Nobody Said It Was Easy. Nobody Said It Would Be So Hard.
- Karen Sole
- Apr 21
- 7 min read
I’m going back to the start. [All rights to the sequence of words in the title belong to Chris Martin, Coldplay, The Scientist on the album A Rush of Blood to the Head]
APR 18, 2025 ksole.substack.com
Oh, beautiful life! Survival. We have the saving grace of resilience, no matter how much difficulty, or trauma comes our way. I’m not sure if that upholds Darwinian theory, because it is inescapable that some things thrown our way are not necessarily survivable, like bombs, where we are standing when an earthquake hits, or the boat we are on that sinks, regardless of our personal resilience in the face of adversity. Certainly somewhere in our lineage all of the adversity we can imagine or know about struck one or other and probably many of our ancestors, even our near ancestors. We usually, I think usually, don’t know much or anything about that, and we do not know that some of that is showing up in our own lives.
When we’re young, life can seem difficult. Later, if we’re lucky, it gets better. It’s not just the much thrown around not caring any more what other people think, usually stated in the much more immediate not giving fucks any more. That is a factor, but not the most salient one. Our kids grow up, even our grandkids grow up. Our family settles into its patterns, healthy or unhealthy, but settled. We get used to it, even if not happy with the shape it has assumed. We have lost some members of our family of origin - our parents, a sibling or two, aunts, uncles, and maybe some cousins. Grandparents have long since passed on.
How can we better know our parents, their parents and grandparents, and by extrapolation the ones who came before them? Who were they, the dearly loved elders? How well did we know them, if at all? Who recorded their stories, or even heard them? How can we know them, hold them, find ourselves through and in them? When we know they are behind us, with us, part of us, our seemingly huge problems assume a collective shape and colour. We see ourselves in the endless stream of humanity, within our lineages. Aah.
And now, what trail, what signs are we leaving our kids and grandkids? What will they say when we shuffle off? Will they say they knew us well? One way we can help our descendants with that is to write what we can remember, or think, or imagine, as memoir, poetry, stories. Or to record our voices. The technology is here to use if we have time, some resources and energy for it.
When my father died four years ago I wrote and spoke a few pages of memories, impressions, surmising at his funeral gathering. It struck me then how hard it is to do justice to ninety seven years of life in a few minutes, wedged into an hour or so of being together to acknowledge and honour those years, the person who lived, in our lives, who had known my siblings and I forever. Our entire lives. He had always been there, one way or another, however much we noticed or cared or kept in touch or not, or showed our feelings or not, or reported on our concurrent lives. How he and our mother, separately for the greater part of their time, longed for our presence, whenever we found time to give ourselves to them. My mother said her life, also 97 years long, elongated because of us, her children, our raggedy, unorganised visits and stays with her, our postcards and letters from far away, and later our virtual connection via her well-named ‘marvellous gadgets’, her truly awestruck pleasure in being able to see grand and great grandchildren on the other side of the world without leaving her home.
When I was living in Milan many years ago, I took a writing class over a few months with an American woman, Charlotte Price. If you’re reading this and happen to know her, please tell her I want to be in touch. She left writing to go be a disciple of Byron Katie and learn The Work, which though seemingly paradoxical, is not. (References to Byron Katie way down below). During the course, Charlotte gave us great investigative exercises, investigative of our own experiences, many of which I see more clearly now as connecting deeply with family, with generations of family. Before I began this piece I remembered one exercise in which we were asked to write about things we could not remember from our lives, to provide details. I’m going to dig it out of my lever arch file, which is bulging with copies and different drafts of many pieces of unfinished fiction and non fiction. Hang about. I’m going for the file. It’s hard to handle, over-full, pages erupting and slithering out of the devices meant to hold each page in place. The circular holes tear over time, the pages hang out on an angle, the whole lot threatens to cascade onto the floor in a moment of inattention on my part.
I found it. Writing homework for 03 November 2009. Write a list of things you cannot remember from your life. Provide details of what you cannot remember. At the time I thought, what craziness is that, describe what I can’t remember? My list is six items long. There is an item about my older brother, Tony, and another about Murray, younger than me and second youngest child in our family; one about walking to primary school each day, and one about a period I spent in Perth, Australia. Then two items, one for each of my parents. Here they are.
She was blonde, and seemed tall. I remember her new summer dresses: fabrics, colours, styles. A grey mock Astrakhan coat one winter. I remember her voice, her most powerful instrument. She didn’t use to shave her legs, being blonde. I remember her standing on the sides of her bare feet on the cold floor if I called her from her bed. She would put more blankets over me tucking them in around me, and admonish me to go back to sleep. The rustle of a cellophane bag of black ball lollies pulled from her handbag when she had been to town, tugged open, and the bag left on the table for us to help ourselves. Her blonde hair set in waves, the clack of high heeled shoes, a slick of red lipstick on her lips to go to town, but the whole face, no.
He was dark. Muscly, sleeves rolled up, shorts, work boots, strong legs with a funny little thing going on at the back of his knees. He never came into our bedroom. He smacked me once when I drew a house on our newly painted house below the bathroom window. I had to stand in the garden to do it. I don’t know why I did it. Maybe the fresh cream paint was irresistible. He used to comb his hair with a wet comb, standing at the bathroom sink, turning his head from left to right in an effort to see where he couldn’t see with only one mirror. I watched him dig, and after, rake the vegetable garden and set a string across to mark the rows, and a piece of stumpy wood to mark each row once it was planted or seeded. I can see his arms and legs working as he did these things, but not the face.
In another piece of writing from 2009, beginning with a a car journey to our summer beach holiday at Urenui, Taranaki, New Zealand, I mention one of my brothers and my sister. Charlotte has ringed the words and noted ‘always name siblings and say where they come in the family order - there we go again, family order, orders of love, the family as a system.
My memoir has been untouched for a couple of years or more. I began it after my father died. I realised how little I knew of his life and how deeply I wished I knew more, and the same is true regarding my mother. What I do know starts with large families, short school lives, work from the age of twelve. In my memoir, which I am writing for the time when my children and grandchildren start to be curious about my life, I write as much as I know of them, and my grandparents. All four grandparents were alive when I was born: Lola and Jim, divorced before I was born; Will and Clara, together until her death at 64, when I was twelve. My mother’s paternal grandparents were in their late nineties when they died. I was sixteen. All of them did hard physical work to survive. I slightly missed my father’s maternal grandmother, who I would have liked to have known. Maraea died when my mother was carrying me. At least I attended her funeral service, in utero, but not her actual burial, as women carrying were not allowed onto the burial ground in Maori tradition. That makes great sense.
Once, before Maraea passed on, Tony, was ‘chesty’. My mother rubbed Vicks on his chest. Great grandmother Maraea advised her to rub the ointment on the soles of his feet too, which she did always after that if we had heavy colds.
How easily we touch the old people, our ancestors through stories. Not many ordinary people write their lives. They don’t have time, they do not value their experiences, don’t believe their lives are interesting, don’t see that their so-called ordinariness is what makes them blaze. Their roots in hard work and hard times, ups and downs, little successes, terrible disappointments, illness, relationships, poverty and wealth, transgressions, houses they lived in, places they saw, wars they fought in, holidays they managed to scratch out, train trips, boat rides, leaving home, coming to new lands, settling, their hopes and dreams for us - to them it all seemed unremarkable but our questions about all of that and them move with every heartbeat.
Copyright Karen Sole
‘Your Timeless Story’ is a guided meditation relevant to this substack and always available. It is a way to connect with your ancestors and their land, even if you don’t know either of those facts! Book online.
Comments