It’s right about now that I’m supposed to say…
“…happy new year!”
So there, I said it.
And what better way to start off 2023 than with a potentially depressing blog?
I know I’m supposed to list all the resolutions I’ve made and announce my declaration of how I’m going to change and therefore save the world this year, however I stopped making new year’s resolutions about ten years ago when I realised I wasn’t actually fulfilling them. Talk is cheap my friends.
So, I am not starting the new year off as I wish to continue. This blog is just a… let’s say… a reflection, of something that happened last week.
Get a beverage guys and lets see what I have to say for myself…
Allow me to begin…
It was Wednesday 21st December 2022 when I phoned mum and said…
“Mum, I need to go into town after work and do some Christmas shopping. People are buying me presents and I haven’t got one to give them back.”
At 2:30pm mum picked me up from work and we ventured into Bolton where there are zilcho shops but, desperate times call for desperate measures.
Like 90% of this country’s population I went to Primark to get my friend a present I knew she would love and I was just standing in the queue that was as per usual fifty miles long, more windy than a successful snake on a 1990’s mobile phone game – ask your parents kids, they’ll know what I mean – and I was just messaging my friend in Belgium about the postcard he sent that now resides on my ever growing “Wall of Happiness” at work.
I was minding my own business with my phone in one hand, expertly tapping away, my other hand holding said present and to my left I saw the definition of a…
“…chavtastic family…”
…with what seemed like fifty dishevelled kids, one prospective powerless grandparent and a lone ranger parent with a mouth like a toilet equally as powerless, trying to regain some form of control over her disobedient herd by hurling relentless colourful language at them which only fuelled them into further mischievous antics.
From the corner of my bystander eye, I saw one kid throwing the mother of all tantrums, another one running around like a frenzied T-rex on crack, a third persistently smacking the oblivious grand parent in the leg and a girl throwing a round pink ball at the display of Christmas trinkets no one needs but always buys because it’s under a quid and potentially useful, in some way.
I turned back to my phone, I finished my message and I was just about to submit my four letter word on Wordfeud when I spotted a small figure in front of me which I thought nothing of until I saw a pink thing drawing closer, heading straight for my face, then…
BANG!
Something solid smacked me right in the mush, my top lip. All I said was…
“Ow!”
The pink thing landed in my arm and rested there like the victim of a horrible trauma and as I placed it on a shelf next to me and noticed it was a bath bomb I automatically thought…
“That’s gonna leave a mark.”
When I looked up again the bath bomb thrower looked at me and quickly ran away, vanishing into thin air and everyone else around me said absolutely nothing. No one asked if I was okay so maybe no one saw anything, maybe it’s not that big of a deal? But then my tongue did a bit of investigating of my top lip and straightaway it found a slit on the inside of my mouth followed by the undeniable taste of blood. I pressed a tissue to my lip and sure enough there was a red patch and I thought…
“…seriously?”
It was already beginning to swell and the first thing I wondered was…
“…how the hell am I going to hide a burst lip now that we don’t wear masks at work anymore?”
Not only that but how big was this fat lip going to be? I’m no oil painting anyway and a burst lip was not going to go in my favour!
I had no one with me and the unsavoury family had disappeared. I asked the family behind me if they saw what happened, but they looked down to the floor and denied all knowledge.
With my lip still bleeding I took my place at the counter still pressing the bloody tissue to my lip and I said to the girl behind the plastic Covid screen…
“A kid just threw a bath bomb at my face.”
And she said…
“Aww.”
Maybe it wasn’t that big of a deal? But as I turned away holding my paper Primark bag, my lip still bleeding, I felt the emotion creeping in. So I did what any grown up, independent 40 year old woman would do and I retrieved my phone from my coat pocket with my shaking hand and I called…
“Mummy”
Mum raced around the corner like a bat out of Hell – sorry, once a Meat Loaf fan, always a Meat Loaf fan. The first thing she did was examine my face stating that it didn’t look as bad as it probably felt and then she apologised for not being there to protect me and fight my corner.
Straight away I thought, I’m 40. My mum should not be needing to protect me, but lip was still bleeding and at this point, in the presence of my superhero mum, I cried.
I felt like a child again. Like a teenager who was hounded by horrible insensitive and nasty bullies who thrived on the misery they inflicted on their unfortunate victims… on me.
I was humiliated! Humiliated by a five-year-old tearaway and I couldn’t do a single thing about it and I couldn’t help but wonder…
“Why me? Again, why me?”
Out of all the people in that ever-growing Primark queue, why did that child single me out? What made me deserve having a bath bomb thrown at my face? What did I do?
Is it because I look a certain way? It is because I look like this on holiday and not a supermodel.
Is it because my hair is turning grey and I don’t do a single thing to change it? Or is because I love looking at the toys in IKEA and picking out what I might buy if I had a kid of my own?
Am I reading too much into it? Could a small child really be that calculated? Or was I just in the wrong place at the wrong time?
Regardless of the answer to any of those ponderings, it doesn’t change the fact that it takes just one tiny thing to bring a whole truck load of stinking rubbish to the surface and as I sit at my kitchen table, an adult, with a job and a husband and a cat we treat like a toddler, I question…
“Why do I feel fourteen again?”
Caked in self-pity because I am a ball of powerless energy that cannot change what strangers choose to see.
You might say…
“It was just a little girl.”
And that’s right, she was just a little girl; but at this point this goes far deeper than a small child acting out with no moral code. For me that bath bomb wasn’t a bath bomb. It was a protractor, a ruler, a 300 paged science textbook; it was the rock that a boy I liked threw at my face because I was too repulsive to even acknowledge. It was every name I have ever been called by anyone who hated the way I look, the way I talk, my likes, my dislikes… my beliefs. It was the undo-er of all things to come undone and I can’t help but think that even though we move on from our past, we never really come to terms with it; maybe we just bury it for a while.
In 2023 I am supposed to find a moral to this story. A ray of hope somewhere; something that kicks off the new year with that positive mental attitude people are constantly harping on about…
So how about this?
The biggest lesson I have learnt so far, is that the journey to self-discovery and self-acceptance is not a short one. It is long, drawn out and painful and enlightening all at the same time and even though I will never look at a bath bomb in the same light, ever again; I am grateful that it was the inside of my lip that burst. I am thankful that the swelling and the bruise were only slight and cleared up within in a couple of days and I am relieved it was only my lip that was burst so my eyes and my teeth are still intact.
Even though my 40-year-old pride took as much of a battering as my lip, I have learnt that burying our bad memories isn’t always the answer. Sometimes we need to remember what we have been through so that we understand why we have the strength we have.
I may not want to recall the feelings of protractors and rocks flying at my face or the names I was called back in the day; but now I know, in order to remember why I am who I have become, I need to remember how I got there and it is not because…
…of bath bombs and breakables…
