Being There

There are moments when you’re called upon to undertake some deed. Many times, you may feel overwhelmed by your own inadequacies as you take up your position on the battlefield of life. 

I recall when six months pregnant being summoned to look after a lovely relative who had had a stroke while living in the south of England. Flying from Northern Ireland to the UK I managed to fill all six sick bags across the entire row of seats at the back of the plane.  I’ve never been sure why my pregnant self decided to be so sick. Even during morning sickness, much earlier in the pregnancy, my body had felt nauseous but had refused to regurgitate valuable food. In fact, in all cases of food poisoning in our family, usually the result of a takeaway, my constitution was like that of my dad’s.  While the rest of my sickened family cleared out their systems by one end or the other (i.e. vomiting or diarrhoea), our systems perversely decided our bodies could handle the toxicity and extract some useful nutrition from the poison we had ingested.  To this day I have no idea why my stomach decided on performing like something from The Exorcist but I still remember the horrified expressions of my fellow passengers fighting to provide me with enough bags to contain the huge quantities of carrot coloured lumpy porridge I projected.

I was also well aware of being under-qualified for the task ahead which would involve caring, cooking and moderate housekeeping. I decided to camouflage my deficiencies by faking proficiency in these areas.  This strategy consisted of

1.    Turning the vacuum cleaner on for half an hour a day so that my relative, who was bedridden, would be comforted by the evident housecleaning going on below. I must confess I did not move the vacuum cleaner just turned it on daily, downstairs. In my defence when I started this practice there was a definite improvement in my patient’s demeanour who seemed disproportionately happier and more grateful.

2.     My tasteless meals were presented as being lighter on the stomach and easier to digest. In fact, my farola (finely-milled semolina) pudding dish became a staple favourite as my relative mentioned she had never been served this their entire life. Either that or she was too polite to complain about the food served. Come to think of it that seems much more likely explanation.

3.     My sweet relative knew that other family members around the world were worried to death about her. So, a daily task of mine was writing letters to distant relatives and friends. She would dictate and I would write and subsequently post these missives. She would insist on praising my housekeeping skills, my cooking and my kindness in every letter sent. As she had relatives in almost every continent I felt at times I was undertaking a one-woman self-promotion of sainthood campaign.  At times there I would blush in embarrassment as I wrote my own praises. But even this letter writing seemed to bring the patient pleasure and the avalanche of responses that arrived in the following days and weeks brought welcome messages of love and concern that were sustaining as regular blood transfusions for my patient.

Thankfully she made a full recovery. Eventually, I confessed my vacuuming trick. When she regained mobility, I had to!  She spent the next month trying to tidy and clean her house and find where I had put stuff in her kitchen. These activities I told myself also speeded her long-term recovery.

She was always very grateful and thankful for my presence during her illness and the lesson learned for me was, even when poorly prepared and totally inadequate, just showing up on the battlefield wins you a medal of sorts. Sometimes it’s not about your abilities but about being there for others.  I can look back now and wish I had been more effective and useful but her sweet response to my incompetence taught me so much.  If we stop wasting time thinking about our inadequacies we can probably achieve so much more.

“Let no excessive self-criticism or any feelings of inadequacy, inability or inexperience hinder you …..”

 Riḍván Message 152, Universal House of Justice

Self-doubting, sad, mad and at times bad

Reading through my diaries has told me so much. Including, just hard how hard it is to be a teenager.  They seem so full of adolescent angst. That actually does not seem to stop even as I entered my late teens. Interspersed with total annoyance of my self-obsession there is also growing compassion for the younger me. 

Most adults don’t realise just how helpless the young are. Many, many entries in my diaries concerned missing the school bus from Limavady to Dungiven where I lived. This was totally outside my control as teachers would invariably keep the class in until I missed the last bus available to me. I ended up racing across the school playground desperately trying to catch the departing bus. Many times I took risks racing across the road to get the waiting bus before it departed. On one occasion I was hit by a car and ended up being flung across the road onto the pavement. The thing that upsets me now over 40 years later is there was absolutely nothing I could do about the situation.  There was no other bus and I had no choice.

There was also a boring self-preoccupation and self-consciousness that appears throughout all the diaries. Recording my weight was a weekly affair carefully recorded in capitals. So what reflections do I have on all these diaries so far.

Listen to the young. Hear their despair. It is real and it is potent. Every single adult who took time to show kindness and a listening ear was a game-changer. If you knew the anguish and self-doubt most teenagers are consumed with you would understand so much more about their behaviour and mindset. Don’t be in a hurry to judge and if they have nine bad qualities and one good be sure to tell them about that one vital quality that they have acquired.

There are a few exerts from my dairies that give a flavour of those intense days.

My first desired career was as a forester.  I couldn’t because I was a girl (I was told).  But I kept the leaflet.  Still there over forty years later.

Boredom was a perennial enemy as this entry indicates.

June 21 

“Today is Monday and today was just a normal boring Monday. Nothing happened, nothing exciting was said and nothing exciting was done. I am boring person in a boring life in a boring place.”

This discovery is rather confirmed by the following entry.

June 26,
“Did a lot of stamp arranging. I evaluated my stamps. It’s a nuisance. I want to stick a lot in but I have no stamp hinges.”

The tragedy of no stamp hinges, does life get any worse?  However, the obsession with my awful appearance was never-ending and often focused on odd parts of my anatomy I am wondering how I managed to spot my disfigurement from behind.  This entry was typical.

27^th  January 

“I am too fat. It’s a horrible thing to realise but it’s a fact. My legs are horrible. They have no shape and at the back they are positively repulsive. We went down the river in the boat. I lay out like a bloated balloon in my swimming costume. Got back just before 8 o’clock.”

Despair was evident at times and dramatically spoken of.

Feb 15 

“There comes a time when your pit of hope just runs out and you quit. You just decide you’re not going to be hurt anymore and stop caring.”

There were some successes.  After playing chess with only my brother for years my mum entered me in a chess competition for girls and I won and played for the Irish team in international competitions.  I remember feeling less useless but also being freaked out by the stress of competitive chess. I stuck the newspaper cutting in my diary and my shyness is evident.

One entry consists of my writing Dam in capitals for the entire 20 lines available for that particular date.  Another has every bad word I could summon up and each is scribbled over the top of the others.  I suspect much of adolescent life is like this.  Full of self-doubt, being really sad at times, really mad quite often, self-critical to an appalling degree, occasionally really happy and often totally bored during it all.

My Diary Collection and Grandad

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I write a lot.  It started a long time ago.  Because of the amount I write it has become necessary to store my volumes.  What I don’t have in quality I make up for in quantity.  A typical example are my diaries.  Every day I recorded what I saw around me and felt within diaries big and small and I did this year in year out.  When I travelled abroad several decades ago these needed to be stored safely.  I chose my cousin Del to be my custodian.  One because she has a huge house in Belfast and therefore room, two because she is trustworthy and three because she has such a huge heart I knew she wouldn’t say no.  This is how I abuse those closest to me! 

In the past week after a period of well over 20 years of storage, I asked for the diaries to be returned and my sweet cousin brought them back to me.  I chose at random one of the dairies and began to read and then finally weep.

It was written in 1979, when I was 16 and scrawled on the back cover was written

“To the dead we feel sorrow

To the dying we feel commiseration

But to the living we leave no tomorrow”

I was not a cheerful puppy, evidently.  Entry on Jan 1, 1975, which was a Wednesday, at exactly 1.15pm  

“The nurse called early today before I was up.  Mummy tells me I am getting fat and the nurse repeated remarks about my eating only emphasised that.”

The fact that it was the afternoon and I was still in bed having breakfast says a lot about how I spent my day and how important food has always been in my life.  For the first pages I complain a lot about not having a colour TV.  In fact, I repeat this complaint almost every day for the first two months of the year.  Whining about not being able to watch my favourite show Kojak in colour was incessant.  Reading it bored me -  endless descriptions of every episode of that TV series.  Yes, you read that right.  I filled page after page with what had happened in each episode.   

I am furious with school, with people around me and with life.  I end one-page entry with the line with the one exception to that.

“Granda was very calm and is very pleasant and courteous.”

This drew my attention as my Grandfather lived with us and had already lost one leg to gangrene.  The nurse mentioned earlier was treating his remaining leg which had also begun to have gangrene.  I read on and discover later that January they had to take him to hospital to have this leg removed as well.  What appals me now is how I complained for weeks about nothing to all around me and, despite that, my grandfather took time to be nice and pleasant to me while facing an operation that would eventually kill him.  Such is the gross and sad self-centredness of teenagers. 

On the 19^th of January I came across a poem that David, my cousin, wrote for our grandfather and which I carefully recorded in the diary.

“As a youth he fought his country’s foes

And struggled in many a field of bloody strife

Such was the glorious dawn

To a happy life

He older grew and had a smile for all

And all who knew him loved his cheery ways

They blessed him for his help

On troubled days

And now although in patient’s bed he lies

The robes of melancholy will not don

The spirit of a soldier

Marching on.”

I remember being told that my grandfather went to world war 1 aged only 17.  When he went to the recruiting office he mentioned his age and the officer told him to go around the room and queue again and to say a different age if he wanted to join.  So, he did and fought through many battles including the carnage of the battle of the Somme winning a commendation for bravery in the process.  What a difference between his teenager’s life and my own.  I am struck by how tests catapult people into a different level of existence.  I am reminded of his bravery that was so much a part of him we almost took it for granted.  His lack of fear and his good humour. 

When he was very ill one tactless old neighbour visited Granda, looking so poorly in bed with his missing legs, and said “Ach Ben, if you were a horse I’d shoot you!”  I remember Granda laughed out loud in response.  He never felt sorry for himself and he met with all that life threw at him with a brave heart and a smile.

I visited his grave this week and was struck that the three people interred there together all showed me so much love that I cannot put into words how thankful I am to have had them in my life.

“I adjure Thee by Thy might, O my God!

Let no harm beset me in times of tests, and in moments of heedlessness guide my steps aright through Thine inspiration. Thou art God, potent art Thou to do what Thou desirest. No one can withstand Thy Will or thwart Thy Purpose.”

—The Báb