If you swallow a pip...

When I was younger I thought that eating an apple pip might just cause a tree to grow in my stomach; something that seemed entirely possible and utterly magical at the time. One day I picked the pips out of my apple and also collected the pips from my siblings' apples. There were five of us, so there were a lot of pips. I ate every pip. But nothing happened. This experience led me to conclude that trees can't grow inside humans, although it appears that plants can. Here is the story of Ron Sevden who had a pea plant growing in his lung.
As an adult, the thought of a tree growing inside me is less appealing. However, this summer I've enjoyed growing lots of plants and trees outside in my garden, where they belong.
Here are photographs of some of the things I've grown.

The Tate Modern

After a couple of days in London we visited the Tate Modern this afternoon before we travelled home on the train. Everyone liked the surrealists and the visit was going swimmingly until we went up to level 5 to see 'States of Flux' and 'Energy and Process'.

It wasn't long before there were mutterings about The Emperor's New Clothes. While I was trying to explain why a pile of clothes might be art, (I was struggling - how do you argue with 'If I did that in my room, would you think it was art, mummy?') my youngest boy went off to find a stool.

We came across him a few minutes later, sitting on his stool, staring at a pair of doors with 'no entry' written on them. As people came into the room where he was sitting they didn't look at the art, they looked at the little boy who was looking at the doors. He probably only sat there for a minute, but a small crowd congregated behind him during that time, pointing and laughing quietly. When he realised he was being watched he stood up, folded his stool and, just as he had observed other people doing, shook his head in apparent wonder saying, 'fabulous, fabulous'.

                                          The 'fabulous' no entry "exhibit."

Of course, there are 'fabulous' artworks at the Tate Modern. One of my favourites is Jackson Pollock's 'Summertime' a painting which I first learned about in an Open University dvd a couple of years ago: it was wonderful to finally see it in real life.

The Famous Five and Grasmere.

Perhaps it’s my childhood diet of ‘The Famous Five’ that has led to our family romps around the countryside in search of adventure. Half term saw us exploring Grasmere in the Lake District with some friends.

We had an enormous picnic by Easdale Tarn. Ridiculous amounts of food and fresh air – we were just like the Famous Five, minus the lashings of ginger beer as the children don’t like it. The scenery was fabuous.

On the way back the children found a pool at the base of a waterfall and stripped down to their underwear for a swim.

I sat on a rock feeling nostalgic, not for my childhood I realised – I don’t remember ever stripping off and swimming at the base of a waterfall – but for the parallel childhood that I inhabited in my imagination, a childhood in which there were daring adventures to be had.

People hiking on the path above the waterfall paused to wave and smile at the children. It was one of those afternoons that you want to fix in memory so that it can be revisited and enjoyed again and again.

Hating cake

Recently I’ve been messing about with some poetry. It’s probably not a good time for messing about as I’m supposed to be finalising my MA manuscript, however it’s been fun to write in a more compact way. I’ve written several daft poems about parenthood including this one:-

Life after Kids

It’s life.

Grim.

And not

as we know it.

Yesterday I spent the morning making a birthday cake for one of my boys. I told him that he could have whatever he wanted (mistake number 1) and that he could print off some cakes from the internet (mistake number 2) for me to look at. He picked the fabulous cakes here and here (second cake down). I didn’t explain that his cake wouldn’t have three or four or even five tiers. I took it for granted that he was imagining something on a slightly smaller scale. It took me all morning to make the cake below. I thought it was quite good. It had a monster as requested and was also castley as specified.

‘I hate it,’ he said.

Initially I thought he was joking.

‘You can’t be serious?’ I said, like John McEnroe.

‘I hate it,’ he repeated.

I was subsequently torn between the desire to tell him not to be such an ungrateful toad and the urge to pick up the grey lump of it and chuck it in the bin.

I’ve been trying very hard over a number of years not to censor the children at home. It seems that there has to be one place in the world where they can say exactly how they feel. I find however that I don’t like their honesty. I find I would prefer a polite lie, the kind of lie that I use when thanking them for potted plants on Mother’s Day.

I stood next to the cake, prickling with disappointment. His face quivered, wobbling around various expressions, searching for the best one to strike – somewhere between anger and surprise at having been so simultaneously brave and rude.

He shrugged defensively.

‘Oh well,’ I said.

‘Oh well,’ he said.

Next year I'm going to Tesco.

Not so itsy-bitsy bikinis

It was good to see Primark recall their padded bikinis recently. I'm sure no-one would dream of selling padded swimming trunks to boys of seven.

Perhaps Primark (and other retailers) would like to revise some of the writing on their t-shirts for two year olds next.

Dan Garavelli writing in the Scotsman maintains that, 'Even more damaging than the sexual aspect of many fashion lines, in my opinion, is the way they are designed to limit girls' horizons; to present them as a bunch of silly bimbos. So there are T-shirts with slogans such as 'I left my brain in my locker', 'Future Footballer's Wife' or 'Catwalk Ready'.

I don’t want my little girl parading about in a bikini stuffed with padding. Equally, I don’t want her going through life with her brain stuffed with fluff.

Having 'a couple of children' at 14 is not a good idea.

For me, 1990 was a year spent humming Sinead O’Connor’s Nothing Compares to You and Maria McKee’s Show Me Heaven. It was a year of homework and daydreaming about an as yet hard to imagine adulthood. More significantly, it was the year that Nelson Mandela was released from prison and the year of poll-tax demonstrations. It was the year that Iraq invaded Kuwait and the year Margaret Thatcher resigned. It was also the year that I first fell in love. In 1990 I was fourteen and according to Hilary Mantel’s comments in the telegraph, ready to have a baby. Mantel insists: ‘I was perfectly capable of setting up and running a home when I was 14, and if, say, it had been ordered differently, I might have thought “Now is the time to have a couple of children and when I am 30 I will go back and I'll get my PhD.”’

After I’d finished laughing, I had the following thoughts. In order to begin a PhD aged 30, Mantel’s 14 year old self would need to complete GCSEs, A Levels, an undergraduate degree and a postgraduate degree. That’s 8 years of education to catch up on while simultaneously raising a child/children. Fortunately, when I started having my children aged 21, I already had GCSEs and A Levels, leaving me with just 4 years of education to catch up on before beginning the PhD: lucky me, I had a head start on Mantel’s 14 year old -easy peasy then - NOT (as 14 year olds like to say).

The first decade of motherhood rattled my brain into a wibbly jelly of tiredness, a sort of mummy miasma that made it difficult to read and even think at times: dividing myself into four (see left) was tricky at best. No author that I have come across portrays the stultifying effects of motherhood better than Helen Simpson. Perhaps Mantel might benefit from reading some of Simpson’s short fiction. Simpson’s collection of stories entitled ‘Hey Yeah Right Get a Life’ captures all the frustration and demands of motherhood in beautiful, observant prose. Simpson also captures the wonderful moments: 'he climbed into bed and curled into her…gazed into her eyes and heaved a happy sigh. They lay looking at each other, breathing in each other’s sleepy scent; his eyes were guileless, unguarded and intent, and he gave a little occasional beatific smile'.

Aside from the personal cost of early motherhood and the resultant juggling of aspirations and familial responsibilities, there is often a physical cost associated with early child bearing. USAID works to provide education and contraception to adolescents in the developing world. Research shows that: ‘Increasing the age at first birth for a woman will increase her chances of survival. Currently, pregnancy and childbirth complications are the leading cause of death for women 15 to 19 years old in developing countries. Children born to mothers in their twenties are fifty percent lower risk of dying by their first birthday than children born to teenaged mothers. Young mothers are not often physically mature enough to deliver a baby, leaving her and her child at risk for death or disabilities from obstructed labor, fistula, premature birth, or low birthweight.’

In addition to these dangers, teenage mothers are more likely to face a life of poverty than older mothers. In a BBC news article, Hilary Pannack of the sex education charity Straight Talking said that, ‘Teenage parents statistically are much more likely to become parents of children who themselves become teenage parents. That means generations of child poverty, which we need desperately to tackle.’

1990 was the year I selected my GCSE options, it was the year that hurricane force winds killed 39 people in England and Wales and fortunately, it was not the year that I gave birth to my first child – in 1990 I was too busy being a child, which is how I believe it should be.

(Here is a short story by Helen Simpson.)

Hurrah for Tomboys!

Sometimes life isn’t funny the first time around, that’s why it helps to write about it. In the story that I was working on last week I wrote about a little girl who wore swimming trunks to a swimming lesson and then wished that she hadn’t. The swimming trunk part of the story was actually true. Alice did wear a pair of her brother’s trunks to a swimming lesson.

With three older brothers it is probably not surprising that Alice has turned into something of a tomboy. She steadfastly refuses to wear skirts or dresses and given half a chance she would have her hair cut like a boy – if it wasn’t so wispy and fine I might just let her. It seems that she is part of a dying breed. Stephanie Theobald pays tribute to tomboys in her piece in the Guardian, ‘Hurrah for Tomboys!’ Theobald laments the fact that ‘Nickelodeon recently redesigned the Dora doll to make her more "feminine" (read "profitable"). Instead of being equipped with tools, map and backpack, her new accessories include halter-tops, tiaras and glittery hairbrushes.’ This article discusses the trend towards accessories and clothes like those now worn by Dora and takes a look at the clothes that famous little girls are wearing. It made me feel pretty good about the tracksuits, jeans, t-shirts and hoodies that Alice chooses to spend her weekends and holidays wearing.

Once she was standing on the poolside, Alice changed her mind about wearing her brother’s trunks. As a parent I hate situations in which I can’t make things better. We had to settle for an experience that probably comes under the ‘learning a lesson’ category: it’s okay to wear your brother’s trunks at the beach where you don’t know anyone, but in the pool with all the other girls wearing their pink frilly stuff you might feel a bit daft was probably the lesson learned. And yet if she wants to wear the blasted trunks again I’ll let her. I'll just remember to pack her (blue, frill-less) costume as well.

Connected by cake

I made two birthday cakes this week. As I made them I wondered about the tradition of birthday cakes. It’s thought that the history of birthday cakes can be traced back to the ancient Greeks who took round or moon shaped honey cakes and bread to the temple of Artemis. Artemis was the goddess of the moon. Candles were placed on the cakes to make them glow like the moon. I thought about this as we turned off the lights and waited for the candles to be blown out; it was pleasant to think that there was a connection between us and the humans of a couple of thousand years ago .

I am aware of wanting to make these sorts of connections for my children. I tell them about things I used to enjoy, things their grandparents used to enjoy and I hope that they will enjoy them too. Invariably though, they aren’t especially interested. Alice had a party today. I had a large bag of prizes and a long list of games to play. Within five minutes of arriving the children were playing Let’s Dance on the wii and nobody wanted to pin a tail on a donkey or sleep like a lion (quietly, apparently). When it was time for the children to go home the prize bag was still full and I wondered if they had really enjoyed themselves. Then I remembered my Dad telling me the story of how he used to buy a bag of sweets with his pocket money and make it last all week. He probably told me the story one day as I was scoffing a whole bag of sweets at once. His story was like a pill, remonstration coated in reminiscence. I found myself doing the same thing this afternoon: when I was your age we used to play games at parties...

The search for connections is likely a symptom of my age; an effort to make the children’s relatives three-dimensional, to give them a back-story, to search for common ground that links us together. It’s quite likely that at some time in the future one of my children, as a grown up, will stand at a birthday party and announce that when grandma was younger she used to play a game where everyone had to sleep like lions. And the observation may well be perceived as remonstration disguised as reminiscence. But when the lights are switched off and small faces are lit like lanterns in the glow of the candles, the children will echo the humans of thousands of years ago in an unintended connection that seems unlikely to ever be broken.

The Snowman

It wouldn't be Christmas without seeing the film of The Snowman at least once. When it snowed heavily last week, Neil and I made a snowman. It was nearly midnight and the air was crowded with enormous floating flakes. The children had been trying to build a snowman all week. They had managed to produce several small, scrappy specimens, but nothing resembling the kind of snowman you might want to come to life. When Neil and I realised how much snow was falling, we pulled on coats and gloves and dashed outside to the front garden. We started to build. We thought that we would just keep going until the snowman reached a decent height - slightly bigger than the children's previous efforts. But once we started, it was hard to stop. The snowman got bigger and bigger. Neighbours, looking out of their windows at the snow before going to bed, noticed us in the garden and waved enthusiastically. We waved back and carried on building. Eventually our snowman was big enough. We found him a hat and a scarf. We found him some eyes, a nose and a smile and he was finally complete. He was the first proper snowman I have ever made and I was so pleased that I ran upstairs to wake the children. It was still snowing heavily.

'Who wants to come outside and play in the snow?' I asked them, thinking that they would undoubtedly jump at the opportunity to fling on their wellies and cavort in the garden in the middle of the night.

Four, very cross, sleepy children refused my offer and stumbled back to bed. Two of them deigned to look out of the window at the snowman before burying themselves under their duvets. 'Look,' I said. 'He looks just like The Snowman. Do you think he might come to life?' The snowman stood expectantly, smiling up at us, a lone figure in the unfamiliar, white landscape. The children stared at me for a moment and then exchanged a she's-completely-bonkers-let's-go-back-to-sleep look. I went back downstairs feeling disappointed. I sat in the study and watched the snowman for a while. He really looked to me as if he might come to life - well, if we had made him some legs it might have helped, but his arms and face had possibilities, it seemed. One of the wonderful things about childhood was imagining inanimate objects coming to life: imagining how fabulous it would be to be surprised. The surprises of adulthood tend not to be so fabulous - 'there's how much in my bank account?' - 'there's biro all over the new sofa?' - 'traffic wardens are about on bank holidays?' 

The Snowman contains the best of childhood fantasies: parents who don't wake up - no matter how much noise you make, an inanimate object coming to life, a personal party with Father Christmas and, most wonderful of all, flying. But perhaps the reason why we enjoy these fantasies so much is because they are just that. It's cold in the snow and most children, as I discovered, don't want to get up in the middle of the night to have adventures. They would rather dream about them instead.

When you wish upon a cake

Every year my mum made the Christmas cake in October half term and every year we all got the chance to stir the mixture. As we stirred the dark, fruity, gloop we were told to make a wish. This was the best thing about the Christmas cake, better than eating it or smelling it baking on a long autumn afternoon. Every year my Christmas cake wish came true. In retrospect, this was probably because I wished for things which were already likely to happen, in order to maintain the magic, but still, it seemed to work.

This year I had two helpers as I made our cake. I had to pick the egg shells out of the mixture before it went in the oven. I told both children to make a wish as they held the bowl and stirred. They both struggled to think of anything. I’m not sure that either of them actually did it. In fact I strongly suspect that one of them closed his eyes and counted to five in order to shut me up!

When I opened the Christmas cake up this evening to begin the icing process, I was thinking about wishes. It’s interesting how a wish has to be made. You don’t imagine a wish, or think it or feel it or contemplate it; you make it. The word make implies a degree of creation, formulation, construction. Maybe next year I’ll give the children more than a few seconds warning before the recipie requires their wishes. Perhaps they will compose something magical, given the time. And my wishes as I made our Christmas cake this year? I didn’t make any, it’s been a good year and I’m just hoping that the cake tastes as good as it smells.

She only likes the red ones

My mum’s mum used to tell a story. I’m a bit sketchy on the details. It involved a sick woman, her frantic husband and a telephone call. The woman would not take the pills which had been prescribed. Her husband called the doctor to express his worry. Presumably the doctor asked the husband why his wife would not take the pills. His reply? She only likes the red ones. (It was only recently that I learned that these lines in fact came from a Carry On film and not a real life story - there's a future post about memory somewhere in there!)

That’s it. That’s the story. It’s short and largely insignificant. Unless you were raised in my family. Unless she only likes the red ones was one of the choruses that punctuated your childhood. Enjoyment of all things red was accompanied by the phrase she only likes the red ones: sweets, apples, ketchup, flowers, jelly – anything red and you waited for the accompaniment of she only likes the red ones.
There were other stories, other choruses. They glued us together, shielded us from outsiders in the way that secrets and private jokes do. But the funny thing about she only likes the red ones is that, in my case, it seems to have stuck. Given a free hand with a paint brush I would smother the walls in red. I’d buy a red sofa and red curtains. I’d buy red dining room chairs and a red range cooker. I’d cover the Christmas tree in red decorations. Fortunately for my family, I’ve only managed the latter (see above). But it really does seem that I only like the red ones.


It makes me wonder about the stories I weave through the fabric of my own children’s lives, will they also contain self-fulfilling prophecies?