Christmas Eve 2022

And here we are back to Christmas. Christmas on the calendar is a definite mark, an unmissable pass  and whatever you are going through at Christmas, in my experience, is amplified, so happy is super happy, sad is super sad, and so on. This evening i'm feeling pensive, a little lost & maybe a little sad. Christmas comes & what is it for ? 

I thought i would blog as a way to run my feelings out, but difficult feelings aren't allowed at Christmas they must me pushed down, sat upon, stifled, because Christmas is HAPPY and merry and if you aren't HAPPY and merry you are Scrooge or the Grinch or Captain Comedown, and so my feelings this evening feel wrong for this evening. 

So what is going on ? I think i may be lonely. I am someone who needs time alone more than most i think. I am someone who needs solitude and for whom solitude is generally a source of comfort, so to admit to loneliness is quite hard. My loneliness stems from a longing to connect i think. It is a long time since i have felt this but as i tap tap on my keyboard that is what is coming up. 

That is enough to write for now. I acknowledge my awkwardness on this Christmas eve but i think i don't need to wallow in it. 

...

Christmas Morning 2022

5am. In years past my home would have just been awaking to the sounds of children, then teenagers, excited about their stockings. I used to lay their stockings out on the rug in the living/telly room.  They were not socks but great big acrylic christmas fake socks, vulgar i suppose, but there is something about the things that come out each year, they harbour memories. I wonder how they feel now after years of not being filled, like un-cuddled Teddy bears or unread books or rooms in houses waiting for entrance. I must throw off this melancholy mood. Or at least assimilate it to try to understand it. 

In years further past I was the child. Mum would put our stockings on our beds. They were proper long socks always with a tangerine in the toe end. Tangerines were christmas treats in the 1970's. Going to bed on Christmas eve i would fall asleep listening to the rustle of her wrapping & filling the socks with carefully stashed little gifts, embroidered animals from the Chinese shop on Elm Hill and paper parasols amongst other things. Once when i was very young i woke in the night and saw Father Christmas, yes really, i remember it clearly, a glowing figure coming into the dark of my bedroom, i shut my eyes so he wouldn't know i'd seen him but i did. 

After breakfast our gifts from family and friends would have been laid out on chairs in the sitting room. My dad's were usually wrapped in a paper bag, that was his trade mark wrapping. And the woman from from up the road who showed me a softer way of being used to give me Devon Violets scent, i think this is where my love of violet perfumes stems from. One year i had asked my dad for a bottle of mead because our teacher at school had been reading The Hobbit to us and mead had been talked about and he bought it for me. In other years i'd asked him for records, Swan Lake, Abba's Greatest Hits, David Bowie's Scary Monsters. 

In the youth, long ago, Christmas day's opened with a glass of champagne and a spliff but today i wake alone except for my cat who as she does every morning came for a cuddle before we went downstairs. I have baked a cake for Christmas day at Amis' house. It is too big for three to eat but i enjoyed baking it, living alone i don't have much reason to bake cakes anymore unless i particularly fancy cake and i'd not trouble to ice a cake for myself. But it is odd after decades of being the provider of the feast to be a guest, a luxury and treat in the first year, but it feels like water running thin in some ways now, a trickling stream joining the body of a stronger river, briefly, before slipping back onto it's own pathway. I am no longer the river or even a great part of the river. 

Oops slipped back into winter-y thoughts. I guess it is natural. It is Winter. And tho this feast, Christmas, is a festival of light, it comes within the bleak of Winter and after the recent cold snap when my fuels bills (research politics and cost of living crisis 2022 if you are reading this years from now) were un-payably expensive i feel a little bleak. I guess the politics of the moment are part of what makes me feel a bit to the side of celebrations this year. National, international, social and personal-social politics are beastly (to a greater or lesser degree) at the moment, the future looks like it may be hard to navigate. The future cannot be held back, life cannot be held in arrest for long, a pause can be held briefly but life goes on, or doesn't, the dead may know pause and but maybe even they are shuffled along as other bodies bury them deeper and the grief of those left behind becomes a ragged cloak and not the heavy mantle it once was.  

So today is Christmas Day. It is 6am now and i just went downstairs and the advent candle in the kitchen fills the room and beyond with light. Today will be a good day i will be with people i love, Archie and Amis and if my stream meets only briefly with others it is perhaps the way i have chosen, at this time, for it to be. To be alone and of small consequence is not a terrible thing, there is a freedom in that journey. Happy Christmas.

...

Boxing Day morning 7am

And so Christmas Day was lovely. Gentle. Made gentle by my son Amis who carried the day as host with warmth & generosity. We watched TV, a charming animation that he had recorded so i could see it "The Boy, The Fox, The Mole and The Horse" and Alexa, the weird character who occupies space in so many people's houses, gave us christmas tunes and told us how to cook with the truffle that Richard had sent us as our joint Christmas present. We gave & received gifts mostly books & consumables. We had cake and champagne at lunchtime and ate dinner as the light was fading. Archie & Amis made me watch the King's speech. They are quite ardent royalists. I am not. I came home, not late, exhausted but quietly happy. My walk home at about 6pm had been fine, lots of cars and people about. A couple of years ago when we had Christmas under Covid restrictions i'd walked home at 9pm and quite frankly it was scary.  

And now it is Boxing Day. I'm snuggled up in my bed with the cat asleep by my side. It's a relief to have got through Christmas day. I think it feels like the year's last hurdle. I was conscious this year of my mum in her care home and feeling guilty about that tho i think she will have had a good time as she seems quite happy in the home and the staff and manager are kind. I know i am not the only person facing that scenario. And other friends were facing Christmas with parents recently died, i was thinking about them too, i have yet to go through that i can only imagine how it feels.

But now, having got over the last jump and on the run to the finish, the new year, there is time to regroup my senses in readiness for 2023. God knows how next year will unfold. I will make resolutions, i always make resolutions and some of them i keep, sometimes for a little while and sometimes they become part of me, but more of that maybe on a New Years Day post. Today i will be mostly eating cake and reading and maybe out in my garden.   

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.   

SNU2. The reason i might have lost the thread is because i am writing up a bit of time in which there was a lot going on and i was mentally and physically exhausted and felt overwhelmed,  vulnerable, strung out and cranky. There were a lot of different tasks and deadlines going on simultaneously. Submissions for proposals for 3 exhibitions each with a different deadline and brief. And the deadline for the Creative Odyssey postcard auction. The UEA/NUA collaborative project presentation deadline. The deadline for making work to be invested for the next bronze pour. The MA symposium taking a day out from workshop time. Applying to help with a printmaking workshop for The Pilgrimage of the Animals event organised by XR and St Peter Mancroft with local print maker Maria Pavledis. Meeting with Maria to discuss the workshop and what she needed me to do as her helper. There was also an artists meeting for the sculpture trail. And through that a further meeting with another artist who gave me a link to a residency which in fact i did not apply for because covid19 made travel plans a little unpredictable. 
And i was feeling hemmed in because when i meltdown i need to retreat but all that was happening was asking me to push out. And i was dealing with Jon grief and unresolved child's grief for my grandpa and wanting to get in touch with my father to ask when my grandpa died but not being able to because my oldest sister was in the country and when she is in the country my family prefer me to stay out of the way and not make contact which added to the grief i was feeling about Jon because when i met him he'd been my home, my happy, my soft space, away from my difficult family. 
There's a book called "Talking of Love on the Edge of a Precipice" which i read some years back that spoke of resilience being born out of feeling loved. I wonder if that is why i hold the love affair i had with Jon so close to me. I felt loved in his arms, and his love gave me the courage to believe in myself, believe i was ok, not rotten, ugly, useless, horrible, but what i wanted to be, someone worthy of love. My anger towards his family stems in part from the way they refused to acknowledge our love affair as anything of worth when it was of huge worth to me, and maybe of worth to him too. 
One of the things that was also bugging me was the issue of some letters of mine that he'd apparently kept which his ex-wife had told me about about two years before. I'd assumed they were a couple of postcards and maybe a birthday card that i'd sent him after our break up when we were close but not lovers. Cards he'd stuck on his fridge maybe. After a session about copyright law in the symposium i was thinking about how i wanted my words to Jon even if they were likely to be disappointingly flat to be in my hands and not the seemingly hostile hands of his ex-wife. A part of me thought "let it go, it doesn't matter" but another voice kept saying "you need those letters". In the end the "you need those letters" won over and i sent an email to nudge the ex-wife into sending them not really daring to hope she still had them, but chancing my arm anyway. Our email exchange was a bloody fight but she sent the letters to me.
What i hadn't expected was a package nearly a kilo in weight containing, it seems, all the letters and cards i sent him when we were together and a couple of notebooks; a holiday diary we'd made together, and one with poems and pictures and things that belonged to us and my thoughts collected together for him at the beginning of our affair. The stuff was so personal it seemed mad that she'd kept it for so long. It was devastating to receive. But also amazing. It made me feel not-crazy for loving him and believing he loved me too because surely he'd not have kept all that stuff and taken it with him if he didn't care. It made me want to swear because damn fool i loved him and would have followed him to the ends of the earth if he'd asked. It made me feel better about making work about him. Not silly but honest. 
This post is an explanation, i guess, of the emotional landscape in which the SNU work was growing. I think that everything the maker-creator is thinking and feeling when they are making-creating becomes part of whatever is made/created so giving this much space to my heart-work feels appropriate if somewhat exposing.  
  

SNU. "Wings on a Wednesday" some of the screen prints using the same screen as the CMYK prints posted earlier. 

SNU. Wings on a Wednesday. 

SNU. Objects. 3d Printing. Sampling.