Sunday Scribblings: Earliest memory

My childhood wasn’t so cripplingly awful that I would need to block it out of my memory, but for some reason I find it hard to remember much about it in detail. I remember the feelings rather than the events, the uncertainty, the anger, the frustration, the love. Inevitably the bad is more clearly recalled than the good: my mother telling us our father had moved out… home-grown chillis burning my eyes after playing with them in the garden… my father dropping my pet rabbit as she struggled in his arms, and breaking her delicate spine. Rifling through the files in my head, I see my sister and I standing on kitchen chairs, crying, frightened of the dog my parents brought home that day, its excited barking scaring us so much they returned the puppy that afternoon. My mother has lived in the same house for the last thirty years; I have sat at the kitchen table in joy and in grief, in shock and in love.

But now new memories are being made and I think I prefer those. Yesterday, the hottest day of the year so far, we celebrated my mother’s partner’s 60th birthday with friends and family. For the last seven years Jim has been the man who has made my mother the happiest I have ever seen her. His calm thoughtful presence complements her perfectly and each weekend, without fail, he buys her flowers; they kiss like teenagers when they think we’re not looking.

We met Jim’s two sons, his daughter-in-law and his twin grandsons for the first time yesterday, and it was an afternoon of coming home. We all got on famously, drank too much wine and laughed and played with the boys, their parents enjoying the break as my sister and I fussed over the twins, playing on the lawn and kissing their grazed knees better. Standing among this extended family in my mother’s kitchen I watched new memories being woven, new connections nurtured. My family has grown, and as my sister’s partner joins us – a man I like very much – I see that this is the beginning of something. I was there on my own, of course, but I wasn’t alone in the slightest.

For more Sunday Scribblings, go here

The future is safe

I blow upon your least fingernail & it flares cyclamen & rose. I suck flames from your ears. I touch your perfect nostrils & they, too, flame gently like that pale rose called “sweetheart.” ~ Erica Jong, from Baby-Witch

I met somebody today. His name is Alfie, and in seventeen years and fifty weeks he will become a man. Madeleine and I went to see our friend Jo this morning, and instead of gold and myrrh we took rooibos tea bags and digital cameras. Born a month early, at only two weeks old Alfie should still be inside his mother’s womb, but instead he slept quietly in my arms for an hour while I sipped tea and watched him breathe. His skin is so soft his father cannot feel it, his own fingertips toughed from building furniture. While the women in the room talked and laughed, Alfie slept on, so very tired from his long journey to get here. The wind was blowing outside but his home was a calm place, filled with the only thing he needed: his mother.

Later, sitting with Mad in our favourite café, I felt so good, as if touching a new life had calmed the doubts I’ve been having this week. Jo is at home with her new little man, and she feeds him and cleans him and allows the world to carry on around her while she’s safe in her baby-cocoon. And I don’t feel broody, don’t have a great desire to have my own baby in my arms, but I would like a piece of that calm too, to be able to live in the moment so completely. This last year has felt like my own gestation, birthing my new self, my home and, tentatively, my book. I don’t know if I will ever give birth to my own child; once I thought that may have been a possibility but now I’m not so sure. It’s good to know that Alfie is here, that the future is in his tiny hands. And who knows who he will be, but it was healing, for a moment, to take myself away from thoughts of death and instead revel in the light from his little face.