The Demise of the Pristine, New Fridge - A Moral Tale

Once upon a time there was a woman who owned a fairly bog standard fridge.  Starting its life with the woman as a great bargain on eBay, it served its purpose, keeping the family’s meat, fruit, vegetables and yoghurt wonderfully cold.  The woman, however, was somewhat neglectful of her fridge.  Despite all her best intentions and protestations to the contrary, she did not keep her fridge in order as she should.  From time to time she could be seen by the passing village postman, lunging across the kitchen from fridge to bin, hurling something dripping and unidentifiable into its murky depths.

One day, returning from a camping trip, the woman discovered that the fridge had had an identity crisis, deciding, instead to have a go at being a warming drawer.  Enough was enough and the woman excitedly ordered a new fridge, which arrived the next day in all its shiny glory.

The woman boasted about her new fridge far and wide.  She waxed long about the built in water-dispenser, sent photographs to long-suffering colleagues and the fridge even made it into a sermon at church about the challenges of not coveting thy neighbour’s new, electrical appliances.  So shiny was the fridge that never, vowed the woman, would she ever allow it to house a dripping cucumber or a furry packet of mushrooms.

My actual fridge!

Good intentions never last, of course and there came a week where one child was ill and one had two swimming galas and a school trip.  The housework mounted and the school work was piling up.  The online food shop was thrown haphazardly into the pristine, still-fairly new looking fridge. At last, when nothing more could be rammed into the salad drawers, the woman investigated with trepidation. She sighed as she lunged, once more for the bin with a dripping cucumber and raised her eyebrows as she untangled a potato tuber from around a mouldy satsuma. 

NOT an actual example of a mouldy carrot from my fridge, though it could well be!

But then she began to smile and the smile gave way to a chuckle, for, instead of berating herself for her incompetence and hopelessness, the woman realised she was free.  It was a light-bulb moment, a veritable epiphany. In that moment, she was free of the unrealistic standards and expectations that were binding her.  The cucumbers could drip and the potatoes could grow, but the best thing was – she could clear it all up and start again.  It wasn’t the end.  It wasn’t an unmitigated disaster – just the messy reality of ordinary life taking over perfectly good but undeniably unrealistic expectations.

THE END

This story is, of course, entirely fictional and in no way representative of anyone living or dead ahem and especially NOT me, but I hope, in making you chuckle, it makes a point to you about our intentions and resolutions, in life and as writers.  Perhaps, as we hit the mid-way point of a month that always feels as if it has 95 more days than any other month, some of us are already feeling a bit down on ourselves that any resolutions we made as the digits switched to a new year have already fallen by the wayside.  I suppose I want to offer my encouragement that it happens, but it is not the end, it is not a disaster.  Keep going, keep picking them back up, keep forgiving yourself and keep starting again.

As I’ve pondered this post I’ve set myself what I am going to call ‘soft targets’ for this year – not tick-off-able or measurable particularly, but things I can work on, with God’s help, to develop as a writer and a human being this year. Perhaps some might resonate with you too.

1. Push myself to be “ten percent braver,” (a popular Twitter hashtag) than last year, saying yes to more things that are slightly outside of my comfort zone.

2. Be kinder to myself, in life and in writing, when I don’t feel as if I am measuring up to my own (probably unrealistic) expectations.

3. Let go of the need for perfection and write something – anything – even if it is something my future self might laugh at / cringe at / want to burn. Within some of those scribblings will be gems of great worth.

4. Genuinely celebrate the success of others and actively promote them, cutting jealousy off at its bitter root.  We are, after all, co-workers, sending the same, crucial message out into the world.

5. Give myself time to contemplate the bigger picture and ponder where I would like to take my writing in the future, rather than bouncing from one deadline to another.

In a Facebook post at the end of 2019, Abby King put it better than I ever could so I will leave the last words with her:

“The end of a year, especially the end of a decade, seems like it's supposed to bring some kind of closure. We're meant to leave things behind as we step into what's new. But sometimes it doesn't feel like much has been concluded. The past year has been messy, painful, beautiful, uncomfortable, encouraging, awful and joyful, all mixed up together, much like the next year will be, I suspect. I don't have long list of huge achievements and major life changes to tell you about. I'm mostly just glad to be here, glad to know there are people who love me and thankful that God is always with us.”

I pray that we will all know this truth, wherever our lives and our writing take us in 2020.  Happy New Year, all!

Georgie Tennant is a secondary school English teacher in a Norfolk Comprehensive.  She is married, with two sons, aged 11 and 9 who keep her exceptionally busy. She writes for the ACW ‘Christian Writer’ magazine occasionally, and is a contributor to the ACW-Published ‘New Life: Reflections for Lent,’ and ‘Merry Christmas, Everyone: A festive feast of stories, poems and reflections.’ She writes the ‘Thought for the Week’ for the local newspaper from time to time and also muses about life and loss on her blog: www.somepoemsbygeorgie.blogspot.co.uk