Andrea, an energetic, skinny-as-a-lath PE teacher, expected to spend her life as a successful head of a secondary school; instead, she found herself abandoning her own career. ‘There are areas of life where there is immense need to step out in faith. We didn’t set out to adopt anybody, but we believe we were called to adopt these children specifically, and we have done it with glad hearts because it is a way of making what we believe a reality.’
There is a chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology called ‘Moral Perfection’, written by Laura Garcia, an adjunct associate professor of philosophy at Boston College (this is the stuff you read when you start down a path paved with good deeds – it is killing me). She describes an eleventh-century monk called St Anselm who ‘claimed to have discovered a proof of God’s existence based simply on the definition of God as a being than which none greater can be conceived’. From this comes the idea of God as morally perfect, and of course, if God is morally perfect and you are a fan, the chances are you will try to reflect that moral perfection in your own life. Maybe that is why in this God-lite world, we accept our own imperfections these days with such an easy, tolerant heart: I’m not perfect. Who’s perfect? Nobody’s perfect. Some people try damn hard, though.
I asked Andrea whether she believed she was attempting to replicate divine goodness in her own good life, but something in her squirms at the word ‘good’, refusing to own it.
‘I believe that God is Love. The person of Jesus is God personified, and there is no doubt whatsoever in my mind that Jesus lived a life of redemptive love. We seek to follow that – not because it makes us good, but because beliefs are empty if you don’t live by them.’
Andrea would have an excuse to do nothing for anybody but her own family, because what she does for her own family on one hectic single day is more than most people have to do in a year. She is, however, a school governor, she helps run a support group, she finds furniture for the needy, support for the vulnerable. I wonder if she would be willing to define even this extra-familial life of hers as ‘good’, but she doesn’t – the message is still one of love and blessings.
‘I had a wonderful start in life with a father and a grandma who were all about love – hard school, not gooey marshmallow love, but unconditional all the same. I always knew I had this love in my life and I feel blessed because of that. I want to give what was given to me, to bless others as I was blessed – that is what motivates me to do what I do. The judgement that really matters is the Lord’s, at the end of the day. I would like him to say to me, “Well done, my good and faithful servant.” ’
I ask her whether she thinks if I do my good deeds I can become a better person. There is a nano-second of hesitation. ‘I believe your motivation is to be a blessing to those you are around, to be good news to those you are around,’ she said, and it is my turn to squirm.
Monday, 11 April
Andrea dropped by for coffee, and while we were chatting on about the good deeds she got a distinct gleam in her eye. In September, Cryssie starts at a special school about forty-five minutes away. Because of the distances involved and the fact she can’t travel back and forth for the best part of two hours a day or she risks getting sick, she’ll go into school on Monday, Wednesday and Friday rather than attend the full week. Consequently, her parents have been thinking about what to do the rest of the week. They are effectively designing a bespoke curriculum with the afternoons spent swimming with her and her brother who has the same condition; the mornings, however, are more of a problem.
According to her mother, Cryssie reads all the time and wants to be a writer, so her mother is going to talk to her about whether she wants to take a writing class with me and we can try to pull together a few short stories. Very daunted. To say the least. To teach her anything, I need to see the child, I mean fully see the child, and not get distracted by the disability, and I am easily distracted.
Good deed no. 101: advised a new food blogger, who is trying to promote her B&B, on blogging: establish blog roll, read, comment, think about video blogging.
Tuesday, 12 April
My eldest son’s middle school is going to join the Jam Jar Army at some point next term, which is great. That’s about eighty to ninety children. Say fifty of them do it, that is fifty jam jars out there – at £3 each, that is £150. Excellent.
Good deed no. 102: bought a neighbour’s child an ice cream.
Wednesday, 13 April
I had my first squeal of delight from a good deed this morning. I had sorted out a couple of bagfuls of clothes the boys had grown out of for a neighbour’s little boy, and then I realized I could palm some old toys off on him as well. I dug out a couple of big puzzles you build on the floor and a beautiful wooden castle my boys never look at, and a big bag of plastic tools – hence the squeal. Apparently the little one loves tools. What I should really have done with all the money we’ve spent on cars and knights and Scalextric over the last decade is invest it in a pension plan. All they really needed was a regular supply of cardboard boxes for rockets and ships, blankets and a kitchen table for dens, and a football. If I had realized that earlier, I could indeed have spent my retirement cruising the Aegean. As it is, courtesy of my freelance career and my glaring lack of pension, I am hoping at least one of my grown-up children has a house with a garage because I will probably have to live in it.
Good deed no. 103.
Thursday, 14 April
Last time I was in London, I found it hard to do good deeds and had to resort to giving money to charity on a daily basis. Admittedly, I was being followed around by three small people, and children do distract from good intentions. In London for work, this time was easier. Walking along the Strand, I came across two Japanese girls taking it in turn to take pictures of each other across from the immense Victorian edifice of Charing Cross Station. The perfect opportunity. Initially, the girl with the camera looked confused as I attempted to take the camera from her (there is an outside chance she believed I was a mugger), but once she caught on, she and her pal were very grateful. They didn’t squeal like my friend’s boy when I gave him toy carpentry tools, but when I finished snapping, they did put their hands together and bow, so I bowed, and they bowed again. We could be there yet but I had a bus to catch.
God has obviously got a sense of humour, though. Bastard. Here I am trying to do a good deed a day, costing me time and energy and money I don’t have, with benefit to parties other than myself (which is my rough rule of thumb), and what does God decide to do? Call my bluff. I was walking along Camden High Street on my way to a friend who had kindly agreed to put me up for the night, and rang my mother to see how she was feeling. Ever since she fractured her vertebra she has been low. So low that yesterday I mused out loud that I wasn’t entirely sure what was keeping her and my dad in Leeds when they could move up to Northumberland. I mused on the understanding that I was musing, that they were not yet so decrepit they would have to come up to us, that even if my mother wanted to, my dad likes his independence too much and goes slightly loopy if he has to stay with us longer than four days. Well, bugger me backwards, no one explained the rules of musing to my mother, so she informed me that she and my dad had made a decision. A big decision. They were coming to live with me.
If aliens had landed their rocket in front of me, got out, waved and gone shopping, I could not have been more confounded.
My mother said: ‘You’re very quiet.’ Because I couldn’t find a cushion, my fist was stuffed into my mouth to stop me screaming. My dad chimes in – they always put the phone on speakerphone when I ring – ‘I can’t cope any more.’ You can’t argue with that one, can you? Oh my God.
Good deed no. 104.
Friday, 15 April
Had a lovely dinner with London friends, but spent the entire meal talking through the consequences of my mum and dad moving in. On the one hand, I love them to bits and this day was always going to come. On the other, does it have to come today?
What
will go first?
Bringing up three children who are now ten, eight and five and already engaged in a fight for light with each other;
running the house (and my standards are reasonably low here);
maintaining the semblance of a relationship with my husband (who is always on deadline and sometimes in London);
caring for two elderly parents (one of whom is blind and frail);
a writing/journalism career which brings in some money – not a lot maybe, but enough to make the difference between eating and not eating;
working on a novel which doesn’t bring in any money at all;
my patience;
or my sanity?
I love my parents. I adore my parents. But my prediction is I lose my patience first, rapidly followed by my sanity, then the novel writing, then the career, then the husband.
I was so subsumed by my proposed new role as carer of the elderly, I helped an old lady on the train back north to get her suitcase into the suitcase rack. When it was time for her to get off, I helped her with it then too. But she can’t have wanted any more help, because she sort of wrestled it off me and was very grumpy, as if she suspected I was claiming the case as my own and intended leaping off the train when it drew into the station and running for my robber’s den with her case of huge panties as my booty. The old can be very difficult.
Good deed no. 105.
Saturday, 16 April
The girls’ dance school is in a former Mechanics’ Institute which forms one side of a Georgian square, at the centre of which is the Catholic church. I am guessing the Institute has some link with the Masons because the doorway is huge and high and set at an oblique angle, and as I cross the threshold I always feel that my name is Alice and this another Wonderland.
The girls change in a large empty room to the right as you go in, with chairs set out around the edges on which proud maternal posteriors perch to supervise tiny, rose-cheeked ballerinas as they don tiny, pink-kid ballerina slippers. What I normally do then is speed-walk into town, buy a newspaper to read the property porn in the Journal’s Homemaker section, down a scalding coffee while they are having their modern dance class and speed-walk back to be there in time to change the girls into their black tippety-tap shoes. Because the dance studio is directly above the waiting room, once they stomp back upstairs for tap, I sit for forty-five minutes with my fingers in my ears to avoid another migraine. Very occasionally, like today, they have a fund-raising coffee morning, which means I get to eat cake and call it a good deed. Result. Apparently the money that is raised is going towards paying for the older ones to go on a cruise. I am guessing they dance on the cruise, so presumably they get a good rate. Young dancers and their mothers on a cruise ship – I so want to go.
Good deed no. 106.
Sunday, 17 April
With the lack of recent rain, the rugby pitch was ridged and pitted and rock-hard. Once a year the club holds a rugby tournament, and we spend most of the day cheering on our eight-year-old son. When we first moved, the ten-year-old took one look at contact rugby, uttered the words ‘Never in a million years’, went back to his Nintendo, and that was him and rugby done. But the eight-year-old enjoys it. I pointed out the concrete hardness of the ground to the rugby coach and he sent me off for Vaseline at the supermarket. Being a natural pessimist, I got Vaseline and plasters and antiseptic spray and Savlon for all those bony little-boy knees.
I smeared gloop over my son’s knees and the coach’s son’s knees, and then other boys came up to me and stood around expectantly, and I kept saying, ‘Who’s your mum and dad? Where are they? Oy, Mum, can I Vaseline his knees?’ I’m not entirely sure what the Vaseline was supposed to do – help the child slide over ground that might otherwise take the skin off his knee, I guess. But the coach used to play for Scotland, so he had to know what he was talking about. Having said that, I didn’t ask to see his knees.
Good deed no. 107.
Monday, 18 April
Al is working late every night in the utterly insane way he does when approaching deadline on a project. Sometimes, when he is up against it, he listens to the music of the 1970s as he works. Tonight I traipsed through the study on my way up to bed, and there was bouzouki music playing as he worked. ‘It’s Tacticos and His Bouzoukis,’ he informed me, glancing up briefly from his screen of numbers, the plinkety-plonkety crescendo of ‘Zorba’s Dance’ building. I had this vision of him waiting till I’d gone to bed, the creaks and groans of the oak bedframe settling into silence, then standing up from his desk, stretching out his shirt-sleeved arms, kicking out one leg and then the other, crossing, bobbing, turning, dancing round the piles and files of paper, the BT Home Hub, his fingers clicking, his spirit free, Zorba on his mind.
Good deed no. 108: advised the food blogger on her blog.
Tuesday, 19 April
Good deed no. 109: checked on the expat after his hospital appointment.
Wednesday, 20 April
Bearing in mind my mum and dad might well be moving in, I consulted an expert.
THE DAUGHTER
Stephanie is, like me, an only child. When she can, she runs away from real life and hides away in her cottage along the row, painting and felting and walking the lanes listening to birdsong. This is her sanctuary, her holy place. Stephanie is about to turn sixty with two grown-up children and a 93-year-old mother, and because she’s been there herself, this friend doesn’t judge when I say how I fall short over and over, caught between kids and parents and work.
She used to spend more time up here on her own; more recently, though, she arrives with her mother in tow. She scoops the old lady out of the car, helping her into the cottage and over to a sofa. As a special treat she carries up hot and salty chips, splattered over with shop vinegar, from the village, and on trips out, pushes her around in a wheelchair, her mother all wrapped up in blankets. Twenty-seven years ago, her mother and father moved into the ground floor of a three-storey house while Stephanie and her husband took the other two floors. Her mother helped with Stephanie’s two children while she pursued a career as a consultant anaesthetist. Fifteen years ago her dad died, and very slowly her mother became more and more dependent, a dependence exacerbated by a gradual slide into dementia. Shopping, her mum would buy the same soap or shampoo when her cupboards at home were full of them, while her repertoire of recipes faded back to a boiled egg and what she could put in a microwave. ‘My husband, who has always been lovely with her, asked my mother to make some Yorkshire puddings for us one day and she said she couldn’t remember how.’ Stephanie shakes her head. The memory problems were diagnosed six years ago, but may well have started earlier. ‘We had a couple of close shaves when she nearly burned down the house – she let an egg boil dry in a pan one time and she forgot to blow out a bathroom candle and the wax set fire to the carpet.’
Stephanie fought for the help her mother needs – help dressing, washing, bathing. She has to be given her meals and snacks and tea, is helped out of bed in the morning and put back to bed at night. Her shopping, washing and housework all have to be done, but there is no resentment, only a daughter’s steady and loving conviction that a fundamental obligation is being met. ‘What goes around comes around,’ Stephanie says. Her mother reared Stephanie, and helped rear her children. Now shrunken, and frail, and dear, it is her turn to be cosseted, to be held in stronger arms, to be a child again. ‘I wouldn’t be where I am today without my mother, so I think for me to turn my back and not help her would make me a bad person. I am simply doing what needs to be done. It’s what families do.’ Not all families, though. ‘I see a lot of miserable people when their parents are in intensive care and are dying. They come in and want us to pull out all the stops to save them, and it is because they feel guilty. They’ll never be able to think that they did all they could for their parents, but I’d like to think I could.’
Good deed no. 110: checked on a friend who has had an operation.
Thursday, 21 April
> My parents are with us again, and after I put the children to bed, Al made up a fire in the living room where they’re ensconced and I made cups of tea for them. Briefly I considered tea for Al and me; instead I pour us both a stiff drink to talk through my parents’ move. That’s not entirely true. I pour a stiff drink, then make it stiffer.
My mum and dad are waiting. She is sitting in a wrap-around bishop’s chair, my dad on the sofa nearby. I suspect they have been waiting to have this discussion ever since they arrived this morning. I hand Al his gin and tonic, and he winks at me. There are some men who would run screaming at the thought of elderly in-laws moving in; Al just grinned and said, ‘We’re an attractive package’ when I broke the news.
I sit down and my mother opens fire. ‘You seemed surprised,’ my mother says, ‘when I told you we’d decided to move in with you. You did offer.’ She sounds slightly offended and slightly amused. The thing about mothers is they know you better than anyone else in the whole world. Know you and love you. Did I offer? I did, didn’t I? In a roundabout ‘God, you’re getting old – I wish I could do something about that – and you live miles away – you could always move up here’ kind of way. My mother is perfectly happy in my house. She listens to her audio books because she can’t see to read any more, ‘watches’ TV soaps with the volume turned to levels that make my ears bleed, and when my dad wants to watch football (which is always), she keeps me company in the kitchen. Here, there are children and conversation and life, which is all any of us really want. My dad is also happy in my house. I have Sky Sports. He doesn’t have to cook or wash up. But he has his own way of going on at home: his daily shopping trip up to Asda; no small children pleading to play Xbox on his television; a weekly trip over to the same church they have attended for more than forty years; handy doctors; and, best of all, no one trying to make him eat pasta.
A Year of Doing Good Page 11