Five o. Fifty. Half a century. Big birthday. BIG birthday. What does it even mean? How do you comprehend half a century? What does it look like, this long passage of time? What does it feel like? I remember my mothers 50th birthday and what that meant. Old. Closer to death. Running out of time. Nearly retired. Menopause. Dried up. Past it. Invisible. But me? Have I lived? Like really lived? Have I felt truly seen, honoured, held before I vanish? What do I do now? Make lists, lots of lists about how to really live now? Have a party? I don’t really want balloons and cake. Will I answer the questions I have now? Will I face myself, really face myself? Will the world make more sense once I pass this threshold into adulthood? Am I too old now to do these things? Wear a mini skirt, get a piercing in my nose, go to a festival, change career, travel the world, have sex (lots of sex), read all the books, play all the records, dance, swim, walk, run and find out who I am. What am I too old for? What am I too young for? What am I for now? Five 0.
The energy of this; the insistent, searching rhythm... what a wonderful thing to read on my 49th birthday morning, when I'm still (after all my changes this decade) too shy to go dancing or host a party. Even the birthday tweet I did on Twitter and Instagram I deleted within minutes! Everything you list... piercings, mini skirts, festivals, travel... all beyond me! Love now how you've made them seem like places on a map I might journey to!
I will curate your piece over on the cure for sleep website this weekend, and come back here with your link once I have. Thank you for taking part! Tx
Thanks Tanya. I really really relate to the shyness you talk about too - I think I am working it all out too! Thanks for this too- finding a voice is of the ways I am moving to 50 and your project really helps xx
This has been such a fun piece to read! Once again you have captured so much Helen and have reminded me of many of the things that went through my head before I reached the Five 0! Beautiful!
Thanks Tracey! It’s funny reading this again a month after turning 50! I feel so much better on the other side!! Am off to Glastonbury next month & am going to wear shorts for the first time since I was 17! Maybe 50 can be a liberation? Xxx
Good for you Helen! 50 can be a liberation for sure even if it is simply that we care less about what 'they think! Have a wonderful time and please let us know all about it! X
So much hope here, full of opportunity and exploration. I remember when my grandma turned 50, so, so different than the 50 we get to experience now when the 50s can be full of vitality. I loved the pulse of this.
A recurring thought on every birthday is my birth day. Not all the day long but at some point I can't help but pay attention to that day decades ago, when I was there for sure but only have conscious knowledge of it from my mother. And that is sparse and indirect, from overheard conversations with her women friends mostly. So there are gaps that I mix up filler for using imagination, my own experience as a woman and that of my mother, now long dead.
A long labour, over twenty four hours, and finally I was pulled out with forceps, actual cold metal forceps that left my soft infant head bruised and misshapen. They also left me with a droopy eye from cranial nerve damage. I was horribly self conscious about it for years, always turning one side to the camera or the mirror to hide it, growing a long fringe to obscure it. When I learnt it was a birth injury I somehow felt better about it, saw it as a battle scar perhaps
My mother was alone in hospital for the whole labour, fathers not admitted then and we'd moved far from her family. A first time mother and an unwilling one at that, she had no clue what to expect, no help or support and she must have been terrified and in horrible pain. Once yanked out I was immediately taken away for several days to have my head 'reshaped' and our shared trauma separated us, meant that the bond between us was never forged.
What a deeply poignant story. Moved to tears. And the tenderness with which you revisit the memory now you are older: seeing not only what damage was done to you in that delivery, but also what that might have been for your mother.
(I was also a violent forceps delivery - Keelings forceps that were banned forever only a few months after my birth, or so my mother told me. I believe that it why I've been in such severe nerve pain all my life - left head/upper neck from consciousness til 30, then it shifted to the lower left vertebrae til this year when it has quite mysteriously gone altogether. My head also reshaped. Which now you've written of it here with such quiet force, makes me see anew how upsetting that is - to our systems as small children, but also symbolically: to have been 'moulded' into a shape that wasn't perhaps the one we should have had...?)
I will curate your piece over on the cure for sleep website this weekend, and come back here with your link once I have. And will be thinking about your words for a long time. Tx
This is beautiful Stevie ,it's amazing how much you know of your birth day I know so little! And of our imperfections we feel shame about that become our badges of honour and survival ,its a really lovely poignant piece thank you for it xxx
While I always consider my children's birthdays to be my own birth day as I am apt to spend a lot of time thinking back to those particular days, and I acknowledge the same with friends, yet I have not considered my own birth day! Now I am thinking about that day. I love the way you have captured so many moments in one tender delivery (no pun intended)! Beautiful. Thank you Stevie.
It is the 5th anniversary of our IVF journey. A year-long jagged labyrinth of needles and syringes, bloating, sickness, hospital gowns, soothing words and becoming an emotional and physical stranger to myself. And then the freedom at the end. The closed doors, the pitying half-smiles, the letting go. I had burned as a child for adventure, of travels to far off lands, of exotic landscapes, foreign tongues, intoxicating smells and dense climates on virgin skin, never motherhood. When I met my love, we quietly agreed to take the next step, but somehow, I knew this path was not meant for me and the child in me who had spun the globe knew that too.
I am not broken by it, but I find myself lost in a foreign vista. I am brave but not tough and I am cast adrift to chart a course with a heart still so full of love to give and so few to give it to.
My mum whose mind is fragmented, brittle and capricious, focussing long enough to share a moment and then lost again to seas of confusion. My love whose completeness for me is all encompassing and my darling dog whose life will most likely end before mine and for whom I will be riven in two. And so, in my new life, every morning before the sun, I quietly slip off to feed the calves. In the darkness, my feet crunching on cobbled floors, they start their morning clamour. I fill their pens with straw, and give them their warm milk, I touch their noses for signs of fever, and there amidst the peace, with the sting of ammonia and muck in the air, I give my love – a secret before the sun.
Louise... tears of fellow feeling reading this exquisite piece by you. That foreign land sensation when one is not able to take the path intended. The strange light it casts onto where we are - everything newly-seen and - if we are fortunate - precious. And beyond the poignancy of it, and the fellow feeling, also the admiration of one writer to another... "I fill their pens with straw, and give them their warm milk, I touch their noses for signs of fever, and there amidst the peace, with the sting of ammonia and muck in the air, I give my love": this is the kind of writing I prize highest - when huge or complicated emotion is earthed by action in real time/place. It's increasingly rare in my experience, too...
I will create this month's page on the cure for sleep website tomorrow and come back here then with your link.
Thank you for your lovely, supportive words Tanya, and thank you for being so generous and giving this opportunity, it has been so good for me to write. I'm currently reading A Cure for Sleep and finding it magical. Louise xx
It is a privilege to provide a place where true stories of deep experience like the one you've shared can be honoured. I've just read your piece again, aloud this time, in the quiet of my writing room - a small way of showing your words that they have been fully received? Here, as promised, is your direct link to your piece in the story archive...
This is beautiful. So much experience and emotion condensed into three short paragraphs. Your writing is filled with the aches and beauty of being human. So good!
Nov 5, 2022·edited Nov 6, 2022Liked by Tanya Shadrick
Waking early to make an orange cake for your birthday is a small act of love i know all to well that shall replace the words that say I love you mum .
Irish mothers don't go in for all that touchy feely stuff and you have shown me in your own way over and over again in all these years a family just how much you cared.
It just took me some time to understand the nature of the game and to play my part and make my own transactions at our little bank of things unsaid.
Gone are the days i question or rally against why it is this way so ,and come to understand we love so much of the time as we were shown by our parents ,a parent myself i see sharply my own imperfections and think not for the first time think of how this all played out for you growing up in that little sacred place in ireland we got to had all our summers .
Our brand of love is an act of tug of war so silly it makes me shake my head to think of it ,fully aware that when you are no longer here anymore it will hurt me the most, but still I cannot say it.
So important that we can write about our mothers this way - so much gets held inside and our relationships with our Mums are so complicated and confusing. Your love for your Mum shines through and you have it so right, that in the end it is the simple things, like a cake and the orangey taste of it that will say everything we need to say. I’m so glad to have read this!
Simply amazing, I felt it straight through my body, just how hard it is when people love us but just not the way we would choose, the tug of war, how we complicate love.
Oh my. Monique. This is such a concentrate of honesty, hardwon wisdom, generosity, perspective. And as a piece of writing, it is simple stunning - what a line this is: "make my own transactions at our little bank of things unsaid." And then the power of that last sentence after you've invoked the idea of an ongoing tug of war: "So I bake you a cake and hope you enjoy the of taste it." It's as if you have stopped pulling on your end of the rope so that you can use your hands to a more creative, a more generous end. Absolutely unforgettable. Thank you for sharing this with us. Here is your link:
You’ll think it’s odd that I’m writing to you, and I know that I only saw you a little while ago, but there is something I want to say.
I’m so glad that you were able to visit us today on your 92nd birthday. I know it wasn’t easy for you – the wheelchair taxi is so tiring, and it takes a lot of gumption these days to steel yourself up for journeys into the outside world. 92 is a big number, hard to imagine until you reach it, and you’ve told me before that you feel every bit of 92. Lots of things are much harder now than they used to be, I can see that.
I was glad that I could make you a birthday cake and it was lovely to sing to you and watch you blow out the candles. It made me smile to see you smile. When we’d finished clapping and the cake was cut, you said that you hoped that you wouldn’t still be here when your next birthday comes around. I think I understand that. How many birthdays are too many? When do we realise that maybe we’ve had enough birthdays and we don’t want any more? I am so grateful to still have you with us, but I don’t want to be selfish and keep wishing more happy returns for you if that’s not what you want for yourself any longer.
I just hope that wherever you are next September 30th, you will be happy, peaceful and smiling, just like you were today.
Oh Sue. What a beautiful, deeply loving letter to your mother you've written. Moved to tears by how you find a way to both love her fiercely and hold her close...while also understanding how it might for her, to find each day so hard. I would have been deeply affected by this on any day I'd received it - but especially today when my 80-year-old mother, only a year into her good new life after 40 years of great unhappiness is now in an emergency ward, and me needing to spend a long time living away from home to be with her, helping her decide how to arrange life if she can't live independently after all. There is what we want, and what we can't have, and your letters speaks so finely to all of this....
55 comments already…believe it or not that’s my favourite and lucky number- honest! Why am I not surprised? Because this place has already proved itself as very special to me. So thank you so much Tanya for welcoming me so heartily and here is my first true tribute to my mother for her birthday. I loved the process of writing it this morning- somehow I woke at 6 like I used to when I last wrote regularly- and I loved honing my handwritten to 300 words. Here they are…
Dear one and only Mum,
Sorry I forgot your birthday.
Luckily Russell remembered and reminded me. We're good loving brothers like that.
I then worked out a way to mark what would’ve been your 87th, as I sat quietly at the kitchen table because Morgan was in the living room with four tweenage pals on a sleepover. Apparently they stayed awake till 5am but she fell asleep at 1! You'd love and cherish how she's blossomed in those ten years since you passed.
Yes, you passed away right there before me. You uncannily waited till I came back from breakfast and then just stopped breathing. So simply. The blessed time I’d had with you through those two nights by your bed at your beloved St. Columba’s hospice, holding your hand, singing to that breath, came to an end and a new simpler world opened up to me.
You see, I connect with that breath every morning after my yoga, lying there like you, just inhaling and exhaling as I need to, nothing else to be done.
I did celebrate your birthday on Sunday by posting about you on the Facebook 'Growing up in Clermiston in the 60s and 70s' group. I took photos of your funeral address by our family's Humanist Celebrant Lara.
She'd met you that previous year when Philip died and you fed her his life story for his funeral. I must publish that address on his next birthday and find a way to expand on the funeral poems I wrote for you both.
Lots of Clermiston folk who knew you responded so lovingly. Not least cousin Janey whom I just discovered was due to be born on your birthday but arrived three days later. Which means it’s her birthday today. I'll go wish her Happy Birthday now.
Tam... how beautiful this is. So intimate, so direct (and yet I know from writing myself of personal experience that will be read for others that this takes skill, and art). The passage about your mother's breathing, and yours, is something special and feels like the seed of a longer piece you might write for publication elsewhere one day...
So good to have you join us here. Here is your link direct to your piece:
This year I want you to remember the crow that continued to chase and dive after the fledgling robin, how the parents tried so hard to get the crow away, fierce cries, diving and diving at the crow, how the fledgling finally fell into the grass, how the crow landed, stabbed, carried the fledgling away, how you watched out the window, struck dumb, paralyzed, wanting to save the robin, felt the agony of its parents as their hollow bones filled with terror, knew the crow also needed to survive, how you didn’t know who to save, knew you couldn’t save anyone, that life is uncontrollable, that you don’t choose who lives or dies, that you wouldn’t want this power even if it was possible, how you can only shake your head at the grace of a good day and how everyone you love most is alive today and bow low below your lucky stars and remember it is undeserved, random and not to be taken for granted, you can only write it down, stare off in stunned wonder and forgive yourself on the days you fail and try not to lay awake fearing when it will end. You live in a world that is senseless and beautiful and all you can do is cook for those you love and hope it fills their cells and their souls and watch them fly away.
You know I've loved your work from the first, and that I think your voice is so wholly your own - so much so that my usual love of placing a new contributor in a lineage in my mind (who they remind me of, while being of course themselves and original): I don't think I've ever done this in my mind with you. But with this soaring piece, I feel I'm in the company with someone as bracing and unsettling as Annie Dillard. Have we ever discussed Pilgrim at Tinker Creek? Do you know it? I feel if you have you will have understood it better than I did - because the range of disciplines you draw on (like her) is far larger than mine. Anyway... this to say that you continue to suprise me! Txxx
Oh my...I love her. She was born in Pittsburgh, about 45 minutes from where I live, but then moved away. I have often felt frustrated with myself because I hop from one interest to the next, never getting quite mastering any subject, life is full of wonder, that oftentimes ends up with books half read, taking me down too many rabbit holes. I think I will borrow your words and start calling it my "range of disciplines." Did you ever watch Love, Actually? I felt like Laura Linney's character when she is behind the door, so excited that Rodrigo Santoro came home with her when this came through. I think that is the gift you give to us all here. xxxx
Oh Shelia, your writing is like none I have read before! I love it and feel I am recognising it now, as I slowly make my way through these older writing prompts. Your writing is so very unique and I just wonder how one creates such beauty!
Thank you Shelia, I am looking forward to coming across more of your work on here.
Today you watched clouds fly across sky. Standing still, eyes lifted. An eagle caught in current and seemingly so free. Later, you thought there might be a rainbow but didn’t go back to look.
You listened to an owl one night when you couldn’t sleep, risking dark to try for stars. You think you saw one and you might have made a wish.
Water was too cold; smoke burned throats; you saw a sea lion almost come to shore, and it was beautiful.
Someone made someone mad and there’s broken glass on the road now. You like to think about what happened and imagine a life being lived. There may have been love, there was definitely rage and now you have to swerve to miss the shards of it all.
The wind is empty sometimes. You are bumping into silence.
There is stillness and you are crawling, and you are walking in a line that moves like this, but a raven chased a hawk in that same sky clouds were racing and you almost believed in a miracle.
Rain has come again; the apples never ripened; a dog that was lost found home.
Another year has come and gone and you took the table to the other room.
Oh my. This is the kind of prose that feels like a poem to me: the kind of writing that makes me want to learn some of its lines by heart, I mean: 'Someone made someone mad and there’s broken glass on the road now'; 'Rain has come again; the apples never ripened'...
How beautiful, how mysterious. Thank you for sharing it.
I will make this month's page on the cure for sleep website tomorrow and come back here with your link to your piece on it.
1984: “I’m going to have the baby.” Dad leapt up. Maybe he thought he was going to have be mid-wife but this was ‘Jimmy’s’ and driving wives to hospital was not allowed. I left in the ambulance, wrapped in a white blanket like Virgin Mary, wheel chair for donkey, delivery ward for stable. There was ‘room at the Inn’, except the lift was jammed with an imminent arrival. My waters broke, head engaged, mucus quickly removed from airways, and there, beautiful you. Days later you lay warm and cosy, almost asleep, while outside snow fell on a cold spring day. Brilliant breaking sunshine and I am suddenly overwhelmed with unspeakable happiness.
Between …swapping city for village, we moved to Lincolnshire where you grew up a little shy. Terrorised by your brother trying to convince you that you were adopted, you learnt to hold your own, your sunny personality reflecting your name, ‘bright one’.
A return to the northeast. New schools and plentiful cousins, your reticence disappeared with the arrival of Barney, our King Charles spaniel. Adventurous, on frequent Eurocamp holidays you made friends regardless of language. Persuasive, you appeared one morning in PJ’s, hat, coat, scarf, feet in shoe boxes to convince us to invest in a ski-trip. Laughter always.
If I wondered what the future held for you, you have constantly surprised me: trekking in Madagascar; University; a year in New Jersey; London, Manchester before heading to Cambodia, Asia and finally your fifth continent Australia. Navigating airports, visas, time zones, you evolved into the adventurous one.
2018, home. The most delightful surprise of all, a beautiful son for you. Roots and wings.
2024. I’m so proud of the person you have become: brilliant mother, thoughtful daughter, long suffering sister and you, yourself! Kind, empathetic, humorous and mercy hearted; it’s been 40 years of privilege.
Oh my. Curated this, and typing to you now, through tears… good ones. Part mother in me, part the daughter (whose mother could never have written to me like this). How I hope you share this with yours - wonderful-sounding person that she is. Just beautiful, Jean. Thank you for entrusting it to our project here. Txx
I used to struggle to remember the date of my dad’s birthday. Was it the 28th or the 29th? I don’t really know why this block existed around its date. I never had the same problem with Mum’s birthday, despite knowing that there was some doubt around it. Being born during the war, perhaps in or around an air raid would add difficulty to dates.
Because everything was about mum – how is your mum? Is your mum better? Bless your poor dad, such a rock, looking after your mum. Always the star of the show, though probably preferring not to be, my ‘mad’ mum, my loyal faithful dad.
Once I got his birth date correct, the next pressing issue was what to buy as a gift? The usual stalwarts of socks and shirts soon ran out; the lack of interest in reading, beyond histories of local pubs, ruled out books. So I turned to music – replacing and or updating dad's old tapes of Bob Dylan,The Rolling Stones, Cat Stevens etc. Sometimes a DVD, perhaps Das Boot (to satisfy the former submariner in him) or a comedy by Robin Williams.
I was often not sure if I had got it right. But dad wasn’t that bothered about birthdays really, beyond a nice card and perhaps a pint of bitter later in the pub.
And now? Now, dad doesn’t know it’s his birthday, let alone what day or year it is. When we tell him, he is pragmatic and fine about it, it just comes as a surprise to him, that’s all.
Does a birthday count if the person with it doesn’t remember the significance of the day? I don’t know. I mark it for him, I remember for him.
You've given voice here, Sharon, to something that I know will speak to many on here: the strange unknowable quality of a certain kind of loyal, caregiving parent - and that wish to show love while not quite knowing them the way you'd want to. I find the searching, questioning quality of your piece so moving, as well as good writing. Always glad when I see a piece from you come through! Here is your link...
Thanks for your generous response, as always. I kind of hold my breath once I have submitted one of these pieces, as think "this time I will get found out for being no good"!
Will keep writing and submitting regardless though.
I'm glad you shared that post-submission feeling so that I can assure you of how I respond to your and others' work here: I'm listening for the quality of thought and memory and self-examination. Celebrating too qualities in each person's prose that seem to me distinct in them, even while sometimes - in the best way - reminding me of established writers whose work I admire. There is no fixed and single measure of 'good' beyond what I describe in my community guidelines, which is 'good intent'. And yet it's also true to say that I've not yet received a piece of writing which didn't have some quality to it that I admired! Which interests me because it makes me wonder how much exciting writing and thinking never gets sent to projects and publications which are more obviously selective!
OMGOODNESS that video is, as the term you use, so touching! What a wonderful couple you are. I started at this post as it tied in with us first meeting yesterday- 16 April 2023 -on what I was nudged to remember by my brother Russell was our mum’s birthday. I’d forgotten. She’s been ten years gone now. All of this threw up so much yesterday and I’m going to come back to it later but got to make the tea now. But just to say that video has made me feel all the more blessed to find this lovely place 💝
The call for birthday letters arrived the day after your birthday. As always, I’d thought of sending you a card on the first of the month, nearly four weeks early – much too soon, even with the increasing vagaries of airmail. As always, I then forgot, and instead had to send an apologetic email on the day. We’ve both been doing this for years, more birthdays than not.
This is a big one, the year you reach the age your father was when he died. The same age as my father when he died, both of them felled unexpectedly in robust middle age. Soon you and I will both be older, god/dess willing, than our fathers ever were. I see it’s weighing on you.
So many odd ways in which our lives, lived on different continents since secondary school, have intersected and echoed one another. Makes it tempting to read meaning and portent in the patterns. Or to ask, how much were our paths laid by the shared circumstances of the children we were?
But becoming our fathers’ elders – just as each of us mothered our mothers, in their waning months – suggests to me we write our own way. That when we each post photographs of a flat grey sea on the same day – one looking east, the other west – or find we love a particular song or are watching a migratory bird in common, it is cultivated sympathy, not soulless fate. That friendship creates synchronicity, and habits of perception; that it continues to generate the food of its own further thriving. The scattered crumbs of digital contact and also the rich feasts of occasional physical presence.
Cake, dear A. Until I can bake one for you, from a recipe I didn’t learn from either parent.
Nicola! How beautiful that you've returned to the project - so soon after your big essay win - and with this exquisite piece. Which is both personal but full of perspectives that widen the sky for me, and the field of how these kind of connections can be understood and articulated. Every sentence is beautiful, but this in particular was stunning to me:
"It is cultivated sympathy, not soulless fate. That friendship creates synchronicity, and habits of perception; that it continues to generate the food of its own further thriving."
Here is your link to the piece in the story archive. I won't share it on Twitter (I tend to only do that in replies if a contributor is talking with me about the project, as I don't like to embarrass people or give a sense that some stories impress me more than others. And yet I'm always happy to see contributors share their words beyond here...
Oh Tanya your words touch me so deeply. I don't quite know what to say except thank you for your time, your close reading of all the work you are creating here, and your utter care and respect for our words and our work.
This year my birthday was hijacked by the queen. It was the day of her funeral, so I decided to take a leaf out of her book and have two. Birthdays that is, not funerals.
So here I am eight days later, on a train to Blackpool. There’s an acorn in my pocket, and the silver sparkly pen my son bought me for my birthday. I chose it myself, he said. Happy birthday from your twat of a son, he wrote in my card. Love you mum.
The rain is heavy and persistent, streaking down the train windows. I trace the wobbling drops with my finger. I know it will stop by the time we pull into Blackpool. The morning has been fraught, my son telling me to go fuck myself multiple times as I try and get him out of the house by 7.30 to catch the bus to college.
As the train pulls further away from my home town, I feel the ties unravelling. At the moment, being in my house, in my life, often feels like being tangled in barbed wire. A year ago, when he admitted that he was seeing someone else, I asked my son’s father to leave the house, and he refused. The situation is ongoing, and somehow it is all my fault.
It’s not my fault.
But Blackpool. Blackpool, where the North Shore is a five minute walk from the station. Blackpool, where the skies are big, and something inside me expands and reaches out to fill the space, tunes into the tides, and listens as the waves crash. Blackpool, where I can reconnect with myself. I am a grain of sand. I am the wind.
Next year, next year, things will be different. Happy birthday.
Kerry! Thank you for joining the project. Our conversation will be in my thoughts often from now on. I just saw your email but as it’s my sons 16th today I’ve not been able to reply to messages. But you’ve found now this right route for submitting your work anyway. I will read tomorrow after my first mentoring call of day is over & will let you know via here too when your piece is in the story archive.
I do hope you’ll want to respond to other themes here - just use the comments area on the post you’re writing on to submit, as you’ve done here.
Dear Kerry, as promised, I've now read your piece and curated it over on the cure for sleep website. Here is your direct link to it in case you want to use that when applying for writing grants or when approaching other publishers:
It has the same impact on me that your mentoring application and piece had: the way you move between the sometimes brutal/ugly/painful moments of domestic & inner life to a hardy determined outward-facing energy. It's compelling to me and I feel you have both essays and a long work ahead of you that will find readers who it speaks to as it does me.
A letter in anticipation of a birthday.
Five o. Fifty. Half a century. Big birthday. BIG birthday. What does it even mean? How do you comprehend half a century? What does it look like, this long passage of time? What does it feel like? I remember my mothers 50th birthday and what that meant. Old. Closer to death. Running out of time. Nearly retired. Menopause. Dried up. Past it. Invisible. But me? Have I lived? Like really lived? Have I felt truly seen, honoured, held before I vanish? What do I do now? Make lists, lots of lists about how to really live now? Have a party? I don’t really want balloons and cake. Will I answer the questions I have now? Will I face myself, really face myself? Will the world make more sense once I pass this threshold into adulthood? Am I too old now to do these things? Wear a mini skirt, get a piercing in my nose, go to a festival, change career, travel the world, have sex (lots of sex), read all the books, play all the records, dance, swim, walk, run and find out who I am. What am I too old for? What am I too young for? What am I for now? Five 0.
The energy of this; the insistent, searching rhythm... what a wonderful thing to read on my 49th birthday morning, when I'm still (after all my changes this decade) too shy to go dancing or host a party. Even the birthday tweet I did on Twitter and Instagram I deleted within minutes! Everything you list... piercings, mini skirts, festivals, travel... all beyond me! Love now how you've made them seem like places on a map I might journey to!
I will curate your piece over on the cure for sleep website this weekend, and come back here with your link once I have. Thank you for taking part! Tx
Happiest birthday Tanya 💗🙏
Dance like no one's watching or in my house cares !😂😊😘
Back, as promised, with a link to your brilliant piece on the project site. Thank you again. Tx
https://thecureforsleep.com/october-issue-birthday-letters/#helen
Thanks Tanya. I really really relate to the shyness you talk about too - I think I am working it all out too! Thanks for this too- finding a voice is of the ways I am moving to 50 and your project really helps xx
I really enjoyed this I loved the way the words read like they tumbled out of those moments we have with ourselves in thought .
Really lovely 😊
This has been such a fun piece to read! Once again you have captured so much Helen and have reminded me of many of the things that went through my head before I reached the Five 0! Beautiful!
Tracey x
Thanks Tracey! It’s funny reading this again a month after turning 50! I feel so much better on the other side!! Am off to Glastonbury next month & am going to wear shorts for the first time since I was 17! Maybe 50 can be a liberation? Xxx
Good for you Helen! 50 can be a liberation for sure even if it is simply that we care less about what 'they think! Have a wonderful time and please let us know all about it! X
So much hope here, full of opportunity and exploration. I remember when my grandma turned 50, so, so different than the 50 we get to experience now when the 50s can be full of vitality. I loved the pulse of this.
Yes Shelia, so very true! Life at Five 0 has vastly improved since our grandmother's day!
I love the pulse of this piece too! Vibrant!
Tracey x
A recurring thought on every birthday is my birth day. Not all the day long but at some point I can't help but pay attention to that day decades ago, when I was there for sure but only have conscious knowledge of it from my mother. And that is sparse and indirect, from overheard conversations with her women friends mostly. So there are gaps that I mix up filler for using imagination, my own experience as a woman and that of my mother, now long dead.
A long labour, over twenty four hours, and finally I was pulled out with forceps, actual cold metal forceps that left my soft infant head bruised and misshapen. They also left me with a droopy eye from cranial nerve damage. I was horribly self conscious about it for years, always turning one side to the camera or the mirror to hide it, growing a long fringe to obscure it. When I learnt it was a birth injury I somehow felt better about it, saw it as a battle scar perhaps
My mother was alone in hospital for the whole labour, fathers not admitted then and we'd moved far from her family. A first time mother and an unwilling one at that, she had no clue what to expect, no help or support and she must have been terrified and in horrible pain. Once yanked out I was immediately taken away for several days to have my head 'reshaped' and our shared trauma separated us, meant that the bond between us was never forged.
Stevie, this is very beautiful. I am in the room with you and feel all the unsaid things hidden in words.
Here Stevie, as promised, is the direct link to your deeply moving piece on the project website. Thank you again. Tx
https://thecureforsleep.com/october-issue-birthday-letters/#stevie
Thank you so much. Until I had the opportunity to write about this I hadn't fully realised how much my life has been unwittingly influenced by it.
What a deeply poignant story. Moved to tears. And the tenderness with which you revisit the memory now you are older: seeing not only what damage was done to you in that delivery, but also what that might have been for your mother.
(I was also a violent forceps delivery - Keelings forceps that were banned forever only a few months after my birth, or so my mother told me. I believe that it why I've been in such severe nerve pain all my life - left head/upper neck from consciousness til 30, then it shifted to the lower left vertebrae til this year when it has quite mysteriously gone altogether. My head also reshaped. Which now you've written of it here with such quiet force, makes me see anew how upsetting that is - to our systems as small children, but also symbolically: to have been 'moulded' into a shape that wasn't perhaps the one we should have had...?)
I will curate your piece over on the cure for sleep website this weekend, and come back here with your link once I have. And will be thinking about your words for a long time. Tx
This is beautiful Stevie ,it's amazing how much you know of your birth day I know so little! And of our imperfections we feel shame about that become our badges of honour and survival ,its a really lovely poignant piece thank you for it xxx
While I always consider my children's birthdays to be my own birth day as I am apt to spend a lot of time thinking back to those particular days, and I acknowledge the same with friends, yet I have not considered my own birth day! Now I am thinking about that day. I love the way you have captured so many moments in one tender delivery (no pun intended)! Beautiful. Thank you Stevie.
Tracey x
An Anniversary
It is the 5th anniversary of our IVF journey. A year-long jagged labyrinth of needles and syringes, bloating, sickness, hospital gowns, soothing words and becoming an emotional and physical stranger to myself. And then the freedom at the end. The closed doors, the pitying half-smiles, the letting go. I had burned as a child for adventure, of travels to far off lands, of exotic landscapes, foreign tongues, intoxicating smells and dense climates on virgin skin, never motherhood. When I met my love, we quietly agreed to take the next step, but somehow, I knew this path was not meant for me and the child in me who had spun the globe knew that too.
I am not broken by it, but I find myself lost in a foreign vista. I am brave but not tough and I am cast adrift to chart a course with a heart still so full of love to give and so few to give it to.
My mum whose mind is fragmented, brittle and capricious, focussing long enough to share a moment and then lost again to seas of confusion. My love whose completeness for me is all encompassing and my darling dog whose life will most likely end before mine and for whom I will be riven in two. And so, in my new life, every morning before the sun, I quietly slip off to feed the calves. In the darkness, my feet crunching on cobbled floors, they start their morning clamour. I fill their pens with straw, and give them their warm milk, I touch their noses for signs of fever, and there amidst the peace, with the sting of ammonia and muck in the air, I give my love – a secret before the sun.
Louise... tears of fellow feeling reading this exquisite piece by you. That foreign land sensation when one is not able to take the path intended. The strange light it casts onto where we are - everything newly-seen and - if we are fortunate - precious. And beyond the poignancy of it, and the fellow feeling, also the admiration of one writer to another... "I fill their pens with straw, and give them their warm milk, I touch their noses for signs of fever, and there amidst the peace, with the sting of ammonia and muck in the air, I give my love": this is the kind of writing I prize highest - when huge or complicated emotion is earthed by action in real time/place. It's increasingly rare in my experience, too...
I will create this month's page on the cure for sleep website tomorrow and come back here then with your link.
Tanya xx
Thank you for your lovely, supportive words Tanya, and thank you for being so generous and giving this opportunity, it has been so good for me to write. I'm currently reading A Cure for Sleep and finding it magical. Louise xx
It is a privilege to provide a place where true stories of deep experience like the one you've shared can be honoured. I've just read your piece again, aloud this time, in the quiet of my writing room - a small way of showing your words that they have been fully received? Here, as promised, is your direct link to your piece in the story archive...
Tx
https://thecureforsleep.com/october-issue-birthday-letters/#louiseratcliff
This is truly beautiful, touching piece
of writting thank you for sharing Louise 🙏
enjoy your calves they are very lucky to have you ,love them ❤️
Thank you Monique xx
This is so very moving Louise! A beautiful tear jerker for sure.
Thank you
Tracey x
Thank you Tracey! X
This is beautiful. So much experience and emotion condensed into three short paragraphs. Your writing is filled with the aches and beauty of being human. So good!
Dear Sheila, thank you for your words ❤
Waking early to make an orange cake for your birthday is a small act of love i know all to well that shall replace the words that say I love you mum .
Irish mothers don't go in for all that touchy feely stuff and you have shown me in your own way over and over again in all these years a family just how much you cared.
It just took me some time to understand the nature of the game and to play my part and make my own transactions at our little bank of things unsaid.
Gone are the days i question or rally against why it is this way so ,and come to understand we love so much of the time as we were shown by our parents ,a parent myself i see sharply my own imperfections and think not for the first time think of how this all played out for you growing up in that little sacred place in ireland we got to had all our summers .
Our brand of love is an act of tug of war so silly it makes me shake my head to think of it ,fully aware that when you are no longer here anymore it will hurt me the most, but still I cannot say it.
So I bake you a cake and
hope you enjoy the of taste it.
So important that we can write about our mothers this way - so much gets held inside and our relationships with our Mums are so complicated and confusing. Your love for your Mum shines through and you have it so right, that in the end it is the simple things, like a cake and the orangey taste of it that will say everything we need to say. I’m so glad to have read this!
Wow thank you so much for reading and I agree totally ! 😊 X
Simply amazing, I felt it straight through my body, just how hard it is when people love us but just not the way we would choose, the tug of war, how we complicate love.
Oh my. Monique. This is such a concentrate of honesty, hardwon wisdom, generosity, perspective. And as a piece of writing, it is simple stunning - what a line this is: "make my own transactions at our little bank of things unsaid." And then the power of that last sentence after you've invoked the idea of an ongoing tug of war: "So I bake you a cake and hope you enjoy the of taste it." It's as if you have stopped pulling on your end of the rope so that you can use your hands to a more creative, a more generous end. Absolutely unforgettable. Thank you for sharing this with us. Here is your link:
https://thecureforsleep.com/october-issue-birthday-letters/#moniquekennedy
Txxx
Dear Mum,
You’ll think it’s odd that I’m writing to you, and I know that I only saw you a little while ago, but there is something I want to say.
I’m so glad that you were able to visit us today on your 92nd birthday. I know it wasn’t easy for you – the wheelchair taxi is so tiring, and it takes a lot of gumption these days to steel yourself up for journeys into the outside world. 92 is a big number, hard to imagine until you reach it, and you’ve told me before that you feel every bit of 92. Lots of things are much harder now than they used to be, I can see that.
I was glad that I could make you a birthday cake and it was lovely to sing to you and watch you blow out the candles. It made me smile to see you smile. When we’d finished clapping and the cake was cut, you said that you hoped that you wouldn’t still be here when your next birthday comes around. I think I understand that. How many birthdays are too many? When do we realise that maybe we’ve had enough birthdays and we don’t want any more? I am so grateful to still have you with us, but I don’t want to be selfish and keep wishing more happy returns for you if that’s not what you want for yourself any longer.
I just hope that wherever you are next September 30th, you will be happy, peaceful and smiling, just like you were today.
With so much love on your birthday, Mum. xxx
Oh Sue. What a beautiful, deeply loving letter to your mother you've written. Moved to tears by how you find a way to both love her fiercely and hold her close...while also understanding how it might for her, to find each day so hard. I would have been deeply affected by this on any day I'd received it - but especially today when my 80-year-old mother, only a year into her good new life after 40 years of great unhappiness is now in an emergency ward, and me needing to spend a long time living away from home to be with her, helping her decide how to arrange life if she can't live independently after all. There is what we want, and what we can't have, and your letters speaks so finely to all of this....
Here is your link:
https://thecureforsleep.com/october-issue-birthday-letters/#suetanton
Tanya xx
Sue this is gorgeous! So full of love and with an understanding that can only come with age. A wonderful letter to read.
Tracey x
Absolutely heartstoppingly beautiful and selfless ,wow ❤️
55 comments already…believe it or not that’s my favourite and lucky number- honest! Why am I not surprised? Because this place has already proved itself as very special to me. So thank you so much Tanya for welcoming me so heartily and here is my first true tribute to my mother for her birthday. I loved the process of writing it this morning- somehow I woke at 6 like I used to when I last wrote regularly- and I loved honing my handwritten to 300 words. Here they are…
Dear one and only Mum,
Sorry I forgot your birthday.
Luckily Russell remembered and reminded me. We're good loving brothers like that.
I then worked out a way to mark what would’ve been your 87th, as I sat quietly at the kitchen table because Morgan was in the living room with four tweenage pals on a sleepover. Apparently they stayed awake till 5am but she fell asleep at 1! You'd love and cherish how she's blossomed in those ten years since you passed.
Yes, you passed away right there before me. You uncannily waited till I came back from breakfast and then just stopped breathing. So simply. The blessed time I’d had with you through those two nights by your bed at your beloved St. Columba’s hospice, holding your hand, singing to that breath, came to an end and a new simpler world opened up to me.
You see, I connect with that breath every morning after my yoga, lying there like you, just inhaling and exhaling as I need to, nothing else to be done.
I did celebrate your birthday on Sunday by posting about you on the Facebook 'Growing up in Clermiston in the 60s and 70s' group. I took photos of your funeral address by our family's Humanist Celebrant Lara.
She'd met you that previous year when Philip died and you fed her his life story for his funeral. I must publish that address on his next birthday and find a way to expand on the funeral poems I wrote for you both.
Lots of Clermiston folk who knew you responded so lovingly. Not least cousin Janey whom I just discovered was due to be born on your birthday but arrived three days later. Which means it’s her birthday today. I'll go wish her Happy Birthday now.
Tam... how beautiful this is. So intimate, so direct (and yet I know from writing myself of personal experience that will be read for others that this takes skill, and art). The passage about your mother's breathing, and yours, is something special and feels like the seed of a longer piece you might write for publication elsewhere one day...
So good to have you join us here. Here is your link direct to your piece:
https://thecureforsleep.com/october-issue-birthday-letters/#tamdeanburn
Tan x
This year I want you to remember the crow that continued to chase and dive after the fledgling robin, how the parents tried so hard to get the crow away, fierce cries, diving and diving at the crow, how the fledgling finally fell into the grass, how the crow landed, stabbed, carried the fledgling away, how you watched out the window, struck dumb, paralyzed, wanting to save the robin, felt the agony of its parents as their hollow bones filled with terror, knew the crow also needed to survive, how you didn’t know who to save, knew you couldn’t save anyone, that life is uncontrollable, that you don’t choose who lives or dies, that you wouldn’t want this power even if it was possible, how you can only shake your head at the grace of a good day and how everyone you love most is alive today and bow low below your lucky stars and remember it is undeserved, random and not to be taken for granted, you can only write it down, stare off in stunned wonder and forgive yourself on the days you fail and try not to lay awake fearing when it will end. You live in a world that is senseless and beautiful and all you can do is cook for those you love and hope it fills their cells and their souls and watch them fly away.
You know I've loved your work from the first, and that I think your voice is so wholly your own - so much so that my usual love of placing a new contributor in a lineage in my mind (who they remind me of, while being of course themselves and original): I don't think I've ever done this in my mind with you. But with this soaring piece, I feel I'm in the company with someone as bracing and unsettling as Annie Dillard. Have we ever discussed Pilgrim at Tinker Creek? Do you know it? I feel if you have you will have understood it better than I did - because the range of disciplines you draw on (like her) is far larger than mine. Anyway... this to say that you continue to suprise me! Txxx
https://thecureforsleep.com/october-issue-birthday-letters/#sheilaknell
Oh my...I love her. She was born in Pittsburgh, about 45 minutes from where I live, but then moved away. I have often felt frustrated with myself because I hop from one interest to the next, never getting quite mastering any subject, life is full of wonder, that oftentimes ends up with books half read, taking me down too many rabbit holes. I think I will borrow your words and start calling it my "range of disciplines." Did you ever watch Love, Actually? I felt like Laura Linney's character when she is behind the door, so excited that Rodrigo Santoro came home with her when this came through. I think that is the gift you give to us all here. xxxx
Yes, yes - it is a range of disciplines, of knowledge, experience, seeing!
And so excited to learn you share a place in common with Dillard. I felt sure you'd know her work, but it's lovely to find out how much!
Love that film and smiling big at the idea of my message helping you have a Laura Linney moment! xxx
Oh Shelia, your writing is like none I have read before! I love it and feel I am recognising it now, as I slowly make my way through these older writing prompts. Your writing is so very unique and I just wonder how one creates such beauty!
Thank you Shelia, I am looking forward to coming across more of your work on here.
Tracey x
Tracey, Thank you so much. So kind of you to take time to respond and I'm glad you enjoy reading it. xx
Dearest me,
Today you watched clouds fly across sky. Standing still, eyes lifted. An eagle caught in current and seemingly so free. Later, you thought there might be a rainbow but didn’t go back to look.
You listened to an owl one night when you couldn’t sleep, risking dark to try for stars. You think you saw one and you might have made a wish.
Water was too cold; smoke burned throats; you saw a sea lion almost come to shore, and it was beautiful.
Someone made someone mad and there’s broken glass on the road now. You like to think about what happened and imagine a life being lived. There may have been love, there was definitely rage and now you have to swerve to miss the shards of it all.
The wind is empty sometimes. You are bumping into silence.
There is stillness and you are crawling, and you are walking in a line that moves like this, but a raven chased a hawk in that same sky clouds were racing and you almost believed in a miracle.
Rain has come again; the apples never ripened; a dog that was lost found home.
Another year has come and gone and you took the table to the other room.
Happy birthday.
I really love the letter to yourself the last line you took the table to the other room is my favourite, something I've done too
Funny how small things make a life and ring true to others 🙏❤️
I'm back, Sabrina, as promised, with a direct link to you gorgeous prose-poem on the project site. Thank you again for taking part. Tx
https://thecureforsleep.com/october-issue-birthday-letters/#sabrina
Oh my. This is the kind of prose that feels like a poem to me: the kind of writing that makes me want to learn some of its lines by heart, I mean: 'Someone made someone mad and there’s broken glass on the road now'; 'Rain has come again; the apples never ripened'...
How beautiful, how mysterious. Thank you for sharing it.
I will make this month's page on the cure for sleep website tomorrow and come back here with your link to your piece on it.
Txx
Dear Daughter
1984: “I’m going to have the baby.” Dad leapt up. Maybe he thought he was going to have be mid-wife but this was ‘Jimmy’s’ and driving wives to hospital was not allowed. I left in the ambulance, wrapped in a white blanket like Virgin Mary, wheel chair for donkey, delivery ward for stable. There was ‘room at the Inn’, except the lift was jammed with an imminent arrival. My waters broke, head engaged, mucus quickly removed from airways, and there, beautiful you. Days later you lay warm and cosy, almost asleep, while outside snow fell on a cold spring day. Brilliant breaking sunshine and I am suddenly overwhelmed with unspeakable happiness.
Between …swapping city for village, we moved to Lincolnshire where you grew up a little shy. Terrorised by your brother trying to convince you that you were adopted, you learnt to hold your own, your sunny personality reflecting your name, ‘bright one’.
A return to the northeast. New schools and plentiful cousins, your reticence disappeared with the arrival of Barney, our King Charles spaniel. Adventurous, on frequent Eurocamp holidays you made friends regardless of language. Persuasive, you appeared one morning in PJ’s, hat, coat, scarf, feet in shoe boxes to convince us to invest in a ski-trip. Laughter always.
If I wondered what the future held for you, you have constantly surprised me: trekking in Madagascar; University; a year in New Jersey; London, Manchester before heading to Cambodia, Asia and finally your fifth continent Australia. Navigating airports, visas, time zones, you evolved into the adventurous one.
2018, home. The most delightful surprise of all, a beautiful son for you. Roots and wings.
2024. I’m so proud of the person you have become: brilliant mother, thoughtful daughter, long suffering sister and you, yourself! Kind, empathetic, humorous and mercy hearted; it’s been 40 years of privilege.
Jean Wilson
Oh my. Curated this, and typing to you now, through tears… good ones. Part mother in me, part the daughter (whose mother could never have written to me like this). How I hope you share this with yours - wonderful-sounding person that she is. Just beautiful, Jean. Thank you for entrusting it to our project here. Txx
https://thecureforsleep.com/october-issue-birthday-letters/#jeanwilson
I used to struggle to remember the date of my dad’s birthday. Was it the 28th or the 29th? I don’t really know why this block existed around its date. I never had the same problem with Mum’s birthday, despite knowing that there was some doubt around it. Being born during the war, perhaps in or around an air raid would add difficulty to dates.
Because everything was about mum – how is your mum? Is your mum better? Bless your poor dad, such a rock, looking after your mum. Always the star of the show, though probably preferring not to be, my ‘mad’ mum, my loyal faithful dad.
Once I got his birth date correct, the next pressing issue was what to buy as a gift? The usual stalwarts of socks and shirts soon ran out; the lack of interest in reading, beyond histories of local pubs, ruled out books. So I turned to music – replacing and or updating dad's old tapes of Bob Dylan,The Rolling Stones, Cat Stevens etc. Sometimes a DVD, perhaps Das Boot (to satisfy the former submariner in him) or a comedy by Robin Williams.
I was often not sure if I had got it right. But dad wasn’t that bothered about birthdays really, beyond a nice card and perhaps a pint of bitter later in the pub.
And now? Now, dad doesn’t know it’s his birthday, let alone what day or year it is. When we tell him, he is pragmatic and fine about it, it just comes as a surprise to him, that’s all.
Does a birthday count if the person with it doesn’t remember the significance of the day? I don’t know. I mark it for him, I remember for him.
You've given voice here, Sharon, to something that I know will speak to many on here: the strange unknowable quality of a certain kind of loyal, caregiving parent - and that wish to show love while not quite knowing them the way you'd want to. I find the searching, questioning quality of your piece so moving, as well as good writing. Always glad when I see a piece from you come through! Here is your link...
https://thecureforsleep.com/october-issue-birthday-letters/#sharonc
Txx
Thanks for your generous response, as always. I kind of hold my breath once I have submitted one of these pieces, as think "this time I will get found out for being no good"!
Will keep writing and submitting regardless though.
I'm glad you shared that post-submission feeling so that I can assure you of how I respond to your and others' work here: I'm listening for the quality of thought and memory and self-examination. Celebrating too qualities in each person's prose that seem to me distinct in them, even while sometimes - in the best way - reminding me of established writers whose work I admire. There is no fixed and single measure of 'good' beyond what I describe in my community guidelines, which is 'good intent'. And yet it's also true to say that I've not yet received a piece of writing which didn't have some quality to it that I admired! Which interests me because it makes me wonder how much exciting writing and thinking never gets sent to projects and publications which are more obviously selective!
OMGOODNESS that video is, as the term you use, so touching! What a wonderful couple you are. I started at this post as it tied in with us first meeting yesterday- 16 April 2023 -on what I was nudged to remember by my brother Russell was our mum’s birthday. I’d forgotten. She’s been ten years gone now. All of this threw up so much yesterday and I’m going to come back to it later but got to make the tea now. But just to say that video has made me feel all the more blessed to find this lovely place 💝
Ah, thank you. For watching and joining us here. Looking forward to your stories!
I loved that Philip Larkin poem to Sally Amis! Not read it before-v moving. Thanks for sharing it
Dear A,
The call for birthday letters arrived the day after your birthday. As always, I’d thought of sending you a card on the first of the month, nearly four weeks early – much too soon, even with the increasing vagaries of airmail. As always, I then forgot, and instead had to send an apologetic email on the day. We’ve both been doing this for years, more birthdays than not.
This is a big one, the year you reach the age your father was when he died. The same age as my father when he died, both of them felled unexpectedly in robust middle age. Soon you and I will both be older, god/dess willing, than our fathers ever were. I see it’s weighing on you.
So many odd ways in which our lives, lived on different continents since secondary school, have intersected and echoed one another. Makes it tempting to read meaning and portent in the patterns. Or to ask, how much were our paths laid by the shared circumstances of the children we were?
But becoming our fathers’ elders – just as each of us mothered our mothers, in their waning months – suggests to me we write our own way. That when we each post photographs of a flat grey sea on the same day – one looking east, the other west – or find we love a particular song or are watching a migratory bird in common, it is cultivated sympathy, not soulless fate. That friendship creates synchronicity, and habits of perception; that it continues to generate the food of its own further thriving. The scattered crumbs of digital contact and also the rich feasts of occasional physical presence.
Cake, dear A. Until I can bake one for you, from a recipe I didn’t learn from either parent.
Love,
Nicola
Nicola! How beautiful that you've returned to the project - so soon after your big essay win - and with this exquisite piece. Which is both personal but full of perspectives that widen the sky for me, and the field of how these kind of connections can be understood and articulated. Every sentence is beautiful, but this in particular was stunning to me:
"It is cultivated sympathy, not soulless fate. That friendship creates synchronicity, and habits of perception; that it continues to generate the food of its own further thriving."
Here is your link to the piece in the story archive. I won't share it on Twitter (I tend to only do that in replies if a contributor is talking with me about the project, as I don't like to embarrass people or give a sense that some stories impress me more than others. And yet I'm always happy to see contributors share their words beyond here...
https://thecureforsleep.com/october-issue-birthday-letters/#nicolapitchford
Congratulations again on your essay getting such recognition, and thank you for being part of this humbler undertaking!
Txx
Oh Tanya your words touch me so deeply. I don't quite know what to say except thank you for your time, your close reading of all the work you are creating here, and your utter care and respect for our words and our work.
🙏
It's a privilege, a joy, the best kind of responsibility. xxx
To Blackpool, to me.
This year my birthday was hijacked by the queen. It was the day of her funeral, so I decided to take a leaf out of her book and have two. Birthdays that is, not funerals.
So here I am eight days later, on a train to Blackpool. There’s an acorn in my pocket, and the silver sparkly pen my son bought me for my birthday. I chose it myself, he said. Happy birthday from your twat of a son, he wrote in my card. Love you mum.
The rain is heavy and persistent, streaking down the train windows. I trace the wobbling drops with my finger. I know it will stop by the time we pull into Blackpool. The morning has been fraught, my son telling me to go fuck myself multiple times as I try and get him out of the house by 7.30 to catch the bus to college.
As the train pulls further away from my home town, I feel the ties unravelling. At the moment, being in my house, in my life, often feels like being tangled in barbed wire. A year ago, when he admitted that he was seeing someone else, I asked my son’s father to leave the house, and he refused. The situation is ongoing, and somehow it is all my fault.
It’s not my fault.
But Blackpool. Blackpool, where the North Shore is a five minute walk from the station. Blackpool, where the skies are big, and something inside me expands and reaches out to fill the space, tunes into the tides, and listens as the waves crash. Blackpool, where I can reconnect with myself. I am a grain of sand. I am the wind.
Next year, next year, things will be different. Happy birthday.
Kerry! Thank you for joining the project. Our conversation will be in my thoughts often from now on. I just saw your email but as it’s my sons 16th today I’ve not been able to reply to messages. But you’ve found now this right route for submitting your work anyway. I will read tomorrow after my first mentoring call of day is over & will let you know via here too when your piece is in the story archive.
I do hope you’ll want to respond to other themes here - just use the comments area on the post you’re writing on to submit, as you’ve done here.
More tomorrow!
Txx
Thank you Tanya…our conversation will remain with me for a very long time.
Feels an honour to now become part of this community you have set up…x
Dear Kerry, as promised, I've now read your piece and curated it over on the cure for sleep website. Here is your direct link to it in case you want to use that when applying for writing grants or when approaching other publishers:
https://thecureforsleep.com/october-issue-birthday-letters/#kerrywhitley
It has the same impact on me that your mentoring application and piece had: the way you move between the sometimes brutal/ugly/painful moments of domestic & inner life to a hardy determined outward-facing energy. It's compelling to me and I feel you have both essays and a long work ahead of you that will find readers who it speaks to as it does me.
Txx
Ah thank you Tanya so much ! I wasn't sure I'd I had some to contribute but found myself in the kitchen early sat baking a birthday orange cake 😊
Thank you for always reading and taking time to add these to the archive ! Much love monique xxx