And What Do You Do?

 

 

Bank Holiday Monday. And we walk, la famille, nine of us aged between 7 and seventy: great nieces and granduncles. It means we walk like a spring; a group stretched by the disparity between years and fitness levels, strung around the reservoir when the younger and quicker get bored of hanging back. We bounce together when our conscience gets the better of us though, and shuffle then in a huddle that it difficult for speeding cyclists to navigate.

 

We go the pub afterwards: it’s easier to eat en masse than ramble as a group. We’re better at it too: eating and drinking together; we’ve done if often over the years.  We’ve had more practice at that than communal walking.

 

We are joined by two of my cousin’s London friends: a futures trader and his wife. I am introduced as Mike’s African Cousin. I am quite plainly not: African. And the eleven years between us and the difference between our complexions (my cousin’s smooth English one, my weathered hide) throws the ‘cousin’ connection into question. I can see the futures trader and his wife thinking: African? No. Cousin …. Hmmmm? Possibly. She’s a lot older though.

 

She takes a seat opposite me. It is a long time since I was obliged to converse with a professional from London. It’s a long time since I was obliged to converse. But she makes it easy: she smiles and laughs readily. I ask her what she does. She is a journalist on one of the national dailies.

 

She is pregnant too.

 

‘Will you work after your baby is born?’ I ask her.

 

‘I am not sure’, she replies, ‘I think I’ll just wait to see how I feel’.

 

I tell her she is sensible. Society plants too many expectations on mothers as it is.  Why would we want to exacerbate those by adding the weight of our own? You cannot describe what becoming a mother is like – the job is too huge, too different according to whose doing it, too personal – so I do not try.

 

She does not ask me what I do.

 

If she had done I’d probably have said, ‘Oh, I’m JustaMum’. But I would probably have added, ‘I do a bit of writing and I teach Hat’ and I’d have gestured my little girl at the end of the table.

 

I wonder how she will describe herself once her son or daughter arrives.

 

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Hat says, ‘I once read something called Ten Tips on How to be Happy’.

 

I know how elusive Happiness can be. So does Mum. So we ask Hat, ‘And what did it say?’

 

‘Oh I don’t remember them all’, says Hat, ‘just two’.

 

And she elaborates:

 

Try to do one nice thing for somebody else every day so that you feel better about yourself.

 

‘That sounds wise’, says her grandmother.

 

‘And make a collage of all your achievements’.

 

Mum – who eight weeks ago shook off Depression’s clammy grip which had pinned her vice like in unrelenting misery for a full six months – smiles broadly; Mum – who until recently would have sniffed at How to be Happy tips – says confidently, ‘In that case I would make a collage with pictures of my children and all their children; for they are my greatest achievement’.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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