http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._N._Taber
Hello
from London UK.
I am
fine, folks, (thanks to many of you for asking) but feeling very tired again after another restless
night. [For the benefit on first time readers, I am being treated for prostate
cancer and doing okay.] .
Now, my
late mother was always singing around the house and there was a time I thought
it was because she was happy. In later years, I realized that she sang to think
herself into happy mode; singing, for her, was a kind of escapism just as
reading was for us both. My mother always wanted us to be a happy family unit,
which we never truly were. I mostly blamed my late father, but I dare say he
and my brother would put the blame on me.
I stopped
playing the blame game years ago and can see now that I was not an easy child
to live with. I suffered from depression (no one acknowledged depression in
children then) that brought on awful migraines. In addition, I had significant
hearing loss that no one ever appreciated, including me, until I was much
older. As a teenager, being removed from my childhood friends at 14 years-old
and forced to live in a god-awful backwater called Hoo (in Kent) did not help,
especially as it coincided with my realizing I am gay; gay relationships would
not be decriminalized for a few years yet.
Yes, I
was a ‘difficult’ child and youth although no one knew just how troubled I was. [My perception is that family
members sit down and talk to each other even less than we did then so heaven
help future generations!] The only surprise about my having a severe nervous
breakdown in my early 30’s was that it hadn’t occurred years earlier. It was a
messy business. By then my mother was dead and neither my father nor brother
ever asked me for my side of events that took place during that terrible time.
They made assumptions and I was expected to live with them. I recovered sufficiently to find another job nearly three years later, but it took
me a good ten years or so to recover fully
and get my life back on track. [Even so, my breakdown still haunts me just as
those closet years of awakening sexuality always will.]
There was
something very wistful about my mother’s singing, yet positive too; it helped
her rise above the trials and tribulations of everyday family life just as
writing helps me. How many of us, I wonder, find similar outlets for their
frustrations? For my own part, as regular readers will know, writing as an art
form comes a poor second to its means to a very effective form of self-help
therapy.
VARIATIONS
ON A THEME
One
long-ago spring,
I heard
an old flower seller
hum a
song my mother
would
always sing to me
whenever
I felt sad
and
lonely, evoking a line
from a
poem about
a pretty
robin left sobbing
(for all
innocence?) as autumn
starts to turn
I was so
innocent then,
listening
to Mother singing
a song to
lift my heart
though
I’d often wonder
why it
sounded so sad
and
lonely, like the flower
in a
poem, rejected
for pretty rose tree blooms
begging a poet’s eye find
excuses
for its thorns
One
long-ago winter,
I heard
another flower seller
hum the
song my mother
still
sings to me whenever
I miss
her, feel so sad
and
lonely for no one even
trying to
see how it is;
song,
mother, child, robin,
rose, poet,
poem…but variations
on a
common theme
Life
forms, art forms, companions
to wishful
thinking
Copyright
R. N. Taber 2013
[Note:
References to ‘a poem’ in stanzas 1 and 2 relate to The Blossom and My
Petty Rose Tree found among
William Blake’s Songs of
Innocence and Experience, but whether or not readers are familiar with
these should (hopefully) make little or no difference to any appreciation of the poem.]