Thank You, Nan
by Nic Shayler
UNCOUNTABLE NOUN
Success is the achievement of something that you have been trying to do.
What is success?
I think the answer lies with who’s being asked the question. For many it may be a great career, a great house, winning a race, winning at life, early retirement and happiness. But if you were to ask me, success would be being a good person. Not a perfect one, because I think the human condition is way too messy for perfection, but a good one;
who does the best they can until they know better, and when they know better, they do better
Maya Angelou
When I was growing up I spent a lot of time with my Nan.
She gave hours of her time to us and although she wasn’t overly emotional in a touchy, feely, huggy way, she showed her love by making apple and blackberry crumble for Sunday pudding because she knew it was my favourite. By always insisting we leave her house with a ‘goodie bag’ filled with crisps, a Mars bar and an apple even when we were adults ourselves.
She would take my sister and I on errands to the co-op, allowing us to hold the milk tokens tightly in their paper twist. She would sing and dance around in the kitchen whilst the boiling pans steamed up the windows and encourage us to hiss and boo along with her whilst she watched her favourite wrestlers on a Saturday afternoon.
Underneath all of these beautifully, ordinary acts of kindness she just accepted me for who I was, always, unconditionally. That is the ultimate act of goodness.
When I moved away and tried to distance myself from the small town where I had grown up, I became a new version of myself, a version which I believed to be better than the old one. I forgot about all the unwavering goodness that she had given and thought that I knew better, would do better and was better.
Of course the truth was the opposite of that. Part of being a good person is to be able to accept yourself and others without judgement.
I believe it’s common that once you have children, you re-evaluate your own childhood. You pick through it and decide which bits you want to pay forward and place in your own children’s lives and which bits are best left in the past. I realised that many of the qualities and parts that I wanted to shape my children’s lives with were ones which my Nan had shown to me. I don’t know very much about her childhood, I know that there were many mouths to feed and not a lot of money. She became a parent in 1947 having lived through the second World War with her young husband being sent away to active service, returning no doubt a changed person. I’m not sure she had the luxury of being able to decide how to parent. I think she just got on with it.
And so I had my children and I consciously worked to be more like my Nan. I began trying to see the good in the world, people and in myself. Notice the word trying in there, it’s not always easy, is it? But I think it’s like anything else, practise makes perfect (or not so perfect).
A few weeks before I was due to give birth to my fourth child my Nan was admitted to hospital. She had been ill for sometime and although I hoped differently I think I knew that she probably wouldn’t be returning home. I waddled in and out of the ward and she made it clear she would stoically hold on until I had my daughter. Of course she did and I risked the wrath of the ward sister when I took my baby, only a few days old to the ward to meet Nan.
