Don't mistake my weakness for kindness

When I was about twelve or thirteen I fell in with a 'bad crowd.'
Not particularly bad in the great scheme of things as you don't get many, honest to goodness, bad crowds in the Home Counties of England. Particularly not amongst young girls of that age. Well, at least not back in the 1990s.

Just the usual stuff, cigarettes, alcohol, older boyfriends (up to the grand old age of all of fifteen) and so on.
No sweat at the time, hair-raising when I think of Jessica in about a decade.
No hanging around in parks into the evening for my daughter.
Definitely no cigarettes.
Or beer.
Or boys.
Not until she is at least thirty five.

Sadly, none of the above will trouble my Georgina.
I never thought I would say this about a child of mine but I only wish she might be smoking a cigarette, or drinking a beer, or going wild about an unsuitable boyfriend, at some point in the future.
But she won't.
Because she's dead.

Anyhow, my parents didn't like my friends. My teachers didn't like my friends. Some of them asked me, straight out, why I was suddenly attached to this group of girls when I obviously didn't fit in with them. Too quiet, too studious for this louder and more bolshy set.

These girls all called me Doogie, after Doogie Howser the boy genius doctor who, according to Mr Wiki P, was the proud possessor of a genius intellect and an eidetic memory. Sadly I don't have either of those things but, in the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king as they say.

I remember talking to one of these girls, discussing how on earth we could be friends when we were so dissimilar. She said that we needed one another. She said, "Catherine, you are a weak boffin and me, I'm a hard thicko. THAT, in a nutshell, is why we are friends."

A pattern that continued to pop up in my life over the next decade or so, although once I hit my mid-twenties I moved in the weak boffin crowd pretty much exclusively. It is my natural milieu.

I needed the 'hard thickos' because
(a) they were useful in avoiding getting beaten up at school and, believe me, after you've seen someone getting their front teeth knocked out on a school bench that is quite the priority and
(b) they knew how to have a good time.
So I adopted the weak and weedy role and came along for the ride.
Oh and I never got beaten up. Still have all my own original teeth. Grin.
I have never figured out why the hard thickos would need me but I was never one to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Another conversation, with this same girl, more of an argument really, ended in an insult that STILL stings to this very day.
She said that I was like a glass of orange squash that had too much water added to it.
Over-diluted.
Weak. Watery. Tasteless. Passionless.
I can only conclude it must have hurt because it was close to the truth. That is why I can still remember this insult about eighteen years after it was flung.
I am a weak person,  I will go to some lengths to avoid a fight, I overuse the word 'sorry' (I was once challenged to go an hour without apologising and I failed miserably, I think I lasted ten minutes or so), I have a fine line in repressing my anger but will go and sit and pick at things for weeks and years (and indeed decades as I've illustrated here) after they have been said.

I used to think that I was quiet because I was kind.
That I didn't speak out because I was thoughtful.
That I apologised because I was wary of hurting other people's feelings.

Since Georgina died, I have had a few unpleasant moments of self revelation.
Confirmations and negations of things I thought about myself.

I cannot be relied upon in a crisis. I am weak.
If you are looking for a tower of strength I suggest you move right on up the line.
Sorry, you said you wanted rubble of weakness? Well step right up, we have the best rubble in town. That is our speciality.
Here you go, have some of this brick dust that used to be Catherine W. Her daughter died and she crumbled.

I'm not as kind as I hoped I was. Not as gentle as I thought.
My weakness, or wussiness, or spinelessness was not kindness.
How I ever got those qualities all muddled up is beyond me.
What I thought was kindness was, actually, pretty tepid stuff. I'm sure you've all been on the receiving end of what I used to term 'kind.' The person that writes a card but never calls. The friends that disappear after a couple of months. Kinda there for you, almost, and then . . . . kinda not.
Even more annoying, I was pretty self congratulatory about my supposed kindly nature.
Look, I even bought sympathy cards. How very sensitive of me. Sigh.

I think I have become colder since Georgina died. And I thought it would make me more caring somehow. I wanted something good to come out of this messy situation of life, and death, and birth, and falling to bits, and my marriage disintegrating, and rebuilding. I'm not sure it did.
A little beady eyed bean counter has taken up residence in my soul and assesses those around me to see whether they are deserving of my sympathy. When his calculations are finished he often throws his hands up in despair and shrieks 'But your children didn't die. Nobody is dead. Leave me alone, take your stupid so-called problem somewhere else.'

Any kindness I have left in me is for Georgina's memory and for looking after her sister.
There isn't even much left over for my husband. Certainly not much for friends.
Because I somehow feel that I am entitled to all the pity and all the compassion.
Because I feel so sorry for myself that I don't have anything left to give out, other than to emit a sort of continuous whine about how sad I am.
For myself. For my daughters. A big greedy pity monster who wants to gobble it all up herself.

The world is infinitely harsher than I ever realised.

When I look around me, I am surprised that there aren't hundreds upon hundreds of us, fallen to our knees in the streets, flailing at the pavements with our hands, wailing. 

Because if it doesn't hit you with a dead baby, it will probably cut you down with something else.

It's in the post folks. It's lurking out there.
And that thought doesn't make me want to go and wrap my arms around the masses.
It makes me want to run away screaming.

I don't know which is worse to be frank.
The watery, annoying person I was before.
Or the cold, cranky one I seem to have become.
But
I hope I know a little bit more about being kind now.
I hope I know what I'm talking about even if I can't summon it up for every occasion that might deserve some.
Tights laddered, missed the bus, parking ticket, broke a nail.
I hope that if I attempt to offer kindness to someone it will have a bit more meat to it, be of a more substantial variety, than that old, over diluted squash version.

As the man says, 'It's so easy to laugh. It's so easy to hate. It takes guts to be gentle and kind.'

Maybe, just maybe, I'm slightly more gutsy than I was before?

And you? Kinder or colder? Neither?



'I know it's over, still I cling. I don't know where else I can go.'