When it mattered

(in response to a passage from A Shepherd’s Life by David Rebank)

It always matters, which is where the trouble starts. How the mayhem begins its unquiet riot in the back streets of my insomnia and hullabaloo. Always the same – does it count? The lanyard culture. Even now as Mum is dead and barely gone and Dad prepares to marry his new love and I am fifty years old and still I am waving my hand and saying ‘will this do’? Is this good enough? When I have a PhD will that be enough? The Booker Prize? Expectations are the bane of life but without them will we ever rise up out of the mud? I have tried, tried so hard to enact a volte face, to revert the damage of the past by praising the quiet despair or the openness or the small kindnesses delivered by my children to others. I knew when I was twenty that my peers mattered. Horizontal life was of more interest to me than the vertical life, yet here I am, as my mother dies, carrying her banner, then dropping it in disgust at my own feeble following, then carrying it again. On and on. Gravity pulls me into the slipstream of illustrious forebears, but as soon as I am in place, I swim to the side, climb out onto the bank and declare myself whole again. I walk along the bank. I walk and walk, planting stakes, but then I dive in again, drawn into the depths by the mermaid’s wish. Only last night a perfectly measured conversation with my elder sister about our father turned into a toddler’s lament, a wail of despair. And afterwards I was ashamed. What is the purpose I wonder of this debilitating drive to seek approval? Is it so that we belong and are not rejected? Not evicted from the tribe? Left to the lions? Funny, last week I wrote about the lure of the family story. It must be relevant now. Transition time – moving on up.

I'm immediately thinking of my sister who was there when it mattered. Recently I had a biopsy which involved having a general anesthetic, and my sister was there before and after. The hospital insisted that the patient would have someone to drive them home and, to emphasize the point, the staff nurse said imagine if you attempt to go home by public transport and you vomit in the bus; all that would happen it that you would be thrown off the bus and then charged for clearing up the mess. I found the picture she brought up quite amusing but she made the point.

I know there are lots of examples in my life when someone was there when it mattered, but this one involving my sister is very recent.

I have always been there for myself, when it mattered. This strikes me hard, a gong resonating [resounding], surprising me. I would have always said, before now, that I had never been there for myself when it mattered. My reputation with myself has been one of the abandoner, unreliable, weak, fleer of the scene, leaving me to fend for myself. A balaclava-ed coward, legging it out of there as fast as I could, saving my own skin. So it’s a new turn of events, a new thought, new conception, of myself has snuck in to my mind. When did it slip in? In the middle of the night whilst I was sleeping, under cover of dark, tiptoeing stealthily, or on a summer’s day, buzzing with sunshine, with the haze of life, slipping in between the clatter of dishes and the chatter of tea? I don’t know when and where. And when doesn’t matter, in this case. It’s the thought itself, the new sense of myself. Laid down over time, with every moment of questioning, of going over and over in my mind what had happened, every new voice being added, new information about how we survive, our animal selves, our strategies and limitations. It’s a composite, sediment solidified. Each speck of sand floating insignificantly it seemed, settling gently; but en masse and with the weight [wait?] of time compacted into something solid, a bedrock, a place on which I can stand, firmly, securely. A place from which I can hold myself up, and look around and see what else matters. Knowing I matter. I am someone who when it mattered did what I needed to do to survive and even when I felt I hadn’t, even when survival meant detaching myself from myself, it mattered that I wasn’t together, it mattered to find myself again, to bring myself back to a sense of wholeness. When it mattered. Here and now. And always. It has always matted to me, to find myself again, to reclaim my birth-right of a solid place to stand, a secure base.