childhood

Mum, Am I Weird? Yes Darling, Because All The Best People Are

~ ChanAtkins ~ 4 Comments
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

My son is nine and for the past few years he has often stopped mid-sentence and asked me this question: ‘Mum, am I weird?’

For the record, he isn’t overtly weird, well, not in my opinion. He gets on really well at school and finds it easy to make friends. He is known for being able to make people laugh and since he started school at aged four, his teachers have always told me that he is kind, empathetic and very diplomatic. I expect part of that is his experience of being the youngest of four children.

At home, however, he is free to let all his weird out whenever he wants. We all are. In fact, we often have conversations where we debate who is the weirdest in our family of six. Most of the time, they all agree that it’s me, but my youngest son is often next. Our ‘weirdness’ takes many forms and is often the source of belly-aching laughter and a fair amount of teasing. I think it’s what makes us, us and I wouldn’t change a thing. However, I suspect that at school, to be labelled ‘weird’ is not a good thing. I can recall that from my own schooldays. No one wants to be the weird kid. No one wants to stand out.

What things mark a person as ‘weird’? Often its the way they dress; perhaps in a wacky or eccentric or unusual fashion. Perhaps its their hair. Maybe its something to do with their social or conversational skills. Sometimes its because of their hobbies.

I don’t think my son looks or acts ‘weird’ in any way, and yet he keeps asking me this question.

I tell him he is eccentric, one of a kind, and memorable! When he was small he had a host of imaginary friends he would make up long and complex stories for. Even as a toddler he pretended to carry around a creature known as ‘Hock’ who sadly died one day when my son sat in the pushchair and squashed him. I tried to say Hock was fine but my son insisted he was dead and even carried his dead body home! I once caught him running a bath by himself for another ‘friend’ and at the dinner table he would have us all in hysterics with his stories about made-up characters. He even had accents for some of them.

My son is obsessed with music. When he was only one, he danced non-stop to Peter Hook from Joy Division at a local music festival. This was in the rain. He just kept going and going. At the same age, I videoed him reaching up to the CD player in the kitchen to turn the volume up on a song. I have videos of him dancing on tables, dancing at restaurants, dancing on holidays and rocking his highchair back and forth violently, yet in tune to the music! When he started nursery at three, he’d get a bit anxious on the way there, but if I played ‘Birds’ by Eels, he would cheer up instantly. As a newborn baby, I could only get him to sleep in the car if I played ‘Hold on’ by Tom Waits.

These days his favourite band is The Clash, but he is also obsessed with Tom Waits, Beck, Blur, Oasis, The Black Keys, Talking Heads, Bob Dylan, Bob Marley and many more! He has his own CD player next to his bed and falls asleep with a CD playing. He fills up notebooks with information about bands and singers and because he wants to be in a band himself, he has even designed his first four album covers.

There is absolutely nothing he does not know about Joe Strummer.

Yes, he is a little unusual. At home, he lets out his ‘noises’, as he calls them. He developed a habit of releasing strange noises sporadically during the Covid lockdowns. Home-schooling him was interesting and I often videoed him doing his work whilst making random noises and movements. I researched Tourette’s Syndrome and even spoke to a health professional about the possibility of him having it. Going back to school seemed to cure most of it and school have never seen or heard the noises we still sometimes get at home.

He gets very easily distracted and although he is almost ten, I still have to direct him with getting dressed, brushing his teeth etc. I have to tell him to do these things over and over again, as he will forget seconds after you saying it. He is so bright though, the sunshine in all our eyes, he lights up every room he walks into and has a beautiful habit of taking people under his wing if he feels they are a bit left out. He will then talk to them endlessly about music, but adults love this! Everyone comments on his unique personality. He can be hard work, but he’s so pure at the same time, there is just no malice in him at all.

He’s very creative, always doodling in various notebooks. Recently, while waiting to go into school, he whispered to me how interesting all the details were. I asked what he meant and he started pointing out things like the treads on car tires and the reflections in puddles. It was such a sweet moment. A few years back, we were driving to school and he was watching the world go by the windows and suddenly announced how the world was better when it was green. He was only little, but his words reflected my own thoughts, and I felt, as I always do, what good company he is. I always tell him he is ‘good value’. He asks what I mean and I say, you just give so much, I get more than I paid for! I can’t wait to find out what his future holds, yet it saddens me when he worries about being ‘weird.’

But as I constantly tell him, all the best people are!

All those singers and songwriters he idolises at such a young age, they were different too. I bet they often thought of themselves as ‘weird’. ‘Normal’ people don’t tend to be as creative. You’ve got to be a little bit weird to be an artist of some sort. I tell him it is something to be proud of.

And it is.

I know how weird I am. (No one else knows the extent of it!) But I love myself anyway. I’m my own best friend. I’m good company for myself. I couldn’t write books and poems if I wasn’t weird and eccentric….

I hope my son soon realises the same.

I wouldn’t change a single thing about him.

The Joy Of Staying Childish

~ ChanAtkins ~ 9 Comments

Confession: I never feel like I’m a proper adult.

I’m sure I’m not the only one. In fact, I know I’m not because this is a regular topic of conversation between me and my husband. We constantly look around at other adults and discern that we are not like them. They are indeed proper adults and we certainly are not.

I’m not sure we want to be. No, probably not.

I was never the kid who wanted to grow up in a hurry and I don’t think my husband was either. I think if he could have stayed a lanky kid playing football until it was too dark to see, he would have. And if I could have stayed a bookish kid reading and writing in her bedroom, I would. Oh that’s still me!

I don’t understand people who want to be adults. I don’t understand people who are adults. I find them really hard to talk to. Most adults I come across are really, really into small talk. Small talk about cars, mortgages, interest rates, remodelling their houses, shit like that. Shit I don’t give a shit about. I never know what to say in reply. I usually have to try and not laugh.

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay (I love this photo. I feel like this will be us in the future)

I’m a giggler. And its getting worse. The older I get the more I want to giggle at everything. The slightest thing can set me off and my family know exactly how to get me going and make me choke on my tea. I’m not sure giggling with other adults happens much though? They all seem so serious. Or cheerful, about mortgages and new cars. I don’t get it.

Me and my husband just pretend at being adults. We both have jobs, though mine is one where I get to be silly with kids who love writing as much as me! My husband makes his job more fun by deliberately confusing customers or spouting random political opinions at them in a cheery manner.

As I type this I am laughing at a group chat we have on the go. I’ve got tears running down my face and my eyes sting. They don’t care though – they just make me laugh more. Sometimes I think they’re trying to kill me. My husband and I drove back from Wales yesterday after dropping our eldest back at University. I think we laughed the whole way back. At ourselves, at other people, at everything.

We look at other adults, other parents and then we look at each other, eyebrows raised.

We don’t mean to be mean, but we just don’t understand them, we just can’t gel with them. We both try hard not to get snared by anyone on the school run. Our tactics are similar. Stay in the car until the last possible minute, rush in, grab child, make no eye contact, rush back to car, phew! We don’t have a lot but we look at other people and feel glad we are not them.

Our response to life is to take the piss out of it. Our reaction to this dying world is to poke fun and laugh until we cry. No one will ever listen to us anyway, even though we know we are right about everything.

When I see a hill, I want to roll down it. When I see a tree, I want to climb it. When I see rocks, I want to jump from one to the next. I’m glad these silly childish urges have never faded. I hope they never do.

How to adult?

No clue.

It’s just not in our genes.

But my question to you today, is this. Do you feel like an adult? Do you ‘adult’ well? Does society accept and recognise you as a fully functioning adult person? Or are you like us? Do you still feel the same inside as you always did? Do you look in the mirror and find it hard to reconcile your ageing face with the childish nature inside of you?

I hope so. It’s much more fun this way.

Dear 12 Year-Old Me…

~ ChanAtkins ~ 6 Comments

Dear 12 year-old me,

Image by Piyapong Saydaung from Pixabay

I think about you a lot! I see you in my head sometimes. I don’t think you looked that different to how I do now. Same hair, same face. I don’t think my dress sense has even changed that much. I still remember your crippling shyness, how it crept up on you until you couldn’t deny who you were and how the world saw you. That became a heavy burden in your later teens but right now, it’s not a problem at all. I wish I could go back and tell you that one day you find your voice! That one day you run your own company and write and publish your own books!

It was all you wanted back then. Every day you would rush home from awful school, the place that churned up your guts every night in bed, and you’d glue yourself to your notebooks and pens, scribbling away, pen flying over paper, never stopping. You had so much inside of you, I think it surprised you as much as anyone when you wrote an entire book. Until the moment you created Danny and what would eventually become The Boy With The Thorn In His Side series, it had been short, endearing stories about lost animals.

What happened when you turned 12? Everything.

You discovered music. You couldn’t stand the vapid boy bands popular among your classmates in the early 90s, but you found a lyrical friend in Bob Dylan and other musicians from the 60s. You felt so out of place in your own generation, until you discovered grunge and Nirvana! I remember how you’d lie on the floor with your head between the speakers of your hi-fi system, trying to digest and pinpoint every drum beat, every strum of the guitar, amazed and bewildered by what you were hearing and feeling.

You discovered movies. The Lost Boys inspired you to write about monsters, though you made yours the human kind. I still remember that moment, the bit at the end of the movie where they discover that the head vampire is really Sam and Michael’s mother’s boyfriend and you thought what if that happened in real life? What if your mother was dating an absolute monster and no one knew it but you?

You discovered that your parents had already been divorced for a few years – for some bizarre reason, feeling the need to keep up a charade until the truth came out. What you felt more than anything was relief that the arguing would stop and fear about who they might date. After all, monsters really did exist…

You started writing Danny’s story fuelled by your own fears.

You discovered gritty storytelling. Your writing shifted from cutesy animal tales to hard-hitting ones about abuse, drugs, self-harm, and crime and that’s because you fell in love with The Outsiders and SE Hinton became on of your heroes. She published The Outsiders at aged 17, so that meant you could too, right? Reading her books and others like them, moved you away from animal stories and into darker territory.

You discovered Stephen King and his influence would seep into everything you wrote from then on. The exploration of character and back story and motivation, and the every day details we so often miss. For you, the monsters were always human.

You thought you were fat and so many people thought it their duty to convince you this was true. You began to wish you could shrink inside your own skin, or pull it all off and start again. You looked at your skinny older sisters with envy and longing. You didn’t want to be seen in public with a face like that, a body like that. You turned to your writing, to your characters and they became your entire world, your friends, your everything.

They never went away, let me tell you that now. They are all still here. Every night my mind plays out scenes that have happened or not happened, and every night I watch my own little movies in my head just like you did back then.

I wish I could go back and tell you that everything you hated about yourself then is everything I love about myself now.

You were called over-sensitive, grizzly, weak, easy to make cry. You lived on the edges looking in, observing. I can’t tell you how much that shaped you as a writer and how I wouldn’t go back and change a thing. How now I can see who you were and what you were becoming, that pain is good, that silence makes you stronger, that observation builds entire worlds inside you. That you overcome everything and did it anyway. At 12 years old all you wanted was to be a writer and today that is all I am. That is everything. I smile every day because you gave me these stories, these worlds, these words.

Thank you for doing it. Thank you for dedicating so many hours in your bedroom to writing and creating characters. None of it was wasted. None of it was in vain. It was all worth it in the end.

Thank you for being you.

With love,

44 Year-Old me.

One Toothbrush – A Tale of Days Gone By

~ ChanAtkins ~ 8 Comments

At my mother’s house, there is just one toothbrush in the bathroom. And I think about that a lot.

I noticed it a few months ago and it hit me hard. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since. It’s become a sort of marker in my mind of life, death, time and family. I realised that one toothbrush is my future.

My mother brought up four children, five if you count the one that wasn’t even hers. At one time she would have brushed her teeth at the end of the day, weary, perhaps frazzled, and there would have been seven brushes in the pot. Then six. Then five when my oldest sister left home. Then four when my father left. Then three, two and then finally, one day, (surely a day that was hugely significant and heartrending for her, but didn’t seem to register at all in my mind…) there was one.

And one day, this will happen to me. Assuming I outlive my husband, after all my children have grown up and left home, it will be just me. Where once there were six toothbrushes, there will only be one. Mine.

And now I think about this every time I brush my teeth and look at their brushes, one less already since my eldest left home for University. One less again when my next daughter leaves in September… One by one, they will all fly the nest and one day, it will be just me.

I think about how that will feel…

Sometimes when I’m really tired, when the demands have come thick and fast, when I crave just a few peaceful minutes to myself to pull myself back together, I look forward to being alone. I’m quite a solitary person and I don’t mind my own company at all. As the years go by I find myself becoming even more introverted, and even less likely to socialise or mingle with crowds. I imagine what it will be like to wake up to a quiet, still house. To go to sleep at the end of the day alone. Sometimes it doesn’t bother me at all. Other times, it fills me with shock and dread. Shock because it slams home how short and fleeting this one life really is, and dread because I sometimes feel motherhood has defined me, so who will I be when they have all gone?

I guess I will find out, just like my mother did.

That single toothbrush caught me off guard. Made me see my mother in a new light. I had never stopped, not once, to think about how she must have felt as we one by one drifted away. I had never, until that moment, stopped to wonder if she ever feels lonely, living alone. Waking up alone, going to bed alone. I felt a surge of guilt and then a surge of fear. That solitary toothbrush stood for so much. A life lived in love, giving more than taking, nurturing, protecting, feeding and clothing and then at the end of it all, sitting alone in a small house, with one of everything.

I wonder how often she looks around and thinks there used to be lots of pairs of shoes in the hall, lots of coats on the hook, lots of mugs in the cupboard, lots of voices and songs and footsteps and calls in the night. I wonder if she wakes up in the morning and thinks, what shall I do today? Who needs me? Is it liberating or lonely? Or both?

I will one day find out.

I have loved being a mother. But I have also understood that a big part of being a mother is learning to let go, almost as soon as you hold them for the first time. They grow so fast and growing is always a form of leaving. They start to crawl, then walk, then run. One day they pull their hand out of yours in case their friends see. One day they tell you not to kiss them in public anymore. One day they ask if they can go out on their bike without you. One day they leave home and you have no idea where they are or what they are doing most of the time, and you have to live with it. Because they have to do it.

Image by 🆓 Use at your Ease 👌🏼 from Pixabay

At the moment, my eldest is almost twenty and living in another country. I miss her but I want her to do exactly what she is doing. My second eldest will be leaving soon too. My household will shrink again. My eldest son will be going into his final year of school next month and will be making decisions about what he wants to do with his life next. He doesn’t need me for much these days, but I am very lucky that he does still want me. My littlest baby is no longer a baby, no longer so little. He grows taller every time he walks in the room. He has started to strive for independence lately; taking showers by himself instead of me running him a bath, riding his bike down the lane alone, rushing ahead of me to prove he can do things. It’s even harder letting go of the littlest one, but let go I must.

And what I must also do is prepare myself for the time when they have all gone. When I wake up to a quiet, still house just as my mother does. When I go to bed alone and hear no voices or footsteps in the night. For a time when I barely have to run the washing machine. For a time when I only buy the food that I like. For a time when I no longer walk around the house picking up stray shoes, bags, books and toys. For a time when I don’t find random piles of stones and sticks in strange places. For a time when at the end of the day, there is just one toothbrush and me.

I hope the way I feel is pride tinged with sadness, a dose of nostalgia mixed with relief that my time is my own. Imagine how much more writing I will get done! I hope this is how my mother feels at the end of the day when she reaches for that solitary toothbrush. I hope she feels a surge of pride for bringing us into the world and then sending us on our way, fully equipped. I hope she knows it was a job well done, despite the hard times and tough times. I think that I should tell her how hard that one toothbrush hit me, how much it made me think of the speedy retreat of days gone by.