U is for (un)usual

It’s time to write about the conversations – the everyday conversations that are also anything but everyday. Because they are part of those fleeting moments of connection with your child.

They are usual, for us at least, because there are Questions To Be Asked, every day. As the child grows, so does the complexity of the questions.

(I am reminded as I write this that there were complex questions back in the day too, coming home for lunch after nursery: Can we go to the park? Who is the Holy Spirit? Can I have some more yoghurt? See if you can spot the complex question in the flow there.)

I thought about it recently. You live your life, you read stuff, watch some TV, maybe. And whether you know it or not, you are in training – training to answer the wild and wonderful questions that kids devise.

How do you train for it? Living, for starters. Listening to your other half, for elements of life that you might not know so much about. Reading up on the Guinness Book of World Records might help too, if your child likes Interesting Facts as much as you do.

But however you train, you realise that it is a very specialist form of training. You need to offer some level of accuracy and relevance to the question – or at least be honest in your
‘I don’t know – why don’t we find out?’

Furthermore, you need to be able to answer those questions on the spot – and may never be asked again. That is the hard part. You may have spent your whole life working up to it, hoping to be asked that key question – and then it’s done.

Or it may never even come. It all depends on your child, their interests, the world around them, whatever they’ve found out about at school. After years of piano lessons, orchestra, choir, and so on, it would be nice to be asked, just a little, about music, for example.

But in the meantime, school has instilled what forte and piano mean – as well as the nice chewy -issimos for each. So you smile and say yes, and get in your tuppenceworth that you can say piano in Italian to ask someone to be quiet. (Because there’s a certain fun of building on other people’s facts, even if you don’t get to do the main delivery.)

The thing is, I do like Useful Facts. I enjoy being asked possible and maybe partly impossible questions, and trying to answer. I particularly enjoy the fact that I am still being asked, as is Dan. That for now, we are a good enough source of answers, enough to keep coming back to.

These questions are the key found items of my days, most days. Sometimes they are things I have asked myself. Sometimes they are things I have never thought to question, and find myself working out in the attempt to answer.

So in the spirit of imparting found items to my readers too, I shall leave you with a few of the choice questions of the last little while – or at least some that I can rememeber.

“Mummy…why does the light go out off on the bus after we’ve stopped?” (Noticing that the ‘stopping’ sign on the bus isn’t always illuminated.)

“Mummy…what are clouds made of?” (Daddy stepped in on that one.)

“Mummy…why do dogs sniff each other’s bottoms?”

I rest my case.

 

Y is for yellow

The trees have started to turn. Little clumps to start with, like bouquets tied against the rest of the green of the canopies. And with it, I know that it is really autumn after all.

These trees: I have come to learn the seasons from them, over the time we have lived here. They change much later than the rest. So if you want to mentally avoid a season coming or going, you can look at the trees and tell yourself: not yet. Not just yet.

Today I wake and see that the yellow has been caught up at the top of the furthest tree.
No arguing with it now.

But in all other aspects, the trees are going about their business. No sudden losses of leaves after a stormy night. Look out of the window, and they are only slightly incapacitated. Like someone walking up a hill and pausing for breath, but still upright.

There are six trees in the stance. As far as I can count. They both fill the middle distance of my view, and continue beyond it – beyond the wall of our house, and the roofline of the house opposite.

When you have a regular view, and natural items in it, they taken on additional significance. You learn to see the weather in checking the view, the temperature, the season.

At other times, they are the backdrop to the thinking, the writing. I look up from corralling the words, see the trees, pause, breathe. I realise they are as necessary to the writing as the words themselves, the limbering up of fingers on keys.

The world of laptops means I can choose where I write, and I do move around the house, writing in different places. But I find myself most often here, writing where I can see the sky, the trees, the pigeon formation team at times.

So it is only fair to tell you that the leaves on the trees are turning yellow. In time, the trees will be bare against the sky.

They will stay that way, even after bulbs are coming up and hedges are putting on new growth. There is an element of deliberation about it. They will not be rushed into following the same timescale as other trees and plants nearby.

It is not that they are better than the others for being later. Just that they seem to be particularly themselves in it. They are high, these trees, and their canopies seem to join up. They are like the tall person with a large frame, not stooping, offering a quiet but clear presence.

Perhaps sometimes the found item is the new discovery about something you feel you know well. It is the thing you wait for, and that still surprises you when it arrives.

The trees have my attention. I promise to them that I will notice when they are fully yellow. And I anticipate them, catching the light as the year winds its way to a close.

X is for x-rated

Because, after all, how many xylophones do you find crossing your path, begging to be your latest found item? It just doesn’t happen that way.

And neither, really, do prompts beginning with x – you may have to go looking for them. Or inventing them.

Turns out inventing is just fine, when it comes to the school Hallowe’en disco. I am there with other parents, helping with the fundraiser. Costumes, yes, but lots of safe, slightly-Hallowe’eny fun, like finding plastic spiders in buckets of cold pasta, and eating syrup-covered doughnuts off strings.

The x-rating is for the costumes. They’re not gross, really, but they do make me stop and notice. Which is the point, really. Some people are in bought costumes, but a lot seem to have devised their own – which I generally like.

So really, you can wear your best party frock, add in a pair of white tights that happen to have what I presume are meant to be blood stains on them, and call it done. Except that you’re 10, and (in my mind) a bit young to be channelling Frankenstein’s bride.

An easier step on some ways – and a trickier one in others – is to keep that party frock, and then add a trickle of makeup in the corner of an eye. A 6-year old lip that’s melting. An eye that’s not really smiling, but looking hollow, which is exactly what you don’t want for your
9-year old on a normal Friday night.

There is a fine line in school shirts with holes cut in them. Gelled-up hair. A certain amount of fake fur seems to be making do for werewolves and hairy ears, and other worrying creatures. Somehow this is easier to deal with than the girls’ versions.

One girl proudly shows off her blue-coloured arms with white veiny lines on – contrasting with her all-white outfit. Her dad did the makeup for her, she tells me. I commend the artistry, and the colour contrast, while trying to decide what else not to say.

I know it’s a bit of fun. They know it too. But I think back to a holiday week, and a workshop on stage-type makeup. The over 10s learn how to create fake wounds. The under 10 sister, at the same holiday week, sees her older sister, and responds by bursting into tears.

I can’t do that. I am on the apple ducking, though, so it would just go in the water, and no one would notice. Plus I am too busy trying to stop myself getting a sore throat from all the talking to the visitors to my stall, helping them see how to drop the fork from a greater height, so it’s easier to secure an apple.

And despite the ‘older’ look, there are 11-year olds here who still cheer, with no false pretence, when they win themselves an apple. They are still children, underneath the paint and pustules.

I am not yet in the camp of parents who are rehearsing their ‘What do you think you look like?’ conversations. I am not yet dealing with teenage years. And these mini vampires are more concerned on getting their fangs on the selection of sweets at the tuck shop. They are knowing, and they are thankfully not all that knowing.

It’s just the contrast that disturbs me. Have the kids been on Pinterest to work out their look? Have their mums and dads? Who agrees to their child looking like a zombie?

These looks may feel like found items. And some of them are art, really, I know. But it’s a form of art I didn’t want to see on children. I would rather the old-school versions of Hallowe’en: the green face, the misplaced wart on the nose than this.

I shift a bit. My knees dislike how long the evening is. I pick up a towel, dry off the forks, and wait for my next set of customers.

D is for the dance

Sometimes, in the hurry of putting a meal on the table, I forget that it is possible to glide. To move around our tiny kitchen and make it feel intentional, choreographed.

When the timings of a meal fall into place, like the drop of a spoonful of peas onto a plate. When the plates go down on the table in the closing moments of the post-homework TV programme.

Somehow, it seems right to call it the dance. Because it doesn’t happen that often that our plans all lines up the way we want.

Add in cooking a meal under time pressure, when everyone is tired, and when you are still expected to field requests on how sheep grow wool and why is a tiny bead stuck inside a larger bead, and Can You Fix It, Mummy?, and you begin to see the rarity of the dance.

Writers on education call it flow. It’s the place where we are in the moment, when our bodies obey us, when one movement flows into the next. We tend to find it in something we find appealing or interesting, something that often comes naturally to us.

Cooking has been a place of flow for me before. Whether it’s late night jam or pickle making, or a series of progressions towards a favoured dish, it can be rewarding to see a meal come together.

But that kind of flow tends to happen more when I am cooking ‘after hours’. When it’s just me, and just the cooking. Those times don’t happen as much now, and they have to fight their corner against the other evening need to dos.

But sometimes, even in the midst of the Express Train to Tea Time, it works. I am not chasing down the platform after the train, nor shovelling coals into the furnace (or even potatoes into the pan).

Motherhood is full of moments of time that vary considerably. The hour of a sports class that can stretch at least to two, in maternal memory. The long dark afternoons when neither you nor the small child is quite sure how you will make it through the next five minutes, but you do.

The dance takes short moments – the five minutes in which you perform multiple heroic tasks simultaneously – and stretches them, makes them flow.

Found items are sometimes ones where we see them, perceive their value and seize them, claiming them ever after as our own. But more often, they are the ones we cannot possess, but which can turn a tired evening around when they appear.

The others about to eat the meal do not necessarily notice the achievement. But in that split second of calm before the eating begins, I do.

 

Q is for quiet

Sometimes, it takes the removal of something for your found item to emerge. For me, it’s rediscovering quiet. Back from a week away, all together, the house is quiet.

I notice it.

A week in a big city – much bigger than ours. A flat at the back of a building – quiet, yes, but there are also sirens. Kids in the courtyard at the back, sometimes. The sound of the lift going up and down the building.

It’s not that home is noiseless. But it is pretty quiet where we live, certainly at night, more so as the weather grows colder and people are inside more.

Back to last week. For various reasons, I slept in the sitting room of the flat. Behind me,
a clock that ticked (not good with that for getting to sleep). On the other side of the room, the fridge, the boiler…Even the goldfish was determined to make some noise.

So coming back to a quieter room to sleep in, that helped. I could lie there and practically feel the quiet steal round the room.

Holiday time is often wonderful – and can also be tricky if you are an introvert. You are with the people you love – and you are WITH them, because you are soaking it all up together.

Add in a separate destination which is packed with noise and movement (more on that separately), and other people, plus further people on trains and metro platforms and at ticket barriers and all the rest.

Let’s just say that there is less space for thinking amid the hum.

Today, it was back to the term-time routine – which meant getting the house to myself again in the daytime. Add in ongoing drizzle, and even the rumble of buses fades in volume.

Walking along fairly empty roads, seeing the raindrops on bushes as the sun caught them…all of this shouted quiet. (In a none too oppressing way, of course.)

It might be hearing your thoughts again. It might be remembering your way of taking stock of the day – the ups, the downs. It might just be not having to talk to anyone for a bit.

Normal days have plenty of talking, of course. That’s fine. There are bus rides and homework discussions and clattering of cutlery in the dishwasher and all the usual soundtrack of life. Just without all the extras.

Found items aren’t just about the new (though they can be). Sometimes they are about the familiar reasserting itself – and our sigh of relief as it does.