I share.
Every family has stories and patterns and secrets. Stories from either side of mine were not always handed down with pride, instead I got snippets here and there and as I grew up I got the sense that there were important reasons for the secrets being kept. So I stopped asking. There were often hints of dramatic events and emotional scars on both sides but very little detail was given. The events were always referred to in a very matter-of-fact way, no drama, no great and entertaining stories. I am a storyteller, it is my predisposition to make everything into an entertaining tale. I love the phrase ‘never let the facts get in the way of a good story’. But in our house the bare facts were what I got if I asked a question about the past. From a very early age I felt that there were things one shouldn’t talk about. I felt a pressure of required secrecy that, because it was unnatural for me, left me feeling suffocated and fearful that I may upset someone accidently by sharing a story.
I feel strongly that emotional DNA is a thing; that the wounds of the elders are passed on to be healed. I think that the study of epigenetics will eventually find that emotional trauma impacts and is stored in our cells. I believe that in families there are patterns and histories that repeat themselves over and over, passed on not just by nurture, but also by nature. Passed on with or without the explicit telling of the stories. I share this because I wonder about the stories our DNA would tell.
In 1980, when I was born, my father was 23 and my mother 21. I was the first grandchild in both their families. After I was well enough to be released from the hospital we travelled by car first to Paris to visit my dad’s aunt, then on to Switzerland to his grandmother. I was still so small that they bathed me in the sink and dressed me in dolls’ clothes. After Switzerland we came back to England and I was shown off to both my grandmothers.
Between 18 months and five years old the hippocampus is developing our sense of self. This tiny horseshoe-shaped part of the brain forms part of the limbic system and is primarily associated with memory and spatial navigation. It is the hippocampus’s job to create meaning out of memory. At three years old it is at its peak point of creating your narrative sense of self; giving you an identity and determining how you fit into the story.
There will have been many things that were happening when you were learning about who you are, recognising your body and distinguishing where you end and where the universe begins. Those things – your family, culture, traditions, and surroundings – were filtered and you began to form beliefs1 and perceive your reality.
The things that happen when we are very young inform how we perceive reality, how we understand love, and what levels of physical touch and intimacy feel good and come naturally. Whether we were smacked, how often we were held, the level of conflict or love demonstrated in our home environment at that age, all of this impacts us hugely.
I was two and a half when my brother was born. By then we had lived in Ireland on a vegan commune where I had a goose called Lucy. We had been to Italy, and lived in Scotland in a tiny house up a very big hill. In 1983 we lived in Thame, near Oxford, where my brother was born at home on a Sunday morning after brunch. My dad’s mum came over to look after me and I remember being excited.
I loved my brother immediately.
In fact my first real techni-colour and ever-so-happy memory is pushing him in a toy pram across a field of grass and flowers, under the biggest, bluest sky, in New Zealand. The sun made everything sparkle and refract tiny little rainbows, the world was huge, expansive and I was wild and free. In that memory I must have been three and he about six or seven months. My belief about life then was that it was truly magical.
For a year we lived in a house-truck in New Zealand and it was an adventure. I loved it. In every picture I am smiling and naked and having the time of my life. We lived in a community of other young hippies and my dad was my hero. I remember all the important stuff that happened during the year we were there; firstly my parents got the local police out looking for us because they thought we’d run away, only to find us three hours later tucked up in our beds. A local boy stuck his middle finger up at me and I didn’t know what it meant but did like the reaction it caused. I went over the handlebars of my tricycle and landed at the foot of a fountain.2 And, my dad shaved off his moustache.3
In 1984 we moved back to London. We moved into my grandma’s house in Hackney, where I had a makeshift bed of wooden boxes on wheels on the landing at the top of the stairs. It was all mine, and I loved it. I loved that I could hear everything that was going on downstairs. I loved staying awake and listening to the adults talking and I loved that the night I had my first nightmare (about a red dinosaur trying to eat me) my dad came and tucked me in so tightly that nothing in any dream could get me.
Shortly after that we moved into our own house. It was just around the corner from my grandma’s and it was a real grown-up house. I was four when we moved in and we stayed there until I was seven. It was the longest we’d ever lived anywhere. I remember people commenting on it. I remember helping my dad lift the paving stones and lay turf in the garden. I remember the day we got a climbing frame, with a trapeze that hung down in the middle. I remember the green gym mats that lined the floor underneath and smelled of rubber. I remember swinging and making up songs, singing as I swung. I remember having a playroom and I remember having Victorian telephones rigged up between our playroom and our bedroom. We were happy. Life was good.
From four to six I felt pretty normal, I’m not sure that I knew what normal was, but I knew when I stopped feeling it.
1. I talk more on beliefs in the workbook section, Step 3: Judgment and Acceptance.
2. I still have the scar on my forehead, even though my wonderfully clever mum did an amazing job at putting me back together with butterfly stiches.
3. I was mortified and went looking for it. I remember climbing up onto the sinks in the men’s portacabin honeywagon. I knew it was naughty to be in there on my own, but I felt sure I’d find his facial hair in a little strip in the sink and get him to put it back on... I did not.
NOT NORMAL AND THE QUEST FOR NORMALITY
‘NOW I AM SIX I AM CLEVER AS CLEVER, I THINK I’LL STAY SIX FOR EVER AND EVER.’
– AA MILNE
The year I turned seven things changed for me.
One day, while I was still six, we were driving to a place we’d not been before. We were going to visit an old friend of my mum’s. I was super excited because she had told me that he had fairies at the bottom of his garden, that she’d seen them and maybe I would see them too. On the way there in the car my parents fought; she was a fucking-awful-map-reading-passenger, he was a shouty-aggressive-impatient-driver, and I was an annoying are-we-nearly-there-yet child, who got shouted at by them in unison for trying to make them stop. My grandma and my brother were also in the car. At one point I remember my dad saying, ‘Well if you don’t fucking know, let’s just follow that car, he seems to know where he’s going.’
Pretty normal family car journey, right?
When we finally arrived I snuck off to the end of the garden and sure enough, right down at the bottom, past the lawn, in the long grass, hanging out by an overgrown Christmas tree, there were fairies. They were awesome.
