When I left Hereford

I'm still experimenting with styles. 

I blogged before about how I use writing to work out what I think. That's still true for how I approach data analysis; writing is a key element of analytic work. 

Here, I've used writing to work out what I am thinking and feeling. I wanted to see what happens if I use artifacts as a lead-in to exploring things that are less tangible.

When I left Hereford, I kept my first toy. Yellow Ted travelled with me. He grew up with me as I grew into an adult, and a parent myself. Technically he is now my husband's. I could think of no greater gift of myself to him than the one who saw all as I grew up. My own memory of childhood is almost non-existent.

My father died, and I have been clearing the family home. I found the loft toys. I had remembered none of them. Yet as they emerged from the loft, parts of my childhood emerged with them and I remembered me as a child holding them and playing with them. These flashes of first-hand childhood memory left me motionless, not breathing, then blinking. So different from all previous, second-hand childhood memory, my dissociative dispassionate observation of another life, a different child.

Yellow Ted is now back where he belongs. With the toys from the loft. With the cot duck, floppy bunny, the spirograph, and Cubby who was too delicate and precious to be allowed to play with me. 

The loft toys did not grow up. They remained in my childhood. And my childhood remained as separate from the adult me as the lofted toys remained from Yellow Ted.  

Those flashes of me as the toys emerged from the loft are the first taste of a me that crosses the generations within me – child, young adult, parent to children. I am disconcerted, scared and curious. 

For now, cot duck and Cubby sit on the mantelpiece at home. Their friends are back in their storage bag. There is only so much memory one can handle at a time.