Bursting the Bubble

As I think I may already have mentioned, I’ve just become a granny for the first time. (Pause for exaggerated yawns) A couple of days ago, I went with my daughter-in-law and grandson for the weekly weigh-in at the local baby clinic. It’s nearly thirty years since I’ve set foot in a baby clinic and I was astonished at the sheer volume of everything: nifty light-weight prams as far as the eye could see; babies of all shapes and sizes in various stages of undress; young mums breast-feeding, bottle-feeding, changing nappies, logging down today’s weight and comparing anxiously with last week’s, asking advice of the professionals and exchanging baby chat with one another. A lot of these new mums had been holding their own in the workplace only a few weeks before, thinking they were hard pushed and stressed out. Now, plunged into the 24 hour demands of messy, exhausting, bewildering, full-on childcare, they realise life at the office was a doddle.

I’m a bit ashamed to admit that for the past thirty years, I haven’t taken much notice of the young mum brigade. Okay, I’ve stepped off the pavement for the occasional push-chair, quietly changed seats on a plane to avoid the toddler in the seat behind, and made the right noises at other peoples’ baby photos (oh the joy of finally getting my own back!). But now suddenly, a whole sector of the community is on my personal radar and it’s taken first-hand experience to put it there. And maybe that’s the way it works. Most of the time we float around in our own personal bubble. In some ways that’s inevitable. It takes God and life to prick the bubble occasionally, make us wise up to all those other bubbles out there in the ether. It took a brush with breast cancer to take me inside the cancer sufferers’ bubble, to put the oncology unit at my local hospital onto my radar and into my prayers. It took the mental health problems of a family member to make me similarly aware of the local psychiatric hospitals. And having a son who’s gay, took me inside a bubble that encompasses a world-wide community, many suffering terrible, violent prejudice and rejection, sometimes in the very places where you’d think they’d be most entitled to love and respect.

Yesterday evening, we went to a wonderful Haydn concert at St Mary’s Cathedral in Edinburgh. The centrepiece of this concert was the choral work, ‘Seven Last Words from the Cross’. The audience was largely middle-aged and middle class, well-behaved and savvy about clapping in the right places. Near the end of the final piece, ‘Father into thy hands I commend my spirit’, a humble little statuette caught my eye, a mother holding a child, simply carved in unpretentious wood. The sight of it, combined with the equally simple words I was listening to, brought a lump to my throat. I prayed for my lovely daughter-in-law, at home in her flat, struggling to convince my fretful grandson that night-time is designed for sleeping. And then my prayer spread out to other young mums throughout the city, some of them bringing up children single-handed with inadequate resources and no support network.

For perfectly good reasons, no-one would have wanted a crowd of screaming babies and their harassed mothers at last night’s concert, but the quiet presence of that little statue, tucked away in a corner of the vast cathedral, was a reminder of all the people that need commending into a loving Father’s hands, those who might be disbarred from a concert but never from our lives.

Have you had any bubbles burst? How has it changed your outlook on life?