tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84858100840597681392024-02-08T05:39:43.489-08:00freefallingbluehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12197746469082978596noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8485810084059768139.post-25655127497939514532007-05-07T12:40:00.000-07:002007-05-07T12:44:16.002-07:00<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: georgia;"><span style="" lang="EN-GB">The genie told me to call for him, whenever I needed some help. Whatever, whenever, wherever.<span style=""> </span>He gave me a rough-hewn paper aeroplane. It had some damage at the tip, presumably from another’s eager use, and a slightly bent wing. I was to throw this to make him appear. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: georgia;"><span style="" lang="EN-GB">I had a number of chores as a child, always slightly beyond my level of competence.<span style=""> </span>As I developed the ability to fulfil my chore with ease, another chore would be added. At aged 8, one of my chores was to set the table for the family meal. It was called ‘tea’, in my little working class corner of the world, and we ate it at 5pm.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: georgia;"><span style="" lang="EN-GB">I was setting the table for tea. Knives on the right, forks on the left. <span style=""> </span>No spoons. Pudding was a Sunday treat only. Mugs for everybody for the obligatory cup of tea, which accompanied every meal like a religious ritual. We measured out our lives in cups of tea. Warm the pot. Loose leaf tea, counted out with a proper loose leaf tea spoon: a deep, ridged, silver-plated tea spoon that lived in the tea caddy and had a rough metallic smell.<span style=""> </span>I could count from a very young age. Measuring, metering, controlling my environment. I still loved to count, even though it was now so passé at eight.<span style=""> </span>One, two, three, four, five, six mugs. And a plastic cup for the baby. Even the baby had tea. Cooled with lots of milk, and just the one sugar.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: georgia;"><span style="" lang="EN-GB">My older sister was cooking. Full of resentment and rage, her presence made my heart pound in my chest and as my heart began to pound, the genie appeared. He was furious with me. I was supposed to call him. Throw my little aeroplane and help would appear. Why was I so proud, that I wouldn’t ask for help? I couldn’t answer, and yet I knew I wasn’t too proud. <span style=""> </span>I was scared. So scared. He looked like God in my Children’s Bible, bearded and smiling yet stern.<span style=""> </span>I was afraid of him. I was afraid of asking for him. I was afraid of asking for help. I was afraid of admitting my weakness, and not getting what I asked for. He disappeared with a warning: ‘ask for help when you need it.’ <span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: georgia;"><span style="" lang="EN-GB">And so I did throw my aeroplane. Not because I wanted to exercise my dependency, not even on a magical genie, but because I was too scared not to. Too scared to get it wrong again. Oh shit, shit shit because the genie didn’t appear. The aeroplane must be faulty. It must be the slightly damaged tip. Maybe I threw it wrong? Maybe the genie now belongs to someone else? Maybe he doesn’t know I am calling him.<span style=""> </span>Maybe he just doesn’t give a shit. Maybe I fucked up again.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: georgia;"><span style="" lang="EN-GB">I<span style=""> </span>wake up in a sweat, stiff with fear. It’s ok, it’s just a dream. Just a bad dream. Just the same bad dream again. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: georgia;"><span style="" lang="EN-GB">I had this recurring nightmare for years and years. I can’t remember when it stopped for good, but I do remembering having it as a young undergraduate at university. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: georgia;">I still find it hard to ask for help. Even harder is to take the help that is offered for free and with love.</span> <o:p></o:p></span></p>bluehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12197746469082978596noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8485810084059768139.post-83587468245449028692007-04-30T14:07:00.000-07:002007-05-07T12:40:24.163-07:00More rules of engagement<span style=";font-family:georgia;font-size:100%;" >You may have found this blog via my secret portal. Welcome. You were meant to find it if you have done so. I only ask that you share my secret with me alone. <span style="font-size:100%;">Shhhhh, </span></span><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-size:100%;">this is a quiet hiding place.<br /><br /></span></span><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:georgia;">When I was little I used to hide under my bed. I would take with me a book and a torch and read for hours. Sometimes my mother would shout me out, and I would hurry downstairs to be 'sociable', as she called it. What she wanted was for us all to pretend we were a happy family. We weren't. My second best hiding place, after she had flushed me out with her terrier temper, was behind the sofa. Here I would also read, or do my homework. I always got A's for my work. I suspect the teachers didn't realise that I was doing it tucked behind a sofa whilst crappy 70s sitcoms blasted out of the TV. Sometimes she would make me sit with the rest of the family. I would gently rock myself, disappearing off into my world of dreams.</span><br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:georgia;">"Stop rocking!" she would bellow. "You look like an abused child!"</span><br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:georgia;">Really? Did I </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:georgia;" >really</span><span style="font-family:georgia;"> look like an abused child? Then why didn't she know?</span><br /></span></div><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:georgia;font-size:100%;"></span><br /></span></span>bluehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12197746469082978596noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8485810084059768139.post-90468102869043741762007-04-09T06:54:00.000-07:002007-04-09T07:00:53.309-07:00Introduction to Blue<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;font-family:georgia;"><span style="" lang="EN-GB">I had no idea how important blogging would become to me. I had no idea that I had such a compulsion to write. I had no idea that I would need to write, regardless of whether anyone has a desire to read the outcome.<o:p><br /></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;font-family:georgia;"><span style="" lang="EN-GB">As a child I used to narrate to myself the story that was my world. I now know that this was a coping strategy. A child’s way of coping with her fear; with feeling not just that she didn’t belong in her family, but that maybe she didn’t really belong in the world.<span style=""> </span>Maybe she had arrived in the world at the wrong time for everyone? My mother’s violence was unpredictable and disproportionate. If she had fallen out with my father eventually one of us would be beaten for something small and childlike: laughing too loudly, teasing a sibling, an accidental breakage because we were playing too boisterously. The beatings were fast and furious, involving whatever implement she could grab at arm’s length. She would stop as quickly as she started, perhaps realising that she was taking it out on the wrong child or that the punishment barely fitted the crime. But she never apologised. She never showed remorse. She would tell us that we deserved such brutality, because we made her life so difficult.<span style=""> </span>Looking back through an adult’s eyes I can see that her life was harsh. My father was distant and ineffective and the pain of her disillusionment was palpable. She had wanted a strong man and a garden full of flowers and children. What she had was a husband whose silence she had mistaken for strength, and a tiny house crammed with lively children who didn’t see fit to make her feel like the mother she had imagined herself to be. She had no garden. She worked 60 hours a week in the family business and had no quiet place at all. Deeply unhappy, the only way to manage this was to inflict it harshly upon those who couldn’t fight back. We bore the brunt of her anger and the weight of her disappointment.<o:p><br /></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;font-family:georgia;"><span style="" lang="EN-GB">I would escape from the house as soon as I was old enough. Perhaps seven or eight, I would wander the local streets alone narrating to myself the story of my journey. I was always the hero of my stories: a poor, misunderstood young thing who had so much to offer a world that didn’t care to listen. One day, someone would hear my story and weep. One day, someone would hear my story and see how much I could shine.<span style=""> </span>I would speak my story out loud to myself, creating and re-creating meaning for myself with every new telling.<span style=""> </span>Although it was more common in the 70s to see young children out alone on the streets, I imagine I brought attention to myself by talking aloud as I scuffed my way along the cobbles. <span style=""> </span>Ten years older and I would have been mistaken for someone with a schizophrenic disorder. And yet this world was my saviour. In this world I was understood, loved, recognised.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;font-family:georgia;"><span style="" lang="EN-GB"> <span style=""> </span>When I was 11 my parents – although I really ought to say my mother, as my father played little more than a walk-on part in any aspect of our lives – gave me a bike for my birthday. I adored my bike. I loved it like I would a person. He was called <i style="">Blue</i> and he accompanied me on my daily wanderings around the neighbourhood. I called myself <span style="font-style: italic;">Scout</span>, after the young tomboy character in To Kill A Mockingbird. (I was a precocious reader, and borrowed my older sister’s book when she studied it for ‘o’ level. I was ten, and it touched me beyond words. From then on I was called Scout, in all of my imaginary wanderings.)<o:p><br /></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family:georgia;">Perhaps this blog is the logical extension of this private world of mine. Here I can continue to narrate my world to myself, to make sense of the insensible and find knowing out of unknowing.</span> <o:p></o:p></span></p>bluehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12197746469082978596noreply@blogger.com0