Bits and pieces from March.

1. Music.

I heard this on the car radio, on the way home from work on a Friday night a couple of weeks ago. It's been a bit of an earworm during March and is kind of in tune (groan), with my latest attempt to be more joyful and less of a gloom and doom type of person.

So I am singing.

In the sense that I am trying to live and be joyful, and to be grateful.

I am trying to be curious.

I am trying not to be resentful or bitter or sad.

But I do feel sad much of the time and sometimes so full of regret.

And that is ok. Because if one day is difficult the next will be joyful.

I don't really have any troubles just now.

Just a sadness that seems like it won't ever go away.

I am so used to having "troubles". It feels odd not to have any. 

This is not a sad post. You might find that difficult to believe.

I am singing. Oh how I wish I could sing or play an instrument or write music.....singing or playing would really help express this deep yearning.

2. Identity.
I've been thinking about this a bit more lately. I read this article about the link between children's emotional wellbeing and resilience, and knowing their family history. This conclusion comes from some research done in the 1990s.

I thought the article would be relating to adopted children but it wasn't. It was written by a parent, who purposely sets about assessing her children's awareness of their family history using the questions used in the research .

Apparently, there are three types of family narratives: the ascending one (“We built ourselves up out of nothing”); the descending one (“We lost it all”), or – the most successful – the oscillatory one (“We have had our share of ups and downs”). All this makes the presumption that the child is within their birth family, and that the family is uncomplicated without divisions or separations.

The research has had a positive impact on children who are in Care or who are Adopted however, and policies and proceedures have been put in place that ensure children know as much of their family history as is possible and can retain contact of some kind.

This photograph is of my Mother and her sister when they lived in a local area called "The Moss". I know a little of the family history from both Maternal and Paternal sides of the family. As a child I didn't know so much though, there were bits and pieces spoken about...mostly of divisions and difficulties and losses, and secrets -  I know there is some big secret I don't know about my maternal family history.

We did not remain a coherent family unit in the sense spoken about above. I don't think many families are. Most people just piece things together by themselves as best they can.

And so we make sense of our history, weaving it into some kind of narrative of our own that feeds into our developing sense of identity. This article is written by a women who discovered that the man she called "Dad" and who raised her, was not her biological father.

It is an extraordinary story, given that she was mixed-race, a fact that was ignored and not spoken about by her family during her childhood, who she writes, "thought that raising me like them would mitigate my obvious difference – that my cultural identity, which I had inherited from them, could overshadow the pigmentation of my skin."

3. Poetry and collective pondering.
Thanks to this post from Teresa I found my way to a postcast with Marilyn Nelson about poetry and collective pondering. I enjoyed hearing about how she starting out writing about her own life and her own culture, before starting to write about other lives, very different from hers.

In repsonse to the first of the poems Marilyn reads in the podcast, I started thinking about myself as a 13 year old white british girl in the North of England in the mid-seventies, at the time of life when identity becomes more important. My family unit was by then long gone, and I was living in another family unit that was not mine. My older siblings and their children were very important to me, as was trying to get an understanding of my Mother and who she was. However I was always a child who would spend a lot of time in other worlds, through books and music. The culture I grew up in was not one I could identify easily with, but it soon had me wrapped up in it's growing consumerism and individualism.

I am wondering what helped the 13 year old Marilyn on her journey to becoming a poet, from when she used to look at herself in the bathroom mirror for hours....,"searching for clues to my truer identity" and when at night she would "say to the dark: Give me a message I can give the world. Afraid there’s a poet behind my face.” I am wondering how much of it was down to her strong connection with her own  family history, and how much her racial identity and the cultural time and place that she found herself born into. It has always been facinating to me, what makes for someone born into a particular place and time, into a particular life, becomes the adult they do....the exceptions....those who go on to do great things and who can provide a voice for ordinary people also doing great things but unnoticed.

She talks about the difference between having a "magic mentality" and an "alliance mentality", about "collective pondering" and about "how to be human now". I love the story she tells about the middle-aged woman with the small voice, speaking up when she saw a Black person being mistreated by a Police Officer. I am curious about the Prayer of the Loving Gaze (contemplation).There is such a lot of wisdom in her ponderings. To make a difference in the world, we need each other, we need to share and discuss stories of love and courage, we need to understand histories...and we need to be creators or at the very least participants,  not merely consumers.

I think On Being might be my new favourite place to hang out on the interwebs.

4.Getting free of the Man box - and of violence against Women.
On International Women's day this year I attended a meeting at work, where this TEDtalk was shown. This was uploaded in 2010. Such a lot of work to do and it's good to see the role of the internet in educating and to see Father's like Tony thinking about how to raise their sons.

How is your March so far? What are you pondering and who with?