Mother's day flowers

On Sunday it was Mother's day in Singapore, so after church Jacob and I went to a florist in Holland Village (the same florist Dad frequents every time it's Mum's birthday or their anniversary) to pick up some flowers. 

The bouquet was large, with bright red ginger flowers, lilies in bud and purple chrysanthemums nestled among green leaves. I held them on the bus that took us to Mum's home, and as we went along suddenly heard a small voice from the back of the bus:

"Dad, why - why - why - why does that girl have so many flowers?"

It was a boy of probably about 5 or 6 years old, feet dangling above the floor and looking at me with great curiousity. His Dad must have given some sort of explanation, because he then said:

"Yes, but why so many flowers??" 

And he continued to ask that question for the roughly 7 minute bus ride, to my great amusement.

Mum loved the flowers, and the little boy turned out to be a neighbour. He came over later in the afternoon and delivered one orange flower to her, to add to her bouquet of so many flowers.

April is the cruellest month

On the Thursday before Good Friday, the train station smelled like hot cross buns, and I was on the last chapter of The Gap of Time by Jeanette Winterson as I walked to the museum. The book is based on The Winter's Tale which has always been one of my favourite Shakespeare plays for it's redemptive arc and that painful human desire for something that seems irrevocably broken and ruined to come back to life. I've been feeling a weight of hopelessness for a while now, and sections of the (overall rather bleak) book reminded me, in a stoic sort of way, that life can go on even when it feels grey, and that things can change. 

“And the world goes on regardless of joy or despair or one woman’s fortune or one man’s loss. And we can’t know the lives of others. And we can’t know our own lives beyond the details we can manage. And the things that change us forever happen without us knowing they would happen. And the moment that looks like the rest is the one where hearts are broken or healed. And time that runs so steady and sure runs wild outside of the clocks. It takes so little time to change a lifetime and it takes a lifetime to understand the change.”

― Jeanette Winterson, The Gap of Time

I have been so thankful for books. Ann Patchett's Tom Lake was magnetic and tender, and it made me text my Mum and ask her out for brunch (which turned into breakfast and a massage). I'm completely absorbed by Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels now, which express the competition and love between friends so well, while also unveiling the wretchedness of poverty. The front cover of the second book I'm reading says: "Imagine if Jane Austen got angry and you'll have some idea of how explosive these works are." I keep a Mary Oliver's poems beside my bed, and two days ago read The Other Kingdoms and it's line about the creatures with their "infallible sense of what their lives are meant to be" twisted in my heart. Life sometimes seems so complicated. I don't really know what my life is meant to be, and sometimes I feel like I made some sort of big mistake as I moved through it, hurtling with arms outstretched towards the next thing only to find myself here, at twenty seven, wondering why?

Yesterday I came home and felt fragile. The night before I'd tried to do too many things, and consequently messed up the process of installing a tempered glass screen protector on my phone. The following morning, inexplicably, the phone stopped working, which felt like a punishment for my incorrigible sin of trying to do it all. I came home and J was making pasta for dinner and asked if I wanted to go out and do some hill sprints. What I really wanted was to be held, and I said so in a sideways way. I could tell J really wanted to run, and he thought about it for a while. Then he came over to where I was on the sofa, changed into my sports clothes, and said "I choose you. You are more important than exercise."

Do you know what that is like? To be told you are chosen when you feel like you've messed up? 

After dinner, and after the slice of courgette and marmalade cake I'd made the night before, and after I washed up and made the next day's breakfast while J hunched over scripts in the living room (this is what it is), J crawled into bed beside me.  

I'm sorry you've been feeling fragile.

I think it was last night - the phone. And I think when it stopped working today it felt like punishment. I makes me feel like I break things, like I keep messing up and can't learn that lesson of slowing down and not rushing. And I feel like a burden in our marriage because you have so much work and instead of being out there you're in here comforting me.

And J reached over and held me with his arms and his words as he reminded me why I matter to him, to our marriage, and to this world. 

Thank you for saying such nice things.

They're not nice, they're true. Do you believe they are true.

I think so, most of the time. I'm glad they're true for you.

Well, that's human I guess. They're true to me, and true for God.

Again, I had that feeling I sometimes have of things adrift being knitted back together.