When Max was finally released into the care of community nurses and able to receive his treatment at home, I put him to sleep in his cot and unable to bring myself to move too far from him, I sat down at my desk which is near the door to his bedroom and was again confronted with the blank piece of paper, begging me to write something poignant to share with you. He became a part of me: we bathed together, slept together and between visits from the doctors, we paced the hallways together. For the next week on the ward, Max was only comfortable in my arms where he could hear my heartbeat, feel the rise and fall of my chest and smell my skin. When he was finally diagnosed, I felt able to breathe again. Because he was so small and would not lie still, he also endured a number of general anesthesias so that the tests could be performed and this only confused and upset him. My anxiety only grew in the next 24 hours as doctors performed a battery of tests including an MRI, a CT scan and an echo. This pain, the pain that I felt as a mother unable to help her child, could not be reconciled by confronting the new experience and allowing it to become part of me. In that moment, in the hospital, I simply could not accept Malidome Some’s definition of pain. This explanation of pain seems sensible, but it is so didactic that is seems divorced from human experience. Pain, therefore, is the emotion we feel as we confront a new or foreign experience and attempt to reconcile it within our existing selves. It means invasion, hunting, meeting with a violent edge.’ (Some, 1998, p. The old that does not want to leave will resist the new one and the result is registered by us as pain. A new experience that does not have a space to sit within us will have to kick an old one out. Each one of them likes to use a specific part of ourselves in which to lodge. We are layers of situations and experiences. Pain is the result of the resistance to something new –something toward which an old dispensation is at odds. The books I read in preparation for this talk proposed that this situation was simply a parental rite of passage, Malidoma Somé said that the pain I was feeling was good, primarily because it was a call to growth. Max was given a bed in the neurology ward and so I panicked I became convinced that something was wrong with his brain. On Saturday I took him to Winchester Hospital and refused to leave until a pediatrician saw him and an hour later we were in an ambulance on the way to Southampton Childrens’ Ward. Each day I took him to the GP and relayed my concern that he could not keep any milk down and that his tummy was clearly sore, each day I was told that he probably had a tummy bug and would be fine in a day or two and each night he would only sleep if he were lying on my chest in the bath. On the last Monday of last term he was rocking back and forth on his hands and knees as he attempted to crawl and by the following Friday he was only comfortable lying flat on his back. A fortnight prior he suddenly began to wail if coaxed to bend at the hips. I did as she suggested: I read an article by anthropologist Malidoma Somé about rites of passage in his Native African Tribe, I read a book by Steve Biddulph about contemporary rites of passage for adolescent males, I brainstormed some ideas, considered a narrative structure then I stared at the blank piece of paper before me. This, she said, was what you were all asked to do in preparation for the Kenneth Clarke Awards. I asked a Div Don where I should start and she advised me to research the topic, brainstorm some ideas, plan the structure and then write a draft. A novelist is rarely asked to express their ideas in imagery but alas an artist is usually asked to explain themselves in words and I seem to spend a disproportionate amount of time shaping passages of text to compliment my artwork.Īnd so, when I was asked to write a speech about rites of passage I knew it would take me some time. Words are not an intuitive mode of expression for me and so I hope you will forgive me as I bumble through. When I am grappling with an idea, I work in my sketchbook and when I have something important to say I articulate it in imagery or as an object. I begin this afternoon with a disclaimer: Chapel Talk on the theme of Rites of Passage 03 June 2015, Michelá Chapel, Winchester College
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