The other day my sister asked me what I’d like for my birthday and I gave her a suggestion. So today, she came round and dropped it off with a lovely card and a doorstop visit.
She brought a young man with her. He looked a lot like one of my nephews, but taller and older and more sullen. I’m constantly amazed at how young they make teenagers these days. It took a remarkable amount of resolve for me not to say, ‘My, haven’t you grown?’ or some such thing as aunties and uncles say. The little boy I’d built catapults with, and fought against with sellotaped-toilet-roll-swords... was quite probably taller than me now. And I felt myself transitioning on my doorstep, from ‘fun uncle’ to ‘irrelevant relative’ in a matter of a single moment.
It’s okay. ‘Wise old wizard’ is the next phase, when the investment of putting them in the wheelie bin when they were little, returns in the closeness they feel when they need someone sensible to help them know how to be a grown up. I can get through the middle bit if that’s on the other side.
‘My haven’t you grown’ indeed! Tsk. I might as well have pushed a pound coin deep into his palm and ruffled his hair. Funny. I never considered that my aunties and uncles too, might have been just trying to keep up with how to be relevant and fun, like they always had been when I was very young. We grow up so fast I guess we don’t often consider that all those around us have to change too. We treat them as constants but they’re not. But there’s no time to consider that when you’re racing through the growth-spurt is there?
I closed the front door and it clicked shut behind me. I exhaled, sighing long and low into the coats. Actually I felt a bit like sobbing into a sleeve, but I pulled myself together in the end. The year of pandemic has already robbed me of so much time. I felt cheated out of watching them grow up all of a sudden.
How can I be a good uncle to all eight niblings? I’ve barely seen them, and I miss them so much! A lot of people say this experience has been a ‘reset’, but it can’t be, can it? You can’t freeze time or make everything the way it used to be by jabbing a pencil into a tiny button-hole! Time has already gone and changed us; we’re going to have to work out how to start again from where we are, not where we were. And that suddenly made me feel quite sad.
But that’s the flip side of the disconnect; some things really needed to be unplugged, powered down, switched off. The pandemic did that - it gave us a forced restart, not just on those things but on everything. In some ways it’s a bit of a pain having to reinstall only the things we need and discard all the stuff we didn’t. For me, family comes out high on that list of things to restart, and to restart well. May God help me.
And that, I think, is what I’m minded to do - begin again, perhaps as I morph into that curious middle-aged uncle in the corner who’s trying his hardest to be either wise and useful for the future, or still funny and lovable from the past.
I think it’s a restart; not a reset. I think the new adventure might be in figuring out who are and who we want to be, not in recapturing who we used to be. And even if it’s difficult I hope I’ll be up for that.
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