Gently Does it
Greetings from my sofa this bank holiday Monday from a mostly sunshine-y Ilkley, how are you?
It’s taken me a while to get these words into an order I feel comfortable with, or rather comfortable with the thoughts that lead to the words. Just that August-y feeling. Two weeks in Scotland, a week at home including A level results, a weekend in London with all the walking and art and an unscheduled trip to Newcastle yesterday to drop the twenty-year-old off for his final year at Uni.
Unscheduled or not, I love a trip to Newcastle. It’s Charlie’s (my eldest’s) home now, but for a while back there it was mine. His first-year lectures taking place in the Lipman building at Northumbria Uni where I had my French and Spanish tutorials and lectures in the late 1980s and early nineties. His second year flat in Heaton just two roads away from my final year flat. He humours me in my reminiscences and always finds a way to take me back to campus for walk past the Student Union and Library. Â
I’ll always remember mum and dad driving me up to Newcastle for the start of my second year and bursting into tears over the frozen veg aisle in Co-Op. I’d felt the tears building during the four-and-a-half-hour car journey north but managed to keep a lid on them. Until Co-Op.
I’ve no idea why Co-op triggered them and not the service station where we stopped for a quick tea and toilet break. Or even when I said good-bye and closed the front door behind them, knowing they were on their way to my uncle and aunt’s, a few miles away from where I live now. And I couldn’t explain why I was crying, but every ready mum had a pack of tissues, a hug and a ‘you silly sausage’ before steering me to the checkout. With the peas.
I guess I was simply in that awkward in between stage. I’d been living away from home for the first time, all semi-grown up but then back home for the summer and very much the adult-child. It’s a tricky dance and a little discombobulating for everyone.
I felt the same feeling in the air yesterday walking up and down the aisles of Asda with overloaded baskets of tins of chick peas, chopped tomatoes and cleaning products, none of us having a £1 coin for a trolley. No tears in the frozen aisle this time, but still that sense of being in no man’s land with mixed emotions gently ruffling the surface.
My brain has a habit of somersaulting and back flipping through these dates and reminders. These markers in time, sometimes idle reflections, other times acting as guide rails to help me understand where I am now and how I got here.
Take August. This August marks nine years since we left Bath and moved to Bournemouth embarking on what turned out to be a shorter than planned time living by the sea and a major pivot point in our family story.
This August also marks eight years since grandma died, her death coming in between mum’s death in the May and dad in September, just a month later.
And this August bank holiday five years ago Andy took the kids to Kilnsey Farm to do wholesome family things like fish for trout and climb big hills and moorland while I went to hospital for my weekly PICC line check. Already tiring of the headscarves covering my chemo-bald head, but not quite ready to go public without them, I was still attempting to put on a good show of coping – for whose benefit I don’t know.
The three children do a great job of mostly keeping me in a forward-facing position when it comes to life, but all too often I find myself trying to make sense of the here and now against a backdrop of these anniversaries and reminders, sometimes forgetting to give the ‘now’ due attention, and I guess that’s what I’m trying to change.
I’m trying to breathe air and space into the now moments and this writing helps. Because even writing out the memories helps to take the heat and intensity out of them.
It helps me to piece together the ‘what’ and view it all with greater perspective, freeing up space to breathe. At least that’s the idea. It’s just that some memories need writing out a few times before getting to the point where they feel lighter and I can be more here, now.
Even this bank holiday in its own small way is a chance to pause. To not think quite so hard and go where the energy takes me.  And that energy right now is taking me to the kettle, the sofa and Heatwave by Penelope Lively, bought in Wigtown on my birthday just over three weeks ago. It isn’t beating myself up that writing this has taken way more drafts than anticipated to get it into a state I feel happy sharing.
Which I guess is partly why I’ve renamed this Gently Does It, because not only does it conjure up images of mum refereeing the boys tussling over the remote control or some Lego with a soft but firm, ‘gently does it boys’, but it’s also a reminder to relax into the now and to give my head a break from the backflips and somersaults, because let’s face it, I never was much good at gymnastics….
Thanks for reading, Harriet
PS I’ve got a little close to the writing and need to hit publish before I waver, so please forgive any stray commas and typos!