As I am making these blog notes about me & my family i'm thinking about what family history is. How one thing or another gets set down as story and how other things don't. What is noteworthy ? And what isn't ? A history is not a novel and yet each person's life may read like a novel, may read well as a novel, or not, depending on who is writing/telling it. 

What triggers these thoughts ? I started out on the family history path after seeing my mum in hospital. A mother is a key figure in a person's life, even an absent mother makes a mark by her absence. My mother is very far from absent. She is a person whose body within the wheel likes to be close to the hub. Seeing her now in reduced circumstances, struggling to get up from a chair, sliding her feet forward inch by inch so slow it took her close to an hour to walk 10ft from the loo & she need a wheelchair for the last 5ft is humbling & shocking. She is in some ways still close to the hub but as a vulnerable person whose needs her family are gathering around rather than as someone ordering events.

A family history written when bones are dry doesn't hold the little things. The journeys my sister & I take to see our mum. She in a car bearing the things my mother has asked her to bring, a battery wireless, optrex, lactulose, her herbal sleep pills, the t-shirt with the dove on it. My journeys to see her in Dereham hospital on foot & by the "super 8" bus, the walk to stand A at the bus station, the ride to Dereham market place, the walk up theatre street & cemetery road,  past the church & the cemetery, the school & the water tower to the edge of town where country roads beckon where i turn in to the hospital gates & say my "hello" to the people standing, waiting, to guide others to the Covid vaccination centre, I go to Foxley Ward, sometimes i have to wait if i'm early, & it is peaceful with birdsong, I wash my hands, mask up, sign in and walk the corridors to see mum who is frail & weary, sometimes better than i hope, sometimes worse. In a room on her own & then in a ward with three others. Their faces, their being briefly imprinted on my being along with the image of mum sleeping, looking pale with her mouth open. 

Now she is in a rehab care home in Costessey. No bus now, i just walk, it takes just over an hour, i'm a reasonably good walker & it seems to take less long now i know where i'm going. The care home is ok. The care home is good. The staff are mostly nice & some are lovely. Her room is painted warm soft orange & has a wardrobe, chest of drawers & an en-suite bathroom. The window looks out on a wall empty tarmac but it is a large window so the room is light & the wall doesn't block her view of the sky. She hates her bed which is a hospital bed, rubber for cleanliness. She hated the air bed she had in Dereham too. I think beds may be a suffering for her now. This is bad because her legs & feet are swollen. They look so sore they are hard to see. I massage her feet & legs when i visit, it changes nothing, they are still swollen after i've touched them. And i give her arms & hands contact too. We talk about this and that, sometimes we talk to the carers if they come in for this & that. They have to juggle the needs of all their residents & like mothers of many children can only give what there is time to give. 

 I give these details because this stuff gets lost. I should name names, or speak of the gate that sells plants at the entrance to the road, Grays Fair, that mum's care home is on, or mention the red shoes i picked up from a skip on the way home on my second visit, red shoes ? or ruby slippers ? Hans Anderson's red shoes ? or Wizard of Oz, "there's no place like home", shoes ? Maybe both, as symbols red shoes run deep in today's culture. 

And what of my mum ? Sometimes i visit & i think is this it ? Is my mum dying ? But i think she is not, or rather she is, as we all are, but that she has life yet to live. But, oh my mum, it is hard this life she has now. I never thought my mum would be in a care home. What is this care home thing but being with her & seeing what people who work in care homes do I see the skill in their jobs. My mum doesn't quite trust me to be strong enough to help her up out of her chair. How could i care for her at home if I can't help her move herself ? This is without even putting in the "have i got the patience & strength of spirit & body to hold her in these last weeks, months, years of her life ?" question. I search & I find even those things wanting in me if i am honest. Its a hard truth, for me, & for my mum who i think feels some times like Lear abandoned or maybe that is a projection i've cast on her born from the guilt i carry because of my inadequacies, my not being able to make life good for her. Because bodies wear out, maybe our old make us fearful because we see ourselves in their bodies, our future, the shame that comes with needing help to go to the loo, get washed, get dressed, even eat or drink. I think sometimes that, tho i loved Jon & would wish him still living, his death spared him the indignity of living in an old body. I think he would have hated being old. I think i will not like it either.      

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.