Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash
Mum said growing up in suburbia stunted her soul, the semi-detached house, the brick school with concrete playground and excellent exam results, all the neighbours estate-agents and solicitors and accountants, their wives (because few estate-agents, accountants, or solicitors were women back then) and wholesome kids with whom Mum played Barbie though she preferred Action Man. Therefore she became a hippie in the late Seventies, just before hippies went out of fashion and punk came in, she smoked pot and grew dreadlocks and lived in a caravan with someone called Wolf, afterwards swinging halfway back to suburbia, as she put it, by marrying Dad who, although an accountant, had long hair and smoked pot (but only at weekends) and kept a dismantled Ducati motorcycle on the bedroom floor for the first year of their marriage, which worked for a while, until I was fifteen and my brother thirteen, when she got restless again. She called this restlessness her itch, which made me think of the ‘feminine itching’ that teen magazines talked about, and after flirtations with pottery and weaving and wild-food foraging, and a couple of years when she came back from Glastonbury spaced-out and stinky, she left us and moved with someone called Freya Firewing to mid-Wales, where they built a roundhouse out of reclaimed railway sleepers and cob plaster, with a compost toilet and bottleglass windows. That could be why I married a gentle cricket-playing solicitor called Derek, and now live with him and our two daughters in a semi-detached house in an up-and-coming London suburb, and teach primary school and don’t want anything to be different, except for promotions and payrises at suitable intervals, and holiday cruises and maybe a bigger garden. But when my elder daughter comes home from school smelling of pot, and gets a fire salamander tattooed on her right calf, I think Here we go again, and it’s no real surprise when she announces she’s spending the holidays with Granny and Auntie Freya. I say Didn’t you say the compost toilet was gross?, she says I’m more mature now, and I try not to panic when she talks about changing her name – she hasn’t decided to what – and hitchhiking to Marrakech in her gap year, and I think with confused yearning of a granddaughter who will do baking with me, and possibly want a princess Barbie for her birthday.
Patience Mackarness lives and writes in Brittany, France. Her stories and CNF have been published in Citron Review, JMWW, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Moon City Review, and elsewhere. Her published work can be found at patiencemackarness.wordpress.com.
