It was Shabbat and I was trying to sleep. My applied project had been a work in progress forever, it seemed and I was determined not to tweak it anymore. I had had been looking over my personal reflection until late the night before, sculpting and shaping it, still not understanding what it was supposed to actually do. I got up and made a large glass of detox tea and stood in my sunny garden. Whilst trying to dig out bits of stuck breakfast, superfood seed mix, from between my teeth, the Eureka moment hit me; an instant of, ‘By jove, she’s got it.’
Why had nobody actually explained that a personal reflection is the same as the preface to a book? The forward? The introduction? The frustration, married with relief at finally having the penny drop made me decide to rewrite the whole bloody lot. It was 8.45 in the morning and I had ninety minutes to bung a few thoughts down before picking Nick up and spending the rest of the morning in synagogue. There was an element of moral responsibility and I wondered if I should email all the students who had agonised over theirs and had borrowed my last one and excitedly tell them, ‘It’s an intro, guys.’
Let me preface my essay
Using my dad as the subject of this assignment should have been easy but it has been an angry lion to wrestle in the darkness with. Sometimes it felt as though something had crawled into my heart and died. At other times, memories like the warm smile of sunshine stroked my cheeks.
It has been a reflection on my life and how it has interwoven with that of my dad. I wrote what I hoped would be an honest tribute to victory over his demons.
My father was reborn, to become the high as a mountain and wide as the sky dad I remembered as a child. He was going to sell a book and I was going to be leather jacketed, a motorcycling, journalist bombing around, digging up fantastic stories.
In December last year, I was in an Oxford pub, the Lamb and Child with author Philip Pullman, discussing books and how he wrote. I asked if he’d ever considered writing an autobiography, as his right to reply to his critics. No, if he wrote anything like that, he told me, it would be more in the form of a memoir. He suggested I write a book but my response was I would not want it to look like misery lit. ‘Then make it happy lit,’ he’d said.
If this essay is to be considered as one chapter in a book, I would like it to be seen as balanced lit. Honest, candid and worthy of both tears and laughter. That would be a very accurate memoir. I hope not to have evoked any feelings in the reader of bitterness and anger towards my dad because that would be false. I have nothing but admiration for a man who has turned into a role model of mountainous proportion.
I write about having two dads and this is often how children of addicts describe their suffering parent, whose torment ripples across the whole family and often to the community and wider society. One person can cause so much devastation for so many.
I remember the terrified child, frightened and crying, held hostage in the kitchen by the night time dad with his flailing arms and drunken rants of how the world would end when Russia went to nuclear war with America.
I remember line of one of my favourite songs, Bridge Over Troubled Water, written by Paul Simon:
Sail on silver girl, sail on by. Your time has come to shine. All your dreams on their way. See how they shine.
And I hope they will.
They bring me to another junction, where, in my mind, I check my map and look up. There is a mountain enveloped in clouds of uncertainty and incredible adventure. I look down, over an eye wetting landscape of both beauty and trauma. Treetops, valleys, lakes; the sea in the distance, reflecting the sun; cattle grazing and lambs, playing Batman or Power Rangers. I wish I could print photographs of those pictures. Maybe that is something far higher up, where the sky is always wilder than motorbikes, leather jackets, journalistic aspirations and innocent, childish dreams.
References
Page, R. The Presence a memoir of miracles. 2010. O Books, Ropley, Hants.
http://www.alcoholics-anonymous.org.uk/
http://alcoholism.about.com
http://www.apas.org.uk/index.htm
http://www.drinkaware.co.uk/
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