I’ve never had to wonder where in the family I got my ‘cleverness’ from. My dad is incredibly logically minded and is fantastic at solving puzzles. I don’t mean jigsaws and crosswords (although he’s ace at logic problems and riddles) but he’s good at looking at a problem and breaking it down into its component parts and perhaps looking outside of the expected scope to find a solution. That probably explains why he spent most of his working life as a mechanical engineer.
My mother possesses that skill too, but in a slightly different way. She’s spent her whole working life doing crafty things like dressmaking, knitting, sewing etc. She’s able to look at a piece of clothing and picture the pattern pieces laid out on a piece of fabric in her head; a skill I WISH I had! She can do the same with recipes too – eat something then mentally write out an ingredients and method list. She won a scholarship to the Dumfries Academy when she was young; a very proud accomplishment no doubt, although she got rewarded with 50p for the honour where her older sister got a brand new shiny bike just for passing her 11+. Hmm... So whilst my dad’s ‘cleverness’ mostly takes the form of theory and being able to apply common sense to tackling problems, my mother’s is definitely more practical and creative.
Every now and again my mother surprises me and shows her more internally creative side. When I turned 13 I got the most fantastic present ever, she wrote me a birthday poem. I’ve since lost the card which had it in (a beautiful card with a picture of a Manx cat on the front), but I’ll remember the poem word for word until the day I die. It goes like this:
You are our darling daughter, you are so sweet and dear
But you’ve grown up so quickly, has it really been 13 years?
You used to be so tiny, but now you’re in your teens
So if you don’t want to out-grow Jamie, you MUST cut down on beans!!
Just to clarify, Jamie is my older brother (he’s secretly far more intelligent than me, but I always joke that I got the brains and he got the looks), and I used to have a mild obsession with having a full tin of beans on three slices of toast (cut on the diagonal, NEVER through the middle and NEVER buttered with a serrated edged knife, I’m a lefty, serrated knives just rip toast to shreds), topped with cheese, as a snack.
It still tickles my mother that I remember it.
Well the other day when I was round visiting and regaling tales of finishing my degree she pulled out a beautiful handmade card with a mortarboard on the front with the words ‘Well Done’ in gold lettering below. I opened it up and immediately felt 13 again. Inside was written:
Our clever wee girl thought “I’ll give it a whirl”
“Should only take a few years”
A degree was your aim, with an honours acclaim
You thought “how hard can it be?!”
You sweated and slogged, rarely down were you bogged
You took it all in your stride
In between times you worked, volunteered, wrote a blog
You seemed superhuman at times!
Then at last came the day, of the last EMA
It’s done, at last, “It’s MINE!!!”
At the bottom, below this poem was the words ANY child loves to hear (read) from their parents; “Well done darlin’, we’re so proud of you”. My mother is clearly the force behind my ability to write.
Ma and da, I love you both more than you’ll ever know and have such admiration and appreciation for you for letting me wander off in supermarkets (you know what I’m talking about) xxx
Pictured: Carrie on her 7th birthday
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That photo was taken at my 7th birthday party, my mother had bought me Henry's Cat party plates and cups, they were absolutely fantastic!!
As an aside, I got my hair cut on Thursday and it's shamefully identical to the style I have in the photo... 24 years later I haven't changed all that much eh.