I'm Proud Of You

Image by Author - The Girl

I could actually feel my insides lighting up when she said it. In fact, I may have enthusiastically shared her comments on the family WhatsApp group and gone about with a little extra spring in my step for the rest of the day. I was pleasant to the children, pleasant to my husband, pleasant to my mother. I kept my hand off the horn and blessed those slow drivers. I waited patiently in a queue, smiled beatifically at the people around me. I was gracious and amenable. There was a weird pay-it-forward effect. It’s now twenty-four hours later and I’m still experiencing those positive vibes, a new-found self-respect mixed with a tingling of self-esteem, albeit alongside a throbbing pain in my hamstrings, quads, glutes, and core. “I’m proud of you,” she said. Had I won an award, added to a symbolic list of achievements, delivered an inspirational speech, written that novel I keep talking about? No, all I’d done was deadlift thirty kilos in a gym on a chilly Thursday afternoon in December. There was a rack pull involved too but I don’t think I need to go into that much technical detail here. This is not a fitness blog. The main point is the stunning impact those four simple words had on me, the difference they made, how they totally changed how I felt about me.   

“I once lifted 120 kilos,” my husband said later, reminiscing about his time as a weightlifter. “Back off, it’s not your moment,” I said. I guess she didn’t have to say it. There’s a temptation to be cynical about her motives. She could just have felt validated as a personal trainer, wanted me to continue parting with my cash. I didn’t think it was all that impressive. I played it down. “Are the rest of your clients in their seventies?” I joked. We were in a health club in Cultra¹. She put me firmly in my place. She meant it. There was no ulterior motive. “You should be proud of yourself too,” she said. “I’ve been telling everyone about you”. By now, I was in a complete state of euphoria. I was floating on fluffy, white clouds, I was seeing party poppers in the sky. I was that boy walking in the air with the snowman. I reckoned I could do pretty much anything.

It took me back to a conversation in a swimming pool changing room. We’d bumped into each other again. It was six weeks since our last chat. We were standing in exactly the same place, in between the showers and the lockers. This time, it was her turn to drip all over the floor. “How’s Alice getting on?” she asked. She was her ‘old’ nursery teacher. She’d made it into a piece of my writing², the one about why I wasn’t taking my daughter to university. As my eyes had filled up with tears, she’d put her hand on my arm and told me to figure out what was worrying me most about my child living in another country and do something about it. We’d discussed online Tesco grocery deliveries. “You’re not going to believe this,” I said. “Alice is back home”. I waited, wondered what she would say, whether she’d see her exit from Edinburgh as a failure. She had a no-nonsense reputation, an ability to get things progressed despite systemic breakdowns within the Education Authority, her return of the bottle of Buckfast that had landed in the playground, back over the peace line, along with a warning about never throwing drinks again, is the stuff of legends. She looked me straight in the eye. I felt the tears start again. “I’m so proud of her,” she said. A puddle was forming on the tiles as she reached for her handbag. “Give her this,” she said. She pressed a £20 note into my palm. “Tell her I’m proud of her. Tell her Mrs D is proud of her”. And I did and I watched the amazement cross Alice’s face, the same Alice who was once just a shy, anxious little girl who only ever wanted her teacher to be proud of her, who wanted her mummy and daddy to be proud of her. All of us were proud of her now.

At the end of October, we returned to Edinburgh. A long weekend in Berlin had been planned around Alice’s Scottish timetable. We’d put measures in place to push her through, to break up her first semester. We’d collect her from her halls. We’d fly out from there together to look at checkpoints and walls and eat currywurst. But, life never turns out as expected, it unfolds in its own strange way and we have to rise up to meet it. In the end, we all travelled from Belfast together, filled our unnecessary stop-over with nothing particularly memorable. When we left Alice in Starbucks to catch up with the one friend she’d made during her brief stay there, we walked from Princes Street towards Leith. There is a photo of me standing outside her accommodation, a place that had become synonymous with despair. It felt like closure for us as parents. “I’m proud of you and Russell too,” Mrs D had said. “You gave her a safe place to come home to”. We wandered the Royal Mile, searched for steps down to the Grassmarket. “Alice should know where they are,” her sister said. “She lived here for a week”. “My Apple Watch recorded it as a short break,” said Alice. “I’m proud of you Alice,” I said, “for coming home, for coming back”.   

And really, our role as parents is not just to say “I love you” because that’s par for the course. That’s the easy bit. It’s to say, “I’m proud of you”, never for how well they do but for who they have become. Too often, death takes away the chance to say that in relationships, and we can wonder where the emptiness came from. Every perfectionist, every attention-seeker, every adult riddled with self-doubt, was once a child who never believed that anyone was proud of them. When we sit in an audience and listen to our child’s squeaky violin miss the notes, when we stand on the sidelines and watch the goals never scored and the ones that go in past them, when we see them fall over in a sack and never reach the finish line, when the job or the marriage or the future doesn’t work out for them, it will all be ok as long as they continue to know we are still rooting for them, believing in them and proud of who they are.   

It’s now eighteen months since I started the initial process to leave my job. It was hard to go against the traditional trajectory expected of me - education, employment, retirement. My career break became the unmentionable, the elephant in the room, the body buried in the garden. My parents seemed anything but proud. They couldn’t understand why I would do all those degrees to just throw it all away. “What about your pension?” my mother asked, “are you paying AVCs?” When I eventually resigned, I had no idea how to break this most terrible of news. I may not have revealed my deep, dark secret for a while. One day, I brought them copies of the Presbyterian Herald. There was a picture of me, words I had written. I was in print. It was a start. My dad began to round up all the Presbyterians he knew. “Ian’s an elder,” he said, “I think Jim might go to church”. He rang a couple of them to tell them. My mum took photocopies. I wondered if they were proud of me yet.  

Inside each one of us is just a little girl or a little boy who wants someone to be proud of us. Watch the amazement cross their face, see them light up, find that spring in their step, believe in themselves again. Tell someone “I’m proud of you” today³.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultra (external link)

2. https://medium.com/@dj-sloan/why-i-am-not-taking-my-daughter-to-university-71a6913425a4 (external link)

3. And if you tell someone, will you let me know?