I lie there

I'm watching. Steam rising, in little curls like cigarette smoke. I'm watching. As my toes unselfconsciously dance to the rhythm of the bobbing water. I move my body a little and make a wave and as I move, the water tries to pull me back and I notice I am heavy, as heavy as can be. I lie there in silence, bar the occasional drip from the tap and an intermittent gurgle from the holes that sit underneath the taps, seemingly challenging me to tell them to be quiet. 

I lie there. Thinking. Thinking, that this is only the third time I have layed here since we moved to this house six years ago. The first time I lay here, I was in the early stages of labour with my second child and my mother had run a bath for me. I remember it was the most uncomfortable, most brief affair. It left me with no desire to repeat the occasion any time quickly. I try my hardest to make it a moment, I watch the curls of steam rising, rising. But then my eye turns to the ceiling where water marks and blemishes and small edges of peeling paper, slightly mildewed, utterly distract me and make my skin crawl a little. 

I lie there. Then I remember that time near to when I went into labour with that second child of mine. I remember being alone in that room with the window open when the young, female doctor told me that my baby's growth had slowed. That my baby needed to be born and soon. That my baby would be healthier outside of my belly. I remember the goosebumps on my arm and I remember thinking that it was either the words she was saying that was causing them or the slight breeze from the open window. I wasn't sure which. I remembered how casually I had dismissed the offer of accompaniment from my husband and my mother preceding the visit, shrugging my shoulders and closing my eyes, wafting my outstretched hands downwards in a 'don't fuss' fashion. I could feel my eyes begin to sting as the doctor explained I would need to return the following day to see the consultant and make a final decision. 

I lie there and think how funny it is this memory of ours. How she plucks long lost narrative from our back gardens. Things forgotten, things purposefully buried, things weighted down so that they sink to the bottom. I lie there and I remember. I do lie there but not for long. Just long enough to see that the smoke has cleared and then I rise and pull the plug. I step out and back into the room, I'd almost believe it hadn't happened but I can see that the windows are fogged, much like my memory.

 

Finding New Memories

My grandmother pictured with a cigarette and with her friends,she's the one with s'one falling off her back!

My work as an Artist and as a Writer is about memory and identity. I explore how we use memory to both create our sense of self and to define our relationships to people and ideas and to time frames. I explore this using myself and my family members as subject matter and I am particularly interested in the way that memory is fractured and ever changing. Memories are recalled and triggered by a variety of complex factors, deaths, births, anniversaries, events or quite simply by scent or sensation, letters or by the classic, the photograph. I have been working with these same ideas for many, many years now and I still feel there is so much more to learn and talk about on the subject. 

Looking through family albums of photographs is a typical starting point for any work that I create be it visual or language based. I archived photographs that my maternal grandmother passed on to me some years back. When cataracts had made her vision blurry and limited and she no longer flicked through their pages, she handed me old albums of photographs of her life. Holidays with friends before she had my mother, photographs of my mother as a baby and her growing up, photographs of my parents wedding and the early baby photos of my siblings and I and photos that we sent when we were far away from her and some of strangers, people unknown to me that were a part of her life. She knew how precious these documents, these memories, this evidence was to me and she knew that I would forever cherish them like they were children of my own. 

I often write about my grandmother. She continues to be a huge influence in my life despite her passing away seventeen years ago. It regularly warms my heart to think that she remained in her own home with the comfort and familiarity of her hard earned possessions and her self created safe haven until the day that she peacefully took her last breath, with my mother by her side. These different memories of her as somewhat fragile, old and ever so, ever so slightly defeated are new to me. They surfaced this week-end as hubby and the boys and I joined my mother in a walk around a park a few minutes from the house where my grandmother lived and died. My mother and I reminisced and exchanged happy memories of my grandmother but then I remembered the walks in the same park with her in a wheelchair with a blanket over her knees and it saddened me. It shouldn't sadden me because she wasn't sad and neither was I in that moment and yet some memories you don't want to find. Somehow I felt cross with this picture of my granny as an old lady, she had never felt like an old lady to me. Not really. She was ninety years old when she died and in the visits that I made to her in that last year of her life, when she would share with me subtle yet vulnerable feelings about her memory betraying her or about her time being up, I would tease her and make her laugh by saying outrageous things, things that she thought were outrageous anyway and her mood would immediately lift. I can hear her laugh even now and even when she seemed weaker than she had ever been before, she was still able to be herself, to be the active and independent woman she had always been and always had to be. She was still my granny, she was still my magic tonic. The same magic tonic that I believe cushioned and held my grief when I lost my father as a girl, the tonic that without words managed to soothe a deep loss and managed to make my world still feel filled with light.  She was pure magic. 

She was the first person I thought of on March 8th, International Women's Day. It seemed perfectly fitting that I should find myself walking around the park by granny's former home, talking about how her life has shaped mine, with my mother alongside, the second person that I thought of on International Women's Day. My maternal grandmother and my mother, powerful forces, powerful examples for which I am so very grateful. Their stories and voices, their courage and their education have served me well and will continue to do so forevermore. I am never more proud than when I hear my children utter the words of stories and memories passed down from these great women and I am prouder still when those boys of mine claim these words and memories as theirs, words and memories steeped in the heritage and identity of these women that raised them and will raise them I hope, forevermore.