Reunions. What are they good for?

   

Time is doing weird things right now. Maybe prompted by returning to Newcastle 30 years after graduation. It was awesome to see the city again and to be with people who I shared some ridiculously seminal years with. 1996 doesn’t feel 30 years ago, and at the same time when I see a photo of myself from those years, short hair, clothes which I can’t remember wearing, a happy anxious probably hungover moment caught on film, I feel a long way from that girl.

 

I wonder, if I was in 1996 now, could I even have vaguely imagined that I’d be back in my childhood village, living in a crumbling 400-year-old-house, with a dog that eats shit like I eat chocolate, a husband who’s the village cricket team captain and children which I noisily pushed out of my own body in the Hackney hospital famous for treating knife-wounds. I didn’t know, in 1996, that 6 years later we’d be showing my father-in-law the first scan of my pregnancy before anyone else because we were worried about his health.

 

In 1996 I didn’t give much thought to the future. 

And in 2026 I try not to think about it too much either.

 

And after graduating, I also wouldn’t have been able to predict that 3 years later I’d be walking down the aisle to marry a boy that I’d met only 3 years earlier.

 

That 6 years after graduating I’d have my first baby and own a house in Harringay. In 1996 I didn’t even know Harringay existed and then it became my home for 10 amazing years.

 

And as I sit here in my 400-year-old cobwebby kitchen thinking about time-warps I recognise that I am about the same age that my parents were when they watched me get married, and that in 23 years time, the age that Mol is now, I will be the same age (roughly) that my parents are now, in their dotage. I say parents. Parent.

 

23 years.

 

And thinking about how long it took those 23 years to unroll is unnerving, veering on uncomfortable because it’s been packed full of great things but has gone at the speed of a juggernaut with no breaks. Mols first birthday party – drunken with pizza and no actual baby present as it took place after bed-time. Liz turning 5 with a lady-bird cake. And then suddenly birthdays are in nightclubs for 50% of the household, and the other 50% celebrate with a long walk and maybe a steak for supper.

 

In 23 years time I will be 74.

When mum was 74 we entered a 2 year pandemic and were locked into our houses, wondering if any of our friends might die from Covid.

How fast will the next 23 years go?

When Granny (my dad’s mum) was 74 she had been a widow for 20 years. Granny, who never failed to turn up to my parents house without a gift – home-made biscuits, a quiche, some green-tomato chutney (I still have her handwritten recipe); a pair of my dads socks she’d darned. I’d hear her chorkle (for that is how she laughed) and maybe we’d tickle each others arms while we talked about school or a fishing trip she was about to go on ("I need to tie some new flies..."). I only ever saw Granny in a tweed skirt. A widow at 54 and never married again. She died in her mid-90s when I was 29 and had a 1-year-old baby.

 

Kiki is going to be 10 (human years) 70 (dog years) in April. I was 42 and Mol was 13 and Liz was 9 when she joined our household as a large-pawed puppy. And now, possibly a little like me, she is past the middle-age line in the sand and moving into another life-chapter. She still eats shit and I still eat chocolate.

What am I trying to say? It’s complicated, but essentially this: if you go to a reunion be prepared for some extremely wonderful heartfelt rebonding with people you love and then a massive dollop of time-warpy-head-whackery and warn your dog when you get home that she needs to look you in the eye and tell you to calm the fuck down.

 

 

Best keep it to myself

  

I was at training on the weekend, learning about understanding and preventing vicarious trauma. It was interesting. But there’s something about having a group of therapists in a room together that could be described as unsettling. By-the-way, the collective noun for a group of therapists is “a worry of…” apparently. Although AI may be playing a little joke on me.

 

There are so many earnest people in the world, and therapists might be near the top the list of earnest-ness; when you are learning about somewhat difficult topics I wonder if what is also needed, running alongside the grizzly truth of how horrid people can be to each other, is a smatter of humour. In these therapy training courses there is much chin-rubbing on a tilted head, the low hum of "hmm-ing", moments of weighty reflection, (unfortunate moments of audible stomach grumbling), and many voices politely trying to have their profound thoughts about their work heard by all.

 

Somehow there is little room for wit on these training courses. And I know – it is because we are talking about Very Serious Things. But when a rather short man in his mid-60s, wearing CND-emblazoned DM-boots topped off with a purple paisley shirt is delivering the hard-hitting content it’s quite testing (especially from the front row because you forgot your glasses) to take everything Extremely Seriously.

 

His DMs squeaked on the hard village hall flooring and the shirt dazzled the eyes with excessive swirling patterns. I am not one to not take these topics seriously, trauma is a hugely interruptive and daunting thing to live with, let alone talk about openly. In this line of work we therapists need to be careful that we don’t end up inhabiting something dreadful that has actually happened to someone else. This is big stuff and cannot be taken flippantly, a person is relying on us to support them with this toughest of material, and the training helped remind me how best to manage with it.

BUT.

Come on therapist colleagues. Please. Just a little loosening of the tight-grip-of-This-Is-Serious.

 

At the start of the training Mr Paisley invited us (we’re always being invited… in hindsight I should maybe have politely declined…) to meditate.

 

We sat there eyes closed, earnestly ‘clearing our minds’ and ‘listening to our breath’ and ‘connecting with the calm beneath the storm’ etc etc and when Mr Paisley said ‘now watch your breath come in and out of your lungs and let your mind be free of … ‘ (something remarkable, I can’t remember what) – when he said the word ‘lungs’ I automatically went into a visual of the recent Silent Witness I’d seen, where Emilia Fox was intently dissecting the lung of a murder victim.

 

And I really got into this replay as it was quite a realistic lung and I remember thinking at the time I wonder if this is fake or some animals lung? Which animal? And then somehow I got to going back in time and thinking about when my dad was in hospital in 1997 after a mega grim operation (called the Whipple Procedure where much of your guts are removed) and when I went to visit him he was in such a terrible state with drips and needles galore and his mouth covered in blood because he kept coughing up gross things from inside… it was deeply disturbing. And then that made my thoughts wiggle (you know how dots join in a funny way in your head, leading you willy-nilly from one place to another) to a conversation I’d had with a friend recently where I’d admitted I not-infrequently imagine the sorts of places you might accidently find a dead body.

 

Oops! I was meant to be clearing my mind and grounding! Not replaying a cheap horror-movie. Mr Paisley invited us to open our eyes and I saw a squirrel zipping up an oak tree that was in the carpark outside the window. Which felt quite normal.

 

Mr Paisley then invited us to talk about our meditation and what nice things we’d encountered.

 

I wasn’t sure that sharing my minds contents at that point would’ve sparked a laugh in the crowd of Earnest Therapists (they may have called 999 and invoked the mental health act 1983), so instead in my gnarly head I laughed like a hyena, while a very clever therapist spent 5 minutes telling us all how marvellously empty her head had been and what a grounding experience the meditation was, thank you so much Mr Paisley.

 

Sliced lung anyone?