“I regret that we didn’t have more children after you and Ellie. After Ellie died… it was difficult enough to handle you. And dear god you were a lot to handle sometimes. Now? I wish we had another one, but it’s too late now, isn’t it?”
My mother’s fortyfifth birthday is in four months time, and by that time she will be back in Sweden in her new job. She rang yesterday to tell me that everything had been sorted. All the contracts had been signed, and she had given notice on her house up in the village near Coventry. In January she leaves that job, then she spends a few weeks idle and packing, and then she goes back to Sweden.
In the middle of that, she’s going to become a forty-five year old woman, and when she mentioned it in passing, she said what she said, and I don’t know what to think about it. In a way I’m so used to being an only child, even if I’m really not. And Ellie does keep popping out of my memories from time to time. Like she’s a ghost that is real, like she’s still there somehow and affect my life.
Forty-five is nothing, of course, just like nineteen is nothing. There’s such an age gap between my uncle and aunt and mother. She was just a little girl when they started to migrate around England after Thatcher’s razing of the North. Auntie and my uncle were older. Uncle was old enough to stay behind when they moved south, and then eventually he moved north to Scotland. Auntie was a teenager by then, but not old enough to do like uncle.
Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like if we had stayed up there. I would have been a proper Yorkshireman. Of course, I wouldn’t have existed at all because mum had to go down to the south to go to university, and then meet my dad in London all those years ago.
Isn’t it strange how coincidences become strands. Doing something becomes a ripple that carry through several lives, several generations. Like, how many of Europe’s present population would even be alive hadn’t there been the two world wars in the last century? How would things have been different if the old monarchies and empires hadn’t been smashed up by the weight of history?
And what would have happened had my grandfather refused to wander around, got on his bike as Norman Tebbit put it, to move south to look for a job? Maybe then my mother would not still grieve for a lost girl, and be a Yorkshire woman with a big family and no knowledge of me and Ellie and dad at all, because we would never have happened.
Picking at threads like that is fun, isn’t it? Coincidences and chance meetings and little things reverberate through generations, and we don’t even think about it. And what ripples will I make? What ripples have I made? What if I had never got the idea to move here? Would Mark be with someone else? Would I have someone? Would Mark be happy? Would I? Would I still be miserable and in the closet in Sweden?
One can never know, right?
Be careful with the little things. They can have big consequences.
Well for sure…
I sneezed four times this morning…. so stand by for January floods in Surrey…
What fascinates me more is ‘six degrees of separation’….. I travel and have always traveled a lot for my job. Time and again in unexpected places I meet people who know people who are aware of someone eventually mutual to both of us. Usually connected through work of course.
The best one was when I was in a very remote area of West Australia. I was loading an oil tanker from an automatic oil well. The oil well ran unmanned for most of the year until a level alarm in an attached storage tank would notify the operators there was now enough product to ship out. So, there I was with a group of people local to the area and got to chatting with a very nice girl there to assist with paperwork. When she found out that I am Scottish she told me of her recent amazing adventure to some small village in Scotland to visit this Aunty she had heard of in the family. As the story went along, I realised she had been in my village and had been living in a guest house just 150 meters away from my house. She thought I was joking with her until I drew a map of the village streets and could describe the people she had stayed with….
Now, that’s coincidence! For me to travel thousands of miles to the Australian remoteness and find another person who had been staying right beside me in Scotland a few months before.
It seems like coincidence, but there’s an explanation. Humans are tribal. We group ourselves using a combination of ethnic, cultural, financial (etc.) characteristics. In a globalized world, that means there are no borders (for the middle and upper classes.) This was already true for the elites all the way back to the 18th century.
Everyone who could afford to do so, vacationed in the same areas, travelled to the same places etc. Many of the people who did a grand tour, no matter where they were from, ended up meeting.
Think of it this way. I grew up mostly in South and North America, now I live in Spain and three of the families who have houses on my street are families I’ve known since childhood. Not the same people, but members of the same families.
The scariest part of this post is the realization that your mom is over a decade younger than me. #GrowingOldIsABitch
And nearly two decades younger than me :O.
See Colin when you become a full time writer you’ll have the old gay/queer audience in the palm of your metaphorical hand.
Three decades anyone? 🙂