I’ve fallen out with time. Caught up with an image in my mind I can’t shake. Shipwrecked close to shore, my fingers will soon lose their dexterity, unless I can stave off the arthritis that crept into my mother’s knuckles when she was my age.
When I was a child one of the nuns suffered severe arthritis in her hands and feet. She wore thick black shoes, the toe section elevated into a convex bowl to accommodate the bulk of her crooked bones. Her fingers were like gnarled tree roots.
This nun disliked me. I was not agile with numbers and she taught mathematics and science. She taught us how to do logarithms from a thin orange book filled from top to toe with figures. She taught us algebra, about equations, and the square root of things, but I could only take in the words, not the ideas behind the words, and most of the time I sat in her class fearful of letting her know. I could only guess the answers to the questions she wrote up on the board, the sums she set.
Irritation stamped on her face like an angry question mark whenever she noticed me.
‘What’s wrong with you,’ she said. ‘Why can’t you do even the simplest sums.’
My youngest brother once told me that mathematics is a language no different from any other language. If you can find the patterns in a language, he said, then you can find the patterns in the numbers.
But I could not.
Even now a sea of numbers swim before my eyes and I lose focus. My eyes blur. I cannot hold the page steady. Already, at first glance, I have decided, this is too hard for me.
Too hard because my father told me before I even tried to add one and one together, before I tried to rote learn my times tables, that I was one of the many females in the world, just like my mother and sister before me, who were useless as maths.
Girls can’t count. Girls can’t perform complex tasks that require intelligence. Girls are dumb.
It stays with me this notion of my intellectual inferiority even as I have worked over the years to dispel the nonsense of my father’s prejudice.
Time consists of numbers. And any fiddles with time, including the agonies of day light savings changes, requires concentration to get my mind around the shifts.
My mind is a shipwreck. One I can view safely from the shore. I can see the once tall masts jutting out from the sea line on an angle. Sea birds rest on its topmost tip, its sails in tatters. Under the water, I can imagine the bowels of the boat, fractured where the rocks ripped her apart. Scuttled on the seafloor close to land but not so close I want to swim inside. Best to view her sad ending from a distance.
A bunch of them have sprouted in our front garden this year. Every year they reappear. Wide spreading leaves that unfurl like oversized flowers on the ground, a pale and insipid green/pale turquoise that looks to be fading even as it’s young.
I dislike this plant mostly for the furry coating on the top side of the leaves. It reminds me of whiskers on a young boy’s chin, not yet fully formed and gives me that creepy feeling when I encounter something yuk.
My husband loves these plants, so we don’t pull them up.
By summer they will sprout long stalks that in time carry top-heavy yellow flowers, tiny petals in large clumps that I think of as Triffids. Those creatures from the John Wyndham novel of the same name, which I read as a schoolgirl and therefore remember well.
These plant-like creatures stung people in the eyes and caused blindness in the population throughout the world.
A scary book for a fifteen-year-old but in those days, I was into scary books. I read all of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories and revelled in the way they made my skin bristle.
I had a similar feeling, though not one of fear, when I peeled the plastic off the morning’s paper and saw on the front page the image of a man I know indirectly through a friend.
He was masked up but apparently smiling, his son on his shoulders.
The caption read something about the way you can still smile underneath a mask.
Without reading the article, I imagined it was telling people to keep smiling behind masks and know that we communicate a great deal with only our eyes and the lines around our foreheads.
The mysteries of body language.
It’s rare to recognise a person from our own life on the front page of the newspaper, not a dignitary, but someone ordinary, only this person is not ordinary, not that any of us are as such.
My first thought, he’d have been chosen because he and his wife have contacts in the newspaper world.
I chastised myself for that familiar feeling. Why them then?
It goes deeper. It’s not that I want my picture on the front page of the newspaper. But the wife of this man is a writer who is recognised. And that recognition seeps into me with an uncomfortable twang.
I know enough writers to know we all want our writing recognised and that there is a degree of pride and pleasure in getting our books out there, but also of having people read our words and resonate to them.
I was young when I first read Gerald Manley Hopkins’s ‘Glory be to God for dappled things’.
The nun who took us for English admired this poet-priest who did not seek fame in his lifetime. He wrote for the love of God.
He did not care that his poems were out here in the world for others to read or so the nun told us, and once more the message was clear.
Do not be seeking of fame.
Do not be seeking notice.
Hide your desires from everyone, including yourself.
In those days, I wrote poetry, too. And had a first whiff of the pleasure that comes from recognition.
My big brothers praised my efforts.
Until then nothing I did was in any way remarkable. My older siblings could read and write and draw and were far ahead of me, or so it seemed to my small mind that said I should be able to do just as they did and so I was useless.
Everything I did came late such and had a secondhand feel.
Was this where my jealousy first reared its head?
Even writing this here
fills me with the revulsion that comes of words from the back of my head, words like: solipsistic, self-seeking, naval gazing. Too much introspection. Stop writing about yourself.
Go into the universal, write about other people. We are not interested in you and yours. We do not care what you think about your life or your feelings. We care only for much loftier themes that relate to other people.
Get out of our way.
Donald Winnicott wrote words that stay with me. He was describing the peek a boo game for babies when they begin to understand here and there, self and other.
‘It’s a pleasure to hide,’ he wrote, ‘but a tragedy never to be found.’
But to be found does not come with fame or notoriety.
You can have your picture on the front-page of every newspaper. You can have yourself admired for all manner of achievements in your life. But to be recognised for yourself beginning when you are very small goes a long way to helping recognise yourself within.
I modelled myself on my disappearing mother. When we had visitors you could see her strip off her apron and the oppression of her life as a mother of nine children tied to an abusive husband and almost skip around the room on the company of people like her brothers and sisters in law and the few friends who entered our house.
You could see her open up like a flower. But you could also hear the criticisms behind her back from people like my father and brothers.
She’s vain. She cares only about other people’s admiration.
She’s fake false and shallow.
A friend yesterday workshopped a series of poems in our small writing group. All of which spoke to her sense of invisibility as a woman.
‘What a small amount of space we’re allowed to inhabit’.
She groaned about the continual pressure she experiences to stay silent, to stay invisible, to behave within the narrowly circumscribed role allocated to women.
And then I heard Alexandria Cortez’s speech in the US Congress and I rejoiced to hear another woman call out the verbal abuse heaped upon women by men who call themselves decent because they have a wife and daughter and know something about woman hood.
But a decent man would, and again I come back to my thoughts about jealousy and the seeking of recognition and the sadness that accompanies enforced invisibility and wonder about my wish to rip up those plants in the front garden all because to my mind they are old-fashioned and wan.
‘Why not let them be,’ my husband says. ‘They look good in winter.
‘That’s true,’ I said. But by summertime we need all the water and sun we can get the other plants to shine, the ones that belong here, the succulents, not this self-seeding exotic plant that would have fared well in an English country garden.
