If there’s a better reason to blog, I can’t think of it.

In a departure from my usual kind of post, I would like to introduce you to a friend who has only recently become a blogger, and for whom this environment is particularly important.

Caroline and I met in 1988, when we were both living in a little French village outside Paris, both pregnant, English-speaking ex-patriates, and I liked her immensely and immediately. Her sense of humour was dry and wry, tending towards black, and her pithy, pointed cracks were delivered in a Yorkshire accent that sometimes brought me to my knees.  What’s not to like about someone who makes you laugh like that?

We saw each other a lot for about two years before I moved back to Canada, but then drifted away from each other for the most banal of reasons: ‘out of sight, out of mind’. We were in only sporadic touch, and saw each other just once in 15 years. 

About a year and half ago, I picked up the phone and called her number. Her husband told me that she didn’t like to talk on the phone anymore; treatment for cancer of the mouth and tongue diagnosed several years before had meant the removal of most of her tongue.

By coincidence, they were in our area on holiday the following week. We made plans to meet, and over the few hours we spent together she described the path her life had taken after finding a small lump on her neck, and to say that her story was sobering is a gross understatement.

Without most of her tongue, her speech was indistinct and she could no longer eat. Instead, she ‘fed’ herself liquid nourishment via a tube directly to her stomach. She went from being a funny, lively, confident woman to someone who avoided the telephone, social situations and going out in public as it meant getting strange looks or unsympathetic reactions from people who could not understand her. She lost her health, her confidence, her independence and the future most of us take for granted. But she’s still Caroline, and now, by god, she’s got herself a blog.

I’d love for her to meet you.  I’d love for her world to get a little bigger.  You’ll find her at Caroline’s Cinderella Cancer Blog and If you’d like to have an idea of what she’s been through, take a look at ‘My cancer ‘till now’.

Postscript:  I’m very sorry to say that Caroline died on Sunday May 16, 2010, at home in France and surrounded by her family: husband John daughter Jerina and son Jack. 

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Forever love

Unconditional Love                                       Artist:  AngeJedudsor    

The first essay to appear here was about an unexpectedly wonderful visit I had last year with my mother, whose mind had been almost completely lost to Alzheimer’s disease.  I wrote several more posts about our relationship, but after her death a few months ago, I decided I was done with examining and analysing the dynamics of our often wary and awkward dance with each other.

Then last week I emailed an old boyfriend to tell him about the bit part he had played in a recent essay about an incident in my  chequered past.  He got a kick out of it, but it was an allusion I had made in the story to my fear of disappointing my mother that caught his attention.   He wrote:               

‘Poetic license aside, my sense was never even of a whiff of disappointment but only of the sheer and absolute delight your mother took in you. I don't recall Rhoda's zest for colour but I do recall her zest for you.’

There are an extraordinary number of motherless children among the writers I follow.  The most thoughtful comments on my struggle to find the right balance with my mother have come from women who, far too young, lost their own mothers.   They have lived what I believe to be the ultimate loss, along with those who were emotionally abandoned, some in ways too terrible to imagine.  I am very lucky not to be one of them, but my friend Brian’s recollection – and  he remembered right –made poignantly clear that I am missing more than I thought now that  my mother has died. 

Motherless children face the loss, among the infinity of other irreplaceable things, of the unassailable, no-matter-who-you-are-or-what-you-do kind of love that is utterly unconditional.  If they are lucky they get it from their fathers or grandparents, but perhaps it is a rarer gift from those hearts.  This is not to suggest that men are not capable of profound, no-holds-barred love, but I believe that many find it hard to communicate such deep feelings clearly and unequivocally. 

Regardless of the difficulties I had in my adult relationship with my mother, she gave me a solid, healthy foundation, and the best part of that was her love, unwavering and independent of whether she liked or approved of what I did.  Without that, I would have been a different person and quite likely a different mother than the already imperfect one I am.  
     
A man I once knew well gave me a view of what it was like to suffer from conditional maternal love.  His mother’s esteem for her family and friends was like the stock market, the joke used to go, up one day and down the next.  We might laugh at mothers portrayed like this in sitcoms and films, but it stops being funny when real children try to make sense of the precariousness of love that is  doled out as a reward, or withheld as punishment. 

For him, an only child, the message he got from his mother’s conditional love was that if he did the right thing, it meant he was a good son and worthy of her love.  But when his decisions were made in his own, or his family’s, best interests, or when she simply didn’t like what he did, all bets were off.  He spent a lifetime trying to navigate the shifting sands of her affection, resisting and resenting the power she wielded.  As a father himself, he sometimes followed her example and was not able to understand, despite his own experience, how painful this was both for him and his children. 

Is unconditional love just for kids?  I think so.  A friend once told me that her love for her husband was conditional, and considering the warmth of her heart, this admission took me aback.  But lovers, best friends, husbands and wives all have the potential to trespass the limits of love; estrangement and divorce are the sad detritus of once-strong attachments.    To love someone despite anything they might do, say or become takes the unthinking, unblinking parental love that every child deserves. 

It seems appropriate that it’s finally on Valentine’s Day that I can finish this essay, which I dedicate to my mother, Rhoda Josephine Goba, formerly Sudul, nee Grasswick, who made sure I knew how much she loved me.  Whatever other regrets shadow my memories of her, I believe this much: I have honoured her by passing on her gift to my children.  If  they frequently seem to take my unconditional love for granted, it only means I got it right.              

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Vive La France!!

My favourite Belgian went to the bank the other day to make a deposit of cash, a rare event that necessitated his using a machine. In his French bank, deposits of any kind will not be accepted by the human tellers who work there, for reasons I don't know and would probably roll my eyes at if I did. So, after inserting his card and typing in his PIN, he was all ready to stuff his bills into the slot when a peremptory message appeared on the screen.


'State the reason for making this deposit!.'

(He couldn't sleep for the lump under the mattress.) 




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Every other Wednesday afternoon, a motley group of nationalities gathers under the plane trees on the village pitch to play boules. The object of the game of petanques, as it is more commonly called in this part of France, is to lob a solid metal ball about the size of a grapefruit as close as possible to the target, a much smaller rubber ball.

A staple of French sporting life and third only to the baguette and the beret as the most recognizable icon of French culture, the game is not, despite what people think, solely the domain of old, stooped French men. Our group numbers about twenty four and the fairer sex is well-represented, as are the Dutch, Brits and Belgians, along with a smattering of Swiss, Luxembourgers, Germans, Austrians and one Canadian.

However, my point in telling you all this is not to boast that our mini European Union is a shining example of cultural understanding, but to complain of the gauntlet of la bise that must be run before the game can start.
The French kiss – the one that goes on each cheek – is that other cultural imperative of French life, and should, if one is sensitive to social niceties, always be offered when encountering anyone with whom one has an ongoing and friendly relationship, even if only situational and relatively shallow. (Did you see Hilary Clinton smack Nicolas Sarkozy the other day at Davos?) Twenty four players equal forty eight kisses, and then the whole deal has to be done all over again before everyone goes home.

It's not that I'm prissy - although I'm not a fan of residual aftershave on my cheeks - but that it gets tiresome. I'm not alone in this – just ask any French teenager how tedious their morning meet-and-greet at school is. In defence of Anglo-Saxon standoffishness, I think a nod of the head is just fine, maybe even a wave that includes the whole group, and in some circumstances, a handshake is not out of place. But gimme a break on the 96 kisses, please. 

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Understanding the nuances of when one should and should use the familiar 'Tu' is an ongoing riddle to me, although a few of the basic rules are clear. I know, for instance, that you don't presume familiarity with people until some enigmatic stage in the relationship has been reached, at which point one or the other party usually asks if they can get chummier. 'Vous' is for strangers, police officers, pluralistic situations, old people and the President. 'Tu' is for children – even if strange – although at some point near the end of adolescence one should switch to 'vous', animals, anyone you know well enough to sleep with or confide in, and, I eventually discovered, total strangers in circumstances where you don't care about being polite.

This is why, when I got out of my car to rage at the idiot who had been tailgating me with his nose up my ass and his foot to the floor, he only smirked. I said vous to him , and the very approximate English equivalent of my tirade would have gone something along the lines of, 'Excuse me sir, but if you don't mind, could you please put your *** up your ***. Thanks so much. ' 


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The French are good with signs. Arriving at a major crossroad, you'll see a thicket of them pointing every which way. You follow the direction you want, and come to another intersection. More helpful signs of all colours. White for place names, green for routes nationales, blue for autoroutes. Pressing on, you navigate one roundabout after another, each with its own emphatic signage. But at some point in the series you'll discover that your destination...no longer exists. You've been dumped.

If you're lucky, there'll be an oxymoronic 'Toutes (all) Directions' sign to follow, but sometimes there's also an 'Autres (other) Directions' sign, in which case you should have brought a map. 


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French spoken with an English accent bothers me. I don't mean a British accent specifically, but just the way most native English speakers pronounce French words, blithely disrespectful of their egalitarian, unstressed syllables and unable to cope with their deliciously throaty Rs. It is the equivalent of nails on a blackboard to me. Lest you think I am being unfairly critical of those brave souls who venture into other tongues, I would point out that I am a frequent offender myself.

It was once my goal to speak French so well that I could pass for a native and when I was younger and more absorbent there was even half a chance I could have done this - some of the time. Living in France, kids at French school, French friends, Dallas every Thursday night at 8:30 dubbed into French – I listened studiously and learned a lot. As a plus, my ear is acute enough to know that the u in a French testicule sounds nothing like the u in an English uniform. If only my mouth could be counted on to follow suit. Like almost everyone who learns another language after the age of 12, I can't completely avoid the corrupting effect of my native tongue.

Still, I tried and practiced and talked out loud to my reflection in the bathroom mirror and scrutinized the lips of the evening news anchor to see where they went with words like 'le procureur de la république' and 'ses homologues Européens', shapes no English uniglot mouth has ever had to make.

But then a kind man took me aside after a job interview in Paris to give me the best piece of linguistic advice I ever got. 'Let me tell you a little secret', he said. 'Stop trying so hard. If you manage to lose your accent but make a grammatical mistake, people will consider you uneducated. But if you have an accent, you can make a thousand errors and they will only find you charming.'


 

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