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In the service of happiness

16th September 2017 · 1 Comment

I hear myself spouting doctrines to my children on the drive to school. Find the good in things. Do what makes you happy. Be around positive people. Eat delicious, healthy food. Get lots of sleep. Live for love. And so on, and the next thing I know I sound like a fridge magnet. I wonder why then, when I actively do a lot of these things in my life, how I still find darker times? How is it that when I so closely control these yardsticks of happiness and wellness, do I still fall off the happiness wagon? This perplexes me. I spoke to a very clever lady who explained her view, in a way that only very clever ladies can. She said that doing things to achieve happiness, things that were in the service of happiness would, ultimately, become futile. Either they would not produce the desired outcome or I would become a slave to these activities in the hope they would deliver. So if stopped doing them, everything would falter and fall.

This struck me as interesting.

Since I gave up paid work a few years ago, I’ve been pondering this question. Through my angst-ridden 40th birthday, dabbling with my profession, adjusting to parenting a teenager, re-entering education, getting my Masters, I had been circling the fact that even then; even after all that, happiness occasionally eluded me.

I have a friend who loves to swim. She’s started open air swimming in a Lido and it has produced such a jolt of pure happiness that I see in her proof of this point. She doesn’t swim to be happy. She swims because when she does so the silence under the water is elemental, so calming it’s meditative. She swims because the rhythm of the stroke enables her to process thoughts. She swims because in a heated, open air pool, in September, the surface steams and she faces into a rising, mysterious fog, her body submerged in warmth. Doesn’t that sound just wonderful?! She has found the thing that for her, is happiness. It is not something she does in the hope that it will lead there. It just is.

I used to love the lectures, early on in my Masters, having rediscovered how much I enjoyed recalling a book or a critical essay I’d absorbed and being able to talk about it with like-minded people. Certain things to do with Denmark, like this Instagram account make me happy; a glimpse of Royal Copenhagen crockery or a place I recognise from my childhood, when I used to visit with my Mum. My Mum makes me happy; her manner and her cooking and the fact that always, always says the right thing. Happening across the most crazy-beautiful pair of shoes on the internet makes me happy; to be fair it’s short-lived as I then frantically work out how I can get those shoes in my life. The happiness then shifts; it’s not pure anymore, but covetous. I am in service of those shoes. Beaches and particularly tropical, palm-tree edged beaches. Roast dinners with gravy. Laundered sheets. White-washed walls. I notice these things are not activities though, they are outcomes. I love a roast dinner, but I don’t love to cook.

So surely the aim – fridge magnet style – is to do what you love, not to covet the outcome of what you love?

With writing there is a curious convergence. This type of writing I love. The reportage, blog-fuelled writing is my favourite. Fictional writing, a novel, is a different thing. I love that I can do it, but the act itself is in service of happiness, it was not always happy-making! It was gruelling but enlightening – you wouldn’t believe what stuff emerges when you have a 1000-words-a-day requirement over your head. It produced satisfaction and an education. I never learnt so much about myself as when I wrote the draft of a book. I suppose that is why I now have some clarity about this whole topic. Time gives perspective, and perspective gives choice…

Happy Saturday…

The beleaguered mothers

13th September 2017 · Leave a Comment

We sit amongst frothy-topped coffees and comment on our ailments. We are the beleaguered mothers. There’s self-deprecation in the morning confessional; we know it’s not the done thing to admit impediment. Yet a string of non-specific, self-diagnosed symptoms emerge: migraines, muscle tension, throat constriction, heartburn, abdominal pain, palpitations, teeth-clenching (my personal favourite). We laugh at ourselves, admonish our frailty and say in unison: ‘it’s the stress!’. That seems to cover it, the catch-all explanation for so many physical manifestations that afflict modern mothers.

It’s not the stress of the new mother; the sleep-deprived, life-curtailed fog that descends after you take the baby home, and lodges for the first year. It’s not the stress of shepherding them through toddlerhood; the fingers in plug sockets, falling down stairs, drinking bleach phase. Nor is it the middle years, where mothers face the reality of not being able to fix everything; no-one to play with at playtime, not being picked for the team, not taking to a sleepover. No, what affects my mother friends is something else. We are now veterans, we have been mothers for many years and are even starting to focus on that empty nest, somewhere discernible but hazy, on the horizon of the distant future. Parenting teenagers offers up a new type of stress. A vapid version of its predecessors; we are on the sideline of our children’s lives, looking in but no longer able to influence, wondering why this all feels so damn weird. Worrying as a job. Professional worriers.

There’s an obscenity to it and that is not lost on me. Here we have a group of women most of whom have not faced real hardship, not real stress, although for each of us there has been a fair share of challenge. No one is exempt from the reach of the conversation that continues, staccato, as we sip too-hot drinks and wonder how long we can steal away together before we really ought to get back to our lives, our commitments, our jobs.

We discuss the need for self-care and tell each other about obscure supplements (Slippery Elm and Ashwagandha), making a mental note to read up on, or acquire said pill. I inwardly fret I’ve shared too much. I suspect we all do. There’s that curious British need to maintain the stiff upper lip. We all say it’s been a great summer and lament the new school term, but secretly love it because it means we can function/work/socialise/be free again. There’s nothing like a group of school mums come September. Those first weeks of term – the freedom! The knowledge that your off-spring are where they are meant to be, learning, and being cared for by other, fully trained adults.

I sit and observe. It is this group of women in whom I am interested. It is these about whom I wrote my novel; the forty-somethings trying to make sense of the mid-life crevasse they find themselves avoiding. The sandwich generation who, once they stop discussing their teenagers, start right in on discussing their older-generation parents. Or the affairs of our peers. Oh the irony! But of course we are also the ‘grateful’ generation. We acknowledge that we have it all. We are the women who were brought up to smash the glass ceiling and many of us gave it a good tap, and still do. It’s just that the stress involved in doing so causes migraines, tense muscles, throat constriction, heartburn, abdominal pain, palpitations and teeth-clenching! Haha!

It seems that what it all boils down to is ability to chill out and not take ourselves all so seriously. We look to each other to see who has mastered this. The ideal reaction is to not react. We agree to work on that, until next time…and enjoy the solidarity of not feeling alone. We are a tribe.

Otherwise known as Lou Bradford doesn’t write

8th September 2017 · Leave a Comment

Can I confess something? Don’t tell. But just at the point I validated myself as a writer – as in my words were published and I got an MA in writing – I stopped writing. I haven’t written a word for months.

To start with, I was heard myself telling people: ‘I’m taking the summer off after the academics. I am going to have a rest, yes, that dissertation really took it out of me.’ And they’d nod. Yes, I suppose so. And there would be this creeping feeling inside me: but isn’t writing meant to be a compulsion? An up-at-dawn, throw-off-the-covers, get-out-of-my-way, I have to WRITE something, need in your soul? I would dispel my doubt with excuses like I was too busy or it was school holidays or we were packing up to go away.

Of course a few months off is no bad thing, but what I noticed was the compulsion to write was simply not there. My classmates continued writing and planning their novels and I just waited. I felt very flat about what I had achieved. All that hard work to get my Masters and then what? The big unknown. I realised I liked being set assignments and having deadlines dictated to me. This is why I did so well in the corporate world; I liked the structure. I liked having a boss. I am a pleaser. Deep down the disquiet got noisier. An inner voice said: maybe you are not cut out for this writing business? Maybe you are not a ‘real’ writer because you don’t need to do it all the time?

I sat with this for a good few months. A couple of things happened. I stopped fretting about my Masters – water under the bridge. And my novel; it’s still there, it’s not going anywhere. I can go back to it. I started analysing what I had written it about, as in conceptually; marriage, reflecting on childhood, school mothers, women of my age, human competitiveness, teenagers. I saw that these topics were entirely wrapped up in what I was thinking at the time. However they were not distilled, in them was murk and sediment. I drew too closely from my own life and thoughts. So I took an almighty step back and it started to get clearer. I started re-forming the novel in my mind.

Now positivity about writing has started to re-emerge. I am returning to my college to do a year’s volunteer advocacy for the Creative Writing Faculty. This will be a lovely opportunity to return to the academic environment but without the hardship! I can spend time with the under-grads and impart my wisdom! Haha. I am no more wise now than I was before the Masters, but I did last the course and made all of the relevant decisions to graduate.

My characteristic existential panic about what it all means, now it’s over, is vintage Lou! What I keep coming back to though, is this place. This blog. This has always been a clean, comforting empty room in which I can air my thoughts and I can see that over time, investment here has brought me so much in terms of pleasure, friendship and the development of my own goals. So I will be back soon…once I spend a few days revelling in the new silence that September and a new school terms always delivers.

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Daddy, I want a pony

26th July 2017 · Leave a Comment

Ce n’est pas moi, whomever this lucky girl is, contemplating being fabulous. I’ve just been to Portugal (old favourite) and revelled in family time, 30-degree heat and grilled fish. I ran a lot in the mornings, down a shady hill with fig trees on one side and ancient olives on the other, looping my 5km circuit until I emerged for the uphill; straight into the blistering morning sun, tinder-dry underfoot. I saw it as a test. And all the time; thinking, thinking, thinking. Running is a good way to process thoughts for me, the meditative thud of my trainers on the ground, a reverb upwards through my body to my head, where all those pesky thoughts reside. I want to shake them out.

I have never been very good a reaching crossroads in life, facing the natural endings, and right now, there are many, not just for me but for those around me. It feels like a seismic time. In relation to my writing, I sense a self-indulgence in this introspection; as my other Masters colleagues have motored on, freshly educated and with an agenda on their minds, I have done the opposite and have not written or planned a word. Even thinking about my degree now can cause a questioning in me. I wonder if there were some elements of it that I judged wrongly. I followed an instinct to work in a way that fit with my professional training: corporate, considered, shiny. Where the convergence of business and creative meet in me. I guess I can’t undo my past experience, nor would I want to and I’ve written before about this conflict. About not fitting the mould. Who made the mould?

I wanted to deviate back to what I knew, this blog, writing essays on stuff I am interested in, I started to wonder whether the creation of a fictional world, inhabited by my own ghosts was a healthy pastime. This is what writing does; it’s like a therapy but also an exorcism. So I mused and ran and mused until I reached a point where I thought: fuck it. That’s about where I am now.

I think the blog is interesting. This long-established place that I created so many years ago was for me, and then that shifted and it became ‘for them’ without my knowing which ‘them’ I was writing for. Prospective publishers? Interested mothers? Friends of my kids? My kids? Family? I don’t even know. All I know is I felt like it was time to reclaim it as mine. In tandem, I have been spending w-h-a-y too much time on Instagram to the point where I might need an intervention. Instagram is a fascinating and endless source of ‘other people’s lives’ but it negates the requirement to deal with your own! Don’t you think?

I met with an old blog friend Sophie, whom I have followed/emailed/chatted to online for years. We had never met face to face. She was like a minty-fresh, beguiling breath of air and I decided that my instinct had been right. Go back to what you know.

Endings and beginnings

1st July 2017 · Leave a Comment

Well, so how are you? *She says sheepishly knowing she’s been away too long.* I’ve been adjusting. Firstly to having finished my Masters, secondly to having a teenager with no school anymore (till September) and thirdly to having a husband home for a few months in-between jobs. This leads to a curious fuzz in my mind where nothing seems quite concrete and I rebound from one activity to the next without clarity or commitment. One could say I am in the middle. I read other things and think I should be writing more and catching up and generally being better at everything. There’s been a dive in confidence in recent weeks which is uncharacteristic. Nothing like a change to the routine to make you question what the routine was.

We went to Glastonbury too and that’s a surefire way to scramble your mind. A place where everyone is happy and there’s music and every conceivable food and outfits that defy gravity, logic and decorum. It is an onslaught to the senses in every way and I loved every minute. I also found that the best way to navigate the whole thing was to succumb to a low-level rosé-induced drunkenness. I realise I am utterly the stereotype to go there aged 43 and marvel at the freedom it represents; the throwback to my younger years when kids and mortgages and Masters degrees didn’t feature. Then there is a come-down afterwards as the readjustment takes place, like having the bends after surfacing from a scuba dive, the return to normality felt dizzying.

Then there’s the future, stretching out ahead like a big, rounded question mark. What next, Lou? When discussing the book with friends my husband said somewhat tellingly: ‘please finish the book, please make it all worth it’. I took from this that he might struggle to understand the strange process of writing a book and the looping round of ‘The Edit’. Capital T. Capital E. I think there’s another six months’ work in it as I face the reality of trying to sell it to a publisher. Not exactly back to the drawing board but a stuttering continuation of the academic but with self-imposed deadlines. What did I say about adjusting?!

I wanted to drop by, I’ll be back next week, promise…smile and wave…

Ability to sit still

31st May 2017 · Leave a Comment

Curiously, a day or two post-deadline and I am ansty, restless, unable to relax. The work involved in completing my degree represented a marathon, not a sprint. Months spent in deep, deep editing (like deep sea diving but not as dark) and then a thesis in which I interpreted, analysed and second-guessed everything I knew about writing and publishing. Imaginations of faceless external examiners considering my words. ‘Hello there.’ The result? Handed in and now bereft! Unsure what to do with myself, I am stranded mid-half term with one child revising (or not) and the other presently skidding across a slip’n’slide in the garden, hastened by hosepipe water and some fairy liquid. Oh the joys of summer. I think a lot about my book and it feels like a friend I’ve neglected; one I need to get back to, but not yet. It’s like we’ve had a silly falling out and now we are licking our wounds. Meanwhile other, new books spring fresh up in my mind and I think about writing something else. Infidelity! I shall be leaving my first novel for my second and that seems premature; a flirtation. My first one is not even finished. This is what professional writers do – write one, sell one, write one, sell one.

So I go back to the small things, reading, cooking, laundry, podcasts and googling. I’ve started running again after years off. I thought my body had stopped cooperating but, turns out it will. It’s as freeing as ever, the rhythm of it and the unmistakable endorphin-hit about an hour after. Then the aching legs and tired muscles. Summer running is one of my happiest pursuits. Due to unforeseen circumstances alluded to in my previous post (apologies for my opaqueness) I find myself accompanied by my husband each day and so we potter about, slightly freaked out by the proximity we share after so much absence in recent times. I’ve called on good friends to help steady our boat and so there have been nights out and evenings in, huddled at the table drinking wine and pondering whether this mid-life we find ourselves in is some sort of twisted trick. The three-generation juggle of ourselves, teens and older parents. We escape with boxsets – Billions and Bloodline – and promise ourselves only to watch one episode at a time. It’s like TV catnip.

The tractors near my house plough new furrows and I try to guess what crop will appear in a few short weeks. Courgettes? Coriander? Broccoli? Potatoes? It’s become the norm to be surrounded from May to September with farm-workers and night time tractors and irrigation tubes as wide as your thigh.

I figure I shall take the summer off, a self-congratulatory pause for educating myself further. If I graduate I shall have two degrees! Who’d have thought? And then by September, when the crops are harvested, I will go back and start in earnest in my efforts to become a published author.

When things go wrong

13th May 2017 · Leave a Comment

On thing about being ‘blessed’ with a vivid imagination is that I’ve already conjured up fifteen different versions for the future, at any one time. I’ve pretty much thought about every eventuality, tried it on, wondered how I’d feel, rolled it over like dough in my fingers and made a set of conclusions about it. The darker side of me, when imagining the worst possible outcome, will shudder and banish the imagining from my head, forcing myself to move on. Of course with my imagination comes all the good stuff; being able to write, being able to dream, being the quirky one who comes up with the outlandish ideas. But most of all I spend time concocting scenarios, my inner monologue occupied in forming outcomes that might never reach fruition.

Then sometimes in life, things happen that bring all that imagining front and centre. Suddenly the thing I’d been pondering came sharply into focus and is real. This happened last week, where I’ve come to an abrupt stop with my academics as stormy waves have hit our little life. They’re by no means life threatening and everyone is ok; we’ve said to each other, my husband and I: ‘no one has died, no one is ill,’ but nevertheless a shift has occurred that has changed our circumstances and called into question things I have been worrying about, well, for ages. There are always silver linings and we are focusing on those but can I just say that for my generation, right now, there is some serious shit going down! Everyone I speak to has life-changing, seismic shifts taking place. The care of others, the loss of jobs and livelihoods, the loss of self. The inconsistency and battle-weariness of decisions that have not panned out well. Marriages under siege, children railing against boundaries, money seeping away, health deteriorating, peace-of-mind slipping. It’s enough to make my me reel! Who said your 40’s were easy?!

But of course this is just one view, it’s possible to turn the whole thing around with the power of your thoughts; your interpretations. Were they really stormy waves that hit us? Or could it be that fate intervened because we needed a jolt? Does life sometimes deal you cards that force an entirely new outlook and the point is to react? Is this all part of the grand plan? Is navigating hard times the way we grow? I feel like I have stumbled across a wisdom board on Pinterest. Without rain, there are no flowers. It’s not the storm you face, it’s how you sail your ship. We are never prepared for what we expect.

I reach no conclusion, other than this came out of nowhere and ironically no amount of imagining (worrying) about it could have changed anything! So it’s true what they say. Live for the day you are in, not the possibly imagined one that might or might not be coming…

Taking pause

5th May 2017 · Leave a Comment

It’s Friday again. The weeks propel past me and yet I am still lusting for time to pass so I can get away on holiday in the summer and back to my palm trees. It’s like a compulsion I have; counting down to the next trip and I find myself sending a WhatsApp to a friend saying; ‘Is it wrong that I want to escape my life so much?’

I don’t – not exactly – but there is a feeling of the hamster wheel right now as the new season drags itself out of winter and the Brits get excited about the prospect of leaving the house without a coat. I am finishing my dissertation, one essay down, one to go. I feel like I have been in this academic holding pattern for a long time but it’s bittersweet. Once it’s done it’s done. I upload the submissions and I have to say I hover over the ‘send’ button for longer than I care to admit! It never feels good enough, but at the same time I can categorically say I have done my best. The book is not complete; people ask me all the time: ‘when can I read the book?’ as if it is imminent and I have to explain that now I have learnt to be a demon editor, I need to go back to the draft and strengthen it, make it better, before seeking out a publisher. I write that: seeking out a publisher, like it’s a case of launching a search that has a guaranteed outcome. It might not. Fingers crossed. Meanwhile I am presently thinking much more of academic principles and the Harvard Referencing protocol and whether my dissertation still has typos. I will write another whole post about it when I am done and it will be entitled: why everyone should do a Masters degree if they can. Education is like a fern unfurling.

I frequent social media as it’s the ultimate distraction from work. I read blogs and like photos and wonder what the hell happened to my Facebook feed when I get inundated with pictures of cute puppies in compromising positions. There’s the usual family stuff, meals cooked and beds made. My daughter’s revision takes on a torturous feel; two weeks till the exams start. We all just want to get underway. She’s 16 soon too and that causes me to take a sharp intake of breath! 16? Eh? She’s smart and beautiful and clever and I feel like I will never fully know the measure of her. Having teenagers is like having a unknown quantity in your midst. So much potential; such a thorny exterior. We muddle though.

The younger son is everything that’s good and wonderful about 12 year old boys. Curious and gentle and heart-burstingly loving. I know it will end, the hormones will come and that will be that. For a few years at least.

Ever want to just press ‘pause’?

Burger

20th April 2017 · Leave a Comment

I’ve been underground; that is, I’ve been otherwise engaged. School holidays spell distraction for me and as I near the blessed end to each one, I secretly relish the prospect that they’ll go back to school and I get to be alone for a moment. I am sure I write the same sentiment every year after Easter. That slightly guilty, slightly wayward feeling intense parenting provokes, when I am in the company of my children so much I wonder where they stop and I begin. Friends have doled out advice in recent weeks as I’ve hit a spiral of self-doubt; part professional (will I ever finish this damn book?!) and part personal (life feels like awfully hard work right now). I need to take a step back and put in place all the usual measures: yoga, good food, better sleep, walking, planning, trying to calm my worries. Turning the amplifier down.

It never comes naturally to me, but I persist.

The season shifted and the wisteria on my house went from tight, unfurled buds to near bloom in a few days. My son turned twelve. My daughter got to grips with her exam revision and we all breathed a sigh of relief. Can I just say that trying to learn ten subjects intimately when you are just fifteen years old is brutal?! She persists.

My peers and I refer to ourselves as the ‘sandwich’ generation; teenage children and parents who are getting older. We are the burger in the bun of life. Everyone’s peddling and wondering how life got so complicated. I find myself looking at women with young children and for the first time ever, feeling a curious wave of envy. Why? I didn’t even like that stage. I suppose what prompts me is the knowledge that when your children are small, everything is ahead of you. Now, as my daughter approaches her sixteenth year I find myself reaching for the memories of her birth like they have been filed away in a dusty box on top of a high shelf. Lid on.

And the book, well it’s on hold whilst I finish all of the academics now required to graduate. One essay down, one to go (the epic, big boy one). Bear with me, I’ll be back.

In all seriousness

29th March 2017 · Leave a Comment

I attended the last of my college sequentials. I have from today until May to write a series of critical essays – a thesis if you will – about writing and publishing. It’s a pensive time for me, I’m not going to lie. The culmination of my time at college has been a fevered, bordering-on-uncomfortable process where I have percolated what it will mean to complete a two year Creative Writing Masters degree. I will emerge from the crysalis to become what, exactly?! When asked what I do for a living I could say ‘writer’ with authority, couldn’t I? I spend my days writing and thinking about writing so that qualifies me, right? But have I been published? No. Have I earned money from writing? Not really.

Aside the academics, I have to decide what must be done to complete my novel. There’s an impatience in me; I feel as if I have waited years to produce this work and now I’d like it to progress. But it’s not ready yet. Meanwhile, I have learnt so much about myself in these two years. It was intimated to me that my life might not have been ‘literary’ enough to meet the constraints of the publishing industry. People like writers to have been monogamous to their trade. To have toiled in the strange half-life of spilling their thoughts to paper for others to read, for that to have been their raison d’être. It feels to me that we prefer that story; the usually impoverished, angst-ridden writer who is steeped in the literary conventions we’ve come to expect. Surrounded by books, educated in books, connected to books.

My trajectory doesn’t fit. I actually left publishing in my twenties, abandoning books to work for a corporate. I can categorically say: I sold out for the money. I wanted to do business. I spent my time penning legal defences and protocols for a multi-national. I wrote emails and policy documents and in my spare time, later on, wrote this blog as an outlet. Added to this is another transgression, which is hard to articulate, but is this: I like frippery. Fashion. A certain lightness of life. This side of me does not fit the category of ‘serious writer’. Yet when I wrote my novel what came out was serious.

It’s an interesting conundrum. I’m an advocate of being oneself. I’ve been around the block, I’m not about to morph myself into something I am not.

So an internal tussle ensues.

This blog is a place where I come to write. A bit like going to a mini-retreat. I have always curated an online space that is pretty and thought-provoking and generally has been surrounded by a loyal community of readers who are interested and engaged. This has persisted for many years and I can’t imagine a time when coming here won’t feel like that. One thing I have established is that people read blogs because they want to know about the person, not the brand. Not the product. It’s the honesty of human connection we are all after.

So I am trying to reconcile the two. Does being a writer mean one must dress/look/speak/adhere to the conventions of being a writer? One to muse…