When i was young i thought my life would be more exotic than it has been. I thought i would travel. I wanted to discover Africa, India, China. I wanted to be immersed in them, live in them swallow them up so they became part of me. But instead i had children. 1, 2, 3. Lots of people have children & still travel. I guess that i wasn't adventurous enough to make it happen. I was scared, when i conceived my first, you could say she was planned, planned in as much as two naive 19/20 year old's plan,"Lets have a baby, wahey, yes lets, I had no idea about what that decision really meant, for me, or for my child. When i got pregnant, my family's response was mixed, my aunt wrote advising an abortion, my granny on my father's side told me she never wanted to see me again, my great aunt on my mother's side, who'd been deaf since she was twelve, knitted my baby clothes to wear and wrote telling me she thought i was brave to keep the child. I appreciated her support which i took personally but it may also have stemmed from her faith as a catholic & the value placed on the unborn child. 

I suppose that my aunt & my granny were also responding from their belief systems. My aunt was a career woman, childless herself i think she would have seen having a child as a bad choice. My granny had had to give up work when she married & marriage & motherhood i think had been disappointing maybe frustrating & perhaps that as well as disapproval about my child being illegitimate, affected her response. Marriage & motherhood can be frustrating & disappointing, and my chances were limited by my being a parent. These were things i could not imagine in the arrogance my youth bestowed upon me. 

I thought i was beginning my happy ever after. I'd always wanted children, i didn't know what else i wanted. Having flunked my A'Levels university wasn't an option & even if i had got into somewhere through clearing i think i wouldn't have fared much better in that environment than i did in school. I was pretty clueless & didn't know who i was at that age although of course i thought i knew it all. 

Pregnancy was an adventure, physically i sailed through it, i put on only the weight of my baby & was back in size 10 (that was model size back in the 80's) jeans within a week. Her birth was not traumatic & her father was loving & caring with me & with her for about a year after her birth. But things changed & our relationship foundered, we split up then got back together for enough time to conceive our second child before the drama with my older sister described in the previous blog - i didn't know then that what happened was just a single night of thoughtless flirting & not a longer more meaningful affair, i found that out 25 years later when asked him straight out. After that Steve & I limped to the end of my second pregnancy knowing that breaking up was no longer an if but a when & not long after Richard's birth i found myself parenting two small children alone. 

Is that an excuse for not chasing my dreams. Lord love me i tried but my try as i might i could never make my dreams reality & every time i seemed to surface I would hit obstacles that stopped me again. When i was young time felt boundless but also I felt like my life-blood was dripping out of me drop by drop as i lived a life that was confined by responsibility, lack of money & fear. In my teens & twenties 30 seemed impossibly old. Funny, now even my youngest child is close to that age & the others have passed it. Are they old ? No.

Even at the great age of 30 tho' dreams of adventure still hung in the ether like mirages in a desert. It is dumb really to think back and call that time desert because i've been lucky enough to have always lived close to flowers & birdsong & the years i spent bringing up my children were not mis-spent & now they feel like solid ground but elsewhere seemed better then. It's a trick we play on ourselves, looking over the fence & thinking our neighbours/siblings/friends lives are better but it took me decades to find a path that felt right, felt like my path.  

Does that mean that the paths i took before were wrong ? I don't think so because i would not be where i am now if i'd chosen other ways & as the saying goes "as one door closes another one opens" but in choosing a door we create the shape our lives become. Moments slip by & at some point as i see with my mother and feel already in myself i realise there are dreams that feel out of reach because i failed to fulfil them earlier in my days. I travelled by exploring the cultures of other places through books, art, music, film, dance, yoga, shiatsu & sometimes friendships with people more resolved in the practice of travel than me who landed close to my home allowing us to connect for a while. But the smells & the sounds, the breath in & breath out of other lands is not really part of my body & weakness in me makes me think it will never be which gives me deep sadness. Body time is linear & tho the body carries memories it living trajectory is forward, always forward, maybe i will still fulfil my travel cravings or maybe my spirit will give me strength in the next body, if i return in physical form, to be the wanderer i always wished to be.  

I read the last lines of the previous post & i think what is this blogging thing i'm doing ? It's thoughts of a moment caught in time. I think back to when Jon died, or when i was struggling with the MA course i didn't finish, when i threw up on the page all the feelings i couldn't contain. There is a strong case for doing this in private in a notebook that will likely never be read even by me, but, then also, sometimes i'll flip back to look at a post from another time, this blog goes back nearly a decade now, and it acts as witness. 

Yesterday i spoke to my godmother about how my mother had invited her over to have lunch & meet an archbishop from Africa who was a friend of my mother's aunt. She said my mother was late getting the meal ready so my godmother & the archbishop were left sitting in the garden, he peeling potatoes & she shelling peas. It conjures up a gorgeous vignette now, in part because i know the garden & my mother & godmother, but life didn't feel gorgeous when i was growing up because it was my normal & other people's normal seemed to be way more entrancing, now i look back and can see how each one of us lives a life that is a bit like novel we just don't know it at the time. 

My seminal relationship was with Jon, no man had touched me the way he did, the relationship was in a league of its own, but there were men in my life before him, what made him the one i go back to in my mind, what makes him the one i take with me wherever i go. I think its about feeling, perhaps how we started, perhaps the timing of our days together, perhaps it was when i opened my eyes for the first time, perhaps it was when i said "yes" and embraced my own life whole heartedly. God only knows but he changed my life. 

He changed my life but now in hindsight i see that all the time my life has been changing, chapters within it act like stepping stones across a river, friendships & happenings belonging to yesteryear held in a golden light, bike rides around the villages around where i grew up, my babies, & people & places that are part of the picture then no longer, or else constants that i revisit or who stand beside me as i travel this life. 

At the moment my mum is ill in hospital, that's where i began this series of blog posts about myself & my family's history. These past few weeks have drawn a new path in my mind the bus ride from Norwich to Dereham, the walk to the hospital from Dereham market place, the room & the ward that mum has been in, the faces of the nurses, the occupational therapist, the discharge nurse, their faces & also their bearing, the way they interact, and while she was in the ward, the women she was sharing space with. Even the woman i was booking appointments with to see mum gave me a part of herself as we spoke, her dog barking in the background. We leave & collect traces depending on character, some are witness but leave without being seen, others notice nothing but spread themselves all over wherever they've been, most of us fall between these extremes. 

Who we are is political. How long our presence lasts after we've died depends on those who carry us with them. Our children are carriers. Maybe our children's children are carriers. Good friends & lovers may also hold us. Bad friends & lovers may also hold us. Maybe that is why they say don't hold a grudge. I do hold grudges, it is a fault in me, it is a fault in me that causes me suffering because instead of letting go i hold on to a bad feeling. But how do I let go of a blow without losing the knowledge that blow gave me ?

For instance, a mark in my story is finding my oldest sister in the arms of my then partner, the father of our daughter & the child in my womb. It was June, we were staying at my other sister's for her daughter's second birthday, my own daughter had turned two in March. We had pitched a tent in their garden as had others. We had left the cats outside for the night at our home but brought my dog. We must have arrived mid to late afternoon i think & when my daughter, Jessamy, got tired i took her into the tent to lay her down & she and i fell asleep together. Much later i woke in the small hours, i could hear two voices quite close by in the garden, & the sounds of a party ongoing inside my sister's cottage. The voices close by were those of my partner & my oldest sister, he was begging her for sex she was prevaricating, simpering & giggling & saying no but not in a way that felt like no. I unzipped the tent door & got out of our tent. I walked over to where they were lying in each others arms. I stood over their heads for a few minutes listening & watching before saying "i could have stamped on your heads while you've been lying there". Writing that i can see that is a brutish thing to say. My sister leapt up to standing like an a volt of electricity had passed through her body, my partner, rolled over, i think he swore. I walked away, my sister followed saying "you really need to do something about your relationship", i remember giving her a look & saying something like "well you're helping" ... my other sister came out & a row that i can't recall ensued. It was a nightmare night. And unbeknown to us then our little cat Percy at home with his mother & our other cat had been run over & killed, that weekend was a bad weekend. After the row i must have slept, gone back to the tent, but i only remember waking up when no one else was a wake & standing in the garden which was wet with summer dew, the scent of  the honeysuckle that sprawled over everything filled the air, and in the distance sheep called their lambs, in this romantic idyll i was trying to make sense of the night before & piece together my life. Maybe what happened was just a little thing, maybe i could have shaken it off, but the aftermath of an event, great or small, determines the direction of play in the future, and i didn't i grasped it to me. It hurt. 

Correct me if i am wrong after WW1 the germans were forced to pay vast reparations that left them bankrupt which gave passage to the events leading up to WW2. I use that gross example because its easier to see the effect of decisions on a massive scale than it is when their measure is smaller. In personal relationships the dynamics are generally subtler, a failure to apologise, a lack of contrition, how other people respond or react. Once again i bring up a more public furore, the Number 10 Covid lockdown parties for instance, the Number 10 parties shouldn't have happened, when it was discovered they happened those guilty lied & tried to evade justice, those who gave or attended those parties endeavoured to "alright" them, to make them a "nothing to see here" matter, these responses have made them worse. So it is with my sister & I, she has to this date, never said sorry & acts in a manner that implies innate superiority & so the wound festers. 

But what if now i peel the bandages off the wound, give it light, give it air, say this happened it was wrong, but it was a long time ago, my life is not that moment, & tho it changed the course of my life change is part & parcel of life. My older children's father & I were not going to ever make a long happy marriage, we were unsuited partners, maybe it brought our separation to sooner end but an ending was inevitable. I've been thinking recently about how that night felt to my sister. She seemed to me to get off scot free whilst i was punished but maybe that let off has meant the wrong committed is more tightly bound to her than if familial pressure had forced her to meet it head on. Like not cleaning shit off your shoes.  

Anyway maybe my writing out how I met that moment is me letting the light in, giving ancient feelings of shock, betrayal, sadness, anger, pain, license to fly. I wonder what feelings my sister might carry from that night, shame maybe, fear, anger at being caught, desire to deflect, wrong, i can only guess, maybe she has no feelings about it. And who am i today to call foul now, i have got plenty wrong myself, who in the course of a life doesn't. So endeth my sermon.  

Can a child be born bad ? I don't think so. But I think sometimes, maybe when a parent is very controlling, a child gets labelled bad because they fail to fall in line with the parent is unable to stiffen them into the shape they desire. My granny, my father's mother mentioned once that her daughter, my father's older sister, was difficult with food & that made her bad. My sister is currently pursuing a narrative that her daughter was always difficult, tho this line of talking seems to have come up since my niece accused my sister's partner of touching her inappropriately when she was a minor. In childhood i was the rubbish child, my oldest sister was clever & pretty, the prize winner, daddy's child, the pet of my aunt & my mother's parents, my other sister was beautiful & good, i was plain & dull & i grew up feeling that i was unlovable. I never felt loved until i met Jon, he let me see myself as someone worthy of love. 

Growing up feeling myself to be unlovable, unworthy of love or care, a person that people would rather wasn't there was difficult. I think my parents were stuck in a loveless marriage & that maybe the third child, another daughter rather than the son i should have been, was a pressure that tipped the relationship over the edge. My mum stuck in the country, away from the job she had loved & the parents who supported her, with three small children was maybe only just keeping her head above water. My dad in a new job with a wife who wasn't used to keeping house & caring for children was perhaps coasting. I don't know. I suppose i just know that i felt like a wrong party. I believe that my parents are not bad people, children got spanked in those days but we weren't beaten, & tho i vividly recall, as a very young child, being dragged out of my chair at family meals by my mother & pulled up the stairs by one arm & locked in my bedroom, the sound of the slide of the lock still rings in my ears, this was not all of my life, there are memories of flowers, animals, art-making & baking too. 

But the sense of being an unlovable person, someone the world would be better without, sits deep in my body & is worse when i am forced into close proximity with my background as i am at the moment with my mother ill. The person who most provokes these feelings is my oldest sister, tho i will give my mum, my niece, my other sister, my older children's father & even my children (because i thought they might be better off without me) credit for triggering suicidal thoughts too. Suicide is part of my family's picture. My father's sister, Betty, committed suicide a couple of years before i was born. She was rarely spoken of except in reference to being the mother of Colin our much older cousin who lived in Australia or maybe New Zealand I can't recall which. I believe it was a gas oven suicide, you will have to refer to my older sister's research to verify this. The methods i have seriously considered are hanging myself & stepping on to a rail crossing. Other methods have been considered. I sincerely hope that i am resilient enough & have enough here that is not my back family to stop me from pursuing these ends but perhaps that is another reason why i am blogging, to give myself release as i am conscious that dark thoughts are gaining a foothold in me & i am frightened. 

I was chatting this week with my mum in hospital. She has a bad cough, phlegmy & deep, tho she seems to be pulling phlegm up it is clearly also sitting in her lungs. For a long time colds have gone to her chest. People seem to have weak places in their bodies where ill health gravitates when they are at low ebb. For me it is my nerves & my mind, i spin out & my mind runs like wild fire, only solitude & silence give me respite, i have to limit the time i spend with others & i tend to make art that is white. It is my body's call for peace i think. This is where i am now but my mother's needs are forcing me into interaction with the people who make me feel worst. How can i meet the needs of the situation whilst also safeguarding my own need to be well ? 

These blog posts are clearly not an academic family history. Here & there i pop in a scrap of information about some other party but really its about me isn't it. I know that i am motivated in part by my need to set my internal dialogue down in writing so i can cut loose from it but maybe also there is ego, a desire to have my story on a page. I think about all the celebrities & politicians who have written or had ghost written their autobiography & had them published in hardback with shiny covers, what makes them think that people will be interested. My mother said about my sister's family history "who cares?" one of my sons said he thought she was writing it because the dead are easier to have relationship with than the living. I wonder if maybe she is doing it to make herself important to future generations, the writer of our past. I guess that is why i am making my mark because i surely know that i'll be written out of her family history, or written in such a manner that mirrors my worth to her which is zilch & i don't want my sister, who is unkind to me & about me & has no children of her own, to be master of how generations sprung from my body are witness to the story that she & I share so i plant my seed here.   

 So here i begin ... but where to begin, where & when does a history start ? Is this a family history, an autobiography, a vengeful hit back, a cry from my heart, a whine ? i don't know, maybe all of those things & more. As i write i guess i will find out. And who will care ? Only me i think, I'm writing for me, as therapy as much as anything i think.  

At the moment I am making work for an exhibition in June for the Lonely Arts Club, an artists community group that i became a member of last year. The exhibition is called Resonance and will be in a local semi derelict space often used for art exhibitions because it is free & also rather beautiful in the way that semi derelict buildings are. The group has had a couple of week long residencies to explore the space organised by Jacqui Jones, one last autumn & one a few weeks ago. I had been to exhibitions there before but not connected to the place as an empty building so these residency weeks have been helpful. 

The Shoe Factory was built about 100 years ago & the front is Art Deco by design & lovely. Inside it is dark & cold downstairs tho there is good light from the windows in the morning & upstairs is cold & light (it may be hot in the summer). There are patches of damp, in the middle of the room upstairs there was a large puddle where the rain had got in in the Spring & one corner is green with algae and there is also water. Some parts are blocked off because they represent a health & safety risk & through some windows you can see inaccessible parts of the building. There are holes stopped with boards held in place with bricks. And nature in the form of budleia & other weed type plants is gaining a foothold on flat roofs and window sills. In a slight breeze the boards stopping the holes bang rhythmically against the wall as part of the sound scape. Some windows are graffitied on, some are broken. Electric wiring is exposed showing the coloured cables routes & there are metal bars criss crossing the ceiling. All this is i guess is part now of the buildings & my history. The anecdotal evidence of a living witness. Once upon a time i imagine it was full of people making shoes & their bosses. Each person a contained unit of experience, their ghosts inhabiting the places they lived their lives including the factory, their bloodline still flowing, or not, depending on whether they had children or not.          

The work i am making for this exhibition began with the thought of the Green Man because of the way nature is creeping into this man made structure, pulling it back to earth. I meet the Green Man in churches, bosses & carvings & paintings, sometimes but also in woods & fields & wild places, inside & outside of me. He is part of my process. My work is always built on process, i'm not the best at any creative art, not a gifted painter, printer, ceramicist or even textile artist which is what my BA was in but i am good at following intuition led process & sometimes i make work that is good enough. 

What i have been exploring this past few weeks is work on paper & on that paper i'm drawing up thoughts, feelings, & memories but then i've cut them out to leave blanks, keeping back to treasure what i love & moving on & covering over the holes, the absences & the mistakes. Perhaps this is the nature of life lived. Here is a part that i loved, cut it out & keep it, here is a bit i wish i could erase, can it be erased or painted over, maybe, but is the mark left, or only partially covered, partially lost but still living within the body of paper or my self ? 

One of the awful things that happens when a person dies is that their death is the end of vessel that contained their life. With my mother ill i feel that sharply, i have stories about her that feel quite solid - the duel that was fought over her when she was at art school in Oxford in her late teens, a shopping list in her young girl's hand that included Cyclax lipstick, the picture of her that my granny (her mother) painted wearing green, a beauty. And more recently my god mother telling me how she looked like a model when she'd arrived at Brandiston Common in her late twenties, where we lived till my parents divorced in the 1980s, long legs & fur. I remember how there were extraordinary clothes in her wardrobe, a ball gown with red roses on white with black leaves. And when my middle sister crashed & wrote off my mother's car in her late teens, whilst, so i've been told she was high on drugs & playing slalom with the cats eyes in the road, there was a black Dior dress that got destroyed. I know it is more important that everyone escaped that crash alive but i've always been saddened by the loss of that dress. My mum was glamorous before i was born. I think by the time i was born her glamour was fading although she is still someone who dresses with a certain flair and always has been really. She & I talk now about how a person is so many ages when they are old. As someone thirty years younger than she is i can only guess at what is to come & i don't think any other ever really knows what is going on for another person, the secret palace inside their mind, the doors that open on to times & places particular & personal to them, but in my mum i see her youth, her childhood, times that were good & times that were sad. She is an embodied family history, she is, we all are. Some get their histories written, some write their own, & others get lost over time, sometimes even while they are still alive.

  

Again i return to my blog after a long break, well it is the place where i give myself witness when the world i'm in becomes to much for me to hold within. Words are not my medium but i have a basic grasp of my mother tongue & that has to do, it would have to do even if all i could utter was garble, mutter, screech or other formless sound, our voices are a deep power, to silence another is dark magic. 

This year my mother's health has gone downhill & she is currently in hospital being rehabilitated after a fall. This necessitates contact with my family which is discomforting because my family is not a safe family but we are having to find a way together to hold her space so that whether she has weeks or years to live she can be as comfortable & happy as her age & abilities allow. I love my mum. But. I love my mum but our relationship is complicated. I love her but it is not the beatific mother daughter relationship that we are taught we ought to have. And i am completely estranged from oldest sister, and pretty much completely estranged from my other sister tho we are just about able to communicate constructively if need forces us to. 

Perhaps that needs a little bit of background & what i think i will be blogging over the next few weeks or months is my family's history. My oldest sister is currently researching our family's history but travelling further back in time to people long dead. I am not privy to this history but she sends it to my sons i believe, & my mother, & my mother passes me scraps. Here is a scrap, my family on my mother's mother's side have circus roots & on Thursday when visiting mum in hospital she told me that my sister has discovered that they used to keep a macaque, i believe that their part in the circus was the chimpanzees tea party but as i haven't done my own research & my estranged sister does not share her research with me I know that as hearsay not fact. 

Recent family history is easier tho possibly more messy to annotate. A living witness may tell a story that a family will close up around so that it isn't seen by the outside who may view the family differently if ugly secrets are no longer secret. Narratives may find themselves in conflict, it happened, it didn't happen, the story is a corpse still stinking not yet reduced to clean white bones. 

I thought i would write my family history because i do not think that i will figure in my sister's because she has played a role in my life that cannot be dressed up to look good. I would erase her from my life too perhaps except that she persists in invading my space by pushing in to the family that i grew, my sons' & my daughter's lives, & so she is perpetually present tho i'd prefer her to not be. She leaves her mark like a cat pissing in another cat's territory, i do not go into her territory except perhaps this is me laying my trace, raising my tail to leave my scent. Is that the nature of autobiography, a telling of tale. I leave my story so that if in time to come my grandchildren's children are writing their family history they will have my words as reference. 

So here i begin ...