I read recently about our tendency as humans to develop categories as short cuts, but in the actual biological world life exists on spectrums not dichotomies, such as XX chromosomes for males and XY for females.
The biological essentialists will try to pin us down into these positions as if fixed for life when our bodies are more complex. Deviations from the norm are intolerable until those deviations themselves become the norm. Witness the rise of ADHD and autism, almost as a regular feature of daily life and for this reason now welcomed. More so when only a few souls cop the moniker. For that’s how it can seem. We dole out titles and categories, classifications of behaviour to help make sense of behaviour and people who unsettle us because they do not behave in predictable ways.
The child who finds it hard to go along with parental directions becomes pathologically avoidant and my daughter taught me a new category ‘a class five clinger’, namely a new partner who comes into a relationship already making excessive demands by texting constantly and insisting on loads of contact.
I think someone a little insecure and I consider the dynamic of this. Does a person cling because they are insecurely attached or does a person cling because the one to whom they attach pulls away. When you feel well held, you have no need to cling.
People like Russell Barkley express it well: ‘You do not get to design your children.’ What of the Mozart effect.
‘Your child is a genetic mosaic of your extended family…[or of your surrogate families in cases of IVF when donor eggs and/or sperm are brought to life] your child is born with more than 400 psychological traits that will emerge and have nothing to do with you…your child is not a blank slate on which you get to write. So don’t be an engineer, be a shepherd to each unique individual in your care.’
Having trotted out a few truisms I must now get to the business of writing.
Mosaic
In the year I turned twelve at Easter time, Mother Mary John our class teacher urged every child to bring in as much Easter egg foil as we could find. Larger scraps preferred.
Every kid in grade six took extra care to unseal whatever Easter treats they received and then we collected the proceeds in a pile on a table at the side of the classroom.
We worked in small groups each taking a sheet of bright coloured tinsel and spreading it with our fingers, then in a gentle motion, as gentle as possible, smoothing out the creases so that every tiny sheet of Christmas tin foil was smooth, shiny and bump free.
As we pressed down on our foil and spread bits out, I thought of my mother pummelling meat. From one thick lump, a thinner wide sheet emerged. Like schnitzel.
After our labours our small pile grew into a stack of tin foil seemingly much more than we began with.
Then again Mother Mary John allocated each of us in our groups a glass ash tray. The type available in Coles variety stores for a mere sixpence. She set glue pots around the table, one for each group of participants. She rostered each group one at a time.
About twenty of us in sets of five hovered over our corner of the trestle, each with our separate piles of Easter foil, our shared pot of glue and our separate ash trays. Then we dabbed glue onto the base of the ashtray and slowly pieced on small scraps of foil.
Artistry in the form of which piece to choose after another. To create the desired mosaic. When the ash tray was covered entirely we set it aside to dry. Then another group of twenty kids took their turn until the entire class had made their ash trays and set them to dry.
A few days later we each reclaimed our half-finished ash tray. The job was not yet over.
This was a tricky task with over eighty kids in the composite grades five and six Mother Mary John instructed us to write out names on scraps of paper loosely settled on the base of our ash tray as it dried.
We hoped no one’s name might stick but some had trouble peeling them off without damaging their well-set foil mosaic. Finally, we painted the messy rear view of our ashtrays in a consistent black paint so that only the minor rough texture of the various sheets remained to look as though the surface was smooth.
Again, we left our ash trays to dry until they were ready to take home as gifts to our father’s for birthdays or Father’s Day, whichever came first.
My father must have received several of these ashtrays given at least five of my siblings went through the composite grade five and six class though I imagined Mother Mary John varied her projects from year to year. It would not do for each child to make an ash tray in both grade five and six.
Still my father must have received five ash trays over the years and sadly none of them remain. This in the days when smoking was commonplace and the gift of an ashtray was considered a joyous thing to receive, the more elaborate the better.
Of all the activities I undertook in art classes over my school years this one stands out. For the rest my memory is one of needlework enterprises such a corn flowers on doilies and pinafores which required the assistance of a sewing machine.
I tackled one of these in my adolescence but never mastered the skill as did my older sister. She was a wizard at the treadle even after my father bought my mother an upgraded electric singer.
I found my foot on the treadle that determined the speed of flow of the stitches a terrifying enterprise. Reminding me now of how I felt when I first learned to drive a motor car.
My foot on the accelerator sent me into spasms of anxiety. Terrified I could not control the rate of flow. And when it came to driving, how to mesh the clutch declutch with the accelerator flow and the occasional and essential need to brake.
I figured early on that I lacked the coordination necessary for tasks like this. That my body was not made up of the same flowing parts I saw in some of my other siblings. Especially my older sister. The way she could coordinate tasks in a seamless manner, especially when it came to the maintenance of our household.
Little did I knew then it was her way of holding herself together. While she was busy going through the motions of the necessary actions to cook, clean and sew, her mind was cut off from awareness she told me years later.
When she did these things, it helped her to forget the things that happened with my father in the night. Whereas I was aware of these visits and could not forget. And the effort to hold my mind together as I went about the tasks my sister tried to teach me and failed miserably left me with a mind that was ever watchful, on alert, stirring up memories, like ash trays in my mind.
A mosaic of memories my sister had trouble remembering. Even as she keeps the tidiest house I know while mine is a jungle of cobwebs, dust and disorganisation.
Whenever she visits, which she will do later today and together we will visit a joint friend I imagine her big sisterly eye casting itself around at the forlorn state of my house, but I choose not to let what I imagine as her judgement to cloud my determination to continue in my messy way.
There is more pleasure to be had in writing than in keeping a pristine house. As the late Olga Lorenzo liked to say, better to have the words ‘she wrote a good book’ on your gravestone than ‘she kept a tidy house’.
No one will remember your tidy house and a too tidy house is one in which we, cannot move, rather like the imposed categories created by human kind to enclose and restrict us into concrete entities that do not reflect the unique and messy state we all must live in during our short time on this earth, especially if we are to enjoy the pleasures of a life well lived.
Whatever that is.
