Teenagers

Teenagers - you can't live with them, you can't live with them.


We've had Chris's eldest son with us from Australia for the last month. It's the first time he's been back in seven months and I'd forgotten just what forces of nature teenagers are.


I'd forgotten also how set in my ways and used to my own space I'd become when, within half an hour of Jack arriving from Heathrow, a swarm of youths had descended on our once peaceful home.


I have now returned him safely to Heathrow and am once again mistress of all I survey - bliss. But spending a month in a house littered with teenage detritus (you know - electronic cables, empty glasses, stray friends, strangely bleeping machinery, random items of clothing) made me more tolerant. Far more tolerant than I would be if we were talking years of course, a month's enough! 


My own son is now twenty three - a fact that bemuses me as much as it does those who have never met him & remark on my youthful appearance. Well I can tell you, I'd look a lot more youthful if I'd never had a teenager!


One of my favourite authors, Steven Covey's, 7 secrets of success is: "Seek first to understand". It's an eminently sensible aim in any situation. But with parents and teenagers it often feels as though "there are no files" as my dear sister would say. Really, for both sides it frequently feels like we're speaking Chinese.


Which reminds me - too funny - my dear friend Dorothy is mother to 4 sons ranging from late twenties to pre teen. (She is also one of the most glamorous and gorgeous women I've ever known.) Her older boys used to say to her when she started to berate them over something, "Mum there's no point talking to us because all we hear is 'ning, ning, ning, ning'". See what I mean?


When my son was first a teenager, and we were living in our rather cramped flat in Scotland, I can remember one night lying in bed and thinking: "Being the mother of a teenager is like being forced to live with an ex lover". It's that exquisitely agonising pitch of emotions that seems to be sustained beyond all conceivable endurance...all the time!


Of course we all know how fearless they are about going for our weak spots. I admire the way our children can stab us right through the heart by using all of our demons against us with no qualms whatsoever. I think it shows a good survival instinct.


Did you know: It's not a teenager's fault that they're rude. Turns out that every time they lose it and disown you or seem oblivious to your wisdom, they're not just being obtuse. The part of the brain responsible for empathy is still developing. 


Yeah, so what's our excuse?!


And don't forget, it's a teenager's job to reject their parents - they're programmed to do it. So next time they tell you to p**s off remember that they're only growing into adulthood!


It turns out that even our teenager's inability to get out of bed isn't a deliberate ploy to raise our blood pressure. No, it appears that a teenager's body clock runs slower than an adult's - so 8am feels like 6am to them. Now it all makes sense. Oh how I wish I'd known all this when I was a young mum. 


But I'll tell you what's changed since Jack was last living with us. I did what Steven Covey suggested and I sought first to understand. I admit that it's taken me 23 years and a lot of mistakes to get here, but better late than never.


Or maybe I just took the time to remember: To be a teenager - to not have done enough yet in life to feel guilt; to not have the weight of experience to carry around; to have your entire future ahead of you; to feel immortal.


It seems to me that teenagers, if they're having a good time, are doing just what they're supposed to be doing - living in their own world, involved in their own passions. Surely this is the one time in most of our lives that we can? And all the while that they're driving us parents demented, their brains are growing and developing, preparing them for adulthood. Neat, huh?




Last week a fabulously mesmerising friend of ours had three of us in fits describing her boarding school escapades. These ranged from breaking into Chapel and drinking the Communion wine to exploding out of a cupboard onto an unsuspecting teacher and emptying a fire extinguisher over her. I know it's shocking but I have to confess to being envious of her exploits. Okay so I worked hard and have a degree to show for it, but oh how I wish at 45 that I'd been a little bit more of a teenager.


Well you know what they say, youth is wasted on the young. Which is why I'm practising being a Forty-Something Teenager: I'm fortunate enough to be in a position where I am finally able to put myself first. I can indulge my passions once more, happy in the sure knowledge that other people's business is none of mine.


As Kalil Gibran so beautifully put it in his gem of a book The Prophet, in the chapter On Children: 


"You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday."
x

Here Comes The Sun

Aah, the delectable George Harrison singing Here Comes The Sun. Isn't this the perfect song to accompany the first of the Spring sunshine?

Let's all sing along!

Meditation

I am transcribing here something I wrote last January which I found and thought I’d include because you might find it interesting. I won’t edit, I’ll just copy. Excuse the swearing in advance!

22.1.2010

“I had an amazing experience while meditating tonight. I was lying on my back and stilling my breathing - breathing out all the stress and stuff and breathing in the Universe.

I can see it, see the energy of the universe, rushing into me, through me. And it feels like I have no boundaries.

I have my eyes closed but it’s not black. I have a vision of sizzling particles, buzzing energy and it forms a mandala around me. First I am looking at it, and as I breathe I merge with it until I am at it’s centre.

Now I am at the centre of the mandala. When I breathe in I have the sensation of reducing in on myself (except I feel no self). And when I breathe out I feel the energy expanding.

There are two things that always happen when I meditate. Almost simultaneously, as I relax into a medititive state, I see a light growing stronger behind my eyes. The light grows stronger the deeper I go until it fills my entire vision. 


At the same time (oh it’s 3 things) my head starts to lift involuntarily - weird. When I used to meditate sitting upright in a chair, I would start with my head falling forward relaxed. And as I meditated it would lift up until my face was tilting upwards.

And as if that wasn’t weird enough, at the same time as I’ve got the glowing bright light and the lifting head, I start to smile! Every time, totally involuntarily - how mad is that?!

I mean I can be doing my thing and not quite settled and there’re a few negative thoughts or problems flitting across my mind, and I start to smile. And I mean a big cheesy grin! It starts slowly - with the head lifting and the lightbulb behind the eyes stuff - and by the time I’ve finished, my head is tilted upwards and I’ve got this great big, open mouthed, beatific smile on my face. Mental!

Now I meditate in the dark lying down before I go to sleep. Which is just as well because anyone happening upon me in this state would get the fright of their life. Either that or they’d think I’d been up to some unmentionable act!

The other thing that always happens is that my body disappears. It’s a bit like a physical version of what I described earlier. Like my mind and self merging with the collective energy but in physical form. My body heats up very rapidly - a strange dry heat - hot enough that I should be sweating but instead it’s a prickly heat like static electricity - dry.

I can feel this buzzing, tingling heat but it doesn’t feel like it’s got any boundaries. I can feel the heat crackling around the surface of my body (I guess where the energy my body’s generating meets the energy around me) but I can’t define it. It feels as if my body has totally disappeared.

My breath becomes very shallow and incredibly slow. Sometimes, when I’m in the state I’m describing fully, I take a sudden breath and realise that I haven’t been breathing at all.

I love meditation. I spent a weekend in the basement of an Edinburgh townhouse when I was 14, learning to meditate, after a British Airways hostess friend of ours reccommended my mum and I try it. 
It was amazing, a revelation to me. The house inside was shabby and hippy. Incense burned and the residents all seemed to wear hessian and hemp (or so it seemed to me). 




Being a bit of a Hippy myself, I was delighted with it all - although way out of my comfort zone at 14. Anyway, that was my initiation into Transcendental Meditation a la Maharishi Mahesh Yogi of The Beatles fame.

When you are inducted you’re given a mantra which is unique to you. I can’t imagine it’s totally unique. Can you imagine having to think up millions of unique mantras, all with different sound combinations?! You’d end up with weird pig noises & swear words!! Oh that’s too funny - I’m having a fit of laughing now.

Just picture it - some poor bastard practising his meditation and his mantra is a barking sound or ”fuck”! Mind you, I’ve seen a few people audibly meditating then: “fuck, fuck ,fuck”... usually after falling over or dropping something! Oh I’ve made myself laugh again and lost my train of thought!

As I was saying, I love meditation. I haven’t done it religiously since the age of 14. I was diligent in my youth, right into my student years. It is an incredibly powerful state - healing and energising and empowering and inspiring and enriching.

When I was 19 and living in a student house in Edinburgh, I went back to my room one lunchtime to meditate (very diligent!) Anyway I didn’t meditate for very long. You’re supposed to increase from 20 minutes to however long you like but I generally last about 15 minutes. Any longer and my fidget-arse self gets bored and starts wriggling.

That probably explains why meditating suits me. I can go very quickly into it and pretty much anywhere. When I travelled a lot I used to meditate anywhere - on the Tube, on a park bench, with noise all around. But once I reach a certain state in that kind of environment the background fades out. It’s like an accute awareness and accute relaxation combined.

Sorry, back to my story: I’m a 19 year old student meditating in my sunny wee corner room in my student house one lunchtime. It must have been only 20 minutes but during that time I had a real Peak Experience. Now I understand the state better and the science behind it, I guess it was my first and most intense experience of the state I describe above.

But it was more than that: the light and boundlessness and the ecstatic feeling and the strength of the energy flowing through me were incredibly powerful. I was unable even to be aware that I felt that way. Awareness involves conscious thought and this was something else. I had no physical sense of who I was and no conscious awareness of the state I was in and yet I knew completely what it was and where I was and how it felt:

Boundless

Infinite

Like cosmic white noise

and yet defined

Understood

Remembered. 

It was the weirdest (and I’ve had some!) and most powerful experience I’d ever had (and have ever had) in my life.

When I came back to normality and left the house to meet my friends Scott and Jaime, I tried to explain it to them. But there were no words . The best I could manage through my smiling, breathless garblings, was that I now knew what death was like. The state we call death, that’s what I had experienced. Like a glimpse, a moment, of the state that is ours when we shuffle off this mortal coil.

Jaime was horrified. He’s a Spanish Catholic. (Come to think of it, he might’ve wangled me a Sainthood or something. I could’ve been venerated in a cave and people would pay to drink my bath water. Might’ve missed a trick there.)

But no, Jaime maintained his horror at my macabre “experience” and took me to see “Harold & Maude”. What a film - hilarious! An E Type Jaguar converted into a hearse because Harold’s obsessed with death. If you haven’t seen it - Harold’s about 18 and Maude’s 70ish - too funny.

So I’ve never been able to express what I experienced 23 years ago. Until tonight when it happened, in a different way, again.

It may have sounded morbid and I must’ve sounded nuts, but it changed my life. Well wouldn’t it? I had an experience of pure bliss and oneness with the universe, an experience that I know was real - because some things just are. 

That’s a good experience to have under your belt at the age of 19. My diligence paid off!"

     

My First Sculpture in 21 Years

My lovely hubby excelled himself this birthday and bought me some clay, a modelling board and some tools. So this morning, for the first time in 21 years, I created something in clay.
This is my first (unfinished) wee maquette (like a mini 3 dimensional sketch for a bigger sculpture). It's about 4 inches high.
I was so excited this morning when I woke up and remembered that I was about to get my hands mucky! 


21 years is a long time not to do something that I used to be so passionate about and practiced in. But I'd locked away my creativity, too afraid that if I carried on sculpting I wouldn't get on with 'real life'.  


And that's why I'm putting these photos on my blog - to ensure that I can't carry on as a 'margin artist' for another 21 years!


Thank you. x

Happy Birthday to all you Slippery Little Fish out there!

Hello everyone, it's my birthday today - 45 years young. I'll drink a wee toast to you all!
Happy Weekend!
Laura x

Sing, sing a song. Sing it loud, sing it long." The Carpenters

I love music. Songs are truly the soundtrack to my life. It was pointed out last October by a dear new friend that we met in Montana, that I have a song for everything. I spent the entire fortnight finding songs appropriate to every situation. I just do. It's fun.


When I was pregnant with my son Max, I had few cravings: Granny Smith apples, the colour red and classical music. Mostly Bach and Mozart - I enjoyed their ordered simplicity, it soothed me. Occasionally, when feeling particularly hormonal, I would listen to Chopin.


I have to tell you the funniest story. It happened when I was pregnant I think, or at least Max was very young. Gavin and I were driving up to Colinton in Edinburgh. I shared my mum's old Fiesta with my younger brother and it was my week for driving. We drove past a Hedgehog in the middle of the road. Being bleeding heart Art Students we decided that the only possible action was to stop the car and rescue the poor soul. 


As we stopped the car, a lorry drove past, squashing the Hedgehog flat. Yes, what's so funny about that? Well nothing. Except that as we watched this poor creature shuffle off this mortal coil, Chopin's Requiem was playing on the tape recorder.


It was too funny. I told you, God's a funny guy! Who do you imagine invented humour?


Anyway, I digress. Actually I've digressed so much that I've completely forgotten what I had to say.


Oh yes, music. You've probably gathered that I have fairly Catholic tastes in music. Funny expression that. The Catholics I've met - in real life and through study, have seemed to me pretty conservative in their tastes. Although I am happy to have had the privilege of meeting many wonderful exceptions to this rule.


I thought about it and guess that the term was coined to describe the Vatican's well read and well educated house. "know thine enemy". It comes from a good Source and for good reason. How can we control our subjects if we don't know what makes them tick?


Shame though. They missed out on a lot of fun by banning and denying all that great literature and art.
No matter of course since it only serves to make it more powerful.


My musical tastes - Catholic. Okay it's pretty safe. I like a good melody and interesting words, and a good beat, oh and the potential to sing and dance along. Not many requirements. I am innately lazy and pleasure seeking in my musical tastes. I love James Taylor and Lyle Lovett. I love Ella Fitzgerald and Joni Mitchell and Carole King and Carly Simon. I love Reggae music. What a beat. 


We watched a programme on BBC 4 and they explained the beat of Reggae music. The trick is to fuse the drums and the base into one beat, one vibration - like a heartbeat. Brilliant. My favourite is "Stir It Up". 
I had the pleasure of seeing The Wailers at the Vintage at Goodwood Festival. They were amazing. I'd been feeling a bit miserable, and behaving miserably, much to my disgust. I was standing in a long slow queue for the toilets when I heard the strains of "Stir It Up" drifting towards me in the dark. I was mesmerised - swaying and singing harmonies like a loony. I didn't care.


I watched them for as long as I could. Dancing and singing at the top of my voice, a permanent grin on my face. What's not to love? A stage full of beautiful Rastafarians full of talent and sure of who they are - their place in the world. That's very sexy. And the music is sexy - primal and rhythmic and in tune with who we are in the best sense of the word.


Mmm, I also love ballads. I'm a Balladeer at heart. I'm not a rocker, although I do fancy myself as Trailer Trash Country. I love The Dixie Chicks. My friend Cara put me onto them and I am eternally grateful.


One of my favourites is "Tonight The Heartache's on Me". It's brilliant, telling the story of a woman alone in a bar when her ex lover walks in with his new girlfriend. She looks like an angel and he looks smug as. Her answer is to take it on the chin and invite everyone to drink a toast to her - the butt of the joke.


I also adore Paul Weller - Mod Father and founder of The Jam. I first fell in love with Paul and his beautiful songs when I was about twelve. I used to make my own badges and listened to all their albums. Favourites of mine were Eton Rifles and All Mod Cons. There is a song on All Mod Cons that has my stomach turning somersaults just thinking about it. It is a song called "English Rose". I am hoping that our new friend Skyler the Cowboy will sing it when we move to Montana. It begins with the most beautiful and haunting fog horns. Yes really! And then the achingly moving and simple voice of the Mod Father himself soars quietly above the waves and the sound of trains in the distance. Exquisite.


Oh but what about Disco?! I love Disco. "Halston, Gucci, Fiorucci". I begged my mum to bring me back a bottle of Halston perfume from America. I treasured it for years, still do. It felt and smelt so glamorous - just like Studio 54. 


One of my favourites is "Young Hearts Run Free". I identified so strongly with the lyrics of that song. I used to sing it to myself while working on the shop floor as a Management Trainee for Jenners. I would day dream about a time in the future when I could go back to my first loves - sculpting and writing and singing and living in La La Land.


My list is endless and you've probably had enough now. So I will leave you with another line from a song very dear to my heart.


Perhaps a wee hymn, it being Sunday n all. "Sing Hosanna" is one of my favourites. I was a choir girl after all. God and I sing that one a lot. You can really belt it out and it sounds pretty funny, especially when I burst out involuntarily. God really does have a sense of humour.


Thank you for reading this and thank you even if you didn't.
x


PS: I've put links to some of my favourite songs on my Blog - take a look!

The Good Wife

I am a wife. I consider myself a good wife. Or even a Good Wife. I make this claim because I know what it is to be a poor wife.
Sadly my first husband bore the brunt of my learning - by trial and error mostly - okay by error mostly. I call Gavin my first husband now. I have much experience of Exs and I don't think it's an appropriate word to describe a previous spouse. Yes it feels good at the beginning when we want to reinforce our decision and forge a separate identity. 


But they are never really our ex-spouse. How can it be so? I have a son with my first husband. My husband has two sons with his last wife. I know that such bonds cannot be broken, no matter how hard we try to destroy them, like an animal who would chew off his own leg to gain his freedom.


I have some experience of divorce. I remember hearing Billy Connolly's version of "D.I.V.O.R.C.E" and loving the words, too young to know what they meant - just that they were funny in his hands.


So I was with my first husband for thirteen years. Something I regard as a success. We were young when we met - 17 and 18. We grew up together and grew apart. I am not surprised. We each brought a lot of baggage to our marriage. It was interesting, and fun, and challenging and I wouldn't change it for the world. Which brings me to my current husband.


I have had the pleasure of knowing Chris for some thirteen years - as long as I was with Gav. It was love at first sight and I don't write that lightly. We met when his then business partner Bill double booked an appointment I had to view a clothing collection and fobbed me off on Chris. Despite having visited their showrooms previously, I had never met Chris and didn't even know he existed.


It was July and I was knee deep in the middle of a buying season. I had left my husband some  five months earlier and was still reeling from the pain and shock and overwhelming sense of failure that our separation had brought so violently to the fore. Truth be told I was also still recovering from a broken heart - a doomed love which had given me the impetus to leave forever.


So not really paying much attention to my imminent appointment, I sat down to wait on a black leather sofa which now resides in our marital home. When Chris walked into Reception and I stood up to shake his hand, the weirdest thing happened. Remember I told you about my mum speaking to me? Well this is the precursor to that.


As I stood and reached out my hand to greet this stranger. As I looked him square in the eyes, as I had been taught, as I placed my small hand into his strong, large one, I heard a voice.


And the voice that I heard was my own. Too strange for words. As I gazed into my future husband's eyes and felt his warm, safe hand envelope mine, I heard my own voice say distinctly: "I want to spend the rest of my life with this man".


Can you imagine? Has it happened to you? I didn't know what had hit me. It was such a strange thing to say to myself. I spent the entire appointment tongue tied and clumsy and I left their showroom on a different planet.


It was many years before my initial thought became even remotely possible and our love was not consummated for many years, but I never forgot that moment and it sustained me through many a painful experience.


Many years later and happily married, I realised what it was that I had felt that summer's evening so many years before. I felt as though I recognised him. I recognised my future husband. I looked into his eyes and I relaxed, knowing that I'd found my soul mate.


I know it all sounds very romantic - and it was to me. The reality of our situation was rather more mundane and complicated. Isn't it always? But the knowledge that I was given that day and the solid love that has grown out of not only our years together, but our shared experiences, has proven to be the perfect recipe for our marriage.


Oh God, I sound like a Mills and Boon novel! Yes, well, that's how I feel. So now I can tell you why I think I am a good wife.


I am a good wife by instinct. Everything that I didn't do in my first marriage I try to do in this one. It is no effort, that is it's strength. I know that our aim is to love unconditionally and let go of Maya - illusion. And I have struggled for many years to overcome my demons and live in that way. This is different. Different in that being a good wife to my beautiful husband Chris is no effort, no chore. I love him unconditionally just like in the movies. I want to please him because his happiness is one of my main goals.


Now I subscribe to Deepak Chopra's view that we all have our Dharma - our one unique talent, skill that is individual to each of us. The belief (Hindu I think) is that we each have one special gift, something that we have a passion for and therefore we are good at. The combination of happiness and purpose is a powerful one - the most powerful.


Well, I reckon that I am Chris's Dharma. It seems to be true. His purpose in life, the thing that he is better than anyone else at, is me. Wow. How lucky am I?


Shall I tell you what he said to me quite early on in our relationship? I was bemoaning some situation, at work probably, and he made a pertinent observation about it and my feelings. I was so taken aback by someone noticing that I asked him how he came to know this about me. His reply to this day is still the loveliest thing that anyone has ever said to me. He said:


"I pay attention to you." 


How beautiful is that? What more do any of us really want but to be noticed, to be heard. I once told that story to a group of my girlfriends. The collective aah that rang round the table was deafening.


So Chris, who is 20 years my senior and all the better for it, continues to inspire me to feats of selflessness that I had only dreamed possible. Of course they're not selfless at all, I just choose to consider them that way. If Chris is happy then I'm happy - whatever that involves.


And I've found that in practising selflessness I am become less selfish. Despite my false altruism I am changed by loving Chris unconditionally. It has made me a better person and a better wife.


Perhaps that is a more appropriate title for this piece. "The Better Wife". Yes, I like that. That sounds much more interesting and flexible than 'good'. More room for manoeuvre in that. Because although I claim such things for myself, I only do so within the context of our relationship. Many of the things that I think make me a better wife would be heinous crimes in some eyes. Isn't that always the case? And I don't care. It's none of my business what other people think of me.


I'll just carry on striving to be a better wife and therefore a better mother, daughter, friend. Because it feels like the right thing to do.


Thank you husbands.
x