In today’s episode of ‘Things I Want to Remember my Child Saying’, we have my daughter, newly turned 5, self proclaimed ‘Princess Flower Nice Doctor Giraffe’, not easily embarrassed, with starlight in her eyes and sunshine in her steps..
I was brushing her hair, and happened to mention the voice note she sent to a friend containing a joke she had newly heard was received very well by the friend. Let’s call him Apple.
‘Apple loved your joke’, I said, twirling a curly lock of her hair in my fingers and setting it on her shoulder, before beginning on the next lock.
‘Oh, that’s good!’ said she.
‘Do you remember Apple?’ I asked, because it had been nearly a year since we moved away from the UK, and she hadn’t seen him since May.
‘Yes Mama, of course I do. I always remember people, I am a Remembering Girl.’
My daughter was six weeks old when I took her for a check up with a health nurse at the hospital where she was born. I was really struggling mentally postpartum. Whenever I looked into my child’s eyes I felt like bursting into tears. I was also so busy with my two year old toddler that my baby was just going through the life motions with me. There was very little joy for me in the monotony of motherhood.
The health nurse had the rosiest cheeks and brightest blue eyes I have ever seen. She looked like the cartoon character of a lovely happy dumpling of a woman. Golden hair curled around her temples and her hands were soft as they caressed my baby’s feet. She crooned at her, cooed at her, and began to talk.
I watched her talk to my baby, and I was mesmerised. My soul cracked in two as she told this six week old baby all about her big brother who loved her and used to do everything with and for her, and how she cried buckets when he moved away, and how she visits him often and he now has grandkids and so does she but their bond is strong, and how my baby will also have a strong bond with her big brother.
Oh and look at your big bright eyes! Look how they take me in, you’ve got stories to tell you do! You’re going to be a talker, and charm the socks off your lovely mama aren’t you! Oh you’re full of stories! Your eyes are brimming with them, they’ll spill out of you soon enough, oh they will! You’ll be the light and life of your family you will, I can see it in your big beautiful eyes. You’re full of stories to tell. Tell me darling, tell me all of them!
My baby’s eyes never left the nurse’s face, bright and eager and sure enough, goosebumps rose on my body, her gorgeous precious eyes were indeed full of stories.
My own eyes brimmed with tears which I furiously attempted to blink away lest the nurse see me. An enormous lump in my throat, painful and unmoving.
For six weeks I had looked into my daughter’s face and not seen her. I didn’t see her. I didn’t bond with her. But that day when the nurse spoke to her for ten minutes, really saw her, I saw her too. I saw my Layla, her beautiful, happy, blossoming, sunshine self.
I saw that nurse today when I went back to the hospital for an appointment for my son. Layla had found a toy trolley in the play area and she walked right past that nurse who SAW her three years ago. Right past her. And the nurse was sitting on a chair, oblivious, watching a baby who had been left in its seat while its mother took the older child out to the bathroom. The nurse sat cooing at that baby the same way she cooed at mine three years ago. Looking at her. Seeing her.
I wanted to badly to get up and go to her.
But what would I say?
Thank you for opening my eyes to the love in my child three years ago? Thank you for being a beacon of light in one of my darkest times, without even knowing it? Thank you because whenever my daughter ignites the world around her with her fire and sunshine, I think of you, because you helped me see her? You don’t know how you put out a hand and pulled me up and into the air. She didn’t known then, she doesn’t know now.
I think of her and that day a lot. It was a blip in her day. A day of seeing tens of babies, probably. A blink in her week, forgotten in an hour. But it was a lifetime to me. A lifetime of lifelines.
I had challenged myself to write a post everyday in May but the past three days had been disgusting in terms of exhaustion to be honest. I’ve walked and sang and read and taken my little all over this town in pursuit of rhymes and baby groups and sensory experiences, and by the time he was settled in bed for the night and I had had my dinner, I just crashed. Motherhood is hard, yet rewarding. He is at the age now (3 months on Sunday) where I feel like I am getting the hang of things finally and feel more in control! So here is my 14th post – playing catchup.
Curtains
Curtains literally mean pieces of cloth that humans put in front of their windows to stop the outside world from peering into the privacy of their homes. Especially at night when the lights are on and everything is laid bare.
However there is also a figurative meaning – to obscure. To curtain something is to cover it up. Like smoking weed for example.
Let me paint you a scene.
The sun is shining brightly down on a street in Crewe, England. A line of terraced houses mounted atop a pavement badly in need of renovation. I am walking along with my pram, when a door to my right bursts open and two young men fall out, pulling hoodies on and slinging backpacks on their backs. They look too benign to be louts, I have to say.
The taller one is fatter, and the shorter one thinner, and they both have long gleaming hair that they’ve pulled back into a bun halfway up their heads. One dark bun and one light bun.
And I noticed as they left the house one began to root in his backpack for something – aha, he pulled it out just as they walked swiftly past me, and as they did I caught a whiff of very strong weed, as the shorter of the two began to vigorously spray the deodorant spray he’d pulled out all over his person, until he was covered in a halo of white that quirky effervesced in the sunlight. He handed the can to his mate, who also proceeded to cover himself in the cheap smelling stuff, and as their long legs pulled them further away from me, they left a trail of deodorant and weed in their wake.
I couldn’t help thinking how stupid they were. To curtain the scent of weed like that right in public. Why not do it behind their curtains?
For information purposes, weed is illegal here in the UK, hence I assume that was why they were trying to mask the scent!
What things do you do to curtain aspects of your life that you don’t want others to know about? And do you reckon you do a good job of it?
Glorious. adj. having a striking beauty or splendour.
I wish you could see it. See the sun bring out the greens of late summer, see how it coaxes the fragrances from the late September flowers, see how it shines on gentle webs, creating a kaleidoscope of colours that shift up gossamer threads as the sturdy little arachnid home sways stubbornly in the wind. I wish you could smell the earth, it’s like the spring of winter. Everything is so fresh, idyllic. Things have bloomed past their prime, and they nod in the breeze with unwitting splendour.
And the sun is warm, caressing, in the cool, sometimes cold, breeze.
This is my favourite season, just before the trees deck themselves in the sunset colours for the evening of summer, just before the bare branches begin to peer over the haze of icy morning fog. The evenings are still lasting, the shadows still long at 6pm, the golden sunshine can still be called a late summer sun.
Nobody in the office wants to talk. All conversation is terse and halted. Stumbling and awkward.
The air is heavy and thick, and breathing is difficult. The heat pounds outside on the glass, in that silent scheming way it has. Condensation forms a layer of sweat on the lips of windows, and the small puffs of air we get through the slim cracks, made so because this country is an infrastructure of Health and Safety, are few and far between.
Alex uses two screens, her hazel eyes scanning first one and then the other. Her long neck pulls her head sideways, almost like an inquisitive sparrow, but there is a look of tense determination on her face. I feel irritated every time I look in her direction, so I don’t.
She always has work to do, and when she doesn’t she actively seeks it. She is like a badger sniffing out of its set. A mouse tottering to and fro. A beaver stacking wood. A long neck waving here and there, alert and watching, snapping up a job the moment it comes through. Scavenging. She is an honest working person but she drives me mental with her oblivious morality.
And the Woman Who Laughs is wearing jodhpurs today. Jodhpurs. And a waistcoat. And a cowboy hat. Indoors. She might as well have bells hanging from her hems.
The fields in the distance sizzle with heat. The sun shimmers on the green, a lazy haze over the slopes. Even the birds seem too tired to chirp. And minuscule cars on the distant hills glint brightly in the sun as they wind around the curling country roads. I contemplate drowsing in my car for half an hour, but the heat in there is ten times worse.
I think sunshine has a habit of making everything look better, and feel better, and sound better, and taste better. Here in Britain we live under a perpetual cloud. The winter sky is characteristically overcast, gloomy light turning everything into monotone. When the sun finally does manage to beam her face down at us, once the relentless clouds have given her the stage for a moment or two, the world is suddenly flushed with colours I never knew existed!
Wow, grass is THAT GREEN?!
That tarmac is looking particularly handsome today!
My goodness, I never noticed how very pink those roses are.
Oh, glory days, this doorstep is the most gorgeous russet I have ever set my eyes on. Peonies nodding in sunlit breeze. Gleaming black railings against the stark white of a Kensington building.
Everything has a humming vibrancy when the sun comes out.
Today the sun woke up after a long and dreary hibernation. She warmed up the world with her rays. She flooded crystal light through nooks and crannies, brightening up what was once so dull. She ignited every blade of grass, and when you peered through the dry, wintry boughs, she set on emerald fire the bushes lurking between.
She set the fog ablaze, creating a mystic haze that was swarming with glittering fairies. She yawned, and her open mouth spilled gold onto window panes, shimmering starkly next to brilliant white and glorious red brick.
She brought colour into the world, is what she did. England without sunshine is a dreary grey slab. The cold sees fit to drape its frosty tentacles over the landscape, breathing air that is metal in its harshness, and making it so breathing is painful. England without sunshine is gum spots on pavements being too bright, and rubbish in the gutter claiming the centre of visual attention. England without sunlight is pink faces and rolling beer cans, its a world over which one has spilled dirty paint water, so all the colours have run together, merging into a desolate, muddy grey mix. England without sunshine is a dirty colourless filter over the world.
And the minute the sun beams down upon us, England is once again crowned in glory.
Oh, world, England is such a beautiful country. With her rolling hills, charming knotted trees and grass so green the emerald princesses are jealous. Even her little winding roads with the small wooden fences on the side, the fringes of grass over grown and the brambly hedges have a magical charm to them.
I had forgotten I lived somewhere so beautiful.
I hope the sun doesn’t wait so long again to show her face, less the desolation of winter seep back into life again. I know there is some rigorous scientific explanation behind happiness and sunshine, but I don’t want to think about that. I want to believe that the sunshine has magical powers, that it wields a paintbrush and a magic wand. That it turns squat houses huddled sombrely along an icy road in a grey stain into majestic, beautiful buildings with vibrant white trellises and bricks made from the finest clay and fired in the hottest ovens.
They say only those descended from the elves can see the Dryads in this picture. Can you?
Just finished reading the Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon for my next assignment. When I logged onto the university website I realised it was due in five days, and my 4k word assignment in seven.
Where did time go? WHERE?
The book was mighty eye opening, and I didn’t understand why they didn’t go home even though they were lonely and unhappy. I mean, sure the money was an issue, but even those who raised it didn’t go home.
That is curious, see? It’s the idea of an illusion that they are still chasing, even after ten years (in the case of Moses). And I was suddenly gripped with the fear that what if I end up like that, always chasing my dreams but never quite getting there.
Well, the first step would be, of course, to ace this assignment, and then ace my exam.
‘Tis a sweltering day, folks, and the masses have left their humble abodes to parade about the city slowly peeling off their layers to reveal the pasty skin they have kept under wraps for the majority of this confusing season. But the temperatures have soared, and roofed places are stuffy, so sitting in this glass library which is acting like a green house is punishment enough.
Although I have to say I am enjoying dissecting Lonely Londoners.
Adieu, and happy Saturday, and Happy Mother’s Day to those celebrating today. We had ours back in March 🙂
When she looked over the hills, after pounding her way up on her rickety old bike, she dreamed she could fly over the metal mess that was the city, and alight on the greenery in the far distance. The mountains, pale and purple beyond, the hills, rising and falling, awash with green in varying shades. All rising above the scrapyard they like to call the city.
She dreamed she could sail up high and touch the clouds, so vast and fluffy, as they drifted along the vibrantly blue sky.
She dreamed she was a daughter of the wind, with magnificent tresses, her body winding and curving and swirling on the air currents, ducking and diving, so graceful and wild.
She dreamed she was the maiden on the hull of a ship, the front line of the sea path, guiding the crew through mountains of waves, lashings of rain and sea foam, and always wind. Always the wind.
The cold wind on her cheeks, numbing her face. The wind carrying her over the globe, through prairies and mountain ranges, under canopies of birches, vales of violets. Rushing through the furious wall of a waterfall. The hot wind of the desert, filling her eyes with sand, the cold wind come night time, shaking her free of her dust grave, taking her someplace new. Always new. Loud and thunderous, roaring and wailing.
She dreamed of hills and rolling frondescence, and when she grew up she wanted to weld her soul to the raging storm. She wanted to be wild and free, she wanted to bend the trees under her will, she wanted to slam herself into the nature so hard that she became a part of it; wind whipped and ferocious, scraggly and strong, full of vitality and life. She wanted to be the silence on the moors. She wanted to be the sea crashing on the rocks. She wanted to be the stillness of a lake under the twilight sky, stars dotting it’s mirrored surface. She wanted to be the planets as they turned around and around. She wanted to be the sun, and the moon too.
She lay under the skylight, and dreamed the stars were holes in the sky to another, brighter sky, way above.
We wake up early, throw our covers back. The air is tantalisingly temperate. No cold toes.
A tentative tiptoe on the floorboards.
No rush of icy draft.
A sigh of relief.
Scarpering feet on the laminate outside, a rush for the bathroom.
“Wake up kids!”, shouts the father from downstairs.
They wake up, because it’s summer and there’s no school.
Visions of sunny beaches, bare legs, feet rustling through dry, cool grass. Daisies to pick, their white faces tinged with purple and sunny smiles upturned to the bright sky. Buttercups nodding in the breeze, shining yellow.
“Do you like butter?”
Do you like butter?”
Images shared over the breakfast table. Licks of ice cream. Wild dreams under a canopy of trees. Adventures in faraway lands, at the bottom of the garden. Cake in the park. Sprinkles of duck food over a pond. Swimming in the sunshine. Sunsets that are stretched out over a long evening. Curtains billowing in the breeze. Dust mites swirling.
Breakfast is had. Dishes are washed. Children are dressed. Never mind Billie has some jam on her cheek. Race for the front door. A little scuffle about who is going to sit in the middle seat. Mother straightening herself before the mirror. Father rattling keys. Fall out the door. Get in the car.
Quick, hurry.
A cloud appears.
Oh. It’s raining.
Hard droplets hit the windscreen, as miserable clouds roll up.
Pack yourselves indoors. It’s not going to clear soon. Warm wind rushes through the house. Socks are pulled on. Books are scattered off bookshelves.
Ocean Bream 