After over a year of not seeing my eldest daughter, Redhead and I had the great pleasure of a visit from my daughter and her youngest son this morning. She is in her mid 40's, a drop dead gorgeous blonde who is about to complete her PhD . She is no dizzy blonde and has worked hard all her adult life to become a very successful woman. Happily married, kids, full time work and someone of whom I am very proud.
With all the border closure rubbish, lockdowns and social distancing crapola that has been going on throughout 2020, it was a short but long anticipated get together that had only one rule: no discussion of Politics.
How did it work out?
The first thing was a HUGE hug.
An embrace and a physical connection that I have missed over these long, long months. To hell with the masks and to hell with the social distancing, she is my daughter and I needed to feel her love.
And I felt it. In spades. The sheer wonder of my hug - our hug and the realisation that hugs are so bloody important. Something poured through me like a channel of calm.
I felt whole for the first time in almost a year. With a hug. No masks, no social distancing and no overhead drones checking on us. We had a hug.
And it felt so damned good I almost wept with the joy of it.
We had earlier decided that we were all sick and tired of talking about politics, the wuflu and all the gender and racism controversies that occupy our lives these days, we would not talk about anything controversial.
The old standby of talking about the weather was out. That can suddenly become dangerous territory should one of the group stray on to climate change.
So we talked about Family.
We talked about when she was a little girl and some of the antics she got up to. We talked about her late Granpa and what a silly bugger he could be. We celebrated his life and his memory and everything that had made us love him so much.
We talked about the movies we loved, how much we wished John Candy hadn't died so young and how we loved Uncle Buck.
We spoke about the ten commandments and how they could be taken down to a couple: Be respectful and honourable and loyal and only kill someone if your life depended upon it.
It was a conversation about Family and Love and what it meant to us as a 45 year old woman, a 65 year old woman and an 88 year old woman.
The person who was absent from our gathering was my younger daughter who has decided that being a vegan and a hater of all things normal has banned me and Redhead from her life. All because she allowed her daughters to treat Redhead in a most abhorrent way.
I am not sure how many of you read the articles posted about the dreaded day that Redhead and I were treated like scum by my woke granddaughters in Redhead's house.
Today, Redhead said
What a lovely surprise , school holidays and my 13 year old great Grandson came to visit with my granddaughter his mother. He spotted my piano and said can I have a go. I turned it on and he pulled out the special piano seat and squeezed himself up towards the piano arms to his side and wrists all bent. I said first thing to do is push the seat back so you have your arms a little stretched and feeling relaxed and keep the wrists up , then your fingers are over the keyboard ready to dance over the keys. I said if you are too close you are not at ease. When he came back the following day he again came to the piano , this time he pushed the seat back and had his arms and fingers relaxed over the keyboard. Famous words then were spoken "I have found the answer it is the UP". From that comment I think what he found was that to use that approach with the computer keyboard and you are more relaxed and faster for games and finger movement. He quickly put into practice a very simple lesson , sit a little further back, keep the wrists up and be much more relaxed.
It was only after I read this that I realised what my Grandson meant when I had asked him about what he had learned from meeting his Great Granma and he had responded
" Keep your hands up. "
I had no idea what he was talking about. Now I do.
Our young people NEED their Granma and Granpa and their Great Grandparents.
They NEED FAMILY.
Family. Or Anger?
I wonder: if my younger daughter and her daughters had sat with Redhead today, told not to speak about the politics and the gender and the racism and the hatred of Trump... what would or could they talk about?
I suspect that there would have been silence.
Because like bushfires, without fuel, there would be no fire.
BLOG COMMENTS POWERED BY DISQUS
