The first school I worked out boasted an impressive number of established members of staff, the ‘old-timers’ who had worked there for twenty plus years. The wonderful deputy head had been there forever, and, it was rumoured, had never had a day off sick and had never changed her hair do in all that time. This is of course the hallmark of a strong school. Even just within the English department, there were three impressive women all called Carol, all nearing retirement age, and it was not unusual to walk in on a chat about the great school fire of 1973, or how the English block used to house goats in the 1980s.
How fortunate we new teachers were to be the beneficiaries of so many years of wisdom and experience. It felt like there was no new initiative that the Carols hadn’t seen before, and would tolerantly take into their stride, knowing we’d come round full circle again in another few years. Some of the other younger teachers and I would joke about who we wanted to be when we grew up (I aspired to be the Carol with the amazing shoe collection and the ability to silence a room with the raise of one eyebrow). There was an awful lot to admire.
After I had my first baby I sadly realised it wasn’t workable to return to the school I loved, with the long commute and even longer days. The local school I work at now is also ‘outstanding’, but in contrast has a lot of young keen beans, who have only just become eligible for covid vaccines and work out together in the gym after school, and so the staff room chats are more likely to be about people’s new tattoos than any events from before the new millennium.
It is highly disconcerting to find myself on the other side of the line, the ‘oldie’ who reminisces about the days of coursework, calls the current GCSE spec ‘the new spec’ even though it’s now been around for years, and struggles with new tech (to be fair, there was an awful lot to learn this year as we all jumped on Teams and live teaching). I am almost tempted by a tattoo just to make myself feel a bit better.
Similarly, at church, I find myself at a bit of a tipping point.
Grace Church launched a couple of weeks before our eldest was due. Which meant that we joined and then instantly received and received the generosity of our new church family: meals, gifts, offers of help, words of support and advice. It’s the most lovely thing, and taught me an awful lot about what ‘grace’ means – I don’t have to be on coffee and Sunday school rotas, I can just exist within the body of the church and benefit from the love and kindness there.
In the book of Titus, Paul encourages older women to “urge the younger women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled and pure, to be busy at home, to be kind, and to be subject to their husbands.” Goodness, how the women of Grace did this! Without judgment or condescension, they welcomed me and the other new mums who soon followed, and modelled godly female roles to us. With several children apiece, there was a huge wealth of experience they were so generous in sharing and sympathising with. And I was all over them seeking advice: "What should I do about this...?" One gloriously sacrificial lady repeatedly slept at our house to help me out at night when it all got too much.
So I definitely labelled myself as ‘a younger woman’, someone who was learning and receiving.
Three years on, emerging from the initial nightmarish cloud of sleep deprivation and with the eldest approaching nursery age, I felt I had the capacity to help set up a church toddler group (with some encouragement from the older women, who had all had their turn of doing something similar in the past). And so SANG was born. (Slightly ironically, we then got pregnant, shifted nursery days, and took on looking after an extra child on Mondays, so my so called capacity took a bit of a tumble, and I sometimes had three children plus a bump on my lap for our singing sessions.)
How I loved our time at SANG! I feel like the boys and I all grew up there, in that sweet, special little community, singing and sharing together. Our third boy was obviously born during our time there, and so the SANG songs were the backing track for his time both in utero and up until he began preschool.
But something odd began to happen. Because I was the one telling people to sign in or handing them a coffee, people were fooled into thinking maybe I was one of those older mums with something useful to contribute. The first times people asked me about things like sleep, I literally laughed out loud, and told them to ask someone who knew what they might be doing. But then I began to realise that a few years and a few children in, maybe I did occasionally have something to offer. Especially when it comes to poo (it’s surprisingly important and I have a whole lot to say on the topic!).
So now as we look ahead to joining a new church, and I blithely offer that they can put me down on whatever rota they like (life is definitely more civilised now the children are all at school), I’m wondering which label to give myself. I won’t pretend that I’m at that needy new mum stage, but neither am I ready to claim much wisdom which is worth sharing. Maybe I’ll just mentally sit in the middle, shovelling out poo advice on one side, and soaking up pearls of insight on the other.
Slightly horrifying thought: does that make me middle aged?
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