Just like 2020, 2021 was an unusual Mothers Day. In honesty we don’t really have ‘usual’ Mothers Days even in non-pandemic years. Some of us in our blended family hold firm to gathering together while others hold firm to not participating. Then there is the third category of those who have no choice in the matter, those who have passed into another realm and are forced to join us through our anecdotes and memories or possibly just our private thoughts.
The third category are almost the most interesting participants.
They loom, making us a little sad, not all of them are actual Mothers,some are aunts or cousins, some are unborn or uncreated children, some are unrelated and others,dare I say it are men.
‘It takes a village to raise a child’ is an African proverb that recognises that Mothering/ Nurturing is a complex old business achieved by an ensemble of characters involved with a childs growth and development.
Happy Mothers Day, Nurturers, whoever you are. We wouldn’t be who we are without you, all of you.
There is a significance to the number of this blog. Come inside and I will explain.
In 100 blogs time I will have been pondering the pandemic for roughly a year. I say roughly because some days there was more than one blog and sometimes a subject took a few days to complete so the same number was used until I was done.
At the time of Pandemic Pondering #1, I had no idea of what was ahead of me, or indeed the rest of the world. #1 was ahead of the government imposed Lockdown in Britain because I was displaying symptoms of a virus and decided to self isolate. I had been unwell for much of March but believed it just to be a regular virus gifted by a toddler. As we have learned more about Covid 19 I do wonder if @theoldmortuary had actually grabbed ourselves an early version.
At the time I was practicing daily blogging, ready for a course with The Gentle Author.
Here I am just over 2/3 of the way through a year still waiting to attend the course and the Pandemic still giving me plenty to ponder about.
Some days write themselves and others need a little more effort to extrude. Dog walks are a great source of blogging material, beyond that the subjects or topics usually just reveal themselves during normal daily life, sometimes we seek things out because they might make a good blog. Meanwhile normal daily life goes on @theoldmortuary, 90% of it too humdrum for blogging.
I was always the sort of child that dreamed about keeping a daily diary. I never achieved it because I had always bored myself within a week. The same thing happened at various times in my life both with diaries and scrapbooks. I started blogging nearly three years ago because I wanted to regain my story telling skills; a career in the NHS prizes factual writing over whimsy. I also like to take photographs, sometimes they are quite random but most can be made useful in some way. In truth, blogging actually started when someone made a cutting and thoughtless remark to me about both writing and photography. Seething, I began blogging and the title could easily have been ‘ F**k You’
It has become a daily habit or ritual, blogging forces me to find something interesting in every day. Some days it has enabled me to concentrate on the positive when sadness and dismay were the actual truth of our lived experience. I am constantly learning and I should probably delete much of the last three years blogs on the grounds of badly written nonsense. Ponderings seem protected and will be excused any future cull because in my mind their mission statement to continue through the experience of this Pandemic makes them many pieces of a whole project.
I strongly suspect I will still be at this pondering malarkey in another 100 days, when @theoldmortuary hits 1 year of pondering. Thankyou for reading. Please close the doors on your way out.
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