Tag: Family

Me, Myself, The Snob

I was brought up to be a Snob. Not with any real conscious intention, but just because that’s the way my family’s beliefs lay.

I believed that people who said ‘hay’atch’ instead of ‘aitch’ for the letter H were intellectually inferior; I believed that those who called supper ‘tea’ were common, likewise if napkins were called serviettes. I believed there were strata in society between humans and that our family was thankfully nearer the top than bottom.

I believed this because generation after generation of my family had all believed something similar for far too long.

At 18, I left my privileged echo chamber of private school (and I say this not without gratitude for the experiences and opportunities it provided) and fell into the real world. Not the real real world mind you. Public relations could hardly be called that, but a more culturally diverse environment than I was used to for sure.

In this world, the two A levels I had scraped were deemed major qualifications rather than the desperate failures by my family and academic peers. I was mixing with people whose backgrounds afforded me a window into lifestyles and upbringings that contrasted drastically to my own (and I, who thought I came from the broken side of the family, the rough edge of posh).

And then I dived further… over the years I waitressed and travelled and met more and more people who showed me over and over again how ridiculously narrow my familial belief system had been; how I had been raised to judge people by meaningless standards instead of learning to look into their hearts and meet them human to human.

I see that my family had no malice in their own judgements, they were products of their own upbringing, a continuation of the lineage of pomp and snobbery and done with as much kindness and love as those beliefs can afford.

But now I am entering a new era, a time and age where my own children are beginning their natural formation of opinions about the world around them and I am constantly checking in with myself as to the values I am modelling. Am I carrying old, unhelpful, unkind, judgmental beliefs that I am passing on to my kids or am I shifting the familial system to compassion, acceptance, difference and diversity? I know what I wish to model, but I’m sure my parents thought similarly too, I bet they thought they were raising progressive kids through their own shifts of self awareness and yet I feel their burden of unnecessary opinion heavy on my back.

I feel reactive and triggered by any form of superiority, be it qualifications, age or otherwise. I know now that the humblest and wisest of voices can come from any direction, without a cloak of ego announcing their arrival.

I wonder how my children will view me in another 30 years, what they will perceive to be antiquated notions and what they will choose to do differently.

As I say to my clients, as long as we are moving forward, no matter how slowly, we are still moving forward.

On, on I step, smashing my institutionalised snobbery, one day at a time.

The Phoenix Decade

It has started. The Phoenix Decade.

Our 40’s are a time typified by the clichéd ‘midlife crisis’: fast cars, affairs, career change, divorce and unexpected death.

Sadly, our society seems to sneer and judge a lot of these changes rather than embrace this as a natural life transition and of course that judgement comes from the fear of ‘us’ and ‘them’, separating the shadow and placing it in someone else’s court. But the truth is, our 40’s are the time for our spiritual renaissance.

Biologically, most of us will be coming to the end of the early years of parenting, the dance of mating and conception taking up so much of our 20’s and 30’s.  And with those elements ‘in the bag’, there opens up a space in our lives to observe ourselves in greater depth. Our children and loved ones will be offering mirrors to the darkest parts of our souls through their triggers and button pushing and it is here that we have the greatest opportunity to dig out the roots of our deepest wounds and raise them up into the light.

This is the decade of philosophical thinking, of reflecting back on our own upbringing, how we might do things similarly or differently; exploring the aggrievements that have entrenched reactions and personality traits that may no longer serve us into true maturity and adulthood. It is the golden ticket for change and transformation, to allow your past to die and your renewed and invigorated self to rise from the ashes.

As I look around my peers, I am seeing sickness that is shaking souls to their very cores – cancers, strokes, depression; I am seeing relationships flounder and stumble with what appear to be unbridgeable chasms of disconnect; I am seeing denial where materialistic choices are covering the voids of love and connection.  For me these are all symbolic gifts to face the Phoenix.

For myself I know I was close to great sickness. The levels of stress and discordance that I was carrying in relation to my mother were putting a burden upon my system that was unsustainable. Despite my healthy lifestyle, organic nutrition and conscious living, I could still feel the poison of unhappiness in my body. I had early warning signs singing through my nervous system, twinges, aches, pains, exhaustion. That was why it was so necessary for me to face that relationship head on and take the space I needed from it.  I could have sat in the dynamic continuing our mutual unspoken discomfort and pain, I could have pretended it didn’t really exist, it wasn’t surely that important, but I didn’t want to die. And that was what that choice felt to me, that my body could no longer carry such a consistently high level of stress, something would eventually crumble.

So I am walking into this decade of the Phoenix with my eyes wide open. I want to face the shadows that will twist and turn out of the ashes; I want to address what needs to be explored.  My husband and I will look into the fragile places of our love and relationship and dig out the dirt and attempt to replace it with light. I will stare into the mirror of my children and try my best to listen to their messages of reflection, to own what is mine and to return what is theirs.  I don’t imagine that this decade is going to be my easiest, moreover because I am also having to witness my dear friends as they uncover their own phoenixes and the joy and suffering that that can bring.  But I am also full of the excitement and possibility that this decade of renewal offers. I am excited to release the shackles of my past and to step fully present (with the best of my intention) into the second half of my life.

I will rise out of the ashes and I will soar.

 

Maverick

This week I watched ‘The Darkest Hour’ with Gary Oldman playing Winston Churchill. One of the core pieces that I loved within this film was how clear it was that Churchill was an emotionally messy individual; by all accounts an alcoholic, perhaps without financial savvy, fractious, demanding AND alongside this a brilliant mind, a wordsmith, family man, and the one who determined to save Great Britain from Adolf Hitler.

He was a maverick: ‘an unorthodox or independent-minded person’

When my brothers and I had to decide which three words we would have on my father’s gravestone, I pushed for Maverick. I can’t even remember now what the other two words are but I knew I wanted a word to honour his fuck-ups and his genius all at once. That is who he was to me.

What I saw from the film was that it took the character of a Maverick to save us from invasion, it took that single minded belief, that ability to walk against the tide, and a little bit of ‘crazy’. I watched the film and I saw my father.

My father did terrible things, he sexually molested me, he paid little attention to the emotional needs of his children, he was frightening in his temper. And he did wonderful things too. He transformed people’s lives both through his psychiatry practice and his generosity in bringing in to his home those in need, including the homeless. He invented psychometric computer programs that are still used globally today (he just forgot to patent them!). His mind was brilliant and broken.

I was not really able to see my father this way until after he died, until then our relationship was just too painful. In watching ‘The Darkest Hour’, I was reminded how important Mavericks are in the world and how an individual can be two parts simultaneously – dark and light.

There is a cleansing going on in our western society right now, where anyone who has ever faltered, made a mistake, royally fucked up or, worst case, been severely abusive is being silenced and shut down. I’ve seen on social media something to the effect of: ‘it doesn’t matter what good they have done, abusive behaviour wipes all of that away’. Does it? Should it?

I just don’t know if life is this back and white, that right and wrong is so clear cut. What if someone can have blurred and damaging boundaries and also create magic in the world? My relationship with my mother is super toxic but she is also a wonderful friend to others. I worked with Jamie Oliver once upon a time and I personally found him difficult (others found him inspiring) but I also hugely respect his drive to change the health of our children through food. My experience of someone can be diametrically opposite to someone else’s. I can also dislike one aspect of someone and appreciate another. One person can experience abuse another healing at the hands of the same person. So how does this tally? How do we bring abusers or fault makers to justice without cleansing our society of the inspiration and necessary change that they sometimes bring?

It makes me wonder how Einstein, Marie Curie, Van Gogh, Michael Angelo, Mother Theresa, Alexander Fleming, Emmeline Pankhurst, Jesus or Mary Magdalene would fair on social media today? Would we celebrate their achievements or chastise them for their failings?

How I reached this place with my father, of being able to respect his achievements whilst not accepting his abuse, was through conversation. Before he died we spoke about my accusation of molestation, he said his mother had done the same to him and there wasn’t anything wrong with that. It wasn’t an apology, it wasn’t really even an admission; soulfully, he still had a long way to go before being accountable to his actions. Yet from that conversation I could understand that he had been taught as a child that this behaviour was ok, that to look at it from my perspective (and indeed much of society’s) was something quite unfathomable to his psyche. He was acting from trauma. I have compassion for that.

And before I am shouted down from the rooftops, yes I still believe abuse must be called to account and appropriately dealt with. But that is the extreme end of our current cleansing and there are multiple shades of grey in between for all the characters and individuals of the world.

I am a flawed and loving person, which part do you see?

Alone, at Last.

Last week, my husband took my beautiful children camping for two nights. It was an adventure that my husband needed to explore with them, without me there. A moment for his relationships to strengthen and bond. And the kids were super excited, camping is their absolute favourite!

But it wasn’t only a big adventure for them but also for me. It was the first time I had ever had a night away from my children and I wasn’t sure how I would feel about it.

Certainly in the lead up to the trip, I ran through a gamut of emotions from terror, excitement, anxiety, curiosity, sadness and joy. The day before, as they erected the tent in the garden to try it all out and jumped around with the unfettered joy that only exists in those depths of childhood, I felt tears and rage at not being a part of this. And woven into those intense feelings, was the knowing of how important a moment this was for them and for my husband. With that, I bade then farewell with conscious lightness, ease and blessings. Wishing them the happiest of journeys and discoveries together.

Then I turned back into my house and embraced my alone time, at last, over 8 years since the birth of my first child. 52 hours of me.

I loved it. I loved walking into town at my own speed; I loved wandering around the shops without a schedule to return to; I loved coming home and turning lights on that would otherwise have woken the babes and reading a book before bed without using a torch. I loved waking at 8am (!) just as my body asked rather than being dragged from slumber by pokes, prods and requests. There was so much that I loved, yet I missed them every minute too. And I realised how much I adore their company even with the bickers and the ‘why’s’ and the pestering because mostly they bring just the extraordinary joy of innocence, discovery and love. And whilst I loved my 52 hours I would happily have swapped it for 52 hours with them.

I know that these 8 years have flown and so will the next 8 and soon after that they will be leaving. I have plenty of time to be alone in the years ahead and instead I want to be witness to as much as I can of their childhood. Yes, I will bless them in their adventures, I will not hold them back in my arms when then want to fly, but whilst they are here, I will savour every precious minute: happy, challenging, sad or funny. Each one matters to me before I really am alone, at last.
** The picture are the gifts they brought me. Heart shaped stones and one they found with a letter F, for ‘family’.