October 20, 2013 by judyfairbairns

Island Blog 106 A Timely Light

First of all I want to say thank you to everyone who comments on my blogs. Your responses to my own thoughts, thrown out into the world, come back to me like a soft warm morning full of birdsong. I write as I feel, looking not for a Well Done, but to touch on another’s life, to connect a couple of dots perhaps, to feel I am not alone, not physically, but in my innermost self, that woman I am stuck with, as she is, with me.

It makes me consider these two women – the visible one and Her Indoors, and the oftentimes mismatch between the two of us.

In the early hours before dawn, I ask myself big questions, such as who are you? and what do you want of this life? and why do we get in the way of each other? and why is it we aren’t perfectly aligned in our thinking? I know it may be a tad late to be addressing these major issues, but I seem to be doing it now and, besides, time is an illusion, whatever that means.

When I meet someone, I observe her intently. I learn much about her from how she says what she says, her body language, her choice of dress, the pitch and volume of their voice. I can hear clearly what the inner person is saying, however much talk comes out of her mouth. Is she really herself or is she fitting in to the shape either she, or others, require of her? Is her confidence real or built only on the sand of her expectations? What drives her? The need to be thought of as a ‘good’ woman, or the need to be true to herself, or a bit of both? Does she feel she has done her very best in this life, or is there an ache of regret and loss, and how well has she managed to conceal it under bright merriment and high rise cheese souffles?

I often feel there is a wasp in between me and someone of whom I have just asked a personal question. One like….. Are You Happy? Oh, I will get a list of all those things she may quickly pull into the room like the success of her children, the fact that the Co-op now sells mixed peel outside of the Christmas period, the arrival of the Redwings to colour up an autumn scene, but she won’t answer me direct. After all, what she feels about her life is not important at all. What is important is how she can make others happy, and this the point when I am in danger of falling out with Her Indoors, because I understand it completely and it is surely a goodly way to live, isn’t it?

No, it is not enough, and becomes glaringly clear when the children fly the coop, and she is without purpose, unless she has been ‘selfish’ during the busy years, and taken time to develop and grow her own interest, one that can support her to the end of her days.

When I look back on my own life, I see how fortunate I have been in my choices. I found a man who has never understood for one second the shrieking sharp-toothed Her Indoors, but has loved her anyway, even if he did have to walk about in full armour-plating for many years, which was wise of him considering my deadly aim.

I think we don’t need to seek acceptance, nor understanding for the inner person, except from ourselves. The big mistake is to bury her, or him, for this applies to both species, and then to blame an outsider for our own refusal to let light in.

Without light, nothing grows but fungus.

September 20, 2013 by judyfairbairns

Island Blog 102 – Memories

They are funny things, memories, but not necessarily in a ha-ha way. If anyone has ever asked a couple to describe their rememberings from any area or time of their shared life, you will have felt, as I have, that they definitely weren’t there together.

When my own mum recounts something from my childhood, she tells it in a way that assures me I was in another family at the time. I used to think she was right and that I was wrong – ever the swing from either to or – and that this ‘wrong’ in me was because I……..what? Wanted it to be different? possibly. Refused to acknowledge the truth? possibly. Had blanked out reality in favour of fairyland? possibly.

Nowadays I see it differently because I understand that she saw me through her own eyes, as a child inside her life and that wasn’t how I saw it at all. I looked with my own eyes, filtered each experience through my own emotions, needs, hopes and dreams, which were never hers. She has ideas for me that I didn’t like or understand or even want. So, the battle begins early in a life, the battle for a good hold on reality.

And who is to say what Reality is?

Even in a marriage, where two supposed adults, really still children themselves, encounter days and times and moments together, the looking will differ to varying degrees. Where one sees rain, the other sees the light inside a raindrop. One feels he cold, the other doesn’t, so was that house a cold, uncomfortable one or was it a wonderful home, or was it both at the same time? And, in the spinning out of the tale of of it, who will name it?

Then, there are the ears that hear that tale. Are they on one side or on the other according to who or what they personally relate to? If I am angry about something or someone, I will, however ‘good hearted’ I may be, paint them in certain colours, and colours stick, words stick, take root and grow.

It isn’t as simple as the glass half-full, half-empty cliche. Cliches are always too simple, sounding like goodly truths but lacking substance, texture, depth and context. They may help to elevate our thoughts and this is helpful indeed, but no living soul is ever one type of person or another. To get from black to white and back again, we must allow and embrace a thousand shades of grey, and it is inside those greys we mostly live out our days.

So, now, as an old woman (I love being an old woman, choosing, as I do, the picture of old age as a cumulation of experience and wisdom and of letting go) I can hear a story re-spoken and learn, from it’s presentation, more about the person speaking it out than I ever do about the ‘facts’. I even hear my own voice doing the telling and notice where I put the emphasis, what colours I choose, what body language I employ, what tone. And it often smiles me a lot.

On days when I only see the rain, there is a moan and a whine in any telling out. The simple question How are You? can see me grabbing someone’s hand and leading them into a miserable dark wet cavern littered with the old bones of all the women I hoped to become and allowed to die without a voice. On days when I am energetic enough to slip between the raindrops, pausing to catch the warmth of their reflected light, I can swirl us both into the sky along with the fairies and the angels and actually feel critical of their need to tell me about the bunions on their big toes.

Same circumstances. Exactly the same circumstances. The days are the same, the tasks the same, the view the same, and yet everything is different.

So, although we are all within the parameters of this day Friday September 20th, and even if we spend a part of it together, we will tell very stories about it’s 24 hour span.

Which of us is ‘right’ I wonder?

August 15, 2013 by judyfairbairns

Island Blog 93 – Tapselteerie Dreams

Last night was an awfully big adventure. Sometimes nights are like that. Short on sleep and long on dreams; dreams that skitter away in the process of waking, so quick as to leave me with the odd snapshot, and a depth of emotion I can’t necessarily fix into a shape.

Whenever I dream there are a couple of venues that consistently provide the backdrop for the drama. One, oddly, is a little corner flat in Glasgow, where I only lived for a short while after Tapselteerie and before moving back to the island. Those dreams are often good ones and I walk through the park or sip coffee in a busy café and there are no obvious lurkings of menace in any shadows.

The other and main venue is Tapselteerie, I know it is, although the stones and layout of it are often wildly wrong. For example, we had a roof over our heads there and walls and floors, the usual household structure, but in dreams, they are often shaky if not completely absent. When I am inside one of these dreams I am always looking for my children, which, for those of you who have read Island Wife, will not be a surprise at all. The stones are grey and cold, the plaster walls missing, and there is often sky overhead instead of a white ceiling.

In these dreams I always have to fly to save them, my children. I always know that I can fly, but each time I must find the courage to do it again. I have sat myself down to think deeper on that search for courage, once the morning comes and strong black coffee brings me in to land. Is it courage to take on the ‘saving’, I ask myself, or is the courage to fly again? And, if I know, as I do, that I can fly, why would I need courage? After all, I don’t need to think twice about walking, running, skipping, now do I?

And I find no answer to that.

One dream took me into the empty ruins of the place, cold it was and abandoned, the grey stone bared, the layout changed beyond my recognition, and yet I knew where I was. I was alone. The crunch of fallen debris under my bare feet echoed around me and I could feel my heart beating fast, hear my quick breathing. Looking up, I could see my children way up high, higher than Tapselteerie high, flattened against the walls, no ground for their feet. Each one was hooked to the wall by their clothing, and they just hung there, making no sound. Much younger and smaller than they are now, they looked like friends of the Artful Dodger, all raggedy and torn and grubby. There were no stairs, no structure, however skeletal, there to allow me to climb. There was only one way up.

I had to fly.

The resistance to just taking off, knowing I could, surprises me every time. It seems, in my remembering, to take a lot of wasted time, dithering about in the ruins of a broken house, when I could be up there gathering children off hooks. But I always do it.

Then, suddenly, I take a deep breath and lift and the feeling it wonderful, the process effortless.

Once, I met Shrattle (Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake), or his lookalike half way up, but he was balanced on a spindly ledge and quite without wings, so no threat to any of us. I lifted each child, light as a feather, off their pegs and into the sky, waking with that glorious light-hearted feeling that always follows flight.

Last night is already leaving me, the memories of the dream, but I do remember one thing. This time it was in colour. Never before has Tapselteerie shown herself in colour, and yet she had bucket loads of it. She gave me walls and ceilings and laughter and spiders and bats in the cellar. If I came down all those stairs, during a sleepless night to make tea, I had to remember to make light, because in the dark I would have ploughed into the huge migration of slugs from somewhere (I never knew where) to the wine cellar. Sometimes a dozen deep and many feet long, the army flowed in silence to wherever they were going. It was a marvel to behold and much less of one to land in the middle of it in bare feet. People said salt will kill them. We said, why would we kill them? We lived with a good number of wild creatures and managed to do so, in the main, without disasters, although the floor in the back hall always needed a wash of a morning.

Dreams I know have symbolism. Mine are often a chorus of many influences. My past, my fears, the book I’m reading, the present circumstances, the last thing I watched on television. Add to that something on my mind, a new truth learned and understood, a forthcoming event and so on. But whatever the graphics, however bizarre and unbelievable the storyline, the emotions of it linger longest, so, to a small degree I can understand what my imagination played out for me and why.

Tapselteerie looked just fine in colour. It may be 20 plus years since I moved inside her walls, heard her song and moved to her rhythm, but she is alive and well and with her own place in my heart.

May 21, 2013 by judyfairbairns

Island Blog 59 – Dolphins

Never let it be said that journeying is for the young. I never journeyed so much in my life as I am these days and all because I wrote down my life and Two Roads Published it. It is not just the trip tomorrow down to Glasgow for an interview with Jane Garvey in the BBC Studios – Woman’s Hour ‘Celebrating Extraordinary Women’ (oo-er) May 27^th 10 am; it’s not just the trip the following week for an interview with Sally Magnusson, a sort of Desert Island Discs for Radio Scotland on June 2^nd, called Sunday Morning; it’s the journey my mind is taking, and my body, both of which, to be honest, have obviously been resting for quite some time.

The trouble with growing older is that we ‘allow’ ourselves to step out of the slipstream. And everyone around us allows it too. When something or someone requires us to step back in, we begin, at first, to spin, understandably, having not had so much exercise for years. We resist and fall back onto the verge, wheezing and flapping our hands in the air, laugh, if we have the breath and say something like…….oh I’ll just wait here for you and admire the view…….!

Not an option for me.

So how does a woman, like me, part way between young and old (not saying which part) find her way back into the slipstream, the rush and tumble of life, a life where people and things become faint memories overnight?

Colour. Attitude. Confidence. Letting go.

I remember learning once this wisdom. ‘Fake it till you make it.’ and I instantly liked that way of turning life on its head. I realised that just because I might feel frightened, or unsure or too young or too old and wheezy, I could, if I so chose, act a part. Now, you will know, if you have read my book, Island Wife, that acting a part was something I did often as each challenge rose up before me, like a Rachel Whiteread sculpture, blocking all exits. It requires not my own strength, not my own experience, even, but simply a willingness to let go, and to find quiet moments in which to sharpen my sword/teeth/wits as preparation for whatever comes next.

I couldn’t cook until hungry guests arrived expecting dinner. I had no maternal instincts until I gave birth. I knew not the rules of engagement, nor of wifedom until they took over my life and woke me each morning with a to-do list. I had no idea when I wrote down my life that so many others would want to tell me how my story sang out to their own, thus creating a new harmony, one that cannot be contained or filed away, for it has taken wings and will make a new journey, all of its own into new skies and over uncharted lands.

Maybe, just by refusing to wheeze and flap and admire the view, I have become the pioneer I always secretly hoped I might be.

And dolphins often play in a slipstream.

January 28, 2013 by judyfairbairns

Island Blog 20 – On Relations and Ships

I’ve been thinking about relationships recently, about the width and length and depth of them, about their shape and colour. They are randomly dotted throughout our lives like wild poppies in a cornfield; bright, nourishing, individual and personal; at work, at home, at school, in our village street and every relationship unique as a snow flake. Relationships matter from the moment we rise until the moment we lay us down to sleep at night, and, without them, or with destructive ones, we humans falter and weaken in spirit and confidence. We wander as lost souls in what looks like a cold and unfriendly world.

Which it isn’t.

As a child I don’t worry about the dynamics of any of my relationships for the language is not yet grown in me,either to explain or understand. I just am. I run and play my way through my days, trusting (although I don’t even know that word yet) that I will be dressed and fed and loved and cared for. As I move into the angst-ridden and angry teenage years, I begin to question, I begin to understand, but I have not yet learned how to communicate, other than with my peers in ways that cause my elders considerable puzzlement. If I am a boy, I grunt in varying keys and laugh in staccato bursts, often rather unsure of the joke. And that’s about all I can say about boys, not being one myself.

If I am a girl I learn to talk a lot and giggle infuriatingly every time anyone opens their mouth. I have a little more awareness of the world I have arrived in, but fight a daily battle with myself over the size of my bottom or the spread of my toes, or the fact that my girlfriend is allowed to turn the tv on without having to make a request in writing, giving due notice.

I am full of envy of pretty much everyone else in my group and I run the very real risk of turning green. If I am lucky enough to have a mother who remembers her own uncomfortable struggle with hormones, and who can watch me through compassionate eyes, I am one of the lucky ones. If, on the other hand, my mother never concerned herself much with the discomforts of teenage life, then my relationship with her will be a very different one, defining, to some degree, all future ones. I seek understanding and I don’t get it, and so I turn away into my lonely self or out to my peer group to forge friendships that may not be healthy ones.

Then I grow up (in theory) and everyone thinks I’m an adult because I now look like one, but my outward appearance belies the inner truth. I am as insecure as I was in sentient childhood, but I must keep it a secret, or I might appear to be too small for my skin.

If my primary relationship is all the right colours and the perfect shape, I find I can do anything, go anywhere, flow naturally, be myself, but relationships, any of them, need both parties to be aware and interested in the collective result. Otherwise, we are just tumble-weeds in the desert, at the mercy of every capricious wind.

I like to divide up the word. Relation and Ship.

One sounds grounded, one wild and free and fizzing with adventure.

Too caught up in worldly cares and I grow brown and dull.

Too wild and colourful and I may find myself locked up. I need to be the link between the two and hold on tight.

What I want is a ladder to the moon.

January 17, 2013 by judyfairbairns

Island Blog 11 – Speed it up

Today despite the fabulous blue cold outside, I felt like a big fat lump. I’m none of those things, but I can still feel each one of them. It’s like gravity is pointing her finger at me and lowering everything a tone or two. I couldn’t find the right key to sing out my day, although I did, of course, make the effort. This lunchtime, after coffee and a small, very small, slice of lemon torte, ho hum, my gorgeous daughter-in-law and I popped into the hairdresser next door. I am ‘going’ grey which is pants in my opinion. Not the grey bit, but the ‘going’ bit. Why does everything take so long??

So, let’s pump up the pace and get this dinky little hair stylist to make it happen, to speed up the ageing process, at least, on my head. I sat there, trying to read the magazine text, but having left my specs at home, I was only able to see the models and you can imagine what that did for the ‘big fat lump’ syndrome. Every time I glanced up at ‘Ageing Mirror Face’ my head was just a little blu-er, but, you know, I didn’t care. You know that place where you are too sorry for yourself to care what happens next, as long as it isn’t more of what came before? Well, I was there.

An hour later, after an ash tone over completely bleached hair, I am looking like a silver star. As I walk back home, through the blue cold, turning gently and quietly to darkness, there is a bounce in my step and I smile to myself.

How extraordinary is this ordinary day!