To the wife of my son (s)

To the wife of my son (s)

I do not know you yet, you are somewhere right this minute tucked up in bed in the home of your parents. Your days are filled with school and friends and weekends of freedom and innocence. But one day in the future your paths will collide and one or both of you will decide that this is the one, the person I can share a life with or if either of you are less lucky this is the one the person I want to possess, to have. I hope for both of you that it is more mutual than that. I hope there is equality in your partnership and a sense of life as a shared journey.

When you have children, god willing, this is what you know – a daughter will be a constant, she will always be with you. A son is a visitor in your home, he is a gift for a time but one day he will meet a woman and around her his world will turn. This is natural and right.

Woman are to competitive with one another to share one man as a son and a husband. I know this, I have had more than one mother-in law. My ways will not be your ways. You will blame me for his shortcomings, the fact that he is spoilt, that he likes life to meet him on his terms, that he is stubborn or selfish, you will see these faults not as fundamental defects in character but rather as characteristics that could or should have been “raised” from him during his growing up. That in order to love someone you need to blame another for the things in that person that you do not love at all. A mother is always the person a wife blames.

A son is only have raised by his mother, the rest is done by the woman he marries, although you may bare resentments in the early years of having been delivered of something  half finished, the reality is that men are molded by the woman in their lives, this takes time, effort, commitment and love, not from you but from him. Whether he loves you enough to become the man you need is what  hangs in the balance.

The truth is there comes a time when a mother can no longer reach her son, he leaves, not physically but emotionally, he goes to a place where you cannot follow nor can you reach your hand out and pull him back. It is a place where he is vulnerable, a place in which he can cry, show fear see himself as week and fallible, and it will always be a place where he is desperately alone until such time as meets a woman, you, whom he trusts enough to let in, trusts enough to see him in his weakness.

This has been my experience and my observation, there are two kinds of men . The first sort wish to remain the child of his mother for all his days, he will find and marry a woman that is prepared to be subservient , this of course works until such time as she has a child of her own and feels she has a greater power base, the struggle that ensues is often ugly and  terribly damaging to all three. This woman it seems has the qualities he wished his mother had had. The other kind of man, opts for a woman whom he believes will be able to stand up to his mother and “take him away” she will have qualities that are not dissimilar to those he is familiar with and needs in a partner. –These have been the findings, of my observations.

Although I have not much been one for the bible, largely because I feel woman were somewhat unrepresented 2000 years ago, There is a reading about children leaving the homes of their parents and cleaving to one another in their union. There is a lot to be said for this, there comes a time when all people need to know who they are and what they stand for in their time, if you remain to much with a generation that is not your own you do not pave the ground of the present but can become mired in the past. It is for you to take the values and beliefs from your growing up and shape a life and a future with those. The generations are supposed to differ that’s what makes for progress.  As a parent you can gift your children with the ability to think and to learn but not force upon them your learning’s and your views. Their world is a different place from the one you have lived in, your torch may not be the kind of light they need to see the way into the future. I can teach you how to think but I shall not teach you what to think – this is what I try to do for my son. Together you will face a future where my thinking may not be appropriate. I wonder if you will see the value in this? Or if you will interpret my attitude as one of non involvement?

I have tried to see all my children as beings that have come through me and not from me, to see them as people and not progressions of myself. I think often of an apprentice to a trade or an artist in bygone times, the very best of teachers equip their apprentices with the tools of their trade, the allowed them a window into the inner workings of all they knew, all they did and then when the boy came of age in his craft he left his master to become his own artist or master craftsman. I try to think that parenting is like this.

To Oliver on our anniversary

The things that I love about you

I love that you are tall, and when I am in a crowd all I have to do is look up and around and I will find you, that I can say whats going on and you are always able to see and tell me. I smile when I see you duck down when you go through a door that your not sure of, that I have to stand on tippy toes to kiss you and even then I cannot reach. I love your long thin stork legs because they make all of this possible, they make me feel like you are venerable but when I get close to you and you tower over me I know that you are not vulnerable in that way

I love that you are a man of few words, because when you do speak it is careful and measured and each word has been pondered over and selected specifically, around you is peace and not a great jumble of noise . You say what you mean and you tell the truth. Your words hold great value to me. You don’t always speak but you always understand and you hear a great deal more than other people because you listen. You seem to decide whether or not you will waste your words or not after you have weighed and measured people or circumstances ~ I like this about you very much.

I love to see you laugh, I love it when you cover your face with your arm when you collapse with laughter, the way your eyebrows go up and your eyes go round almost as if you are surprised and then the laughter bubbles up and out of you. I especially like it when you laugh at your very own private joke, that some people miss how astute you are and that in your secret but seldom unkind  way you are laughing at them.

I like that when you are cross with me or want to talk through something that you always start by telling me that you love me very much, that before you begin you make me feel reassured and safe, that you never tell me what to do but always make suggestions, you don’t tell me I am wrong or I did badly or failed, you talk to me about better ways of doing things and how we can tackle difficult situations together.

I love that money is unimportant to you and although you know and like nice things the pursuit of money is not one of your drivers. That you know who you are as a person and you know it has nothing to do with how much money you have in your pocket.  That you have the capacity to reassure me about all things financial and that my capacity to earn money is also unimportant to you, and that you really would rather I was happy.

I love that you value our relationship and you relationships with other people, that you guard those relationships  from harm and protect the people you love, that if I love someone you have the depth and capacity to gather them to you and include them in your loving. That you believe in family, that you know that you are not competing for my attention with either my sister or the children.

I love that you try very hard to trust, that your life experiences to date make this hard for you and mean you have to stretch yourself. To put yourself in an uneasy place and yet you do, you allow yourself to stand exposed growing in the trust that I am standing next to you.

I love the color of your eyes, and how they shift between somewhere near gold green and a fathomless brown, that just by looking into them I can read a hundred things that need no words, that you look at me with love, tenderness , care sometimes sadness and even pity, that sometimes there is desire and passion, but always you look at me the way a man is supposed to look at a woman, I love that when you look at me you see me, with all my defects and faults, my strengths and talents, the weakness’s and in your eyes I see that you love me, that because of the way you see me I feel like a woman, I feel beautiful and special, I feel both strong enough to be better and small enough to ask for help, to say carry me and I know you will.

These are some of the things that I love in you

Things you may not know about me

Things you may not know about me

I blame your parents for damaging you

I really would rather sleep

I love country music

Getting old and ugly scares me

I don’t trust people to look after me but I am trying

I expect my body to just go ~ like a maintenance free car

I pray that one day my granddaughter will look with horror and say you did what to your hair with hot wax

I fear I am living in a world that needs me to be a lot thinner

I have made a great many mistakes but have few regrets

I am really nosey

My sons playing rugby is supremely important to me

I don’t really want to be a non smoker

I love Toulouse Lautrec and maybe as an extension Pin-up art

At the end of it all I would like to be seen as a mixture between Martha Stewart,  Ditta Von Tease and Angela Merkel

Pablo Neruda is just about my favorite poet

I prefer Tagore’s view on life and the cosmos to Heisenberg’s

I eat health bread because I like the taste not because its good for me

I like being liked but I also like being disliked

I love bunting and polka dots and jam

Sometimes I am so unsure of whether I was born before my time or some decades to late

I like rules and stability and the fabric of society being maintained – I just don’t think I should be bound by any of it

I really am a socialist

I love scones but I hate crumpets and I think bagels are chewy and sour and have nothing to recommend them

I have less good taste than my mother and only marginally more than my father

I know you all think I dance badly – I think I dance great

I prefer Brie to camembert

I like apricot jam but not peach

I like being alone which is why I stay up late and sleep at odd hours

I love all things red

One day I want to own an Oscar De la Renta dress

I always preferred Hello Dolly to Gone with the wind

I dislike being cold, and I really dislike being to hot

I wish I could commit to a religion

I love road trips and I hate airports

Gardening was how I came to absolutely believe in God

Going to the chapel

It has been the season of weddings, and I seem to have spent several Saturdays in a row attending one after another. Last Saturday as I sat in my pre-appointed seat with an excellent view of the bridal couple I had reason to give thought to the girls that had gone before, the ones not decked out in bridal finery this day, the ones that didn’t win the proposal of this groom. In my minds eye I imagined these girls, the ones that would be drinking themselves to the point of smeared mascara, the ones in their pajamas watching a movie with tea and silent sympathy from a best friend. The girls that didn’t get their true love and the dream wedding. I wonder if they have spent the wedding days thinking of what might have been, of wondering where they went wrong, what they could have said or done differently.. was there a moment that all was lost? Or was it eroded over time?

My mind turned to the grooms and their choices of bride. It would seem that there are those that choose stepford style wives, others choose life partners and the foolish ones  select the would be playboy bunny.  I watch the events unfold with a weary cynicism stuck in the generation between the older folk that have marriages that have withstood trial and tribulation and the dewy eyed younger people.

I watch a couple some years married, a man who has boxed above his weight, the trophy wife who has been wooed by his success and finance more than by the absence of good looks wit and charm. I wonder how long she will be content with status and power by proxy or if she will revert to type, and the pull of the once captain of the rugby team will be to great to resist. And he this once upon a groom will he regret not marrying the girl who loved who he was and not the girl who loved what he became?

There is no test like the passage of time, on the days when loyalty will mean more than love and betrayal will way against promises made.

Where am I in all this? I will marry again, can I put my ego behind the needs of a union based on love, mutual respect and a shared view of the future ~ I think that this time, this man this new found understanding of me…I have a good chance.

and then there was gratitude

This morning I sat under the shade of a guava tree on a granite rock, the rock was still cool from the night but the day was warming up around me as I rested. I wondered how old the rock was and from there I turned to thinking of my own age ~ I shall turn 36 this year. I wondered if you could select days or moments quite consciously  to remember, if you can I have selected this morning to remember and store as a treasure. This morning I knew peace and simplicity, I felt my body holding my soul and had gratitude that I am still young and strong. Not the strength of your twenties where nothing hurts and you take your youth and physical resilience for granted, but the sort of gratitude you have when some days you glimpse age and frailty in the pain in your back or the stiffness in your joints when you rise after sitting wrapping Christmas presents.

I sat this morning and thought this is a good age and a good time, I love a good man and am loved in return. I have seen enough to know fools gold from that which is real.  It is an age where if you are lucky you are still comfortably nestled between your parents and your children. I am still a student but I have also become a teacher.  Much like my body, which wasn’t what it was but has endured and strengthened so to has my mind, although I still have much to learn, I have some things of value to pass along – this is a good age and this morning was a good day.