City story

Meditation

I’ve been in London for the last few days. I went to learn more about meditation. I had forgotten about the vast, exciting dusty crazy beauty of the city and all the people who live there.

I learned some cool things, like if you flatten yourself really hard against the teeniest corner of the Tube that can still not be enough for the person standing in front of you with a rucksack on their back, and that if you try to force an automatically sliding cab door shut the driver will lose his shit with you. I saw the Christian Dior exhibition at the V&A, which made me remember that loving clothes isn’t frivolous as they are works of art, ate unidentifiable but divine food at Ottolenghi, drank wine, watched the majestic Emma Thompson and the gorgeous Mindy Kaling in Late Night at an adorably tiny cinema in Crouch End, caught up with my sister (whose ability to make me laugh further revealed the urgency of fixing my postnatal pelvic floor problem) and got the chance to cuddle my sassy little nieces, aged 7 and 4. I was there for just over 24 hours but came back with enough nuggets of newness to make me feel like a plant that’s just been watered.

On the way back to Heathrow, feeling like a Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner cartoon, I watched a stand-off, as a man tried to get on the Tube with a big suitcase. There was another man blocking the door, also with a giant suitcase, and he only had about a centimetre of space in which to move further in to the train. The man trying to get on was like Arnold Shwarzenegger in The Terminator, opting for a monosyllabic and threatening ‘Move’ command. The other man did not move, then Arnie repeated: ‘Move’. This went on for a good two minutes. ‘Move,’ Arnie kept saying and the other man kept not moving. I was sandwiched right there, observing the immovability of each one with wonder and interest. I resisted the urge to step in and negotiate, because my anxious brain is pretty melodramatic and it flash-forwarded to newspaper headlines like ‘Mum stabbed to death on Tube’ or ‘Innocent mum dies in Tube terror stand-off’ and I thought, I’d better not, I’ve got three kids and this Arnie guy seems unhinged.

Arnie was persistent and eventually the whole train carriage rearranged themselves so the man blocking him at the door was able to shift a few centimeters, letting the Terminator and his unwieldy baggage on. Life carried on and I caught the eye of the girl next to me. I made a thumbs down sign and we both started to giggle. God it was hot. The next stop, Arnie was blocking the door while a young woman with absolute comedy luggage tried to get on. Arnie stepped forward and patiently helped her load on suitcase after suitcase, then meekly squeezed himself further in to the weary crowd.

Nobody is a tit all of the time. We are all only tits some of the time. The rest of the time we’re ok. That’s just how it is.

Three boobs

Meditation, Motherhood

I sometimes look down at my belly and a character comes to mind from one of those old Seventies American cop shows. He’s an amalgam of them all: a good guy, he likes doughnuts with his coffee and he says things into his walkie talkie like ‘Mac, we gotta prawblem heeyah.’

Because postnatally (oh alright, prenatally too), I pee a lot, I get lots of glimpses of my belly all day. The cop says: ‘We gotta do somethin’ bout this.’ Then the day goes on and I run around and I think, I’ll do that Tupler technique thing later. I’ll work on my transverse abdominis possibly another time. Note to self: must start doing something about this belly.

A few weeks ago, I was leaning over to put my jeans on and my son said, as if observing an orangutan in the wilderness, ‘Look Mummy, you’ve got three boobs.’ From where he stood, yes indeed it did look like I had three boobs. The usual two – then my stomach hanging down in a sort of cone shape. I had that diastasis recti thing in my last two pregnancies, where your stomach muscles split, never to find each other again unless you spend 20 hours each day doing some weird deep abdominal pulsing thing. I had an umbilical hernia too, which is where part of your intestine sticks out of your abdominal wall. That was a real gift, I must say.

Anyway, I look down at my tummy and think, yep, we’ve got a problem here, but I haven’t done anything about it yet. For a while, I went down the route of thinking ‘oh my body is destroyed but look, I have three darlings to show for it and it’s all been worth it’ – but the truth is I do mind what the hell has happened to my body and how radically it has changed since I had three children in four years. My poor body had no chance whatsoever to ‘ping’ back, because I let cravings rule me in pregnancy and ate far too many salt and vinegar crisps. When I did pregnancy yoga, it was mainly the kind where you just lay down and relaxed.

My strategy was ‘I’ll deal with it when I’ve finished having babies’ and now this Seventies guy eating a doughnut is on my back all the time but with no solutions. I work a lot on my mind because I feel, what with all the mental illnesses and neurosis, it’s fairly flabby. I meditate because it has been scientifically proven to change your brain, and I get such a kick out of that. You can change your brain. I love that. There’s so much hope in it.

Yet my body waits, quivering in expectation. When will it be my turn, it says. You can’t just be an ace brain walking around on two legs. Your body is just as important as your mind. Then it comes out with this cracker: We are one and the same, you know.

Notes on mortality

Motherhood

I had some conversations about death with my middle son today. Our neighbour’s grandmother had died, and the funeral is today. They love this neighbour, a young man who babysits often and plays the best, weird indecipherable superhero games with them. So the boys were concerned about him, and very interested as to where his beloved granny had gone.

I probably speak about death with my children a little too much, because there was a two-week period a couple of years ago when it seemed I was about to die. I suppose I want them to know that if I did, it wasn’t my choice to leave, and that part of me can’t die because it’s part of them. Anyway, I try to knock death talk on the head, in general.

But my middle son was on a roll today and really wanted some discussion around the idea. ‘When you be dead, are you dead forever?’ ‘When I be dead, will you be dead? ‘Can we all be dead holding hands together?’ ‘Can we be dead but then be statues in the museum?’

He sat in his car seat in the back while I answered (Yes. All things going as they should, yes. No, but that’s a touching yet incredibly distressing idea. No.) We drove on for a bit in silence, and he stared out the window, deep in the kind of thoughts that only a three-year-old can have. Then he said quietly: ‘But the heart never dies Mama. It can’t.’

On cue, we stopped at a red light and I turned to him. ‘Where did you…? Where did you get that from?’ I said, looking at him. He is as pretty as a bluebird, this child. ‘My brain told me,’ he said matter-of-factly, gazing out of the window again. These children. You think they are speaking mostly gobbledygook as they try to carve sense out of the world with their limited, lisping vocabulary – then they break out these showstopping lines that sound like something an ancient sage has come up with after a hundred years meditating in a cave.

The light turned green and we drove on. ‘I hope I die with blood bleeding all over me,’ he added, in a tone that can only be described as glee. He is a little boy, after all.

Jabba on your shoulder

Mental health

‘My mouth isn’t asking for chocolate, my whole body is asking for it,’ said my son recently, totally disassociating himself from his need for the sweet stuff. Nope, nothing to do with him. At the age of three, he nailed it: how cravings work. As an adult, you can test it out. Go on. ‘My mouth isn’t asking for [insert your vice here], my whole body is asking for it.’

Each day, I scrape by on a dichotomous regimen of stubborn disagreements between my mind and my body. They aren’t even close to deciding how we are going to live out the rest of our days together. A wingman for each sits on either shoulder. One’s clear (militant, even) about what it wants. Green things, water, fruit, no rubbishy big bready things. No alcohol. The other is really laissez-faire. Slovenly. Looks a bit like Jabba the Hutt. Lives for today. To hell with tomorrow.

I tell Jabba that it’s all very well living like that in your 20s but not in your 40s when you have health issues and three small boys. At this age, you know that most of the decisions you make regarding exercise and diet are going to have a knock-on effect on how well you live. And how long you live. But then Jabba will tell you: fuck it, come on! You could get run over by a bus tomorrow. You deserve this, it’s been a long day. Let’s do it!

I think we can agree that he’s fairly unattractive with his wide-gash mouth and gross protruding belly. So why’s he so damn seductive? Why does he get his own way so often? It takes willpower to pick Jabba off your shoulder, and place him down firmly behind you. That willpower thing, that’s just a little giant something I’ve been working on recently. In turns out you have to do stuff and repeat stuff for your brain to compute that you mean business. You have to keep doing stuff and keep repeating stuff for your brain to change, to morph into something better.

The other lieutenant is no great shakes, either. That one is almost as annoying as Jabba. Way too holier-than-thou. I can’t sit here all day necking green juices and exercising. I’ve got things to do. One day, I’ll brush them both off. The holy one can give Jabba some tips on how to smarten up a bit. Jabba can tell the holy one to loosen its vice-like grip. I’ll tiptoe off, wobbly at first – but then I’ll start to run with the unbelievable freedom of someone who’s finally found the straight, sure road, hidden all along in those unconquerable peaks and treacherous valleys.

Photo by Jay Ruzesky on Unsplash

Beach speech

Motherhood

We found a little cove today, an inlet somewhere along the Wexford coast. I’d let the boys be adventurers and explorers, knowing that the hundred metres or so of rocks stretched out before their childish eyes like a vast, undiscovered planet.

They forged on ahead, bravely leaping and slipping and climbing, their tiny legs goose-pimpled from the chilly breeze that whirled in from the Irish sea. I lagged behind, so they couldn’t see me but I could see them, in that way we do when we want our kids to think they have at least some freedom. ‘We are con-splorers!’ the eldest shouted to the wind, while the younger straggled behind, stuffing as many rocks as he could into his pockets for later contemplation. ‘EX-plorers,’ I couldn’t resist yelling, briefly blowing my cover. ‘We are CONSPLORERS,’ he shouted again, and I watched with love as he navigated the rocks and the rock pools, because this eldest son often approaches outdoor things with trepidation. The younger, weighed down with his rocks, spied me and roared, ‘C’MON Mama! We have CONSPLORING to do!’

‘It’s…oh never mind,’ I muttered to myself. I threw off my shoes and started to follow them, resisting the urge to tell them that it was time to turn back, we had gone too far down the coastline. Then, we turned a jaggedy corner and found this small, sweet cove. It was rocky, and the sea in it sparkled deep green, not blue. A crab, with one leg missing, scuttled into the water. Time stopped. I smiled and feasted on the look in my eldest son’s eyes, because I knew right at that moment he felt like the first person in the world to have discovered that beach. I knew that inside his head a door had opened forever: I am an explorer, and I find the most beautiful things.

I kept quiet for a while, then my usual beach speech came out. I can’t help myself, it happens every time I am on a beach. ‘This is my favourite place to be in the whole, wide world…’

‘Mama?’ The triumphant explorer interrupted me before I really got going about the sound of the waves on the shore, the shells, the marbled stones, the sand and how it tickles your feet with memories from the past and promise for the future. ‘My favourite place in the whole wide world is Smith’s Toys Superstore.’ I looked down at him, started to give another speech about nature and how it’s the best, then stopped myself and grabbed his hand. We picked our way back across the shoreline, and the cove faded away from sight.

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I see you

Mental health

I’m rereading a book I read when I was about 16, The Catcher in the Rye. If you took refuge in books as a teenager, then you probably know about Holden Caulfield and his beef with ‘phonies’; they were mostly adults, and they were mostly bullshitting him.

If your parents or the adults in your life are disengaged, then being a teenager sucks. That age is so tender. They are children, they are starting to look like adults. Their brains are exploding with childish things and grown up things and hormones, and everything else. If old man time gave me a free pass to go back, I wouldn’t. I suffered intensely. In fact, my brain froze on teenage mode all the way through my 20s and even beyond, because I didn’t mature properly. The reason I didn’t, I think, is because I didn’t feel ‘seen’. I wanted so desperately for an adult to understand even an iota of where I was coming from. But they couldn’t.

I wonder can I give this to my children – I really want to. What do I mean by being ‘seen’? (It sounds bloody awful, doesn’t it? Like something from a compulsively cheesy American TV drama.) I mean: That they feel loved for who they are, no matter what. That they feel adored for the ‘bad bits’ as well as the good bits. Actually, that they never learn there is such a thing as ‘bad bits’ within the young self. There aren’t.

I try to watch my language with my children. I try to say things like oh that’s naughty behaviour instead of you are a naughty boy. I read it in some parenting book somewhere. Do children pick up on such nuances of language? I don’t know. I’m winging it like everyone else. I tell them I love them, a lot. I hope that whatever I’m doing, that by the time they are teenagers in a few short years, they will still be talking to me. Really talking to me.

I really hope that by then, I will have given them the tools to slash through the confusion that settles in adolescence. I want to show them that most of humanity is not phony, but utterly glorious in its inescapable spectrum of joy to sorrow, ugly to beautiful – and utterly reliable in its passage from darkness to the surety of light.

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Bloom

Motherhood

I want to tell you today about the first time my first son smiled. Every parent probably has a gooey story about seeing that first smile.

With my other two sons, the smiles seemed to happen in increments. It sort of seemed like they had always been smiling. Maybe they had been doing it with their eyes, or maybe because I had more than one baby I didn’t specifically notice when their faces first opened up to the world. Perhaps I really noticed my eldest son’s first smile because I had all sorts of post-natal mental illness at the time, and it was like someone switched a powerful light on in the room, briefly. I don’t know.

Anyway. We were snuggled up in bed one cold, grey January morning. It was dark outside, it seemed the sun would never rise that day. He was seven weeks old. I’d just fed him. I propped him up on some pillows, and turned to put a cardigan on to start the slow descent downstairs, where I would spend the day figuring out how on earth to be a mother. I stood up, bent to pick him up – and then…

Honestly, do you know those clips in nature documentaries, where they’ve sped up the frames so you can see a radiant flower go from bud to bloom in a few seconds? It was exactly like that. He grinned. Toothless, he gurgled and grinned even wider. He shone. His face beamed, he smiled straight for a good two minutes. He stared at me, straight in the eyes, and grinned even more. His face was exploding with love and happiness. In a small pocket of precious time, the two of us grinned and gurgled at each other for what felt like infinity. It is etched onto my brain, as transcendent and transformative as the moment of his birth.

I don’t know that he was particularly grinny because he’d picked up that I was not, or he immediately felt the power of something that would reliably connect him to other people for the rest of his life, but it was a moment of exquisite beauty. So pure and perfect, my tiny little newborn, woken up to the world.

I picked him up, padded downstairs and made coffee, the grey of the morning transmuted into light.

Wake up call

Mental health

‘You can’t beat death/ but you can beat death in life, sometimes’

How cool is this? Charles Bukowski wrote it in 1993. He died in 1994, at the age of 74. A friend sent his poem The Laughing Heart to me this morning, and it illuminated a sentence, or instruction, that has been reverberating around my head these last few days. It says: ‘I cannot help you with your fear of death, but I can try to help you with your fear of life.’

It came in one of those self-speaking-to-the-self moments. You know, that sacred, special ‘inner voice’ that comes to you sometimes? No, it’s not the naggy horrible one, telling you all sorts of lies about yourself. You can call that one the critic, the monkey – you can call it a dick – call it whatever you like: it’s not you. It’s the you that wants you to stop being you (I’m not going to edit that. I know it’s irritating to read, I’m sorry).

Another friend of mine says that suffocating voice is ‘just old childhood tapes’, playing on a loop. She pressed stop on them ages ago. Actually, she pulled out the reels and burnt them. I really listen to her because she seems like a fully evolved person. She’s one of the happiest people I know. She has also suffered the most of anyone else I know.

There is another narrative pulsing within you. It’s very quiet, calm and steady. It tells you things. Important things. How can we find this voice that can help us beat death, sometimes? You just have to get still inside yourself. Slip behind the curtain. There’s meditation, yes. But it could also sneak up on you when you are doing the dishes or walking the dog. Or when you are drifting off to sleep or waking up, and your consciousness is touching something else. Your soul, maybe.

You will know when you hear it because your heart will light up and then, as Charles Bukowski says in the last line of that poem, the Gods will delight in you.

Dances with wolves

Motherhood

‘Stop using your wolf voice Mama,’ said my eldest this morning. What a great way to describe my asshole voice – the one that comes out when I have been unable to control my temper.

My son was having an epic tantrum. He wouldn’t tell us why he was so upset. I ran downstairs, dripping wet from a snatched morning shower, to crying so heart-wrenching I thought something truly awful had happened. Like, he’d lost a piece of Lego or something.

I did that thing that is the opposite of the story from Aesop’s Fables, The North Wind and the Sun. Do you know it? I think about it weirdly often. The tale really struck me as a child. Basically, the wind and the sun quarrel about who is strongest. The wind, as is its wont, was blustery and forceful, convinced it would be the one to get a passing traveller’s cloak off. He loses it and blows as hard as he can, but all the man does is pull his cloak even tighter. Then – you guessed it – the sun gently shines. It glows and winks and burns brightly. The man throws his cloak off.

So, yes, I did the opposite of that. I kept saying, ‘What’s wrong? What’s wrong?’ whipping myself up into a foul and impatient mood. Eventually I forced him to tell me through blackmail – you know, this one: ‘If you don’t tell me now X will happen’.

He answered. ‘Daddy poured milk on my cereal’. Wolf voice came out in force. ‘Are you (insert nearly a swear word here but I managed not to say it) joking me?’ His eyes widened. The milk and cereal were forgotten. There was a frigging wolf in front of him.

I think about that Aesop’s fable a lot as an adult because I keep having to learn the same lesson repeatedly. Being taught it once just doesn’t cut it. If you are forceful and shitty – with your children, with anyone – things will backfire on you. If you can tap into some level of light within yourself, and let that illuminate your reactions, then your children (your spouse, your boss, your friends, whoever) will automatically shine back in response.

You’ll get some time to feed the wolf before it bites, too.

Seek and ye shall find

Mental health

I love that quote from Rumi: What you seek is seeking you. When you hear it, your heart relaxes a little. You stop trying to shove the smudgy roundness of yourself, edges all blurred from life’s sweet and shocking other plans, into a stark square of expectation.

It means that you don’t have to strive so relentlessly to ‘become’, as Michelle Obama might put it. In her brilliant biography Becoming, she traces back through her life, and it reads like a motivational map. You want to apply it to your own hopes and dreams. It’s the kind of book you put down, punch the air and say: Right, I need to get to work. At its core, you see she worked her butt off to get where she is today – but you also understand that who she ‘became’ was inevitable. What she sought was seeking her. She was just very proactive about meeting it halfway. Or, in her case, near the finish line.

We are all ‘becoming’. We really don’t have to know what it is specifically we are becoming. Back in my late 20s, during a treacly bout of depression, I kept hearing a voice in my head. It said, over and over again, Become who you are. Become who you are. I basically thought: Fuck off. Who am I? Who am I supposed to be, anyway? I felt very weighed down by the notion of becoming who I was. So many young people do. The pressure of expectation nearly floors them before they get started.

Eventually, the depression muted and I stopped hearing the voice. Actually, I deliberately stopped listening to it. I shoved it down as far as I could into the depths of my self, so I would never have to face the reality of being who I was.

I’ve grown up a lot since then. I realise that none of us have any choice but to become ourselves. To be ourselves. You can’t fight against who you are, any more than you can stop the tides from rising and falling, any more than you can stop the sun setting or flowers from blooming. You get the picture.

What you seek is seeking you is an immensely comforting snippet to rest your head on. It means that you don’t have to try so hard. The freedom to be yourself stretches out before you on the road less travelled. The path is pristine and nobody has set foot on it.

Nobody can, you see. It’s your road.