Note the arms crossed, the hunch of shoulders, a dress she didn’t want to wear. The picture is too blurred to give detail to her expression, but I remember. I hope my sister doesn’t mind me posting this, I shall ask her when it isn’t four in the morning, but her birthday parties were worse than mine - she had more of them, our mother learnt by the time it was my turn that it wasn’t worth the horror - and then I found this photograph. Note the tilt of our mother’s hand and chin, her arm tense, I can hear her exactly whoa whoa now just sit we’re going to play I need you to listen. A Very Organised Fun. And there’s more. Because according to our mother’s politics we went to the local state primary school, a principle I applaud as a voting adult but which meant none of that to us aged five and nine. At the local state primary we were the only ones who lived in a house, everyone else lived in the flats across the road which meant birthday parties were Why do you live in a museum? And neither of us had an answer to that. And we didn’t really have any friends, maybe the odd one, but not enough for pass the parcel so our mother would insist the whole class came including the ones who hated us. Also, god love our mother, but she wasn’t fun. She had other skills, she could bake bread with a hole in it and she filled me with feminist zeal but parties weren’t her thing. She wanted them done with, they panicked her, she invented hunt the banana which should have been funny and noticed inappropriate and renamed and wasn’t. Also, given that we lived in what looked like a museum, why was the prize a piece of old fruit which it often was for pass the parcel too. Oh god, the thundering feet, the screams of laughter, the doors opened that shouldn’t have been, the bedrooms looked in, tongues stuck out and fingers up, our secrets trampled, the shame of being seen. Note the girl in the dungaree skirt making a run for it, the boy in the jumper dreaming of his train set. When my children were small I imagined for a minute that I had somehow to do the same, make some arbitrary stab at popularity, a normality that we didn’t agree on. And then I remembered how no one enjoys them, how stress seeps up from youngest to eldest and down again. How all children want is to feel loved.
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Gosh - that tilt of the hand!
That's it. To feel loved. Thats what they'll remember.