I’m still thinking about that tiny – but ever-growing baby…
And I am starting to wonder about a few things.
I never knew my own grandparents. I met my mother’s step mother once, when I was about 7. My childhood contained other people’s grandparents. I had no real aunts and uncles, being the child of solo immigrants. But my brothers and I had a raft of our parents’ friends who were, as was the thing in those days, also called auntie or uncle.
My own mother died suddenly when my youngest son was only four months old, my eldest was ten years old. So now, after the birth of my first grandchild, I am now seeing what has been missed.
When I was in America, looking at my retrospective exhibition, I started to see more and more connections. Since coming home, and letting the experience filter through, I am seeing even more. I see the repeated need to figure out relationships, familial and friendly, because I think… that the friendly relationships, and the future lovers, are actually founded on an inherent understanding of family. So, I had no doting grandparents, and, as my two brothers were 8 and 10 years older than me, I have started to see my rural childhood as somewhat solitary. I think it suited my character to a certain extent… or is it that my character developed that way because of the the solitude?
I have had so far a 41 year marriage. A close relationship, with two lovely sons, now adult, and the grandson… I have good friends… some I have had for a long time, but not from my childhood like some people do (including my husband). I don’t have friends from university the first time round either. I have been known to say to myself that this is because maybe I wasn’t a very nice person in my youth. I certainly think I could be “difficult” to get on with. My oldest friends are from when my own children were young… and I cherish them. Sometimes I don’t think they really understand what I am doing, but they don’t seem to care and they seem to love me anyway.
So I think what my work does, is enable me to have the conversations I missed, that I want to have now. They are tentative explorations of relation, connecting, loving… from different angles, in different media/voices, in the hope of reaching, finding the things I want to say to my mum, to hear the answers I think she might have had, had she lived long enough for me to feel comfortable asking her.
I think I am searching for some roots. I can’t go back very far in my family tree. On paper we have gone back a couple of generations… but I don’t feel connected to those names.
With the joyful birth of my beautiful new grandson, and of all this love, I am coming to realise, that I don’t really need to dig around for the roots. I have become the roots.
New work is being forged with these things at the forefront of my thinking, no longer swimming around in the fog, unidentified, unexpressed.
Is it only BECAUSE I have fifteen years worth of work to look back on that I can identify these ideas? Would this realisation have come to me had I not spent those years making and searching?
A bit of a breakthrough maybe?
Back to the twigs………….
