Playing with Plot

This month I have been playing with fiction writing. Thought I'd share a little sample:

Running her finger over the ridges in her thumbnail, she took a deep breath. She smelt warm soil and her own high expectations. The small black tray in front of her had seemed so fragile in the garden centre one day ago but now it had grown in strength; filled with moist earth and the importance of her task.

One by one she gently shook the seeds from the small packet into her left hand and separated them using the creases in her palm as dividers. Six for this tray and six saved in case the first ones failed. She made sure the reserve seeds were safely returned into the paper sleeve with the lip folded over; holding the first six down with her thumb.

Using the wrong end of a pencil, she carefully swirled six deep holes in two neat rows spaced equally across the tray. One seed was dropped into each and covered over with soil and her whispered pleas. The clouds stretched away from the sun, casting a sudden brightness on her garden table as she steadily poured water from her measuring jug. With another deep breath, she welcomed this as a sign of good things ahead.

"Hi love."

Daniel's voice sounded very close, possibly already in the kitchen. Normally his key in the door gave her time to move from her day to their day.

"Hey, I was just tidying some old things out of the shed. How was your day? Did you make your meeting?"

"Good - yes, just!" Daniel crossed the patio to kiss his wife's cheek. "Didn't realise you knew where the shed was," he teased her gently. "Well, Gareth came to the meeting with exactly the arrogance we predicted and he managed to drop into the conversation that he'd been at Georgio's last night with Michael Kennedy. Damn fool."

In one motion she rose, kissed his forehead, slipped the seed packet under his newspaper and placed them both on top of the recycling box that sat on the edge of the patio. Their evening had begun; as sweetly and calmly as they always had. Although tonight she held the quiet potential inside her like a secret.

Pots in My Head

I recently received some thinly-veiled disapproval about how I am raising my son. Little Man had had a tough day at school which had culminated in his lunchbox emptying messily into his school bag. What followed was a tired, emotional, end of week meltdown. Someone observed this and thought best to recommend a book to me that lots of 'really great mums' rated about us lowering the bar on kids' expectations of themselves.

A few months previously, this eager soul had given me a book to read entitled, 'The Gifts of Imperfection'. I detect a pattern. This person has a theory on me and it is leaking out in book recommendations. Once I had emerged from the stages of indignation - How dare they? Who are they to judge? Their problem is... Hmm, what if they're right? - I boiled it down to a distinct possibility: I am a perfectionist and this is affecting my family.

I don't know about you but I have always struggled to tell the difference between perfectionism and PMT. Do I want things done my way? Yes. Do I experience extreme irritation when people don't do it my way? Probably for two out of every four weeks.. I thought I had dodged the pure perfectionist bullet because I *gasp* can go to bed sometimes without wiping the kitchen counters down. That makes me laid back, right? A perfectionist could never do that.

Except they could. Because there is always a damn spectrum involved. Just because I can be sloppy on the crumb front, I can never stop reviewing the pots in my head. That's where my quest for perfect is working around the clock. I have a pot for each child, a pot for me as a mum, a pot for my parents, a pot for me as a daughter, a pot for my partner, a pot for me as a partner, a pot for work, the list goes on.

When things are going well in a life category, that pot is full, but one mishap can empty a pot. Once a pot has emptied, all hands are on deck to put it right; if someone thinks I am doing a bad job as a mum, that pot is empty all of a sudden and needs extra super-mumming until it's full again. The genius of this is that there is no filter. Even if I couldn't give two hoots what a person thinks, if they don't think I'm doing a good job, the pot empties.

Naturally, this is a full time job. There are very few times in life when every pot is brimming - more often than not, there are a few that need replenishing at any one time. No wonder I'm exhausted! I wholeheartedly agree with the 'OK is good enough' philosophy in theory. In practice, however, 'be the best you can be' resonates more clearly in my head. Do I need to check how this is being interpreted by my son? Probably. Although, if we're honest, aren't we all bouncing between these two messages daily? Food for thought. If you need a reading list, you know where I am.

Decorate Your Waiting Room

Is there something you really want to do? You may not have told anyone or allowed yourself to dwell on it but is there something crouched inside you that you remember occasionally and your heart flip flops? It might be to live somewhere new, to start a business or a creative project, it may be an escape plan from a relationship or a job, it might be an entirely different life you really want or it might be finding the time to take that course in that skill you really want to have. Do you feel you are waiting for the right time to do it?

That's ok.

I have a lot of things I am waiting for; some are realistic, others are dreams. The time to devote to learning a water sport, the time to write more, the chance to move back to the coast, the opportunity to study again, the summer I will get to spend on Nantucket. These are all things I grew up just assuming I would get to do. Just because they were on my list. Recently, I got into a panic that I was so far from being the person this list paints the picture of. My journals and Pinterest account reflect this person but she is virtual - the real me is working hard to bring up a young family, working part time in education, keeping on top of laundry, weeding a small garden, making time for date nights, worrying that I'm doing all of this well enough.

Please don't misunderstand me, I am very grateful for my life. I am one of the luckiest people I know. I actually love weeding. My panic wasn't really about wanting a different life, mine was more of a realisation of how far I had drifted from the original plan. And that's ok too. But I then thought how important it is to check in with the 'stuff you really want to do' every so often. We watched a programme last night and the matriarch of a lovely family, having brought up her four children over fifty years, felt it was finally her time to do something for herself. She loved painting so she booked herself on a month long trip to Italy to paint. And it made me wonder about the balance of giving your all to the here and now - meeting the kids' needs and all that involves - and allowing yourself to chase those dreams. Does it have to be all one and then the other or can they co-exist?

Many articles that I read shout that today's women should absolutely chase their dreams. Girl power. We should find that magical way of being everything to our families but also book those weekends on yoga retreats or set up the easel once everyone is in bed and practise our watercolour. I have to be honest, I struggle with that! I am quite all or nothing so the thought of taking a break from potty training to spend a week learning to surf fills me with confusion. How can you do either of these well if you are part-timing it? I have no doubt some of you manage this and I applaud you (and am slightly intimidated  by you). So I was left thinking will I rejoin the tracks of my dreams only once the responsibility to pay the mortgage/service the car/bake for the cake sale/clear out the shed/mediate the siblings/descale the kettle has died down?

But then I read a beautiful novel (where on earth would I be without that sentence?!). Nina George wrote The Little Paris Bookshop in German, Simon Pare translated it and my friend at the library recommended it to me. She said it was the story of a man who had a great start to life but then, when things went wrong, he hid himself away, wasting time, until life pulled him back in at the last minute. Having read it, I would recommend it but I wouldn't describe it like that. Jean Perdu runs a floating bookshop on the Seine. An early love affair blows his life wide but when it finishes, he devotes himself to his bookshop, recognising that, 'it was a common misconception that book sellers looked after books. They looked after people.'

Now I think Jean Perdu still had things he wanted to do but the time wasn't right. His bookshop became a waiting room of sorts BUT he was not wasting time. He knew that there would be another heart-bursting chapter in his life but he also knew the time leading up to that chapter was crucial. It wasn't glamorous or eventful but it was rich in soul food. When asked how he sold books, he says, "Books are like people, and people are like books. I'll tell you how I go about it. I ask myself: Is he or she the main character in his or her life? What is her motive?.. Is she in the process of editing herself out of her story, because her husband, her career, or her children or her job are consuming her entire text?..I compile courses of treatment. I prepare a medicine made of letters." " A book is both medic and medicine at once. It makes a diagnosis as well as offering therapy."

This man was waiting but he was fully living in the meantime. He was learning and reading and talking and listening and thinking and getting to know how people work. When his next adventure came, he was ready as a result. This made me see my panic in a whole new light. I know there are more adventures ahead but it's not their time. A mistake would be to see this time, the present, as a sign that I should adjust my future dreams. This time is preparing me for them. I'm not in a waiting room, I am in my own floating bookshop. Yes, for now we are moored but that means we can stock up on all the rich land experiences until it is time to sail again. And it's really ok to wait.

I have a hero. I call him Dad.

So I took May off as a sabbatical – and when I say sabbatical I mean my annual relentless slog of exam marking. But now I’m back and ready to celebrate my fabulous dad in honour of the approaching Fathers’ Day. As I have mentioned in earlier posts, my dad has always been a bit of a hero, not just for me but for a good number of my friends too so I thought I would write a Grateful Daughter’s Guide to the Fabulous Dad. Any dads, uncles or grandads of young girls reading this – take note, follow these rules and she will be writing tributes to you in years to come!

Number 1: My dad taught me the value of adventure. My internal memory blanket is bursting with big and small adventures woven into each other, all overlapping and messy but full of colour. He took us on endless walks with no destination (a real skill to get kids to do this!), he took us camping in the rain, he drove us across continents led by his own itinerary, he up sticks and moved us around the globe for four years and taught us how small and gorgeous the world is. He gave us the confidence to be adventurers ourselves which I will be eternally thankful for.

Number 2: My dad taught me the importance of taking an interest in everyone you meet and remembering what they tell you. I am still learning how to do this but my dad is a rock star at it. He can be in any room of people and he will be the one having the most interesting conversation as he will be taking a genuine interest in who they are and he will actually be listening to learn; not waiting for his turn to speak. The best bit is the remembering part – even now my dad will be talking about a friend he had back at school and he will suddenly break the story to say, “Yes I played rugby with him, he was really interested in bees – he would spend hours studying them.” If dad ever met that friend now, he would make him feel amazing to know someone had remembered that about him.

Number 3: My dad taught me that if something is worth doing, it is worth doing perfectly. This applies to staying up that extra hour until two in the morning to proofread your essay one final time and ensure it reads well to making sure every bauble is placed just right on the Christmas tree. It is a mind-set, a dedication to quality. DIY jobs were always an art in our house growing up; you don’t rush, you get your tools in line, you measure endlessly from every possible angle and you enjoy the task.

Number 4: My dad taught me that exercise is really important. He did this first by role -modelling; I can’t tell you the amount of people who have told how great my dad was at football, at rugby, at gymnastics. I remember hours spent pulling his damn golf bag around the course, hours spent on a football side-line and moments of awe as he back-flipped his way up our back garden when he thought no one was watching. He then spent hours driving me and brother to swimming practices and endless competitions. He still maintains that the best remedy to a bad day is a swim. And he is right.

Number 5: My dad taught me to take lots of photos and to write lots of things down. This is all part of valuing your family and your experiences – don’t do it to the exclusion of being in the moment but having those little forgotten moments recorded somewhere will mean so much one day.

Number 6: My dad taught me to notice what people do well and tell them. This is a great one and is all part of being curious rather than judgemental. He always told us that everyone does something well and it was important to notice that and let them know you spotted it. Admittedly this was hard when he was trying to get me to see the positives in the class bully who was making my life hell but it is a great life lesson in breaking down barriers and thinking the best. It is also easier than hating. He still does it today; when my two-year-old launched a ball across his garden and knocked pretty much all the petals off dad’s beloved roses, dad said “Wow, nice throw!” and meant it.

Number 7: My dad taught me to not follow the trends; to be my own decision maker. I admit I struggle with this but I love that it is there as a lodestar to call me back to what is important to me. I don’t remember us as a family ever doing anything because other people thought we ought to. In fact, together with mum, dad always made independent decisions for us and didn’t wait around to check the fallout. I really aspire to tune into what is important to my family regardless of what other families are up to.

Number 8: My dad taught me the importance of laughing at myself. I was a horribly sensitive child and would scream in fury when dad would tease me. I dread to think how serious I would be now if dad hadn’t lifted that seriousness occasionally and tickled me. Even now, if I have a bad experience at work and my instinct is to run off, cry in the loo and berate the world for being so cruel, I find it helpful to see the twinkle in dad’s eye and remember that I just need to get over myself sometimes.

Number 9: My dad taught me to put people before principles. It is all well and good having strongly-held morals and opinions in this life and my dad has as many as the next person. However, he has shown me time and again that you quietly put those principles on the shelf and walk towards a person in need if the situation calls for it. In this way, we let our experiences shape our principles rather than the other way around.

Number 10: My dad taught me that life is difficult but it is not bad. There will always be times that we cannot see through to the end of, when we hurt, hurt and hurt some more. But. Life is fundamentally good and we have an important role to play in keeping it that way. Roll with the punches and find the silver linings.

So, Daughter Daddys out there – what you are doing is making a huge difference! Daddy on!

Stand on the Other Side of the Tree

I recently met a dear man, who lives in my village, at a poetry reading. I was describing to him whereabouts in the village my house was when he slapped his thigh and said, "Oh you live near the grand old oak tree!" Stunned, I felt he hadn't been listening to my location descriptions at all; the only tree near my house was a nondescript one in the middle of a patch of grass. But he was adamant, "Yes, the great old oak - so magnificent - do you know that was planted in honour of the coronation of King --'s coronation and stands on what was once our village green? So magnificent."

Oh.

When I drove home that night, I took a moment to walk around this tree standing humbly on its patch of grass. He was right. I'd never really noticed how enormous or perfectly sculpted it was; how the branches fanned strongly out in a near perfect arc. Standing with the tree between me and my house, I had a little quiet wow moment. It was quite quite magnificent.

I have been taught for years that we should always try and look at things from all angles to really appreciate and understand them and I genuinely thought I was doing this well until recently. As well as my tree moment, I have been reading Elizabeth Gilbert's achingly great book, "Big Magic". She writes about the creative life and changing perceptions of genius - and she stopped my tea halfway to my mouth when she wrote about creative angst. She challenges the notion that creating (be it art, music, writing, whatever) is a torturous, pain-filled, soul-crushing experience.

Now I took issue with this. I have always secretly aspired to be a tortured soul - a writer pained  by the sheer darkness of humanity. I thought if you frowned and ached and spent days crying by the sea, it just meant you were doing it right, the genuine article. But Ms Gilbert's words slapped my furrowed brow hard. Working in a factory is difficult she says, being a single mum to three kids is difficult. Writing is not difficult. It's a luxury, she says. Clearly I had some thinking to do about this. That said, I truly am so grateful for the nudge to question a completely received idea.

Some approaches to life are harder to challenge though. We fear anarchy or crumbling identity if we let go of them and we generally label them 'common sense' to ensure we're allowed to keep doing them. I have always been an old school disciplinarian. I am naturally zero tolerance of bad behaviour in my classroom and my home and, to date, this has served me well. Until Son number 2.

The naughty step is met with a grin, a telling off with a little cheeky dance and being sent to his room is seen as a great opportunity to build book towers - yippee! Thankfully a colleague recommended 'No Drama Discipline' by Dan Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson to me. Now this book would have had me eye rolling all the way to the bin had I not been desperate. It banishes the naughty step, or any form of punishment/isolation. It promotes connection; hug your toddler through their tantrum and teach them how to regulate this emotion storm. Essentially Attachment Parenting.

This goes against every deep grain in me but gosh darnit, it's only working! Early days obviously and nothing is foolproof but what a revelation - that another of my well polished approaches/opinions has been loosened to allow something new in. And it might just work. I'm starting to wonder which other of my approaches/opinions need a spring clean.

Essentially, I think I am learning to evolve a little - something we all need to do. Darwin famously said, "It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change." So, which tree do you need to go and look at from the other side?

Wow moments

My two-year-old boy says something quite regularly that never fails to make me smile like a goon. He say, 'Wow'. And he says it in the way it was originally intended - he is expressing pure amazement at something so surprising that no other word will do. He is wonderfully undiscerning with his Wows; a bowl of strawberries gets the same 'Wow' as when he entered Salisbury Cathedral. I find myself wanting to show him new places (and new bowls of fruit) just to watch those little eyebrows lift and the little mouth fall open for the wonderful word to escape.

It has got me thinking about the notion of surprise. A friend recently wrote to me saying she needed 'something irregular and extra-ordinary to happen to [her]'. Like so many of my friends, she (and I) are blessed with a riotously colourful back catalogue of memories - mostly filed into travel, relationships, life-changing connections with strangers on trains and coming-of-age revelations sat on our backpacks next to waterfalls. We took our 'Wow' moments utterly for granted when we knew there was always another one on its way.

There are numerous reasons why surprises become fewer once you 'settle down' and do the family thing. One is that routine has to inevitably set in for family life to function. Another is that you are so damn busy living in the past or the future that you forget to allow the moments of wonder to slow your pace and change your direction. A slightly more worrying reason struck me when flicking through my older son's 'Boys' Handbook'. It was a Baden-Powell-ism: "A scout is never taken by surprise; he knows exactly what to do when anything unexpected happens".

Obviously, in a cub scout context, this is understandable but the bare message chilled my bones. Are we trying to make our lives so comfortable, protected and controlled that we are denying ourselves access to surprise? I recently read an article encouraging parents to involve their children when selecting their own reading choices in the library; the idea being that our children would see us as readers too and learn about good habits in selecting new books.

This is all very well-meaning. However I will never forget the moment my mum asked me, aged eleven, whether I wanted to take a look at some of the books in the older section of our library in Brighton. Her suggestion completely baffled me because for the eleven years she had been bringing me to the library, she had deposited me with the colourful book boxes and pillows of the children's section and she had disappeared into the dark, dusty, quite frankly boring aisles of adult books. In that moment of confusion I realised that I had genuinely (no joke..) thought adult books were written in a different language. Where I got that idea from I have no idea but as I crossed into the young adult shelves and saw they had titles I could understand and pages of new stories in English, I was blown away. A true, if slightly unusual, Wow moment. If my mum had followed this article's advice, I would never have had that revelatory moment that, even now, makes my heart race.

So, how to allow the surprises back in while we're also trying to reduce risk, plan meticulously and live intentionally. Surprise, by its very definition, cannot be looked for. We need to clear the space in our lives and tune into the two-year-old we all have buried within us. Prepare to be amazed by something that could simply annoy us if we close our minds to it.

Just this week, while settling down for my blissful half hour of peaceful reading while my son had his guitar lesson, another parent came to invade my quiet. He picked up a guitar from the deserted shop floor, emptied his pockets onto the table then settled himself on the sofa adjoining mine. Bad-naturedly, my irritation levels rose at this unexpected intrusion. However, he then started to play a gentle, beautiful piece, lost in his own bliss. We were two strangers sat in an empty guitar shop, both indulging our own passions for a moment. As it turned out, a Wow moment.

Nightswimming through Therapy

Two things happened  this week; one looking back, one looking forward. I watched a documentary on Michael Stipes and I discovered Therapeutic Writing. If you have never listened to REM or if you were a huge fan but have neglected your dotage, stop reading for a moment and put 'Nightswimming' on Spotify. Seriously, it's like floating face and palm upwards in a lake of pillows with the soul of your fourteen year old self navigating.

Stipes' advice to anyone involved in writing or creating anything was, 'Don't listen to anybody'. Once you get past the irony of him actually giving that as advice, you realise where his lyrics come from. They fall, unfiltered, from the clearest part of his experience of feeling. They seem to make no sense yet they perfectly described feelings I didn't realise I was having until he sang about them.

Whoever you are, no matter how wealthy, bitter, frightened, intelligent or self assured, you will have a heard a lyric or read a sentence once that stopped you in your tracks. Someone else, an entirely other human being, will have achieved the beautiful experience of putting their feelings into words. You encountered them and suddenly felt a little more known. I am so darn thankful to Mr. Stipes for not normalising his head; for allowing the words to somersault out as they did. C S Lewis always maintained, 'We read to know we're not alone'. Some of us read, some of us listen.

The documentary didn't say much about why Michael Stipes wrote. I don't know anything about his mental health or his personal life but I am willing to bet both were made more enjoyable because he wrote. There is something 'other' about the process of writing. Similar to listening to Stipes' lyrics, I discover what I feel once I've written it down. Until then, it is roaming my mind unidentified and sinister. My mental health and personal life would be in a much sorrier state without the therapy of writing.

This week I discovered this was actually a 'thing'. There is an Institute in America not to mention an entire body of psychologists devoted to the power of creative writing for therapeutic purposes. One task that caught my eye repeatedly through my reading was the simple exercise of writing a letter to someone who has wronged you in the past. You don't need to send it, you just need to allow yourself to say all the things you have been keeping fenced in. There is now 'scientific proof' (more on this as I research it!) to show that people are able to move forward emotionally once an exercise like this is completed. So simple and not rocket science but, sadly, this is the sort of thing we all know about but don't devote the time to actually doing. I am going to try it this week and I urge you to do the same - I really hope you feel a little lighter afterwards.

In the meantime, get back on Spotify and give yourself ten minutes to revisit a long-lost but long-loved lyric that gave your experience of this crazy life a name.

Room to stand still

When I was younger, I collected images of people I wanted to be - in scenes I wanted to live in - and stuck them to my bedroom wall. The most memorable was an older teenage girl on a train platform in a French beret, with a sweet little wooden-trim suitcase and a carefree scarf. I pinned her to my wall and longed to be her; a few months later I made it happen. Sitting on the train heading to North London to stay with my aunt, I lay my beret on the suitcase at my feet and realised I didn't want that girl's outfit. I wanted her freedom.

It didn't matter that I had wasted months saving my Saturday job money and scouring Brighton's charity shops to perfect the look. That was a crucial part of the process. Sitting on that train by myself, I couldn't stop smiling because another piece of my jigsaw had arrived - I realised I craved independence and the romance of train journeys. Something in that image had drawn me in and taken over my thinking for months until I stepped right into it and woke another part of me up. In those young years, there were no worries about what I should be doing - I just remember doing a lot of following my heart and answering to noone about it. I was busy getting to know myself.

Somewhere between then and now, I lost that confidence. My twenties seemed to involve an awful lot of people telling me who I should be, what I should think and I lost that growing clear vision of who I wanted to be. At the time, it felt like growing up of course. You don't have time to spend months recreating a photograph from a magazine for crying out loud, you have to earn some money, find a flat, have some relationships, paint the town red. Maybe seeing so many others doing life in such different ways to me made me question myself and trust them. An incredible amount of inhibitions crept in and set up camp in my head to the point that I willingly lost my young self in order to fit in.

This, without doubt, is not just my story. There are versions of this lament in many journals out there - I lost my way! I can't remember who I'm meant to be! I always feel I should be doing something else! So I have a small theory of how to navigate our way back to the freedom and possibility of living as our younger selves. We need a room to call our own. Think about it, when we were children and students, we had a whole room (or sometimes half a shared room..) that was all ours. We picked the floor, the walls, the bedspread, the lamp. More importantly, we picked the pictures on the wall and where we put them, we picked the music on the stereo, we picked the layout and changed it whenever we changed. When anyone walked into that room, people got to know us. When we walked into that room, we stood still, we became ourselves and we spread that around us like extensions of our inner world.

I am not suggested for a minute that we should all build an extra room onto the back of our houses in order to refocus our thoughts. What I am saying is that we need to recapture the spirit of our own room. Whether it is a corner of a wall in the study, a shelf in the bedroom, a cupboard in the dining room or even a book big enough to stick all our bits in; we need a space to collect what inspires us. An image, a quote, a thought, the melody of a song, a small piece of our own art or writing. It is not there for display purposes, it is there to remind us what we like, who we want to be able to say we were when we're old. It is not necessarily to be shared, it is a chance to forget trends and expectations and to be honest. Obviously there are on-line versions of this very process, Pinterest being the most popular. I think these are fabulous and definitely have their place. However, you are still moving around images chosen by other people and the pressure to 'follow' others creeps in again.

I once knew a very creative couple who were lucky enough to live in a two bedroom flat in South London. While they always slept in the same room, they each had a bedroom to themselves. It was an experiment they were trying to see what would come out of them as individuals and as a couple if they maintained their separate and joint identities. For the two years they lived there, each of them grew beyond recognition in their confidence and risk taking, not to mention creativity in their jobs and hobbies. Their rooms were amazing. This month, in amongst the unceasing tide of life, I have been trying to stop and refocus myself to my own channel. I have taken a few more romantic train journeys, I have cut out a few more images and given myself room to stand still.

Private Penance Patterns

A friend recently played me a song and said if there was ever a set of lyrics that he thought were written for me, it was these. I urge you to listen to 'Note to Self' by the gorgeous Jake Bugg. As I gratefully cried my way through the second listening, the line that struck me was, 'Don't cover your wounds with salt'. It blew me away. I spend a lot of time, and I mean a lot of time covering my wounds with salt but I hadn't really realised it until I heard that line. Now, don't get me wrong, this wasn't a complete revelation - I am a cradle Catholic so I have learnt and perfected the art of self recrimination and loathing all in the name of the greater good. It's as much a part of me as my right hand. Something about the sweetness of this song made me realise I had taken the 'payment for my sins' to a whole new level in recent years.

It got me thinking about how other people deal with the aftermath of doing something wrong; we all have a set of patterns depending on the nature of the wrong doing. One friend said he feels bad straight away so finds something kind to do for the person he has wronged and then he forgets it ever happened. Another friend talked about her penance in similar terms to carbon emissions - you take a flight, you plant a tree. She commits a wrong, she does a good deed - the latter doesn't have to relate to the former, she just restores the balance of one good for one bad. For me it's more like twenty thousand good deeds are needed to offset one bad and you aren't ever allowed to forget it. I'm starting to wonder whether I've got it a bit wrong..

I went to a talk recently where the speaker made reference to the way sins were dealt with by the whole community in the fourth and fifth centuries. If you committed a wrong, you were required to confess this wrong in front of the entire gathered community and then spend between seven and nine years excommunicated before you were deemed 'clean' and able to rejoin society. Heaven help you if you committed another wrong within that seven years. As time moved on, it was thought more appropriate for our confessions to be done in private to a priest who would listen to our list of misdemeanours and then decide on an appropriate a penance for us to set things straight. This could be a set of prayers or a good deed. In this way, my friends - not religious friends I hasten to add - are following a very similar pattern. Why have I decided to extend my penance back to the seven-nine year sentence I wonder?

This all becomes much more complicated when you are faced with teaching your own kids how to deal with wrongdoing. I merrily tell my two year old to say sorry and give a cuddle to his brother if he hits him/steals his toy. This seems to be working out fine. I get more confused with my nine year old as the last thing I want to do is promote my own brand of seven-year - self-beating yet I know this is what I'm modelling for him. Luckily, he reads. When he came home telling me how he had spoken during a minute's silence by mistake, he promptly cleared a section of his toy box and donated it to a charity shop and then apologised to his teacher. He then forgot about it. Apparently this is what Harry Potter would have done.

Of course, I know I am not alone in my penance pattern. There have been two moments of artistic clarity when I learned I was amongst friends. The first being Travis singing 'Why does it always rain on me? Is it because I lied when I was seventeen?' Classic Catholic thinking - ten years on but the punishments still come. The second was the gorgeous poet, Mary Oliver in her fabulous poem 'Wild Geese'. Read it - regardless of where you are on the penance spectrum this will give you a word hug. Her opening lines: 'You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.' blew me away. Still do.

I am really keen to hear about alternative steps to take post-screw-up in order to put things right with yourself and the world. Moving forward, I think the fog is clearing on the message that I need to adjust my penance patterns.  I need to give myself a break. Tune in to my inner Harry Potter not my inner bible, reduce my sentence by about eight years, read my 'Note to Self' more often.