Grace
Yesterday was Youth Day. Today is Father’s Day. Standing side by side they invite us to consider the sacred purpose of family, which is to be an incubator of love. Family is where we learn to love and be loved. The shape of family-love forms the shape of our loving far into the future for good or for ill. In Jeanette Winterson’s amazing novel, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal she writes about her first lesson in love:
“Auntie Nellie cannot have had much money. Twice a week she had all the neighbourhood children she could squeeze into her one room and she made onion soup or potato soup and all the children brought their own cup and she ladled it out off the stove… They all loved her and she loved them. She called her dark little house with its one window and black walls ‘Sunshine Corner’.
It was my first lesson in love.
I needed lessons in love. I still do because nothing could be simpler, nothing could be harder, than love.
Unconditional love is what a child should expect from a parent even though it rarely works out that way. I didn’t have that, and I was a very nervous watchful child. I was a little thug too because nobody was going to beat me up or see me cry…
When love is unreliable and you are a child, you assume that it is the nature of love – its quality – to be unreliable. Children do not find fault with their parents until later. In the beginning the love you get is the love that sets.
I did not know that love could have continuity. I did not know that human love could be depended upon…
Auntie Nellie made love into soup. She didn’t want thanks and she wasn’t ‘doing good’. She fed love on Tuesdays and Thursdays to all the children she could find, and even if the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had … ridden into the stone-floored kitchen, they would have been given soup.
I went down to her tiny house sometimes but I never thought about what she was doing. Only later, much later, trying to relearn love, did I start to think about the simple continuity and what it meant. Maybe if I had had children I would have got there faster, but maybe I would have hurt my own kids the way I was hurt.
It is never too late to learn to love.
But it is frightening.”
Grace,
Alan
Stepping Stones Children’s Centre
Playground Spruced Up
A member of CMM generously donated synthetic grass
to spruce up the playground for the children of Stepping Stones.
