Jo Ind

Last week I had the following conversation with a friend.

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.

(more…)

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.

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. (more…)

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…

I get heartily sick of the challenge of raising a family being characterised in terms of work/life balance.

Who thought of that phrase?

It makes it sound as though the only things we need are to earn a living and spend time with our families.  The implication is that so long as we’ve risen to the  challenge of getting work and childcare covered, we’re sorted.

Well, I’ve got news – we’re not.

I have another need and that need is for solitude.  I’ll say it again, but louder: “SOLITUDE.”

I need time to be alone/pray/write. (I use forward slashes rather than commas because I’m not sure if they are different things.)

It is that need for solitude that too often goes unrecognised and therefore gets squeezed and therefore needs naming in capital letters.

Earlier this year I agreed to give a talk on revelation, identity and social media at the Greenbelt Festival. I rashly took this on in January when I had just taken redundancy and therefore anticipated I might be twiddling my thumbs around the August Bank Holiday (ho, ho).

As a result I have  had to clear the time (three whole days so far) to be by myself and do a bit of reading and thinking and praying and writing – whatever name you give to what I do in my study.

Do you know? It has made me feel so good…. I was able to pay attention to random thoughts that had surfaced and been left hanging around like odd socks for far too many years.  I felt peaceful, deeper, ‘gathered-in.’

I must do this more often. I WILL do it more often. Prayer/writing/solitude might not get named in “having it all” features in glossy magazines but I’m naming it and I’m doing it now.

As an anal person, I never used to understand why some people lived in a mess. Because I’m someone who is never happier than when everything is in its place, I just didn’t get untidiness.

Now I can explain it.  It’s called living with a small goat toddler. (more…)

Are you still a feminist?’ – that was a question asked of me last week by a young woman who had read one of my books.

‘Now there’s a question,’ I thought as I stood at the bus stop tapping a reply into my Blackberry.  ‘I was a feminist when I last thought about it – about four years ago – but I don’t know if I still am because what would involve thinking and I haven’t got time for that.’

Since I’ve had a child and endeavoured to look after my family, earn a living, be a good friend, go to the gym, sing with my jazz band and play the organ (oh, and then there’s the cooking, cleaning, shopping, washing, bill paying, gardening etc), life has been about immediacy – how to get Arch’s shoes on without a fuss so we both get out of the house on time.

My only time for reflection is when I’m waiting for a bus. I use those moments to strategise: ‘If Arch is going to Oscar’s party on Saturday, I’ve got to buy a present. The only window I  have for doing that is before work on Monday, which means I won’t be able to go to the gym, which means I’ll have to go on Sunday night, which means I can’t take him to see Sheila.’

All the time this is going on, some part of my brain is building up a backlog or things I would like to reflect upon – how has being a mum affected my feminism? If giving birth is both so horrific and so natural what does that say about the nature of nature? If my brain is no longer what it was, does that mean I am no longer the person I was or is there more to me than my cognitive functions?

I feel as though I’m living on borrowed thinking. It’s as though I’m using Internet Explorer 6 and keep seeing the prompts to update my browser but don’t have time to press the button.

Can you be a feminist if you can’t think? That’s one to add to my list. Right – must load that washing machine.

I wrote this poem one Mothers’ Day several years after my mum had died. Recently I lost Arch, aged three, in the supermarket for about five panic-striken minutes. That experience has brought me back to this poem, re-living it, this time as the mum.

The night after my  mother died
I lay in fear.
I am a child in a supermarket
Terrified
Searching for my mum
Between the aisles.

There she is.

In the sleepless dark
I toss between the faith
She would never abandon me
And her breathless body
Growing cold
In my hands.

When Virginia Woolf famously said a room of one’s own was necessary for a woman to write, she could not have envisaged a room that looked like this:

But for me, having my own space on the web in which to doodle my thoughts and write my life feels every bit as important as the hut at the bottom of the garden, for which so many women yearn. (more…)