Motherload

Yesterday, I dropped my son off at school. First day back. We were late, running, son hadn't done his homework properly, everyone was ambling and ruinously slow. Son stormed off without saying goodbye. I stormed out of the playground, my emotions plastered all over my face.  Then I sat in the car and cried to my mother for a full hour and a half, venting every single one of the grievances I carry about with me like so much lead. A 47-year-old sniffing and snotting to her nearly 80-year-old mother. I should have been ashamed of myself (don't worry, reader, I was).  She was brilliant, as she always is. My quiet, self-contained wartime mother, whose magisterial sense of proportion is the equal of any classical architect. She said a couple of things that stuck: 1. You're quite wrong to keep on regretting something that happened twelve years ago.  2. If the kids shout at you, walk away. You don't have to put up with that.  Those two sentences, in amongst a lot of...

So, like the rest of the nation, I have been going through New Year, and found to my surprise that it DOES mean something. In fact, it feels as though New Year has gone through me, like an extreme weather event, or a bout of food poisoning. New Year is something visceral – a kind of terror in the body, gut-clenchings of nameless fears and monstrous brain creations, pulsing in the dead of night. All your evils come back to haunt you, and to cleanse you. In the daytime it has felt little better (having not been able to sleep, I have been an inzombiac). I have felt tearful, hysterical, irritated, anguished, furious, desperate, seared, flagellated, exhumed, empty, slackened, throttled, murderous. All these things at times; at points, all at once. In the days following Christmas and then New Year, the wastelands of yesteryear and the bleak untried plains of the coming year have blown through me. It has been difficult to locate handholds in amongst the rushing grains of what took place...

Christmas seems to me the most preposterous process of emotional line-drawing and dread.  'Advent' turns out not to mean anticipating the coming of the Lord — or even Father Christmas. Or rather the true meaning of 'anticipation' is searching nightly through the contents of your soul, memory and wallet for a full month, while trying to hold down a job, and cope with everyone else's unfiltered greed (if they are children) or unmitigated disappointment (if they are adults).  All through December I feel I am wading through the treacle of my own and everyone else's expectations and anxieties. I am measuring myself up, working out what didn't get done, what I hoped would happen and didn't, combing back over the year in a cloud of sadness for time lost, and by extension, sifting through all the previous years, now gone for ever. We are all working and living a kind of double time, trying to fit in everyone else's activities (aka hopes and dreams), h...