Last night Iain texted to tell me he had lunch with my New Best Friend (TM) and to catch up on gossip. At some point I mentioned how bewildered I am now that I have assorted new social skills.
I said I’m old! No longer cute and sexy!
He replied Bah. Course yr still hot!
I protested that I always do stuff late and backwards!
His very sensible answer was I guess it is a nicer time to learn tho. As at least all the other human nature psychology stuff is in place. And you have more money for hot lady clothes.
True. When my grandma was thirty-six she gave birth to her seventh child, and became a grandmother for the first time. Her life as a working class woman raising a crazy crew of children on a farm in the rural NW is something I simply cannot imagine, even though I grew up in the same place with the same people.
What did she think about at my age – what did she love?
There is no record, no journals or letters; she even burned many of the photographs of the children. I have many scraps of evidence about life on the farm and it is impossible to put together an accurate narrative. I know she considered her life easier than what her mother went through, as a divorced woman raising six children without money or education.
My own mother was in turn thirty-six when I presented her with a grandchild. I know very well what her life was like that year, what worried her or made her laugh. She was still paying off the bills from the disease that nearly killed me. It was all was painful beyond measure, with no relief on the horizon.
I am an only child and I created more grief for her than can possibly be calculated. But she persevered. They all persevered.
But I do not have the values that kept most of the women in my family in one place an entire lifetime. I’m not the sort to settle, and I don’t believe in fate.
If anything I take after my fiendish great-grandmother, a woman so determined to reinvent herself we do not even know our true surname. Where was she at this age? Nobody knows.