I was thinking of maybe being positive for a change, but then as I went about my daily doings the title of this instalment kept flashing through my head. I was thinking along the lines of picnics and children frolicking through meadows in this majestic and well deserved sun. But all the while, as these fleeting images were conjuring up fervent images of joy and hope, all that was going through my brain was the actuality of social misfits.
I am one. Born of one aspirational mother of married "posh" decent, whose mother abandoned her children to successfully snare an actual (papers have declared it) Tycoon, and one father who by marrying my mother was moved right up into the dizzy heights of extreme wealth, notoriety of bastard proportions from the peaceful / tough realms of a bullying father and an over compensatory mother from the badlands of Isleworth and Sunbury. A marriage that was fraught with warring families and obvious social disparity that ended in acrimonious divorce. Not the best of starts in life, then the death of my mother when I was 13, apparently lead to me being labelled as a homeless 13 year old by one knowing psychologist. With all this baggage, is a wonder that I even dared have children, as we very much know that the apple never falls far from the tree, but nature tricked me and provided me with the two most precious things a life could ever call for, our daughters.
Anyhow, digression is my forte, as we know. The other day I was semi invited and duly followed, into the, as I saw it, Dragon's Den of mothers from my daughters school. I am, as I seem to have mentioned in almost every piece, a total and utter social spastic, for want of a better word. I become paralysed when meeting people, unless it's an exceptionally good day and the person I am meeting is a little bit more on a back foot than me. I become weirdly depressed and heavy of heart and what is tantamount to a fart comes out of my well educated mouth. People around me, particularly the person introducing me, get uncomfortable and it's not long before they cast me aside and wait until the time that I have become so swollen with angst that I leave. True story. This is what my children have to follow, this is the example that I have seen I set. What hope do they have of becoming confident, well rounded individuals, when there mother is an ellipse, a bad one at that, of inadequacies and baggage that cannot be shifted?
I hate the school playground at drop off, and weirdly enough, so does my daughter. I try very hard to put a brave face on it, but those farts just line up at the exit to my mouth and all I really want to do is dump and run. But I can't, my daughter won't let me, because she too has farts where words should be. I tell her, I think, as a vain attempt to get her to where I am still trying to get, that "remember, you are 10 foot tall and eat lions for breakfast." I make her repeat that mantra, probably also a little bit so that we can waste time in the hope that the bell will go and she can run into the classroom where everything is in the teacher's control.
She is amazing my eldest, and when on form she commands her little sister and her peers as efficiently and admirably as any dictator, so it's there, as it is with most of us, but at those times when it's sort of most important it eludes her, and me, and we're left farting on the corner like the apple that fell not so far from this tree.
My youngest has harnessed all of these neuroses and pulled them around her like a Rhinoceros skin and she just barges through many situations and completely switches off if something is being said or done that she doesn't like. Again, not what the handbook would tell one to do, but it's very hard to veer her out of this, because when talking to her, right after you say her name, she tuned into a better life where things happen that she is fully involved in.
My children, as I have mentioned, as I am sure yours are too, are the most precious things the world has ever provided me with, but it's my pollarded tree branches that are causing the apples to wobble, and eventually land, if not right under, then certainly within spitting distance of my arbre. With this in mind therefore, I need to get to the bottom of the baggage and check some of it in surely, but where the hell to start? Old fashioned are these misfits, we want new world confidence at all occasions, no?
I am one. Born of one aspirational mother of married "posh" decent, whose mother abandoned her children to successfully snare an actual (papers have declared it) Tycoon, and one father who by marrying my mother was moved right up into the dizzy heights of extreme wealth, notoriety of bastard proportions from the peaceful / tough realms of a bullying father and an over compensatory mother from the badlands of Isleworth and Sunbury. A marriage that was fraught with warring families and obvious social disparity that ended in acrimonious divorce. Not the best of starts in life, then the death of my mother when I was 13, apparently lead to me being labelled as a homeless 13 year old by one knowing psychologist. With all this baggage, is a wonder that I even dared have children, as we very much know that the apple never falls far from the tree, but nature tricked me and provided me with the two most precious things a life could ever call for, our daughters.
Anyhow, digression is my forte, as we know. The other day I was semi invited and duly followed, into the, as I saw it, Dragon's Den of mothers from my daughters school. I am, as I seem to have mentioned in almost every piece, a total and utter social spastic, for want of a better word. I become paralysed when meeting people, unless it's an exceptionally good day and the person I am meeting is a little bit more on a back foot than me. I become weirdly depressed and heavy of heart and what is tantamount to a fart comes out of my well educated mouth. People around me, particularly the person introducing me, get uncomfortable and it's not long before they cast me aside and wait until the time that I have become so swollen with angst that I leave. True story. This is what my children have to follow, this is the example that I have seen I set. What hope do they have of becoming confident, well rounded individuals, when there mother is an ellipse, a bad one at that, of inadequacies and baggage that cannot be shifted?
I hate the school playground at drop off, and weirdly enough, so does my daughter. I try very hard to put a brave face on it, but those farts just line up at the exit to my mouth and all I really want to do is dump and run. But I can't, my daughter won't let me, because she too has farts where words should be. I tell her, I think, as a vain attempt to get her to where I am still trying to get, that "remember, you are 10 foot tall and eat lions for breakfast." I make her repeat that mantra, probably also a little bit so that we can waste time in the hope that the bell will go and she can run into the classroom where everything is in the teacher's control.
She is amazing my eldest, and when on form she commands her little sister and her peers as efficiently and admirably as any dictator, so it's there, as it is with most of us, but at those times when it's sort of most important it eludes her, and me, and we're left farting on the corner like the apple that fell not so far from this tree.
My youngest has harnessed all of these neuroses and pulled them around her like a Rhinoceros skin and she just barges through many situations and completely switches off if something is being said or done that she doesn't like. Again, not what the handbook would tell one to do, but it's very hard to veer her out of this, because when talking to her, right after you say her name, she tuned into a better life where things happen that she is fully involved in.
My children, as I have mentioned, as I am sure yours are too, are the most precious things the world has ever provided me with, but it's my pollarded tree branches that are causing the apples to wobble, and eventually land, if not right under, then certainly within spitting distance of my arbre. With this in mind therefore, I need to get to the bottom of the baggage and check some of it in surely, but where the hell to start? Old fashioned are these misfits, we want new world confidence at all occasions, no?
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