She walked out of the church and out of our lives, on to the next family who needed her to carry their loved one over into the next world with the love and kindness she had shown Mother. As I turned back to the church and the remaining family, I thanked God for Ann and the presence she had been in our lives.
As I think of my family once again, my daughter comes to mind and I know there are some little people I would like to spend time with before I have to say goodbye.
Chapter 8
The Daughter
I am looking forward to visiting my daughter and my grandchildren, and I feel that familiar sense of happy anticipation begin to rise as I head up their street. The house appears on the left and I see the little tricycle we gave the youngest for Christmas last year sitting in the front garden. Abandoned next to the tricycle on the grass is Teddy, which they will be frantically looking for at bedtime. Little Oliver is in the bad habit of leaving Teddy wherever he goes and forgetting about him. I suppose it is his clever two-year old way of delaying bedtime as the Hunt For Teddy begins every night at 7.15pm. Bath is done, dinner is eaten but where is Teddy? Oliver can’t possibly go to bed without Teddy! ‘Teddy, Teddy!’ the children call, laughing as they look under couches and inside cupboards. The parents look on highly unamused, but that’s part of the game when you are two.
I walk through the house and hear voices coming from the back garden. I walk through the sliding doors and out on to the terrace, and there is little Oliver sitting with my daughter intently playing with Play-Doh. I watch as his chubby little dimpled fingers press into the Play-Doh trying to shape it into something he is not yet capable of making. I admire the look of determination on his face while his eyes sparkle with pure two-year old joy. Anything is possible to him. He has not yet learned the grown-up talent of disbelief. Of talking ourselves out of things. Of telling ourselves we are not capable.
There were many times I told my daughter that she couldn’t do or be something. I was trying to protect her from disappointment, and to prepare her for reality, but actually I was killing off her spirit of curiosity. I was moulding her to life as it currently was rather than teaching her to mould life to what she wanted it to be.
I watch as she encourages Oliver to not give up as signs of frustration start to show. The Play-Doh isn’t doing his bidding and with a grunt of frustration I watch as he throws it to the floor, saying ‘Naughty Play-Doh, bad Play-Doh,’ and crossing his little arms firmly over his body. My daughter gently picks it up and encourages him to try to make something different, but he has had enough and he turns and flees toward the safety of his firetruck. That is something he can control.
I hear squeals of laughter as my granddaughter comes hurtling around the corner of the garden being chased by her father. He catches her and throws her high in the air, both laughing as she lands in his arms and they tumble to the ground together. I am amazed at what a different relationship my daughter has with her husband versus the one I had with my wife. In my day, men were expected to be the breadwinners while the women looked after the children and the household. Never would a man think to take time off to care for the children, but this is exactly what happened after our granddaughter was born.
Alice had suffered from terrible postnatal depression. She had been a high-flying executive when she met her husband. They had both travelled the world for their respective jobs and both were very happy with the arrangement. Then marriage came and the inevitable desire to start a family. She worked right up to the birth, never letting up despite the exhaustion she felt. There were a few scares along the way, but she has always been a stubborn little thing, and despite warnings from the doctor to slow down, she kept up the pace as best she could and gave birth one week early to our beautiful granddaughter.
But things didn’t go as planned. The baby cried a lot and Alice found she was not able to switch off and was barely sleeping. She felt under pressure to be the perfect mother, to get back into shape and to keep living life at the pace to which she had been accustomed before the pregnancy.
She came to our house one day in floods of tears saying that the baby wasn’t feeding properly and that she didn’t know what to do. She looked utterly exhausted and miserable, and I didn’t know what to do for her. I left her with my wife as I believed it was women’s business and I went out for a walk. I felt useless and lost and desperately wanted to help my baby girl but didn’t know how. I never really accepted her growing up. She was always my little girl and someone I felt compelled to protect, and I didn’t know how to relate to her as an adult. I felt we lost some of the closeness we had had when she was a child as I wasn’t able to adjust to her leaving childhood. I struggled with the idea of her dating boys and becoming a wife and someone else’s sweetheart.
The day she announced she was pregnant was a strange one for me. It clearly marked the end of her childhood in my eyes, despite the fact she was thirty-five, and while I was excited at the idea of becoming a grandfather, I felt the ground move out from underneath me that day.
When I first held my tiny granddaughter in my arms I cried. I quickly wiped away the tears as I didn’t want anyone to see, but I felt this intense connection to her, and felt those same feelings I had felt when I had first held Alice as a newborn baby.
When Alice was born, I had not been allowed in the birthing room. I waited anxiously with the rest of the new dads in the waiting room, nervously pacing as we heard the next round of screams and grunts. As the nurse would bring a tightly wrapped bundle to the waiting room window, all heads would snap up wondering if this was ours, and then most heads would bow again, staring at empty palms.
Alice didn’t cry when she was born, the nurse said. She had turned blue and had to be taken away for resuscitation. She sure made up for it in those first few days of life, but what a way to start! The nurse finally brought a tiny pink bundle to the waiting room, asked for Mr Jones and angled the bundle down towards me so I could catch the first glimpse of my daughter. As the nurse left with the baby, the other men in the room shook my hand and patted me on the back with mumbles of congratulations, each of us looking just as lost and proud and choked up on emotion as the next. I sat back down and waited until the nurse came to tell me that I could see my wife.
Babies weren’t given straight to the mother in those days, and while I see the benefits of the way it is done today, when I think about what my daughter went through when she became a mother, I do question whether we have gone too much the other way. My wife remained in the hospital for another three days while the nurses took care of Alice, even encouraging her to go out to dinner with me on the last night before she went home. There wasn’t that expectation for an immediate bond with the baby that Alice found so hard when it was her time to become a mother.
When a child is born, a parent is born, and the transition from corporate high-flyer to mother was a hard one for Alice. She accepted this and was able to reach out for help, and luckily for her was able to get through it. But it opened my eyes to things I took for granted with my own wife. I noticed how much more involved Alice’s husband was with the kids, and as I stand here watching him now, I feel a wave of gratitude for how things have changed.
I look over at my granddaughter in her princess dress and tiara and wonder what she will do with her life. The world is truly her oyster, as they say, but I worry about all the choices that stand before her. The world is changing so rapidly now, and there is all this talk about machines taking the place of flesh and blood. What if the path she chooses to take is not always available to her? I suppose a certain amount of adaptability is being taught these days and people don’t seem quite as concerned with change as we used to be. There are systems in place now to help companies transition from one state of being to another, as their old identity no longer conforms to the new way of the world.
But I digress again. I want to soak up this moment with my family. Just truly enjoy being with them as they live their lives, the little ones absorbed in the momen
t, as we all should try to be. I love how children play. They don’t question themselves or what makes sense. They just lose themselves in the very act of creation, inhibitions not yet learned, and hearts not yet broken. Dreams and reality are blurred at this age and that is where the best moments of imagination are born.
I watch my granddaughter playing in the sand, watching her on the cusp of becoming a big girl, while still wanting to remain little. She always looked much smaller when tucked up in bed at night. Her six-year-old attitude was firmly packed away as she cuddled up to her blankie, reminding me to leave her night light on so Mummy and Daddy could come and give her a kiss goodnight when they came back from dinner.
She had been having a hard time lately as she discovered for the first time just how mean kids at school could be. She is a very loving and caring child and would get very upset if anyone called her names or accidently pushed past her while rushing into school when the bell rang. She could never understand why kids wouldn’t apologise when they had hurt somebody, even if by accident, and she really felt the injustices of the world.
She is a perfectionist and the teacher was getting frustrated with her at school. One day over Sunday lunch Alice recounted how the teacher had really put my granddaughter down in front of her classmates when she coloured an autumn leaf blue rather than the usual red, orange or yellow. What we took for creativity the teacher took for non-conformity and that certainly wasn’t allowed. My daughter told how she came home from school, shoulders slumped and an air of complete defeat around her. She believed herself to be ‘not very good’ and she said the teacher didn’t like her. Well that sent my daughter into a tailspin, as she spouted words about crushing her spirit and the like.
While I can see where my daughter was coming from, I must admit that it is hard on teachers these days. The classroom sizes are much bigger than they used to be, and I wonder what the effect of them losing some of their authority has had. While I don’t agree with corporal punishment, as used to be the norm when I went to school, I still believe there needs to be a certain amount of respect, and I don’t see this anymore. Teachers are called by their first names and the children know that they don’t wield much power. It must be a tough role to play, but it is also an incredible opportunity to be able to shape such small minds and to instill a love of learning and an encouragement of curiosity into their hearts.
As a parent I know how tiring small children can be, and how much easier it is if everyone simply does as you ask. But it is a shame when a teacher lets an opportunity for encouraging individualism, self-belief and imagination be lost, and so I can understand why my daughter was upset. There is so much pressure on everyone these days; pressure to perform, to get good grades, to be above-average. Individualism gets lost in the need for comparison and comparison is the effect of conformity.
I pushed both my children to go to university and now I wonder whether I did the right thing. Why do we have to fit a mould? What would happen to humanity if more of us were allowed to follow our dreams? When we view life as having finite resources, we create an unhealthy and unnecessary competition. If we believe there are not enough jobs to go around, not enough money, not enough food we see the next person as competition, as someone we must be better than. We push our children in a direction they perhaps don’t want to go in out of fear. We call it love but really it is our fear of the unknown that we project on to them.
I remember my son coming home one day having won an award for his clay sculpture he had entered in a school art competition. He glowed with pride and possibility and announced, at the ripe old age of fourteen, that he had found his calling. Well, I suppose he didn’t quite say it like that but that is what I heard. And I panicked. I suddenly saw dreams being washed away as I imagined my son working as a starving artist, struggling to make ends meet as he tried to carve a living from a passion. I didn’t believe it was possible to combine the two, which I suppose looking back now was quite naïve. Out of what I believed to be concern and love for him, I insisted he give up his art studies when the time came to choose the subjects for the following year, and I worked through the pangs of guilt by telling myself that I was not crushing a dream but that I was the parent and I had the experience to know what was best for my own child.
My wife didn’t agree with me at the time, but I would not budge. No son of mine was going to be a sculptor when there would be bills to pay and responsibilities to assume. But what if parents have got it wrong and children have it right? Are adults too blinded by their fears and personal experiences to see what really matters? Is it fair that subdued or shattered dreams come to life again through our children? Children are born with an innate ability to connect to life at a different level, and through practicality and what adults call reality, we slowly disconnect them from this to ensure they conform with life as we know it, as we experience it. But what if we let ourselves be led by their childish simplicity, what if we encouraged their dreams rather than suppressed them? There are many paths a child could follow but not all lead to happiness. We need to support our children while they are young, and create healthy and well-balanced children rather than spend our time fixing broken adults. We throw around words about living the life of our dreams, but we are too afraid to really do it. But what if we followed the lead of our children?
There is a lot of stress involved with being a parent these days. Not that it was easy when my children were young, but there are so many choices, too many choices, and that is a natural creator of stress. However, I feel the balance is perhaps better for my daughter today than it was for my wife. There are options today that didn’t exist when we were young parents. And as I watch my little granddaughter being chased by her father through the garden, I realise how involved young fathers are these days. Times are changing, and we need to accept that and work with it, but people are not always good with change.
I sit down on the terrace and watch my family. I soak up the joy in my young grandchildren’s faces, such simple but all-encompassing and powerful joy. They are lost in the moment, completely unaware of anything but this moment they are living.
Little Oliver spots a butterfly and on wobbly legs he starts to chase it. He falls down but never takes his eyes off the butterfly, and as he scrambles to his feet again the butterfly takes flight in search of its next flower. Oliver is fascinated. ‘Flutterby, Mummy, Flutterby,’ he squeals, and I realise just how much our children have to teach us. The joy to be found in the simplest of life’s pleasures. The putting aside of worldly worries and just being. Allowing the energy of life to move us along and to carry us when needed, not being weighed down by negative thoughts and stress.
Is worrying a habit we pick up from our parents, or is it something we are born with? Is it a learned behaviour or are our brains simply wired that way? I never believed in sheltering my children from the world, thinking instead that discussing world events at the dinner table was a way to prepare them for life on their own later on. But I think a certain innocence should be maintained, and in fact encouraged. The world changes so rapidly, but our views and opinions stay the same. What will change that? A new perspective is needed, a new way of living and what if the clue was in front of us all this time? What if our children could guide us, before they lose their innocence? Tiny souls still connected to another world, not yet tainted by this one. The joy of discovery, the joy of connection, the joy of unconditional love before the world adds conditions.
I sit here for a moment longer just watching. I have loved spending time with my grandchildren, in a way that was not the same with my own children. Maybe I didn’t have to worry so much about their education and could just enjoy being with them. I really came into my own as a grandfather. I gave myself permission to play and laugh and be with them. Their little soggy kisses on my cheek as they sat cuddled up in my lap. Their weeny soft hands inside my big rough one. Their tiny fingers wrapped around my thumb as they fell asleep in my arms. They adored me and I adored them. They called me Pop
and I loved it. I loved them. I still do.
I stand up rather begrudgingly, but I know I must move on. I say to the little family I see before me to always look after each other, to always laugh together and create joy together. To always be there for each other and to be each other’s solace, a safe place to return to after a tough day out in the world.
I reach out and place my palm against my daughter’s cheek. ‘Take care my angel. You have been such a good daughter to me. You have always shown me love and care and concern. You have never judged me. You may have disagreed with some of the decisions I made over the years, but I think you see now that I made those decisions with your best interests at heart. You see that now that you are a parent. I will miss you. I am so proud of you, for your strength, your courage, your resolve. Please take good care of your mother. She will need you now more than ever.’ I gently pull my hand back, take a deep breath and take one more moment to soak in the happy domestic scene before me. It is time to leave. I have another grandchild to visit.
Chapter 9
The Son
As I walk up to my son’s house I can hear music coming from the upstairs bedroom. Complicated and intricate notes float down from the open window calling me to them. I follow them inside, up the stairs and into the bedroom of my teenage grandson. I sit down quietly in the corner of the room and just watch. I suppose I should say listen rather than watch, but there is something so mesmerising in the way my grandson holds the violin and sways his body as he plays. His fingers move and vibrate and control and command, but it is his body that leads the way. His body is playing the music, not just his hands. When I watch my grandson play I understand the expression to ‘put your heart and soul’ into something. The music and he are one. The violin is an extension of him, a tool, a way for his soul to shine through and connect with the world. He is transformed in this moment, and his transformation reaches out and transforms others. Music is contagious, it reaches out and captures the audience, pulling them in, demanding something of them. A piece of their soul perhaps? Or is it the other way around? The music adds to our soul?
A Lifetime of Goodbyes Page 9