Categories: uncategorized
Date: 04 February 2012 11:41:52
Today marks my return, I hope, to more regular blogging after the enforced block of "real life". In the last week I have turned 40, been visited by Ofsted and had my status as a "good" teacher reinforced and have had my viva - "medium/ majorish" amendments required is prob the best description. What all this actually means in terms of "achievement" hit me at 2am this morning when I woke up and rather than panicing felt myself thinking, "it's all over for the moment, I've done it and I'm still sane".
The viva thing is wierd because I found it affirming in a way which I hadn't expected. There are things which need to be amended - the bits that I myself wasn't comfortable about on the whole, but there was positive feedback and when during the whole episode I shared my dream about writing the book with half for single parents and half for church leaders I wasn't laughed at or patronised I was seriously, but quietly encouraged that at some point I should go for it. I am not an academic and as regular readers will know I don't want to be; I'm an interpretter - in some ways that is why achieving the M Litt is more comfortable for me than having, in the end, going for the PhD would have been.
Sitting in the pub afterwards, for the first time, I think I actually recognised what the whole Durham experience has done for me. It has turned me into somebody who is, I think, happy in her own skin now. It has also put me in the position where I am ready to choose the labels I want to apply to myself - rather than having them forced upon me or taken from me by others. Now I know there is a whole argument for not having labels but for me they are useful as they help me identify what I do and don't want to be identified by. At the end of this part of the journey I know I am a woman, who is an progressive evangelical Christian and who happens to be gay; a single parent and various other stuff. I also recognise that because of who I am finding the Methodist church has been vital, as I said the other day. It has enabled me to be in a place where it is ok to be me, but the academic study has also done that. Part of the whole thesis was about saying that the experience of "the single parent" within the church environment is as important and relevant as that of single people and married people with children). Now before anybody starts I know single people are undervalued too, but I think there is an invisibility of single parents which occurs because they are neither fish nor fowl being single people with children and so not facing some problems single people face, but also experiencing other problems precisely because they are single.
I could go on but I am stopping here for today and I think over the coming weeks more coherent posts will start to emerge again, and hopefully ones which are far less me centred.