In spite of repeated requests from my nearest and dearest, I had been singing again as I made the coffee. Music has always been part of my life, even though, in spite of writing a number of songs, I can only enjoy it, not make it. It was probably some odd combination of notes that triggered the memory… and many of the notes that issue from my throat are undoubtedly odd. I found myself singing ‘Men of Harlech’, a song I have probably not sung for over fifty years, yet somehow, I could remember the words; lyrics I had learned before I had any concept of what they really meant.
Even given my extreme youth, my grandfather had explained, in terms I could understand, about the historical siege of Harlech in the fifteenth century. As I thought back to that moment, I started remembering in more and more detail. I could see the ebony and ivory keys of his piano, the worn red velvet of the seat that lifted up and in which he stored his sheet music. The Windsor chair to the right of the piano in the front parlour, next to the pale, marbled tiles of the Deco fireplace. On the mantel, an old photo of me in a first tutu and above it, one of the bronze masks my grandfather had made. In the alcoves there were portraits he had painted of my mother and myself… but painting was never his forte. He was a sculptor by gift, an electrical engineer by trade and an artist at heart.
I remember the room in vivid detail, including the carved dragon-box on the windowsill, my easel and chalks by the octagonal oak table he had made for me, my toy box with his home-made electrical toys and the reel-to-reel tape recorder on which my earliest voice was already stored… and already a part of my history.
More clearly than anything else though, I remember the already-fading songbooks. Grandad would play and I would read and sing the words, learning how to memorise as I read at his side. The book with Men of Harlech in it had other traditional songs, like Bladon Races, Widdicombe Fair, Scarborough Fair and John Peel. I learned about the old songs, their stories and the land which had brought them to birth. It never felt like learning, only a satisfying of the insatiable curiosity of childhood.
The other song-books I loved had belonged to my mother as a girl. There was the Snow White one… I remember its cover and every illustration. My mother had painted these characters on my nursery wall when I was tiny, far away in the married quarters of my father’s regiment. I loved too the Pinocchio songbook, both of them published by Chapell, both with the same, soft illustrations, the magic of a story and the songs to sing as my grandfather played.
As I sat with my son drinking coffee this morning, he pulled me from my rememberings, asking what was going through my mind. I started talking about the songbooks, following the pictures in my mind, reiterating how Disney’s Snow White has to be one of the greatest motion pictures of all time, for both its artistry and innovation. A true work of art. ‘Only’ a quarter of a million frames went into the film… just a fraction of the two million cells that were painted by the artists during production. That is a huge feat to tell just one small part of a fictional life story!
Then I was stopped in my tracks as a sudden thought occurred to me. My sons too see only a fraction of the life I have ‘painted’.
I had been describing these things as if they were familiar to us both, yet he barely remembers his great-grandfather. He probably doesn’t remember the house at all, certainly none of the details so alive in my own memory. And there is a reason for that… he did not exist in the world at the time I was recalling. I had lived for a quarter of a century before his birth.
That’s fairly obvious on the surface, but it was not the surface thought that had really got me thinking. Even though, in the manner of all small boys and young men, much of his life has been lived as far out of my sight as possible, I have always been a part of his world. Since his birth, I have been a mother… first maman in France, then Mam in the north and Mum (amongst other, less appropriate, epithets) in the south. Regardless of what he and his brother have called me, motherhood has been a defining role and a major part of my life. I have defined myself as a mother.
I am in a privileged position with my son. Few parents get to spend as much time as I do talking across so many subjects with their children, when those children are grown and themselves (technically) mature adults. Because of the unique circumstances of our lives, Nick and I can spend hours talking every day and have grown to know each other better than many. Over the last few months, as I have shared incidents from my past and the adventures of youth, his face has taken on a curious expression, as if seeing me for the first time. “I really don’t know you at all,” “who are you?” and “what have you done with my mother?” have been a repeating chorus.
He is right. There is a whole chunk of my life during which he was no more than a future possibility. A whole quarter of a century when I was not his mother, when he was not part of my life. Yet I still largely define myself by the maternal role. At other times, I have defined myself as daughter, wife, friend, colleague…and a host of other roles. Some of them have been fleeting, some deep. Yet first and foremost, only one of my ‘roles’ will last a whole lifetime… the one in which I am no more and no less than just me.
There are memories buried so deep they may never again surface, either for me or to be shared, yet they have been, all of them, part of the journey that made me who I have become and will become as I move through this life. There are parts of my inner life, my thoughts and dreams, that no-one will ever know… not even me if memory is the only pathway to access them. They too are part of the journey to now.
It came as a shock to realise how neatly I had put myself in a box of my own making; a box which, though beautiful, is too small to hold the whole of any life. I wonder how many of us do the same? And I wonder how much of the richness of our own lives we may miss by defining ourselves by any role, no matter how tender, how important or how wonderful it may be. We are the product of every moment… an unfinished work of art that will take a lifetime to create. And, like any other work of art, maybe we need to allow ourselves to step back from the details and see ourselves whole to begin to appreciate the artistry of Life.
Sue Vincent's Daily Echo 
Reblogged this on O LADO ESCURO DA LUA.
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It is through our past that we are able to appreciate our present and plan for the future. I enjoyed that very much!
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Thank you. Yes, there is a single thread running through our lives and we forget how closely one end is joined to the other.
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Sue, it is very interesting when your adult children allow us out of our boxes and look at us and really wonder about us. As I get older, I wish it would happen more.
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I’m getting a lot of it at the moment, though I believe my sons still think some kind of immaculate conception was involved in their creation 😉
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Reblogged this on Chris The Story Reading Ape's Blog and commented:
For Parents and Offspring Everywhere – Sieze and cherish moments together…
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Thanks, Chris.
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My pleasure Sue, you’re fortunate to be doing this with your kids 😃❤
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I know… I wonder how many get this kind of chance? xx
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You are so right. Our children only know us in our now and our role as mother, they don’t know our past and the experiences that define us as people.
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No they don’t, and most never will. It is odd though how we move into that place where their knowledge of us becomes our vision of ourselves.
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We are as you say so much bigger than the sum of ourselves.. yet we all fail to see this. Like life we are a circle.
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More of a spiral, perhaps… continually growing upwards 🙂
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That’s it Sue a perfect description <3!!
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🙂 ❤
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Reblogged this on The Feed By Our Pantheons Way.
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I wrote a poem about my surprise the year the loch froze and my mother put on a pair of borrowed ice skates and glided away. Many years later I saw the same surprise on my son’s face when at a summer fair. He’d been trying to master walking on stilts but couldn’t do it. I took the stilts and strode off on them. He had not expected his mum could do something like that! Nor I that my mum could ice skate.
And think of all the years our grandparents lived before our parents’ birth – a huge chunk of time in which we couldn’t ever have known them. I remember my own grandfathers but my son never knew them and when I and my generation of cousins die there will be no one to remember them anymore. I tell my son stories as my dad told me of generations gone before. I hope he will do the same one day.
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Nick’s face when I put the rollerblades on… yes, there are those delightful moments when they realise we too were once young and did ALL those things they never think about. 😀
I was so lucky…I knew most of my great-grandparents and sat listening to their stories of the Victorian and Edwardian eras of their own youth. It was another world. I was very young for most of the time I knew them…though my sons vaguely recall their ‘very old grandma’, their great-great-grandmother. I wish now that their tales had been recorded in some way.
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II loved this post, Sue. We are so much more than just one role or another. We continue to evolve and develop as the years pass, adding many more stitches to that already rich tapestry.:-)
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We do, but we often seem to forget that 🙂
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Very insightful, Sue. You make me think of my childhood and younger self. There are some memories I’d rather forget but some are treasured times my own children don’t know about and probably couldn’t fathom if they did.
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We lived in a different world when we were yonger, one that would be unfamiliar to our own children…it feels rather odd sometimes.
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What a wonderful post, Sue. Fascinating to ponder on how our roles and our relationships change as the years go by.
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Thanks, Wendy, they do… and yet there always seems to be one dominant role by which we see ourselves at any given time.
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What a great post full of insight and poetry. I really enjoyed it as reading it brought back so many of my own memories…. it was like a key unlocking a treasure box. Thanks
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Thanks, Paul. There is a whole lifetime ofmemories for all of us, yet for most of them, it does take something to spark them again 🙂
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I cannot tell you how much I enjoyed reading (and thinking about) this post. TY!
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Thank you, Rae 🙂
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I’m still waiting for my sons’ curiosity to arise – lol! It is amazing how little we know about the people closest to us, and sometimes I wonder if one can ever really know another? The mind is a private chamber to which no one is privy, unless a person cares to share it. In my experience, the men in my life are fairly mute, leaving me guessing and filling in the blanks. And forget the questions about who I am!
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I doubt if we even fully know ourselves most of the time, Eliza, so it isn’t to be wondered at that others do not know us. We meet, learn to work with a person in whatever role, and assume we know them because we know that part of them that interacts with us…it is iceberg territory 🙂
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‘iceberg territory’…love it!
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😀
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Reblogged this on Stuart France.
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