Ghosts

You needn't believe in ghosts to see that's true

Dear Reader

Here is a photo of my grandmother. She died many years ago and anyway, we never met. But, she’s kind of everywhere for me. This month’s newsletter is about being haunted, and how the nature of haunting is that it is most likely to be by your own family. By your ancestry.

Saint Augustine says, the dead are invisible, they are not absent. You needn’t believe in ghosts to see that’s true. We carry the genes and the culture of our ancestors, and what we think about them shapes what we think of ourselves, and how we make sense or our time and place

- Hilary Mantel

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Under my pillow

The grief is a planet. A dust ring.
A small moon that’s been hidden
under my pillow, that’s been changing
the way my body moves this whole time.

- Camille Rankine from The Increasing Frequency of Black Swans

(Incidentally, this is some very nice wisdom from Rankine about giving yourself permission to think a little smaller).

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Lost in the Forest

I am researching my ancestry online. The program rewards the gaming part of my brain, the nucleus accumbens, or something. It delivers little kicks of dopamine to me. There’s just enough free choice and just enough linearity. A little bit of research and deduction, but also a steady supply of database hints.

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Two mouse clicks and I am out of Australia. There is not a strand of DNA to tie me back to this country I have always thought mine, and now, not even an ancestor with feet on the ground here. It’s a startling way to relearn the history of colonisation. How quick, how thorough, this marginalisation of Aboriginal people. But, most shocking, how recent. Two clicks and all traces of me here are wiped. What is it to feel this place is home, then? What is this connection I feel to the country when it has no depth?

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A couple of divorces, remarriages, some family estrangement, a little mental illness here and there, moves across countries and my family is disarranged. So, when I pick up the trail in my ancestry research, much of what I find is new to both me and my (divorced/estranged/moved to separate countries) parents.

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I am a direct descendant of Sir Oliver Cromwell. But it is ok, I have all his enemies’ blood in me, too¹.

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Initially, most of my families’ births and marriages spread like a blot of water colour paint over South-East England. But a saliva test reveals it’s really only seven per cent, and the rest of my ethnicity is from other sources. Every branch of the tree brought a little something else with them. German, French, Jewish, Belgian, Spanish, Icelandic, Lithuanian, Russian, Czech, Swiss, Norwegian and more. I am made up of too wide a range of small percentages to find the home I am seeking.

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I find my estranged grandmother, though. She is a distant relative of Jane Austen. I find her other husbands, too. I discover she married at nineteen, to a man from the same town in Sussex. I see her second marriage at twenty-five, to a man on the London stage. (He performed with a young Audrey Hepburn). Finally, overlapping with her second, her third begins with my Grandfather. They meet in the war. My Grandfather is a pilot. This will be her most (passionate but) doomed marriage.

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The Maths of Ancestry

Our findings suggest a remarkable proposition: No matter the languages we speak or the color of our skin, we share ancestors who planted rice on the banks of the Yangtze, who first domesticated horses on the steppes of the Ukraine, who hunted giant sloths in the forests of North and South America, and who laboured to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu.

You are of royal descent, because everyone is. You are of Viking descent, because everyone is. You are of Saracen, Roman, Goth, Hun, Jewish descent, because, well, you get the idea. All Europeans are descended from exactly the same people, and not that long ago. Everyone alive in the 10th century who left descendants is the ancestor of every living European today, including Charlemagne, and his children Drogo, Pippin, and, of course, not forgetting Hugh. If you’re broadly eastern Asian, you’re almost certain to have Genghis Kahn sitting atop your tree somewhere in the same manner, as is often claimed. If you’re a human being on Earth, you almost certainly have Nefertiti, Confucius, or anyone we can actually name from ancient history in your tree, if they left children. The further back we go, the more the certainty of ancestry increases, though the knowledge of our ancestors decreases. It is simultaneously wonderful, trivial, meaningless, and fun.

The truth is that we all are a bit of everything, and we come from all over. Even if you live in the most remote parts of the Hebrides, or the edge of the Greek Aegean, we share an ancestor only a few hundred years ago. A thousand years ago, we Europeans share all of our ancestry. Triple that time and we share all our ancestry with everyone on Earth. We are all cousins, of some degree. I find this pleasing, a warm light for all mankind to share. Our DNA threads through all of us.

Ancestry is messy and difficult. Genetics is messy and mathematical, but powerful if deployed in the right way. People are horny. Lives are complex.

From Adam Rutherford’s “You’re Descended from Royalty and So Is Everybody Else” in Nautilus.

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Reciprocity and Estrangement

I was very interested to read this article by Joshua Coleman in The Atlantic on changing trends in family estrangement in the US.

Yet, in the same way that unrealistically high expectations of fulfillment from marriage sometimes increase the risk of divorce, unrealistically high expectations of families as providers of happiness and meaning might increase the risk of estrangement.

Our expectations may have outpaced the capacity of these relationships to repair and resolve their patterns of generational harm. And then there’s this to worry about, too.

But in other cases, estrangement is born from love. One of the downsides of the careful, conscientious, anxious parenting that has become common in the United States is that our children sometimes get too much of us—not only our time and dedication, but our worry, our concern. Sometimes the steady current of our movement toward children creates a wave so powerful that it threatens to push them off their own moorings; it leaves them unable to find their footing until they’re safely beyond the parent’s reach. Sometimes they need to leave the parent to find themselves.

Yes, the work of letting go is hard.

Where does this leave us on reciprocity? If we loosen these family bonds, what do we replace them with? Previously, I have suggested the chosen family, the queer family, but we live in a time unsuited to the proximity, frequency, pace and ritual required for elevating friendships into the reliability of what family once was to us. I worry that we won’t replace them with anything. That we might live even more dislocated than we already do.

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Walk Until You Feel Better

This piece, “Writing from the Bibbulmun Track” by my friend, Mary-Rose MacColl is just beautiful. “There will be despair and hope both..” Oh, my heart.

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“It’s So Easy to Blame the Mother.. and Images Can Be Misleading”

The film I want to see next is Jane Castle’s documentary, “When the Camera Stopped Rolling”.

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The Moments That Make Up Motherhood

What Donahue manages to paint are the minute yet momentous milliseconds that make up the experience of motherhood. They are snapshots of the mundane and the grotesque, the horrible and the wonderful, all imbued with a clear sense of time, both the lack of it and how quickly it seems to go by. “I have this urgency about being a parent, that it’s something that I’ve chosen to do, and I love being a parent, I love my children,” she says. “But there’s a melancholy to it because it’s a very short period of time that we’re parents. And I’m very aware of the shortness of it.”

- Amil Niazi in The Cut, “The Art of Motherhood: Madeline Donahue captures the ecstasy and agony of being a mom”.

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An Ode to Mother-Teenage Daughter Love

The song, Exactly What to Say, is one they co-wrote about a typically fraught mother-teenage daughter relationship. “You think that I don’t listen, that I don’t have a clue,” Lorina sings, tenderly, “but the things that happened to me back then/ I don’t want them to happen to you.”

From “The strange world of Aldous Harding” by Jude Rogers in The Guardian.

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If You Need a Fix of Better Things

This interview with Pamela Adlon about Better Things by Isaac Mizrahi is the best one out there.. And I have watched and read a lot of interviews now, because I am (slowly) writing an article about the show.

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Repeat, Relearn

I dreamed my daughter came to pack up another bedroom. She had a second bedroom in our house.

I was a mixture of sad and resentful and trying my best to be detached, as usual.

I looked around the room and realised it would make a nice study for myself. We would repurpose this room, like the last one. It looked out into a courtyard garden I did not recognise, with a pond. Well, I would get koi fish, I decided.

The meaning of the dream was obvious. I needed to relearn the same lessons. But I could have some luck this time.

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When Does Our Child’s Cuteness Peak?

Did you know that, by one study’s assessment, a puppy’s cuteness peaks around eight weeks of age? Did you know that around this time mothers, who have been extremely doting since birth, can begin to find their pups irritating? It is then that pups can become better at learning skills from other dogs, or even humans—pretty much any dog other than their moms. Even free-ranging dogs tend to drift away from their mothers. Puppies form more long-lasting bonds with their siblings.

From Rivka Galchen in The New Yorker.

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Nostalgia For Families I Never Belonged To

One of the mother blogs I came across when I first became a mother² was Catherine Newman’s Bringing Up Ben and Birdy. Did you know it?

The thing about mother blogs, even more than parenting memoirs, was all the intimacy. The writing was so much more immediate. It was like living in their homes. When the blogs finished, these families’ homes went too.

By the time that era closed I was a single mother and my energy for living inside someone else’s family had declined. And of course, later still, everyone had teenagers and so no one would have wanted outsiders peeking into their, by now, quite complicated homes.

But you wondered what became of these mothers³ and their children. So, I was unexpectedly sentimental to find this recent interview and with Catherine Newman and its tour of their home in Cup of Jo.

When the kids were tiny, we covered the coffee table with white paper. It was fun for them to draw on the table, and their friends would come over and draw, too. It became a 20-year habit. Now, at Thanksgiving, someone will doodle a perfect thing or a portrait, and I’m like, okay, I’m cutting that out and keeping it! We score games on it, I take notes during phone calls, I figure out recipes on it. When the kids were teenagers, I would come down in the morning after a big sleepover, and there would be all these tiny dirty drawings on the table or bad words, which was the funniest and most innocent rebellion.

And I love their gorgeous house, which is small and open planned, like ours.

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On Survival

Biologically speaking, the symptoms of perimenopause make sense to me. The average prehistoric 40-something woman would be a grandmother many times over. She may no longer have the physicality for extreme hunting and gathering, but she has the wisdom and empathy to nurture, heal and love all the little ones, the vulnerable, the needy.

She sleeps lightly and little, her sense of smell is acute. She’s snarly when someone she loves needs protection or when they’re being a dick. She has a reduced sexual desire (and sore boobs), which is self-protecting as childbirth at her age is high risk, potentially fatal. She has an extra layer of padding even though she shares her elk shank with the growing children. Her inner heater flares fiercely and allows her to share the fireside. Her brain doesn’t bother holding on to certain trivial facts as she is too busy being indispensable.

From Meg Bignell with “Perimenopause hits when a woman is at peak busyness. Is it a survival mechanism?”

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Rewilding

This, by Phoebe Weston is such a hopeful read on Europe’s largest river restoration project. (God, I love rewilding projects).

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Ghosts: Mourning a Parent

The best way to water is the beer method: stand out there watering for as long as it takes you to drink a beer while the child swings on the rope swing. When your beer is done, or the child wants to do something else, you are done watering.

From How to Grow and Preserve a Garden by Tedra Osell in Dead Housekeeping.

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Buying Nick Cave Tickets

This is a good article by Dorian Lynskey about Nick Cave’s tour and why the best time to see him perform is right now.

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Can This Last?

There is a period when it is clear that you have gone wrong but you continue. Sometimes there is a luxurious amount of time before anything bad happens.

Jenny Holzer - The Living Period.

(I think about this observation of Holzer’s a lot when watching teenagers).

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Ghosts: Figures in the Night

I dreamed I was pregnant with twins. I am so zen these days that I was not even apprehensive.

Perhaps you can be too calm.

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My ex gave my children a knife for cutting vegetables. Like a curse, I have cut my fingers twice with it.

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My son told me his father has temporarily moved to a beach. He spends all day snorkeling and has never sounded happier, he said.

He has always preferred the subterranean existence.

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We need a cleansing ritual for Hallowe’en after the year we have been having. My husband, P, who almost always humors me, agrees to bring the backyard brazier up to the front yard to join our other brazier so we can have the smoke of two fires to walk between.

Is it tonight you want to do that, he asks. Or is it on the proper Hallowe’en?

And what I love about my husband and teenage son is that they will both do the cleansing with me. No questions asked.

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P is ‘on call’ for the weekend. When the phone rings he pulls the car over so we can swap seats and I drive. Listening to my husband on the phone gently coaching a junior worker on their interactions with teenage clients pushing boundaries, I hear him say:

The trouble is you’re already spoiling for a fight. Come down a little.

I like that phrase and the soothing way he says it. Come down a little. Not to the teenager. To the adult.

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P was walking home alone late at night in torrential rain. A car pulled up 50 metres from him and the men in the car called out. He was ok, he assured them. But they got out of the car, and all ran towards him. My husband said he braced himself. But when they caught up to him he realised that they were drunk teenagers, and perhaps they saw in him that he was good natured, too. So, they talked in the rain for a bit instead.

His story reminds me of the way dogs sometimes meet one another off-leash in the park. This could be a fight, or it might not. They will decide when they get there.

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Recommend

Recently, I saw Michelangelo Frammartino’s Il Buco. It was the film equivalent of staring out over a field. It was just what I needed.

Finally

Happy Hallowe’en, my reader. Let the strangers in and meditate on death.

I know I promised two newsletters and only just squeaked in one this month. Sorry. The curse of best-laid plans.

The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men

Gang aft a-gley,

An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,

For promised joy.

- Robert Burns.

1. Scottish, Irish. In fact, I learn I am more Scottish than anything else.

2. Thank you to Agnes Bosanquet for sending me the link. You’re right! I enjoyed it!

3. Some blogs I loved were written by fathers and yes, I wondered about them, too.