Monthly Archives: May 2014

On the mama-margins

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I share your chin-strokes over growth-spurts, school choices, and ridiculous tantrums best ignored, but less so your anxiety over balancing career with children.

The gender-heavy aisle division of toys and clothes arches my brow, too; but I don’t think about it for very long.

I’m a mother, but identify more with being a parent.

I covet your homemade cakes, but there’s not a snowball’s (mmmm..snowballs) chance in hell I’ll get round to baking one.

I, too, feel my identity under attack, but more for reasons of rootlessness than feeling arrested.

For every on-line high-five exchanged between you, I have a momentary awkward hover over the ‘like’ button out of a weird sense of manners.

My child is tall. She has deep brown eyes, a thousand yard stare, and long fly-away hair that grows at a rate of an acre an hour. That’s probably as far as I can go public with a visual of her.

Being fortunate to have a child has affected me profoundly also. I can frequently be found looking through every photo of her from birth but the feelings are bigger than the vocabulary available to me, and I’ve given up the search for it.

My guilt is mainly the retrospective kind; the futile sort. It hits when I think of the state of my savings and former life-long propensity for living-in-the-moment that risks threatening the quality of rainy days.

They say fluency in any language comes with practice. I’ve never had a flair for any; it took me a year to master broken parenting, and I read it better than I speak it. I’ve plateaued at reasonable working proficiency but doubt I’ll ever hold my own with the natives, no matter how welcoming and friendly they are.

Retracebook

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Minimised in the corner of this screen is a portal to the past in the shape of a photograph. It is of a teenage boy averting his gaze from his dancing partner to somewhere off camera as they shuffle awkwardly in their finery at their prom. Or debs. Or tracey. Or sharon. It scratches at my peripheral vision and I am compelled to open it again, study it, minimise, maximise, minimise. Its sender tells me the boy now shares his life with a woman in America, and has a teenage boy of his own with another.

The determination to stay social networking sober does not guarantee immunity from passive snooping. One click on a teasing email subject and I’m staring my past right in the spotty face.

Closer inspection reveals his partner as the one who replaced me. It was inevitable. A careless kiss with another would see to it that I had killed it as far as he was concerned. Our two years together survived parental interference brought on by intervention from the nuns brought on from the curiosity brought on by the early morning shadow that passed their windows. He would ease his way back out of my bedroom window at dawn, cross the field, and cut through the convent grounds before jumping behind the wall and in through his own. Huddled innocently together on my bed, we compared the size of our hands and lay still against the backdrop of quarrelling parents, bickering siblings and the Big Ben bells at 10 on the telly. The strip of light disappearing from beneath the door at midnight signalling the end of family strife.

The mattress replaced the steps by the parochial house where we sat after school. Right under the nose of those collared conquerors of passion. A daily ritual forged after a summer’s eyeballing on the Green from opposing teams in a season long game of rounders. We had already engaged in a heady exchange of compilation tapes, the intensity of commitment measured by the frequency of shared folks songs ‘with meaning’ (me), and power ballads and rock anthems (he). He was fourteen, quiet, with a fondness for all the wrong music, and Charles Bronson films. I was a year younger with a taste for colourful shoes, and my head (and sometimes my hair) in the clouds. Both of us about to find the other in the shape of our first love.

[several paragraphs later]

And then I emerged from my mother’s womb, totally naked. The shame.

The beginning.

Thanks Facebook. You are to the soul what Peppa Pig is to psychoanalysis.

I’ll fresco if al have to

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Jean Byrne, why have you forsaken me? I’m not talking about your fondness for luminous yellow or those accessories manufactured in NASA’s spare parts department (all of which give me a serious Jean-on). All it takes is you reporting a spate of bad mood burglaries by the sun across the South-east and there’s a stampede towards Boots to replenish the fake tan supplies.

And it’s only beginning, the force-feeding me happiness. “Isn’t the weather great?” delivered ad nauseam in the vocal equivalent of three thousand exclamation marks in font size 90, caps lock on. A challenge to the likes of me who shares a facial expression range with Van Morrison on a night out at a comedy club.

Ordinarily, when the temp numbers go double, I barricade myself in the house and wait patiently to swear at the first eager neighbour  unable to resist digging out his lawnmower. Usually after he’s done with that other popular outdoor activity – smoking. There he is at his backdoor, post-meat ‘n’ veg Lambert and Butler in one hand, hip in the other, surveying the lawn, and the compulsion hits. Even better if it’s nine at night. If it’s OK for the ice-cream van to come playing the theme from Match of the Day, it’s OK for him to rev up his pneumatic grass-cutter. 

This year would’ve been no exception had we not endured one of those visits from friends that will have me lying about being the outdoor type for the remainder of the season. The anxiety usually begins at the biscuit aisle in M&S (height of sophistication round our way), and ends with their premature departure following one crying session too many from their wee one following the umpteenth encounter with our wee one. Halfway up an Ikea tunnel on a tiled floor, as their parents strain to discuss the merits of pre-school programmes, one woman hoping the other hasn’t noticed her one has been enjoying unfettered access to chocolate fingers. But the evidence is everywhere.

So that’s it. From here in, it’s the communal neutral green grass cushioned park. No polite restraint when our children are pulling one another’s limbs off. No no intervening and passive parenting before swiftly feigning concern when the cup has already been knocked over just because they’re having a coronary. And no post-visit grazing on the sickening collection of buns they brought. The same ones that wouldn’t ever meet M&S socialising standards. I’d say it’ll be safe to suggest a dander to the ice-cream van though. Every sun-split cloud and all that.

My 1st abandoned post

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Title: “Too many protest singers, not enough protest songs”

Theme: Decline of the protest song in popular music.

Inspired by: Recent elections, political apathy, the corresponding rise of the insidious ‘play list’ dictated by 20 and 30 something taste-making slaves to brand bland, uniform devotion to Converse, and the focus group.

The main point: Contemporary music can be charted along a number of defining political epochs. It was about creating a sound and a look that was new within the context of a strong feeling that the world was somehow being changed and that something radical was happening. That’s over. I don’t want it to be, but it is.

Evidence:

Past (with a few still present): Billie Holiday, Pete Seeger, Woodie Guthrie, Dylan, Joan Baez, Patti Smith, Nina Simone, Bob Marley, Punk, Billy Bragg, Springsteen, Neil Young, Ani DiFranco, Manu Chao etc. etc.

Present: Pussy Riot

The title of the abandoned post is a line taken from a song by the illustrious Edwyn Collins. Girl Like You’ was released in 1994. A trawl from that year reveals one song aspiring to protest status: Zombie by The Cranberries. I’ll let you draw your own conclusion on that fantasy.

Conclusion: Political conscientiousness and angry protest music has been hi-jacked by tofu-chewing multi-millionaire best mates of the G8 and dumbed down to a lazy ringtone. The traditional fight for justice among the musical fraternity has, more or less, been reduced to the wearing of a poxy wristband. Every second a brain is desensitised by a Mumford & Son song *claps hands* There goes another.

Reason for abandonment: I live in a time when delicate irony is contemplated over coffee so *sips* I was unable to whip myself into enough of a frenzy. The needle returns to the start of the PJ Harvey album and we all stroke our chins like before.

What to give the man who has everything?

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What do you give the man who has it all?

The wife and kids

The lovely home

The successful job

The healthy parents

The many friends

The 10k personal best

The everything he’s lived for

The youth on his side

The second house a mile from his first

The halfway from heartache

The rental agreement

The kids two nights a week

The emotional disorder

The stranger for a wife

The impending separation

The unlonged for silence

The science of new appliances

The both sides of the bed

The 10 month personal worst

The healthy parents

The many friends

The sanctuary of work

The strength on his side

The everything to live for

The new world order

The halfway to a new beginning

Very little, I suppose.

Just an assurance that you’ll keep pace

With him till he gets there

Where we’ll all be waiting.

Things I haven’t learned as a parent

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1. What male parents make of it all. Or fathers, as they are sometimes called on Earth. In a world wide web of ninth degree scrutiny of mothering by mothers, it’s hard to tell. 

2. Why a campaign hasn’t been launched by someone somewhere to ban the hideous term Baby Led Weaning. Or a campaign to ban me from convulsing over it. Or a piss-taking swipe at it, or an earnest unpicking of it in the context of the ever expanding lexicon of parenting. Everything that pisses me off about parenting can be summed up by it. Look, I’ll settle for a poxy bumper sticker at this stage.

3. Whether I have prevented even one prospective parent from buying an Angel Care monitor. I’d like to think I’m doing my bit to support parental consumer ‘choice’. Add to that one less travel system purchase and my job here on hell is done.

4. Of any parents who came through private maternity care freely willing to admit they thought it was a waste of money. They must exist. Step forward like good people. We’ll disguise your voice. We’ll even distort your face. We won’t use your real name. We’ll get Miriam to do the gushing intro and that surly McCullough bloke to interview you with his confidence-inspiring indifference. How about a witness protection programme? A French fancy? Two French fancies? Both pink?

5.  Of any songs about parenting. That’s worrying. Parenting is on a par with vegetarianism and jogging in the song-writing department. That ought to tell us something.

7″ Heels

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Do the names Yannick Etienne, Cheryl Parker, or Katrina Phillips ring any bells with you? Me neither; until tonight. And they would’ve been condemned to obscurity forever had I not been reminded of my close acquaintance with these women by the release of Morgan Neville’s award-winning documentary 20 Feet From Stardom. The film pays tribute to those unsung heroes of contemporary music – the backing singers. In anticipation of seeing it, I’ve been digging out vinyl featuring memorable backing vocals that often feature forgettable backing vocals that threaten to murder them all single-notedly.

Yannick Etienne climbs the world’s highest vocal peak on Roxy Music’s Avalon. I’ll risk busting a vocal chord every time I hear it to assail those closing notes that orbit a vocal range only dogs in Siberia can hear. And maybe Joe Pasquale. Here, have a listen, and find out what knocking yourself out by strenuously flexing your voice might feel like. If you succeed, I’ll nominate you for a Darwin Award.

Ditto Cheryl Parker on I Can See from Martin Stephenson’s Gladsome, Humour and Blue album. Poor Cheryl went on to join Beverly Craven (of “you light up another cigarette and I pour the caustic acid over your ears” fame), but prior to that fall to disgrace, she was knocking about with one of the underrated folkies from Oop North. Stephenson was one-time label mate of Prefab Sprout who themselves incubated their own wistful houseplant that doubled up as a backing vocalist. Allegedly. Just put some white tights over your head, eat half a packet of Oreos and loll your head around to re-create those vocals. Cheryl would knock her unconscious by merely drawing breath. You’re gonna pull an Elvis lip at the 80s production, and I’ll worry you’ll dismiss him on the basis of listening to one of the weaker tracks on the album. Free the shackled mind, as Cheryl sings before hopping her vocals up on a rocket launcher.

Wait a second, it’s not on youtube, and I’m fucked if I’m deleting a paragraph that slags off Prefab Sprout’s backing singer. We’ll never see the likes of it again. Buy it on iTunes.

To my mind, Katrina Phillips was always a young Kathy Burke crossed with the fiddler from Dexy’s circa ’84. She and Terry Hall are ambling through the streets of Brighton hop-scotching around their feelings and promising each other they’ll always be friends. They’ll vow to meet up in 20 years time on the promenade, she in her dungarees, he in his sullen lips. This imagery should never have been tampered with, but their vocal game of tig took a turn for the unexpected tonight when I discovered she looks like the love child of Annie and Marmalade Atkins, scientific progress permitting. “So walk where angels fear to tread….”, you’re it, Kathy, I mean, Katrina, “… for everything we ever wanted”.   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6c5ntJ6Kw0