Friends have cats that saunter, sleep, roll and yawn. Cats who allow you to poke them without trying to take your hand off at the wrist. Cats who don’t get brought home from outside the pub by nice young men at half past eleven at night. But somehow we always seems to end up with the hyperactive, high-maintenance ones. I’m starting to wonder whether I’m drawn to them without even knowing it, or whether – more worryingly – I MAKE them like that. Hm.

In life I find certain similarities between the people I gravitate towards, even though when I’m drawn to them I don’t know that thing about them. If that makes sense. For example, I seem to root out people who play fretted instruments, men who wear hats, those who weren’t allowed to watch ITV as children and the moderately depressed. I bear no responsibility for the first three traits, and hope I’m not the cause of the last.

So maybe that’s it. Maybe it’s the same with cats. The kittens are loopy BEFORE I get my hands on them. I am not to blame.

Thank God for that.

ეტყობა რომ ბევრი მაქვს სათქმელი ქართულზე, თარგმნაზე, საქართველოზე…

ასე რომ: ყიყინი: Beyond The Croaking Frog

ახალი ბლოგია, ბევრი არ დამიწერია ჯერ. მოითმინეთ და ერთად ვნახოთ რა იქნება…

All the Georgian stuff is upping and leaving. It’s off to Beyond The Croaking Frog. Wish it luck.

When I had my first child I spent eighteen months being torn apart by a dreadful pressure to be perfect. I was terrified of saying anything that might give the impression I wasn’t in control and completely fulfilled at all times. I struggled with telling people the baby was driving me mad, or that I desperately wanted a day off, or that I feared I’d lost sight of who I was. I thought it made me a bad mother. The effort almost made me lose my mind.

Nowadays I don’t even try to maintain the facade. I am not a perfect mother, if such a thing even exists. If I’m in control it sure as heck doesn’t feel like it. Post-divorce I spend much of the time looking after them by myself. I get ratty. I get bored. The kids sometimes go to school in odd socks. They have near-misses, plenty of them. I frequently want to run away and join the circus. The three of us lurch chaotically from day to day. At night I get lonely and worry I’ll be alone forever. Sometimes I am terrified I’m not up to the job. I fantasise about afternoons in the pub drinking beer. And most of the parents I know admit that alot of that’s the same for them, too.

Recently though, I’ve been wondering whether I’m too quick to relate the chaos, the frustrations and my shortcomings. Especially with people who don’t have children, does it all make me sound a bit like someone who’s been lumbered with a job she can only be half-bothered to do? Do those tales of the children almost blowing up the house, the cheerful recounting of A+E stories and the blank expression which meets the question ‘where are the kids today?’ when I do have time off make me look like a crap mum?

I always assumed that everyone knew, somehow, implicitly, that my children are my Alpha and Omega, the reason I get up in the morning, the reason I try to be better than I am, the reason I bother fighting off the dark days. They are my world. My children know this because I tell them, every day.

But none of that changes the fact that parenting’s hard work, really hard work, and sometimes a bit of cursing, flippancy and black humour is all that stands between being able to carry on and losing your marbles. I think that’s ok. It’s hard – and dishonest – pretending those emotions don’t come into play. Does it make me a less caring mother if I admit my heart sinks at the thought of another school concert? If I entertain a brief impure thought about the fit doctor at the Children’s Hospital? Should I keep under wraps the stories about frantically drying their clothes with a hairdrier before school because I forgot to hang the laundry out? Would it be better to pretend I don’t sometimes just want to go and get drunk with grown-ups?

Instead I could tell people about the times I hug them so tight they almost pop, or the moments when their sheer beauty makes my heart skip a beat, or the days when I think how empty it all was before they came along. I could talk about the desperate terror of the phone call from nursery that tells you your child’s going blue. Or the pit in your stomach when you’re separated by thousands of miles. I could tell you how proud I am, every second, and that they are, in fact, the best kids anybody has ever had or ever will. And that letting them go, little by little, is the hardest thing I will ever have to do.

If I did, though, I’d never be able to function. I’d be right back where I was as a new mum, in a maelstrom of love and fear and what ifs. All that stuff’s there, but it’s so intense, so terrifying, that I have to push it down, just a little, and take solace in the more mundane. It’s a luxury I have because, thankfully, my children are healthy and I’m supported as a parent by wonderful family and friends. If things were more precarious I’d no doubt be in that maelstrom most of the time. But I can escape it, sometimes, and I do. If I didn’t I don’t think I’d ever let them out of my sight, and I’d go mad in the process.

It probably doesn’t really matter. My job’s to bring them up right, not to look good doing it. They’re fed, they’re watered, they seem to be happy. They know I love them more than anything else in the world. Surely that’s what people should judge.

If there are any Georgians reading this does not mean ქლიავი მინდა but rather that I feel a bit დებილი today. English people: plum as in muppet, not plum as in greengage.

This happens from time to time, and as usual I’m not even sure what’s brought it on. I have been a bit dim recently with computer-related issues, but not enough to explain this headspace. I’ve been a relatively useful person several times this week. The kids have been fed as required every single day and I haven’t mislaid either of them for ages. I haven’t got drunk and embarrassed myself for a good couple of weeks, so it can’t be that. No humiliating walking-into-lampost incidents. No awful mistakes at work. It’s a mystery.

So here I am on a perfectly nice Sunday morning with a big “I’m an idiot” cloud over my head. I’m waiting to see what it dumps on me. Will I be a) horribly disappointed, b) exposed as a fraud, c) laughed at, or d) all of the above?

Experience should have taught me that, in fact, the answer is e) none of the above. I’ll potter around and mope a bit, spend hours on end trying to attribute my mood to some happening or other, get a bit low, maybe listen to Fisherman’s Blues and have a little cathartic weep, and then normal service will be resumed.

What a numpty.

I was young. I was new to the translating lark. I had limited access to texts. I very much liked the few extracts I’d read of Nodar Dumbadze’s The Sunny Night, which recounted undergraduate life in Soviet-era Tbilisi. It was funny, relevant and that was what I was going to translate, dammit!

Unfortunately, the extract I had ended suddenly, unsatisfactorily. I had no access to the full text. I couldn’t leave it as it was. So I changed the ending. Only a bit, but changed it nonetheless.

Well, I won. This is me, propping myself up against the noticeboard displaying the results, announced the very day I finished my Finals. I’d been celebrating for a good few hours, hence the rather “dazed” expression.The guy who took the photo had been celebrating too. The blurriness kinda gives it away…

So anyway. I spent the prize money decades ago. It wasn’t much. I used it to part-fund further study, during the course of which I got me some translation morals. I wouldn’t dream of translating what’s not really there any more, hence the residual guilt.

Yesterday I decided it was about time I got back on the literary translation horse. I’ll be entering something or other in a competition at the end of the year. This time round I’m a bit spoilt for choice; I’m finding it hard to choose between texts, even between prose and poetry. The only thing I do know is that this time I won’t be making it up. Honest.

One of my children was in Georgia this year on the anniversary of the 2008 conflict with Russia. In the days leading up to it the UK media started reporting escalations in military activity. I anxiously contacted friends in the region for information and reassurance. One responded by sending me a YouTube video showing tank columns, shelling, fleeing children and the injured and displaced. Another started swearing with such vitriol about the opposition forces and giving such calamitous predictions for the future that I hung up, in tears, feeling desperately fearful for my daughter and for all others, both known and unknown to me, living in the region. I felt terribly uncomfortable, for whilst I understood my friends’ worries and strong emotions I could not cope with how they expressed them to me.

Last week I passed an anti-war protester in the street. He was shouting slogans, arguing quite disrespectfully with passers-by who did not agree with his views and generally being angry. His stance was so absolute. He made me rather uneasy. Later that evening a friend and I made vague attempts to work out what it meant to not be 100% sure of your own stance, to not be absolute, to not see things in black-and-white. It set me thinking.

In both of these cases the issue was not so much my opinion regarding the rights or wrongs of the conflicts themselves. What distressed me was something more fundamental about how we so often respond to conflict by over-identifying with one of the sides, escalating division and the sense of “Us versus Them”. What it boils down to is this: conflict is essentially dualistic, and dualism doesn’t sit well with me any more.

In Buddhism, as I’ve understood it, “Us” and “Them” are illusory concepts. In reality, things that appear distinct are not really separate. Fundamentally, there is no distinction between self and other, subject and object. In short, the Buddhist view is that reality is basically nondualistic. By extension Buddhism applies a nondualistic perspective to a conflict situation and demands that we abandon “Us versus Them”, black-and-white thinking in favour of that polychromatic middle ground. And so, I suppose, as my overall world-view has become less dualistic, so being at ease with neutrality and less inclined to take sides in conflict seem to be less indecisive cop-out and more desirable default state.

That’s all well and good but when neutrality seems untenable what do we do? The ‘one-size-fits-all’ pacifist stance that was so embraceable at 18 seems less so now. But if we’ve abandoned dualism can we really ever justify the use of force from a Buddhist perspective? I’m not sure we can. I certainly don’t think it can ever be viewed as skillful action. There are scenarios in which the use of force seems to me the only viable option. I just don’t think we can excuse its use in Buddhist terms. As with all of the precepts, if we intentionally break the principle of not causing harm we surely have to hold our hands up, acknowledge our behaviour as contrary to Buddhist teaching, accept that as volitional action it will bring about consequences (most probably negative), resolve to minimise those consequences, and try harder next time to avoid conflict in the first place. It is, I think, missing the point to try and excuse use of force in Buddhist terms. I like Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s essay on this. There is also a really interesting round-table discussion on the issue. It’s a long one but a good one, and they do the subject more justice than I ever will.

Anyway. Enough with the thinking. My next post will be much more frivolous. I think we all need the break.

One Sunday morning the aroma of half-caffeine New York fine-ground wafted past and – pop! – out of the egg came a tiny pensive caterpillar. It started to look for something to do.

On Monday it experimented with ping pong in a market and was thankful for family.

On Tuesday it listened to 8-bit music and played Baldur’s Gate very badly in a pub.

On Wednesday it built tents with small children and pretended to be a stegosaurus.

On Thursday it was helped by kind neighbours, peered into the inner workings of a Ben 10 Omnitrix in the vicinity of birthday cake and dropped springs all over the floor.

On Friday it was ablaze with productivity in the morning, cheered by festival fun in the afternoon, fearless in the face of mild inertia at teatime, giddy in pubs in the evening and completely unable to recall simple Irish tunes in the early hours.

On Saturday it was extremely hungover and over-indulged in roast pork baps.

The next day was Sunday again. The caterpillar had one nice mojito, half a bratwurst and a whole load of folktastic festival fun.

After that it felt much better. It pondered its week and realised it had no need at all to build a small cocoon around itself from which to emerge in two weeks, thank you very much, as it was very happy indeed with the wonderful cocoon of friends, family and community it already had.

The end.

Aged 6-7: Giraffe-keeper
On my seventh birthday I awoke with a burning conviction that there would be a baby giraffe waiting for me on the kitchen table. There was not.

Aged 7-8: Composer
I won the Radio WM “Design our Christmas Card” competition and spent the £5 book token on a horribly dull and dry history of classical music. Shame I didn’t do some piano practice instead.

Aged 8-10: Full-time Wimbledon Ball-girl, Girl-who-picks-up-the-flowers-from-the-ice-after-figure-skating-competitions, Prima Ballerina, Pop Star
Hm. The delusion years.

Aged 11-13: Herpetologist
One sunny day Plop, my red-eared slider terrapin, tunnelled out of his enclosure. Hot on his tail was Sodapop the box turtle. Plop was found lurking at the bottom of Miss Pring’s pond, and unceremoniously hoiked out with a broom handle. Sodapop was never seen again. 10 years later we moved Plop to an Erdington reptile retirement village where it was confirmed that he was a she. What a shock. We really thought we knew him/her.

Aged 14-15: Foreign Correspondent
Reuters, Reuters, how did we fail to get it on??
or
Lawyer
Ahhh, LA Law. I was going to be Grace van Owen. Oh yes.

Aged 16-18: Marxist-Leninist Revolutionary, Anthropologist or Major Thinker
Hm.

Aged 18-35: Diplomat, Academic, Linguist, Literary Translator, Head of Oxfam, Lexicographer,Troubador, Maker of Nice Things, Writer of Erotic Fiction, Satirist, Chicken-Keeper
Indecision creeps in….

Aged 36: No freakin’ idea
Milk maid, maybe?

For language-learners this economy comes in very handy. I got through several oral exams and a two-week French exchange uttering little more than ‘Ah bon’ with varying intonation. You have a hotel room for tonight but with a shower not a bath? Ah bon… (hold on whilst I consider my options). Your sister’s hooked up with your boyfriend? Ah bon?! (amazement). I’ve failed my oral? Ah bon… (resignation).

Georgian interjections – Gawd love ‘em – express with a sensible vowel-to-consonant ratio what might otherwise demand considerable tongue-gymnastics and grammatical dexterity. Constructing a Georgian sentence is a labour-intensive, time-consuming and frankly high-stress endeavour. Georgian interjections, on the other hand, practically leap off the tongue. In addition, they encourage – demand, even – the kind of dramatic delivery rarely warranted by an English interjection, and that’s kinda fun. It’s hard to deliver “Oops” with too much understatement, but აუ! (Auuuu!) ვაა! (Vaaaa!) and ვაი! (Vaiiii!) need delivering with gusto, and if you can throw in some cheek-clawing or wave your hands around a bit, all the better.

So here are my favourites. I use them in English cos they just don’t translate. Next time you see them you’ll know what I’m talking about.

ეხ! Ekhhhhhh! – Resignation with a hint of regret
აუ! Auuuuuuu! – Admiration
ვაააა! Vaaaaaaaa! – Surprised delight and amazement
აბა?! Aba?! – Surprise
აბა?? Aba?? – Appeal, petition
აბა!? Aba!? – Encouragement
აბა!? Aba!? – Hint of threat…
აბა?!?! Aba?!?! – Sense of “Why so surprised? You’re stating the bleedin’ obvious!”

აბა’s quite handy. I use it alot…

I briefly toyed with the idea of basing a Masters dissertation around the Georgian interjection. I didn’t. A few years later someone else did. აბა?!?! What did you expect, woman?!

Ekhhhh!

And, ultimately: Meh.