Moments to treasure.

We arrived home from school this afternoon.  P sat on the floor and asked if I'd like to hear a song he's been learning in music classes; S lay on the couch and we clapped our hands together rhythmically.  Everyone was calm.  No-one ran to turn the TV on, nobody was grumpy or unhappy, nobody competing with anybody, no-one doing anything anti-social.  There have not been many homecomings like this.

Mentors

This will seem to come out of nowhere; it doesn't, but to untangle the thoughts about adults who influence children is too long-winded.  Suffice to say that part of my ruminating involved thinking back to adults who made me feel worthwhile in one way or another, and some surprisingly fleeting encounters from my teens sprang to mind.

Once was the family doctor I used to see in the portable building that constituted the local medical centre, slapped in the middle of a dead-flat paddock and separated from the government housing estate where I lived by yet more thistle-infested paddocks.  Minors are not allowed to see doctors unaccompanied by adults, but at 16, having been the victim of a physical attack that left me with debilitating headaches, I made a kind of stand for myself and kept an appointment with this doctor when the adult in my life refused to take me (another story for another day, perhaps).  After a flurry of sotto voce consultation amongst the staff, I was allowed in.  I was referred to a physiotherapist.

I don't remember whether it was before or after this that the doctor recommended that I leave home.  I think I partially persevered with this appointment because I already had a sense that she was somehow trustworthy, so maybe it was before.  But she certainly told me to get a scholarship to college and "get out of that house".  I've never forgotten it.

College wasn't my thing, but her perspective on my teenage world and the inference that she saw some sort of promise in me held me together in many ways.  I learnt at some point that she came from an accomplished family herself.  I thank her for getting out there and doing some good in more ways than she was trained for.

Another encounter was even more fleeting, but from around the same period of my life.  The German poetry contest.  I saw a bit of a Rilke poem on a blackboard this morning and it brought this memory back: students had to go to the German Department of the university at an allotted time on a Saturday morning and read the same memorised poem to the appointed lecturers.  Well, I had screwed up completely.  I was at my boyfriend's house, don't know exactly why, but I didn't manage to get myself to the university till well over an hour after the end of the competition.  I'm a bit shocked at myself when I think back to it because I was a very earnest little student.  It's a salient reminder of the juggling of so many intense experiences during those years... At any rate, someone was still kicking around in the department, a woman who seemed a lot older than me, who was good enough to go through the motions and at least listen to me.  It wasn't clear to me whether I was really still officially part of the competition or whether she was taking pity on a distressed and disorganised girl.  But I recited my poem, and she was moved, truly moved.  I forget the words, but she made it clear that after endless mechanical recitations I'd made it beautiful for her again.  Weeks later I got a certificate commending my performance (lots of those got given out), but the whole accidental shape of this episode gave me such an vital sense of contact.  And as with the doctor, it held parts of me together.

Thank you both.