Christmas

and other things that don't last forever

Today the children have been back at school, and as it’s Twelfth Night, I am supposed to have taken down the Christmas tree. I haven’t done it yet. It is still twinkling there, in the corner, decorated, as every tree should be, with a completely random assortment of stuff the kids have proudly brought back from school over the past decade - clay reindeers, paper robins, handmade googly-eyed pom-poms and decidedly grubby felt snowmen - along with some extremely choice plastic baubles they’ve been allowed to choose annually from the garden centre. Like me, it has quite a large amount of soul but very little class. I can’t quite bring myself to dismantle it.

This Christmas has felt normal and wholesome in stark contrast to the last, during which everything proceeded exactly as it always does, with mince pies, turkey and a tree, but with our entire family tag-teaming covid and therefore mostly unable to leave the house. All of us have had similar experiences in the past two years, a sort of house arrest with all the luxuries of modern life but none of the autonomy. For some, it’s been worse still - the inability to be with loved ones during sickness, tragedy or loss, for example. Nobody has been unaffected.

Have we fully processed the collective experience of a global pandemic? I don’t think we’ve even come close. If we were a small group of co-workers, or a family, or a school community who had been through such an ordeal, I’m pretty sure we’d be having some intensive therapy right now. But when the difficult, disconcerting, or even traumatic experience is global, we are presumably less equipped to confront the emotional fallout. Instead we seem destined to just keep moving forward, without much vocalised acknowledgement of what we’ve been through. And yet, as anyone who has spent time with people who have lived through war, disaster, or community tragedy can attest, such large scale shared human experiences leave an indelible imprint.

For me, one imprint of the pandemic is the way it reinforced the utter fragility of everything we take for granted. The freedom of jumping in your car or on a train. Setting off for a weekend away. Being in a pub. Hugging people. Seeing your kids into school. All of those things that seemed to be baked in to the lives we had come to expect, just gone, overnight. I still keep wondering why I spent so much of the lockdown in loose fitting clothes, or even in my PJ’s and dressing gown by early evening. Maybe I just needed to feel some kind of escape from the endless restriction, and being braless was about as close as I could get.

The pandemic experience is absolutely not the same as the trauma of war or disaster, but nevertheless I feel it’s created in me a low yet audible hum of anxiety, as if I am now forever conscious of walking on a rug that could get pulled from under my feet without warning. And suddenly I seem to be seeing echoes of the same structural fragility that the pandemic exposed, just…everywhere. Over on twitter, I have, perhaps foolishly, built a ‘platform’, as it is called, a place where I have ‘followers’ and they ‘engage’ with me. Thirty three thousand of them, to be precise, and imagine my excitement when, just over a year ago, I was given the precious ‘blue tick’, for being ‘notable’ (based on my fairly regular journalism). Obviously the whole thing is daft, but I couldn’t help feeling a little bit thrilled with the tick, and yes, it did help give me some kudos in terms of my working life, and who doesn’t want that? For a year, I flew with it. But then, Elon came. And now I almost want to get rid of my tick, lest others think I pay eight dollars a month for it. And twitter itself, my 33 thousand followers, my tick and the whole she-bang, could be gone tomorrow if Elon or someone else decides to pull the plug. It is as fragile as tissue paper. In many ways, it is meaningless.

Of course I felt the rug go during the pandemic in another big way too - the reputation I had built up through nearly a decade of campaigning for more positive births for women, was suddenly upended overnight to the point that I was being dropped by a charity I’d supported with my whole heart, deplatformed from an international conference, barred from various facebook groups and campaigns, and even (fairly recently this one) having someone refusing to speak at a conference because the organisers had an endorsement quote from me on their website. I can remember the feeling of it all spiralling so rapidly out of control during the week or two of my social media ‘cancellation’ in November 2020. It was as if I had fallen over a cliff and a crowd had gathered to watch me slowly lose my grip on the tuft of grass I’d grabbed to try and save myself. I could feel it slipping through my hands and in that moment I knew I was absolutely fucked, to be honest. Life as I knew it, was over.

Such experiences can leave us wondering: is there any point in building what can so easily be destroyed? I wonder if this is why my creative energy has been intermittently blocked for the last little while, because if someone kicks your sandcastles down enough times you start to wonder if there is any point even being on the beach. And of course, it’s not really about sandcastles, or reputations, or blue ticks on twitter - it goes deeper, much deeper, to the very nature of being human: on the one hand so important, and fascinating, and multi-dimensional, and vibrant, and on the other hand so fragile and so utterly temporary.

Last week my middle daughter who is 12 kept jokingly asking me if I would marry her but in a kind of desperate, needy way that made me think something else was going on. And it was: she suddenly erupted with a huge outpouring of sorrow, not just that I would die one day, but that she would too, and that we all will, and that eventually nobody will even be able to remember us. “When you die, I will miss you so so much”, she sobbed in my arms, her face almost incredulous at the massive reality of this statement. Both she and her elder sister, 14, seem more anxious about death and mortality than I ever remember being at that age, but of course, I hadn’t spent two years being bombarded with graphs about how many people had died that week or wearing a mask to school. “Seventy years is not very long”, she wept, panic stricken. “What if I make the wrong decisions about what to do with my life?”.

As she said this I remembered ‘While I Nurse You to Sleep’, because I’d shared it just a few days previously here on this substack, in particular the part when I say:

I spin back again into the past and revisit pivotal moments and say all the right things and make all the right choices. I realise that if I change one dot you might not be here, slowly falling asleep in my arms, and decide that all my choices were the right choices even the wrong ones if only because they led me to this moment, to your existence.

I was amazed to realise that, even though she was the baby in the poem, I had never read it to her or even told her about it. We lay on my bed, wiping our tears and sniffing and sobbing as the tissues piled up around us and I read the whole thing aloud to her, ten years after I’d written it. Afterwards she slept the night there, on my left hand side, just as she had done back then when her belly was full of my milk.

For my next chapter in ‘book 4’, I’m going to be exploring body image and how it feels to look in the mirror when you’re female. I’ve been interested recently to see some conversations opening up about aging, with women like Michelle Obama and Emma Thompson speaking candidly about how they feel about their faces and their bodies, and even one or two articles about so-called ‘pretty privilege’, and what it’s like when your ‘looks’ fade and you begin to feel, as a middle aged woman, that you are invisible. I do get the sentiment of all the positivity we have now around menopause, but I also think we are creating a shadow there if we are not careful in which darker truths about the reality of aging and mortality can lurk. We thought they listened to us so carefully because what we had to say was important, but it turns out it was because we were young and beautiful. Sometimes when we catch our reflection, it’s ok to feel angry or sad about that.

Feel the anger, the sadness, the loss…and then face it. Put the baubles in a box. Take down the tree and drag it out the house. Sweep up the needles. Notice the emptiness, the gap. Rearrange the furniture. Move on. I shall do this tomorrow.