About 24 hours after I had gone into labour I made a pact with myself to never forgot the horror of giving birth.  I made a decision to remember what it’s like to feel you simply can’t do another contraction and yet have to do it again and again and again – cruel,  relentless, merciless, on and on and on for 48 hours.

This time six years ago, I was in hospital waiting to see my consultant to discuss being induced.  Tomorrow is the day I took my first prostin.  The day after that I took my second and my third.  On the fourth day, I went into labour.  On the fifth day I was still in labour.  On the sixth day my son was born.

I re-live it every year.  And as I do I salute, with awe, our great-grandmothers and great-great-grandmothers and women today,  in some parts of the world, for whom there is more than a slim chance that death will be the outcome of their labours.

Each May in its fresh, lime greenness and sweet, exuberant blossoming, I remember the savage cost of new life.

I also remember it was worth it.

It’s a poem that has kept me steady in the shaking of living with Mulitple Sclerosis.

For copyright reasons I can’t quote it, but I guess I can tell you where you can find it: here.

Go slowly, friends.

This post is a repeat. I’m saying exactly what I said in my previous post, My ideal personal trainer, it’s just that sometimes, when you’re really trying to get into an idea, it helps to say it again in a different way.

I am still recovering from plantar fasciitis, a strain on my right heel brought about because my determination to run has been greater than my willingness to listen to my body.

When I realised the discomfort was brought about by morning spurts around the park, I didn’t run for two months (I swam instead) in the hope that rest would get me better. This has worked to some extent but not completely.

So now I’m trying a different tack.  I’m doing exercises to help my heel every day and in the past few weeks I’ve been back on the road, easing myself back into running kilometre by gentle kilometre.

And doesn’t it feel good? Doesn’t it feel great to be out in my running shoes again? To be getting fitter rather than slobbier? To be toning-up rather than filling-out? To be moving in the direction of a solid, firm torso rather than a wobbly blob blancmanged at the end of the sofa?

And that is my point:  getting fit is the easy bit. All it requires is a bit of will-power. If we decide that is what we want to do, most of us can do it.

It is on that road that I have met  my personal trainers.  They have been there as I have moved solid torso-ward.  We can all be happy when we’re doing that.

But my aspirations are deeper.

I want to embrace the whole of life and life involves being tired, being ill, being old and being injured.

Even if I were to run a Marathon, what would I do when I had done it?  No one can’t get fitter indefinitely. The time has to come when I am becoming less strong, more puffed and moving towards what, in my fear, I perceive as a wobbly blob.

My challenge is this – to be happy when I’m moving in that direction too. Unless I can crack that,  I’m only living half a life – and the easy half at that.

Image @Steve Wright

I’ve liked them all, and I’ve learnt different things from each.

But as I nurse a running injury I’m thinking about what I need in order to be able to run without doing as much harm as I do good.

That’s got me onto imagining what I really want my personal trainer to be.

My ideal personal trainer would be someone who:

• Speaks the language of sleep and rest as eloquently as he talks of exertion
• Understands that a woman’s strength waxes and wanes with the moon
• Is as skilled in the fine art of listening to the body as he is in pushing it
• Appreciates that a body in winter has different needs from a body in summer
• Grasps that time spent exercising is time that would otherwise be spent earning money or being with the family and so needs to be kept in balance
• Knows that nothing in nature goes on and on getting better and fitter and stronger…but goes in cycles with seasons of fattening and leaning, of working and resting, of hurting and healing.

Just look in my loft. There are boxes packed with all the pages I have written.

Look on Amazon. You can find my books there.

Look at my home. Apart from gifts, everything I own has been paid for through my hours of labour putting one word in front of the other.

I am a writer – it must be true.

So why is it that all these years (decades), there is nothing that is as hard as writing? All the other things – training adults, filing my accounts, managing a team, teaching children, making websites – none of that is as difficult as the blank page,

the empty brain,

the silent room.

I found the film a little disappointing because so much of it was about the politics and practicalities around women as artists. These are important issues for sure, but they aren’t the questions that I’m asking at the moment.

Friend: Are you coming on the coach-trip to Blackpool?

Me: No.  I didn’t fancy it with Arch. He hates being strapped in a seat. Making him sit still for three hours there and three hours back is something I’d rather avoid.

Friend:  You should just tell him he has to sit still. That’s what I do with my little granddaughter. I could take her on a coach journey anywhere.

Me: So? Ebony is Ebony and Arch is Arch. That’s the difference.

How many times, in the five years since Arch has been born, have I had a variation on that conversation? (“My child does this. Your doesn’t.  Therefore you should change your parenting.”)

The assumption underlying it is that children are pretty much the same so they’ll all respond in a similar way to similar treatment.

But where does that assumption come from? It’s certainly not true of adults.

Some adults needs to sleep for eight  hours a night, others thrive on four.  Some adults are at their best in a creative environment when they can make it up as they go along, other prefer to operate where there are clear rules and procedures. Some adults enjoy getting up early on a cold winter’s morning to run around a rugby pitch (they do honestly), others prefer to sit in bed and watch a film in Italian for the sheer sensuality of the words.

I’m sorry. This is so obvious I’ve embarrassed myself writing it down.

My question is this:  If we accept this is true for adults, why should it be any different for children?

Do I think that parenting has any bearing on the way a child behaves? Yes.

Would children behave in a similar way in the they were all brought up the same? Definitely not – and thank God for that.

You know what they say about criticism and moccasins?  How much more true is it of parents and their gloriously varied offspring?

So that was how I came to be doing something I had not done for five years, ten years, 20 years in some cases – laying my hands upon my treasures…opening them, smelling them, remembering what I had been doing and who I had been when I had drunk deeply of their meanings.

But as I leafed through these layers of self, I was surprised to find strangeness and familiarity in equal measure.

Take The Continental Philosophy Reader, for example.  I remember buying that from a store in London when I was in my 20s.  I recall how excited I was to have it.

Good grief.  It included Claude Levi-Strauss on the Structural Study of Myth, Michel Foucault on The Discourse of Language and Hans-Georg Gadamer on The Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem.  Who wouldn’t have been wetting herself?

But as I looked through the fat and juicy tome, I realised that some 20 years on, I didn’t understand a word of it.  What ever was it all about? Did I really read that kind of thing just for the Hell of it? Today I can barely read a newspaper.

Yet in the margins of this inscrutable text, were my annotations showing just how much it had meant to me:  ”YES!!!!” , “Cf mimesis”, “Cf Rubem Alves”, “Yes, yes, yes!” I got it once. I don’t get it now.

All of which caused me to ponder…where did that thinking go? Is it lost, just because I can’t remember it?  Do the things we can’t recall disappear or have they become a part of us, affecting who we are, at some level creating us, even if we can not trace them?

It was never part of my plan to play the organ for funerals, but it just so happened that I became a church organist because I could play the piano and there was a vacancy on the organ stool.

And so it was that playing for funerals became part of the rhythm and texture of my life and has been for the past 20 or so years.

Some funerals are huge standing-room-only affairs – 400 people squashed into the space with not enough orders-of-service to go round and with trouble being heard at the back.  Others are pitifully small and lonely.

Sometimes the person who died is someone who has approached death without fear and who leaves an inspiring legacy to her mourners.

Other times the coffin is shockingly small, carried by a mother and father in unbearably poignant steps.

Some families know exactly how they want the service to be conducted. They are well organised.  I have time to practice and my brief is clear.

Other times – and I enjoy these more, if I’m honest – I’m waiting for the hearses to arrive before I can find out what tune they want to what hymn and what I should do with this rock band that has turned up unannounced and set up in the corner.

But whatever kind of funeral it is – black or white, peaceful or tragic, smooth or veering on the chaotic – I always feel profoundly humbled to be taking part.

What can you say to people who are bereaved?  Not a lot.  Words lose their currency in the rawness of grief.

But music….quietly playing as families hold cold hands and kiss their beloved’s face before the coffin lid is  closed…offering suggestions of amazing grace, hints of heaven’s morning breaking….

I am so honoured. It is one of the best things that I do.

Image @szbrozek

Don’t get me wrong, I love summer evenings – sitting with friends as the barbeque cools and the scents of the impending darkness fill the air, calling the children in from the far ends of the camp site as it approaches ten o’clock, coming home all nice ‘n’ lazy because it’s light and it will stay that way for – oooh – hours and hours. I luxuriate in the ease of summer.

But there’s another side (should I say a shadow side?) to the gloriously long evenings of June.

What about the times when I’m tired or sad and all I want is to get home, have a bath and get into my pyjamas?  It’s just not the same doing that in daylight.

What about the moments when I long to create a womb-like space in which to curl up, light a candle and pray?  I need to do that all the year round but in summer there is often a dissonance between the callings of my inner world and the long, glaring hours of light.

I’m not complaining. One of the many things I enjoy about living in England is its climate and the contrast between its winter nights and summer days.

But as the year is poised on this, the summer solstice, I salute and welcome the start of the hemisphere’s descent into darkness,  just as, in six months’ time, I will welcome its ascent into light.

Image @ Jean Carneiro