#10. My mum, radical lessons

also Pandora's Jar, I Hate Suzie, The Blessed Madonna, my mum's chocolate cake

Hello!

For the first time since rejoining GDS I found some calm in the storm and used it to plan the next year at a high level. Although that should have freaked me out it’s left me feeling grounded. Yes, obvs, I know that planning a year’s work is a fiction. But it’s been a thinking tool and that makes it a useful fiction.

Also it’s my birthday on Monday - second lockdown birthday! - so in the absence of seeing anyone for real I’m going to channel Katie who loves to proclaim her birthday in advance in a charming but insistent way. I’m going to be 43 and if you hit me up a with a surprise message you’ll make me smile :)

My mum

My birthday always makes me think about my mum. For obvious reasons.

Ever since my mum had cancer a couple of years ago I’ve been meaning to write about the things that she taught me when I was very little. She’s since recovered and we’ve been in a happy weekly bubble through lockdown. But she forged the core of me and I realised at some point that I didn’t want to leave it too late to thank her in public.

She raised me and my brother pretty much on her own as a working single mum. She worked at a law centre in Camden, was a political activist in Islington (our bedroom was - annoyingly - campaign HQ for the ward’s Labour party in 1987) and later was a legal aid solicitor in Hackney. She’s always had an irrepressible zeal for helping others.

But most of all me she helped me and my brother. We grew up in London in the 1980s which was a very different London to the one we live in today. My mum did her best to arm us for this changing city by teaching us what she knew about the world…

Radical lessons

I can’t do justice to all the things my mum taught me. So I’m going to pick five things.

The first was to notice sexism and fight for the rights of women. In primary school I remember her telling me that whenever I referred to an imaginary person as an example I should use “she” or “her” because for thousands of years our society had always used “he” or “him” as examples without thinking. I wouldn’t write those kinds of abstract imaginary people for another five or ten years. But that instruction stuck in my mind like a feminist microchip. (This chip also included the belief that all mums went to Greenham Common).

The second was to oppose racism even in the face of your own unconscious bias. My dad ran a world jazz orchestra so I grew up being semi-parented by musicians from all over the world. But it was my mum who taught me my most unforgettable anti-racist lesson. One day, again in primary school, I asked her if she was racist. She thought for a bit and said - I try very hard not to be, but I was brought up and live in a racist society, so I expect that I probably am racist in ways that I can’t see. I was shaken by this. We went on anti-racism marches so I knew it was a Bad Thing and yet here she was saying she was racist. Her answer made me realise - at a very young age - that your best intentions and actions don’t just magically align. There is work to be done. I don’t know if anyone has taught me a more powerful lesson since.

The third was to see gay and lesbian sexual relationships as everyday things. We lived in a big shared house (a hangover from the 1970s) and the two men that lived on the top floor were a gay couple. Several women that my dad worked with were lesbian. All of these men and women were part of my life long before I had any idea about sex. When I eventually and inevitably asked my mum what sex was she plainly explained the mechanics with equal weight to same-sex and different-sex couplings. It took me years to realise that not everyone had this version of ‘the talk’.

The fourth was to learn how to learn. She refused to have a TV in our house because she thought reading was better so I devoured books as a child. (I can still conjure up the smell of Finsbury Library just by closing my eyes). But the best thing she ever taught me was how to revise. At 14 she showed me how to take notes, condense them onto index cards two weeks later, and turn them into ‘spider diagrams’ the week before an exam. I never feared an exam again. If you know me at work then you know I still take notes like a monster. And these days there are whole startups founded on spaced repetition and visual thinking and mindmaps. Years ahead of her time.

The fifth was that people with ‘good’ politics can still be fucking arseholes. My house was a left-wing house. Musicians, artists, legal aid lawyers, speech therapists, teachers, writers - these are a left-wing bunch. I’m ashamed to say that I grew up thinking left-wing people were better people than right-wing people. Until my mum caught wind of this and set me straight. Will, she said, it’s not true - lots of these left-wing people are horrible in their personal relationships, and some of the kindest and most loyal people I’ve known are Tories - so it’s just not that simple. She. Was. Right. Politics is not straightforwardly correlated with character. (Obviously this applies beyond politics. People are complicated was the real lesson. And how to swear).

These five lessons were a radical education. So was giving me a surname based on our address rather than either of my parents’ surnames. I’ve disagreed with her on plenty of things and learned lots of my own lessons but, still, it strikes me that these five lessons shaped my fundamental outlook on life.

So I just want to say a public thank you to my mum, Gillian “with a hard G” Welch, for raising me like that xx

Reading

I’m reading Pandora’s Jar by Natalie Haynes because Claire bought it for me and it is extraordinary. The last 500 years of patriarchal culture - art, literature, music, poetry - have twisted the women from classical myths to fit our misogynistic reality. Pandora (it wasn’t a box, and she didn’t open it), Helen (dazzlingly smart, not just a pretty face), Medusa (turned into a monster for being raped wtf, and kept herself to herself), Clytemnestra (not a wife from hell, killed Agamemnon for murdering her baby and sacrificing their daughter) and on and on - these women are not the women we’ve been led to believe they are. My mum - who read us feminist versions of fairy tales - would wholeheartedly approve of the whole book. Particularly this meme that Natalie describes in chapter two and is my new image of who Medusa was…

Watching

The last episode of I Hate Suzie shook me so hard. An angry man, explaining a woman’s behaviour to herself, while her outward voice tries to pacify him, and all the while her interior monologue is saying the polar opposite. One of those pieces of TV that changed how I see myself. The whole series was great tbh. The on-the-money representation of period pains made Esther furious that it’s taken until her 40s to see the thing that happens to her every month represented well on TV. And Naomi’s Permanent Mega Truth theory will never leave me…

PMT is the only time you see everything clearly. Once a month the world is in focus and the shit you put up with the rest of the time reveals itself. If you have to have a difficult conversation have it just before your period arrives and you lose your bottle.

Listening

I spent the day in Figma on the side project and this playlist from The Blessed Madonna kept me company. We Still Believe.

Cooking

I’m going to cheat for thematic/poetic consistency because I haven’t technically cooked this. My mum’s coming round on Monday for my birthday and I’ve asked her to make the chocolate birthday cake she’s been making since I was 3. Yeah her radical education was good but her chocolate cake might just be even more fundamental…

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Right, it’s 10:30pm on Friday night and I’m done. Lockdown has clearly warped my sense of what Friday nights are for! Part of me is looking forward to unwarping this later this year. But there’s part of me that kind of likes the weird peace and quiet.

Stay safe.

Will