Grandchildren beat the heart alive

Grandchildren are the moist butter of life. 

They soak into the mundane existence 

and enrich life with flavour. 

Full of get up and go 

they inject energy into even old bones. 

They lubricate the seized-up thoughts of old age.

Stimulating thought and laughter 

their call for stories 

triggers your own forgotten creativity and joy. 

What can I say? 

This life is full of broken eggs and hurt, 

but this luscious butter 

beats the heart into a wonderful cake, 

soft, fragrant and fluffy. 

Baked with love it catches one’s breath 

and injects new life and laughter.

Reflections on Character fuelled by my P3 art piece

 My Mum is a custodian of epic proportions.  Things from decades even 50 years ago, of worth, are carefully stored.  In her garage, there are even the school exercise books of my children with their early writing, poetry and stories.  My grandfather’s old medals, certificates, and awards for shooting etc are all on shelves safe and sound.  My father’s letters of reference as a young teacher, his qualifications and his many letters are wrapped up with care.   The very first letter he sent to my mum over 70 years ago can still be retrieved and read.  The pages worn thin, with lines from folding and unfolding, show my father’s handwriting and thoughts.  On the wall opposite me is an oil painting by my grandmother which is around a hundred years old.  I’ve known this about my mum for years that she takes care of things and people with tenderness.   In her attic, above the garage, there is even a huge bag of my artwork from school.  It includes work from my primary school years P3 and P4.  Today, for the first time in almost 60 years I got a ladder and braved the spiders and their webs, to get the bag down.

As I took out one of my earliest pieces (see above) from P3 in primary school the art took me back.  Made of material stuck on a sort of canvas, I can actually remember making it.  It is indelibly branded in my memory. I did it in the room used for sewing and knitting.  That must sound odd to a modern audience but there was a time when very young primary students would spend hours mastering all kinds of stitches (both in sewing and knitting).  As our artwork required material we were making our creations in this room.  

The teacher was the wife of the headmaster a man who had suffered from polio as a child and limped badly.  His father had been a captain of a tea clipper (merchant sailing vessel of the 1860s) which shows how old I am! Anyway, Mrs Philips, his wife, mostly taught P1s those innocents to whom school must have seemed a bit of a shock.  In Northern Ireland you start school aged only 4 and if you happen to have a birthday in July you would be a 3-year-old who had just had turned 4 a matter of weeks previously. 

Mrs Philips was terrifying indeed.  She seemed permanently furious with all children.  I am not sure if she was born like that or had morphed into this type of enraged teacher with age but the end result was awful.  This particular picture, of mine I remember so well because while I made it one of her P1s was locked in the sewing box room adjacent to the class and roared and wept the entire period.  Someone whispered that he had wet himself with fear and as punishment had been locked in the storage cupboard.  The sound of his howls and his suffering was heart-breaking and being young myself the horror of it went deep.  Sometime during that endless class, I promised myself I would never become immune to the suffering of others.  As I stuck material with a shaking hand onto my board I pledged that if there was any other choice as an adult I would choose not to inflict pain such as this.  

In later years I could rationalize and tell myself that perhaps Mrs Philips had not always been like this.  Maybe, she had been a good mother and treated her own children well.  Indeed, it was possible she had taught primary school for years and did a tremendous job and this present version of herself was not characteristic of the real person she had been for most of her adult life.  I began to think of people like a graphic line with goodness on the y-axis and time on the x-axis, sometimes down and sometimes up.  Perhaps, Mrs Philips was in the abusive phase only at this point in her life?

Then, at university, I suddenly thought that a simple line is not adequate to reflect a person. Perhaps instead we should use an extra dimension, making an area.  What if a person’s character is proportional to the area under the line.  That would be much harder to determine but be more accurate because if you stayed loving for 40 of your 60 years then you would have a larger area under the curve.  It makes sense, doesn’t it?  If you had been a vicious person for 60 years you could end up with an area of roughly 120 but a loving person for that length of time would have a tremendous score of 600!  But, what if you are a hurtful teacher but a loving mother? 

Obviously, we need another dimension.  What if we added a three-dimensional approach to our diagram? This could represent all the other aspects of our lives, how we treat our parents, grandparents, neighbours, our dog etc.  Instead of an area, we would be looking at a volume where that line is rotated through 360 degrees in space. Here it is shown for a simple line rather than our jagged line but it gives the principle.  Our character is now represented not by a line or an area but by solid volume.

But though this might reflect much more about a person’s character it still fails to take into account all the interactions that happen to each of us as we pass through life.  You can meet an amazing person who inspires you to be better than you ever were before.  So perhaps 3-dimensional shapes that interact with others to substantially change would be closer to reality. Not a totally solid volume but a more malleable shape. 

Then, we have had occasions when religions have come along and changed not only individuals but whole civilizations.  It often seems that at the start of a religion dramatic positive changes happen to a whole populations' spirituality and then with time corruption can set in. Meaningless rituals and corrupt clergy can play too big a role.  Perhaps, then the character can be represented as malleable solids/volumes interacting with each other in a liquid (representing for example religion).  When religion is a dense, deep, inspirational contribution to life the molded volumes/solids all float higher on top.  When, religion becomes corrupt, materialistic, divisive, and fanatical the liquid becomes less dense and lighter without meaning or sense at which point the shapes sink into its depths far from the surface above.

Knowledge is praiseworthy when it is coupled with ethical conduct and virtuous character ...

Bahá'í writings

Toothless in the United States

This summer, the day before I was due to fly to Boston from the UK, my front tooth came out! We’d been cleaning out kitchen cupboards of foodstuffs and a packet of dried mango needed to go. Unable to dump it, but unwilling to carry it all the way to The US, I turned to the only other viable alternative. I sat watching TV late that evening and downed the entire packet. It was only when I was at the last handful that I felt that there was a piece of stone or glass in my mouth. Spitting out the foreign object onto my palm I was perplexed about the shape and colour. This was neither a stone nor a piece of glass. In fact, it looked more like a part of me. More like a front tooth. Rising with a sense of dread from the sofa I approached the mirror above the fireplace and smiled. The reflection felt like a smack in the face.

There is something about losing one’s front teeth that feels grief-like. They say that dreams about teeth falling out are usually about grief or loss. Well, I can say it may be a metaphor for grief but losing one’s teeth also actually causes a bit of grief.

I spent a useless few hours phoning dentists to get an emergency appointment. You then discover the reality that what constitutes an emergency for you just does not hack it for the NHS dentist! My main problem it seemed was that I was not in excruciating pain. The tooth I had lost was a root filling and as such devoid of sensitivity. Had I been writhing in agony I’m sure an appointment would’ve opened. So, there was nothing for it but to fly to the US toothless. It would mean weeks of looking frightening. I tried to smile with my mouth closed and usually managed. However, in an IKEA store in Boston, while holding my four-week-old grandson an American lady approached me and cooed and exclaimed of the tiny baby in my arms, “how beautiful a baby, how tiny his feet and hands”. I agreed and in my total pride as a new grandmother beamed my appreciation of her kind words. She recoiled from me in horror and over her shoulder in a huge mirrored cupboard I understood why.

There is something demeaning about being toothless. The character in the Victor Hugo's 1862 novel Les Misérables, Fantine, has her two front teeth pulled to sell them for money. In the movie of the novel, the heroine, played by Anne Hathaway, has her back teeth removed instead. The moviemakers knew instinctively that their audience would have lost a degree of sympathy and empathy with the heroine had she been so maimed.

The proof of this is the more recent serial version of the same novel which decided to be brutally honest about the scene and show the heroine having her two front teeth pulled out. The horror of this episode so shocked fans that there was outrage online with devotees furious and angry beyond belief that their heroine was now no longer what she once was.  It had obviously ruined the whole series for them.

Being toothless is not all negative. It taught me a degree of detachment. My son had to have a tooth filled in Boston, while I was there, and the $500 bill made me determined to avoid any dentist help in the US. Toothless I came and toothless I would go.

It was a remarkably useful prop when getting my two older grandsons to brush their teeth each night. I would watch them brush their teeth until they finished and then open my mouth wide and ask “do you want this to happen to you?”. At which point they quickly re-applied their toothbrushes with gusto. Strangely, none of my three grandchildren flinched at my toothless state. They hugged me as much as ever and it was salutary to see that disfigurement is not such a big deal for the young. As long as you play, read to them, take them to the parks and chat and laugh with them they overlook all sorts of oddities.

I enjoyed time with loved ones in Boston.   I also had the fortune to meet up with an old friend of mine who lives two hours north of Boston. She came down by train to see me for a few hours and warned me that she felt she had aged greatly in the 10 years since we’ve seen each other and might be hard to recognise at the train station. I sent her an email and told her not to worry as she could easily spot me as I was missing a front tooth!  It did give me a hillbilly appearance which by the second week began to even make me laugh. Especially when brushing my hair and putting on make-up in the morning. It felt like barring the barn door long after the horse has bolted.

When I returned home I managed to find a dentist to construct a replacement on a post drilled into the root of my old tooth. Thankfully cheaper than an implant! As the dentist held up a card to work out the colour of the replacement tooth she said: “yes, I think it needs to be slightly blue like the other teeth” to her young assistant. Depressing news indeed! Whatever, the gap has gone and I can now smile without frightening nearby strangers.  

I’ve learned a lot from the whole experience. When you pass 60 parts of you have a tendency to fall off or alternatively, weird things decide to grow on you. Physically that can be shocking but there are also mental cracks that appear. Names escape one, reasons for entering a room evaporate. Simple words that are not at all complicated evaporate from the mind. But love remains and it eases all ills, physical and mental. Loved ones work their magic, massaging healthy hope back into old bones and making new wholesome memories to hold onto. There are worse things than being toothless and my replacement may be a shade of blue but I am not feeling blue just very grateful for everything.

"If we are not happy and joyous at this season, for what other season shall we wait and for what other time shall we look?" 

Bahá’í Writings

If you talk less, they listen more

My father’s attitude to looking after multiple grandchildren was rather unique. I like to think he had an odd mixture of backgrounds that lead to experimentation. His mother had died when he was very young (around two or three) so in one way he could easily relate to lonely and unusual children. Fortunately, his mother was one of 12 siblings so, on the other hand, there was an excess of aunts and uncles and cousins to lavish care and attention on him.  His sociability probably sprang from this huge extended network which he took long road trips to renew and strengthen over the decades.

Then, he was the headmaster of a secondary school and had taught in the UK, Canada and Australia. That gave him ample opportunity to get to know the developing mind of a wide range of youngsters. So, when he had grandchildren one would have figured he would use his extensive educational experience to great advantage.

However, he claimed that the best way to look after a herd of grandchildren was to leave them alone. He would generally take them to a huge flat beach where they could walk for miles and only get ankle-deep in the sea. Then, he would studiously ignore the children but follow them from a safe distance. He claimed parents were far too interfering with instructions like “Take your socks off”, “Keep your shoes on”, “Where is your coat!” “Do you need a drink?” Or be the font of too much useless information, “This is a limestone rock”, “Here is the shell of a mollusc” or “This sea is called the Atlantic?”

Or constantly made fear-inducing statements like “You could easily drown”, “The sun is really bad for your skin”, “That dog might bite”, “Beware of strangers”, “You could easily get lost, be careful”.

Instead, he felt that silence allowed the child to really explore their environment in a much more personal and intimate way. He discovered a herd of small children usually unconsciously appoints a natural leader and they keep the group together. All his energy would then be devoted to ensuring safety not distracting conversations. Adults feel the need to talk, inform, respond, elucidate to each other but especially to children. The frightening reality, he claimed, was that most talk is just gibberish and many of us have come to so many false conclusions it might be much safer to opt for silence instead.

Children were clean slates ready to write their own reality, he felt, and thought it really unfair to interfere or mess them up. This hands-off attitude changed when he had just one child in hand. Then, he’d question them mercilessly trying to work out how they thought, what they valued, their views on things etc. It was that unique ability to flick from silent bystander of the group to loving inquisitor of the single child that build epic bonds with children. When children sense you don’t need them to be an audience they relax. If you talk less, they listen more when you do speak. If you respect their space both physically and mentally they sometimes gain much more.

A friend recently described being in Africa on the savannah and learning that by walking a few steps in one direction stopping and then heading in another and stopping repeatedly, the nearby animals grew used to his presence and began ignoring him. To them, he just seemed to be another grazing animal. 

Perhaps by adopting the same approach with young children we can get the necessary closeness to observe the important interactions they’re experiencing rather than our own flawed expectations.