we're all making our own sense of things
‘Mum can you go in your study while our friends are here?’
‘Sure.’ I put lightness in my voice, because…well, because of course. He’s nearly eight years old.
Child runs away, but after a few steps stops.
Turns.
Speaks.
‘But maybe don’t close the door.’
Child turns and runs again, joins brother in never-ending soccer game.
‘Mum! Guess what? Tomorrow, I’m getting a recorder! And we get to bring it home.’
And I say, ‘That’s great.’
Because that’s what mums must say when their children are young and filled with the joy of it all even if said mums are, all the while, remembering their own mother, teaching music in a primary school, and pouring an extra brandy (and sometimes four), on recorder afternoons.
So here’s something I did not know.
Nine year olds – even the ones who were even-keeled eight-year-olds – are extraordinarily emotional human beans.
So, right now, I am sitting here, determined not to respond to the sound of a ball banging against a bedroom door, a sound which is being made by a person equally determined that I will.
He says: ‘Mum, ever since you’ve got that computer you’ve just been living on it.’
I reply: ‘I’m trying to get my book written, I need to work really hard on it, otherwise I will never finish it.’
He asks: ‘What’s this one about?’
I tell him: ‘It’s a memoir…’
He interrupts: ‘Oh, so it’s like your memories?’
I say: ‘Sort of.’
He is perceptive: ‘So it’s about Denis, right?’
I say: ‘Yes, and some other people.’
Eagerly: ‘Me? Am I in it?’
Thinking quickly about how I’m going to answer it: ‘Well, I don’t want to write too much about you and your brother…’
Interrupting (again): ‘Because we’re not memories, right?’
Is it just me, or do the feet of a nine year old smell out of all proportion to their size?
So here’s the lads sketching in a church. I gave them books through which I, of course, wanted to encourage the obsessive transcription of every moment of every day.
Just this morning a friend and I were having coffee and reflecting that even with still-young children you look around and think, ‘But that’s not what I wanted to teach you…I haven’t taught you the things you need to know yet…don’t be nine, we haven’t finished with eight’.
But if you leave the space, you get your compensations, don’t you? It never occurred to me that they might like sketching.
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| From spain |
And here’s the lads, map in hand, finding the way to our hotel in Burgos. Moments to make your heart sing indeed.
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| From spain |
And you can never have enough Mortadelo y Filemon. A worthy use of your allowance even if you can’t understand a word of it.
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| From spain |
Also, you see that chair in the window. At the end of the day (quite late in mid-summer, I think getting close to eleven o’clock), you can sit in that chair with a glass of Spanish red and watch the colours change over the sea.
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| From spain |
Wettest July since 1888 according to last night’s weather presenter.
I must say, coming from Australia’s increasingly frightening drought, I find being in this rain…I’m not sure of the word exactly…not ‘reassuring’ not ‘comforting’ not ‘a relief’. But it’s certainly a physical and emotional response of some kind. Not that you can just swap the water from one side to the other. But just…I don’t know, I’ll think on it and see if I can explain it later on.
I got a haircut yesterday. First one since March, and a satisfyingly lovely one it is too. I’m thinking of going and buying a hairdryer so that I can keep it looking lovely. A hairdryer and one of those little round brushes.
After the haircut we went to the Rubbings Museum, then we walked home, my boys took photos of me:
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| From july2009 |
then it rained on us. We watched Spongebob Squarepants which is still weird.
In Edinburgh at the moment, there’s a million festivals on all at the same time. I was reading through the brochure for the Festival of Politics and saw the session “Annie Lennox and the SING campaign”. I am going to that for sure. She was one of those women that the teenage me adored. No, adored isn’t right. But she made me feel like you could do things. That there were things to be done. I remember one Saturday afternoon, watching a music show and there was Sisters are Doing it for Themselves.
My Mum, who would have been younger than what I am now, watched it with me. I remember that she stopped whatever it was she was doing and stood in front of the television and watched it. And she said something like, ‘They are, you know.’
I don’t know how much of my precious prepaid gigabyte I just used watching this, but more than twenty years of Saturday afternoons later, it was worth it:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Pu0Fn1oRN4&hl=en&fs=1&]
I was doing the dishes and listening to a radio programme about Muriel Spark and her new biography.
I had forgotten that Muriel Spark’s son lived with her parents. The biographer explained this by saying something along the lines of, ‘She couldn’t do the kind of writing she wanted to do and look after him’.
And that was interesting, because just that morning I’d been writing in my diary about the conflict between the two things I’m trying to combine – firstly, putting on a show; and secondly, showing my boys some of the world.
The conflict between being a writer and being a mum.
I don’t want this to be a conflict. In fact, one of the appeals of coming to Edinburgh was the opportunity to immerse my boys in my ‘work’. (For now, let’s leave aside definitions of work, and whether or not this counts towards my ‘career’ and whether or not you have to make a living from it in order for it to count as work). When I was deciding whether or not coming to Edinburgh was a good use of some very precious funds, I looked on it as a chance – probably a once-in-a-lifetime chance – to show my boys that life can be filled with all sorts of bits and pieces and in all sorts of different ways (though at the same time, reminding them – constantly – how bloody lucky they are – again, another post for another day).
My wish to show them this side of me (my ‘work’) is probably closely related to my current obsession with validating the contribution that I make to my relationship and to my family. Which is fuelled by all sorts of things. Ego; and becoming an orphan; and turning 40; and waking up and finding myself an expat wife; and having no career to speak of; oh, and being middle class enough to have the luxury of obsessing over such things.
But I do obsess over it, and that obsession has been exacerbateted by our move to Abu Dhabi where the mister and I have roles that are even more gender-defined than they were at home. I worry at the ‘example’ I set my children. I worry (and the mister does too) that our children see – that they live – such a gender-specific life where the mister goes out to work and I pick the kids up from school.
But it’s funny, because if we hadn’t moved to Abu Dhabi, I never would have come and put on my own show. I would have looked at Edinburgh, from Adelaide, and thought, ‘How could I do that with children? Just how?’
Like I said a few posts ago, when I did start thinking about doing this, I really had no idea how I was going to make it work, bringing the lads along. But like I also said, bringing them here was no harder than any other plan for being away from Abu Dhabi. And in the end it worked out okay, because the mister can get a few weeks off and he’ll be here soon and he won’t be missing his connecting flight (I’ve forgiven him for it, I really have).
But my goodness it’s up and down, polishing a script and rehearsing and looking after little boys who, even when they’re quiet, are pretty loud. Yesterday morning, the two things that I’m trying to be right now – a writer and a mother – were completely incompatible.
I needed, more than I needed anything else, to work through my script. To look at it word by word, to reassure myself it was finished, to immerse myself in it just a little bit more (I’m sure that sounds wanky, and I do apologise for that). To get this work done I woke up early, kept telling my children to ‘put the television back on’ and let them ladle sugar on their weetbix.
Perhaps they got wind of my urgency, because they co-operated by burrowing themselves away in cubbies made of curtains, playing three games of Cluedo without an argument (two pounds fifty at the oxfam shop that game cost and all that was missing was instructions), reading, working in their sketchbooks and munching their way through a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut paste and several punnets of berries.
The writer in me was almost happy. The work had to be done, and I love my script, I just love it, and working on it always makes me feel good.
But at the same time, the mother in me couldn’t help thinking that my boys weren’t doing anything that they couldn’t be doing at home. And not only that, but here they were, cooped up in one small room, with no yard for soccer or cricket and nowhere for mixing mud potions with added stones. This isn’t broadening their horizons, it’s limiting them.
I don’t want to do everything. I just want to do what I do do well.
Anyhoo, I’d made a bargain with myself (and written in my diary, so I couldn’t back out), that I would find us a routine where I spend the morning working and in the afternoons, we go exploring.
So I got a few hours done, then off we went for a run in Holyrood Park and a fossick through Our Dynamic Earth. It was brilliant. Wonderful. And when, after carefully reading all of the information and pressing all of the interactive buttons, my little boy said, ‘Yes, but who is going to tell us where the first dinosaur came from’, I would not have been anywhere else in the world. And then we ran home around – but not up – Arthur’s Seat and my goodneess me, they are thistles over there, and the crag is gorgeous and that grass really does wave in the wind and now our umbrellas have blown inside out, and how lucky are we to be seeing all this?
So I don’t know. What’s the answer?
Because one moment, those two things, being a writer and being a mother are completely incompatible. And the next, they are a perfect fit.
Last Christmas Day, by which I mean the one before the one we had the other day, while the mister was in emergency getting my grandfather’s broken ribs seen to, I dished up the home made tartufo.
My dad peered into the mister’s mother’s bowl and said, What’s that? He was pointing at a Haigh’s truffle. Cupofcino or shiraz, I can no longer be sure which. The truffle was on the side, because the day before the day before the Christmas before the one we’ve just had, tartufo still seemed like a good idea, but an idea for which I did not quite have time. So I made the ice cream and decided to serve it in scoops rather than balls, and with truffle on the side, instead of in the middle.
An excellent plan which resulted in a mighty fine dessert. Except…
My dad, removing his face from the mister’s mother’s bowl said, ‘Where’s mine?’
‘I didn’t give you one,’ said I.
‘Why not?’
At times like this, people will know when you are not telling the truth, and so I did not even try to lie.
‘I thought it was wasted on your tongue, dulled as it is by this savage chemotherapy you’ve been enduring, but nonetheless cooked Christmas lunch through.’
‘And you also thought that I wouldn’t notice that I didn’t get one?’
The mister’s mother was shocked. But my Dad and I, thinking of my mother who was once caught hiding mandarins from her own children, laughed until our tummies hurt.
And when we got into bed that night I said to the mister, It’s going to be a hard year. And so it has. Topped off with a fairly ordinary couple of weeks I have to say.
But it was pretty ace being tapped excitedly on the arm at 6.45 and woken with the words ‘mum, mum, he came, can we open one yet, please can we…mum, mum, it’s light sabres…’. And because I’m a bit ambivalent to this whole Santa Claus thing, the best presents were clearly labelled ‘Love from Mum and Dad’. mp3 players (I know, kids these days) pre-loaded with a bunch of songs I thought they might like.
Of course, it has introduced a whole new argument to our family life. ‘Youngest Boy, I know you totally love Wipeout, but you have to have the volume at fifteen or less’. But what’s life without family arguments?
I’d better go. If the mister gets home and finds me blogging, I’m in fifteen kinds of trouble. There’s a lot to do round here.,
