Love lessons hard to stomach

I wish someone told me at some point: ‘Maybe it is a good time to visit your family.’ There was no one there to tell me that. There was no one to remind me, to encourage me, to make that decision for me. Perhaps we were all too comfortable with WhatsApp chats and occasional phone-calls. All too comfortable with not needing to clean up the house before the guests arrive, make time for each other. We are heavy together at times, true, but we are also good managers of each other’s moods if we choose to be.

I chatted to a friend recently online. I was almost breathlessly listing all the troubles that do not belong to my dream life and that are not possible to escape from. With every point listed, I felt that I was adding a stone to her basket, making her life as heavy as mine. I felt she listened through reading the messages in our chat but I had an impression that I was making her body posture bend, just as mine was bending at the time. I felt horrible for being so needy and then I thought maybe she thinks differently about it all. Maybe… she has a bag in front of her and all my stones end up in that bag and then perhaps she will use them to create borders for flowers in her real or imagined garden. Perhaps she will make something useful out of my pain. Perhaps every point listed needs support to be enlisted.

I am feeling quite lonely now and strangely I have this urgent need to care for the world, feeling that I messed up big time on a few seminal life tasks in the last ten years and I’d like not to be doing it forever. Regrets pour out of me through holes in my head and chest and where the holes are I have a vision of green grasses growing. When I was little I used to help my dad with guarding our cherry orchard. Every so often I would sit down in the very early morning hours and I would watch the dew on the grass blades and their shimmering in the morning rising sun. I remember thinking then that there is no hope for me as there is no job that would pay me for looking at the light piercing through water. Children know little about the job market, don’t they?

Above my desk, on a shelf, I have a mug depicting the hedgehog character from Beatrix Potter’s story, Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, illustrating also a piece of cake on a plate, a tea cup, a butterfly, a ladybird and twig and her in the garden with a bird perched next to her apron. She looks at the cake invitingly with an expression saying: ‘I hope you will like it, my dear’. Next to it there is an old battery (which my husband tells me off for using because he correctly thinks the rechargeable ones are much more environmental, he knows his stuff) and a small electric candle that shimmers when I put it on. The candle is reassuring, albeit it is not a real one. I can’t stop the temptation of being cynical about world advancements. I think I am missing the poets of Grasmere, the guys that would say no to developments and preserve grass fields so that we could do the job of the poets, writers, politicians, film-makers, recovering androids, whatever. Who wouldn’t like to be the good android on the cards of human history? One that gives the air back to people.

I like Beatrix Potter a lot but this inviting expression ‘I hope you will like it, my dear’ is not necessarily what I need right now given that in the last 7 years I put on weight over 30 kilograms of precious mass mostly because I changed my lifestyle a lot and moved my bottom into a car seat fed up with pushing the pram. I haven’t made reasonable adjustments taking into account the needs of the body and the needs of bossy kids. At some stage I also worked in a very challenging school witnessing a lot of misbehaviour and violence at times. I remember I was so stressed after work that I would stop in front of Tesco, buy a huge pack of Pringles and I would eat it all in one sitting in a car even before I entered the house. My stress levels at the time where beyond what I could handle even after having completed a course in Stress Management and I was working with a former football coach and someone who trained in boxing. The unpredictability of violence – this I could not stomach and neither could he.

My health collapsed then again and I saw that there are limits to every training and every theory and every good intention. I wasn’t the right person for those kids, but who was? Do they ultimately need to see for themselves that they are going in a wrong direction?

That said, I think there is some ridiculousness about the way we judge kids, about the way we name what we are doing. For example, back there at the school, the long lessons for kids with difficulties in attention were changed into 20 minute tasks and then a break, but then you read any guide on good lecturing and this is exactly what it recommends, for anyone who attends a lecture to keep the students engaged, so how come one measure is labelled as students engagement and the other one as a strategy to manage disruptive behaviour. Ultimately, it is the same thing and a brain to feed at regular intervals. Wouldn’t business leaders call it the Pomodoro technique? Is it possible that we are all unruly kids with a tendency for violent behaviour if we are kept in cages for too long, be it the cage of boredom, deprivation or permanent interference?

I thought I was on a staircase to heaven back then, trying to handle as many social issues as I possibly could tackle at the time and now I am more conscious of looking for steps that could really make a difference. I am limited in scope.

That said, when we try to stay on that staircase and we put our foot on a wrong step and our leg is sinking, does it do it to get burnt or to heal? Are there any other substances in material science that do not have the same effect on the body as concrete? Mud baths, perhaps? Sometimes the step is this. The mud bath that puts our feet in recovery. That heals the legs to make things safer.

The radio reported this morning of the Pope’s operation and that it was successful and he is recovering. Illnesses are dissatisfying companions, that perhaps remind us that we should be taking our wishes into account while we are still living and breathing. {By the way, if you are working in an office, have you also noticed that the word ‘operations’ is one of the triggers for your colleagues and employees and yet we use it for our admin offices. An anxiety trigger that perhaps is worth noticing when things get a bit stuck at work.}

I think that’s it from me today. Just remember to keep on cuddling your kids, those inner ones and those nearby. Love to all, A.

And my prayer for today.

God, with clenched teeth I rest today.

May I remain silent about how much I love you or fear you. Just in case…

The voice cruises towards you…

I can feel it too.

But you are on your own timeline.

Thank God.

By for now,

Alicja Pyszka-Franceschini