Hot air

In response to the non-British question And what do you do? I have tried saying: I'm just a mum.  While few will turn away, it invites being patronised or soothed by well-meaning people talking quickly about it being the hardest job and yet an unspoken awkwardness hangs in the air. Sooner or later I meet a single mother, perhaps a pathologist or a refugee from domestic abuse, with four kids who has worked ever since her first child was born.  No matter how much I rationalise my choices or that my children want me there for them, I twitch with an unconscious, gnawing guilt:  You are supposed to work for money.  

A variant of the question is: What did you used to do? as if giving one the opportunity to claw back validation.  To this, I can reply smugly, even though it is one of the most detestable traits, because my jobs and the confidence lent by the unspoken trappings sound good. I was a software consultant, European programme manager,I worked for American software companies, Apple... And behind all that, silent, implicit, in serried ranks: international travel, holidays, car allowance, health plan, life insurance, pension, stock options, housing allowance, moving allowance.  Fortunately, it matters little because no-one really cares about your choices. They are just yours, after all. 

For a short time, I tried saying Nothing as though this word, suggesting invisibility, might make the question and the questionee fade into that void. On the contrary - people find this response puzzling, even faintly aggressive.  It invites questions.  Recently I have tried: Taking each day as it comes, the edge to which is generally understood as: Back off.  Sometimes the determined type who might be overcurious or teutonically insistent will follow it up, dangerously with: But how do you spend your time? So I wriggle and squirm and burrow into the milongas where these things are rarely asked.

When we ask What do you do? do we really mean Who are you? What lucky few of us are what we do? And (when) does doing what you love as a job kill that enthusiasm?

I am agape when I read the back covers of books or adverts for events and see the lifetime accomplishments of others. Some of these people I know and have finally realised the glossy shimmer of those words is not necessarily much indicator of truth.  It can be mere veneer, a spin, a smoke and mirrors trick that would not look the same in a harsher light.  I wonder at the power of advertising, the relentless urge to be special, to be someone and the temptation to compare one's life with others.   

Listening to the Naxos Children's Classics series of Great Explorers, Great Inventors, Great Scientists etc. one realises that the skill of these people was in their adaptation to an environment or circumstance and that the truly gifted are very few.  Take the story of Louis Braille is just such a case.  While undoubtedly intelligent, inventive and persistent, were it not for a tragic accident who knows what would have happened to this son of a leather-worker who fully intended to follow his father in this trade. Furthermore, it was was only posthumously that his name became famous.  The fame of these men and women came, typically, not by striving for it but as an accident, an epiphenomenon of their focus on their work.  Happiness is the same - one does not, with success, search for it; it settles, like a gift, like grace, while you are occupied with something else.

My husband used to admire what he saw as a facility to sell myself into promotions and good pay rises each time I moved company.  It seemed a propitious time in which to do so, though perhaps that ease came just from being young and independent. This was the sort of success my parents' generation wrote to their friends about in Christmas card round robins.  

The enquiries at interview amounting to Who are you? What have you done? require the sorts of pat responses that are not hard to learn.  There being no need now for corporate legerdemain I decided it was time for an updated response to that question:  Thus:

She was brought up in Germany, Nigeria and the UK and later spent time in France. She studied English, French, information systems management and philosophy at three universities. She speaks four languages. She had moved home forty times before the age of thirty five. She started work young, at fourteen or fifteen in a Spanish bar. She flitted between waitressing and bar work in nightclubs, cafés, hostels, canteens and restaurants in Italy, Germany and the UK, was the chef for a while in a French bistrot.  She found a modern purgatory temping in shops, offices and teaching English; tried living in Paris and early days web design before slotting into multilingual technical support, moving on to become a software consultant and trainer across Europe and as European project and programme managers for well-known multinationals. 

The attentive reader realises, at this point, the spotlighting overemphasis in these sorts of blurbs, of the pronoun. 

Omission

That rise was mostly on hot air.  Once fully independent she made a series of staggeringly bad choices, in love, career and money.  The resulting harm to the soul was unsurprising but the resilience of youth wrested her into her thirties. There, the biological clock and a nest egg, soon blown, tumbled her into marriage, children, and a large, Georgian moneypit in Scotland, becoming by dint of repeated experience, an expert in dry rot.  The shock of the move from London took five years from which to recover.  She outstayed other English or English-sounding migrants unable to adapt to the harshness of the Scottish weather, the Puritan mediocrity of certain provincial towns and their incongruous, inflated sense of self, or the racism peculiar towards the English.  She wandered the subterranean caverns of largely solitary parenthood for many years, experimenting with the distraction of alternative personal and familial life-styles, before following the strains of Argentine tango into a different world. She might now be neurodivergent were it not that these days so many seem to be. 

She lives an entirely ordinary, somewhat privileged and largely reclusive life, being a wayward daughter, unsuitable wife, and dubious mother to a tolerant family in Perthshire. Her fallen-into form of marriage suits the town in which she lives. In many ways neither have moved on much from the 1950s. She wonders with a creeping doubt, a quiet and stealthy alarm, whether all this is what some famous writer called "a life slipped into the negative" but decides on better days that having time to chat with your kids and time to oneself could never be so called.  She has an appetite for solitude, writes, cycles, makes soup, occasionally dances in Europe. She feels she camps in her house, excusing her housekeeping by telling herself that the search for truth, bikes lanes and better dancing don't lend themselves well to home-making.  She invariably upsets various authorities, appreciates the lack of constraints and consequential freedom that let her do so and tries to be good, or, failing that, honest, until the pricking of conscience reminds her that these should be the other way around and that this dyad may account for much existential angst.