like shouting at Dalmations, isn’t it?
-S.
PS- apparently my site keeps crashing and/or is unable to load. It would explain my stats and my lower comments, and luckily some friends let me know the site is often down. I would say if you’re able to see this then say hi, but then – Dalmations!
I downloaded a few new CDs last night – Glee’s latest, Sarah McLachlan’s new one which I’ve been waiting for some time to get my hands on, although strangely now that I have it, I’ve been afraid to listen to it. It’s there, as though it implies something, this listening to it. My iTunes has been a mess for a while courtesy of a corruption during a download and much of the music hasn’t been working. I spent some time with it last night and while driving in this morning I had the radio on, the music on high. And I thought about things.
Music has always been troublesome for me. I was told an interesting theory by a therapist and that is that people whose lives have been traumatic often have adverse affects from music. One study asked children who grew up in angry, hateful homes to choose some music to relax to. One teenage girl chose the most thrashing heavy metal imaginable, real thrasher basher stuff that makes eardrums bleed and speakers explode. The research showed that those with fast and furious lives and thoughts could choose fast and furious music, because it was the background noise that they knew.
I don’t know what that teenager’s background was or how similar or dissimilar it is to my own, but I know that I have always had negative effects from heavy music. Fast music additionally would grate on me, anything like hard rock or heavy metal or rap would just exacerbate an already overactive embrace of anger. I may not have had fast music as my comfort zone but anger, well…anger I knew.
To that end slow music is my bag. Calm music, soothing music, music that can drift into the back of the mind and stay there, music that can’t control or hold or drive or cling, but just be. I think it’s why I’ve always loved Sarah McLachlan, she comes in through the ear and drifts around the back of the head just there, yes just right there, and you’re set. As a person so historically prone to inner rage, anything with a tempo above a heartbeat could ignite me. I couldn’t even listen to faster music, I needed slow stuff. Happy music was for people who could be happy, not people who could be me. I even have a playlist on my iPod called “Happy” which is full of stuff that I never play but which could charm a Care Bear. What’s most listened to on my iPod is a playlist called “S’s list”, which is full of what Alastair calls “kill yourself music”.
I was driving in this morning and on the radio came a fast, up-tempo song. I turned it up and started to sing along. As I waited my turn at the roundabout, I realized something: I haven’t played my “S’s list” for some time. I haven’t played my “Happy” playlist either, but the last time I clicked on to “S’s list” I found it a bit depressing, a bit maudlin. I found it made me sad. I found I didn’t want to be sad. I found, for the first time in my life, that there’s a difference between being me and being sad. Throughout my life I haven’t had the bitter, violent, angry music because I found more in common with the dark, I found more in common with the bleak. For many years if someone were to ask me what song I would identify with the most, it would without doubt be Sia’s “Breathe Me”. The first line says it all: Help, I have done it again. The stanza “Ouch I have lost myself again/Lost myself and I am nowhere to be found/Yeah I think that I might break/I’ve lost myself again and I feel unsafe” was the story of my life, it was my own self-imposed definition.
After years of therapy, after heartaches and fuck-ups and regrets, I don’t have to impose that anymore. I’m no fool – life isn’t always easy and it isn’t always going to be. I’m not completely fixed and I’m maybe not going to ever be. I don’t have sorrow as a constant companion because I don’t need it. I don’t have self-loathing and awkwardness as my guide and my life anymore because it doesn’t need to be here. I’m not perfect – I look at myself in the mirror and don’t like what I see. Of the 10 kilos that I lost last year I’ve gained back 3 and I find I want to lose them and more, even though I know that takes me back to a state of scrawny. There’s fixed and then there’s Fixed, and I am maybe not yet the latter.
But I am allowed introspection without despair. I can laugh and not be full of myself if I do so. I can have music and laughter even if it’s got tinges of bittersweet sometimes. I can listen to Sia’s “Breathe Me” and love it as a piece of music and a piece of who I was and have been.
And I can put the iPod in my ears and turn on Sarah McLachlan’s new album and I can dance like a monkey to The Maverick’s “Dance the Night Away” because the single greatest thing therapy has taught me is that life is too short to be so sad.
This past weekend my allergies exploded. As in really exploded, to the point where my eyes started swelling shut and then last night they commenced bleeding. I wanted to make parallels to certain Biblical references but my sense of humor has pretty much failed, as evidenced by me crying and holding frozen washcloths to my eyes, asking Alastair to “Fix it!”, as though he carries tubes of allergy medicines in a holster around his waist or something.
I’ve been back to the doctor today after ringing in sick to work – I worked all day, but the dribbling swollen eyes meatn driving is out of the question, so home I’ve been. The good news is I had a doctor who has prescribed something that (knock on wood) appears to be working. The even better news is I saw a female doctor who sympathized so completely with my raging and horrific eyes that she told me if these meds didn’t work she could hook me up with steroid treatment. I have been hurting so badly that I would consider anything to get better, including but not limited to bathing my head in acid in an attempt to get better (hey whatever works, right?) so I have no problem considering steroids. This morning I had to use both hands to pull my eyelids apart and there are giant burst blood vessels in my eyes, beefy shots are the least of my concerns. What I am concerned about is crying like a baby due to the pain and the fact that the big day is a little over two weeks away and right now there is no amount of photoshopping that can be done to improve my looks.
It got so bad that Alastair took us all off to the seaside on Saturday prior to the big game, to let the sea air help with the pollen. It worked, and all of us had fun.
(I am uber-proud of that photo, I admit.)
In other news, I finally stopped bleeding. Seriously. I was looking at standing still and creating my own Red Sea for a while there, but the bleeding has stopped. Or it stopped only to start again two days ago, which I have discovered is just my period. Only it’s not really like a period, it’s more like a query in time, a “Should I do something about it? Nah?” type of event, the bleeding is so light. Is this the Mirena finally having a positive effect? Time will tell…
I’ve been busy downloading songs. You lot are fantastic in some of your suggestions, thanks for that. Some of you chose some seriously obscure shit, so finding them all has been hard work for a blurry, bloody-eyed chick. But I’ve re-discovered a lot of songs I’ve forgotten (Chicago – my first concert ever! Come On Eileen – fabulous!) As for the playlist, it’s everything you’ve suggested, everything our other guests are suggesting, and lots of faves of our own.
We’re a little over two weeks away now, and getting things ready for the day of the wedding, the big barbecue, and the honeymoon (which currently due to work restrictions, I’ve managed to finagle a measly 4 days. It’s enough – we’re using our last airmiles and an upgrade we got and going as far away as we can on it. We’re off to Antigua…for 2.5 days. What I won’t do for some sun, eh?) We are getting there (and have some 30 bottles of wine in our bedroom to help remind us of what’s to come). Menus are sorted, clothes for all of us but Jeff and Alastair are done, and I have to get off my ass and do something about the hair and makeup because I’m useless with stuff like that (also, the lady who wanted to charge me £200 to do my hair and make-up? Are you high? Are you proposing to do my hair in 24k gold? Are you aware that I have 4 children and a nursery bill to pay?) but progress is being made, like this:
Alastair is building a giant barbecue spit, which will be spit-roasting porcine come the day (I believe it’s called “slow-pulled pork” or some other meat term like that). We’re trying not to stress about the upcoming things to do because it’s supposed to be fun and lots of elements of it are (like us clearing out our freezer by eating our way through it, something else which is also mildly stressful as I’d like to lose a million pounds prior to the big day but hey ho). All in all, if we survived Mirena and can survive pollen, in-laws at war should be the least of our concerns, right?
Oh yes – and something else I should mention. This little blog o’ mine turns 7 tomorrow. I’ve been blogging for 7 years now, which I think officially makes me ancient and one of the long term ones. I feel kinda’ chuffed about it, if I’m honest. It’s like watching my life go off to school now.
I sometimes think that there’s a code that people with kids learn, something akin to a secret handshake or just the telltale evidence of a smudge of finger paint on the hems of our jackets. In our house it’s the joke of CBeebies theme songs – you imagine walking past a fellow parent on a dark corner under the amber glow of a fluorescent lamp. The other person smells vaguely of baked beans and jacket potato and may or may not be bearing a badge that reads “Number 1 Mum!” on the pocket of her handbag. You assess her and get the code ready.
“Do you know it’s Springtime?” you say low under your breath.
“Hear it in the windchimes,” comes the affirmative, and you know that the operative you are dealing with is indeed a parent.
The comments about search engine hits to my site intrigued me earlier this week. I am floored that so many found this site via my IVF posts, just like I’m floored that this site is one of the top Infertility Blog Sites out there as well. When I look at my life, IVF was a huge part and an insignificant part. It was everything and nothing. I think sometimes that it’s like what they say about childbirth – you go through it and suffer but then promptly forget the pain. When I read my archives from the IVF periods I can’t remember most of it. The posts are detailed and troubling, full of things like leg cramps and discomfort and bananas and spotting, all with a line of desperate fear and surging hope running like a thread that connects every post to the one before. If I search my memory I remember the strangest things – buying the first set of bibs that I ever bought. Being offered a seat on a full tube as my stomach had popped and I was clearly pregnant as opposed to presenting the clear signs of curry binges. I remember the big things, too, like screaming in pain in the bathtub as I suffered kidney infections and contractions and midwives tiptoing around me, their faces full of concern as the NICU was prepped in the background for a pair of preemie twins. If I look back further I remember the tubes and vials of injections that needed to be mixed, I remember the endless excuses for work to get to the clinic for scans, I remember the wanting, the constant fucking hoping, that came with each and every cycle.
I remember it all and I have forgotten it all. It is huge and important and it is a blip. IVF gave me my dreams on a plate and yet it is my dream of the past. I was asked recently what the twins will know of the IVF treatment and the answer we have is simple: Nothing. We discussed it and I know this sounds crazy and unlike me, the one who brushes her heart off her sleeve on a daily basis and parks it on a platter before the world, but we think that the role that IVF played in creating the twins is (from the twins’ perspective) not relevant. It doesn’t matter (to them) how they got here, what matters is that they are here. What my body went through to get them is part of my past, it doesn’t have to be part of theirs. We know that fertility treatment is a common enough experience particularly in our part of England, which has the highest twinning rate in the country courtesy of such treatments, but if there is a chance that they could feel strange or unusual or different or uncomfortable because of it, then why tell them? I would rather they not have to wonder about the details, to not have to know that their creation was a chance, a long shot, a sodding fucking miracle of two crappy eggs that created the greatest children in the history of the world, that a technician with latexed hands gave rise to two of the single most important people that I’ve ever had the privilege of getting to love. I would rather they simply assume they were created and carried out of love, because they were.
Last week a consultant was needed for a portion of the work I’m doing. He was in and out in a week, a nice man in nice ties and nice suits as nice consultants often are. The first day he came in he was super early and full of bounce and cups of coffee.
“Blimey you’re here early,” one of my guys exclaimed while happily taking his cup of proffered caffeine.
“I’m staying in the area all week to work. It’s like a holiday! I am able to sleep past 5 am!”
“Sleep issues?” came the reply.
“5 month old twins,” he replied with a grin, “I’ll bet you have no idea!”
I sat back in my swivel chair and looked at him, nursing my coffee. I smiled, my hands laced around the corrugated cardboard. “It gets easier,” I say, violating my sacred rule to not give advice to twin parents. “When you get one on a schedule the other soon follows.”
My team – previously unaware I had twins myself – look at me.
“You have twins?” the consultant asks with surprise.
“I do. They’re two and a half, so I remember those early days,” I say, even though truth be told I don’t really remember them all that well.
He smiles and nods at me in an appreciative way. We compare smaller notes – sexes, ages, if they were preemie or not, all of it the common parlance of parents with multiples, the “where are you from?” intro questions that Americans who meet up ask to find common ground, the “horrible weather, isn’t it?” that the British align themselves with.
Later the consultant and I meet by chance by the lift. He smiles at me and we talk more of twins. We then wait for the lift to arrive in companionable silence. The doors open and he stands back to allow me in first, and he follows suit.
He looks at me, as though weighing up whether to take a chance. He nods to himself, deciding to take that leap.
“London Bridge Fertility,” he says, looking at the lift panel and pushing the button.
I smile a little bit and feel a part of my heart tug in a way I hadn’t felt in a few years, not since standing at a kitchen counter injecting myself, not since laying on a hospital bed counting follicles. We don’t tell people in our real life that we’ve had fertility treatment because we’re both fairly private, but something in this feels different, perhaops because after this week I won’t see this consultant again and when he goes my reveal goes, too.
“Woking Nuffield,” I reply, looking straight ahead.
“It was our first round lucky,” he says, still looking at his feet.
“It was our fifth and final,” I reply.
He looks over at me. “A lot of heartache, that.”
I smile and look at him as the doors slide shut. “Yes and no.”
Yesterday afternoon Alastair’s brother and sister-in-law were burgled. We found this out when we logged into Facebook and saw photos of their house, and how it had basically been ransacked. They took all the goodies, including laptops, jewelry, Playstation, Wii, the lot.
I’ve had my car broken into a few times (and once I was stupid enough to leave my briefcase in said car break-in, thereby losing my laptop, phone, wallet, and yes my passport, all while I was in a foreign country. Very clever, no?). I’ve also had my home burgled before. It’s a depressing and horrific state of affairs which, even if you’re covered under insurance, still feels awful. Being robbed is bad enough, but the worst part of it is the very basic thought that Bad People Have Been In Your House Touching Your Things. They may have had dirty fingertips. They may have been the kind of people that would harm you if you caught them in the act. The truth is though, the fact that someone came in your inner sanctum is bad enough.
Talking about it last night, you realize just how impractical you can be when it comes to property. Alastair’s sister-in-law had all of her jewelry stolen because, typically, she had it in a box in her dresser. As you do. As I do, in fact. I don’t have lots of expensive jewelry but I do have some shiny things and yes indeed, they are in a box in my dresser in the bedroom. This is because that’s where you keep things, you don’t typically get dressed and then think “I wonder what necklace would match this, I’m going to go into the garden shed and dig it out from under the weedkiller, see if I have something that brings out the blue in my shirt.” I decided I will have to move the jewelry though – I was thinking of piling it in the bathroom under my tampons (no thief would want to go through a basket of feminine products) but then realized if it was in the box of the hated fiberglass tubes that I wouldn’t want to go through them either.
Although Alastair’s never had his home been robbed he has had his garage broken into, and been around his family when they had an incident. Years ago he went on holiday with his father and stepmother in France. They all rented a house together and spent several weeks in the middle of nowhere. He was telling me about it last night.
Apparently during the stay their stepmother suspected they’d been robbed.
“The garage door is open and the lawnmower’s missing,” she said urgently. “We should ring the police.”
“Why would someone steal a lawnmower in the middle of nowhere?” came her answer. “Particularly an old rusty one?”
She then decided to take investigative matters into her own hands and was searching the ground outside of the garage. When asked what she might be doing, Inspector Clouseau replied: “Looking for evidence.”
It turned out she was looking for cigarette butts. This, because the French smoke. This, because clearly all burglars smoke.
My imagination went into overdrive, and I pictured the scene.
So while a burgler was casing the joint, wearing his black and white striped T-shirt and his beret at a jaunty angle, he decided he needed a nicotine fix. He took out his pack of Gauloises – certain that due to his Frenchness he would not be caught – and smoked incessantly while plotting to emancipate an overly used piece of ride-on agrarian maintenance equipment. When he saw the family leave to walk to the village to stock up on garlic, stinky cheese and baguettes they would tuck under their arms like rogueish natives, he saw this was his chance.
“Zut alors!” the robber would have said. This because every French textbook ever teaches us that the French, they use “zut alors!”, which is akin to us saying “golly gee willackers” or, at a stretch “aw, shucks”. Apparently the English speaking world thinks the French are stuck in the 1950’s wondering where Wally and The Beav are, with their expletives to match. The truth is I’ve known many native French speakers and not once has someone ever said “zut alors”, not even when I offered to pay them to say it, so presumably the textbooks try to teach non-native French speakers to say “zut alors” in order to make us sound like assholes to the natives.
So back to the robber.
“Zut alors!” he would exclaim, stamping out the last of his cigarette. “Zees is my chance! To hell weeeth my Citroen! A deux chevaux ees too fast, le bastarde, all I need is 3 ‘orsepower!”
He would tiptoe into the garage, looking only at his fabulous prize of a 20 year old piece of shit lawnmower. He would silently slide onto the seat and, upon finding the key in the ignition, could be heard to happily exclaim “Sacre bleu!” (that other old French adage they teach us that the French say, in between drinking coffee out of bowls and smearing Nutella on their fish dishes). “Eet ees mine!” He would then power up and gleefully ride into the sunset with his prize, all at a stately pace of 5 miles per hour and leaving a clean swatch of freshly mown Pronvence hillside in his wake.
The truth is the landlord of the property later said when called that he’d taken the lawnmower to mow his other properties and would be returning it later.
When Alastair rang his brother and sister-in-law to see how they were doing last night, he had a brief conversation and when he hung up, he turned to me.
“They’re getting pissed,” he said.
Fair dues. When you’ve been burgled, there’s nothing to do but drink.
-S.
PS – French stereotypes in this post are used to inpart the hilarity of searching for cigarette butts and not because I think that every Frenchman walks around looking like Marcel Marceau and plotting to steal appliances. Honest. Now the Swedes, on the other hand…
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