[All links repeated at the end]
1. Our kitchen ceiling caved in, due to a major leak from the bathroom. But there’s nothing like children dancing around in helpful excitement to make a small catastrophe feel like a minor adventure. (It’s only when a secondary leak floods the initial repair that I cry.)
2. The courgette seeds we planted have become fat leaves on dark stalks, budding again and again. I’m currently debating whether I need to cancel all trips away from the house, so I can be here to care for the tiny kitchen garden of sprouting herbs and craning, fur-bedded vegetables. I feel like a god. I started with a bag of soil & seed compost, an old tupperware box, and seeds; accessible to lots of people, I hope, and I cannot recommend it enough.
3. It’s difficult to measure love, and it’s irresponsible to discount the effects of our parents’ inherited trauma. I can safely say, however, that I have never once felt loved by my mother. I disliked her through my childhood and teens with the kind of gut-instinct a child has for grinding quotidian injustice, then found a peace with her in my twenties. Friends with similar parents had said over and over, ‘It’s just about accepting that they’ll never be who we need. We just have to decide whether we want to have a relationship with who they actually are.’ And I did, so we saw each other frequently, and I swallowed that sense of always being manipulated and unheard. (When I told her news of my job redundancy, or my pregnancies, or my cavernoma, I was cut off each time with more pressing anecdotes of her own. It was almost funny, in the way family jokes are, except for all those times when it wasn’t.)
Last summer, four years since the cancer treatment and death of my father — appointments and notes and visits, my efforts to ensure distant family were kept informed about each change in condition, each suggestion from the care team — I had a similar nerve-wracking few weeks with my mother, this time in a French hospital. This time I couldn’t visit, but found myself the initial point of contact, responsible at first for telling her neighbours, siblings, and my sisters, as well as calling her and the hospital each day for updates. Some weeks after her return, I received a typed letter informing me that I was subsequently being removed as one of her executors (my sisters though would remain) as well as having my power of attorney revoked. I have never uncovered why. She didn’t contact me on my birthday, nor on Christmas Day (I, like all children in these circumstances, still contacted her on her birthday and at Christmas. We always want to prove that we’re better than they’ve told us). All of this wormed inside my brain, constantly, painfully, until sudden clarity hit: Jackasses Gonna Jackass. (Before I was declared the Most Terrible Person, my sister held the title; before her, my father; before him, my uncle; before him, probably me again. This realisation also helped.)
As my children grow older, my anger returns. As they grow past milestones I remember from my own childhood — the age I was when calmly told to choose what I was going to be hit with after some behavioural infraction; the age I was when she stormily cut my hair from past my shoulders to a boy’s dull, savage chop (I wept throughout — my father tried to intervene — she insisted afterwards that it was what I wanted); the many, many ages when she consistently told my embarrassed visiting friends to ignore me as I was ‘just showing off’ – such a trivial slight! such a shaping of my feelings about keeping her away from people I valued! –; the years and years where I wrestled with my unfathomable unhappiness in this nice, middle-class home where I was bought presents and taken on holidays — it seems horribly simple to avoid these things. Don’t humiliate your child. Don’t terrify them. Don’t constantly repeat the witless truism that you ‘love them, but don’t like them.’
I find it easy to admit making a mistake. I apologise freely and with thoughtfulness to my children, my partner, friends, because I am not perfect, because we are all human. Part of growing up is the difficult realisation that your parents are human too, and they make mistakes. But sometimes it’s even harder to accept that you really haven’t done anything wrong – at four, at seven, at 10, at 37 – and that you, like everyone else, deserve better.
Anyway, when I vanish down a Lucille Bluth-flavoured hole of anger and hurt, I remember that exercise helps everything. And it does! Do treat yourself to some, if you can. Also, I read this book while camping recently and it is wonderful. Dodie Smith writes with such understatement that I could read her books twenty times and come away with something different each go.
4. This programme (part 1 of 2) about Jeremy Hardy is so utterly wonderful. It also contains clips of brilliant Linda Smith and Humphrey Lyttleton, and I realise I spend vast portions of my time watching, listening to, or writing comedy because it’s how I understand, process, and communicate my own feelings to the world. (If that’s not turning your lemons into lemonade, I don’t know what is.)
5. I finally order prescription sunglasses, after years of balancing normal sunglasses over my spectacles, on the pollenous days I can’t hack contact lenses. Continuing my Squash And A Squeeze philosophy of life, it feels like a gift, delighting me at least six times a day.
6. Although repetition has somewhat rendered athletic ads featuring everyday girls and women a cynical trope, there’s nothing like watching a large group of girls play a sport they love. The variety of body shapes, the support they offer one another, and the sheer enjoyment of it. Really, don’t all joys boil down to enjoying our bodies while we can?
7. The day is bright today, and I took the dog on a longer walk than usual; watching that dog trying to run out a greyhound was hilarious, the sleek fool. At the time, I was listening to this episode of The Cut on Tuesday, on the topic of Spring Horniness and the weird trash we get hot over, which contains the immortal line “The bud is breaking through. But the soil that nurtured the bud was all fucked up, and now the flower is weird.” Also, the final line of the episode made me do an actual out-loud bark of laughter.
8. It’s several years old now, but I love how both Bad Neighbours 2 and this review scratch an itch in completely different ways. I love the film for everything it undoes of the first one, plus the sheer charm of Efron and furious optimism of Chloë Grace Moretz; also, Rose Byrne, who might be one of the most underrated comedic actresses of our time. But the review offers something else, and sates the library-card-carrying part of my brain that wants to read a thousand think pieces on Magic Mike XXL and Parks & Rec and The Windsors. I hope you enjoy both.
1. When Jeremy Hardy Spoke to the Nation here
2. The Cut on Tuesday – I Want to Put My Mouth on That here
3. Little White Lies review of Bad Neighbours 2 here