Big baby

 

"You must understand, that for a daughter to protect her father's image is natural; Freud built a whole career around it."

(Amon Goldfinger)

   

 Dad

(All photos: Gigi album) 



My mother had difficulty conceiving her first-born, my sister, and was then told she probably wouldn't have any other children. There's a little over eight years between me and my sister; by the time I came along, Mum and Dad were seen as older parents. I wasn't "tried for", nor planned for; I wasn't even expected.
Initially, I was diagnosed as gastric enteritis. When Mum's symptoms persisted and she returned to her GP, he confirmed that she was actually about three months into another pregnancy. When Mum told Dad, he had to have a sit down for a while. He apparently told Mum she'd have another girl and said "This one's certainly taken her time."
In fact, I was born two weeks before my due date; probably the first and last time I've ever been that early for anything. In contrast, my sister had been two weeks late, emerging after a day and a half of labour. I arrived in just two hours. My eagerness hadn't compromised my size: the nurses told Mum I was one of the biggest babies ever delivered on their maternity ward. I'm sure she was thrilled. The hospital in south-west London has since closed down, but I'm pretty sure there's no connection.
After Mum died, I sorted through the rest of Dad's personal bits and pieces that she'd kept for years. I have his pocket diary from the year I was born; his entry for the day I arrived reads: "9.15 am, BIG baby girl! Nine pounds fifteen ounces!" I don't know whether it was because his plump, gurgling white-haired baby resembled the vegetable, but my Dad immediately wanted to call me "Chou Chou"; French for "Little Cabbage". Fortunately, my mother wouldn't entertain the idea. She suggested "Barbara" after her closest sister and their own lovely mum, who Dad was devoted to. Dad suggested "Babette", then "Gisele".
I love my name: I thank my Dad eternally for it. I grew up loving the ballet I was named after, as well as the musical of Colette's book "Gigi", the diminutive pet form of Gisele or Giselle. I bristle a bit when people tend to call me "Gee Gee", with a hard rather than soft "g"; but it's a tiny irritation after nearly becoming Chou Chou. "Cabbageonsea" sounds particularly unsavoury.
When I was fifteen, I stomped off to rally against a local fascist group. They insisted on parading their neo-Nazism through the friendly, multi-cultural area I had grown up in and my Dad's sense of justice and idealism bubbled in my veins. Swept along with older, more seasoned protesters, I joined some lying down in the main road, so that the fascist group and the mounted police protecting their right to march would either come to a standstill or trample over us. Clearly, I hadn't really thought this through.
Hauled up by my collar by a weary riot officer, I garbled something about a "******* Police State", much to my great shame now. I was told to behave or I would be taken to the nearest police station to cool down. Obviously I didn't behave enough; two hours later, I was in a holding cell in south London with a handful of others. Now terrified, I announced I wanted a solicitor. Then I did what any self-respecting freedom fighter would do. I asked for my mother and burst into tears.
Mum was so ashamed that her youngest was in the local nick that she wouldn't come with Dad to claim me. He looked both worried and relieved to see me; now I realise he was also quite bemused. The sergeant told him I needed a "good talking to". My Dad nodded, signed for me and said absolutely nothing while we got in the car and drove home.
I was used to Mum's Irish, ginger temper. My Dad hardly ever lost his temper with me so when he did, I knew it was Bad. About five minutes from our house he stopped the car near the local shops. I started to cry again. He gave me a proper handkerchief. Finally, in his most Poirot accent, he said: "What did you think you were doing? What have you got to say?"
"Well, the thing is -"
"Shut up. Your mother thinks you should see a child psychologist. Luckily I can't afford one. Your mother thinks you're going to kill her by giving her a heart attack. Do you want to kill your mother?"
"No Dad."
"Why suddenly the politics? Why aren't you like other girls?"
"Mum says I get this from you?"
"Shut up. And do you think you'll be doing this again?"
"Well, there's a rally up in London in a couple of months and I thought..." At this point, I realised I might be pushing my luck.
"OK, this is what's going to happen. I will collect you from the rally in London and bring you home. You will never insult a policeman again, unless he's a bad policeman. When we get home, I will shout and swear at you and clip you over the head. Then I'll send you upstairs without any telly or any food. Your mother will be satisfied and I can get on with my work. Are you hungry; do you want some chips before we get home?"
And that's how it went when we got back. Apart from one thing: Dad never did get to collect from the rally in town. A couple of months later, just as I straggled past my sixteenth birthday, my Dad died. He hadn't quite made it to fifty nine.
This Sunday is my father's birthday; I write the same thing in my own pocket diary now each year, marking the age he would be now. It makes me more aware of my own I suppose, yet even at this age I'm aware that I'm still very much that big baby. I still want to be like my Dad when I finally grow up. I'm fairly hopeful he would like this blog.
I recently heard one of Dad's (and Mum's) favourite tunes set to the hymn "Vaster Far Than Any Ocean". I was aware that the melody "The Carnival Is Over" is traditionally used as a hymn in the Netherlands, but I'd never heard it in church here before. It was like a warm. reassuring hand at my back. The piano version included here is achingly lovely. The tune made so popular by The Seekers was originally adapted by Tom Springfield from an old folk song about Stenka Razin, a notorious rebel leader in 17th century Tsarist Russia. Folklore tells that Stenka came to a particularly sticky end. I doubt that his Dad ever went down to collect him from the fray to buy him chips.

"Like the little girl who's not very cute - her teeth are funny, and her hair doesn't grow right, and she's got on thick glasses - but her father holds her hand and walks with her like she's a tiny angel that no one can touch. He gives her the best gift a woman can get in this world: protection. And the little girl learns to trust the man in her life. And all the things that the world expects from women - to be beautiful, to soothe the troubled spirit, heal the sick, care for the dying, send the greeting card, bake the cake - all of those things become the way we pay the father back for protecting us..."

( Adriana Trigiani)

"Another baby you say? A big baby? How big??"

The Little Cabbage.

 "The Carnival Is Over"  (Piano solo version - pianist, sadly, uncredited)

"I'd like you to be a teacher, if you want to be a teacher. It's been a good life for me. But more than I would like you to teach, I want you to learn something about this world."
(Tony  Liegeois - Dad)

Boys will be men

"When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years."

(Mark Twain)

Yesterday was Father's Day. With every passing year, my Dad becomes ever more the yardstick that any man who should come into my life in the future will be held up to. With every passing year, he has also become the mirror I hold up to myself.

Father's Day was originally inaugurated in the United States early in the twentieth century to compliment the celebration of Mother's Day. Most probably founded in 1910 in Washington by Ms Sonora Smart-Dodd, a member of the Christian Women's Temperance Society. She had told her pastor that fathers should be honoured as well as mothers; her own father, a veteran of the Civil War, was a widower who had raised his six children on his own. 

The first celebration was on 19th June that year; Sonora's father's birthday was a couple of weeks earlier. Initially, public acknowledgement was vague and variable; Americans resisted the innovation for some decades, viewing it as a mainly commercial venture. Finally, after two failed lobbies, President Johnson issued a presidential proclamation in 1966, designating the third Sunday in June as Father's Day. As recently as 1972 , Richard Nixon passed it into law as a public holiday in the States, finally following the annual celebration of motherhood.

On a recent visit to the doctor's surgery, I realised I had interrupted quite a busy antenatal clinic. I'm accustomed to seeing very young mums-to-be in Brighton; often with one or two other small children already attached. In a city with such severe housing problems, seasonal employment and a burgeoning younger population, you often note the pattern of four year gaps between pregnancies. A "career mother" may necessarily escape the often demoralising job-search and fortnightly interrogations at the local benefits office. I asked my friend's little girl what she wanted to do when she left school and this bright and confident child promptly told me she wanted to have her first child at eighteen and a sister or brother at around twenty two. But I readily admit that I know very young and very devoted single mums, who love their kids obviously and unconditionally and who appreciate that parenting is both as tough and as good as it gets. But what of the young fathers?

Sat opposite me at the surgery was a young, skinny boy of seventeen, flanked by his seriously pregnant girlfriend, two years older, and by her mother; seemingly three feet taller and broader than both of them. His trainer laces were undone and his coach's cap was back to front. Both of these affectations appeared to be deliberate, unlike his presence at a prenatal clinic. He looked terrified. 

The granny-to-be glared at me as I made conversation with the couple. I asked him if he was looking forward to being a dad: he shrugged and muttered that he didn't even know his own father yet. This nearly broke my heart but earned him a threatening scowl from uber-gran. She told me being a father was a "piece of p***"; that her own kids had three different dads and she'd managed without hearing from any of them. The lad shuddered, as if he too was wondering if she'd disposed of a stream of baby-fathers. 

I disagree with her utterly: it's true that a boy can easily father a child, but it takes a man to become a dad. We pressurise our boys to man-up even though this often encourages eternal laddishness. We smile indulgently as little Mikey struts around after his big brothers with his water-gun in the park but tut unsympathetically and from a distance when an older but not wiser Mick confuses assertion and aggression at the football pitch. Is it any wonder that many teenage boys prefer to steer clear of the minefield of open emotions, theirs or anyone else's? 

While society may not actively encourage boys to be promiscuous, the sowing of the male oats can still be seen as an unspoken rite of passage. Determinedly chaste at twenty five, I was considered a scared, silly or at worst frigid female. One of my dearest friends around then, a confident and funny gay man who was a virgin in his early twenties, was simply seen as some kind of freak. Pressurised into sex with his first boyfriend, he was diagnosed with AIDS at the age of twenty three.

Traditionally, little girls are not dissuaded from developing nurturing skills from an early age. Generally, I don't believe we wholeheartedly prepare little boys to expect and embrace fatherhood: toys, games and the media are still very gender-centric. 

The lad at the surgery told me he'd not really ever thought about being a father and had known his girlfriend three months before she fell pregnant. He looked as though he was being punished, although the girl and her mother professed themselves to be over-joyed at the news. His possible mum-in-law-to-be nudged him and said at least he was "in working order" and that the hardest part was over for him. I wanted to tell him that actually being a father could be the biggest, bravest, brightest part of him. I wish I had: I wish someone had told him long before he was pulled into an antenatal clinic with his laces undone and feeling that his future was all stitched up against him.

"By the time a man realises that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he's wrong."

(Charles Wadsworth)

 

"For a New Father"

(John O'Donohue)

As the shimmer of dawn transforms the night

Into a blush of color futured with delight,

The eyes of your new child awaken in you

A brightness that surprises your life.

Since the first stir of its secret becoming,

The echo of your child has lived inside you,

Strengthening through all its night of forming

Into a sure pulse of fostering music.

How quietly and gently that embryo-echo

Can womb in the bone of a man

And foster across the distance to the mother

A shadow-shelter around this fragile voyage.

Now as you behold your infant, you know

That this child has come from you and to you;

You feel the full force of a father' desire

To protect and shelter.

Perhaps for the first time

There awakens in you

A sense of your own mortality.

May your heart rest in the grace of the gift

And you sense how you have been called

Inside the dream of this new destiny.

May you be gentle and loving,

Clear and sure.

May you trust in the unseen providence

That has chosen you all to be a family.

May you stand sure on your ground

And know that every grace you need

Will unfold before you

Like all the mornings of your life

"This is my most important role. If I fail at this, I fail at everything."

(Actor Mark Wahlberg)

"Father and Son" Ronan Keating and Yusuf Islam

"It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was."
(Anne Sexton)

"Home Beyond"

"My soul tells me, we were 

all broken from the same name

less heart, and every living thing 

wakes with a piece of that original 

heart aching its way into blossom."

(From "Below Our Strangeness",  by Mark Nepo)

Today is my Mum's birthday, no matter that she passed from this seen world two and a half years gone by. She is eternally my mother; it remains part of her history and therefore of mine that she was born on 6th April. The final few months of staggered steps and struggled breath and the death she so feared were only a brief darkening in the long life that was often vivid and loud with talk and laughter and interest. 

I wear remembrances of her everyday; mainly something of her jewellery, but often now a hint of her smile or rueful pursed lips. In the same way, I wear my father's only watch and carry the little cross he kept in his wallet, just as I seem to wear his big heart on my own coat sleeve. A friend told me it was mawkish to carry on celebrating birthdays and carrying such keepsakes; that she advised all people who had lost family or close friends to simply "move on". I couldn't agree less.  Ancestry and kinship help to define us; understanding where I'm from and how I came to be me makes sense of where I'm headed and the surest way to get there.
I miss my parents everyday, but a birthday remains a celebration of all that person was; the humour, the passion and the achievements. Mum loved to get cards from my sister and me, she loved little treats; she tutted at the "waste" of cut flowers but loved to receive them all the same. So today, there will be cards and yellow flowers by the stone that bears her name.  I've brought some bright kerria into the house from my garden; it was growing uncoaxed when I moved in, just as it always appeared with the spring at Mum's house. I've been playing Newton Faulkner today: I always say that I introduced Mum to "Dream Catch Me" and other songs of his, but of course my parents and the ancestors were there beyond all things introduced.
I've also often said that my Mum was my anchor and Dad my compass. May you always find the fond and familiar to celebrate and to navigate the course your soul remembers.

"A Beauty Blessing"

As stillness in stone to silence is wed

May your heart be somewhere a God might dwell.

As a river flows in ideal sequence

May your soul discover time in presence.

As the moon absolves the dark of resistance

May thought-light console your mind with brightness.

As the breath of light awakens colour

May the dawn anoint your eyes with wonder.

As spring rain softens the earth with surprise

May your winter places be kissed by light.

As the ocean dreams to the joy of dance

May the grace of change bring you elegance.

As clay anchors a tree in light and wind

May your outer life grow from peace within.

As twilight fills night with bright horizons

May beauty await you at home beyond.

(John O'Donohue)

(All photos: Gigi, album)

"Dream Catch Me"  Newton Faulkner

The Mother

A great deal has been written about the circle of life and dependency; how with age the parent becomes the child and the child the parent. I wrote this poem a couple of years ago, when my mother was still alive but increasingly frail. My sister and I were worried that she wasn't the woman she had been, her fragility was unfamiliar and even alien to us. But no lapse of memory or loss of capability dilutes parenthood. I realised you can never truly lose that sense of having been carried or nurtured; of having been mothered, or fathered. We really are all somebody's baby, no matter how old. It makes some sense that when you look into a very aged face you may glimpse the infant within us all.

I was very upset when I wrote this poem, but now I find it comforting. I know I disappointed my mother in many ways; now I understand that every obstacle I overcome, every sadness I comprehend and every joy I appreciate is as much a tribute to my mother and father as my first steps.

"Mother"

There's a weakness within,

almost malignantly foetal;

it rips us at the middle.

Mother I am so much yours, 

more than flesh and blood;

my thumb-print is on the photo

you signed to my father as "sweetheart".

I kick at your sides even now,

your labour is long overdue;

now my kisses unsettle your hairspray,

but you birth me everyday.

                                                Gigi

Little women

"Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim." 

(Nora Ephron)

(All photos: Gigi, album)

Mum before she married.

I was quite distressed today when my sister told me my Mother's Day card for Mum hadn't arrived in Hampshire. This will be our third Mothering Sunday without her. It may seem silly to send a card to be placed at your Mum's grave, but I've always sent her one; don't think I ever missed a year. Like her, I'm big on cards, giving as well as receiving. You can often write out what sticks in the throat and crushes the heart and the written word is a memorable testament to a feeling. Hopefully, my card will arrive on Monday.
I've been thinking I should post a little testament to my Mum as the beautiful, funny, vibrant woman that she was. Mum had a strong femininity that wrapped itself around her motherhood like a Harris Tweed cloak; reassuringly abrasive, irrefutably warm and seemingly indestructible. The photos here span most of Mum's adult life as a wife, mother and early widow, but she herself never stopped being her mother's daughter. 

I never knew Granny Barbara, but Mum talked about her a lot. Like Mum, she was a petite and coquettish woman who loved things with bows and trims, in spite of her harsh and sparse upbringing. A Glaswegian Presbyterian by birth, she left her clan to marry my grandfather; by all accounts a surly Norn Irish Catholic widower, a farmer with no land of his own. 

Barbara was initially ostracised by the other Catholic women in their part of rural Antrim. They threw eggs at her front door and refused to sit with her in church: very Christian. She won them over with a gentle nature that belied her resilience; and with her gift for "knowing": they would come to her to reveal their fortunes apparently; also, not strictly Christian! She must have said something right because the egg throwing stopped and she was embraced by the women and the parish.

Mum's feistiness seems to have been inherited from her father; her quiet determination from her mother. She often referred to her as "poor Mum", but Granny was rich in the admiration and respect she invoked in her own four daughters. There was a fifth, youngest child, a son called William; also his mother's boy, to the anxiety of his father. My grandfather was a commanding but demanding man. Barbara bore her son when she was fifty, which may seem an unthinkable age, but she was by then very much a Catholic Mother. 

Her health deteriorated after her last pregnancy, although she lived to see her girls bear their own children in England before she eventually succumbed to cancer. She encouraged all her children to fly the nest and make something of themselves, even though at the time this essentially meant leaving Antrim and leaving her on her own with a weary but volatile husband. She eventually came to England in her final illness: my Dad helped to nurse her. Practically disinherited by his own family in Belgium, she became a mum to him too.

My Mum often grieved that my sister and I are childless; for me, it hasn't been a choice and it's my one big regret in life. I like nurturing creatures: it feels empowering rather than compromising.  I often say that I felt orphaned when Mum followed my Dad two and a half years ago, but I will never feel motherless, whichever day my card is delivered.

It's funny how the circles turn: Mum always said that Granny loved the song "Que Sera, Sera" and would sing it while she did the family laundry. Mum loved it too; I look at photos of her before she became my mother and she reminds me of Doris Day, who I find adorable. The song features in the old Hitchcock film "The Man Who Knew Too Much", also starring my Jimmy Stewart. Somewhere I have the film on DVD; I warble this now, sometimes when hoovering. I hope I've inherited much from some strong minded, big hearted little women; I hope I don't waste it. What will be, will be.

When Tony and Josie got married...

Mum with her own mother, my Scots-Irish Granny, and with her first baby; my sister.

With me when I was about eighteen years old. Please ignore floral jacket.

Mum in Paris with me and my sister, the year Princess Diana was killed there. Mum's in her favorite shade of red; my sister appears to be wearing a deceased animal with shoulder pads. I am honestly wearing a skirt, albeit a very short one, and black nail polish; Jesus, Mary and Joseph.

Mum went to Australia in her later years, when her health was already failing and she depended on a walking stick; she loved it there, later encouraging me to go and fall in love with the continent too.

My sister and I with Mum on her birthday, nine years ago.

This is one of the last photos taken of Mum, a few months before she died. It was taken on my birthday, almost exactly three years ago. Already very frail and ill here, she died little more than six months later.

"What would men be without women? Scarce, sir...mighty scarce." 

(Mark Twain)

"Que Sera Sera"  Doris Day

"Taking joy in living is a woman’s best cosmetic." 

(Rosalind Russell) 

"You educate a man; you educate a man. You educate a woman; you educate a generation." 

(Brigham Young) 

"I am a woman; my country is the whole world." 

(Virginia Woolf)