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Grey Rebellion

4th November 2018 · Leave a Comment

One thing I notice about being a writer is that ideas which cross my mind no longer just drift through, they stay, mulch in like compost, and in time become a blog post or an essay or a concept in my book. This is good, in essence, because I’ve always been a thinker, I consider it an extrapolation. The concepts vary from lofty and high brow, to everyday and banal, and this one falls somewhere between the two.

Recently, my friend Amanda said she was going to stop colouring her hair in favour of natural grey. She ‘said’ this; what I really mean is she posted it on I nstagram stories and as I scrolled through one day, in amongst a million other things, I initially didn’t think too much of it. Then my mum – who also follows Amanda – mentioned it to me. I went back over the story again, and thought: yes, going grey, there’s actually a thing called ‘Gronde’ (grey-blonde), and who knew? I googled ‘going grey’ and found out this is a huge preoccupation with women my age, and older.

I have been dying my hair since my twenties, owing to it being a mid-brown, mousy colour. I longed for those Rachel-esque streaks in the nineties. I once went a vivid, plum red, a colour that would never occur naturally. My hair was bleached platinum blonde right after university, at a hairdresser appointment where I didn’t pay attention to what the stylist was proposing. In more recent times, I’ve inadvertently succumbed to the mucky, khaki hair that happens when you over do it, and try to edge your way back to something more befitting your skin tone.

Not long after I was thirty, I started noticing grey hairs. One or two; four or five, no more than fifteen, thirty maybe? One hundred. A whole crop. Hair colouring turned from an idle dalliance to something I did to simply preserve the status quo. This continued until now, where I adhere to a regular five-weekly trip to the salon for a root cover up, and then endure a couple of days of itching scalp, two to three delightful weeks of no roots, before needing the process to start again. There is an inconsistency in the results, after all, I am pursuing what is a chemical treatment. Maybe the colour is too light or too dark, or afterwards has lightened in the sun, until I become an unenviable brassy blonde. It’s never a static, reliable outcome. I look around; everyone looks the same. All of my contemporaries have coloured hair, bar a rare few who are true brunettes, and who seemed not be greying at the rate I am. In conversation with a friend, we tried to think of one peer amongst the school mothers who had never dyed her grey hair, who was ‘naturally’ grey. We could find none. I accept these may be the circles I mix in. Women of a certain type (my type?) do not take to the signifiers of ageing readily. They cavort with artificial enhancers, hair dye being the least of it.

But the fact remains, could I be so bold as to state that no one seems to want to be grey haired? Grey hair meant old, and old meant a whole raft of other stereotypes that I couldn’t begin to unpick, they are so ingrained in our collective consciousness. It was as if to me, naturally grey hair was the flag denoting having reached a point of no return. The point after which everything important, current and vital about me would leach away. Of course I can see that this is irrational. But nevertheless…the feeling persisted.

Men go grey – my husband is going grey – and I don’t think he and I have ever even acknowledged it. The distinguished salt and pepper at the temples is accepted with an entirely different judgement to when a woman has not coloured her roots. Grey roots on a woman – especially against dark, contrasting hair – can be considered shocking, and not in an outlandish, cool way, but in a deep-seated ‘she’s let herself go’ way. It is a crowning manifestation of age (literally) that can’t be downplayed or ignored.

Is this another unspoken principle which women are required to observe, but never agreed to? An example of inequality to endure?

I start to look for positive grey hair stories, and find they abound. There are whole rafts of women who have abandoned the grey #greyhairdontcare, and the liberation they gain from a dyeing regime that is punishing, expensive and if I am honest, fairly soul-destroying heartens me. What used to be your natural state, your take-it-for-granted-hair, is something that can only be obtained with diligence, time, effort and money. That is how Cindy Crawford, aged 52 still has her infamous, lustrous chestnut mane. I no longer have a chestnut mane. Who are we kidding? The women who live in the squares of my Instagram feed are well in to their fifties, they are women I grew up with. I think we can safely assume they see a colourist most weeks.

With all of this churning away in my mind, I went to the hairdresser and in an act that I can only describe as insurgency, I told her not to colour my roots. We chose a different approach, one which might – let’s see – mean I can have less dye and more me. I endured all over ash blonde highlights, and in the moment of reveal in front of the mirror I was virtually palpitating. Seeing my grey blonde hair with exposed roots (!) caused a physical panic, a moment of fear and exposure I hadn’t anticipated. Closely followed by relief. I messaged Amanda. Solidarity sister!

It’s hardly a true revolutionary act, and I might find in a few months I revert to my old ways. But in the meantime, it’s a subtle grey-toned experiment in rebellion.

Image of the late Mimi Weddell (aged 90 in this photo).

Rage

26th October 2018 · Leave a Comment

During a discussion (although he called it a debate) about Brexit, my Dad and I skirted around the edges of rage. I felt it well up in me and tried to swallow it down, as if it were gristle, unable to spit it out and leave it on the side of my plate. The gap of generational divide exposed. My family have never been particularly argumentative but instead specialise in a kind of quiet respect that could, at a push, be described as passive.

I wondered afterwards if I am too outspoken. I wonder how it comes across when I write here, how I feature here in these posts, and whether it is a supplicated version, mindful of the tremors that can be caused by placing one’s opinions on the internet. The compulsion to write is balanced with a fear of sharing too much, or of misjudging what is appropriate. I am ‘woke’, in the urban dictionary definition of the word, a new concept which I explained to a mother friend recently. But meanwhile, I don’t like to disagree with people, I don’t want to be a person who forces their views on others. I’d rather state my views and see if anyone agrees. Live and let live.

I finished Deborah Levy’s book ‘Things I Did Not Want to Know‘. It’s a book which captures the inner monologue of your forties. A backward glance to childhood and teenage hood, to growing up in the 1970’s, at a time when mothers and fathers aren’t like they are now. She describes the strange hinterland of midlife; of crying (or wanting to) on escalators, not knowing why. From that post-book void, I ploughed in with another, and listened to Lily Allen’s ‘My Thoughts Exactly‘ which lays her childhood bare and tells of the heartbreaking lack of attention she experienced. It seemed sacrilegious for her to expose her parents in this way, when assessing them by today’s standards, but as she alludes to in the narrative, she presents the facts. Whatever my feelings, the book is exceptional. The judgement is ours, as readers. Her honesty blew my mind. I think to myself; her parents did not see it as their role to form and nurture the humans they made.

Levy notes in her book that women mustn’t write in rage, because rage will discolour meaning. We must write in calm, or else we won’t be taken seriously. But what do we do with the rage in the meantime? I get a flashback to passing a country house retreat in Devon where ‘Women’s Screaming Therapy’ was advertised on an innocuous roadside sign. Screaming seems futile and more often than not, any rage I feel dampens down eventually and I continue on without it. Women are intrepid. Acceptance is key; rage is not. Rage comes from a place that does not move forward, but is stuck in an unending cycle of red.

The generational divide remains a fascination to me, though, and I excuse all manner of behaviours from the past because that’s just how society was then. I find myself referring to this in conversations with my husband, my Mum, my friends, to those who can see that society has lumbered along since, lets say, Y2K, and there has been a seismic shift. Do you reminder Y2K?! The end of the world. Binary code and computers without instructions. It didn’t amount to much. Instead, there have been a series of lesser known quakes taking place under my feet. The tectonic plates of family, work, marriage and parenthood have all formed new continents.

My husband calls. The dog sits at my feet. Waiting.

I think of the rage of other women. Ones I know and ones I am only acquaintances with. Rage about failed marriages, divorce and having children who rebel. Rage at promises broken. Rage at not having enough money or not having the lifestyle she might have envisaged for herself. Rage at the deal she might have made with herself to accept that which is unacceptable. Is this rage about loss? I think of those times when I’ve seen women lose their shit on Facebook, late at night, after they’ve had their wine. It’s that witching hour, when women email unsuspecting recipients and spill their vitriol; at the teacher, the volunteer sport coach, the retail outlet where she bought something that wasn’t to her expectations, and lambast the page, as unfair and unnecessary as a hurricane. I do it myself when everything gets too much, like this week, in the supermarket, where the plastic that everything was wrapped in tipped my balance and I became one of those awful huffy, shouty women whose children look at the ground and are embarrassed by. This particular kind of rage – the middle aged kind- seems to come from a deep source which is more often than not covered up. No one likes an angry middle aged woman. Younger women might have more leniency in this regard, but beyond the age of forty, forget it!

This is what Levy alludes to in her book. The secret inside which stokes the flames. So the irony is that we read about mindfulness, meditation, self care, taking a nightly bath and eating vegetables and trying so damn hard to quell the feelings. As if calm is the panacea to everything that life throws, from plastic, to politics, to wrinkles, to parenthood and onwards. Take a deep breath. But is it?

Quit your job. You’ll be fine.*

10th October 2018 · Leave a Comment

I have a cold. This means a self-imposed quarantine of long, quiet days, spent waiting for recovery. The kind of sick day that used to be alluring, when I was working, or before I had children. Now, it means solitude, until the collection of my children after school, then the normalcy of weekday life reverts in the evening hours, but with congestion, a headache, aches and sniffles.

I am left with my thoughts. When unwell, it’s hard to imagine being well again, which sounds ridiculous but is true. My body under viral attack, I trace back to when I last felt this way as if I can identify the rogue bug and eradicate the possibility of repeat. It was last winter; skiing, a dormant French hotel room. My efforts to stay healthy border on obsessive, I have little patience for this. My life is predicated on my being well; the cogs don’t turn unless the engine is running. My children look at me reproachfully when there’s no bread in the house.

I watch too much Netflix – end to end ‘Killing Eve’, that pink dress! – and documentaries about the environment. I feel so fretful about the environment I have to check myself. I am being brainwashed by the scaremongers. But the more knowledge I have, the worse it gets. It seems, in this instance, that the scare mongers might be right. I’ll tell you what. When global temperatures rise by 2 degrees, and the ice caps melt, and the planet is too hot to even go outside, I’ll see you on that last piece of remaining, un-flooded land, and we can watch the plastic containers float by, and wonder whether it was worth it. It’s a dog’s dinner, or, as my friend messaged me last week: ‘we are fucked’.

In a flurry of luck, in my sickened state, I got Glastonbury tickets on Sunday. I’m almost ashamed to admit this because they are so desirable, and so hard to come by, especially this year, that I remain incredulous. Early morning; multiple devices, an incentivised teenage son sitting next to me, rapid refresh, mouse clicking, abject frustration as the connection drops, we get booted out. The registration page, the payment page, the confirmation page, all flash up in a striptease, pressing forward, click, click, click. A bizarre technological dance which abruptly ends with ‘BOOKING COMPLETE’ and I feel adrenalin like I’ve scaled a mountain. Surfed a wave. Done something other than sat in my pyjamas. I wonder if I want them so much simply because they’re hard to get? Then I remember how much I love Glastonbury and how utterly freeing it is to stand in a field and experience music so loud it makes your organs vibrate, and to do it with hundreds of thousands of other humans.

I start listening to the audiobook of Deborah Levy’s ‘Things I Don’t Want to Know’ and find it cripplingly, awe-inspiringly good. It’s the kind of book I want to write. This has a dual effect. Half inspiring, half terrifying. Deborah’s written it already. Deborah can write the innards of my mind, as if un-spinning a knot of wool. I’m only a smidgen in, and I know I will love it already. And hate that its been done. This is how it goes with writing. No longer do I have thoughts and allow them to pass through. Now my thoughts have become a thing I must capture, I must write down, I must turn into something that is work. Quit your job. You’ll be fine.

I observe the shit show of American politics playing out on the news and feel the bile of conflict. Everything feels off. Theres’s conflict with the process, conflict with society, conflict with the commentary. I read a lot, and liberalism seems to pervade my newsfeed as I realise I have concocted a partisan following in support of feminism and an egalitarian sensibility. I read a lot of women writers who suggest in their language that all men who are accused of sexual misbehaviour are guilty, because, well, because…men. This troubles me, and I wonder whether any of those women have teenage sons who are about to navigate the treacherous water of gender politics in coming years.

I watch old family videos, trying to locate one of my daughter, aged one, laughing, giggling uncontrollably, the baby girl she was. The DVD is no longer compatible with our machine, and I wonder how I can regather those images. Later DVDs obligingly play, leaving me questioning why the one from 2002 is considered defunct? What happened in 2002? In 2003 I look young, and brown-haired, and really, really slim, despite doing zero exercise at that time.

I feel viral, weighed down, and shuffle around my house wearing a weird, old, dowdy Alpaca cardigan that reaches my knees. The postman comes. I discard the junk mail envisaging land fill; rotting catalogues for things I never wanted. I make mushrooms on toast (I went shopping) as a comfort food, like my mum used to make me, sautéed in butter, with garlic, and scattered with chopped parsley.

I message my writing group and they put me straight; ‘just write’ they say. We console each other. The virus is making me jaded. I turn to the blog because it’s the least demanding way to write. Type. Preview. Publish! Oh so easy! So here it is.

*Craig Ward typographer.

‘People who love to eat are always the best people’*

5th October 2018 · 1 Comment

I was infamous amongst my university housemates because I resolutely did not cook. I arrived with a bag of tangerines and some cheese, and proceeded to live off that until my friend Emma took pity on me and shared her sweet and sour stir fry. This continued throughout my student years, until I lived with my future husband, who then took over the mantle of cooking. He was – and is – a gifted cook, and won his way to my heart with, amongst other things, food. We married and he cooked, whilst my own repertoire was limited to pasta. This worked fine for the years we cohabited in early marriage, and until we had children, at which point (coincidentally?!) his job meant he had to work away some of the time, and my job (mother) meant I had to prepare food for my babies. Even then, I didn’t really cook, and was reluctant to do so. This seemed entirely reasonable to me and was a product of my generation, right? Just because I was the woman, why should I be the one to prepare our food? I was proud of my inability, because deep down I thought cooking represented some vestige of the past. I didn’t cook because dammit, I didn’t have to. I’d married a man who did it for me. It seemed the ultimate in gender progression. Cooking was the same category as tidy cupboards or keeping orderly admin. Dull. Dated.

What I failed to appreciate was that my own lack of skill rendered me disadvantaged as our family grew. I could not feed my children home cooked food. I could not cater a dinner party. When I maintained my career, I made cooking out to be one of life’s pastimes that I was way too busy to participate in. But in time, as my career dwindled, and my children grew up, them having a mother who couldn’t cook became somewhat unhelpful. Plus…I love food.

So I learned to cook, as chronicled here and I now do so religiously, stopping in the past few weeks to photograph the daily offering (I’ll share the results on instagram). This is, in part, as a testimony of my own cooking capability (I am proud of how far I’ve come; I make no bones), but also in readiness to teach my daughter to cook, for a time in future when she will not have me doing it for her. The empty nest over the horizon makes mothers do all sorts of odd things; photographing food for recipes, walking through her empty bedroom when she is at school, and feeling heavy-hearted about it, being incredulous on the prospect that soon she will be driving.

I realised, like so many realisations since I turned forty, that cooking is one of life’s pleasures, and being able to cook is a gift. Cooking for friends or family is like giving yourself, your time, your goodness, to a process that nurtures. The same applies to baking, which I have entirely not mastered, but which I see has the same profound effect. I read the book ‘Heartburn’ by Nora Ephron recently, a story peppered with recipes, as it tells a tale of a cook whose marriage falls apart. The meaning she instils in food, and its significance to events in our lives, is not lost on me. My best memories are from around tables. My mother’s food is the route to all solace and contentment. My recollection of my Danish Mormor’s gooseberry tart, or her ‘frikadelle’ and gravy remains the sweetest reverie. Her gravy, its unlikely components passed down like folklore in our family (milk, and tomato ketchup) sums up how the women in my family behave. There’s a degree of nonchalance, hopefully some style, and old-fashioned, understated know-how. I see now that for years I didn’t understand the relevance of these distinctions.

In short, knowing how to cook has made me wise, not just about how food behaves when its prepared and heated, but also about feeding my own moods. Of knowing my own mind. And, I suppose, crucially, of escaping my thoughts at the end of a day. Cooking enables an emptying out of the mind. I’m an advocate of vegetables because they don’t misbehave, they rarely poison people – when they’ve gone off, you can tell, – they’re healthier and cause less waste. This is why most meals in our house are based on vegetables with meat (sometimes) and not the other way around. Again, an example of the ideological u-turn provoked by age. As with most things that I now think, but didn’t used to, I wonder if its simply because I have time? I can almost feel the trolls saying ‘yes, but, we’d all cook if we had your privilege of time,’ and maybe that’s true.

Meanwhile – and I’ll be quiet, and finish with my evangelical tone just as soon as I point this out – I discover companies like this, who are proponents of real produce, homegrown, to be cooked from scratch and without being wrapped in plastic. Bananas in plastic? Courgettes in plastic? Avocados in plastic? Everything swathed in it. Frankly, it’s freaking me out. I suppose this is what they mean by wisdom; just because we’ve always done something a certain way just because we can, doesn’t mean we should. I receive a text from my daughter; ‘what’s for dinner?’

*Julia Childs

Retrospection

28th September 2018 · Leave a Comment

I had such high hopes for September. The summer holidays over, and a stretch of uninterrupted time weaving ahead of me, a lovely long road, with all the possibility of the words I would write, and the things I’d get sorted. Getting sorted is a key preoccupation, getting ahead of every little thing. If I am ahead, then there will be time to write. If there is time to write, maybe I will make some headway with the book. During my Masters degree, when I had submission deadlines, I would take myself off to work and of course it all got done, because it had to. One of the hardest parts of post-academic life is that the deadline is one I have set myself, and it is my self-discipline which dictates the word count. All the best intentions…

My daughter and I are doing university tours. We visit on open days, speak to undergrads and talk about course structures and her suite of worries are entirely different to my suite of worries. The prospect of packing her off to university seems far-off and implausible, but of course, I know it will come. The excitement is counter-balanced with a sense of…not regret…but a bittersweet awareness that her childhood is drawing to a close. Conversely, as my son enters his teens (like a marauding rhino), I recognise the same feelings I used to have about her. The parental readjustment required to at once allow growth, but to also provide boundaries. The conversation on boundaries revisits with alarming regularity, and I find myself thinking: didn’t I explain this last week?

Last week my son was injured playing rugby. All my years of being poker-faced on the sideline came to an unceremonious end as I stood, striken and peering through the rain, waiting to see if he was going to get up from the mangled pile he had been at the bottom of. It’s a curious thing to see your child injured and to see others administer to him, and after some time, when he did get up and was clapped off by the opposition – keen to get on with the game – I felt grateful he was OK. Later, sitting in ‘Accident and Emergency’ in hospital waiting for X-ray results, the feeling persisted. Acute worry, and the love, and the incredulity of how danger and threat can come for you, unannounced. And always in the knowledge that there are other families, other mothers, whose children are more injured or more sick, and a swathe of gratefulness floods over me again, rendering me quiet and vacant. A few days later and we see a surgeon, after the swelling subsided. He’s fractured his cheek bone in three places, and I find myself wondering whether it was my fault that he was raised to love a game that is so fraught with injury. We are a rugby family and I married a rugby player, and I’ve never known any different. To us; the merits of the game far outweigh the risk.

There’s a reluctant medicalisation. Ironically, I had been reading ‘This is Going to Hurt‘ by Adam Kay, the memoir of a junior doctor, which describes the ailing NHS and what it’s like to work within it. I sit opposite medics, on the receiving end, and wonder how long they’ve been on their shift. I have an urge to be kind and polite to them, as we sit and read posters on the wall that say: ‘physical abuse against our staff will not be tolerated’ and I wonder who on earth resorts to physically abusing staff, those whose job it is to help? We observe the other punters and how everyone tries, surreptitiously, to deduce everyone else’s symptoms. It’s not always obvious.

It struck me as we waited (another waiting room, another part of the hospital) that it’s these sorts of events that inform my writing. Writing itself doesn’t happen in a vacuum, but instead is – for me at least – an after-affect of life. It was Anaïs Nin who noted: ‘we write to taste life twice.’ My children, and my observation of them has always been a source; there’s an event, a feeling, the witnessing of a moment. Then there’s my musing afterwards.

Meanwhile, there are breezy, brisk Autumn days. Crane flies cling to the outside of the windows, their spooky legs stretched wide, in contorted squats. Everything seems to be drawing inwards, homewards, ready for the winter months. Maybe I am a winter writer? Maybe the introspection of cold and darkness is what is needed? Or maybe, life just gets in the way of my words? Maybe I make too many excuses? Whichever way, I am good only for dog walks and quietness this week.

A Book in a Book

13th September 2018 · Leave a Comment

I reluctantly enjoy this time of year, despite the fact it heralds a slide into the interminable British winter. The short days and short tempers of my compatriots don’t stop it feeling like a fresh start; out with summer, in with autumn. There are still hints at lushness; green grass, ripe blackberries, crops ready to be harvested. I walk with the dog around my familiar fields, and note the soft crust of the mud, which in a few short months will be frozen. Or worse; dank, sodden and rain-soaked. It was at this time of year that I started my Masters degree three years ago, and I sat amongst other wannabe writers, wearing writerly clothes and clutching writerly notebooks, in which we intended to pen our masterpieces. I felt I blagged my way onto the course, my evidential body of work was this blog, and a stilted short story about a school girl called Cressida, who wanted to rebel against her parents. My tutor, during a Skype application interview, asked me what I did when I got really stuck with my writing. I floundered over my answer to that question, she might have seen through me, she might have known I was a novice, and ‘my writing’ consisted of blog posts that were haphazard at times, and focused too much on clothes shopping rather than searing life commentary. I’d never been really stuck with my writing, because I only ever wrote when I felt like it, about frippery. I knew more about brand development and search engine optimisation than about how to unstick a stuck paragraph.

So when I got the place, we sat, day one, in our studio and went round the table in a sweat-inducing introductory session where we were asked to outline the plot for our novels. There was some invisible peddling, resulting in various iterations of ‘I might focus on…’ and ‘I’ve always wanted to write about…’ and such like. I said I was going to write about a school setting, mothers specifically, in the privileged environment of private education. Prep school. They nodded. Moving on. I had no more a clue of what my plot was then, than I did after a year of the degree! A plot stubbornly alluded me, and any measures I took to secure it, despite intensive workshopping with my peers, left me with a flimsy structure, a plot with the strength of a wet biscuit. I knew it. My tutor knew it. But my writing was good. Thank God, my writing was good. I chased ghosts of plots, and developed questionable preoccupations with themes; women, teenagers, competitive mothers, wealth, marriage, disillusionment, until I felt I could cobble a novel together. And so I did. I wove in concepts like a houseboat location, and set the novel by the water so that when I took daily walks by the shore, I could note tree types and tidal nuances, and that felt like book research. I asked my teenage daughter’s unsuspecting new boyfriend, on his first visit to our house, how he might behave if he were attacked by a swan, all in the name of reasearch. I contacted a swan sanctuary, and became an expert of the monogamy of the birds. And although this lent depth to my work, it did not give me a plot.

I remember it fondly now, with a wry smile, and see that the Masters was the ultimate learning exercise; of course it was. The academics twinned with the realisation that although I’d written a book, there were issues with it. I spent a lot of time then (and now) pondering whether I was good enough. Why couldn’t I find a plot? Who knew plots were so damn elusive? I came to the conclusion I needed a brain the size of a planet to manage one; I had enough trouble keeping track of my real life, let alone the fictional one I might create. Thankfully, I graduated, the first draft of my novel nestled safely and mutely in a folder entitled ‘book’ on my laptop, and thought; ‘well that was that’ all the while weathering the probes of friends and enemies alike. ‘Have you finished your book yet?’ To a writer, that’s the equivalent of a mother asking at a coffee morning why your toddler isn’t walking yet.

My writer friends and I used to talk about when we would become writers. Would it be when we finished a draft? When someone else read it? When we got an agent? When we got published? When a box full of pre-sale proofs arrived? When we saw our book on the shelf in a bookshop, or on Amazon in the best seller list? When we won a literary prize? Oh, the mind boggles. When we overheard two people discussing our book? When our book was the subject of a book club evening? When we started the second book (you’re surely a keeper at this wretched pursuit if you can do it twice)? All of the above? None of the above? The ribbon unspools. I guess the point is there is no defined or accepted time. You learn how to do it, then you reflect, then you write a bit more, then you stop. Then you start. Now, I see that it was all part of the process. Or at least part of my process. There are a million writers following a million different paths, like any creative in any profession, there are highs and lows; you move forward, you move back. It’s a game of snakes and ladders with more snakes than ladders, for sure. But that’s OK. There is time. It’s the season of fresh starts, and mine will be finding the book in the book.

Is Instagrammable a Word?

7th September 2018 · Leave a Comment

Possibly, I’ve spent too much time on Instagram, scrolling like I am demented, looking for something to entertain me. I’ve caught myself, over the course of this summer, (which has been an awesome summer, with some certifiably Instagram-worthy moments to it), becoming immersed in the social media lure. I tell my teenagers to get offline, then I try to do the same, because, y’know, practice what you preach, and I fail. I read articles entitled ‘break up with your phone’ and I wonder: how? My phone is the method through which my day, my kids, my husband, my friends and my work functions. Within my family, it’s how we communicate, plan, evolve, argue, apologise, share. So instrumental in the day to day, the hour to hour, that I wonder: can a mother of teenagers ever really break up with her phone? My mind telescopes back to my own teenagehood, aged 16, evenings spent on the landline, not even cordless, but tethered by the phone cable to the wall, in the room downstairs, by the kitchen. Now, I challenge myself to stop scrolling, but this summer was spent, when not away on holiday, in a kind of maternal half-life of waiting to take on whatever plans had been made, and who needed a lift where. My phone becomes someone to chat to whilst I wait.

Note to self: never, ever chose a rurally located house when you have small children. No matter how charming you think it will be to hang a piñata on the tree in the garden, and have frolicking children gambol beneath. You can’t possibly imagine a time when they are grown up teenagers, and said rural house is not on a bus route, is miles from town, and every step from the front door (virtually) is along a treacherous, blind-cornered, country road.

I drove a lot of miles in July and August.

So, my status quo has been in place for a few years. I am a housewife, who is also a writer. I can cook and clean to a standard beyond Apprentice Level. I am an Advanced Level housewife, and in recent months that has taken centre-stage, and the writer in me has had to wait, hold back, knowing it’s not her time. I get panicked thinking: when will it ever be my time?! I bet Beyonce doesn’t have this problem.

I read my contemporaries as they discuss their own ambition, and I nod in agreement. But where does social media fit in the landscape of ambition? What is Facebook and Instagram to the middle aged woman? Why do some have a natural compulsion to post pictures, like the teens, whereas others will have no part to if? Do we compete to be seen? Is it a way for us to remain ‘current’, to say, ‘I’m still here! Look at me!’ I observe women much younger than I, who are newly married, childless, or building their own empires, and they discuss how they manage their time, and share hints and tips for how to ask for a salary increase, or how to manage a freelance work schedule, or how they arrange their shelves. I find myself thinking, yes, but are there fewer requirements of you at that time in life, other than to be 25, and fabulous, and to have Instagrammable shelves? They perhaps don’t have the self-consciousness my generation has.

I’ve heard it said that a woman’s ambition can make her ugly, especially when it is played out, vicariously, through the lives of her children. This is why competitive school mothers are such a recognisable cohort. This week, an extravaganza of ‘back to school’ pictures flood my feed. I wonder if in years to come, our children will feel duped that their photos were posted without their consent? It’s the equivalent of your mum getting a family album out when your boyfriend visits, but it’s there for the entire world to see, forever. Even with privacy settings.

Whilst scrolling, I happen across the work of a photographer, and she’s selling her photos as prints. I want one instantly, it’s called ‘Breath’. This is the side effect, the other power of Instagram. We direct message (DM, to the uninitiated); it’s done, I’ve bought one, and she’s putting it in the post. I tell her I want the image as it shows, in a glance, what a relationship should look like; see above (and note the air bubbles). What love can look like, if you’re young and free. I want to hang it in my house.

Meanwhile, the pictures persist on Instagram; things to covet, things to consider, concepts to absorb, stories to post.

It’s possible I have become a cliché, or a foregone conclusion. A version of myself I might have lamented, dare I say, ridiculed, in the past? This, especially when I was building my corporate career, and had little time for the contemplation that is now my daily activity. Have I lost my way? In the past, at times where I lost my way, I was unable to see how and where, and it was only with the passing of time that I could recognise what had happened. Now – and by that I mean nowadays, as my status quo has been static for some time, – there is awareness. A personal surety that I can attribute to life experience. This is what it feels like to be the other side of 40, and liking it.

I’ve become one of those women who knows her own mind.

And breathe.

Photograph by Nirrimi, her work found here.

Musings about Palm Trees

22nd August 2018 · Leave a Comment

So that was a trip.

I have returned from two weeks holiday; we went to my beloved Florida, and then my newly beloved St Lucia, in a veritable tour of palm trees and of wearing tropical kaftans. Like swigging a restorative tonic down in one, summer holidays are a salve, a balm, a tincture, and all other lightly medicinal things which make your soul feel better. So many thoughts occurred to me there that I want to share here, but I kept them stored up, not wanting to be inside, at a laptop typing (wishing there was an app that could literally record your thoughts, as you have them? Terrifying, but also oh so useful). So I am left with many impressions I want to record, observations, assertions and such like. Taking time away from home is, for me, as the ‘homemaker’, doubly thought-provoking, as the release from the daily work of caring for others creates space in my mind, and it’s liberating.

I learned that I still love palm trees and spent a good portion of time pondering why they represent such happiness to me. I think, like all things, it’s rooted in childhood, when we used to decamp to Florida for extended periods, as my parents ran a holiday home rental business there. We would touch down and my brother and I would race through the airport, through the air-conditioned casing of the place, vying to reach an external door which would allow us a deep breath of humid, hot air (no matter what time of day or night), with the sound of cicadas, and tiny brown lizards scuttling across concrete, and borders of palm trees. It represented safety to me. And amongst the tumult of divorce, there was contrast to home. A whole other empire.

Now, I see my children do the same thing, but for them, it is a satisfying inhalation of family time, where the rigours of home, work and school are suspended. There’s nothing like it. Even more bittersweet with teenagers as there’s the knowledge that the days of this kind of purist family time, all together, may be numbered. Soon they won’t want to come with us, will they?!

In St Lucia, we made lovely friends and spent the week chatting and drinking, and sunning ourselves. We went to Caribbean restaurants perched in rainforest canopies and ate lobster burgers. We fell asleep to the sound of tree frogs. We spent hours in the sea, sometimes flat like a pond, turquoise crystalline-clear, and saw striped neon fish dart around our legs. We spent an idyllic day on a boat, skimming the coastline of sheer black rock, edged with impossible green-blue. Every scene an instagram-worthy feast. Decisions involved which bikini to wear or which drink to have; Mango (rum) Crush or Piton Beer? But there were also airport delays. Travel sickness and a dodgy cod fillet. We got sunburnt and were profoundly jet lagged for the first few days. We argued over where to eat dinner and during playing cards. I forgot to bring enough books. I lamented the blatant and obscene over-use of plastic packaging in both American and the Caribbean (even more sacrilegious for being a small island, somehow). There was that curious phase after the mid-point where you kinda want to stay, but you also know you have to go home. There was the packing and unpacking and all over again.

The good with the bad. The rough with the smooth. But most of all, family, tradition, indulgence and time were ours. We dissected the pros and the cons and wondered how, as a standard we have become people who work all year to escape the lives we should be loving. What’s the saying: cultivate a life that you don’t need to take a holiday from? I needed a holiday. But, I have to say, I have returned fresh and excited and poised for what’s next. So whilst post-holiday blues pinch and pull, and every time I look at social media someone, somewhere is still away, doing what we did, and that grates, I see that it performed its function. And that is to give perspective. To free up the mind. To release. To allow me to take stock. To a writer, what more could I want as I approach September, and the bouquet of sharpened pencils* that it represents?

*in the words of Nora Ephron from the film ‘You’ve Got Mail’.

Summer is for salad

1st August 2018 · Leave a Comment

When writing, I don’t pen a word for days, weeks even, and then I get stuck in, shoulders aching in protest as I sit at the keyboard, in awkward, hunched positions, trying to keep my back straight, limiting my punctuation because I just want to get it down. If the mood to write comes, I musn’t ignore it. In the summer time though, this is near on impossible. Instead, I make endless notes and carry stuff around in my head with the plan to write it when the sun goes down. The grass outside is burnt, tinder-dry, ochre and it looks so odd compared to the usual green lushness of the British summer. This spell of weather brings with it a new way of living; one which feels surreal, and as if we are on borrowed time. It takes three weeks of doing something regularly before it becomes a habit, right? So with this summer comes the habit of throwing open the doors each morning, opening up the back of the house, as the wall is all glass, and allowing a four metres scheme of fresh air in, after a night of being closed up. Checking the garden. Feeling the warmth, choosing clothes that are cool, protective from sun. Incongruously, winter coats hang on pegs and in cupboards and it’s hard to imagine we’ll ever need them again. Oh, but we will, come October! It feels endless, this summer, like an intermission during a long show. Time to get an ice cream and watch the world go by. The summer brings with it an extension of time, of days, one that differs to the dark drawer of winter.

It’s so unusual to have such a spell of sun, it defies all normal convention in this country. We, as a nation, are so starved of this weather, we have instead a ubiquitous blanket of cloud that hangs low in our skies through most of the year. We went to Portugal and on the flight back (above the clouds) I made lists of things I need to do. My reminders list stands presently at 59. What will be lucky 60? School holidays are a hiatus that I both love and deplore. A time of flux for us before September returns, and sharpens us all up again. My list spans from essay ideas (social media and teenagers/procrastination methods when it comes to writing/why I want to befriend people who make podcasts), to items I need to source (car wash sponges/’Bitter Orange‘ by Claire Fuller/beaded necklaces perfect for tanned skin). I think of the future and the traction I will need to get from where I am now, to where I really ought to be, and I shudder. Make a fresh list. Write the book.

Writing is not for summer. Summer is for salad.

We’ve had family staying and a houseful of kids. We’ve had a makeshift pool in the garden that’s needed daily coaxing to stay clear-watered. We’ve had builders planning the next phase of renovation. We’ve had the dog groomed and hedges cut. I’ve scoured the summer sales for impractical dresses in retro patterns. A steady stream of stop, start. We’ve watched a season of ‘Ozark‘ and felt the lingering sense of ‘what next?’ when it ended. Season two is out now, I believe. The floor is littered with flip-flops and tennis rackets and half-unpacked suitcases and as ever, there’s more laundry that there ought to be. All this to the soundtrack of comings and goings. I’m aware these summers will pass me by soon; this cornucopia of family life that I am the epicentre of. What’s for dinner? At some point, in the not too distant future, term time and school holidays will be something that affects others, a distant memory to me, like night feeding a newborn, or pushing a pram.

But for now, it is where I am at. Wholeheartedly.

On Endings and Beginnings

18th July 2018 · Leave a Comment

And so, the term ended, and with it, my son’s tenure at his school of the last six years. The school that has been instrumental in shaping my view of ‘the school mother’. They (we) are a breed, a type, a demographically-defined group. As the culmination of the academic year neared, a dizzying run down of leaving events took place; plays, trips, excursions, a sentimentally-charged Prize Giving service, speeches, parties and farewells. I recall this phase with my daughter’s schooling, but back then, with the first born child, there was a deeper seam of childhood nostalgia to mine, and the future that lay ahead was unknown. Little could I have imagined that, like everything in parenthood, the future would bring new challenges and new excitements, and the past would fade into the background, rightly so. With a second child, I know what to expect, and am reassured that this rite of passage from junior to senior is necessary, and correct.

I have been a school mother to young children for over twelve years, dropping off and picking up from the school with the daily regularity of the tide. I commented to another mother, that come the time children attend a senior school, it is possible to drop them at the bus in one’s pyjamas, as there is no need to exit the car. There is no lingering at school, there is no mother’s gossip, there is no influence, meetings with teachers are rare, email communication, if any, is king. She looked horrified. The transition from one domain to the next is a brutal one to navigate. No longer defined by one’s children. The shock!

All of this plays on my mind, because it is this midlife transition that interests me the most and which, despite my best endeavours to diversify my writing, I come back to. I met with my publisher friend last week and described my enduring preoccupation with midlife mothers and she nodded sagely, and said; ‘yes, I see what you mean.’

Meanwhile, whilst not defined by my children, I remain enamoured, and exasperated with them. The love, which spills over as they mature, is constant. But now, my teenage son, who has been swimming in a small and safe pond, pushes against the every boundary. Thirteen and nearly taller than me; and I am tall. Puberty for the male gender is a long and drawn out affair, full of daily updates; voice drop, height (7 inches in 9 months), shoulders, biceps, a testosterone peak. It’s an uncanny process where the sweet, soft, gentle boy of old has gone, and instead there is a lean, young man in his place. I recall it differently with my daughter, as an understated and short-lived process from girl to woman. Childhood draining away in a trickle, rather than a torrent.

My novel meanwhile, remains in an editing file on my laptop and my feelings about it shift over time. I used to consider it a shiny new gem, whereas now it feels older; in my darker moments I consider it hackneyed, even. This is the writer’s fear, I know. The problem with spending years writing your first book is that time doesn’t wait for you, and the world shifts on to its next encounter, and your writing remains frozen in time. I note that maybe this is why writers favour historical fiction rather than the present day? The present day doesn’t stay present for long, and all too soon, references become clichéd. I learnt on my MA to avoid clichés at all costs, so this troubles me.

In parenting, and perhaps in writing, there are few project closures, no ‘lessons learned’ meetings. Instead there’s a subtle creep, almost imperceptible, and that alone marks a milestone. It’s usually when I look backwards, promoted by a photo or a memory, do I realise what’s passed. This feels like a new era, and one that comes with good feelings. Here’s to endings and beginnings…