Reflecting who we are

Posted on by Grace

I have never been able to interest myself for very long in the need to keep up appearances. It seems to take me an enormous effort just to work out how to get things to look good, or at least better than usual, for a special occasion. But it has occurred to me that I am quite deeply affected by the images that I see around me, and that I do often internalise these in relation to what I feel motherhood is expected to look like. I might not be consciously measuring myself against such images, but I am aware of the pressure that they bring, especially when there is nothing else to offset it. 

I think beneath this there is a more basic question: “am I doing any good?” It is difficult to know and there are not many outside sources to give you an answer, or to regularly reinforce or acknowledge your efforts. But also the job itself is so all-encompassing that the answer can perhaps never be definitive. The effects of what we do or don’t do might not be seen for years to come, and even then they might take us by surprise. 

I guess if one was to ask: “what does good look like?” the answer could be as various as all mothers are in their own individual relationships with their children. But still I think there is a value in having some examples to go on, and in seeing others engaged in the same thing. It’s one thing we’ve really lost out on during the pandemic, I think: doing parenting alongside others as opposed to in our own little self-contained bubbles. 

I think what I am interested in is images of motherhood that tell a different story; that weren’t necessarily created to meet the requirements of a particular platform or medium. I want to be able to remind myself that there are sources of wisdom in the lives of those beyond me and my own experiences.

Dealing with birth

There are many recommendations around how we can try and prepare for giving birth, and yet in the aftermath there can be a bit of a void, once the immediate rush of the first few days has settled down. A couple of years ago, as I was waiting for my first baby to arrive, I was moved to watch a short clip from the BBC about how women from the Oromia region of Ethiopia help a new mother to begin to recover. Five days in, she is surrounded by the women of her community who gather to perform a special ritual. Prayers are said, there is singing and dancing by the older women, porridge and tea are shared, and a herbal medicine is prepared to help the mother recover her strength. It is a tradition which seems pitched just right: meeting the emotional vulnerability of the mother with notes of encouragement, cheeriness, and, above all, understanding. It is expected that she should need all these mothers and sisters around her, and so there they are, ready for her.

As I was preparing to welcome our second baby, I heard quite a different story from a woman in this country who is now in her nineties. She described how, when she had both of her babies, it had been customary to go into a kind of nursing home set up specifically for the purpose. After giving birth, she had to wait two weeks before returning home (despite having no serious medical issues), as it was thought best to allow the mother time to rest physically first. I was quite taken aback, thinking of the impact of this separation from the family at such a critical time, but it also made me realise how we can’t take for granted the way in which we do birth now. It makes me think that for so many women, and for so many different reasons, birth and what follows is not necessarily the empowering experience that it might have been.

The one difference that stands out to me in these two stories is that one can be made to feel either visible or invisible, in those early days. With both of my births, I found it very difficult to be observed in the first few hours and days, even by those who were trying to help, as I made attempts to breastfeed. I was very afraid of being told I was doing it wrong; afraid I wouldn’t be able to do it right. But being “seen” is I think a gift at this time, and perhaps the only way that you get to truly realise what is happening to you. 

How we are together

Though I wrote initially that I was looking for images, I was thinking of something that captures motherhood in action, as opposed to a still. But in this search I have found myself drawn in by the work of a photographer, Elinor Carucci, born in Israel but who is now bringing up her children in New York. Her collection Mother captures numerous moments from the first nine years (including pregnancy) of her life as a parent of twins. 

The images in this collection work to straddle the gap between art and life, and illustrate why sometimes we might need art to help communicate a truth about life. We don’t generally get to see ourselves in the act of mothering. But also, children change and time moves on so quickly. ‘I photograph moments because I don’t want to lose them’, Carucci said as she later presented her work to an audience. 

There is a picture that I like called ‘Bath’. The mother is sat behind her son in the bath, and holds him with one arm across his upper body as he tries to strain away. The look and emotion on the boy’s face is unrestrained; he is unhappy about having to have the bath. But the mother’s energy as she looks down is focused on trying to quieten him, whether this is possible or not. It speaks to me of that frequent need to do the quietening, whether or not you feel quiet yourself. And it also conveys powerfully to me that double task of allowing the child the space to feel everything and anything, whilst also offering to contain those feelings of distress which so quickly become too much.

It is not complicated. But it is complex, and there is never a day that does not offer up moments such as those that Carucci has chosen to share with the viewer in her carefully edited collection.

A mum’s work

You don’t really see the work that is involved in being a mum until you become one. Much of this takes place beyond view within the privacy of the home, and often in those out-of-hours spaces. I almost find it necessary because of this to imagine what it is like for other people, either in similar or very different circumstances.

In David Olusoga’s television series A House Through Time, he explores in the course of four episodes the history of a particular house (and its occupants) in Bristol: 10 Guinea Street. In the late nineteenth century, a baby was born to one of the couples occupying the house, but was to die at just ten weeks of what was then a very common infectious disease, in this case tubercular meningitis. The programme explores just how difficult it would have been for the whole family to keep clean: a huge priority especially for any parent of a newborn. There was no bathroom in the house at the time, so any water for washing would have had to have been carried up the stairs, in a house of multiple occupancy which was several storeys high. Each member of this family would therefore have shared the same water for their weekly bath, and the baby’s turn would probably have come last. 

There are times when, as a mum who has chosen mostly to use cloth nappies, the drudgery of constant washing – alongside everything else – can feel a bit pointless, or even silly. But at times like these it can help to imagine how others have borne the daily cost of living, without necessarily expecting that things should be any easier, or that this in itself will be enough to keep everyone safe and healthy. 

In a depiction from a similar time period, Hamlin Garland gives a very unsentimental idea of what motherhood could be like for a wife living on a farm set in the American plains. In the short story ‘A Day’s Pleasure’, Mrs Markham is introduced in the act of carrying out one of her many daily chores: ‘kneading a batch of dough with the dogged action of a tired and sullen woman’. It is interesting because this figure could easily come across as a kind of cliché; the response of the woman to her situation could have been predicted. But the writer with a kind of kindness makes us imagine and feel the burden of what this mother has on her plate. She is kneading the dough at the end of the day after putting the children to bed, and for her this is not a pastime but a necessity. She is physically worn down by it all, too: thin, stiff, with a ‘pam’ in her back, and even somewhat lame. But, again reaching beyond cliché, there is no easy claim in this story that being with the children makes it all worthwhile. It feels as though this woman has little time to enjoy such a thought. 

A reference point

Images carry the potential to be useful, or unhelpful. They can inspire, or they can fuel self-criticism and unhealthy comparison. I think we are increasingly aware of this tendency in how we use social media, for example. Social media gives us access to other people’s lives, and yet the world in our feeds can never be the whole world, however much it may feel like it. This is why I’ve felt the need here to be more active in selecting what to pay attention to: not simply going with what my eyes are drawn to first. Spending here a little time and attention, what I find moving in some of the instances above is the dignity that they lend to a task that can never be complete, nor perfectly achieved. It is dignifying, regardless of appearances.

Image by Hands off my tags! Michael Gaida from Pixabay

On not giving up

Posted on by Grace

One way that getting older can help, it seems, is in enabling you to spot the patterns. One of my patterns is wanting to give up. But I noticed recently that this impulse or drive – it is always pretty strong – actually has a strong correlation to my commitment to whatever it is I’m doing. That sounds odd, but I guess it makes sense. The more I have given myself to something, wholeheartedly, putting all of my energies in, the more I can run into trouble when disappointments arise, when it feels like the goal will never be realised.

Nevertheless, spotting the patterns doesn’t necessarily solve anything, or make it easier. Often the impulse is just as intense when it comes around the next time, and because the feeling is familiar, that in itself can make me want to follow the message I think it is giving me. But last time I was aware of this happening, I did try to stop and think about what it is that has meant I have been able to get past the point of giving up in the past. Because while I’ve felt this with most of the things I’ve done, and I’ve gone through the motions of having the giving-up conversations, there are a fair few things that I haven’t in the end given up on. So I started to become curious about how that was the case. 

These are some things that I seem to have learned; or at least I think they’re the tips I need for myself. 

  1. Allow yourself to give up for the night, then see if you can do another day. This isn’t just because things look better in the morning, and it doesn’t mean that you see things wrongly at night. But the resolve or energy to keep going takes time to seep back in when it has all been exhausted. You can test it out: is it now trickling back, even a little?
  2. Let yourself feel the tiredness. This is probably something you’ve been fighting. But it is good to be able to give in to it, especially when you choose to do so, permitting yourself to let go. Sometimes, for me, this looks like sobbing it out until that day’s tasks, routines and plans fade into irrelevance. Sometimes I have to speak out the rage: the result of all the pent-up pressure, or disappointment. It’s messy, but for now, it’s necessary. Apparently it is Banksy who is quoted as saying: ‘if you get tired, learn to rest, not to quit’.
  3. Identify your ‘co-mates’ (Shakespeare’s word) or ‘comrades’. Wanting to give up can be tied into having taken on the burden of whatever it is you’re doing as if it is only your own. But often there are others who care about the same issues, or share the same beliefs; who do a similar job or have chosen a similar route. Whatever it is that is held in common with such people can make us ‘comrades’ (from the Spanish camarada, meaning ‘chamber mate’). It is good to be able to think of who these people are, even if they seem to be faring comparatively well at present. It is a reminder that the path you are on exists beyond your own experience of it, and will go on existing as a viable option.
  4. Recall your friends. You might need to reach out to people who you know will be on your side for no other reason than that they like you.
  5. Find someone who cares enough to listen. This doesn’t have to be someone to whom you are connected; the only thing that matters is that they can give you space to talk without the fear of repercussions. Admitting you want to give up can be the most painful step, and it can help to tell someone who isn’t themselves going to be affected.
  6. Remember what and why you’ve invested to get here. Granted, this may not be any help when you’re feeling the distress and could happily throw it all away. But it’s useful to remember that there was a beginning, and a good reason why you began. It is the counter argument to feeling you will never see the end.

Some caveats

This is not to say that there is anything wrong with leaving or stopping or walking away. But I’ve found that doing these things comes with a cost and you have to be ready for it. Most of the time when I am consumed with the thought of giving up, I don’t have it in me to make a clean break, or to take the necessary, sometimes complicated steps to make a change to another route. So I need to remind myself that there are ways to avoid the pain that, at other times, has come with the things that I have in fact given up on. 

Steadying thoughts

If I was prescribing some poets as companions to read at such a time, I might start with Robert Frost and his ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’, and include at some point ‘The Arrow and the Song’ by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. But, though I don’t claim to be an expert, the poet who probably knows this terrain the best is Wordsworth. He also takes his own explorations to a deeper place: demonstrating that the course we take through life is not only to be described in terms of the things we do, but that we experience the world and our journeys through it as spiritual beings. The spirit itself needs to be addressed, especially when it has found itself in trouble. For me, I found these lines light up recently when I came across them:

– So build we up the Being that we are;
Thus deeply drinking – in the soul of things,
We shall be wise perforce; and, while inspired
By choice, and conscious that the Will is free,
Shall move unswerving, even as if impelled
By strict necessity, along the path
Of order and of good.

(from The Excursion, Book 4, ‘Despondency Corrected’)

These lines are spoken by the Wanderer in Wordsworth’s long poem, and addressed to the character named ‘the Solitary’, during the course of a conversation in which the two discuss various questions. The Wanderer is a thoughtful man who has discovered what wisdom he has through observing and travelling, and allowing Nature and the experiences of those he encounters to be his teacher. The pronouncements he makes come from someone who has, in a sense, come a long way. In the lines that precede this bit of the poem, he has been suggesting ways in which we become conscious of something beyond us that is more lasting than the mortal beings by which we are surrounded: something with which we are however connected. 

There is a kind of morality or right doing in this idea of ‘the path / Of order and of good’, but it is the way in which we get to it that seems important. Knowing what to do and how to do it comes from this deeper absorption ‘in the soul of things’: from acknowledging the soul and its enduring reality. This, Wordsworth is saying, becomes for us a true source of strength: ‘So build we up the Being that we are’. Not by trying harder, but simply by witnessing, and keeping our eyes and hearts open.

One final thought

As in Wordsworth’s example of the Wanderer and the Solitary, we need others to help us not to give up. And I feel too that this past year of dealing with the pandemic has highlighted how we have a collective task to support one another with this. I hope we don’t lose sight of this in the weeks and months to come.

Image by Mariusz Matuszewski from Pixabay

Mental adjustments and some self-talk

Posted on by Grace

In ordinary times, many of the major adjustments we go through either come with plenty of time to prepare, or special kinds of support to help us through. Perhaps the biggest examples would be when someone gets married, or experiences the loss of a spouse or parent. There can be quite a few stages along the way in either case: weddings don’t just take a lot of time to organise, they are also the culmination of lots of decisions, for the short and the longer term. By the time a wedding arrives, we have given some thought to what we are getting into, and anticipated what that will involve.

But we are not living in ordinary times, and many of the adjustments we have had to make in recent months have come as a shock, even if the warning signs have previously been present. Personally I have found this shock or sudden disturbance almost the hardest part to deal with. The evening of the latest announcement of restrictions being put in place by the government has seen me filled with a state of disbelief – not wanting to believe this is happening – mixed with panic. By the morning, disbelief has been replaced by anger, yet the panic is also still there as I try to figure out the practical implications for us as a family, and what we will need to do as a result. The whole process has taken a huge toll emotionally, and I think this is in large part due to the way in which these necessary adjustments have been forced upon us: it is all beyond our control, there has been no time to prepare or discuss it with anyone, and the people with whom we might most want to connect – for support and reassurance at such a time – are themselves at a distance and equally under pressure.

This all occurred to me again as I reflected on the biggest and newest change to have affected me most recently: following the birth of our second baby. In a way this arrival does fit into the category of planned-for changes, and yet at the same time I don’t think we can approach anything of such significance in quite the way that we would were we not living through this pandemic. This global story has taken up so much of the available space in my brain, but also foreshortened the units of time in which I feel able to operate. We are operating day to day, and week to week, by necessity. A pregnancy doesn’t fit this pattern, and so it has been extra difficult to compute in advance what the arrival of a new baby would be like and what it would mean for us all. It has been like trying to put one’s mind in two different gears at once.

For this reason and others, I don’t think the pregnancy got me very far with the job of adjusting to what was to come, and so the first few weeks since the birth have thrust us into a very different place. There is something about what we have found both in dealing with the pandemic and welcoming this new baby that has to do with confronting a fresh reality. It is accentuated at the moment in the home, where you are essentially in it 24/7, so you really do only have what you can see in front of you. But its force comes from the sense that it is now required of you that you be something you have had no practice in being, and that there is no time to wait or press pause. 

This being said, it can be easy to fail to notice just how much we have adjusted: instead becoming overwhelmed by what we haven’t managed, either mentally or practically, rather than what we have. So this past week had left me feeling things had been a bit disastrous: I hadn’t got beyond clearing up messes and getting food on the table. But then I realised that it has only been four days that I have been doing this on my own, since my husband went back to work. That is four days to learn a whole new pattern of loving, caring, coaching and disciplining. Four days to work out how to prioritise a new and ever shifting set of demands. These four days in themselves marked a new period of adjustment, when we had already begun the work of adjusting as a family over the previous two weeks since the baby’s arrival. I realised that I couldn’t yet expect myself to be able to do all the things I needed to do, because I just hadn’t had enough practice yet. 

It helps when I can have a thought about what’s going on. So these are some of the thoughts I’ve caught myself with this week: 

  • Daughter 1’s bright eyes and sharp mind can be a bit misleading: despite the fact that you can hold a conversation together, she still only has the brain development of a two year old. In fact, although you spend most days together and she seems to know the ropes as well as anyone, she is not your peer. So you can’t expect her to fully comprehend that because her screaming will stop the baby from finally dropping off to sleep, it would be better if she stopped screaming. After the event, I realised how futile it had been to try to ‘make’ her understand simply through my voice and words. 
  • Daughter 1 is adjusting too. The job of adjusting is not just something for you to deal with on your own, but something that you are working on together and can look out for in her. 
  • It feels at times like my relationship with daughter 1 is lost. I have been alarmed by the strength of my feelings: wanting space instead of cherishing closeness. But now that her sister is here I understand that my emotions will take time to settle into a new formation. I feel protective over this little newborn, and so suddenly I can’t maintain that exclusive attachment that I had for and with my eldest. Still, these are early days. 
  • The things that feel like your shortcomings in this time don’t cancel out the work you’ve done with daughter 1 up until now. You have come a long way with her already in the two years you have shared.
  • Although their basic needs are the same, the way in which each child needs you to meet these needs are pretty different at present, so you are having to be two kinds of mummy. The one who holds and feeds, decodes cries and keeps a record of the last nappy change. And the one who chats about what we can see out of the window, guides her down the stairs, tries to make mealtimes happy, and to generally keep up on some level with a turbo-charged body and mind. Though it feels isolating in its intensity, it occurs to me that actually this doubling up is not too dissimilar from what has been asked of so many parents during this pandemic. It has been a time of wearing all one’s hats at once, along with a new one for all those who are now also homeschooling. There really is a lot of life going on behind our closed doors.
  • Though your mind is telling you “I have zero stress management skills!”, this is not true. It is simply the latest manifestation of a challenge you have been encountering in different forms since childhood. Perhaps the closest experience to this that you have had has been at work when you simply have to maintain some decorum, regardless of what you feel is being thrown at you. You’ll remember from this that you do have a choice in how you respond, and that you can also choose to do what you need to do to help you through. 

All this mental exercise is nonetheless fairly taxing, and so when we need a break from it all, I can recommend listening to a recording of Mary Oliver reading ‘Wild Geese’ for a post on Brain Pickings. The music of the poem is, I think, as helpful as the words. 

Image by Samuel F. Johanns from Pixabay

Winter in the Wilderness: Poems to Light the Way

Posted on by Grace

It has been difficult recently to find our way through the days in this strange elongated time of not much happening or changing, even while the world keeps on spinning and making demands of us. I think that is what has brought the idea of the wilderness to mind. But of course 2020 is not the only time we have been there, and in putting this little collection of poems together I have been thinking about what I might myself have needed when I have got lost or stuck in other ways. I am hoping this is a collection I can return to in future, not because it enables me finally to make sense of everything, but because it might give me some thoughts I can work with when I’m not sure where to look next.

I am aware, too, that this month is the season of Advent. This is something I have never fully celebrated in the traditional way, though I often find myself at this time of year wanting to be able to dip into its attitude of waiting and hoping, or wondering and inwardly preparing. As a concept it can feel closer to where I am at than what we get at Christmas, which is the glorious fulfilment of a story that you either have to enter into as a complete vision of the world reborn, or somewhat ignore as a narrative that in its very completeness might feel like just too much to take in. A few of the poems below, then, do speak to the place that such a season can bring me to, although I have steered away from making this a collection about Advent and tried to widen it out further, beyond the themes of faith and belief. 

In the rest of this post I have made a start on thinking about each of the poems, but I will also be sharing some readings of them over the next twelve days, so do follow along with me either on Twitter (@sanityandgrace) or Facebook if you’d like to hear them read aloud. 

1) Among All Lovely Things My Love Had Been, William Wordsworth 

There is excitement to be had at this time of year, as we play the game of spotting the best Christmas lights that we can see as we travel around town at night. But I love how in this poem our attention is drawn to the more humble glow-worm, though Wordsworth’s joy in discovering it does not seem to be any less. The scene, too, is not picture-perfect; it is a stormy night that brings out the earth-bound creature, and yet the storm does not hold any real power to dampen spirits here. 

2) Let my first Knowing, Emily Dickinson

This feels like another love poem, though I am not certain what kind of being is being referred to as ‘thee’. I like the poem better for this openness.

3) Abide with me, Henry Francis Lyte

Henry Francis Lyte wrote both hymns and poems, and though for us these lines now come coupled with the tune by which we know it, the words do hold a particular resonance when taken more slowly or allowed to stand on the page. I like the combination in the five different verses of a deep sense of need, along with a confidence in the one who can meet that need. There is also proportion and an idea of scale: everyday realities are exchanged here for a larger reality in which the threat of darkness, temptation, ills and death can only by met by trusting in someone who is more constant and who survives beyond all of these things.

4) In Memoriam A. H. H., 67 – Alfred Tennyson

Though Tennyson is here addressing the friend he has lost, it is as if the poem finds a way for him to still feel connected in the present to one who in more than one sense now resides far away. What I find hopeful here is that Tennyson is able to experience at least for one night a settled peace, allowing him to sleep, and that this keeps him in time for once with the natural order of things, which in itself is a mercy: as the night precedes the dawn.

5) To my small Hearth, Emily Dickinson

Light here is in itself a kind of salvation, and it seems to arrive unbidden, bringing with it a change that could almost be permanent. 

6) The Old Woman, Joseph Campbell

This is a poem in which stillness has its value. Instead of winter being a time when things are simply dead, here it becomes instead a time to shine. What has been done in the past is sufficient, and there is now no need to “do” any more. 

7) Shadows, D.H. Lawrence

In this poem God is both known and unknown, and the way in which he is known and experienced is continually in flux. But unusually, here, God is in the shadow as opposed to the light: it is as if he participates in the same seasons of shadow that Lawrence goes through, and to which the earth itself is subject. While life itself moves through phases of pain and trouble, the shadowy element brings a kind of cushioning that is able to preserve body, soul and spirit until ‘new morning’ comes. 

8) In Memoriam A. H. H., 124 – Alfred Tennyson

These lines tell a story that can feel almost impossible to tell or to identify for oneself: of what it can feel like to come up against the threat of losing one’s faith, or whatever it is that gives a person that sense of the world holding together. But the lines also give ear to something that only poetry seems to have the right kind of space for. The voice of the heart speaks up, and for a time, within these little stanzas, what the heart says is enough.

9) The Birds begun at Four o’clock, Emily Dickinson

This is not strictly a winter poem, since dawn begins much later at this time of year, but I have included it nonetheless because of what it has to tell us about things of wonder and beauty going on without our awareness, even when many of us may still be ‘asleep’. It is a poem that carries a reminder that there are tremendous forces of life at play, even within the spaces that we physically occupy in the world, and that human life is not the sum total of all that there is. 

10) Light Shining Out of Darkness, William Cowper

These lines might risk feeling too easy, and it could be tempting to gloss over them. But I do, personally, want to retain the possibility that there might be a natural law or pattern at play that is higher than my own understanding can reach. ‘God is his own interpreter, / And he will make it plain.’ 

11) Winter Rain, Christina Rossetti 

I can often associate the rain with dreariness, especially when it is so frequently cold and dark at the same time. But there is none of that here, and as the lines of Rossetti’s poem run on, they compel me to feel that in fact, the more rain the better.

12) The Oxen, Thomas Hardy

This is a poem to come to when the old traditions feel worn out and spent. It revolves around an ‘if’, allowing that the hopeful bit may never be realised, and yet in that ‘if’ there is still always the chance that as the year rolls round again, old feelings might once more be revived. 

Image by S. Hermann & F. Richter from Pixabay 

The Art of Being a Toddler

Posted on by Grace

‘For a moment she gazed fearfully at the cliff. Then she got bored. The cliff, the sea, the rocks: They never changed, never moved. Boring. A dog appeared. “A dog!” we both said.’
– ‘The View’, Orhan Pamuk

I suspect there is an art to the business of being a toddler, so this little entry is an effort to celebrate that, in between the inevitable moments of quiet despair in which I wonder how life turned into quite such a mess of battles. 

Detecting, Copying

Suddenly, she thrusts into the light a quirk I didn’t know I had. “Right,” she will say, as we turn to go up the stairs or move onto another activity. This is an announcement: we’re doing this now! It also means: I’m choosing to make this happen. Now, of course, I can hear the echo from my own voice and realise this often arises from my eagerness at leaving the house or finally managing to do something. It sounds so much better in her voice; she’s rather stolen my trick of confidence! 

Finding

This is the talent most often on display: finding what I didn’t realise was there to be found. The odd curled-up, once-wriggly “worm’ (a tiny version of such), knocked to the very edges of the kitchen floor by our passing feet, which she greets with delight: “oh, a worm!” A feather on the grass, but not just one feather only: each feather is a reminder to look out for more. And stones: mostly they need to be small enough to fit in the hand, but they can be as tiny as they come. Any new location or destination offers a chance to look for stones. They look as if they had been waiting all along for someone who knew just what to do with them.

Rearranging, Repurposing

This seems to be one of the main tasks of life. Mummy has her jobs, and I must find my own out of whatever has been left behind / made available. The tins, for example, can be taken out of the cupboard and positioned in a nice semicircle. The pans can be pulled out, and used as containers for anything small enough to form a collection inside: potatoes, onions, treasures from the garden and magnets from the fridge. But it doesn’t end there: there is always life in this game, and it can be begun again tomorrow as if it had never been completed.

Revising the Command System

This has happened so gradually and surreptitiously that by the time I realised how unprepared I was, the process was well underway. But though I can’t say I enjoy trying to reverse it, it does make me smile to note the sheer mastery of the thing. Her latest phrases, “Get it,” and (my least favourite) “Fetch it,” show a command of language and its purposes, at the very least. 

Interestingly, she knows, already, how not to put herself in a position of weakness. Though there often seem to be multiple reasons why she doesn’t want to get into the highchair, the fact that once she is in she can’t safely get out again by herself must be high amongst them. Likewise with the trolley and the car seat. But this instinctive assertion of self does give me pause. It is what I feel I have doggedly forgotten how to do, frankly, and perhaps this is all to the good in an adult universe where we have to find a way to get along. Perhaps much of the time, self is not the thing that most needs asserting: there are other things that we individually represent. And yet something about seeing this untamed, fresh-hewn instinct enacted in front of me reminds me of what I found also in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. While the consequences seem unsightly, it is possible to determine to be someone who doesn’t back down.  

Setting the Pace

I came across a sentence unexpectedly in a book that put things into place for me somewhat. The comment was simply made that toddlers prefer to take things slowly. It made me stop short because it doesn’t often feel like that: it feels like there is constant energy and activity. But I notice now that the energy is directed towards the doing itself: there is little focus on getting the thing done. So we can do as much or as little of it as we want, and take as long as we want over it, because time is not an issue. As R.S. Thomas says in his poem ‘The Bright Field’: life is not in the ‘hurrying on’, ‘it is turning aside’. 

Listening, Always (though not in the way one might have planned)

That evening, there was a tempest in my head, but as far as I know, no real indication of this in my expression. She reached over from her highchair, and started stroking my arm with her thumb; real, genuine stroking. “It’s OK,” she said, repeating herself, as she’d heard me do so many times before. A few minutes later she spoke of “feeling better”, patting me in various places and noting that I’d been “stressed”. I had no particular sense that she knew what I was thinking, or that this was an early sign of empathy in action, but rather that it occurred to her, almost on a whim, to give me some special treatment all of a sudden, much as she does for her cuddly bunny. All that listening she has been doing has built up to something in her, I realised, and here it is, re-forming and coming together. But it is miles away from what I thought I was telling her to listen to, and certainly when she is asked to listen it could go either way. 

***

At this stage, we are not quite two. The toddler years have just begun. 

Image by Alexas_Fotos from Pixabay

Strange but instructive things about early motherhood

Posted on by Grace

So much of what is written about motherhood aims to be helpful and thereby explanatory. But the things I have found myself thinking most about are the bits that feel strange, the things you couldn’t have calculated for and that you wonder what to do with. Over time these have gathered so frequently in my mind that I couldn’t do otherwise than write about them at this point. In the process of writing, I hope to find what it is that the strangeness might, at the same time, teach me.

  1. Being subject to your body

I don’t mean the bump, although that is an obvious manifestation, and the obvious does help to make it sink in. What I really mean is the way your body communicates with what you might have thought of as you. The messages are no longer advisory; they have become urgent, almost at times veering on threatening. Food and drink are no longer pleasant pastimes. I am more used now to the feeling: if I don’t eat something in the next two-to-five minutes I’m going to be sick. Similarly at the commencement of breastfeeding: food is no longer a joke to be taken or left. All of this can feel a bit shocking in a culture which, to me, encourages us to think we are in control of our bodies and can bend them to our own will. But on one such desperate occasion I had a thought (an obvious one) that helped me. Your body is not serving you alone any more; it is keeping someone else alive. It’s life and death; you suddenly understand that in the early days of a newborn. This is a bit more difficult to get your head around in pregnancy: it doesn’t look like much has changed except for the weight. But I’d like to think there could be a little more compassion and understanding in our culture, in place of the wry smiles, for new mothers at every stage even in their apparently incessant eating. Two years on, the memory of the kindness of the question: “are you OK?” still sticks in my mind as a group of us waited patiently for a typically long-delayed wedding reception to begin.  

…feeling a rush of milk, she hurried to the nursery. This was not a mere guess; her connection with the child was still so close, that she could gauge by the flow of her milk his need of food, and knew for certain he was hungry. (Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy)

2. Humans need daily adjustments

There is so much talk of the benefits of routine for babies, and step-by-step suggestions of what to do if you’re having problems – with sleep, naps, feeding and all the rest. But in moments of vexed frustration when I’ve felt trapped in a cycle that I can’t quite end, the one thing that has brought relief has been to remember that I’m dealing not just with a baby, but with a human. The recommendations and guides would have you believe a baby is a comprehensible, airtight thing, a concept that begins and ends. It actually gets quite hard to think outside of this box. And yet: when have humans ever conformed to such an idea about themselves? I don’t sleep to order myself – the time that it takes me to succumb can vary quite a bit – and I have had many nights as an adult (pre-baby) when I haven’t slept through, and have longed for company, a hand or voice in the dark. Equally, sometimes, somewhere to lie down is enough. We are as various as the world around us: the weather, the moods of the sky, the shifting winds and colours of the earth, not to mention the landscapes that exist often hiddenly on the inside. If only I could have the good sense to remember that this must be just as true in the early years. 

3. Expectations and loneliness

You know, of course, that there’s a risk of being lonely. In fact you probably plan for it. But when it comes to it, it never feels as simple as matching a solution to a problem, and I wonder if there is a key here somehow in how we address loneliness more widely. To begin with, it feels as though the need would be met if one could just manage to see some fellow mothers, people who are in the same rather topsy-turvy boat. But I noticed as time went on that everyone, by necessity, ends up fashioning their own boat, in their own distinctive way, so that that sense of being united by a common experience can start to dissipate. Similarly, I sometimes expect that once the right person is there, it will be possible to talk about the things that bewilder me when I’m on my own, the things that have built up in between. But then when we do meet, our attentions are often so crowded by mutual wonder at our respective babies, and the antics that come with them, that the present becomes enough to take account of. It’s good to talk, but conversation isn’t a magic bullet, and it doesn’t always reach the places we need it to. It’s one reason why I am so glad of mothers who have written about their experience, not just today, online, but also on paper, at other times. Though it can be easy to forget it in today’s media, and marketplace, motherhood is not a new, reinvented or modern concept.

The few words she has exchanged with this woman Frances, known only by sight after all from the nursery school queue, are the merest tips of icebergs. (‘Cafe Society’, Helen Simpson)

4. What distance can do

It feels as though she spends quite a bit of time hanging onto my legs, balancing on my hip, or with her hand in mine. That’s how physically close we are day to day, and probably how it has been for many of us especially recently in lockdown. But there’s a kind of loss of awareness that comes with this, and I am grateful for those moments when I am caught off guard, espying her across the room or in someone else’s care for a little while. It’s like a sudden aha moment: being able to see this person for who she is. Sometimes there is an element of suddenly being able to feel an emotion with regards to her that I almost haven’t had space to feel before, or at least for a while. In little ways, the distance helps, indeed feels necessary to the relationship itself.

5. You are still you

Discovering this, after what might feel like the loss of it, is supposed of course to bring reassurance. To allow ourselves such reminders is what we are encouraged to do. But when putting on what Liz Berry in one of her poems calls the ‘uniform’ of motherhood has involved such an apparent transformation, there can be a twinge of disappointment (at least there has been for me) in coming to the realisation that underneath it all, you still carry the person you started out as. The same habits are there: habits of mind and thought, and ways of doing things. I am a little freer from them – I can potentially choose to shut them off when needed, as I have had to do – but I am not free. I know, too, that here begins the story of the kind of mother I will become: one which I will try to direct where I can, but which also will unfold out of and beyond me. It will not just be for me, or for one part of me, to write.

Thinking about this post has made me realise something else. You have to find a way of working out what motherhood means in your head. It’s not just about the doing; it’s also being. The being is now and forever.

Photo by Jenna Christina on Unsplash

New favourites: yours and my own

Posted on by Grace

For, on a table drawn beside his head,
He had put, within his reach,
A box of counters and a red-vein’d stone,
A piece of glass abraded by the beach
And six or seven shells,
A bottle with bluebells
And two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art,
To comfort his sad heart.

(from The Toys, Coventry Patmore)

We are in what feels to me like a year of transition, between age 1 and 2: where the markers at the opening and close of the year are clear, but the path between them is not. The changes are rapid, and nothing is fixed forever yet. 

At the beginning of the calendar year, I wanted to commit to making a log of the little things, month by month, for as long as I could manage. We’ve made it now to six months – albeit with some flagging towards the end. This is a record of how my daughter is discovering for herself her favourite things, before casting them away and finding something new. But it is also a reflection from us as her parents on our own favourite things about her: on what she does and how she does it.

I hope this has some relevance even if your attention is not taken up much of the time with little people. On some level I am also trying to explore what it is to be in the world, and to be in love.

January

i) There has been a succession of three favourite books this month: Not So Silent Night, its solid pages given over to the noisy animals of the nativity, Car Car Truck Jeep, sung to the tune of Baa Baa Black Sheep, and Who’s That Scratching at My Door, about a boy who has plenty of toys but wants a real playmate. Each book must have had a reign of about a couple of weeks, during which time you would have it read again at any opportunity. It’s lovely to see how you will often sit back content once you’ve got one of us to start reading, letting the story simply unfold before your eyes (and ears). 

ii) One of your favourite pastimes is to pursue the cat who is a long-time resident at grandmother’s house. But your interest in dogs – of any shape, size or colour – is not far behind either. At first I thought this was to do with coming across creatures who seem to be on your own level (closer to eye-level, and harbouring similar kinds of energy), but now I wonder if it is the other way round, and more that you feel able to speak their language? ‘Woof woof!’ you call, in a gentle whisper.

iii) It’s funny how the ‘firsts’ that count aren’t always the ones you had expected. One of our favourite discoveries over several weeks has been that you are now ready to give us a hug. You lean in and extend your arms around us, knowing now exactly what a hug is for. And it comes in the most casual of moments, and not necessarily for long, but it is certainly deliberate, chosen. There is something to understand here about intimacy: it has a slow build, but once it is established, it emerges freely and easily – not through the big, significant gestures but more often in the day to day postures of living.

February

i) You have taken to studying things en masse, to see if you can pick out individual things: the array of different birds spread across the inside cover of A Busy Day for Birds, the pattern of little pictures on one of your old hats, or the woodland creatures on your wallpaper. It is so easy for me to gloss past things but you remind me to take a second look:
Yet take another look and you may bring
From the dull mass each separate splendour out. 
(from ‘Dream and Thing’, Edwin Muir)
Incredible, really, that you can transform something from ‘dull’ to a ‘splendour’ just by looking, isn’t it?

ii) Your affections are shifting and now there are occasions when a toy will receive a big cuddle: as you hold it tight against your chest and rock slightly from side to side. For those few seconds, your award of attention is total. 

iii) It is so exciting to hear you verbalise a new word for the first time. It feels as though you pick your moment, when suddenly the word sounds like a thing to you. It happened the other day when you were marshalling together the unlit tealights. Grandpa offered to help you count them, but when you got to ‘two’, you stuck on it, and for a while afterwards everything was ‘two’. It must have felt great in your mouth as you kept repeating it with that long drawn out “ooh?”

March

i) You’re much, much more choosy about your books now and quite a few of the old ones don’t get a look-in. But the board book version of The Gruffalo is having its moment. We wander in a rather pedestrian way through the pages meeting various animals who fail to make much of an impression. But when we reach the last page a smile slowly spreads over your face as we come to a picture of that creature about whom we know much less. Is he friendly? Should we be scared?

ii) You’ve been practising your wave for a little while now, but I think the gesture is starting to take on even more meaning for you. Often you don’t wave until the person has gone, or hung up the phone, but then you will call out ‘byee’ with great fervour, as if you’ve caught just the right moment. It seems less about communication and more as if we’re playing a game and this is the pose you strike when the music stops. 

iii) You must recognize many words now, but it’s a thrill to get an insight into just what those are. Often you will point to an object and make a sort of generic noise for ‘that’ or ‘there’, but if we ask you to point to something first we can find out if you already know what it is / if you know the name for it. I normally start with “can you see a …” but I’ve been amazed at some of the things you’ve identified for me in response. The world is coming alive again as you assign each thing its place. 

April

i) You know the names of the things you love, and bunnies in all shapes and sizes are generally greeted with an exclamation: “booies!”  “bweez!” – or something akin to that. I wonder if it’s anything to do with the fact that the cuddly bunnies we have look much more person-like than some of the other animals on all fours. Certainly today you were keen to waggle some of your chopped apple in the face of your favourite bunny, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he/she was soon to be offered tea.

ii) You use your fingers creatively: to tickle our backs, which is apparently where we are most ticklish, or to feed us whatever you have suddenly decided to turn into food. It must be such a delight to be in command of reality in these moments. It is your turn to be the rule-maker, except that here, for now, there is no judgement.

iii) Never mind learning a language, sometimes you’re content just to tell us what you think in your own. Your chatter has all the intonation of matters that are at once serious, engaging and not to be refuted. Not for the first time I have the sense that you know it all before we’ve even attempted to teach you.

May

i) These two new words have changed everything. Now that you’ve started to say ‘story’, there is not a time of day that doesn’t offer itself to be filled with a reading. And it starts as soon as you’re up. But of course it makes sense that the other word you’ve taken on is ‘again’. The ending invites the beginning.

ii) Your hands have acquired another new skill, as Daddy provided you first with a pen, and then a set of crayons to draw with. But when you decide it’s time for “drawing”, the paper often cannot be provided quickly enough, as you seize your chosen colour and make ready. Then, just as quickly, it is over and complete, and I find myself rather envying you your ability to be satisfied with your work in a matter of moments. 

June

Our drawers of odds and ends have to be emptied out time and again as you sort through the random cluster of things. For once, the euros and dollars that may never recover their purpose as currency have a use, as you gather up all the coins into a box, and tip them out again. Perhaps when you tire of this we will need to make a new musical instrument …

Some final bitesize thoughts on what I am learning:

  • life adds up to something; though it can feel like we have done “nothing”, this is never the whole truth
  • paying attention is worth it, and is its own reward
  • though as adults/parents we are forced to question this day by day, the world you inhabit is enough. You are making something of it with every step. 

Image by Pezibear from Pixabay

A Meditation on Simple Things

Posted on by Grace

In the past few months things have been drastically stripped back. Where we have come to expect choice, variety and preference, these have been replaced all of a sudden by a narrowing of options: we must rely on what we can get. But in the process I’m sure it’s highlighted how complicated our lives had become, and the lengths to which we were prepared to go to satisfy what we had become accustomed to identifying as our desires or needs.

All this has made me want to connect to something tangible, the consistency of which has survived longer than the inventions of our own generation. I began to look out for those things which have brought humans pleasure, solace and sustenance over the centuries. For tangible things are still vitally important to the human schema. We are not just beings of spirit, but beings who need to be able to reach out and touch the world of which we are a part.

This is my own little list of ‘essentials’. 

Breath
I am not so interested in the breath as a placeholder for neutrality. But I do like how it provides a sign of the function of the whole. William Wordsworth writes of ‘the breath and harmony of music’: that which holds it together, and sustains each note and phrase. The breath is the architecture. It is the simplest, most constant and most flexible part of the composition. 

Bread
I imagine that bread looks and tastes different depending on where you live or where you come from. This has probably long been the case. But its meaning must be the same: it fills the hole that hunger has left, and it is good for sharing. The dough or the loaf must always be broken into pieces or portioned out so that there is enough for everyone. It is a wonderful gift, keeping us linked to the earth and to the grains which it nourishes into life.  

Rain
In Imtiaz Dharker’s poem ‘Blessing’, rain can only be imagined: ‘the small splash, echo / in a tin mug’. The noise is what is missing in the time of drought. The sound of rain must be one of its great pleasures. Sometimes pattering, sometimes drumming down onto the earth. Rain reminds us of all the happenings outside of our own control. It commands the space, before withdrawing again. And the best times, I think, are when we least expect it. 

Sunlight 
In Emily Dickinson’s poem the everyday is no less remarkable for being everyday: ‘I have seen the Sun emerge / From His amazing House / And leave a Day at every Door …’ In Greek mythology, the sun god was represented as emerging with the dawn on a horse-drawn chariot to ride across the expanse of the sky. Without this image in mind, we may perhaps be less inclined to look to the body that is doing the bestowing for any sense of company or intention. But Dickinson helps us to feel this bestowing once again, as if on one occasion she was able to observe it all anew: with eyes that could be genuinely amazed.

Candle
Candles have become a luxury item now that we no longer need them to see in the dark. They captivate now with the scents and colours that have been added to the wax. But the image of a flame in the darkness has an enduring resonance. A single flame flickers, and wavers. It is alive and moves. It bends, and remains steady.  

Colour
Colour lends meaning to what we see, but it is also a gift in that, like music, it does not have to denote a particular meaning. The colour of a flower for example simply shines forth; it is part of its identity. In the same way, colour speaks to me of choice. Its very existence gives us a reason to be creative, while choosing between different dyes, paints, crayons or inks, or picking clothes, flowers or food. To be in possession of colour is to know a kind of richness. 

Bath
I am trying to think as widely as possible: the tin bath in front of the fire; the ritual baths that are used for instance in Judaism or Hinduism; public baths; open pools and rivers. Across time, people have found a way somehow to honour the body’s need for relief and immersion in this other element. Surrounded by water, there is not an awful lot that can be done, except to move, to be still, and to be.

Pillow
It is a detail such as this that brings the literary text of the Bible to life for me. In the preceding verses, the whole cast of Jacob’s future life has been set in motion as a result of the directions of his father Isaac. But then Jacob embarks on a journey to Haran, and because the sun sets while he is on his way, he stops at the place he has come to, ‘took of the stones of that place, and put them for his pillows, and lay down in that place to sleep.’ Who knew that pillows were so important? Clearly we have been needing a place to rest our head for about as long as we can remember. 

Image by klimkin from Pixabay

Locked down and shut in, or locked in and shut down

Posted on by Grace

I want to write about the impact of this on feeling, or the ability to feel. The circumstances may be different (comparing amongst ourselves, or, alternatively, with the severity of what has been experienced at other times or in other places), but I think the effect may be similar in kind. I’ve thought of three examples, among the best studies of such a predicament.

I want to know: how can I get myself out of my own inner lockdown, but also how can we help others? How are we going to carefully come out of this?

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

For Jean-Dominique Bauby, locked-in syndrome was a medical condition in which he found himself trapped after suffering a major stroke in 1995. Like Oliver Sacks’ accounts of the patients whom he treated for neurological conditions, I find Bauby’s story incredibly resonant, even for those of us who have not experienced anything approaching what he suffered in the last years of his life. 

After awaking from a coma, paralysed from head to toe, the only function that is left to Bauby is that of his left eye, which he is able to blink. He uses this to communicate that his mind is unimpaired, and ultimately is able to translate his thoughts, by blinking to select letters of the alphabet to be re-formed into words. 

Bauby receives much love, help and support in the months that follow. But there is only so much that anyone on the outside can do. The gift of the book he has written is that it gives an insight into how he kept himself alive, beyond what the medical profession could do for him. He has to choose what to do with his mind: 

A letter from a friend, a Balthus painting on a postcard, a page of Saint-Simon, give meaning to the passing hours. But to keep my mind sharp, to avoid descending into resigned indifference, I maintain a level of resentment and anger, neither too much nor too little, just as a pressure cooker has a safety valve to keep it from exploding.

It is not just about recalling moments of beauty, or thinking of cheering things. That is a big part of the project of survival, but it is not the only aspect. Bauby also has to be honest with himself, because what is at risk here is the slippage into ‘resigned indifference’. That, too, is a protective mechanism but it stops the life-flow even more than the physical paralysis could do. Instead, there is vital and active self-control here, for both resentment and anger are emotions which, left to themselves, feed themselves and grow. Bauby needs them to do their job, and no more.

I am thinking about the energy available to Bauby too. The effort that it must have taken to blink his way steadily through these communications must have been exhausting. But at the same time, emotions are a kind of energy, and he needed to keep these activated, whether good or bad, to buoy him up; to help him maintain that ‘level’ that he mentions.

I wonder, in this context, what our own version of Bauby’s eye might be. Perhaps, in fact, it is still a kind of eye contact: allowing ourselves to meet someone else’s glance even when it is easier to pretend they’re not there. Allowing ourselves to witness the life that is visible to us just beyond our own threshold. Willing ourselves to acknowledge it even when it is perplexing and painful. 

A Tale of Two Cities

Doctor Manette is introduced to us at the point at which he is about to be rescued from his imprisonment. For nearly eighteen years he has been in solitary confinement, not knowing what has become of his little daughter, who will by now have grown. He has suffered without accusation or trial. 

In every aspect of his being, Doctor Manette betrays the effect that this treatment has had on him. His voice ‘was like the last feeble echo of a sound made long and long ago. So entirely had it lost the life and resonance of the human voice, that it affected the senses like a once beautiful colour faded away into a poor weak stain.’ In the extreme, this is what happens when parts of ourselves go unused, for a long time. He has so little left that there is nothing to replenish that echo, to set the sounds ringing again. 

With the help of his daughter, who is part of the rescue party, Doctor Manette does recover something of his former self and activities when he is brought to safety to England. But much of the novel explores the threat of Manette’s trauma resurfacing, given that we learn he will neither talk about those lost years, nor can he later recall how he recovered from them. His friends, those who look out for him, worry that although he doesn’t talk about it, these experiences are often on his mind, but that he is afraid of opening up the subject for fear of what might thereby be unleashed. 

Sometimes, he gets up in the dead of the night, and will be heard, by us overhead there, walking up and down, walking up and down, in his room. Ladybird has learnt to know then that his mind is walking up and down, walking up and down, in his old prison. She hurries to him, and they go on together, walking up and down, walking up and down, until he is composed. But he never says a word of the true reason of his restlessness, to her, and she finds it best not to hint at it to him. In silence they go walking up and down together, walking up and down together, till her love and company have brought him to himself.

There is something very moving about these repetitive motions in the novel’s account of Doctor Manette. When, later on, he suffers a relapse, he returns to the work with which he had occupied himself in the prison: making shoes. The work is a habit to which he clings, providing him with a kind of mechanical order where there is no order, and a sense of purpose and action where there is no human fulfilment or interaction. Dickens shows how careful we must be in trying to correct these anomalies of behaviour, even if they seem to be unhealthy. There is much care, above, in the way Doctor Manette’s daughter simply accompanies her father in his walking up and down, without questioning it. Her intuition is right: it is not the time for challenging or probing the habit. Her father’s deepest need is for the balm of ‘her love and company’, which he had lacked, among many other things, for so long. And she communicates this not through talking, but through accompanying him many a time, ‘in silence’, through his distress.

Dejection: An Ode

Coleridge has been hearing the notes of the throstle, and gazing at the sky’s ‘peculiar tint of yellow green’, but keeps coming back to the same conclusion: 

I see them all so excellently fair, 
I see, not feel, how beautiful they are! 

And at the close of the following section of the poem: 

I may not hope from outward forms to win 
The passion and the life, whose fountains are within. 

Within, there is only ‘this dull pain’, ‘a grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear’. Who can say what this pain or grief is about? It seems to have become so familiar that such a question is past relevance. The only thing that matters now is that it is present, and weighs heavily. It is a ‘void’ without shape or form, unlike those ‘outward forms’ that Coleridge so wants to be able to connect with. 

It is interesting that the poem is entitled ‘dejection’, because actually that word doesn’t appear in the body of it. Instead the word that is repeated a number of times, within, is ‘joy’. I don’t think this is meant as an answer to the dejection, but it does serve as a direct counter to it, coming from another angle. Coleridge calls joy ‘this beautiful and beauty-making power’ and it is as if he uses the poem to awaken joy, calling upon it as a reminder, making a claim upon it. It is as if this invocation brings the musical excitement of joy back into the poem, and so this is what Coleridge wishes upon his friend in the last verse: ‘With light heart may she rise … Joy lift her spirit, joy attune her voice …’ Joy is the connection-maker, the necessary link between within and without, which we must try to wish upon each other.

Image by christels from Pixabay

Music for Our Time

Posted on by Grace

When everything is a bit monotonous except for the bad stuff, it pays to find something new. But for me I think the best way I can realize this is by making an effort to look into what is already available, that predates me and my concerns. Of the pieces that follow there are a number of which I would already have been aware, but I hope that thinking about them in this light will deepen the way I engage with them, not only now but also into the future. 

  1. ‘Fanfare for the Common Man’ by Aaron Copland

(recommended recordings: by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra)

It was hearing this again that prompted me to write this post. The sound of the timpani and the trumpets offers a signal that everyone should fall silent for a moment. But this is not as a sign of respect for the bigwigs or royal heads of our society. This piece is dedicated to those who do the jobs that at other times might be beneath our notice. Writing in 1942, when the U.S. had just entered World War II, Copland was inspired in his composition by a speech given by then-Vice President Henry A. Wallace, who said: “the century which will come out of this war […] must be the century of the common man.” Copland would later echo the same sentiment, saying, “It was the common man, after all, who was doing all the dirty work in the war and the army. He deserved a fanfare.”

2. “Comfort ye” from the Messiah (Part One) by George Frideric Handel

For over two hundred and fifty years these words have been sung. We are familiar with the overarching narrative and the celebratory peaks that come with it. But it starts with “comfort ye”, and “speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem”. Noël Bisson notes in his listening guide how the ‘slow moving strings’ that introduce and precede these words ‘immediately create an atmosphere of peace and tranquillity’ for the entry of the solo tenor. In a way it is another version of the signal given in the fanfare above: “pay attention,” “give us your ears,” but here not through command but soft entreaty. Matthew Henry, in his 1706 commentary on the biblical text, writes: ‘Comfort you, comfort you —not because the prophets are unwilling to do it (no, it is the most pleasant part of their work), but because sometimes the souls of God’s people refuse to be comforted, and their comforters must repeat things again and again, ere they can fasten any thing upon them.’

3. ‘Humming Chorus’ from Madama Butterfly by Giacomo Puccini

This piece could not be more unlike the sound I tend to associate with opera. There are no words, there is no exaggerated vibrato, and no obvious excitement. But the melody, and its delivery, still seems to tell a story. Kate Hopkins comments, on behalf of the Royal Opera House, that ‘the melody and its repetitive, lulling accompaniment are as simple as a lullaby.’ Perhaps this is what a lullaby for adults might sound like. In an account by Los Angeles Opera, the origins of the chorus are explained: Puccini had been entranced by an uncharacteristically long moment of silence featured in a dramatic production of Madame Butterfly. Butterfly, a Japanese geisha, has been abandoned by her American naval officer husband, Pinkerton, but now holds an overnight vigil, awaiting his return. There is an optimism here that is soon to be shattered by the arrival of Pinkerton and his new wife. Optimism is often beautiful in its frailty. And yet it survives, too, in so many different forms, as this piece I think illustrates. 

4. ‘The Lark Ascending’ by Ralph Vaughan Williams

In her article on the work, Vanessa Thorpe reports that it actually dates from the day Britain entered the First World War, when Vaughan Williams was holidaying on the coast, and walking the cliffs. There’s a great sense of space in the music, I think, which feels good for us at this time. But there is fullness too in the accompaniment that the orchestra provides to the violin. We are not on a lone journey here, but a part of the world that we observe. Prior to the walk, Vaughan Williams was inspired also by the poem of the same name written by George Meredith (published in 1881). It is a long one, but the lines below were among those included on Vaughan Williams’ manuscript:

For singing till his heaven fills,
‘Tis love of earth that he instils
And ever winging up and up,
Our valley is his golden cup,
And he the wine which overflows
to lift us with him as he goes;

5. ‘My Life Flows On’ (How Can I Keep From Singing)

This is a nineteenth-century hymn, and the version by Audrey Assad (which I like) retains the Christian framework, but others also have adapted a few of the lines to their own taste, in adaptations that span the genres of folk, blues and Celtic music. I find it encouraging that the song has this versatility which enables people of different persuasions to find life in it. But there is a reason why I include a hymn here and I suppose there are two things that I like about this traditional form. One is that, as is the case with the Psalms, hymn writers never seem to forget that life has its trouble, and in fact that this is often why we need to sing. I find the acknowledgement in this form often feels honest without being depressing. The second thing though which I really like is how a hymn provides a structure to belief (even in its very straight, regular rhythms) and how on some level it doesn’t matter whether I feel able to subscribe in that moment to it or not. Presumably people with much stronger faith would be disappointed with me here. But I just love how the song carries on regardless. A song can leave me with my feeble and perplexed brain gloriously behind, and I get to listen in. Wonderful. I hope that’s what heaven sounds like. 

6. ‘Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude’, from Harmonies poétiques et religieuses by Franz Liszt

I wanted some piano music for my list, but not something that I was already so familiar with that I knew what to expect from it. This piece is much longer than the others I’ve noted, so there is some opportunity for further listening than I would normally be doing. It references a two-volume collection of poems by Alphonse de Lamartine (1790-1869), and in both the poetry and the music there is an attempt to point towards a divine presence in all creation. But in a quote from Lamartine which prefaces Liszt’s work, there is also a reflection on how we experience time when our sense of the world is in flux: 

When barely on my brow a few days have slipped by,
It seems that a century and a world have passed;
And that, separated from them by a great abyss, 
A new man is born again within me and starts anew. 

7. Theme from The Mission (1986), including ‘Gabriel’s Oboe’, by Ennio Morricone 

(recommended recording: conducted by Morricone himself)

The music here lifts even whilst it expresses a kind of beauty that is allied to pain. It’s one of the most emotionally intense pieces in this list. And yet it is ok if we are not quite sure exactly what is being expressed. Writing for ABC (in Australia), Dan Golding reviews the narrative of the original film and the place of the score within it, but at the same time suggests that the music has taken on such a life of its own that it can be taken on its own terms as quite distinct from it. He acknowledges that you might well not know the story behind the score: ‘For many, there is simply no association to dwell on while listening.’ I don’t think, in this case, that this is a cop out. 

8. ‘Stay Alive’ by José González

(for the 2013 film The Secret Life of Walter Mitty)

In an interview for Vogue, Gillian Sagansky asked: ‘Would you describe your sound as more melancholic or hopeful?’ González: ‘I know I’m producing music on the borderline between those two emotions, and I always try to have a hopeful twist underneath. I know a lot of people think my sound is melancholic. Towards the end of the song I always want to convey a sense of hopefulness or at least anger underneath the melancholy. It’s hopelessness that I’m trying to avoid.’

So much of this song speaks to me of depression. I find it a most comforting companion piece. Sometimes we need to stay muted, but to know that there is also a rhythm persisting in the background, and that there will come a point when we’ll feel able to meet it. Stay alive, friends.

9. ‘Deep Peace of the Running Wave’, / A Gaelic Blessing by John Rutter

(recommended recording: by the Cambridge Singers with the City of London Sinfonia)

Anything by John Rutter is a treat. But ‘peace’ is I suppose what is most needed. And yet whilst I like that repeated refrain in this piece, I do have a funny relationship with the words here which almost seem to mean less the more the music takes over. It starts with a kind of groundedness though: those unchanging characteristics of the ‘running wave’ and ‘flowing air’ which manage to withstand the forces of human turmoil and invite us, in turn, to stand still. 

10. ‘Over the Rainbow’, for the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz

Lyricist Yip Harburg said that when he was trying to write the song, he had in mind a little girl who “had never seen anything colorful in her life except the rainbow.” That is what the song stands for, I think: a reminder of the thing that seems out of reach except that we have at some point managed to catch a glimpse of it. There are many well known versions of course, and some that are in frequent circulation, but just now I’m minded to turn to Frank Sinatra’s 1944 recording. It is light and misty, and good for transporting us out of where we are to quite another time, which is really what this song is all about. 

Image by Photo Mix from Pixabay