My backyard

*Inspired by all the lovely photos that April has on her blog, Riley's World.

Out of the blue, a month ago, my mother asked me to dye her hair for her. I was very surprised at the time, and even more surprised when she said she liked the job I had done so much that she would like me to do it again.

My mother hates having her hair touched. Her scalp is very sensitive so she has a very hard time trusting hairdressers. For her to ask me to do this was both a compliment and a huge responsibility. For my mother, appearance is very important, so there was no way I could risk making a mistake with this.

There is something very disquieting about seeing my mother’s naked scalp, her fine hair wisping with grey. My mother is a dynamic woman who leaves me in the dust when it comes to energy. Her sense of self and belief in her own outlook of the world is fuelled by a personality that can be rather overwhelming. However, here, in my kitchen, with a towel around her shoulders and her hair gently combed up with my hands, she seemed so fragile that it frightened me. I think, for the first time, I really understood that she may not always be in my life.

I don’t know if I can do justice in explaining how I feel about my mother. The emotions are so mixed, so complicated, so conflicting. I love her, and desperately want her to approve of me. She was the strength in our family, the only thing that was constant. She worked herself into the ground to ensure my sister and I had opportunities. She went without, and I felt guilty that she seemed so tired and so… hopeless. While my father went out wooing his next wife and starting over again, it seemed my mother was stuck with us as a weight around her neck, holding her down from being able to live her life. I know this is unfair, and that she loved us and did her absolute best for us.

Maybe that’s where some of my guilt comes from. The fact is, I was a selfish teenager. I was angry with so many things in my life. I hated the fact we were all but forgotten by our father. And I hated how excited I got when he would pop in for an impromptu coffee. I hated that any time a note went home for a school excursion, it would be a struggle to get the money together, and my mother would get even more stressed than usual. I resented that my friends had nicer clothes, and their parents took them to exciting places. I wanted to go with them but I hated feeling like I was always the poor relation, begging a lift. I hated seeing the rash spread up my mother's neck and cheek whenever the stress became too bad.

I wanted my mother to be able to have the clothes she desired, and to go out and enjoy herself. She has always looked 10 years younger than she actually is, and she was a very attractive woman. She still is. Yet in the whole time we were growing up, she never dated, and never brought a man home to meet us. I now understand why a little better, but it still saddens me. My mother’s childhood had been disrupted and traumatic, and it left her with little trust in people. There was no way she was going to risk her young daughters with men she might have had relationships with, because she knew how untrustworthy men could be.

In fact, we never had any of her friends visit. She worked as a nurse, and she looked after the maintenance of the house. She had a fantastic garden that she had built up over the years, where she spent many hours. She sketched beautifully. She danced around like a wild thing around the living room, with her Rolling Stones and Led Zepellin albums blaring loudly, inciting complaints from our neighbours that I should keep my (!!) music down. She went vegetarian and took up yoga. She hated cooking, and we rarely managed to go a week without the beans being burnt because she had wandered into the garden and forgotten the dinner.

Yet, for all the times we scraped by with just enough to eat and travelled by public transport (or walked), our lives were richer than most around us. My mother introduced me to music and art and a slightly bohemian outlook on life. Once we were a little older and money a little less tight, she stretched the budget (somehow) to pay for horseriding lessons, piano lessons, and we always received our Encyclopaedia Brittanica editions. We had wonderful books, classics like The Grapes of Wrath, all of Tolkien’s books, Schindler’s List, The Crystal Cave series. Those books, an arm’s reach away, fuelled my love of the written word. That alone is worth the world to me.

It can be easy to feel that you're losing your sense of yourself when your mother has such a strong personality. We fought, loudly, during those teen years. And I withdrew from her during my 20s. I hated myself for causing my mother even more anguish, but at the same time, I hated her for not seeing that I was ‘me’, and could not be the power-suit-wearing lawyer-type that she dreamt for me. It has felt that every move I’ve made in my life has just been another form of disappointment to my mother. I’ve felt tugged between the obligation to an amazing woman to be the person she hoped I might be, and the obligation to myself to recognise the person I actually am. Usually that tug-a-war meant I just stayed in one spot, unable to make a move in either direction.

My mother and I will never have a calm relationship. Our personalities are so different, and our perceptions of the world around us so varied, that we can only guess at what the other sees. I am finally reaching a point where I no longer feel that by following my own dreams, I will be betraying my mother’s. This is a huge freedom. I feel like a bird just breaking out of a shell, shaky and vulnerable, but with the potential to fly.

As I slowly brushed the dye onto my mother’s roots, making a part, brushing it on, flipping the strands over to create an new part, and again brushing the dye on, my mother piped up.

"Are you sure you want to do it that way? It’d be better if you did it from the side instead."

"Shut up" I gently chided her. "You asked me to do it because you liked the way I did it last time. Now just let me do it my way."

"Yes", she agreed. "You're right. Do it your own way."

Loose thoughts

I cut my finger yesterday, on a can of cat food (yuck!). The cut is on my right hand (yes, look at your hand), the ring finger, beside the nail, facing the little finger. Who would have thought that you used that surface of your finger so often! Not me. Not until now. In the past five minutes I have grimaced in pain twice due to unintentional contact between that cut finger and other, less forgiving surfaces. Ouch!

- - - - -

Isn’t it disconcerting when you are walking along and see someone who looks really, really familiar. You think to yourself, Wow! That’s Joe Bloggs! Until you realise that you haven’t seen Joe Bloggs for 15 years, and there is NO WAY that he could still be 20, so this must be someone else entirely.

"You're a good friend."
I don't want to be a friend. I want to pin you to the ground and breathe you in, tasting the salt off your skin.

"I appreciate you."
Niceties to keep me at arm's length. If only you lay awake at night wondering how my fingers would feel tracing your flat hard stomach.

"You have a beautiful soul."
Doesn't quite make up for my lard arse though, does it.

- - - -

When I've broken up with someone in the past, I've taken or destroyed all their photos of me. Why did I do that? Was it an assumption that noone would want to remember me? Or a spitefulness that, if they didn't want me, they couldn't have my image either. I'm not sure. Probably a mixture of the two.

- - - -

I've mentioned my running dreams before. Where, suddenly, I can run and skip, and I feel light and free. And my heart, my soul, takes flight. I wonder if that's how you dream when you're old. I wonder if that's the 'true' me. In my dreams when I make love I have the body of my 25 year old self.

- - - -

I always feel more comfortable with a pen in my hand. I suppose it substitutes for the cigarettes I gave up so many years ago, and the dummy I gave up quite a few more years before the cigarettes. When I have a pen in my hand it always seems as though there is some potential, and all I have to do is sit and wait for it. Words come. Of little value and even less structure perhaps, but still, they come.

And then sometimes they leave (like just then), allowing me to stare out into space with hardly a thought in my head, just all that rambling 'white noise' that ticks over in everyone's brain.

What of the stories I am to be writing. I have bogged down there. Too much. Too soon. So much. Where to stop. Where to start. Should it be so difficult? Look at all the crap I can blab on about here. And of course it doesn't have to be GOOD. It can be abysmally bad. Bad is better than nothing, regardless of my father's favoured saying "If you're going to do something, do it properly" How crippling is that logic if you look at it from another perspective... "If you can't do it properly, don't do it at all".

- - - -

I feel the time we've yet to reach
Is not yet within our own belief
But I feel sure that time will come
If it goes one and on...

I know I've quoted that song before [Paul Weller's Country] but its optimism that there will be a time of realisation is the same optimism that wakes me up with a sense of hope each day... the time will come.

It has been a very busy week. Work has meant late nights on a job where the client kept changing the specifications at the last moment... but it was finally put to bed on Friday afternoon (it was originally due to go to the printer on Monday, so that gives you an idea of the scale of these changes). Anyway, we celebrated on Friday night. Cut loose after all that tension. I admit I cut loose a little more than I had expected and suffered for it all day Saturday. And today has been a write-off as well. So a waste of a lovely weekend. Oh well. Live and learn.

During the past few weeks I have been thinking about things though. Jotting down notes. Trying to make a little sense of them before putting them in words here.

There are stories in my life than I have never given voice to; events and relationships that I have avoided thinking about rather than question them. I was brought up in a household of stoic tradition, where problems were not admitted. You didn't cry into your cornflakes, you just got on with it, regardless of what 'it' was. And if I didn't 'just get on with it', it was down to the fact that I was too sensitive, a typical Cancerian, taking everything too personally, the subtext being that I was weak. Even today, any question about my childhood seems to be taken as a veiled criticism, and that it was my reactions to the events in my life that was flawed, and not that any of those events might well have been worthy of a reaction.

I never voiced anything for fear I would be criticised for being too soft, or even worse, because I might hurt those around me if I did find my voice, and I couldn't bare the thought of causing hurt. So I kept quiet. And soon I found myself without a voice at all. Afraid that any call to accountability in my relationships would be just cause to stop loving me. And to not be loved was the worst punishment of all.

I don't want to be seen as the sort of person who blames the world for my problems. Trust me, I take full responsibility for all my fuck ups. But for a very long time I took responsibility for other people's fuck ups as well, and I'm trying to find a way to sort my way through those things, to let go of the guilt that I still feel over a lot of my past.

For a while... I'm not sure how long... I plan on voicing my stories. I don't want them to be taken as blame or guilt. I just want them to be voiced, from my perspective. I understand that there is no truth. We all see things through our own flawed and self interested eyes. So these will just be stories. But maybe by letting them go, they will let me go as well.

At least, that is what I hope.

Just a quicky. I'm just home from the movies. I had been talking about seeing the newly released Director's version of Donnie Darko for weeks, and I finally hauled my arse in there.

What a beautiful movie. I'm still crying, an hour afterwards. A gentle, melancholic cry.

The movie was so well created; the acting, the writing, the depth of the characters around the central characters... I don't know if, in part, I particularly related to it as it was set during a period of time that I was just finished growing up, so the music was familiar, the tracksuits, the 10 speed racers, the artwork... all I do know is that I often cry during movies (big girl's blouse that I am), but I'm wholly aware that I'm being emotionally manipulated and that it is a superficial response that will be forgotten as soon as I get to the carpark. This was, and is different.

If I could have written a movie, I wish that I could have written that one.