Being A Mum
Happy Mother’s Day!
On May 9, 2015 by Speranza
I can’t remember my mother’s voice or even her face sometimes. On some sensory level I can still feel the softness of her skin as it encased the bone when I would trace my hand back and forth across the planes of her cheek and brow but it’s been nearly forty years now. I dream of her sometimes and all of the normal things I would have liked to have done with her and never did, like treating her to some highlights at the hair salon, imagining her squealing delight at my sons – especially as babies – or having an English tea out somewhere a bit fancy.
My mother was truly beautiful inside and out and possessed great vats of personal charm. In the hospital she received flowers from every tradesperson we had ever hired – and the milkman too, all of whom had received “a bit of cake” and a cup of tea when they were working at our house.
In now vintage photos with her hair falling in a shining rope (“I don’t know, I s’pose you just wound it round your finger, really” she answered unsatisfactorily when I pressed her as to how this was achieved) she looked exactly like Lauren Bacall, a childish pronouncement that pleased her immensely. I once asked her sister (my aunt obviously) if she thought I bore any resemblance to my mother and she looked at me and said “Weeeell, not to be rotten but your mother was a very good looking woman you know.”
Nice.
Being A Girl . Being A Mum . Introspection . Uncategorized
Sometimes I’d Like the Cream
On March 24, 2015 by Speranza
I’ve been paying more attention lately to my female co-workers, friends and families and the way they talk and deal with the men in their lives and it is completely fascinating to me how men are still being revered and pacified (I use this word intentionally) so automatically and unconsciously. It’s been absorbed into our psyche and our culture to keep them on the content side of things.
(Or maybe it’s just anything for a quiet life since so many men are renowned for their tiny sense of tolerance and their quickness to unnecessary anger.)
Which has obviously worked for them during their tiny childhoods.
Uncategorized
Sentimental Fool
On March 14, 2015 by Speranza
I’m a very sentimental person.
All manner of things both happy and profoundly sad can reduce me to tears at a moment’s notice from a song (“Over the Rainbow” should come with a warning, there I said it) to the open, earnest expression on a dog’s woolly face as he waits outside a café for his master. I can only do news in eyedropper amounts because how else can we tolerate another day trying to make sense of anything unless we are once again seduced by denial? (Thank you Ernest Becker). Sometimes life feels so overwhelming I feel the weight crushing my heart down as though someone has their boot upon it.
And I absolutely don’t consider this a need for help or a neurosis – it’s natural to feel this way when one really, truly sees the big picture and acknowledges the absolute anguish that is all around us.
When ‘Frasier’ was very young, we would often take long walks – specifically designed to tire him out if he only knew – and on one such occasion I happened to stoop and admire the pink granite in someone’s driveway, showing him how the veins of grey and silver sparkled as I turned the stone back and forth in my fingers. From that moment on, each and every time we went walking, Frasier made it his duty to seek out a nugget of pale, pink granite, charging back to present it to me with proud, excited eyes. (Which explains why, twenty four years later I still have a spaghetti jar filled to the top with thumb nail sized nuggets of pink granite.)