Silent Sunday
Posted under Silent Sunday
Archive for July, 2011
Anarchy
Posted under Witterings
Kind of quiet round here I know. This always happens when I go in to a kind of crisis. I want to blog it out, I want to talk about it until I’m sick of it … instead I retreat and knot myself up in sleepless nights and the glums.
I quit my job. I took the Holstee Manifesto (which I blogged about a few weeks back) literally. ‘If you don’t like your job, quit’, it says. I don’t, so I did. It’s not been the easiest time trying to extricate myself but the worst of it is over. I have no plans for the future, absolutely none, other than spending the summer with my boys. This is Diggy’s last summer at home before starting school in September. These precious, precious days aren’t coming back.
Right now I don’t feel liberated, although I’m absolutely sure I did the right thing. It’s just not very easy untangling myself, but soon it will be done. Then the slate will be clean and it’s time to start afresh.
In the 20 years I’ve been working I’ve had 3 careers, each hugely different from the other. I’ve never, ever been out of work until now…not even for a day. Times are changing. What’s next? No idea. That’s OK.
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Silent Sunday
Posted under Silent Sunday
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When words aren’t enough
Posted under People I love
Sometimes, words aren’t enough. Sometimes there just aren’t the words…sometimes only touch will do…
One of my clearest memories from primary school was being wrapped in huge, smothering hug by my lovely teacher, Sister Margaret. Things were tough at home, it all got too much for me in class and I lashed out in anger at another child and then collapsed in a puddle of teachers. Sister Margaret quietly swooshed in and led me in to the Quiet Room and just held me. I can remember it so vividly, the feel of her slightly scratchy fawn-coloured pinafore against my cheek, how tall she felt, how she just held me, saying nothing while I sobbed and gave myself up to her embrace.
Of course, she wouldn’t be allowed to cuddle a child these days. Bertie’s teacher isn’t even allowed, strictly speaking, to put suncream on them – since no ‘rubbing’ allowed. My cousin, a teacher of teenagers, can’t touch a child in her care without the presence of another teacher as a ‘witness’. She learnt this the very hard way, after being disciplined for opening the top button of the shirt of a girl who had fainted in class. Her parents made a formal complaint about their daughter being ‘inappropriately touched’.
The guidelines exist to protect children, and that’s right and proper. Seems insane not to be able to help a small child put suncream on, offer comfort in times of need or assistance to the poorly … but I guess that’s where we are. But I can’t help feeling it’s verging on cruel to deny a child, or an adult for that matter, physical comfort when words are so often not enough. I can remember holding a friend of mine as she wept in to my shoulder, telling me she couldn’t have children … and another as, stunned, she told me she’d lost her job and was 6 weeks pregnant … only yesterday I dished out a quick squeeze in the playground for a friend with the glums about a work situation. Sometimes words just don’t cut it.
Though it makes me sad, I accept that the ‘no touching’ rules are in place for good reason and that they exist to protect the innocent. So I have gathered up my cherished memory of Sister Margaret’s warm and heart-felt embrace and keep it in the ‘Precious Memories’ corner of my mind … and hope, probably in vain, that my children won’t ever need that kind of reassurance at school, because it won’t be forthcoming … alas.
