Accepting mediocrity, or finding perfection in averageness

Since I’ve been back from a Continental week away, my brain has felt cauterised. Numbed by sleep and crisped up by sunshine and barbequed fresh sardines, I’ve struggled to muster the necessary histamine response to feeling stressed by anything. I’ve hardly had any feelings at all save a kind of clean zen calm that rejects anxiousness, sadness or even passion. To say I’m fine is an understatement, used, as it normally is, as a sort of passive-aggressive spit, to convey that actually everything is terrible. I am actually fine. Things are going well, I guess, and if I feel anything about it at all, it’s a sort of shocked nonplussedness, with a touch of boredom creeping in at its edges, the way my cuticles are starting to push at my holiday shellac.

Nevermind our Mexican manny sacked us before we went away – a tantrum too far from overtired, underoccupied kids, and our too relaxed approach to his clear financial straits and teetering mental health saw to that. I understand now, how other people’s problems can seem hysterical when one’s own life is plodding along just fine. Instead, we’ve roped back in the once more volatile half of Helorgi, the kids’ childminding duo from when they were young and frankly, tricky. No longer a student, but a homeowner with a dog fetish, she herself seems more self-assured now she’s negotiated the tricky patch between uni and working out who she is. In the gulf of the childhood since she last spent time with the kids, she’s been astonished by the change – Jonah’s manners, Ava’s calm withdrawal – the dogs she now normally sits instead of children giving them a mutual  focus for these aimless last summer days.

My ‘just good enough’ form of parenting – too many video games, not too much cajoling about homework, commitment to just one or two main activities, diet of fish fingers and fruit, lavish-birthday-cake-and-slack-wrapping-paper approach to their childhoods appears to be bearing out. They’re becoming perfectly normal, and I don’t seem to mind too much, for all I spent my own childhood being told, implicitly, to strive for extraordinary. It never seemed to make me very happy.

They will return to school two inches taller a piece from just enough suncream to ensure they do not burn, just enough ice cream to learn their own limits on sugar, just enough culture to offset the computer addiction and just enough fun to keep boredom, just about, at bay. I’ve worked just hard enough to pay for it, and be in a position to plan holidays to come.

It’s all good, but noone’s winning any awards. But whereas, in summers past, I’ve agonised over what I will do with the rest of my life, now I feel pretty okay with where I am. The way ahead looks dimly lit but cosy, and I don’t try and peer into the bleak abyss of years to come: my expectations dulled to a gentle seesaw of nice and less nice – a cheap business class flight here, a convenient economy shop there – unlike the choppy waters and diet of high days and drama of my own childhood holidays –  that largely keeps me grounded at okay, and dare I say, even happy. My own and other people’s attention seeking has rescinded in my sphere of interest to background radiation. I know it’s sometimes there, but I feel so much less invested.

It all gives me rather less to write about. In any case, I question the value in continuing, however inspired I was reading Emma Cline’s The Girls on a Portuguese sun lounger -a novel so evocative yet pacey, so beautifully constructed for all its fatalism, and fudge of teenage angst anchoring the haze of its sixties Califorian zeitgeist mirage, that I thought back to my own teenagehood and found another kernel of a book. I flew through it in a self-indulgent day after an excellent and much-needed massage from a beautiful eastern European migrant that made me lazy enough to ignore the kids’ midweek  dedication to Minecraft after a day or two of too much Atlantic sun, feeling my own jottings by comparison seem somehow fruitless. Even my acceptance onto a creative writing MA next year feels as though it might just be more prevarication – why not accept the dull comforts of an okay job, with its rigid pay grades, humane hours, just above inflation annual pay rises and holiday accrument, and the unlikelihood of being let go anytime soon, than strive for something more ambitious and risk rocking the financial boat of paid vacation and a pension?

It’s perfectly okay to be average, as has been Tom’s mantra from the start of our relationship – perhaps its unlikely, fairytale beginningit’s most unusual landmark to date – whose family’s most ebullient expression of happiness, “that’ll be nice,” the pedestrianism of which once incited me to pick vicious, intellectualised holes, now seems to be a benign expression of the calm acceptance of one’s fate. I realise too, now I’m back, how much more value a good cup of tea has over a glass of fine Champagne. 

Being perfectly average, Tom says, only half ironically, and in an echo of heterozygote gene theory, is actually the same as being perfect. And, as his long buried Portuguese ancestry bore out, (our surname is one of Portugal’s most common)  he really was, as he predicted, a deep brown by day three of our holiday, even though, on the other side, his Celtic heritage saw him puce the day we arrived.