On becoming a wise child
Contents
Chapter 3: 17:00
Are we nearly there yet? [supplementary]
Churn [supplementary]
Addition for the m/other-us-all
Introduction
During the past month, new research was published indicating that, in later life, women’s grey matter thins more rapidly than men’s. That got me thinking. In my old toolbox or the manstream way of thinking, that knowledge would have put me in a place where I would feel less than. I would have allowed myself to be Othered.
As I learn to use the changing bag of our m/other tongue, I find a different relationship to that knowledge. What if the thinning of womankind’s grey matter is the very thing that allows the crone’s wisdom to emerge? What if this is part of the matriarchal leadership of humankind, orcas, and elephants? Without the tyranny of logic and the conscious cognitive management of life, might this allow maternal leaders to make the fast connections and creative leaps that keep human beauty alive and equal in the world? What if what the manstream dismisses as foolishness, babbling, and immodesty is in fact creativity, connection, and wholeheartedness? What if our thinning grey matter leads us to become more childlike? And in becoming more childlike, we become wiser by living out our commitment of connection with others?
This month’s fiction continues from last month’s and tells us more about Graham, and what has driven his life choices. It set me pondering transitions and tipping points. As I navigate the move from toolbox to changing bag, and attempt to persuade you to pick up your changing bag too, I have encountered internal resistance to speaking out - feeling terrified and stuck because of the risk of shame, ridicule, and exclusion.
Building on last month, where we considered how active witnessing is part of speaking our m/other tongue, this post focuses on the challenge of self-witnessing with honesty, despite the discomfort it brings.
The fiction follows directly from last month’s piece. Graham has just told a story from his childhood, in which his childlike delight had been crushed by the realities of farm life. Then the lights suddenly went out.
State of semi-ness
As part of his training as a vet, Graham had visited the Sussex Downs to see fireflies. It took him straight back there as person after person used the light of their phone to address the instant darkness that had fallen over them. The impenetrable, unexpected blackness had led to an unexpected silence too. A shock. Then a couple of fearful screams before the twinkling of individual lights.
He could hear Val scrabbling for her phone, then heard it fall to the floor, and her hand brushed his leg as she felt around for it. The unchosen, risky reverie, touching the reason he left home, had left him stunned by the intensity of the self-revelation. He felt Val touch him, so he, maybe more forcefully than he might have done in other circumstances, put his hand on top of hers.
“They’ll have a back-up generator,” he said, reassuring himself more than her.
Even as he spoke, emergency lighting started to cut in. The light produced was much lower than the usual level of ‘come hither and buy food’ (or sandwiches, or useless tat that you just buy at a service station as you need a bit of a pick-me-up in the middle of the in-between space from destination to departure. Divert and distract was always the action of his inner saviour). Surely, he thought now, someone – some facilities manager – must appear and take some visible leadership. Surely someone had the responsibility to guide them through this crisis.
His hand was still pinning Val’s. She gently put her other hand on top of his, sandwiching it between her own. He risked a glance at her. He expected disgust. It wasn’t there. He saw warmth, and normality. He expected his hidden sensitivity, which he risked showing, to make her want to drop him, expunge him, see him as a poofter.
It had been a word that had given him a degree of comfort, a sort of place to belong, an identity. But he couldn’t even call himself that any more. He wasn’t a homosexual, and poofter wasn’t an okay word, and he didn’t want to offend, even if that was the name he’d carried at school. He never wanted to offend. He knew the horror of being offended. He wasn’t gay like that. He was once freely sunshine and diamonds on the lawn, and delight in other beings. He was joy. Joy was crushed that day. He had never questioned why he’d remained single all his life, when he knew he’d like a relationship with someone, and that someone would be a woman. But sex had never been of interest to him. He’d always wanted to talk, and be interested, and have someone be interested in him. He wanted to share sunshine and diamond lawns.
“Thank you,” Val said. “Thank you for sunshine and diamond lawns.”
He was still hanging his head. His smile was reactive, quick, and a bit unconvinced.
On maturing to be a wise child - transitions, tipping points, risking, being stuck, and making scraps beautiful
Quilters sometimes use a method called crazy quilting. Instead of laying out fabric in a careful pattern, they just find scraps of cloth they love and begin sewing them together, spiraling outward until the quilt is big enough to trim and finish. Abandoning anxiety and living by our creativity, especially at this alarming moment in history, is like using the quilter’s freeform method, but instead of a crazy quilt, I call this kind of life a sanity quilt. To make a sanity quilt life, start by putting curiosity, creativity, and true fascination at the center of living. Then, add other things you love, slowly filling time with beautiful experiences.
Something strange happens each month as I carry out this research. A post goes out to you on the first of the month. I then choose the next batch of fiction, sit with what it means to me, and draft a response. More often than not, it feels utterly incomprehensible – I am baffled, and full of shame. As close as possible to the 15th, I send it to my editor. Then, before they have even touched it, something shifts. Lo and behold, something falls into place inside me and I think, ‘Oh, so that is what it is about.’
This post-doctoral research is beginning to take on a pattern, emerging from the scraps I write each month. I found myself drawn back to the posts from February 2025, June 2025, and July 2025 as I tried to gather what this month’s fiction was about. A central theme surfaced again: Erikson’s developmental stages, and the movement from being consumed by shame – where there is no autonomy – towards a place where there may still be the discomfort of guilt, but also the possibility of initiative.
This month’s fiction seems to tell me that I already know tipping points arise under pressure, at moments of crisis. These tipping points can be ‘fixed’ using a manstream toolbox, and that may well lead to stability. The master’s tools might ease the discomfort, but they may also ensure that nothing is different next time. Alternatively, those tipping points can be channelled through the supplies of the changing bag to allow, well, change! This month’s work has brought me to a potential brink of new understanding: that it is through witnessing oneself, while also being the recipient of the active witness of another, that productive community building becomes possible.
As I generate the theory that supports the operationalisation of our m/other tongue, I find myself in a semi-knowing state. I no longer want to be a reluctant part of the toolbox, and yet I do not fully know what it means to have a changing bag instead. I am in that twilight zone between darkness and light. I want to know what is in my changing bag. I want to be ‘there’, to ease the discomfort of not knowing. But I cannot fill it by thinking my way through it – that would be wholly incongruent. To fill the changing bag by thought alone would be to dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools. Bring on the immodest, babbling fools that know more than they can say! I must fill the changing bag by doing – by undertaking this post-doctoral research through Heuristic Inquiry, and discovering that I do know.
I want to be able to act in complex situations for the good of the people I care for and care about. I have to do this in a world where my m/other tongue is not the primary language. I want our m/other tongue to be spoken.
I could withdraw. I could hide away and find somewhere safe enough, comfortable enough, to get by. I think both Val and Graham have done this throughout their lives. Neither has managed a sustained relational partnership with another adult. They have been skilled professionals, yet both have felt marginalised. Each, in different ways, has wrestled with a sense of unfulfilment: Val in never becoming a mother, Graham in never resolving the rupture of his childhood. From an Eriksonian perspective, both seem caught at the stage of autonomy versus shame. They want to be themselves, to claim autonomy, yet the response to their being leaves them feeling shame.
The supplementary fiction I have added this month points towards a movement from autonomy versus shame to the next developmental stage: initiative versus guilt. Being able to use initiative means I can choose to take creative action. It may be wrong. I may feel bad. If what I do is not good enough, I still have a choice – to repair any rupture and to refine my actions in future; not in order to find ‘the answer’, but to continue building connection. As ruptures between people are repaired, the Uni-verse might become a multi-verse, as I wrote about last month and the month prior.
Last month I named active witnessing as one of the supplies in the changing bag. In truth, that is another way of speaking about empathy. Perhaps we invent, or recycle, concepts so that we do not become complacent, imagining we know exactly what we are doing. It may be part of the ongoing work of community building. Previously, I focused on witnessing between people. This month, I am held by the need to witness oneself in the presence of the other. I am certain this is important. I am less certain why. For now, I have to sit with that uncertainty as the first of the month approaches: I must release this imperfect offering into the world for you to witness.
Not knowing/letting go is one of the foundations of drawing on our tacit maternal knowing. And, if we take being pre-verbal, right-brained, and social seriously, as in Theraplay, then becoming too concrete, too certain, too quickly is a recipe for poor work – whether therapy, research, teaching, or management. Yet even that statement risks seducing me back into the toolbox. It turns a lived sense into a fixed claim. At most, all I can say is this is how it seems to me.
The fiction presses me to consider that I must integrate the childlikeness of both male and female to be wise about this operationalisation of our m/other tongue. This integration is not the same as capitulating to patriarchy. I still don’t know how this integration lives and feels, yet the premise of this research is that I do know, just as you do know. But in the toolbox of the manstream, we interrupt our own knowing because we are conditioned to value the one form of knowledge endorsed by the patriarchy.
Graham’s delight in the diamond lawn and the rabbit is crushed by too much reality, too quickly. When we explore and prize our m/other tongue, when we integrate creativity, it may appear to the manstream as childishness. I would argue the opposite: it is an attempt to become childlike, to retain awe and wonder and creativity, rather than dismiss them. To find the coherent beauty of scraps.
Oh, my thinning grey matter. Let me be foolish, babbling, immodest. I need to move downwards into experience, back to a childlike core. To loosen focus. To open the gateway and allow feelings and images to flood through the rest of the brain. To tolerate being overwhelmed by multiple ideas. Not to edit. To undertake that super-encountering process – this month not with literature, but with interior experience.
Graham comes from my imagination. As such, he can only be a manifestation of how I have processed sensitive masculinity within myself, below the threshold of consciousness. Fiction is my space of play, my childlike territory, where I relinquish intentionality. Under the pressure of producing something, come what may, I am given a mirror in which to witness my own pre-verbal, non-verbal, right-brained, and social functioning. I can only claim Graham as a representation of my inner maleness. The heuristic question remains: this is how it is for me – is it like that for you, too?
Learning to operationalise our m/other tongue has grown from recognising that Theraplay carries a message beyond the therapy room, and working out with my heart and my hands what that means. I have to be determined not to think what that means. Grounded in attachment theory, Theraplay uses relational play to enable a felt sense of safety and a secure enough connection to others for people to become able to thrive. It doesn’t fix people. It enables connection and community. It works first with the heart, through hands-on connection. Cognition of what is felt and done comes later.
Attachment theory, as set out by John Bowlby, argues that a felt sense of safety depends upon belonging within a social network. Yet contemporary applications often focus narrowly on the mother–infant dyad and its impact on lifelong mental health, rather than on the wider community’s responsibility to care for that dyad while they are dependent on others. Interdependence is missed - maybe because to take interdependence seriously, the role of the paternal figure has to be taken seriously too. However, that role can’t fall into the authoritarian, patriarchal mode of paternal function relying too much on cognition and logic, eschewing emotion and intuition.
Paternal figures must engage with the mess and the muddle – not by becoming maternal, but by inhabiting a distinct paternal place. Richard Bowlby described this as the role of excitation and exploration within primary attachment relationships. To enable excitation and exploration is closely linked to a child moving from autonomy into initiative, from shame towards guilt. The paternal function is as necessary as the maternal for sustaining community.
Both Val and Graham experience their lives as ‘less than’ in the eyes of the manstream. Despite their competence, they feel like failures because they do not belong. Yet they do not wish to belong to the communities in which they were raised, or in which they now live. To do so would violate a deeply held sense of what - for them - is moral and right.
From their places of not-good-enoughness – where autonomy is overridden and hardens into shame – the absence of anyone witnessing their joy intensifies a sense of how scarce deep connection can be and what that deprivation inhibits in terms of living life fully. Yet both continue to give, caring for those with less power than themselves. Vet and psychotherapist. Perhaps they are driven by fear of that same scarcity in themselves. Maybe seeking some kind of reparation for themselves. Are they too doing the right deeds for the wrong reason? Even that question may arise from shame – from an inability to accept that one’s motivations are good and come out as good deeds, for the right reason.
John Bowlby developed Attachment theory through an evolutionary lens. Attachment, in this view, serves survival. Survival of the fittest can be interpreted as domination – taking food, supplies, profit, power, as the only way to survive. Or it can be understood as cooperation: tribe or pack ensuring collective care through interdependence. This leaves an unresolved question. In the worst conditions, why do some people collapse into self-preservation alone, while others continue to place community above individual gain, recognising that self and community are inseparable, especially when resources are scarce?
Val and Graham have retained at least a partial orientation towards community, or caring for others. How? Perhaps their saving grace is that their parents did the best they could within the constraints they faced. They were true to the best they could access within themselves, and that left deep marks on their children. Val and Graham are good and honest and also stuck.
There is, I think, a foundational courage that is not about exploration or excitation, but about a stance: here I stand; I can do no other. It holds solid, even in the moments when the lights go out and the feeling of crisis is active. It is a fundamental belief that can’t be rocked, even if it costs. This is deeply personal. It is our taproot - our ontology, if you like. It is secure, but it may not always bring a felt sense of safety. It becomes the reference point of a person’s understanding of the world.
For me, that primary reference point is the mother/infant experience, and so my vocation is to care for others. I have heard people say it is dangerous to take the mother/infant experience as our primary reference point for organising the world. But why? It is no more dangerous than taking capitalism, or patriarchy, or whiteness as our primary reference point. But taking a relationship that embodies the loving use of power in the service of a less powerful other requires people to feel. And that may bring home to people that they have suffered despite the best endeavours of the people who have loved them. That is complicated. To love and hurt. To both bare and bear the reality of this can feel dangerous.
Such complex inbetweenness can create tipping points, transitions, stuckness, or, if spoken out and witnessed by both self and others, potential for finding a felt sense of safety to integrate with the ontological security.
People do their best. Val and Graham were loved as fully as their parents were able. Sarfan was loved by his grandmother, his brothers, and his mother before she disappeared. Daniel’s earlier story remains unknown, but he is loved by his husband. They are about to launch a mammoth operation to rescue the children. Most people can tolerate what is going on at the service station, but Daniel knows that the state of semi-ness will be too much for the children he cares for. Foundational courage and challenges in the lived world combine to create tipping points that can be disasters or opportunities.
Winnicott (1997) wrote, “It is a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found.” He also wrote that “there is no such thing as a baby, there is a baby and someone. Meaning of course that whenever one finds an infant one finds maternal care and without maternal care there would be no infant” (Winnicott, 1960). All my professional life, I’ve read this as being about mothers and babies and what goes wrong if mothering is not good enough - a toolbox reading of understanding the failure so it can be fixed. But what if we read it differently: that there is no such thing as a solitary story. Where there is a story, there is an audience and actors. Without story, there is no life. A hidden story may bring private satisfaction, but if it is never received, it becomes a disaster for the teller. Storytelling, relationship, and community are further supplies in our changing bags.
Good-enoughness. In-betweenness. Semi-ness. Partial tellings, partial hearings. The toolbox has been set aside. The changing bag is still being filled. I do not know with my head. I do know with my body. Hopefully my hands can follow my heart in stocking the changing bag. Maybe heads will then change too. A new theory will be born in all of this messy storytelling.
Addition for the m/other-us-all
The cry, “Are we nearly there yet?” reveals the manstream’s obsession with destination. The purpose of our life’s work in the m/otherland, using our m/other tongue, is not to arrive somewhere specific. It is to be fully present with ourselves and with others; to honour, or witness, whatever ‘fully’ means at different times, places, stages of growth, and for different people, both ourselves and others. Productivity is that. Community is that. Productivity is community building. It is difficult, even dangerous, work because we can’t shut down when it becomes difficult to do.
These fiction extracts were initially shared out of order in February 2025 when I started this post-doctoral research.
Are we nearly there yet?
Any change brings disturbance. Lights going. Lights coming back, but dimmer. The shiver in the room was palpable.
“Do you think the heating will go off?” Val asked Graham, not sure if her shiver was a reaction to the change or to an anticipation of cold.
“Surely a manager will appear now!” Graham responded.
The room was like a tide. You could hardly call it semi-darkness, but the lowering of the light level made the place feel like a seashore after the sun had set, but before the light fully faded. Eyes seemed unable to manage the semi-ness. There were trips, some apologies, some swearing. One tide seemed to be heading for the toilets, another towards the food counters, as if bodies needed to be comforted in the middle of the rip current of not sure-ness.
The stationery shop was pulling down its rolling screen, cutting it off from the rest of the service station. Val watched. A woman in a high vis jacket was ushering people out of the space, getting them across the carpet divider, that imperceptible in-shop/out-of-shop line in the sand — even more invisible in the gloom. She then pressed a button and the screen started to slowly descend, but very slowly the heaving throng of watery people crossed back over the in-shop/out-of-shop line until she had to push the button again to stop the screen’s descent.
Too far away, Val couldn’t hear the words; but she could see frustration in the woman’s body — and fear. She scuttled forward, ushering people, then back to press her button. Forward to usher again. Back and forth, back and forth, like a manic wave until the barrier got low enough that it would take an effort to be inside the shop, not outside. Val could see the relief on the woman’s face and in her shoulders.
Closer were the food outlets. Other people in high vis jackets were trying to pull down barriers and screens. The noise here was close enough to be heard as words.
“No, sir, we can’t leave them open. We can’t run the tills because we have no connection.”
“Why not?”
“We are on emergency power, that’s not enough to run the network. No network, no tills. We can’t sell anything.”
“But don’t these people need feeding?”
Really these people didn’t need feeding, the sense of emergency only cut-in as the lights cut-out. And it was only a sense of emergency. All were under cover. For the moment all were warm and, really, they were not far from civilisation. It wouldn’t take much for services to reach them if a real emergency occurred.
But for those stuck, not knowing, the emergency felt real.
“How long will it be?”
It was the question on everyone’s minds, but it was being voiced at the food outlets.
“I don’t know, sir. I don’t know, madam. I don’t know. I don’t know when we will know. I don’t know who will let us know. I just don’t know.”
Sarfan looked out from behind the counter. He could feel his eyes get big. He, too, was reminded of the sea. The not knowing. The endlessness. The cold and the heaving of movement of people crammed in. The stomach, not sure if it was fear or sickness or hunger — or all three.
“Cookers not work, no?” He said to his colleagues.
“No mate. We’re done for today.”
“We give this food?” He asked.
“No mate. We’ll just have to chuck it. The order system won’t work.”
“But it’s food.”
Only someone who had experienced no food and starvation to the point of eating anything, would know. He’d never managed to cope with the waste these people made. He thought about his grandmother who cared for them after his mother went, not able to go out because she was a woman, not prepared to send them out for fear they would be picked up and made to fight. Until she just stopped.
Sarfan had found her cold in her bed in the morning. He and his brothers looked at each other and knew they had no choice. They left her there, taking any jewellery, anything that might have value if sold, anything they could carry, and they left.
Sarfan tried to never shut his eyes. When his eyelids slid down, when he could not resist it any more, the noise was too much. Every scene, every sort of transport, every bang and bump, every gun and terror, every illness. Every death of every kind. The times when he wished it had been his own death, for relief.
He wrapped up the burgers that had been cooked ready for expected orders. He boxed up fries.
“Here,” he called to the people. He put them on the counter.
He used the water in the water boiler and filled up paper cups and put out tea bags and the whole box of cartons of milk.
“Here,” he called to the people.
The drinks, the fizzy stuff, he left. That never went off and could be sold tomorrow when the world was right again. But he would not waste.
“You’re toast, mate,” his colleague said. “Your wages would never cover all of that.”
Sarfan sank to the floor behind the serving counter. He couldn’t care any more. He’d wait till they’d all gone and clean down the equipment, as he always did. He only liked this place when it was shut and he could clean out the stale fat smell and scrub the floor and take the leftovers and give them to the people who slept under the bridges and flyovers in the town that he had to drive to, to the house that he shared with fifteen other men who also had jobs that they had to keep silent about. They took turns in the beds. They were pleased for whatever food someone brought back from their job. They had food and board deducted from their illusionary wages, but at least this way they actually got to eat something. But it was more than Sarfan’s heart could bear, to take the food from his job to what was meant to be his home.
He wished the lights were brighter. The intensity of the lights here, at all times of the day and night — he liked it; there were no dull gaps for the horrors to creep in, and it helped him stay awake as much as possible. He may have reached the purported golden land, but he was still travelling, trying to find safety. Mostly when he shut his eyes, he saw his Gran’s eyes open and her limbs stiff and her light of love gone.
Churn
Daniel checked around his staff. Sally couldn’t knit as it was too dark, but no one would know as the needles kept clicking, and her hum kept going. Next to her, Kian was still looking at his book. Maybe there was enough light to read, maybe not. But they were keeping going, holding together.
He could feel Jacob and Mia tightening beneath his arms, and he soothed with his voice, explaining what was going on. At the same time, he texted the school asking them to contact parents and carers, trying to sort out some video calls so that the children could be reassured. At least there was a strong signal here, even if the tills and ordering systems had gone down. The mobile data bill on his phone may end up big, but this was an emergency.
Yasin was checking the charge on the phones of the children who he’d been playing games with. He was talking with them about how they might change to games that didn’t need electricity…or much light. Daniel couldn’t quite work out what was going on, but there were ripples of laughter from the group, and he knew Yasin was quite a magician in turning tech into imagination games. Marley was holding a torch so that Jayden could continue with his very serious game of chess, and she’d now taken Nina onto her lap.
All was well. All were cared for. All were calm. Bigger catastrophes had already befallen all of these children. Yes, this was unpredictable, and unhelpful, but it was what it was. It was life, and these children were living life because his magnificent staff were keeping the things that could be kept predictable, predictable. No matter what, they kept the whole show on the road by keeping connections ticking over.
His phone rang. It was his deputy at school letting him know that she’d managed to get through to the police and explain the situation. The second school minibus was on its way to the north side of the motorway. The 20-minute journey was going to take about an hour, but the police were going to escort the minibus there and the children could cross to the other side. The minibus would then take them back to school via back roads. Some carers and parents were making the same journey if they had cars. She’d send Daniel all the details as they became available and let him know when the minibus had arrived so he could keep the children in the safe space they’d created until it was time for them to be rescued.
Daniel had to admit he was relieved. It could have felt on a knife edge, so much noise and confusion and uncertainness, and he had been worried about all the children, and his staff. It was so easy for any of the children to suddenly find it was all too much and throw chairs or scream or do something that drew negative attention to their need to manage. He gave Jacob and Mia a bit of an extra hug, sighed, and smiled. Let others churn, he’d be still.
Bibliography
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Eliot, T. S. (2014). Murder in the cathedral. Bloomsbury.
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