Mother’s Day: A Survival Guide

My mum & sister, Clare. (Thanks for letting me use the picture, Dad!)

Mother’s Day is terrific inspiration for anyone writing a feminist blog – it’s a day when it’s practically mandated to write about the inspirational women in your life, especially if they gave birth to/raised you. It’s also a little bit awkward when you’ve lost your mother and want to make that post, but don’t want to feel like you’re pissing on people’s parade.

1. You’re not alone. Actually, I wish this one was a little harder for me to remember. Out of my closest friends, three of them have lost their mothers and a couple more aren’t on speaking terms for various reasons, and I wish more than anything that none of us had to go through this. But when all your friends are buying daffodils and chocolates and going for Mother’s Day spa trips with Mummy Dearest, it’s a little hard not to feel left out, jealous and pretty damn pissed off with the world. Remember that there are other people in your position right now – reach out to them if you can. There are online communities as well as support groups – Hope Edelman has some helpful links & resources on her website, and her book Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss is an incredibly helpful book for dealing with losing your mother at any stage of your life.
2. Stay off the internet. Seriously. I made the mistake of checking Twitter this morning and ouch. Despite glowering silently at every advert and piece of spam mail that somehow got past the filter this past week, I’d somehow managed to forget this in the caffeine-free ten minutes between waking up and scrabbling for my iPhone. Don’t get me wrong – I’m really glad so many of my friends/acquaintances/celebrity crushes/people I have no idea why I’m following are having a great day with their parental units. But there’s no denying it’s difficult when your plans mostly involve chocolate for breakfast and wailing into a box of Kleenex whilst watching the Idina Menzel-Lea Michele duets from Glee. OK, the last part might just be me, but focusing on other people’s happiness is not what you need right now.
3. Make sure people know how you’re feeling. I’m not saying that you get a free trip to Bitchytown today, but you’re not going to feel great and it’s important that the people around you know that. If you need a bit of TLC, then make sure you ask for it – equally, if all you want to do is hide in your room and not talk to anyone but your cat, that’s fine but make sure your flatmates/friends/partner know that it’s what you need.
4. Remember the good times. If you’re lucky – and I accept that not everyone is – then you have some fantastic memories of your mum. Focus on them today, and even though it hurts I can promise you’ll feel better.
5. Just because you can’t send it, doesn’t mean you can’t buy a card. I did this the first Mother’s Day without Mum – it just felt so bizarre not to get one, even if it was just going to sit in my desk drawer. I couldn’t write it without crying, but I’m glad I did. These last two years I haven’t felt the need to, but it’s nice to know I have that option. And there are other things you can do to mark the day as well – my Dad & sister are taking some flowers to leave at the cliffs where we scattered Mum’s ashes, which is something we do to mark special occasions. Shortly after she died, I went to Liberty (her favourite shop) and bought a beautiful notebook where I write things I’d like to tell her -  from long, emotional letters to descriptions of my new shoes – and where I write down memories. It’s also the most expensive notebook I’ve ever bought, but I think she’d approve.
6. Start a new tradition. In Motherless Daughters, Addie decided to spend her Mother’s Days in the garden, “I made a ritual of planting flowers and praying for strength, light and life. It fits for me because I’m honouring my mother and nature, and celebrating the life-giving aspect of myself – which was truly the gift my mother gave to me.” [pg 24-5]

It’s never going to be an easy day, but it’s not supposed to be. Shortly after my mum died, someone told me that the amount it hurt was a measure of how much I loved her. You can’t make the pain go away, but you can ride it out knowing that it will fade (and come back, and fade again). And whilst it’s OK to take a few days to feel horrible, remember that you can’t hide from the world forever, and she wouldn’t have wanted you to.

R.I.P Gerard Donovan

I’ve written extensively in the past couple of days about the women who have inspired me – and with Mother’s Day on the horizon, I’m not quite done yet – but following some sad news earlier today, I’d like to turn my attention to one of the men who shaped my life and gave me and countless other young women the encouragement and confidence that they needed.

A month ago I shared my experiences about coming out at an all-girls Catholic school, and I emphasised the instrumental role that teachers can play in tackling homophobia in an educational environment. Although there were numerous incidents where the teaching staff were either not as supportive as they could have been, or were downright offensive, there were a couple who stood out as champions of tolerance – and crucially, they were the ones who most influenced me, and who have stayed in contact over the last decade.

Gerard Donovan was my Head of Sixth Form and Classical Civilisation teacher – in fact, he gave up some of his rare free periods to include Class Civ in the curriculum, even though by the time A Levels rolled around there were only two of us in the class. He also tutored me in Greek during lunch periods, and it was partly through his passion for the subject that I went on to study it as an undergraduate at Edinburgh. He encouraged me to apply to Oxford, and even though she and I weren’t a good fit, his belief that I was capable of it has stayed with me ever since.

Yesterday I learnt that he had died, suddenly although following a period of illness. The outpouring of grief on Facebook from his pupils past & present has been overwhelming – it’s clear that he shaped a lot of our lives. We stayed in sporadic contact over the years, and he always let me know how proud he was of my success, even though said success often went against the teachings of the Church that was such a big part of his life.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the person I was at 18, and what she’d think of the woman I’ve become. Overall, I think she’d be pretty darn impressed – I have a successful career as a journalist, I’m a published author and this weekend I got to share the stage with women who inspired her. I owe such a lot of that to the people who supported me then – in particular my parents, Mr Donovan, and the poet Ange Topping, who was my A Level English teacher. Both my mother and Mr Donovan are no longer with us, but I think – I hope – they know how their support and belief in me has helped me over the years.

Mr Donovan was a very kind, gentle man who was soft-spoken and maybe a little shy, but beneath that had a wicked sense of humour. Admittedly this once manifested itself in quizzing me in detail on the Peloponnesian War in front of the Ofsted inspectors – despite said war not being on the curriculum. I had been talking about bacchanals earlier though, so possibly he felt I deserved it. And anyway, one thing I learnt from Mr D is that ancient military history is cool. Everyone seems to be reminiscing about his teaching French with a Scouse accent – I missed out on that particular pleasure, but I imagine he was as endearing in French as he was in Greek. He was incredibly supportive when my mother was seriously ill during my A Levels, and I’ve heard similar anecdotes from countless people in the last 24 hours. He was everything a teacher ought to be, and will be very sadly missed.

Teen for God – growing up queer in a convent school

Earlier today, presenter and journalist Giles Coren got into a bit of a slanging match with some teenage girls who had read one of his articles on why vegetarianism is a bad idea in class. Hell hath no fury like a vegetarian publicly mocked, and there’s nothing more self-righteous than a Catholic schoolgirl. One of them called him a ‘faggot’ on Twitter – when he retweeted it, his co-presenter (and out lesbian) Sue Perkins called the girls’ school to complain, and has taken a bit of flack on Twitter for it. She’s stated that she doesn’t want to discuss it further, so this post isn’t about that.

Mandy Moore & Jena Malone in Saved! My school wasn't quite that bad, but it came close...

I went to a convent school from the age of 11-18, and realised pretty early on that I was queer. I didn’t know how to deal with it, or how I could keep it a secret from my friends, so I pushed it to the back of my mind and pretended to fancy Sean from the Manic Street Preachers. Yeah, I don’t know why I thought that seemed so plausible either. But as the years went on, people started asking questions. If someone asked what my type was, I’d blush and stutter and mumble something about not really having one rather than admit that I preferred Courtney Love over Kurt Cobain. Then again, I blushed and stuttered when someone asked me anything, so maybe that one wasn’t such a giveaway. But when my classmates were covering their pencil cases and schoolbooks with pictures of Boyzone and Leonardo DiCaprio, mine featured Shirley Manson, Audrey Hepburn and the ever-present Courtney. When I reluctantly took down the posters of horses on my walls (anyone remember Horse and Pony? Their centrefold was Downlands Cancara, the original horse from the Lloyds TSB advert), they were replaced with pictures of Diana Rigg in The Avengers. That, coupled with my decision at 15 to cut all my hair off and get a crew cut*, started to raise a few eyebrows.

Looking back I regret ever lying about my sexuality, if only because it was so obvious at the time. I’d come out to my family at 14 (prompting my mother to reminisce at length about her crush on her school hockey teacher), and they couldn’t have been more accepting. But remember the part where I said this was a convent school? Yeah. This was still in the bad old days of Section 28, when ‘promoting homosexuality’ in schools – which in practice meant discussing it at all – was illegal, and when you factor in that notoriously liberal establishment, the Catholic Church…. My GCSE RE textbook had a whole chapter on how we shouldn’t condemn homosexuals, we should just pray for them and send them to conversion therapy. In the same class, the teacher referred to AIDS as “God’s punishment.” It was customary practice for our head of orchestra to make homophobic remarks during rehearsal.

If I’d come out at the time, I don’t think I would have faced too much hassle from my classmates. I mean, I was already an awkward, geeky social pariah who ate her lunch in the girls’ toilets to hide the fact she had no friends, so I’m not sure it could have gotten that much worse. The one thing that stopped me was the knowledge that if it did, the school would not protect me. If I’d mentioned, in that letter I wrote in a fit of desperation to the Deputy Head about the bullying that was going on at the time, that I was also struggling with my sexuality, I’m not sure she’d have called my house at 6pm on a Friday to discuss things. Even if she did, I can guess where she’d have thought the real problem lay.

In the end, I did come out at school – in Sixth Form, not long after my Classics teacher got flustered and tongue-tied during a discussion on Sappho. It was pretty much a non-event – the general consensus was that I was more interesting than people had realised, and by that point I had enough queer and queer-positive friends to feel safe doing so. I discussed my coming-out experience on Woman’s Hour a little over a year ago - as I say there, the negative reaction came from the teachers, not the pupils. At our Leaver’s Ball, the RE teacher mentioned above came up to my parents and reassured them that at university “I’d find a nice man and come back to God.” My atheist father rolled his eyes, my mother muttered something probably blasphemous under her breath and together we walked away from seven years of guilt and brainwashing.

I was one of the lucky ones. Stonewall is doing a good job of tackling homophobia in schools (I wish it would do the same for transphobia, but that’s another story), but we’ve still got so far to go.  I don’t know if the school will take any action against the girl who called Coren a faggot – if it’s anything like mine was, there’ll be remonstrations for bringing the name of the school into disrepute, but the actual terminology will be glossed over. But because Sue called them, they’ve been forced to acknowledge that there’s a problem. Whether this girl’s attitude was something she picked up from the media or her parents or her friends, I don’t doubt that it was incubated at a school that preaches the evils of abortion and contraception and recoils at the shocking idea that two women or two men (or more than two people, or people who define as non-binary) can fall in love and live happily ever after.

I hope that the school is horrified, and sits this girl down to remind her why homophobic abuse is never acceptable and can never be justified. But even if they don’t, reporting this incident to the school has sent a clear message to the people who can stop this behaviour for good – the teachers.

*the irony here being that, as a funny girl with short dark hair and glasses at the height of the Mel & Sue phenomenon, my nickname was, in fact, Sue Perkins.