Jo Ind

There I was making all the preparations for Arch’s fifth birthday – cake (tick), presents (tick), balloons (tick), card (tick).

“Now darling,” I said.  ”There’s something you need to learn and it’s very important.

“When somebody gives you a present, you must say: ‘Thank you very much’ whatever you think of it.  Even if you don’t like it, even if you’ve already got it, remember the people who gave it to you have been thoughtful and kind – so thank them.”

I had no faith in Arch’s ability to learn this lesson so, at his party, I was in full-control mode whisking presents out of his hand to avert social calamities. “We’re having far too much fun to open them now, aren’t we?”

The crunch came a few days later when friends dropped by with a late present for Arch and we had no reason (pretend or otherwise) not to open it there and then in front of them.

Arch eagerly tore at the wrappings. It was Mr Men pants. I curled my toes – too young for him, not his thing, nothing he could play with…. What was Arch going to say?

“Thank you very much,” he said,  confidently looking my friends in the eye.

Afterwards I sat Arch on my knee and told him how proud I was of what he had done.

“Yes,” he said. “I thought I was going to like the present – but I didn’t. It was boring.”

“It was,” I said, “but you learnt something very important about not hurting people’s feelings.  I’m really proud of you darling. Well done.”

But as I said the words, I felt my heart contract.

If what Arch has learnt was so good and useful – why had it made me sad?

* Image @ uglyhero

For me, there have been few surprises about motherhood. There have been some, for sure, but in general Arch, who is now almost five, has brought me the awe, exhaustion, love, fun and general all-round blissedoutness I had always anticipated.

And I had done plenty of anticipating being a mum. I first started longing for a child when I was in my early 20s. The dream wasn’t fulfiled until I was in my early 40s, so there was plenty of time to yearn and imagine how it might be.

The biggest surprise for me has been the discovery that having a baby hasn’t completely dealt with that part of me that…wants a baby.  Five years on, I still want to be pregnant, to give birth and to breastfeed. That desire is more of a still small voice than the womb-wrenching scream that it was in my childless days, but it is there nonetheless.

“Have another one,” is my first response on observing this but  – even if I could – I’m not sure that’s the solution. I’m guessing that even if I had five or six, I’d still end up grey-haired, saggy-bellied and wanting a baby.

As I already have a child, I’m wondering if the desire that remains is best not taken literally. Perhaps I should welcome it as primal, as archetypal.   I wonder what would happen if, instead of feeling saddened that my baby-days are over, I embraced my desire as a metaphor to live by and found other ways of conceiving, bearing, giving birth.

This is a new thought. It’s very much in embryo but I shall wait as it implants and see what grows.

Why is a 5km run known as a fun run? That is a question I used to ask myself as I sweated it out on the treadmill – panting, smelly and desperate to sit down after a mere 3km’s interval training.

A 5km run is said to be for families and beginners. But despite years of working out at the gym, I would feel defeated after running little more than half that distance. “How do other people do it?” I wondered. “I can’t carry on any more…”

That was until last Saturday, when it was such a glorious spring morning I decided that instead of working out in the gym, I’d go for a jog around Kings Heath Park.

I had already found out that a figure of eight in Kings Heath Park is 2km, so I decided to do one and a half circuits and call that my workout for the day.

I started off. The frost on the grass was glistening like pearls in the low-morning sunshine. The bare trees stood in sculptural silouettes against the clear blue sky.   Tiny varieties of daffodils and snowdrops were peeping shyly from the earth.  The birds were calling to each other, reminding me of other dawns I had witnessed, other times when I am overwhelmed by the sheer sensuality of being alive. I completed one lap.

On the second circuit, replete with voluptousness, I decided to pray. I remembered a baby I knew who was in hospital, for one loop of the eight.  I thought about the people of Japan, for the second.  Every time I glanced at the roofs of the Kings Heath terraced houses, I would think of the people who lived in them, whose names I didn’t know but whose neighbourhood I shared.

“I’ve just run 4km,” I realised as I finished the lap.  “How come I couldn’t run 4km on a treadmill? Isn’t that a great example of the connection between body and spirit? Doesn’t that just show the fallacy of thinking of the body as a fixed, physical entity?”

And with that, I thought I may as well do another 2km circuit – and I did.

“Spirituality is when the inside of things is bigger than the outside” – Richard Rohr.

I came across that quote while I was taking a look at the new website of  St Saviour’s, Bridge of Allan where my brother is rector.

It just happened to catch my eye because I was about to write a post on why I was finding it hard to post at the moment.

There are many times in life when I find my inner world more vivid and enticing than the outer world: I can’t read on the bus because I want to stare out of the window, I’m late for an appointment because I have been day-dreaming in the bath, I don’t switch the telly on because lying on my back looking at the ceiling is far more entertaining than anything being offered to me on a screen.

I’m going through a time like this at the moment – a time when I am being beckoned by my soul rather than wooed through the web. The outer world is small and thin. My inner world is rich and deep.

I don’t know if this is “spirituality.”  I don’t know if this is the way of being to which Richard Rohr was alluding. But it is good to name this place and it a good place to be.

I have always said that the hallmark of a good writer is one who is changed through her words.

The purpose of writing is to make a difference. If words don’t make a difference to the author, then why should they have an effect upon anybody else?

It is now almost a year since I have been working for NHS local, a digital service for the NHS in the West Midlands.

I have been handling the words and video on the site for long enough to ask myself the question: “What difference has this content made to my life?”

As it happens it has made a difference in so many ways I will need to write not just one post, but a series to explain it all.  This is the first.

I no longer weigh myself

I used to find it so disheartening to find that the more I worked out, the more I weighed.

“Muscle weighs more than fat,” my friends would tell me, as I noted that I had lost two inches from waist and gained seven kgs.

I know, I know – or at least I did at one level.

And yet the NHS continues to use the bloody body mass index (BMI) as a way of assessing if someone is obese, even though the index does not measure if the weight is due to muscle or fat.

It’s very difficult to really believe that weighing yourself is a waste of time, when our national institution responsible for health asks you to step on the scales in an attempt to assess your risk of high blood pressure, heart disease and cancer.

Thanks to NHS local, I can now say: “Bog off” to my scales and to the body mass index. The service has made a film of two women, of similar height, both classed as overweight in BMI terms.  The women were put through a body volume index (BVI) scanner that can distinguish between muscle and fat at Heartlands Hospital in Birmingham.  Despite being a similar height and weight, the scanner found one woman was healthy and the other needed to lose some fat.

At last, I can fully believe what my friends and Phil, my highly-toned and clincially obese (in BMI terms) personal trainer is telling me.  “Muscle weighs more than fat.” It really does. Thank you, Dr Asad Rahim, from Heartlands Hospital.

As for you, scales. “Bye bye.”  I measure my waist and that’s all.

The problem with Christmas is that it’s based on the notion that having dinner with our extended families is a jolly good thing.

I wonder where that idea came from.

In general, the families that we have come from do not give us all that we need – and that is healthy. It is what gives us the momentum to leave home and find happiness and fulfilment in other ways.

If the family from which we have come has done well-enough, it will have enabled us to become resourceful adults who can form friendships, become part of communities, engage in meaningful work and…er…create families of our own.

But at Christmas we do a very strange thing. We put aside the things that really do nourish us and go back to the people and the environments from which we needed to move on.

(‘Move on’ is the right expression for those from happier families.  ‘Escape’ is more apt for the rest of us.)

The strangest thing about this – the brandy butter on the Christmas pudding of this seasonal phenomenon – is that we make out this is special and wonderful and we’re all having a lovely time.

Merry Christmas everyone.

Last time I blogged, I was asking for help.

My pride at my four-year-old son, Arch, felt so overwhelming I felt it should not be seen in public. I wondered how other parents handled (or concealed) this obscenely primitive emotion.

As a result I have had three very helpful conversations, two on Facebook and one in the flesh, about the dilemma. (Is it a coincidence that the three people who helped me did not have children themselves?)

One discussion was about our ambivalence about pride of any kind. Is it good or is it bad?

We expect people to take a pride in their work, for example, but if they are too proud we wag our fingers at them: “Pride comes before a fall.”

I look in the dictionary and see it means both “excessive self-esteem” and “self-respect, personal dignity.”  Those are two very different things – opposites even – and yet the same word covers both. No wonder it’s confusing.

And then there’s that interesting point about whether we can be proud of something that has got nothing to do with us. I would not think so – and yet I am. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s pride and there’s parental pride and they are two different things.

The pride I take in my own achievements, I can handle – after all my achievements aren’t all that great.

My family and loyal friends will protest: “But Jo, they ARE” and I’ll say: “No, no, anyone could have done it if they’d worked as hard as I did/had as much luck/support/education as me” and I’ll believe what I’m saying. (Or at least I think I will.)

The pride I feel for my four-year-old son, Arch, is something different all together. It is a primal torrent that exudes from my being flooding through any poxy modesty filters I might have created for the sake of social niceity.

It has been there from the moment he was born and threatens to burst forth whenever a friend or stranger inoccently asks: “How’s Arch?” It’s so powerful, it’s obscene. It’s so indecent, I worry that it shouldn’t be let out in public.

What if anyone sees the pride I feel for my son? What if it gets muddled up with the hideously unpalatable envy and competitiveness that seems to be part of the fabric of middle-class parenting?

Fellow parents, can you help me with this one? What do you do with the pride you feel for your children? Do you hide it? Do you wallow in its glow? Do you share it with close friends but conceal it from the parents of your children’s classmates?

Let me know, please. Share your pride – before I burst…

PLEASURE.

That’s it, I’ve said it.

I was leading a workshop for Birmingham Book Festival last weekend called Finding Your Blogging Voice. One of the first things we did was brainstorm our reasons for blogging. Between us we said:

• to have a voice
• to showcase work
• to create an archive of material
• to explain a business
• to connect with people
• to improve SEO.

I was leading the workshop and so I forgot to say that, though I do indeed get all those benefits from blogging, my number one reason for going tap, tap, tap at my lap top as I am right now is because I enjoy it.

There are all sorts of different pleasures, of course.

The pleasure of blogging isn’t like that of sex or swimming or lying on the sofa with a glass of wine. It’s  more like the pleasure of making a photo album – but using word-pictures rather than images.

And, as I said when I created this website, it’s like the pleasure of having my own room and getting it just how I want – my own little bit of cyberpace where I can play and muse and hang out with my friends.

In her seminal post What We’re Doing When We Blog, Meg Hourian talks about the anatomy of a post and the communication evolution etc.  It’s all good stuff.

But she doesn’t say: “Having fun.”  That’s what I’m doing when I blog and the day it stops being enjoyable, is the day I’ll stop blogging.

There were tears, of course, when Arch had his first day at school – and they were all mine.

They started on Friday when I dropped him off at nursery for his last day there. I came home and wept those kind of from-the-belly tears that go on for a long time.

I only cried a little bit when I saw him in his school uniform for the first time on Monday morning and then a bit more when a friend sent me this photograph and some apposite words about the love being in the letting go.

I cried remembering his first day at nursery, his first night in a cot, his first solids, the time I bagged up his 0 – 3 month baby-gros and put them in the loft. Read the rest of this entry »