But she didn’t...and then she did

When you are a story teller and your parents die part of your grieving process is to tell stories.
You may have guessed that writing helps me sort my brain out. After Mum died my brain actually broke and writing wasn’t going to fix it. EMDR did that but even though I now want my blog to be about things other than my parents and death that still seems to be where my brain is, so I guess I still have the normal fixing to do.

  When my Dad was still alive I had started to write down a complicated family story. Because it’s complex, it’s long and it takes time to get right. I have written and rewritten it a million times, never quite happy with what it’s saying. Each time I wrote something, I would doubt the truth of it and go and check with my parents. Now that they aren’t here, the story has been freed. I don’t have to tell the truth. I can take the grain and twist it into something more and I’ll be honest, it’s doing my head in. I have a new character and she is relentless; constantly nagging at me to write down what she thinks.

A friend sent me a message, asking if I had written Joanna Cannon’s The Trouble with Goats and Sheep. I didn’t. I wish I had because it’s such a lovely book but I know what she means. The prose feels very me. I was telling the Long Suffering Husband about her text and I said, “It’s funny really because when I was reading it I kept thinking, ‘I could have written this.’l
Then a little voice in the back of my head said, “But you didn’t.”
And it’s true. I didn’t. I think I’m too lazy to get any of my writing published, so I probably never will and that’s fine.

It made me think of a story about my Mum I want to tell you. (I think it’s true but I can’t check so there is at least a grain in there).

My mum was quiet. You could easily miss her brilliance and steely determination, blinded by the flashy lights of my Dad. She was quite happy not to go out very much but Dad was gregarious. He loved a party. He liked to host, which meant lots of work for Mum too but sometimes  I think she preferred that as she was in control of what happened in the evening. He wasn’t one of those men that just dropped things on her, though; they worked as a team.

 However, they did go out. Mum had a large circle of glamorous arty friends and belonged to a babysitting circle. Every woman in the circle was given a certain amount of those little white  cardboard tags with different coloured dots on. The dots represented different amounts of time. They paid each other with these tags for baby sitting services.

One of my mum’s arty friends was a woman called Patsy. My sister and I loved Patsy. We wanted to be her when we grew up. To us, she seemed both glamorous, rich and romantically tragic. Patsy ironed towels, jeans and her, oh so sexy, silk French knickers (“Oh, darling, they’re just so comfortable under trousers.”) She and Mum did their weekly shop together, the first rule of this shop being that first you stop for coffee and the second rule being that it takes all day and includes lunch. Her husband was a businessman and had a lot of wealthy contacts and so one evening Mum and Dad were invited to a ‘Tarts and Vicars’ party.

This type of party was, apparently common amongst posh people in the early Eighties but it was an entirely new phenomenon for my Mum and Dad who talked about it a lot afterwards. Dad had glittered his way through it, drinking, telling stories and being surprised at just how flirty all the women were. Mum found it slightly more overwhelming. I remember her describing the kitchen to me the next day.  It had marble worktops...MARBLE!....an island with a fridge for champagne.....Mum decided that she quite liked champagne..... and a long breakfast bar with stools that Mum had spent most of the evening sitting on talking to a woman named Su.....WITHOUT AN E!
Su had been discussing television. Mum had strong opinions on television: she liked it. When I was growing up Mary Whitehouse was in her heyday, warning that TV was going to ruin us all and that it would numb our brains and stop us reading. Mum held the opposite view. Su was a feminist and she and Mum agreed on a lot.
“You see, there are no good female role models on television,” Su drunkenly waved her champagne glass around.
Mum agreed that she would like to see more women being normal on the television.
"I mean, that sitcom that's on at the moment. It's rubbish.  I could have written that."
Mum looked at her and quietly said, "But you didn't."

About a year later, Patsy was in our kitchen when I got home from school, bubbling with excitement.
"And it's all your fault," she told my mum.  "I hope you are going to watch it."

We all sat down together to watch the new sitcom on Chanel Four.  Dream Stuffing, about two women, sharing a council flat in London.

"Sometimes you shouldn't," was all that Mum would say.