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Desperately seeking dad

1
I spoke to my niece recently. She has just started Year 12 (lower sixth to those of us born north of 1990), and she needed a copy of The Tempest for her A level Lit course. Rather you than me, I thought.  As the resident English teacher, I was more than willing to plunder the dusty store rooms of my school’s almost redundant department store cupboards (so-narrow is our choice of texts, thanks to Mr Gove). Personally, I have never warmed to Shakes’s supernatural-come-comedic shipwreck; the so-called comic relief that Trinculo and Stephano are
SelfishMother.com
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meant to provide amongst the motley brigade of castaways has never done it for me.  Give me the maudlin tale of a son and his murderous uncle, or the shallow megalomaniac celtic king and his bloody endeavours any day of the week.

It was 8.30 at night when I called my 16 year old niece, and I had just got in from a PiYo session; a double attack on both on my expanding paunch, and my wearisome problems with sciatica. When I enquired as to her own evening, she told me she was ’Just Skyping, like we do every night for like, 3 hours’. 

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Three hours?,  I said, incredulously, acting the ancient aunty if ever there was one. My memory is short, I’ll admit.  It hasn’t been two minutes since myself and my sisters were vying for a slot on our landline of an evening. In our 3 story terrace, it got to the point where my mum resorted to acquiring a second-hand intercom so we could buzz  the inhabitants of the top floor when the call was for them. I wince when I wonder at the state of our quarterly BT bill. By the time I was 14, it was nothing to spend 6 hours a day with my best friends
SelfishMother.com
4
at school, and an hour and a half of an evening talking about, I don’t know what, on the phone.

There is something primal about the friendship that springs out of adolescence. This year marks 25 years of friendship with the girls I met in the nascent days of my secondary school career. Not so long ago we were 11, and now we are turning 37, an age that would have been geriatric back then.

I now find myself in the privileged position on the other side of the whiteboard, as a teacher. The personalities and friendships I see forming on a daily

SelfishMother.com
5
basis in my classroom help to keep me in a job that I would otherwise have left long ago. I have somehow amassed a group of Year 11 girls that have inhabited my classroom every break and lunch time since they were barely teenagers.  When once, they talked of periods and boys, they now talk of music gigs they are going to at the weekend (these are many), house parties, love bites and…, well, periods and boys.  They are lovely.  I am an honorary Year 11 when I am in their presence.  Not so long ago I blurted, ”Is he in our year?”, when the
SelfishMother.com
6
latest goss was doing the rounds. Oh, how we laughed!

For my part, the four girls I called my best friends when I was their age, are still my closest confidants; P.B., Caroline, Claire and Anna.  We don’t speak often enough, and see each other even less, but they are still those girls I turn to first when my world is changing for both the good and bad. Some, I met thanks to our mutual form teacher in Year 7, the foreboding, Miss Hall.  Others came later, as our friendship group broadened and we moved beyond Sweet Valley Twins and into Point

SelfishMother.com
7
Horror; out of East 17 and onto Oasis, Blur and The Boo Radleys.

When talking about the significant others in our lives, it is natural to reminisce about what it was that drew us to a particular person. It was a mutual love/dislike/passion for… More often than not, the topics that follow this pre-requisite include sport, music, comedy; rarely do they include bereavement. However, for one of these sacred four, it was our strange grief that brought us closer, specifically the loss of a father.

I couldn’t tell you how it started, but by the time

SelfishMother.com
8
we were 15, my friend Claire and I were in regular (more than) daily written communication.  Before our friendship had really begun, she had lost her dad unexpectantly aged barely 12. And, although we never spoke about it at the time, I believe that our mutual fatherlessness brought us together. I still harbour a huge cache of our correspondence and though I haven’t read a lot of it since it was originally composed, I know the unspoken fact was, I’m lost without a dad, and so are you.

Before we knew it, our devotion to the written word had run

SelfishMother.com
9
to sheets and sheets of A4 paper, scraps of notebooks and the backs of bus tickets; notes which we exchanged between lessons, before the end of the day, or in the playground, with the furtiveness of a drug dealer passing on goods to his loyal customers. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t all woe-is-me.  In fact, very little of it was.  Most often the early stuff was filled with the same topics my current Year 11s cover every lunchtime; who has snogged who, what happened at the student night we illegally got into last week, and more regularly,
SelfishMother.com
10
what would happen if we were Mrs Jones?

Let me explain: Mr Jones was the chemistry teacher at our very Catholic girls’ high school.  By the time we were in fourth year, lunchtimes were either spent watching the chemistry lab windows for a glimpse of him, or composing hilarious ditties about his obvious similarities to Kevin Bacon. We became obsessed.  We gleaned information where there was none; our sister’s friend’s friend says he is a Methodist; he has a baby daughter; he drives a silver VW Golf. The obsession hit its height when one science

SelfishMother.com
11
lesson, I hit my nose on the wooden ledge of the lab top. It was nothing more than an accident, but Mr Jones’s reaction (warm, worried, and humorous), was enough to make my adoration of him so strong, that I glued the wooden Bunsen taper we had been using that lesson to my diary. There was no looking back after that.

Our whole friendship group was in on our obsession, and encouraged our unrequited passions.  We would cook up reasons to be in his presence; before school revision sessions, missions to drop off ’much needed’ medication to each

SelfishMother.com
12
other’s form rooms where we would coincidentally catch a glimpse of Mr Jones…

It didn’t last long, but l still remember it got to the point where one of our group remarked that it was a case of a replacement father figure, if ever there was one.  She was right, although at the time I laughed it off. For my part, I know that all the times we joked and dreamed about being Jones’ wife, what I actually meant was daughter.

At the age of 15, I knew I was looking for a dad, and I still am.  Don’t fear, there is no sniff of Oedipus in my own

SelfishMother.com
13
marriage.  My husband has always been my best friend and my equal, but in a female-dominated family, I did and still do subconsciously look for that male figure. And although I realise it will never be in the form of flesh and blood, I suppose it is what drives me to pursue this current research.

At the brink of turning 37, I still yearn to grasp the meaning of a father.  I still want to find dad.

SelfishMother.com

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- 1 Jan 18

I spoke to my niece recently. She has just started Year 12 (lower sixth to those of us born north of 1990), and she needed a copy of The Tempest for her A level Lit course. Rather you than me, I thought.  As the resident English teacher, I was more than willing to plunder the dusty store rooms of my school’s almost redundant department store cupboards (so-narrow is our choice of texts, thanks to Mr Gove). Personally, I have never warmed to Shakes’s supernatural-come-comedic shipwreck; the so-called comic relief that Trinculo and Stephano are meant to provide amongst the motley brigade of castaways has never done it for me.  Give me the maudlin tale of a son and his murderous uncle, or the shallow megalomaniac celtic king and his bloody endeavours any day of the week.

It was 8.30 at night when I called my 16 year old niece, and I had just got in from a PiYo session; a double attack on both on my expanding paunch, and my wearisome problems with sciatica. When I enquired as to her own evening, she told me she was ‘Just Skyping, like we do every night for like, 3 hours’.  Three hours?,  I said, incredulously, acting the ancient aunty if ever there was one. My memory is short, I’ll admit.  It hasn’t been two minutes since myself and my sisters were vying for a slot on our landline of an evening. In our 3 story terrace, it got to the point where my mum resorted to acquiring a second-hand intercom so we could buzz  the inhabitants of the top floor when the call was for them. I wince when I wonder at the state of our quarterly BT bill. By the time I was 14, it was nothing to spend 6 hours a day with my best friends at school, and an hour and a half of an evening talking about, I don’t know what, on the phone.

There is something primal about the friendship that springs out of adolescence. This year marks 25 years of friendship with the girls I met in the nascent days of my secondary school career. Not so long ago we were 11, and now we are turning 37, an age that would have been geriatric back then.

I now find myself in the privileged position on the other side of the whiteboard, as a teacher. The personalities and friendships I see forming on a daily basis in my classroom help to keep me in a job that I would otherwise have left long ago. I have somehow amassed a group of Year 11 girls that have inhabited my classroom every break and lunch time since they were barely teenagers.  When once, they talked of periods and boys, they now talk of music gigs they are going to at the weekend (these are many), house parties, love bites and…, well, periods and boys.  They are lovely.  I am an honorary Year 11 when I am in their presence.  Not so long ago I blurted, “Is he in our year?”, when the latest goss was doing the rounds. Oh, how we laughed!

For my part, the four girls I called my best friends when I was their age, are still my closest confidants; P.B., Caroline, Claire and Anna.  We don’t speak often enough, and see each other even less, but they are still those girls I turn to first when my world is changing for both the good and bad. Some, I met thanks to our mutual form teacher in Year 7, the foreboding, Miss Hall.  Others came later, as our friendship group broadened and we moved beyond Sweet Valley Twins and into Point Horror; out of East 17 and onto Oasis, Blur and The Boo Radleys.

When talking about the significant others in our lives, it is natural to reminisce about what it was that drew us to a particular person. It was a mutual love/dislike/passion for… More often than not, the topics that follow this pre-requisite include sport, music, comedy; rarely do they include bereavement. However, for one of these sacred four, it was our strange grief that brought us closer, specifically the loss of a father.

I couldn’t tell you how it started, but by the time we were 15, my friend Claire and I were in regular (more than) daily written communication.  Before our friendship had really begun, she had lost her dad unexpectantly aged barely 12. And, although we never spoke about it at the time, I believe that our mutual fatherlessness brought us together. I still harbour a huge cache of our correspondence and though I haven’t read a lot of it since it was originally composed, I know the unspoken fact was, I’m lost without a dad, and so are you.

Before we knew it, our devotion to the written word had run to sheets and sheets of A4 paper, scraps of notebooks and the backs of bus tickets; notes which we exchanged between lessons, before the end of the day, or in the playground, with the furtiveness of a drug dealer passing on goods to his loyal customers. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t all woe-is-me.  In fact, very little of it was.  Most often the early stuff was filled with the same topics my current Year 11s cover every lunchtime; who has snogged who, what happened at the student night we illegally got into last week, and more regularly, what would happen if we were Mrs Jones?

Let me explain: Mr Jones was the chemistry teacher at our very Catholic girls’ high school.  By the time we were in fourth year, lunchtimes were either spent watching the chemistry lab windows for a glimpse of him, or composing hilarious ditties about his obvious similarities to Kevin Bacon. We became obsessed.  We gleaned information where there was none; our sister’s friend’s friend says he is a Methodist; he has a baby daughter; he drives a silver VW Golf. The obsession hit its height when one science lesson, I hit my nose on the wooden ledge of the lab top. It was nothing more than an accident, but Mr Jones’s reaction (warm, worried, and humorous), was enough to make my adoration of him so strong, that I glued the wooden Bunsen taper we had been using that lesson to my diary. There was no looking back after that.

Our whole friendship group was in on our obsession, and encouraged our unrequited passions.  We would cook up reasons to be in his presence; before school revision sessions, missions to drop off ‘much needed’ medication to each other’s form rooms where we would coincidentally catch a glimpse of Mr Jones…

It didn’t last long, but l still remember it got to the point where one of our group remarked that it was a case of a replacement father figure, if ever there was one.  She was right, although at the time I laughed it off. For my part, I know that all the times we joked and dreamed about being Jones’ wife, what I actually meant was daughter.

At the age of 15, I knew I was looking for a dad, and I still am.  Don’t fear, there is no sniff of Oedipus in my own marriage.  My husband has always been my best friend and my equal, but in a female-dominated family, I did and still do subconsciously look for that male figure. And although I realise it will never be in the form of flesh and blood, I suppose it is what drives me to pursue this current research.

At the brink of turning 37, I still yearn to grasp the meaning of a father.  I still want to find dad.

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Mammy, teacher, writer and occasional wife. After an unexpected family tragedy, I am taking time to focus on things that matter to me most. Being a mammy and wife is up there, battling closely on a daily basis with pursuing my love of writing... Thanks for reading. See my journey unfold at Instagram and blog at https://iwatchthesunrise.blogspot.co.uk/

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