Down and Up Again

The positive mood has fluctuated over the past few days. Daughter #3 seems to have taken a nosedive again, and then pulled upwards. If only she had some decent female friends to confide in who could tell her that these feelings of alienation and 'not fitting in' are a regular - if unwanted - feature of the teenage years, being largely driven by hormone levels. Also of the peri-menopausal years, something I'm not going to divulge as it won't cheer her up any. It's unfortunate that as one member of the family is clambering onto the front end of the hormonal rocking horse, another is being bucked off the back end at the same time.
I've told her that life is pretty much hard work, but that it WILL get better and she WILL find her niche in the world, but I think she feels that it's so much hot air. On the one hand, she wants to hear comforting noises, but on the other, she's pretty disbelieving. I've tried to shortcircuit the tear-fests by briskly telling her to get up, get dressed, get some food and start doing something positive - anything positive - but my case isn't helped when she indulges in watching crap like 'My Mad Fat Diary' which dwells on mental and self-esteem issues. If you watched to much telly, you'd end up believing the world was a terrible dark place, with death and madness only a step away and you might as well wrap yourself up in a duvet and spend all day crying. But of course they all watch this sort of self-pitying victim stuff, so to not watch it is to be 'out of the loop', and 'out of the loop' is not what she wants to be.
Sadly, she seems to believe that the answer to her problems (or at least temporary relief) is for us to pay for her to go on trips, or to gigs, but I don't think she understands that we REALLY can't afford to do this. University is looming, and that is going to cost us BIG TIME when they're both there.
Fortunately the endless rain seems to have petered out. The sun is sort-of out at the moment and the river level is dropping rapidly, so some actual rowing is on the cards rather than the grim gym sessions, which everyone is p-r-e-t-t-y sick of by now. I coxed the older juniors this morning - the stream on the river is still pretty fast, so the coaches little lectures, given to a stationary crew, saw the quad drift back downriver some way before they got going again.
Leisure sculling outing tomorrow - hopefully. The better weather should see the squad numbers increase once again but, as  ever, those who haven't been down to the gym sessions will be unfit as well as lacking in technique and confidence. It'll take a few weeks at least
to get things going again, but by then the last of the Head of the River Races will be upon us. We'll be doing 'time only' rows, I think!

More of the same...

Another day dawns. The Husband is off to Manchester first thing and leaves me the car. This is both good and bad. It means I don't have to walk down to the boathouse for the junior training session later this afternoon, but it means I don't GET to walk down to the boathouse, which means I'm falling short on the load-bearing mileage thingy that I've got going to keep me fit.
It does mean. however, that I can give Daughter #3 a lift home after her double training session, which today is probably a good thing as she is most definitely feeling really down.
Poor girl. She tries so hard to be hard-working, conscientious, responsible and fit....and she does so well.
I am constantly staggered at her drive and commitment (and wonder where she gets it from!) but worry that she is taking on an awful lot onto her teenage shoulders. School work, rowing training, TWO paid jobs...enough!
There was a bit of a crisis this morning. A welling up of sadness and loneliness that spilled over as I hugged her and tried to comfort her. What prompted this? I ask myself....is it a hormonally driven fluctuation, the result of driving herself to try for perfection, a seasonal funk of gloomy days and not enough sunshine?
I've always said to her - and reiterated it again today - that our love for her is absolutely unconditional.
It's FAB if she does well, and we're really proud of what she achieves, but it has no bearing on our love for her. It's not conditional on anything she DOES, it's there because of who she IS. Our girl.
I feel for her so much. My teenage years weren't the happiest. My parents, as I have mentioned in the past,
were generationally conditioned in the post-war era to expect that children were largely there to fulfil their own often-frustrated lives and plans. They were supposed to dutifully toe the line, pursue post-university careers that would make the old folks glow with vicarious pride, and never, ever, do anything to bring opprobrium onto the neatly tended semi-detached respectability carefully nutured by restraint and making-do. I was not their ideal child. Sulky, rebellious, frustrated and desperate to be independent (although not financially - that never occurred to me) I made the most horrendous errors of judgement that effectively cocked up my late teens and twenties. But the errors of judgement were ALL MINE!
So what I want more than anything is to make sure she never feels that she has to do things to make us happy. I want her to be happy, for herself, and in herself. And at the moment, that doesn't seems to be happening.
The best I could offer - over and above a listening ear and comforting noises - is that she is essentially lonely, because there isn't anyone of her acquaintance who in any way measures up to her in terms of excellence. She is in a different league, but will find her soul companions as she progresses in life and goes to university.
Unlike some teenaged girls I know, I would trust her to govern her own life at university NOW on account of her amazing maturity. But I DO know that - deep down - she is still just a little girl. And it's that little girl that I'm looking after today.
So the plan is, little things to look forward to, dotted through the coming days, weeks and months: coffees out, a new activity or two, a day out at a music festival. Cutting back on the remorseless work ethic, the endless 2 and 5k erg-tests so bloody beloved by the rowing fraternity. Keeping it light.
I know her mood can flip just like that, for the the better or the worse. I just hope that when I get down to the club tonight, she will be feeling a bit better in herself.

A Return to the Front

Absolute madness - the urge to write gets no less, despite the traumatic ending to the PhD which saw me refuse at the last fence to do the proposed corrections.
Much shock and disbelief at someone who had completed, submitted, had a viva....and to all intents and purposes passed (although there was much huffing and puffing about the borderline status).
Why? Why did I not knuckle down and just do what I was told? Rewrite the bits that were considered unsatisfactory, go through with a fine tooth-comb and correct the typos, insert the references that were suggested as suitable?
Well, that boat had sailed. I could no more open up that document and write another word in it than fly to the moon. I had HAD it with academia. And academics, and the pifflingly unsatisfying nature of research done at such a micro level, that no-one either knows nor cares what the findings of your thesis are. Not even me. At a party, someone asked me to sum up my PhD in a sentence, 'Because' he said 'it's perfectly possible'. So I said 'Verbal aspect is not all it's cracked up to be'. And it isn't. And its not worth another moment spent on it, not even to get to wear the funny hat and have a limp and half-hearted buffet reception in the department common room.
But still...the urge to write persists, and its been a peculiarly unsatisfying 18 months on the intellectual front.
On the one hand, I have a great deal of specialised knowledge. On the other, I have neither the desire nor the opportunity to use it. I open many books and notebooks, my mind skids from one subject to another enthusiasm; it burns but briefly before the volumes are abandoned in the pile on the table, gathering dust.
What is my problem? Why am I such a light-weight, a butterfly, a charlatan? Have I had some psychological crisis that leaves me thus unable to commit to a project, or am I frightened of becoming a jack-of-all-trades, a flailing amateur, destined to half-fill journals with half-baked prose?
I've considered maybe I've been depressed, but I don't feel the awful sense of pointlessness and doom that supposedly accompanies that. I don't know what I feel. Boredom mostly, a sense of the drumming of fingers whilst the days fly by unused, a need to fill my days with something other than hoovering up mud, washing and cooking.
Even a part-time job - in a pleasant enough environment, with tolerable people, became a hindrance to getting on with...nothing. But I resented it's restrictions.
Rowing: Rowing is great when it goes well. It takes you out of yourself (because you HAVE to concentrate!), keeps you lithe and co-ordinated, fills your lungs with fresh air, but the interstices tend to become just time when you sit around waiting to go rowing again.
The children are growing so fast that I merely tend their needs and they beetle off on their own.
The Husband is going through such a total career and existential melt-down that we seldom communicate in any meaningful way at the moment. He is mute with misery, but I don't want to replicate his mother's inane witterings to fill the silence.
The Dog...the Dog is a blessing. Rescued mutt, desperate to love and be loved, bounding, extravagantly pleased to see his humans and snuggle inconveniently alongside them in bed. He keeps me busy; active, anyway.
So resurrecting this blog (as I have found the login details) will be a bit of therapy.
I shall work through - in words, blessed, necessary words - what it is that I am missing, and try to heal that wound, whatever and wherever it is, that lies across me.
Bear with me. It might not be pretty, or happy, or even useful. But I am going to give it a go.

G-g-g-golden Years

Daughter #3 is twelve years old, going on thirteen. A clever, quick- witted girl, very into her guitar, social-networking and rowing, part of a circle of interesting, quirky friends - including a 'boyfriend'. She's busy, independent, mature and reflective. In short, she is nothing like I was at twelve.
I can't really even remember being twelve: I have no idea what I was like, or what I liked. My memories of that time are sparse. I can remember (just about) being in the second year at 'big' school, and some of my teachers, but I can't remember what I thought about my life. I can't remember what I did at weekends. I don't remember meeting friends and hanging out, nor playing, although I can remember clearly the great times I had a couple of years earlier aged eight or nine,with a gang of friends, roaming about beech woods, throwing bamboo spears and making dens, before we had to move up north. Those earlier days have assumed a golden haze of nostalgia: it was a totally safe environment where we were permitted to wander within the extensive college grounds from dawn till dusk, the little enclave of staff-houses provided a ready made circle of friends and other homes to play in. In bed at night I could hear the owls hooting and the foxes shriek. My parents didn't bother me (or bother about me) too much and, I guess, I didn't bother them.
In moving north, our lives altered radically. My parents moved from spacious staff accomodation to their first mortgaged property. The house was new-build, a bungalow, small with plasterboard walls, at the end of a cul-de-sac, adjacent what was called in those days, 'council houses'. We were now under each others' feet. I was confined, and thus under constant scrutiny.
I no longer roamed on my bike - I knew no-one in the area anyway. My parents spent a lot of time getting the house and garden to their liking. We spent a lot of time in garden centres at the weekend. I started at a new school for the last two years of juniors and made a couple of friends who lived in surrounding villages. I only really saw them at school - my mother didn't drive, and my father worked long hours in a career he relished.
I think I spent a lot of time reading and drawing: I can't really remember. My bedroom, which had been tastefully decorated without any consultation with me was seen as part of the house in general and it didn't feel like mine. It was no sanctuary from the world, not like my untidy old two-windowed first-floor room that overlooked the length of the garden and onto rolling cowslip fields and copses.
I think I was pretty depressed at twelve, actually feeling that the best part of my life was already over, all freedom and friendships gone. All around me seemed dull, boring, sterile, pointless. I can remember meticulously copying a Leonardo drawing one day and then distinctly thinking 'what is the point of this?'

I can't even remember what books I read, although I do remember that my father ferried my mother and I down to the library every Monday night. I can recall its smell, a unique disinfectant/floor polish smell and the child-unfriendly demeanour and hauteur of the white-haired chief librarian to whom we gave the nick-name 'Snowdrop'.
Did I enjoy school? I think so, although my chief delight was to invent imaginary histories for the oldest pupils, who we considered awfully sophisticated, rather than any true interaction.
How on earth did I spend my time? I can't have spent it all in solitude, surely? But in truth I cannot recall any play-dates, or proper trips out. I have no photographs of myself at that age - I forfeited all rights to that sort of thing when I stormed out of the house at eighteen, never to return. In fact, my memories of my entire teenage years are sporadic and patchy at best. I can recall an odd scene from a holiday, or secretly applying make-up in the public toilets, or walking up the farm-track with the dog, but I think that in the main my life was just so dull that I failed to archive it for future reference!

So what will Daughter #3 remember of her early teenage years? I've always thought that the most important thing I can do for my children is to supply them with a repository of good memories, of good times had, great places visited, nice food eaten, fun. It was a good moment when she said to me on her return from rowing on the river one brilliant sunny day, that she'd gone up river in a single-scull and paused to look around her at the willowy banks and listen to the wind sighing and the birds twittering ".....and I thought,'this is what I really enjoy!'"
And I knew at that moment that I was maybe, just maybe, getting it right.