Token of Affection

I went to the Foundling Museum yesterday. It's the place where the orphans, the abandoned children were taken.  When mothers took their illegitimate babies to be cared for, they were asked to leave a token to identify the child in case their circumstances changed and they were able to reclaim them later.  They left coins and keys, hairpins and pebbles. When they had nothing to leave as a token, they snipped a piece of fabric from their skirt or from the baby's robe. So many babies were taken here that the Museum's squares of everyday dress material now comprise the largest collection of 18th century fabrics in the world. 

The displays of these small, poor items are heart-wrenching. So little, yet covering every meaning of their word. 

Noun: a thing serving as a visible or tangible representation of a fact, quality or feeling.
Noun: a voucher that can be exchanged for goods or services. 
Adj:  done as a symbolic gesture.

A token is an item that stands for something else. Once you know what it stands for, the item can be anything at all. In this way, shells or small discs of metal become a currency, a slip of paper can be exchanged in store for a gift, a small white stone is a declaration of love. 

We all wind up as orphans sooner or later - this is the way of the world. We are of an age now where, one by one of us, we are losing then burying our parents. As adults, as parents ourselves, we are wise enough and weary enough to know how this is done.  The phone calls, the paperwork, the practical tasks, the triage of items that made up a life. The tokens we choose to keep are not the important things, the valuable things. They are chosen not for merit but for meaning - a meaning that we have created for ourselves. 

And although we are wise enough, and weary enough, and old enough and adult enough now to haul ourselves through this time - we are still children, their children. Whether they leave us at 5 months or 5 years old or 50, no one is quite ready to be an orphan, to hold that token and know it can't swap back for the person who is gone. 

All There Is

Sometimes small things happen, and they get blown up out of all proportion. And sometimes big things happen - but they feel really underwhelming.  Big news comes, and all you can think is - "is that it?"  

Perhaps it comes with age, this ability to incorporate tough stuff and make into the new-normal with barely a flicker of the eye. Is it a skill, a competence, a gift, to be able to recalibrate, just like that? Or does it make me a psychopath, a nihilist, a deadhead? 

I'm pretty certain I might have posted this before, but anyhow here's my take on it all.

https://youtu.be/LCRZZC-DH7M?list=RDLCRZZC-DH7M

Lemon

Once upon a time, I was sad if life served me lemons. Then I learned to make lemonade and that was fine. Just dandy in fact.  

So if on a day that deals you lemons, it dishes you a late-night grand finale of salt to rub into your wounds, I guess the right thing to do, maybe the only thing to do is SLAM. 

Slam around the house. Slam the door of the dishwasher with a resounding ring of glasses chipping against each other. Slam your bare fist into the punch-bag when you pass it on your way to the utility room. Slam out your bitterest version of The Way You Look Tonight on those poor neglected piano keys. Slam your hand in the lid of the piano - on purpose, just so that something else hurts more than the thing that is hurting you inside. 

Desperately Seeking

The producer of the Rocky Horror Show died this week, and newspapers did that thing they do where any story even vaguely connected with the film gives them an excuse to publish photos of people in their pants. 

I'm not averse to this - on the contrary - due to my lifelong girl-crush on Susan Sarandon. Not only is she smart, cool and beautiful, but I really admire the way she has lived her life.  She campaigns on the issues she believes in, she only dates younger good looking men, and she doesn't give a shit what people think of her. 

I like the fact that she is naturally beautiful and she works it. You don't get the impression that she's putting her amazing breasts out there, over and over, because she's the victim of the system, or wanting approval.  She knows she looks gorgeous and she gets 'em out there with confidence, with defiance, with panache.  She was courting controversy again at the start of the year by turning up at an awards ceremony dressed like this: 

She's 69 years old. She's stunning - and she's till full of mischief. She knows she's going to upset a lot of people with this outfit, but it secures her continued position in the spank-bank of a lot of others.  

See her - want to be her. 

Sisterhoodlum

It was International Women's Day yesterday. At the current rate of progress, if we are to achieve social, economic and politic parity we only have to wait another 117 years. That's not a global statistic, that's just in the UK.  It seems hard to believe doesn't it? And it's a fact I want to ram down the throats of all those young girls who say there is no need to be a feminist because women are equal now. 

Women are supposed to help each other, work together to raise one another up. I think over the last 30 years or so, a great many women have forgotten this (if they ever knew it).  There is so much judgement, so much running--down of one another. Women like Katie Hopkins are the 21st century wicked witches. 

I feel I have a responsibility not just to make my own path, but to make it wide enough and solid enough for others to come with me on the journey, not just behind me but alongside, arm in arm. Taking up the whole pavement like the Sex In The City girls. They were good friends, weren't they? All different, but tight, loyal. 

I've got girlfriends like that. Without them, I'd never have survived. I can count them on the fingers of one hand - but who needs more than four corners anyway?  I am truly blessed. 

Motherlode

It's Mother's Day. And my mother, who is in good physical health at 76, is slipping away from us with dementia.  I went home last weekend to work on a memory-book with her, to try and capture some of the history before it's too late - and it will soon be too late. I've been horrified at the speed of her deterioration, and we will have to start working on some concrete plans for the next stage (whatever the next stage is). 

My dad, who is not a patient man at the best of times, drinks heavily every evening now, which must affect his mornings too. I imagine a person more confused than my mum might need a lot of help going to bed and getting up.  Neither of them really ought to be driving anywhere, but both of them still are. There's a high chance they will hurt or kill themselves - or god forbid, someone else, in an accident so that needs to be addressed too. 

I don't know quite how this help and sorting is going to work out - other than that it will fall to me.  My brother is busy with his terminally-ill child and my sister lives in Australia.  And I'm the oldest, so I am kind of in charge I suppose. 

I've had a difficult relationship with my mum from my early teens through to my thirties, but it's much better now. Becoming a mum and finally growing up myself has helped me to forgive and even understand some of the things she said and did so they don't matter so much now.  She has been a lovely granny to the girls and I know that she loves us all, in her own strange only-child way.  She will be gone while she's still here, like her father before her, so I kind of know what to expect.  It won't be fun, but we will still find the fun in the days that we have, just as we have learned to do with my nephew.  Where there is love there are always smiles. 

I don't usually post poetry on here, but as it's Mother's Day, here's one from a couple of years ago that I'm editing at the moment.  It's not quite ready for submission, in my view, but it's getting there.  I was thinking about it when we were doing the memory book, and she was talking about all women in her family who were named after flowers. Her parents were not in favour of showing emotion, and it must have been a funny old life, just the three of them. As my granny often used to point out, my mum stuck out like a sore thumb - an exotic looking child with her striking red hair in a family of mouse-brown. 

Marion: I

Born in the summer of the gathering storm,

Soothed each night by the rhythmic thud

Of bombs falling on the Glaxo plant
She Listened With Mother
All dozy and cosy in the Andersen shelter
Watched over by the eyes in the potatoes
Studding their soil sky like stars;
Spiders were her night time friends.

Endlessly re-knitting jumper into scarf
They also served who sat and waited
Picking balsa-wood pips from their teeth
In the pretend-jam sandwiches of birthday teas
Barrage balloons hung cheerily along the Thames
Just for her – bomb-site fire-flower

In the family bouquet of Rose, Daisy, Violet & May.

  

Marion: II

Ernest as his name, father was away
Beating the Nazis with the neatness of his inventories
Seasick, then homesick, then sick of it all
Counting the cost of the ruins of Germany
Lodged with a family just like his
Where another girl with plaits and a too-small dress
Knits the same scarf, thumps the same piano scales
Laughs at spiders and the same stained moon.

Then victory was ours, and he came back
A stranger to his daughter
"When's that man going home?" she hissed.
He was not a one to pull her to his knee
Throw her in the sky and catch her in his arms
With a joyous shout; she held the basket
As he pruned and told the names of all his roses,
Secateurs held gently as a child’s hand.

Recovery Position

So at last I have found my way back to myself.  It has been a hard journey and a long haul. Looking back I can see that I dropped gradually down to rock-bottom like a diver floating down to the sea bed – no tumble or sudden screaming plummet to tell me that my fall was the equivalent of a terminal-velocity Twin Towers swallow-dive.

In the depths, I was smashed. But only on the inside, so nobody else could see.  Slowly, so slowly, I have put myself back together, and clawed my way inch by agonising inch from the bottom of the abyss back up to the sky, and a safe distance now (I hope) from the edge of precipice.

What I want is still the same.  Which means I’m still not where I want to be – wherever that is. But time moves on, and that isn’t always a bad thing. The outlook has improved. And you never know - I might still get to be The Very Thing.