This week I’m at West Dean doing an advanced glass fusing course with fabulous Alex.
This week I’ve been married for twenty two years.
This weekend I’m going home to my African Outpost, back to the day job: wife mostly (these days), part time mother (when the children come home), wannabe writer and – now – fledgling glass artist with plasters on her fingers.
Life dovetails neatly at times so that all the reasons – the reasons for my being here, here right now – merge as reminders all over again.
Chicks ruffling feathers and spreading wings and an old hen going home to roost.
So at a time when the vulnerability of morphing wife/mother/whatever-it-is-that-I’m-supposed-to-be threatens to overwhelm, I feel mildly gratified to have – for now – reined the flailing me in with (given all that glass cutting and hot kiln shelf handling) a slightly worse-for-wear grip.
The course wasn’t an after thought; my entire trip, the past six weeks, were built to accommodate these few days, this crescendo parting shot which – given the palpable jarring that struck as I stood on a cold east London street corner a few weeks ago saying goodbye to my son – has offered much more than better insight into the way glass fuses and how: it has reaffirmed what we all know but sometimes forget: life moves and changes so there’s no point in standing still for the stagnancy will mean the buffeting is harder.
I am the youngest in my group of eight. My class mates are all, mostly, grandmothers. I look around as they work and I don’t think ‘when I’m a granny I’d like to be like them’. I just think, ‘I’d like to be like them’. They have all trodden the well worn path that I’m on, found a way to mind the gap and, if ever they lost a bit of themselves on the way, clearly rediscovered it. I don’t see age when I look at them. I see grace and composure and strength and stories.
And when we take our pieces out of the kiln I see something else: an analogy: I see in their work the colour and detail and finesse of experience that my crude efforts lack.
As women we aspire to lots of things: when we’re 16 we aspire to size 10 jeans; 18 and it’s a place at university; 23 it’s a glossy career and a pair of Jimmy Choos, 30 and it might be a husband and our own home, 33 and it’s a child that will sleep through the night and understand the point of a potty.
45, I cast my eyes around the studio again, and it’s ‘I’d like to be like them: with stories to tell, an identity all of my own and the understanding that to keep learning means you remain forever young’.