A stray beam of low hanging sunshine falls across my mother’s face. She stirs and I stroke her cheek to reassure her. It’s odd how she still responds to this tiny touch, although most of the woman I once knew has gone. Her agitation rises as the sun sinks. I’ve learned a whole new meaning for the word ‘sundown’ these past weeks.
Go away
She snaps at me
Go away
A carer appears at the door
Is everything OK?
Mum wrestles with words
My daughter needs something to write with
She can still sound just as authoritative as she did in a classroom all those years ago. The carer and I exchange glances. She leaves a sippy cup of weak, milky tea on the table behind me. Mum will refuse it of course. My father loved his tea that way, but Mum’s not going to drink it. I’ll fetch her some well-diluted orange juice from the fridge when she’s more awake.
The parts of my mother that remain in these twilight days are often unexpected. The voice that once sang the Wesleyan hymns of my childhood is as powerful as ever. We put together a reasonable rendition of ‘Oh Christmas Tree’ at teatime – or maybe it’s ‘The Red Flag’. She doesn’t remember the words, and it’s no matter to me. The woman who hated cats also does enthusiastic recitations
“I love little pussy, her fur is so warm
And if I don’t hurt her, she’ll do me no harm
So I’ll not pull her tail, nor drive her away
But pussy and I very gently will play”
Sometimes she remembers who I am, but mostly she meanders through the mist of childhood trauma. World War II broke out shortly before Mum’s 10th birthday – a little over 84 years ago. She and hundreds of other children were sent out of London to live with complete strangers. Now she endlessly relives those days, alone in a strange bed and longing for home.
Oh Mum, I wish you were here
I stroke her cheek and she turns to the touch, temporarily comforted.
The war had been over for almost nine years when I was born, but it cast long shadows over my childhood. Some food was still in short supply in 1954, and I was issued a ration book. I grew up on the edge of London – a city of many ghosts. Whole neighbourhoods had been bombed to rubble, and my parents and grandparents still flinched if ever they heard a siren during a radio drama.
In primary school I took it for granted that my friends were Jewish, and it wasn’t until I was older that I understood why. I remember watching the news on our state-of-the-art black and white television, and asking my mother what the word ‘refugee’ meant. It seemed to have a negative connotation that I couldn’t quite fathom. Mum told me a refugee was simply someone who had been forced to leave their home because of a war – ‘the’ war, it was then – and now I can see that she had real empathy for that suffering because of her own experiences.
I suppose all those bible stories and Wesleyan hymns are in part responsible for my irritating optimism. I’ve often been accused of seeing the world through rose-tinted spectacles, but after a childhood bathed in parables of kindness and generosity what can you expect? My Sundays were filled with stories of Jesus. From the Good Samaritan, to the feeding of the five thousand, they brim over with generosity and relentless optimism.
Tell me the stories of Jesus I love to hear
Things I would ask him to tell me, if he were here …
The rest of my week was also rich in stories, parables and positive life lessons from both my parents. Two wrongs don’t make a right, everything we have comes from the earth, Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby – my first introduction to the golden rule at the heart of every spiritual path, and a strange parable of my father’s about a woman who arrived at the gates of heaven with badly manicured nails because she’d been busy caring for other people.
2024 has been a year of elections. No real surprises here in the UK, but the drama on the far side of the Atlantic more than makes up for that, with the bipartisan nature of 21st century politics on display as never before. I’ve long ceased to be able to watch political debates on television. The sheer rudeness of the participants reached its nadir in Donald Trump, whose 2016 debate with Hillary Clinton apparently provoked a surge in calls to abuse helplines. But I read. I read a lot, and what I read was becoming more and more depressing until 21st July 2024.
The story of humanity has so often been pitched as a battle between ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Nobody, but nobody, wants to believe they’re the bad guy. I imagine even the men who’ve banned Afghan women from so much as speaking in public places seriously believe they’re on the side of good. And who’s to say they’re wrong? After all, evangelical Christians in the USA turn out in droves to support book bans, the rowing back of rights for women, and discrimination against immigrants and LGBTQ+ people, to name but a few. All this in the name of a man who preached loving your enemies and not judging other people.
As I’ve said, my anxiety for the world began to lift a little on the day Joe Biden stepped aside. It lifted still more when Gus Walz expressed his love for his dad. The response to this spontaneous outburst of pure joy was interesting. In some circles there was instant derision, rowed back a little when it was revealed that Gus had a learning difficulty. Apparently it’s OK to express love if you have a learning difficulty, in anyone else it’s a sign of weakness.
To declare love so joyously is to make oneself vulnerable. It’s not a safe thing to do. It makes people feel uncomfortable and we’re all a little afraid of discomfort. This week I’ve been reading Jessa Crispin’s ‘Why I Am Not a Feminist’, and I make no apology for quoting her, as I couldn’t have expressed this any better
‘Safety is about control. In order to feel safe, things have to be made predictable. And the only way in life to make something predictable is to control the outcome. Whether that is through manipulation or abuse, it’s an unethical impingement on other people’s freedom.
[…] Safety is a kind of surface level cleanliness, where outward behaviour is the most important thing. It’s like the city that brags about how safe and clean its streets are, and meanwhile the jails are filled with the homeless and the poor and the mentally ill, and littering gets you publicly whipped.’
I’m tempted to blame the internet, but in truth it merely enables our entrenched addiction to the safety of belonging. Instagram may magnify our concern with ‘surface cleanliness’, but ‘what will people think?’ was the mantra of my childhood. Now’s not the time for the full story of the day my mother and my brother missed the church picnic because he refused to wear the ‘right’ shoes, but you get the picture.
Of course a certain type of politician will always be there to exploit this longing for safety, for being part of the in crowd. I can keep those scary immigrants out. I can wipe those criminals off the street. I can stop those nasty international wars. Build a wall! It’s oddly comforting to turn over responsibility to someone who promises to make such a complex world a safer place. But their whole joyless edifice is built on fear, control and a vague sense of victimhood – the absolute polar opposite of Gus Walz’s uninhibited and joyous expression of love.
You may call me naïve – and I almost certainly am – but I prefer the world I see through my rose-tinted spectacles. I prefer childlike tears of delight to the entitled whining of a multi-millionaire. I prefer the Jesus of my childhood to the miserable tyrant of American evangelicalism. I’ll take vulnerability over toxicity any day, and if that makes me look weak then I’ll wear my weakness with pride.
bluesinateacup 