'My grandma died'
'Oh that's sad - She was 90 so at least she enjoyed a good long life',
'I've broken my arm'
'Oh dear, you're lucky it wasn't your leg so you can still get about!'
'My house has burnt down'
'Gosh that's terrible, it's so fortunate you were all out at the time - it doesn't bear thinking about the alternative'
'I've lost my job'
Thank goodness it wasn't before Christmas' (Christmas is always a key one - if your bad thing happened just after Christmas then that is extremely 'fortunate').
'I'm terrifically ill'
'Oh no, thank goodness it wasn't over Christmas/on your holiday/birthday/you can just stay in bed and get better'
I am absolutely the worst (or best depending on how you look at it) at this particular quirk. I cannot leave a statement about something shitty that has happened to someone, without immediately trying to counter with a bright side. Which is so odd because I am fully aware of how annoying it is. My lovely dad dropped dead from a heart attack two weeks before I gave birth to my first child after a hideous and long labour which ended in an emergency C section under general anaesthetic because she was well and truly stuck in there (honestly they tried EVERYTHING, hormone drug, what felt like 20 billion hours of pushing and ventouse - none of which could force her down that canal). I sat/lay in my hospital bed for 3 days on a catheter, unable to move much or it turns out, sufficiently breastfeed my daughter, and I received emails, texts and well wishers who were keen to remind me that 'it was all part of the great circle of life'. 'At least you have your baby now' was basically the message - that has balanced the books nicely - Negative, your dad is dead: Positive, you now have a baby. I know that each and every one of them meant well, I did not take any offence, but I can categorically tell you, that having a baby that isn't feeding on your sore and pitiful nipples after an emergency C section on top of attending your father's untimely funeral the week before - does in NO WAY make up for losing a beloved parent. However, I never once challenged the 'circle of life' well wishers as I didn't want to upset them. It was all terrifically British.
I am increasingly finding that people are doing the same with this great Pandemic of ours. 'Thank Goodness it wasn't over Christmas ' (imagine the screaming face emoji here), 'Thank goodness it's spring and the days are getting lighter - imagine if it had been cold and dark!', 'Aren't we lucky that we all get to spend time together as a family', 'Don't think of it as being stuck at home, think of it as being safe at home', 'Thank goodness we have the countryside', 'Imagine if it was 30 years ago and we didn't have the internet!' 'Thank goodness you have a house and garden, imagine being stuck in a little flat in a tower block in London with 20 billion children that are all breast feeding and you're blind and in a wheelchair' (OK I made the last one up). And true to form, I am the absolute best/worst at this game. My brain is constantly thinking of all the ways this could be worse for us/me.
The main and most remote and ridiculous of these is my 'close shave' thoughts over my GCSEs which I took 25 years ago. I cannot stop worrying about all those teenagers who perhaps didn't take their mock GCSEs as seriously as they ought, because no one could have foreseen that those marks would be used towards their actual GCSE results. In my case in particular, my Spanish mock exam exposed my deep and fundamental lack of knowledge and I don't think I even had a grade for my mock - it was that bad. I shall never ever be able to forget the anger in my teacher's face when she pulled me in to a classroom and spent quite a bit of time yelling at me as I sat on a wooden chair, pale faced and racked with guilt as her face became redder and redder and there was almost actual steam coming out of her ears. I had up to that point found her and my lack of Spanish knowledge a source of some amusement, so when I got to one of the early questions in the exam, which asked me to 'walk in to a police station and explain to the police that you have lost your bag', I can vividly remember the feeling of not knowing a single word to help, even the word for police. So, feeling it was inappropriate to leave the entire section blank, I did what any Brit Abroad would do and invented my own hybrid language. My now legendary attempt at an answer included the immortal line, 'Mi losto mi handbagio'. That line in particular made her more cross than I thought it was possible for a teacher to be at a child. Every day since I discovered that they had cancelled the GCSE exams for this year, I have thanked my lucky stars that it wasn't 25 years ago and that I had the chance to learn a sufficient amount of Spanish between my mock and actual exam and make that teacher exceedingly happy with a respectable B grade.
The next is an almost giddy happiness that we hadn't booked a holiday abroad this year. I have spent much of the last decade feeling guilty that I have failed my children so magnificently because I haven't managed to take them abroad for so much as a 2 star hotel-Benidorm-package-holiday. They haven't even crossed the channel to France. 4 of them don't even have passports. But at the beginning of this year I was determined to 'right' this 'wrong' and finally get them all on to foreign soil - 2020 was, after all, going to be an excellent year for us. I had found a few options, one with flights to a beautiful hotel in Spain courtesy of my friend's timeshare option, and the other a nice chalet on a campsite in France. It was only K's reluctance to part with a single solitary pound of cash towards either that saved us from losing out because I wouldn't have thought to buy travel insurance in advance so I would imagine that we would have lost all the money we had invested. Not to mention some serious First World Disappointment from me and the children. What makes me even merrier, is that nobody is going abroad. As a poor, impoverished, mother of many, it can sometimes happen that I *may* view the pictures on Insta or FB of my friend's foreign holiday jaunts with just a tinge of jealousy. I imagine them luxuriating in their foreign hotel/villa luxury, with delicious meals and waiters and housekeepers, as I sit outside my tent/rented house in the UK, exhausted and weary after another day of doing exactly what I do at home, but in slightly different or harder surroundings. It's not that I don't enjoy them - I have absolutely LOVED every one of our family holidays. But they are hard work and not what I would consider a 'holiday' for me.
Particularly the last one which saw me flying solo with the children to a campsite in the Isle of Wight, only to be greeted by gale force winds on the first night, which subsequently broke our tent. Not to be defeated, the children and I found a way to make it work with some abandoned old poles and, with a little help from the friendly neighbours, we got it back up again and we soldiered on to have a very enjoyable (but as I may have previously mentioned) fairly tiring holiday. So the fact that people can't bugger off to Lake Garda, Croatia, Barbados, the South of France or in fact ANYWHERE - makes me just a little bit pleased as punch. I'm not proud of this fact. But it's just that it's nice that we're all pretty much in the same boat. Some boats are bigger and nicer, with better gardens, naturally, and some are actual boats, but we're all in one and that helps me.
I could go on and on - thank Goodness Bea, my eldest, got to go on her school ski trip at half term - imagine how heartbreaking it would have been to finally finish those sodding monthly instalments I could never afford only for her to be cruelly robbed of the opportunity at the last minute; thank goodness we don't have a small toddler requiring constant entertainment/saving from certain death all the live long day (Ted, my third child was particularly in my mind with this one, he was, what one might describe as a 'handful'); thank goodness we're not in our old house in London with a tiny garden and neighbours that hated noises of children; thank goodness I like arts and crafts and am not OCD; thank goodness K didn't lose his job too and we still have one income coming in; thank goodness we paid most of our hideous electricity bill off before I lost all my income; thank goodness I'm not about to have a baby; thank goodness we don't have 20 children in the house like the mad Radford family; thank goodness I took up running a few months ago so I have a legitimate reason to leave the house alone and escape without question whenever I like and all I have to do is put leggings and trainers on..... I could come up with these all night. But all things considered, this is truly the best time a bad thing could happen to us as a family and my brain is acutely aware of our luck. And the last week has really been akin to a normal holiday for us - the weather, the lack of the dreaded school work emails, the bike rides, camp outs, baking, jumping (the children are really and truly making my point for me with the trampoline - I couldn't have asked them to make more of a point to K about just how wrong he was), making, marshmallow roasting, swimming (we got our converted-fish-pond-pool up and running in time for the hot weather) and general japery have been exceedingly enjoyable - I've even started to read my latest remote Book Club book whilst sunbathing. The fact that this holiday is mandatory and hasn't cost anything (if you don't count the £150 trampoline) is even better.
Although I will leave you with one negative my brain is making me relive over and over and over again, just to ensure my embarrassment stays at a peak. The problem with continuing my running/shuffling during lockdown means that I now pass a number of people on my run/shuffle, as they too, enjoy their hour of exercise. All very socially distant from one another, obviously. On one of the first truly sunny and warm days this week, there were more people out and about in our little village than I have ever seen out on foot. I had said 'morning' to a great many people by the time I was finally doing my warm down walk on the road to our house. I said 'hello' and 'morning' to a few more people until just as I approached our drive, a very smiley couple who I think live slightly further down our road, said another 'good morning' to me, I responded again and then she spoke once more, and for the life of me I cannot fathom how I thought this, considering my red, sweaty and legginged state, but I swear I heard her say, 'you look lovely'. Now. I do not know this woman. I clearly didn't look anything like lovely in my present state even if her previous encounter of me had been whilst I was giving birth to a 20 pound horse, but I didn't think any of that. I thought, she just told me I look lovely, so I replied 'Thank you'. As she passed me by and I walked on to our drive, I realised with a moment of clarity I wish I had had 30 seconds earlier, that she had said 'Isn't it lovely' as she raised her smile and hands to the air and was clearly referring to the quite lovely warm weather. That made an awful lot more sense. So then I had to decide whether to to turn round and explain why I had said 'thank you' which, on reflection, I decided would be even more awkward. So I kept walking and now all I can think over and over again is that one of my neighbours is spending her days wondering why a person would thank her for saying how lovely the weather was.
Until next week then my friends, may the sun continue to shine, the children continue to jump and K and Marie Kondo continue to be wrong. I am MOST thankful for that. xxxxxx
No comments:
Post a Comment