How to build a CV
My daughter is home for the summer. She’s working at a fashionable clothing store in the city, heading into work looking like she’s going clubbing.
But there is no dress-code, mother, she keeps telling me. And yes, everyone dresses like this.
She is, you see, making the most of her staff discount, even though she’s supposed to be saving for a trip to Bali
I say trip, but it’s actually an exchange term in the university course she’s doing. And in fairness to her, she did apply to universities around the world, hoping to study in America, or New Zealand, or Canada … But despite her good grades, she didn’t get a place. Competition for everything seems to be so fierce these days.
The options left were universities here in Europe, or distance-learning, which as we all discovered during the pandemic, can be as distant as you wish. So she, and a couple of her friends, have decided on distance-learning from Bali.
Bali!
My initial response was a big NO. Followed by lots of smaller no’s. No. No, no, no.
How’s that going to look on your CV? I probably said – which is rich coming from me. Because at fifty-six my CV reads like a mash-up between a slap-stick comedy and a fantasy novel. Somewhere in the mid-80s, it even lists my time as a Fax-machine operator. Who am I kidding? The twenty-something area manager, of the cleaning company with whom I’m applying for work (more of that later), won’t even know what a fax machine is!
Anyway, we got over the CV bit, not least because every bone in my body revolts against the very idea of a young person setting out on their unique and extraordinary life, on this unique and extraordinary planet, with the idea that the moves they make should be dictated by how it might look on a piece of paper, read by a stranger, in years to come.
Growing up and growing out
So yes, why not Bali.
I visited Bali in my early thirties, as part of an eighteen-month jaunt around the world. That was BC – before children. I have a photo somewhere, of me lying on a beach, in a bikini, tanned and slim as a strip of streaky bacon.
So why not, I’ve found myself saying to friends. Because if you can’t go off and live in a bikini at twenty-one, when you can you do it?
Oh, but I’m scared.
I remember halfway through that global jaunt of mine, ringing my own mother. These were the days before smart phones. The stationary telephone ruled. Paid for with pre-bought cards, accessed only after a long and smelly wait behind a queue of straggly-haired back-packers. I’d been in the Galapagos Islands for a week, or ten days, or two weeks. I can’t remember now, but I’m sure my mother knew exactly how many days that trip was scheduled for, because when I finally arrived back in Quito, bought my phone card and waited my turn, she nearly passed out with relief when she heard my voice.
And now it’s my turn. It doesn’t get any easier, does it? Of course I’d like my daughter to stay in a rainy, cold Europe, but she’s busy with vaccinations and insurance and yes, buying itsy-bity pieces of clothing.
She left one of these itsy-bitsy pieces out the other night. A stretchy black top, for me to try on because we can, and do share clothing sometimes. Bulky stuff like sweatshirts … But this? I couldn’t get this thing over my shoulders, and that, my friends, is gravity for you. Fifty-six years of pushing me down, widening me out like a baker kneading a dough-ball. My hips are fine, my stomach too as I keep working with the weights, but the girth of my shoulders? It’s funny what age does to a human body. My nose is another example. It won’t stop growing! It was never tiny in the first place, but at this rate I’m going to be giving Fagan a serious run for his money.
Anyway, the shoulders thing coincided with a text I had from home.
Holding on to it all
My auntie has had a fall, and she’s now in a hospice. My auntie is ninety-one and I don’t think I’ve seen her in twenty years. She’s surrounded by her four children, her many grandchildren and even some great grandchildren. She is loved and cared for, and the affection I hold for her, which I do, was forged in what feels like a different era. Nearly fifty years past, when as a child we’d knock about for a couple of weeks with our cousins up North. Granddad, with his trousers rolled up, grandma renting the seaside chalet, all us eight cousins screaming with delight as we splashed in and out of a freezing North sea.
My auntie is also, like me, the mother of twins, although unlike me she didn’t find out until a couple of weeks before. No ultrasounds back then. One baby, slept in a sock drawer for a few weeks until they had it sorted. This is true. There’s no need for me to embellish that story even if I wanted to, because with a bit of padding, a sock drawer works just as well as the priciest crib from the priciest store.
Those twins are sixty-two now. And one of them, also married a twin. And when twenty-one years ago, I had my twins, everyone in the family was so delighted with the obliging way in which I’d carried on the tradition of multiple-births, my twin cousin’s mother-in-law, knitted cardigans for my babies.
Teeny-tiny cardigans, for teeny-tiny babies, who’d arrived a month early. (That’s one them in the photo accompanying this blog.)
We’ve been sorting stuff out lately. Any regular readers will know why. (If you don’t, feel free to start here)
Anyway, there’s a box. We all have one. And the box contains many precious things that I will never part with. And the cardigans are in there.
And obviously, just like that lovely stretchy top, my daughter left out for me to try on, very recently I jokingly got her cardigan out to ‘try on’.
It didn’t fit. And the only way it might be of use to her now, was if I unraveled the wool, to crochet her a string bikini for Bali, which is about all she’ll need.
Funny, yes?
Then why am I crying again?
Until next time,
Cary
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Lovely having you back with your delightful and poignant 5 minute reads .