the best day, the hardest day

Today is the birthday of our daughter. The hardest day of my life, the most beautiful day of my life, the best day of my life. (I have written about it here.)

This morning, we woke to frost and a dusting of snow, so we wrapped up well and went for a walk. Every year on this day, when we share memories, it's different. Today, R talked about how he feared we were close to death, how he thought we would die, our premature baby and myself, how he tried to stay calm. And I remembered his shaking, cold body when I tried to lean against him, his white face, and that I asked the midwife to look after him. I remember watching blood running down my legs and trying to think why. I also remember signing my name under a short note I wrote in a shaky hand (when this is over, never again) but no note was ever found. I remember roaming the house all night, shouting and laughing and roaring. It has taken me years to speak calmly about the nuns and the nurses at the hospital where S spent two weeks incubated in a brightly lit room, where we had to fight for access, had to beg for my milk to be fed through the gastric tube. So on this cold and grey day we walked full of wonder how it all turned out, how we are all sane (?) after all. And at one stage, this girl was walking towards us, maybe six, seven years old, on her way home from the school down the road. She was deep in an imaginative play, gesticulating, hopping, whispering, not noticing us or anything else. And R looked at me and smiled, wonder what's her story, he said.

 

And I will raise my hand up into the nighttime sky
And count the stars that's shining in your eye

In the silence the ever-present past

 

This is footage from Inis Mór, the largest of the three Aran Islands in Galway Bay, on the west coast of Ireland. It's a wild place, rough and windy. The land is crisscrossed by stone walls, protecting the fields from the wind. About 4  mins into this video, you see Dún Aonghasa, a prehistoric hill fort, one of several Bronze Age sites on the island. But this is not a history blog, so for anyone interested, go here. 

The poem is spoken by Mike Scott of the Waterboys. He wrote it in the early 1980s when the band was living in An Spidéal, a small village on the Atlantic coast, overlooking the Aran Islands and the coast of county Clare. The village is famous for traditional music sessions.

I like to believe that the storm he is referring to at the beginning of his poem is the one we ran away from in October 1981 when we were staying on Inis Mór for a short while. I have very little memory of our time there other than that we walked a lot, were accompanied by all the island dogs, met very few people and smoked our very last joint sitting next to the fort looking out on the ocean. That day, we decided it was time to have a child, one of several, so we imagined. 

Back at the harbour village of Cill Rónáin, the fishermen had started to pull in their boats and gear, windows and sheds were secured and by dinner time, the storm warnings were all around us. Early the next morning we got the last boat back to the mainland. 

This was the time when I started to think of myself as becoming an adult.

permission to unravel

Monday

Once again I wake in the early hours without any bearings, the small shaft of light coming through the blinds spinning. In my left ear, the hatefully familiar deep hammering noise. I shout out a string of curses, the worst that come to mind, while I stumble and crawl to the bathroom along the walls and on the floor, before the contents of my stomach rush up. I wash my face, blow my nose and as instructed, take note the blood clots shooting out from my sinuses. My knees buckle and I let myself fall.

Hours later, tamed by dramamine and the resignation provided by too many years of chronic illness, I am watching my GP's receptionist print out another sick cert.

It is my understanding of things in general that we all carry at least one demon around with us. They are tricky, demons, never showing their real face. And no, they are not obvious and have nothing to do with fear or loss or something that happened long ago.

The demon I carry around occasionally taps out secret messages, knocking inside my sinuses and inner ears, my brain. I have long given up deciphering. It's all code, acts of pure self defence, reminding me that he's still around, that he'll never leave. But then again, he'd be lost without me. So there. And for now, my demon comes with a sick cert. 

This year's first. 

Tuesday went in a blur.

On Wednesday, I had what my daughter would call a small massive melt down. I usually have one by day three anyway. By now, we are pretty blase about it. This time, I extended my repertoire in that I shouted and called R names. He shrugged it off and made tea. Secretly, I was hoping for him to at least lose some of his cool. But he never does.

By Thursday, I was back to coping mechanisms and managed to persuade a hotel manager to forgo the cancellation fees because, bullshit. Also, we are not going to attend my father's 90th birthday party this weekend, which is a relief in more ways I can express. 

Today, Friday, I am fed up and scared and I wish for - oh I forget, nothing, everything, whatever.

A few days into the new year, I cut the big toe of my right leg walking on this glorious, sunny beach after a swim in the Pacific ocean.  I had run into the waves holding my daughter's hand. We were giddy like teenagers on the run. Her baby, a few weeks old, was well out of sight and earshot behind the dunes, looked after by the men. And briefly, she was my little girl again as we were diving through the surf,  laughing, shouting with happiness.

The next day I had to show the red toe and my by then throbbing leg to a doctor, and I started a 5-day course of antibiotics. The toe got better, I forgot about it. 

What's this?, my GP said on Monday. This antibiotic is not authorized for use in Europe. Could be the cause of this flare up, tsk tsk etc. (But do I care?)

happy 73rd birthday Van Morrison

There are many rumours about Van the man, especially in Ireland. He's said to be reticent, bordering on rude, a loner, mysterious. Today is his birthday.

This one's a true story, I swear. A cousin of a friend of a friend told me this many years ago. And he must know, he's from Belfast:

Before he became famous Van Morrison once met said cousin in a local pub and the two started talking about a tricky boiler repair job when they were interrupted. Van Morrison left the pub and subsequently his career took off, fame etc. Many years later, said cousin met him by chance at a function and Van Morrison's first words were "About that boiler . . . ".

Anyway, in my family, we have favourite songs.

This used to be my daughter's favourite when she was a young teenager, becasue she always likes a good story and as usual, there's a story behind this song (beautifully explained in Thom Hickey's blog):




This is R's favourite because it brings back memories, he says, of listening to the radio while waiting at the hairdresser's as a secondary school boy:



This is my favourite because it reminds me of a special day in Connemara:



And this is an extra just for the fun of it:

Today, I was walking past the bus stop where I first taught S how to get home from school by herself. She was a skinny little 10-year old waif, shy and quiet in public. All afternoon I have tried unsuccessfully to remember what school bag she had at the time. But I remember the yellow jeans and the lilac sweater and her hairband. I can see her standing at the bus stop ready to come home just as I taught her during the days in the previous week when we travelled together every day. I am watching from across the road behind that big tree as the bus comes along. She doesn't know I am there but she is doing all the right things, carefully and seriously, the way we had practiced.
In those days, I was probably the one who was scared most.
Come to think of it, I still am.

For a long time I stood at the kitchen window watching R digging and replanting, raking leaves with the last blustery winds from last night's storm around him. Last night, a long conversation with a friend who returned from the climate summit in Marrakesh about the unusual melting arctic sea ice and jet streams and possible outcomes.
Tomorrow is our daughter's birthday. The long hours of labour and her birth changed our lives dramatically, in ways we never thought possible, never expected in our hippie innocence and which we only realised and continue to realise in hindsight. The way we and everyone and everything is connected, the gift that will always return, the myriad faultlines that run deep below us all. There was a time when the memory of that day would fill me simply with happiness, incredible happiness that seemed to stretch forever into the future. Oh, it is still there, her voice, her face, her laughter and her tears, all of her will always reach into my deepest innermost heart. But there is also such fear now and a sadness I never expected. And worst of all, she knows. That her future will not be as easy and uncomplicated as the life we had as a family. That her generation and the generations to come will face challenges and disasters we never imagined.
This is a hasty translation of a comment in one of our national papers, by Kai Stritmatter, author and foreign correspondent currently living in China.

Shout! Do not stop being horrified. Do not hide behind jokes. Stop reassuring each other that it may not be so bad. Assume that it will get much worse. This is how it looks from China: the world is now ruled by Trump, Putin and Xi Jinping. And: America is fucked. Europe is tipping. The liberal West is a thing of the past. Democracy is seriously wounded. And now? What about our children?I posted these lines after the US election on Facebook. A friend replied: "Relax!"
I did that once. In Turkey. After the rushed election of Erdoğan. When he stood before the people and pretended to be meek. I did relax then, I told everybody: Give the man a chance. Well, I will not do that again. I've learned my lesson: We must take them at their word, these megalomaniacs, these narcissists devoured by their thirst for power and revenge. Believe them when they promise to sow hatred and practice retribution. I don't understand how we can pretend today that the world is turning as always. Something monstrous is happening. It happens now, at this second, it happens tonight while you sleep, and it will happen tomorrow when you wake up. Barack Obama just visited Athens. He spoke urgently about the flame of democracy. He also tried, so I read in the newspaper,  "to take away the fear of Trump". Of course, he wants to keep a bit of influence on Trump. I think that will be disastrous. If Obama were honest, he should say, "Be afraid!"

What is now referred to as "the post-factual age", I've been living in for almost 20 years as a foreign correspondent in Turkey and China. Living with lies, propaganda and resentment, I've learned that in China and in Turkey. Existing among autocrats and budding autocrats. In societies where one lives in a minefield full of uncertainty and arbitrariness. But throughout I always had two consolations. First, I can always go back home and rely on the values ​​I believe in. And second, the world is always striving to become a better place because people elsewhere also dream of freedom and human dignity. Well, the charisma of democracy has been disintegrating for years: America's wars in the Middle East, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. The revelations of Edward Snowden. What do you want, you hypocrites, people were asked in Cairo, Moscow, and Peking? The world has become a feast for cynics. For how much longer will my home country be a safe place I can feel proud of? Will Europe also fall?Do not let yourself be lulled. Not from the smell of your morning coffee, not from the subway that runs today as always  The world is no longer the same as  yesterday. Shout. Wake those who still believe in the comfort of hope, who lack the power of imagination. Wake them up. There's a monster. It stuck his gaze on us. Look him in the eye. Shout! And then go to work.

No rain today, cold yes, but clear mostly. Late breakfast, we make plans for the afternoon. I go upstairs to sort out my desk for the coming week and there is that ping on my phone.
The message reads don't worry we are fine and for the rest of the day I sit and watch a live stream camera of Wellington bay,  the waves of the Pacific ocean gently rolling in, rolling out, rolling in, no tsunami, no tsunami, no tsunami, at least 45 aftershocks. My child is safe.

summer gatherings, final

1988, already steps ahead

The ground not quite there where it should be underneath my feet. But this I know: Soon I will feel it again and eventually I will go upstairs and take the sheets off the bed and fill the washing machine, the last couple of loads of summer gathering laundry.
Maybe not exactly today, there is no rush.

It's been a full summer and she was my shiny diamond throughout. It was a wonderful summer when she was around (and a pretty awful summer when she was not. Next time, I want intend to be considerably more healthy).

I forgot how deep it goes, how physical this feeling is, how heavy my arms and legs become  watching the departing car. Her serious face behind her sunglasses, while I am wiping away tears. Only minutes earlier we were snapping at each other, stop taking pictures of me, (stop being such a mum, stop being such a teenager) and now there she goes again, a car on the motorway to the airport.
In a couple of hours I will check the website that allows me to track their flights over the next two days and by the time they are back home with the cat and the dog, I know that I will have found the ground beneath my feet as well.

She moved out 14 years ago, slowly widening the gap (which now is 18,000 km wide). I know the drill. We usually argue at the last minute. Before we start crying.

Again. I let her go back to her amazing life. And you have no idea how amazing!

If this is true:

I suppose we are all products of our parents' joy and suffering. Their emotions are written into us as much as the inscriptions made by their genes.

(Siri Hustvedt)

Then she got all our joy genes.

Thank you my love for a wonderful summer.

There is this slight feeling of ground between my feet. Although to be honest, after almost four weeks  in the horizontal position I am not certain, could be wishful thinking.

At least I don't fall asleep any longer listening to podcasts. Which means that I have been discovering once more how everything is connected. Don't ask. But in my addled little brain this listening sequence was entirely logical: about folk singer Richard Farina, Irish spy and tearoom lady  Margaret Kearney Taylor,  the amazing story of Bala and Shamira Amarasekaran's chimpanzee sanctuary in Sierra Leone,  and the inspiring approach of flipping the script (reverse the usual or existing positions in a situation; do something unexpected or revolutionary) when confronted with hate.
In short, I have once again been able to reassure myself that the world is simply amazing.



The butterfly larvae are getting fat, R has dug up all the potatoes, cooked huge quantities of tomatoe sauce, now ready to go into the freezer, he swept all the floors and cleaned the cooker (surface). He has been cooking dinners for the last six years anyway, knows how to change sheets and do laundry, enjoys grocery shopping to the point that I have given up all hope of ever writing a shopping list again - although this morning I had to mention the neglected bathroom and the ironing . . .
No, seriously, no I did not. I swear.

The summer gatherings are slowly coming to an end, our various visitors are on their last missions catching up with more family and friends elsewhere before coming here again for a last and possibly weepy celebration of life as a family. This is my kitchen window and my daughter cooking (she got that from her father):

What are days for?
To wake us up.
To put between the endless nights.
What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They flow and then they flow.
They come, they fade, they go and they go.

(Laurie Anderson)

A calm day, a pleasant, wonderful day. A day like an anchor. In the morning I faint after the shower and R runs up the stairs with a cup of strong tea. Based on this past week, whatever recovery I am expecting, it is going to be very slow. I spend large parts of the day in bed where I carefully select a podcast to listen to and soon fall into a floating dreamlike state, voices inside and outside of me fading through the open window and up into the sky. I like to think of it as meditation. 

Eventually, some part of me wants to get up and, dutifully and carefully, I move around, almost sleep walking, deadheading flowers, rinsing the tea pot, hosing down the patio, changing towels, until I am breaking out into a sweat and my heart starts banging with an angry fist. 
After my lunch time cup of milky coffee, I fall asleep for a while. Later, we watch Heart of a Dog, R leaning over the edge of the sofa holding my hands. In paradise, we often played our Laurie Anderson tape in the evening after sunset, sitting on the stairs with the dogs, chatting with passing neighbours, all the kids running around under the mango trees, singing O Superman.

Meanwhile, our daughter, our married grown up daughter is in Ireland, with her man and her friends, retracing our steps from the summer of 1979. They send little snaps from Connemara, smiling in the rain, running along windy beaches, like tourists in their tweed caps, cycling on Clare Island.

Turning time around
That is what love is
Turning time around
Yes, that is what love is

(Lou Reed)

summer gatherings begin

This is the view from the kitchen window this morning. The plumeria is not doing too well. And one of the small fig trees has not survived this mild winter. The roses are late but I forgive them.

While chopping some fresh strawberries into my porridge, I listen to the news, the road works and the birds, considering whether I should douse the evolving ant hills on the patio stones with boiling water or let them be. 

Bad karma. 

Years and years ago, we called on a friend living at a Tibetan Buddhist place in the south of France where we not only shared the bedroom with seven nesting swift families flying in and out of the windows, but also had to carefully accommodate various ant colonies in the shower. It was all done very orderly, the ants were provided with safe passage to and from the soap dish and stayed well away from the drains. 

Only two years before that trip, I daily spent a good amount of time killing large civilizations of ants, thick red ants, which ran along my washing line and nested inside the door frames and the box with S's colouring pencils and basically everywhere. Not forgetting the cockroaches, spiders as large as your hand (the smaller ones, the larger versions were higher up in the trees) and of course, mosquitoes. The geckos and the skinks and the giant millipedes, however, S wanted to keep as pets. Life in paradise was not without challenges.

her blue body

I didn't go for mother's day stuff - we lived in a commune, it was the 1980s, my child was introduced to other things about life, we were serious hippy rebels.
There are vague childhood memories (mine) of colouring cards for my mother but that must have been before I went to school. And the teenager I was then would not be seen dead with a mother's day memento or a bouquet. And thankfully, my mother did not like the idea either. But I only found out this week that it was not a nazi thing after all, this day to idolize women as mothers. See what I mean, my teenage anger etc.
Still, my child called on Sunday - by total coincidence, of course. 

Anyway, in the words of Alice Walker:

We have a beautiful
mother
Her hills
are buffaloes
Her buffaloes
hills.

We have a beautiful
mother
Her oceans
are wombs
Her wombs
oceans.

We have a beautiful
mother
Her teeth
the white stones
at the edge
of the water
the summer
grasses
her plentiful
hair.

We have a beautiful
mother
Her green lap
immense
Her brown embrace
eternal
Her blue body
everything we know.

For My Daughter on Her Twenty-First 33rd Birthday

When they laid you in the crook
of my arms like a bouquet and I looked
into your eyes, dark bits of evening sky,
I thought, of course this is you,
like a person who has never seen the sea
can recognize it instantly.

They pulled you from me like a cork
and all the love flowed out. I adored you
with the squandering passion of spring
that shoots green from every pore.

You dug me out like a well. You lit
the deadwood of my heart. You pinned me
to the earth with the points of stars.

I was sure that kind of love would be
enough. I thought I was your mother.
How could I have known that over and over
you would crack the sky like lightning,
illuminating all my fears, my weaknesses, my sins.

Massive the burden this flesh
must learn to bear, like mules of love.

Ellen Bass

My child lives 18 622 km away from me. Which is 11 571 miles. Which is quite a distance. Her garden is doing well, it's spring.  We are a living geography lesson.

There is a man downstairs painting my kitchen walls. He tells that me he lives in a tepee during the summer. Yesterday, he showed me the scar on his neck where he had a tumour the size of a grapefruit removed last year, 38 radiation sessions. But you know, he said, I just got back onto my horse - which in his case is an imported US van. He smells of woodsmoke and sings church hymns while he works.

His daughter, he informs me, is afraid of the open skies and refuses to visit him.

Meanwhile, my daughter calls and we talk for a long time about everything and nothing. When people ask me how I manage what with my only child living so far away, I try to come up with a clever answer.  Because honestly, I can't tell you. What would it be like if she came through this door from time to time and put the kettle on in the kitchen? Would we talk about the same things? Would we have a different relationship? No idea. When I am awake, I know she is asleep and when she is up and about, I am asleep. We meet at the edges of our days. She is always 12 hours ahead of me. If in rare moments, I need comfort, I know she is not alone. That she is married to a wonderful man.

Do I miss her? Complicated. I just love what she is doing, has done with her life. I could not for a second ask her to abandon it. And no, we have not driven her away. If anything, we encouraged her.

This is where most people start shaking their heads in disbelief. I like to think she had a great childhood, what with the different countries and continents and schools and all that chaos. Or even despite of that. I know I made a mess of being a mother, many times. I think we all do. I told her that much.

Watch us, a small family of three, two adults, one girl, so close at times, we could walk with our eyes shut, holding each others' hands. One tiny shift of chin, one short stare and we know what's up. Even via skype. Beautiful and scary at the same time. We will never be without each other.

I can tell you this: she knows how to cook, grow food, swim, cycle, teach yoga, climb mountains, manage entire government departments, speak diplomacy, she is a ferocious reader, loves fiercely, and she has never ever been afraid of the open skies.

I could not ask for more.

She'll probably give out to me now for telling.

Remembering when I first watched this movie and the time I asked my teenage daughter to watch it with me many years later and knowing that she loves it and that she got the message, too.

Sometimes when I lie awake and need to calm my mind I make up lists. Memory lists, like my daughter's first shoes, starting with the pair of tiny warm sheepskin booties R made, next the soft red leather slippers from our Dutch friends, traditionally used as inlays for wooden clogs and passed on through generations and friends (see below), she learned to walk in these, followed by the first pair of solid booties (blue) and on through her first years up to the yellow sandals (with a good grip as we reassured S when she walked up the hills of West Cork one summer). These sandals were the only thing stolen from us in paradise and it happened while we were still living in the hotel among the wealthy tourists. We marvelled at the thought that somewhere deep in the rain forest a child was now walking in yellow Birkenstock sandals. It was a good thought. Still is.

So the mind wanders.

I try and match my child's face at the time to the shoes and I fail and of course, I worry. When she calls the next day, I move real close to the screen and count - once again - all the beautiful freckles on her adult face. 

The Nso people of Cameroon, I read recently, do not allow a close mother-child relationship. Childcare is the communal responsibility of the entire village. To avoid eye contact, mothers blow into their baby's faces. They have to work in the fields, they cannot afford time for cuddling and singing. 

I see it here, too. Only our fields are offices and that puff of breath, we call it education.

Yesterday at midday I stood in front of the house where my mother was born. Through a large gate at the side I recognised the gabled roofs of the stables and barns of her grandfather's haulage firm. I tried to see my mother there, the way she balanced on a stone as a two year old. 

Today it's all overgrown weeds, a couple of cars here and there, and in the main building, an empty shop front with for rent signs. I have vague memories of visiting the town as a child but never this building. It was sold long before I was born.

My mother was happy here. I know that. In the stories she told us about her grandfather, he was a dashing hero lifting her up onto his horse and setting off in a wild gallop through the estate. 

I know there are other stories, too. Of too much drink and rowdy scenes and of course, the war. Always the war.

On the motorway, I was trying to explain all this to R who was having fun driving without speed limits. I think it came across all sentimental and hollywoodish anyway. Just then we drove under a bridge where someone had written in big white letters: Somebody loves you

(- how do they do this, hanging down from the railings in the darkest nights with a spray can writing upside down?). 

Before we left I was up in the attic looking through the toxic box my sister passed on to me after my mother's death. I throw out some of it whenever I sift through. Last time, I threw away all the legal stuff, the threats and insults my parents exchanged over years via their lawyers, court orders to pay more, to hand back this or that, all water under the bridge. One day, the box will be just an innocent collection of faded photographs of people no one will remember.

And as it usually happens, I dipped into a couple of other boxes to find my balance again and I found a letter from my mother-in-law, which she had sent to me when my six months old baby girl had meningitis. It is one of the world's most beautiful letters and looking at the smudged ink where my tears had dropped onto the paper thirty odd years ago I had to cry again. 

My own mother had not yet met her granddaughter and when a few weeks later, we arrived after that long hot drive across France and I held S out to her, she recoiled and quickly stepped backwards. 

I will never understand it all.

trust

Watching R with our deaf and blind old cat this morning brings back memories of our early parenting years when I went back to work and he stayed home. Maybe replace memories with revelations.

Quite often, I would find pebbles in her nappies (diapers), her wellies with a puddle of water inside, dead woodlice in the pockets of her dungarees. But there was also my red cheeked smiling toddler with unkempt hair holding out her arms and unwashed hands to me. Wisely, R never really told me what went on in the garden, which at the time was a very big walled-in space with large overgrown patches full of brambles and broken bottles and ancient waste. Come to think of it, there was a time when S would bring me old batteries. In any case, the house mansion with all its faded grandeur and sweeping staircase and all the gaping wounds that 100 years of neglect bring about was a minefield for anybody. Whatever possessed us?!

And: There was a large water tank way back in the garden. I know it was roughly shoulder high, toddler shoulder high. As I was rescuing the old cat this morning from inside the small bit of bramble hedge we have here, while R was digging up the spuds across the lawn, I saw my toddler throwing stones into the water tank, 30 years ago, pulling herself up to the rim to watch it splash and my knees gave in.

You are overreacting, R tells me. That cat has a great sense of smell, she would have found her way out in time.