I wrote this in the last month of 2022, but didn't share it. Today, on International Women’s Day, I thought I would.
Sometimes you stumble and fall and staying down for a while is the best plan.
2022. A vintage year for all the wrong reasons.
I had a moment yesterday. Actually, I have had a considerable number this year.
Light bulb moments, and being hit over the head with a blunt object moments. And even those blindingly obvious moments when embarrassment at your own stupidity makes you laugh out loud because if you didn’t you’d cry.
My moment yesterday made me weep. Deep down in the heart of me, weeping.
A realisation so obvious it took my breath away.
As the proverbial mardy teenager, I really didn’t want to be my mother. I didn’t want a partner. I didn’t want a family. I didn’t want to be attached to a community. I didn’t want…And so, the list of did-nots went on and on, I was in danger of drowning out the voice of what I wanted to do for a very long time.
My mother was sporting. She played cricket, and tennis and any other game that attracted her attention. She was lithe and athletic. And relished watching sport nearly as much as playing it. In her 80’s she acquired a taste for snooker, and considering the bar-room nature of the game, it was an interesting choice for someone with deep Wesleyan roots. In part because of my mother’s love, I ran away from anything that smacked particularly of team sports and I do mean run literally. I was a sprinter.
In the intervening years, well, specifically after I gave up smoking in my 40’s, I’ve not exactly embraced sport, but I do hike. Actually, I did the Camino de Santiago in 31 days, and I cycle. I followed the whole of the Thames from mouth to source just as the tightest restrictions of lock-down were being relaxed. Now, that most fearful of challenges is being faced – swimming under water and, yes, you guessed it, my mother could do that too, although she hated swimming in the UK cold.
My mother was practical. Her feet were firmly planted on the ground, and she looked at the world squarely without side. Even her love and faith were practical. She wasn’t sentimental or demonstrative. She believed utterly and without question that her purpose was to serve.
I am practical, until the instruction manual wears my patience too thin, or that screw just doesn’t want to respond to my growing annoyance.
My feet, well, I have talkative feet, which dislike being planted anywhere for too long and my look, whilst direct, does flit from position to position, weighing options and seeking alternatives, more 360 degrees and a circle than a square.
My faith, well, I’m glad I was given one. However, the traditions I was born into don’t sit comfortably with my sense of justice, equity and inclusion, let alone my understanding of the spiritual nature of my human self.
While not sentimental, I can attached significance to almost anything if there’s a story that goes with it. Hence, my home is full of both beautiful things, natural and created, and things that are neither beautiful nor universally loved. However, the story that is carried in the object and released by handling it makes it beautiful.
Demonstrative? Yes. So much so that as a child, after my dad died, I asked my mother if I was adopted, as I seemed to bear no resemblance to her in how I moved in the world and was touched by it.
Shaking hands, as the English do, has never seemed enough to me. Greetings should be generous and welcoming, and yet for UK tastes such energy is forward and intrusive, and should be sanctioned.
And now I come to the final line of my description of my mother ‘She believed utterly and without question that her purpose was to serve.’
I had a moment yesterday which made me weep. Deep down in the heart of me, weeping.
A realisation so obvious it took my breath away.
I am my mother’s daughter, and I have the best of her.
She taught that mardy teenager to serve, and over the years those seeds have grown into my understanding, my actions and my doing. My serving is neither subjugation, nor sublimation but a simple reckoning that my living is bigger and bolder and braver when focusing out in community and collaboration.
Three Generations of Women
One mardy teenager, one 'maiden' aunt and one mother.