Did you ever set out to make something beautiful and good or even just nice, only to give up when it was nearly completed ?
I've done this a lot and sometimes it distresses me, but mostly I just spend time thinking, with a kind of detached interest, about the reasons for it.
*
She sits on the little bed with it's painted wooden arms that Dad made especially and attached to its sides so she wouldn't fall out. Mum's rampaging through her wardrobe, as if she's looking for something and suddenly pulls out a hotch potch collection of what looks like just bits of material but in and amongst are some little half stuffed toys that began as attempts for her brownie sewing badge.
She'd been to the lady's house, with another brownie, and the lady had shown them how to make a pattern with some paper, pin it to the material, cut it out and sew it, leaving a small hole, which you could stuff with special stuffing or some old tights if you didn't have any proper stuffing.
There was the little felt Humpty Dumpty with his long loose legs which the lady had praised but had made some comments about making the stitches smaller or something and making sure the button eyes were secure which had felt slightly embarrassing, and she hadn't done that because she'd got the badge anyway and hadn't really liked the Humpty Dumpty toy anyway because
she didn't know why
she sighs as she sees him
Mum places him on the bed beside her and pulls out the three other, aborted, attempts at different characters and places them beside him.
They make a motley crew.
Why don't you ever finish things ? she cries in frustration. The strength of feeling in the mother's voice is startling. The child is shocked into silence. She didn't know her mum felt that way about her.
Paralysed in that moment, she can but look askance at the Motley Crew, thinking churlishly for a moment how they'd got her into trouble, but then the sight of the poor things with their flat heads and gaping holes, old tights peeping through, their lack of arms, their insufficient legs, the way their sometimes one eye gazed unblinkingly, unaware of the consternation they had caused in their incompleteness melts the small child's heart and she gathers them up and puts them in the fairy cot her mum and dad had made her one Christmas and turns around and says not sorry to her mum but that she will, she'll finish them
but she doesn't.
She attaches some bits of green wool to the flat head of the smallest, whose one black button eye is sewn on with a rather garish yellow thread, making her look a bit demonic and she hugs and kisses her and tells her she's beautiful she doesn't need another eye as she lays her back in the cot next to the hard bodied beautiful black baby doll with her sleeping eyes and her silky blue bonnet that the child thinks is absurd but doesn't remove because the soft black curls underneath are also wrong somehow she doesn't know why they just are.
Another day she sews an arm onto the turtle shaped toy but she doesn't have enough of the same material for any more and anyway she isn't really sure what a turtle looks like she just liked the word, so she pops him in the cot on the other side of the baby doll, next to nearly complete Humpty, whispering one day she'll fix him when she's found a picture and the right stuff.
The biggest one is like a sun she thinks, but worries that the sun shouldn't be fat, nor have limbs, so she simply sews the buttons on with some pleasing red thread, so pleasing she doesnt notice immediately that they're placed rather strangely close to the edge and when she does she simply sighs and puts them with their friends in the cot.
The child covers The Motley Crew with the pink frilly edged counterpane that mum had sewn by hand because at that point they had no sewing machine then sat on her bed to read.
The mother never mentions them again and the child never finishes them, but often tells them that they're good enough for her and she'll protect them from the mum if she should ever uncover them.
*
It's not as if blame can be attached to anyone, nor a direct cause and effect cited because, after all, these tiny incidents are just part of growing up and learning are they not. Sure, the mother could have been less emotional about the Motley Crew. In a different mood she might have been. A different person might have not mentioned them at all, or maybe taken one out, sat down next to the child and asked her if she'd like some help - they could look through the button box together and find some more and this other person would help the child sew them on securely ?
The child doesn't even know of a different way because she is a child and lacking in experience. There are other people in her life but no-one yet to help with projects such as these.
And these facts are also the reasons for the Two Lost Summers.
The first was one following the rather surprising event of the child winning an art competition with a rather psychedelic picture of a sunflower. Each seed was a different colour, meticulously drawn and coloured in with wax crayons. The somewhat ominous dark blue powder colour wash her teacher had shown her how to paint over it was a strange and striking foil to the flower's gargantuan brightly coloured head. Everyone seemed impressed, most of all, her class teacher whose response was to give her a cutting from a magazine with a photo of a waterlily pond and suggest she could make another picture based on this over the summer holidays.
As the 6 weeks dragged by, the weight of the task of drawing something for the teacher sat heavily on the child's shoulders and the usual dread of returning to school after the long break was inflated further by her inability to do something with it. Paralysed by her lack of familiarity with water lilies (she'd never seen one, and really had no idea what they were) the child found herself unable to enjoy any of the usual summer holiday activities. The swings at the local park didn't make her feel ecstatic as they usually did, she was too listless at the beach to clamber over the line of stones, shells and seaweed to paddle at the sea's edge as she longed to. Ice cream was allowed to drip down the cornet her Dad kindly brought her along the difficult path between the dunes. Her skates, once her favourite things to don and roll precariously down the drive's slight incline and come to a stop at the bottom with a skilfully executed extravagantly sweeping turn, lay forlorn and abandoned in a dark corner of the garage.
September crept up like impending doom. The kindly, wise teacher never mentioned the water lily task and as Christmas approached, the feeling of dread lifted but never quite left entirely, hovering around her head and shoulders, ready to descend whenever it wanted.
The following summer was not quite as bad. The task presented was prompted by her Dad who thought she might become a weather girl, so, smilingly, the lovely teacher gave the child some equipment; an exercise book, some sharpened pencils, a rubber, an outdoor thermometer and a small book on clouds for children like her who could learn their names and meaning.
Nobody had accounted for the lack of variety of clouds or variance in outdoor temperature in a child's life should they be wanting them. The diary was religiously kept for a long-enough period to see the monotony of the weather in those parts during those days and the ensuing blank pages testimony to the stability of the climate, or perhaps she just couldn't be bothered to recount the drizzly summer rain that occasionally fell or try to name the drab grey covering from which it fell. The cloud book promised great variety, but couldn't teach the child that only time and travel could fill her exercise book diary with that.
Maybe lost was a misnomer for these two summers; maybe they were merely markers for the pain of change. As she made her transition into adulthood, the child resisted many of the changes that was to bring.
Later she would realise this and the two summers would sit together like a double hyphen in her story, following The Motley Crew and delineating a break
=
I've added a bit more to this rambling ' think piece ' if you will, over on my Taste Blog, partly because I want to give a fuller picture of my mother and to think through myself how she influenced me in so many positive ways.
*
