Will Dig Life

Two weeks after returning from Vienna, the kids and I were off again, this time to Germany. Not a holiday for me but work: I was asked to provide live subtitles for the biannual conference of IVSS Churchear , a Europe wide initiative to challenge and support churches to fully include people with hearing loss. Because this organisation started in Germany it's very heavily German dominated (and this conference was held in Eisenach, Germany - Luther and Bach's town) but these days they're so international that they need to offer everything in English too. So my role was to provide on-the-fly translated subtitles in real time - that was challenging, though fun to do!  The organisation had invited my entire family to come but after two weeks in Vienna, Mr didn't feel able to take another week off so it was just me and the kids. We flew from Bristol to Frankfurt, then took a two hour train journey to arrive in Eisenach. A small, very picturesque town, and our hotel could have...

I learned so many things this summer. Every time I speak to relatives and friends about the past, hearing their perspectives, I fill in the picture a little bit more... and it's more and more a greyscale picture. As a child, I "spoke like a child, and reasoned like a child" as the Bible says (1 Cor. 13:11) which is really, as I see in my own children, a very black-and-white view of the world. There's good, and there's evil, and the difference between them is clear cut. In my child's world, my father (and his kin) was evil. My mother (and her kin) was good. Confusingly, my aunt was disturbingly both - rescuing us from our father, therefore good; terrorising and psychologically devastating us, therefore also evil. I grew up and left that place at 21, moving as far away as I could, and perhaps my understanding of my family didn't mature that much as an adult: I just wasn't there, and I wasn't really thinking about it. It's only now, as I have reco...