Confession

I have a confession that may leave Paige Nick gasping for breath: I love Mondays. I really do. I have been meaning to write my little ode to Mondays for some time, but it hasn’t happened. So today, a Tuesday, I am taking the time to explain why Mondays are fantastic.

Mondays are the day I kick out the rest of my family (except the dog and chickens) and the house becomes mine. A simple scan over the internet will tell you that I’m not supposed to say how much I adore my Monday morning peace. It isn’t just that it is Monday; it is that I am a woman, a wife and a mother. Apparently the woman bit is supposed to get tossed out on its ear and all I’m supposed to say is: ‘I.love.my.children.and.husband.more.than.anything.else.in.the.world.’

I’ve never understood this. It is a bit like going on to facebook and writing ‘I love being able to breathe!’ Or ‘Being able to walk is brilliant!’ To which my past Oregonians would dryly reply, ‘Yeah, and bears shit in the woods.’

My adoration for Mondays, however, is not so obvious. I adore them. Because I love to write. I love writing even though it earns jack. I love it even through it often physically hurts me to do it. I know that writing costs my family some of my time and energy. But as we have discussed, having me locked up in the mental ward is expensive and then they would really be robbed of my time.

Yes, I would very much like to earn a better pay check. There is something very thrilling about seeing numbers in a bank account and knowing I put them there, be it because I scrubbed a toilet or I wrote a kick ass press release. I may even be better at scrubbing toilets (heaven, help me). But writing is one of the few activities I do when I truly feel like me, in my entirety, rather than sliced up and borrowed and stretched. Writing is my thing. I never have to put on an act. Or force myself to believe that I want to do it. (This does not hold true for the submission process.) I love the solitude, the silence, the ability to let my mind go as I battle to get the story stuck to paper. I even love seeing all the scribbles and corrections from an editor. I think, ‘I’m one step closer to finding the buried treasure.’  Sometimes when all is said and done the treasure leaves much to be desired. But I try again. Because writing is mine. Mondays give me back my writing time.

Mondays and writing fit my personality. I go out, do my thing, smile and enjoy the people – but when it is done, I need to recover. Oh Monday mornings, how you heal me. You give me back my energy. If you were an actual thing I could hold, I’d kiss you.

Apparently this is because I am an introvert. I discovered this after reading ‘Caring for Your Introvert.‘ What a revelation after hearing my entire childhood that I was an extrovert. All of which seemed very odd since, while I have never had any problem standing on a stage and making an utter fool out of myself, I’m shy. I find large crowds overwhelming and at major social gatherings REM’s line ‘That’s me in the corner‘ plays on endless loop in my head.

Corners are awkward and uncomfortable. But holes, nice cosy ones – like my office – are fantastic. I own the space. It is mine to do with as I chose.  I chose to write. A maddening occupation, but so are many. At least I yearn for mine enough to be pleased when Monday rolls around again.

Show & Tell

I am writing. The story is behaving in an amiable, cosy fashion, which has allowed me to nestle amongst the words. The story waits while my arm rests. It never admonishes me if I can’t make Stephen King’s prescribed word quota for the day. ‘The words will still be there,’ it reassures.

What a heaven sent blessing my story is in a writing world full of neuroses. But even so, I have not been immune. The little ghouls of self-doubt began to prod me, whispering, ‘This could have been a fine story, if you showed it but you’re telling. May as well hand a reader an outline and be done with it.’

I became so wrapped up in the popular mantra, ‘Show, don’t tell,’ that I began to fret about sentences as basic as, ‘The egg was blue.’* Was I telling that the egg was blue? How does a writer show blue? How could I paint with words, without blue, but make the egg embody blueness?

Thus, I sent my writing bff** my meagre scraps of an emerging ms. Then I waited. There are these time zone issues, day jobs and so on, which prevent instantaneous response. So like any rational person does, I refreshed my email countless times. This was despite my being well aware that nothing I did would change the fact it was 9pm, rather than 3am. I would have to wait.

Anyway, I’m fine now. I am allowed to carry on. I have been reassured that when the writer has left her box of paints back in primary school, it is perfectly acceptable to describe an egg’s colour by telling the reader that the egg was blue.

This is precisely why a neurotic writer should always have a writing bff. It is these people that store away a portion of the writer’s sanity for emergencies. It is the writing bff that notice that the writer has gone off the rails and hands over a comforting cup of common sense. ‘Here, I’ve saved this for you for a time exactly like this.’

By the way, there really are chickens that lay blue eggs. Honest.

*This is a fictitious example, despite the fact eggs can be blue.

**Writing Best Friend Forever

Kathleen Norris, Sisyphus and me

Swimming must now fit into the majority of my days. In order to save my right arm, what can be saved, I must get stronger without putting more strain on my permanently damaged ligaments. It is working. Not perfect. Nor will it ever be. But the arm is getting better, and if I keep ploughing through the water, better still.

Swimming is not an activity easily incorporated into my life, like jogging, or taking the dog for a walk. It requires access to a pool and a lot of time: time to get there, time to change, time to shower, time to deal with soaking wet hair, time to drive to my next destination and, of course,  time to actually swim. Due to pool accessibility, this time cannot be done in the wee hours, nor in the very late, but in a very specific span of time, time that was normally reserved for writing. I’m still searching for a better solution. But for now, those precious working hours have been reduced, some days by as much as half.

The often heard lament, “I have so little time,” gives the lie to the delusion that the daily is of little significance. Everyone has exactly the same amount of time, the same twenty-four hours. (Norris, 16)

Yes, it was and has been frustrating. But until this past Thursday I had allowed myself to operate in a delusion: that the situation was something to get through, and then everything would go back to the way it was. Then reality crashed down. For the first time I truly acknowledged that this is my life for the foreseeable future. The condition is chronic. I did not accept this revelation gracefully.

It is as if I have taken the world’s weight on my shoulders and am too greedy, and too foolish, to surrender it to God. (Norris, 25)

Swimming is mindless, repetitive and time sucking – like laundry. Laundry, it is always with me. I was doing laundry the day I heard I was published. I do laundry on most holidays. Laundry, it is a task that never has an end. Like swimming. How circular. How depressing.

- Sisyphus*, is that you?

- Obviously not, he is busy rolling his rock continuously up that hill.

- Dear heavens, I’ve started talking to the condemned deceased!

- Clearly, I need a break from the madness; I settle for a bath.

Baths require books. My current book was Kindle bound, so I scanned the shelves for a sturdier companion. I was drawn to The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and “Women’s Work” by Kathleen Norris: a poet, a feminist, a Protestant, a Benedictine Oblate whose work often focuses on the profound of the every day.  This is my life, I thought. I am caught up in the seemingly meaningless details of living: cooking, transporting children, tossing in another load.

Both laundry and worship are repetitive activities with a potential for tedium, and I hate to admit it, but laundry often seems like the more useful of the tasks. (Norris, 24)

Or in my life: Both swimming and writing are repetitive activities with a potential for tedium, and I hate to admit it, but swimming is now the necessary task.

I have not been in complete denial about my problem with time and writing. I read Elizabeth George’s Write Away to gain hints on how to change my approach to stories, a way of doing some prep work during the less quiet hours.  Thus, amongst Thing 1’s MMA and cricket practice and homework, Thing 2’s swimming and ballet lessons, the dog, the garden (and soon chickens!) and all that time spent sitting in parking lots and waiting rooms, I have been researching, reading, daydreaming and making a mass of notes. To call it an outline would be an over exaggeration. But there is a plan, a guide to what I wish my next creation to be. Maybe (hopefully) this will reduced the amount of time spent staring off into space?

But that tube of writing time looks so narrow. I fret: is it possible to get my quirky brain to adjust, to cooperate? I am starting all over again. Not a revision of an old project. But from scratch. It makes me nervous. It feels like stage fright.

But deep down, I had so little trust in myself, let alone in my vocation as a writer, that I saw each poem as potentially my last. (Norris, 8 )

Even the poets battle the never ending circular of doubt.

Dear Sisyphus, I feel you: your pain of having to roll that rock up that mighty hill over and over again.  I swim so my arm works: so I can do laundry, so I can cook, so I can turn the key in the car to take my children to school (not figured out how to do that left handed). There is no end to these details. They get in the way of what I want to do. And after each story it isn’t enough. I feel I must write another. Again. And again. And for what? These things, they are all small, repetitive, insisting that they must be done.

“Look at that! The priest is cleaning up!” . . . But I found it remarkable…that in that big funny church, after all of the dress-up and the formalities of the wedding mass, homage was being paid to the lowly truth that we human beings must wash the dishes after we eat and drink. The chalice, which had held the very blood of Christ, was no exception. (Norris, 2-3)

Tasks of the daily life may be undervalued but they are unavoidable, I simply never anticipated having to add swimming to the list. Yet unlike Sisyphus, my endless work comes with a gift. I now have days, many, many days, all laid out with time. This long procession of potential writing days – all time I assume I shall now be granted with this taped up, braced up, working appendage -  is thanks to a strict and repetitive swimming regime. This time is not as wide as it once was, but  – as I must keep reminding myself -  this time is now much longer than my arm originally wanted to provide.  So I close the door, turn the key (left handed) and write my first blog post for BookLive since November.

It’s a beginning, all over again.

Cited Works:

*Martin, Richard. Bulfinch’s Mythology. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.

Norris, Kathleen. The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and “Women’s Work.” New York: Paulist Press: 1998.  (Link: Amazon, Kalahari)

The Art of Writing Life

The art of writing about one’s life is to take a moment, or many, and create a story that stretches beyond your own experience. Like business economics: finding the micro and applying it to the macro. Richard Rodriguez accomplishes this in his essay “Late Victorians,” which takes the architecture of San Francisco and weaves in gay history, religion, family, and AIDS.  An essay about houses becomes both personal yet profound.

Yet this art also bends the truth, with its careful editing and splicing of life. Human beings are complex creatures who can be painted as saints or as demons depending on how the writer angles the lens. Nor can it be helped that the writer speaks from her own camera, leaving the majority of perspectives out.

This excerpt is from my blog piece, ‘Writing my Godmother.’ It was written  for Kate Farrell’s project Wisdom has a Voice.

When ‘I am fine’ hurts

Writing hurts.

It is a problem that has cropped up from time to time over the last nine to ten years. But this year the problem refused to go away. I finally shared my woe with a member of my dojo, himself a physiotherapist. After a quick examination he packed me off to a colleague to see what she could do.

As the physio poked and prodded me, she discovered I was far more of a mess than I ever believed possible. A leftover trauma, she called it, not ever addressed. The body injuring itself, pulling muscles and throwing itself out of whack. Rather than healing, the body simply carried on, learning to work around the problem, which only created others. This is why the braces and meds never worked: because neither stopped me from using my body incorrectly, asking muscles and ligaments to do jobs they were never designed to do.

So now am in the odd position of coming to terms with something eleven years after it occurred. Session after session of physiotherapy, all to unravel the consequences of being attacked by two full-grown men. The incident plays out like a rapid series of snapshots, leaving blanks all around. I’ll never know exactly what I did that day. But I do know strength I did not own came from some deep-seated ‘fight or flight’ instinct and I fought. During all of this my shoulder suffered tremendous impact. A shoulder that had yet to recover from surgery. Yet, when all was said and done, instead of summoning help, or even indulging in tears, I went grocery shopping at the local Rondebosch Pick ‘n Pay, oblivious that I was filthy and bleeding. Because I felt obliged to thank the homeless men who interrupted the fight and got me out of there.

‘Are you going to see somebody?’ a friend asked, eleven years ago. ‘Talk to somebody? Or go to another doctor and make sure you really are okay?’

I dismissed her suggestion immediately. After all, once the grocery shopping was done, a seemingly endless queue of people began to tell me that I was going to be fine, that I must move on. What else is there to do? It wasn’t as if I had actually been raped or mugged. I did what had to be done: a tetanus shot for the mysterious cut on my neck, bandage for the elbow, disinfectant for the scrapes on my knees and the top of every toe. It never occurred to me that there could be problems beyond that. Sure, the next day I could hardly move. And for more than a week after I was attacked, my neck was so sore it still felt as if I was being choked. But that is par for the course in such matters, I told myself.

Nothing really happened. I won. I needed to get over it. And I had. Mostly. There is a blog post here, which many of you have read before, which hints at some unresolved issues. I have an aversion to chain-link fences. I flinch when men speak loudly from behind. I don’t like to sit in a restaurant with my back exposed to the rest of the patrons. My heart rate goes up any time I consider I may have fought a man who was holding a knife to my throat. But these are just quirks, life must be lived forward.

‘When we live in constant pain, it can lead to depression,’ my physiotherapist mentioned, as she examined all the tension locked in my neck, jaw and head, the source of my constant headaches.

I considered the haze that hung over my life this winter for no discernible reason. The more the physio poked, the louder my brain insisted I pay attention. Then I had a nightmare. I couldn’t hide the tears. It triggered the first honest and in depth discussion  about the incident with my husband in eleven years. We talked about my lingering fears and his. Because until now, neither of us wanted to admit that despite the fact we felt we should be over it, we were not –and are not – over it.

‘You are strong and healthy,’ the physio said, ‘you just need to be allowed to heal. To tell your body it no longer needs to be in permanent fight or flight.’

At least the exercises and physical therapy should prevent permanent injury to the soft tissue and ligaments in the rest of me. But for my arm, it looks as if I will require surgery. Then more therapy. All because I sought help too late.

It is so hard to find the correct balance between wallowing in self-pity and moving forward. I wonder if the societal trend to be positive is why the necessary pause for recovery can be overlooked. The pressure to focus on being grateful that I was not actually raped left massive guilt for any lingering residue from the incident. Because I am well aware many suffer worse. The news is filled with unspeakable horrors from crimes against a woman’s person. I was lucky. Nothing actually happened. So why can’t I just get over it?

The problem of this guilt was brought home to me while reading Margie Orford’s piece in The Guardian, Once Upon a Life. Margie goes to great pains to point out how many of her fellow detainees suffered far more than she. I read the piece while constantly thinking, ‘But just because others had it worse doesn’t mean what happened to you wasn’t awful.’ She concludes her horrifying account by stating, ‘I am fine, apparently.’

I am fine, apparently. Except, not quite. It is time I stop apologising for it.

To my godmother

I opened my email this morning to discover the paperback version of Wisdom Has a Voice is now available on Amazon.*

I smiled; I cried.

I keep waiting for it to hurt a little less.

Did you ever know how much I looked up to you?

 By senior year these whispers had grown louder and had widened to include me. My apparent lack of dating life became a Thanksgiving dinner topic amidst groans that I would end up like you. But that February I watched men watching you. While your hair was clipped short and your outfits were far from flashy, your confidence gave you poise that turned more than a few heads. When we socialized with your male peers, you shared well-considered opinions on current affairs, laced with humor and wit. I saw the men’s eyes full of admiration and respect. It was on this visit that I realized then that your single life was not necessarily an accident, but a choice.

Author and Auntie in Oregon

I still cannot look at a bird book without feeling ill. But I am learning to love your feathered friends. Not that they have left me much choice.

Your birds go on singing. They refuse to be ignored. Our home is near the nesting grounds of the rare oystercatchers. Your great-niece and nephew wake in the wee hours of the South African morning to the sound of the guinea fowl pounding on the sliding doors. The francolins trot out their chicks to peck as the children eat their own breakfast. Owls perch on the roof, scouting for prey as bedtime stories are read. During the day, I write at home, taking coffee breaks on the porch, and cannot help but see the sunbirds flit from branch to branch. Each spring we watch as the sugarbirds’ tails grow into elaborate trailing ribbons. How I wish you were there the day I witnessed a small bird in flight, desperately dodge an African Eagle’s aerial attack.

But you missed it.

All because of your choice that was not a choice.

*Paperback is not available on Amazon.co.uk just yet, but they do have the ebook

Wisdom Has A Voice – ebook now available

Dark clouds bearing evil intentions cloak our family tree. Their whispers draw us into a complex sadness, which we must fight, or we find ourselves banished into never-ending paranoia and grief. Yet, somehow, I have not succumbed. There have been periods of gray paired with too many tears. But even during that dark February hour of my senior year of high school, 1996, your hand extended, beckoning me to Houston, where the sun still shone, a marked contrast to the Oregonian winter gloom.

You were determined to soak me in Vitamin D. Off we marched through popular bird watching trails. Handing over spare binoculars, you pestered me to notice the varied tips of wings and color of clawed feet. Of course your bird book would usually announce that what I described did not actually exist. Such outings did not endear me to your feathered friends. I far preferred the living, breathing alligators, which were frequently seen leaning against the signposts cautioning walkers to give the beasts a minimum berth of thirty feet.

The above is the first two paragraphs from my essay ‘Birds of Promise,’ which is featured in the motherhood memoir, Wisdom Has a Voice*. However, I did not write about my mother. My mother is alive and well. As the priest in Kolbe House once told me, ‘There be dragons there.’

I wrote about my godmother only to face the fact that ‘there be dragons there,’ too. It seemed impossible to pay tribute to the person who made one of the biggest impacts on my life, in both how she lived and died, with only 2,500 words.  Suicide is not only often misunderstood, but has a tendency to overshadow the victim’s legacy. I wanted to be honest about both.

Nor is my godmother mine. She was the auntie to my three siblings and my many, many, many cousins. She was also a sister to her four siblings, a daughter and granddaughter. As I wrote, I began to fear I was offending those who also loved, adored and admired this woman. But as the editor of the anthology gently pointed out, this was my piece from my point of view. I may not own my godmother’s memory, but I must own the piece.

I would like to thank Catharine Farrell for all the hard work she put into creating a unique tribute to motherhood. Working with her and her editors was an experience I’ll always treasure. There was an open dialogue between us that is sadly becoming rare. Rarer still, is an editor of a motherhood anthology who would embrace an essay about an unapologetically unmarried and childless woman. But Catharine Farrell did, proving that this book is not a glorified collection of sap better suited to the genre of greeting cards. So while writing ‘Birds of Promise’ was far from the therapeutic experience I had hoped, in the end I have been left with a small sense of justice. I can only hope the rest of my family feels the same.

* Wisdom Has a Voice is available now in ebook format for those who will not be able to purchase the paper version due out in October 2011.

When you are six the 21st seems very far away

I had no idea what I was getting into the day Short Story Day South landed in my inbox.  How well the actual day will go, only time will tell. But I cannot blame any failure on lack of support. Mossel Bay has bent over backwards to prove they can hold their own against the city folks.  However, not everybody is willing to wait till the big day. A group of Grade 1 students at Milkwood primary have already begun composing their chain-stories.

‘Mrs. B*, are you really going to put our stories on the internet?’

-       Yes.

‘But Mrs B, when?’

-       Soon.

‘Why not nooooooooooooooow?’

Who could resist? Thus, as a taster, I bring you the first story from Milkwood’s Grade 1.

STORY 1

One day there was a little boy. This little boy was 7 years old and he loved to do homework. (Luxolo)

He also loved swimming lessons. (Lily)

And when he was doing homework, his homework fell into the water. (Talitha)

He jumped in the pool to get out his homework. (Daniel)

He dried it with a hair dryer. (Grace)

Then his homework blew away. (Ryan)

He got a demerit, because his teacher didn’t believe him. (Kyle M)

He cleaned up the class for his teacher and she scratched out the demerit. Now the little boy is happy. (Shaun)

The end.

On the 21^st Mossel Bay will have an event for adults at 10am at the local Diaz Bookshop. At 2:15pm there will be an event for the youth at the Mossel Bay Central Library. Both events are free.

*Yes, the students really do call me Mrs. B. It is a long story. To make a long story short, I have an almost impossible to pronounce last name.

There be Danger in Fiction’s Lies

Editing, rewriting and digesting constructive criticism have become part of my daily life. Thus, I hardly blinked when my work was returned with the tell-tale signs of tracker run amok. The editor had made careful notes, with numerous well thought out suggestions. Overall the entire experience went smoothly, but for one little bump: an unseen editor decided to change the cause of death to a more realistic single shot to the head. The original cause of death defied belief.  Stranger than fiction, the mantra says.

As Helen Moffett writes in her famous (or should be famous) piece Stuff that authors (AND editors) need to know, ‘Your fictional world has to obey much stricter rules of internal logic and consistency than the real world. . . In real life, the unimaginable happens all the time, widely improbable coincidences occur daily, and characters are much larger than life.’

But who is deciding what is real? Are there times where our fictional lies become so ingrained that they colour reader’s perception of reality? Because my disagreement with the editor was not over my latest short story, but a non-fiction essay. Thankfully we all came up with an honest solution to the problem. But what a bizarre experience it was to defend a factual suicide against perpetuated fictional myth.

Here’s another tale, one from my hometown: A man walks into a bar and shoots the bartender at point blank range. The shooter then turns the gun on himself, firing a bullet into his head. Both men survive.

Unbelievable? Perhaps. Unusual? Most certainly. But to the best of my knowledge, it is true.

It is a Catch-22. The truth is too strange to be commonly written in fiction, so the writer falls back on myth and stereotype; this reinforces readers’ beliefs that the lie is actually true. The reality is that a bullet to the head is not a guarantee of death. It does happen, of course.  But at times the victim survives, as Stieg Larrson’s trilogy accurately illustrates. But how many people thought Stieg Larrson had crossed the line into improbability until Senator Gabriel Giffords was shot?

Fictional lies masked as realistic portrayals can lodge into the common psyche, unwittingly contributing to unnecessary drama and be life threatening. Ever watched a Hollywood film where a woman in labour doesn’t scream while being overcome with mind-numbing pain?*  It does happen. Of course it does. As Midwife Thinking** shows, these screaming women are too often painted as being unable to cope, and this is perceived as the norm.

But screaming does not necessarily mean the woman can’t cope. Nor does every woman, even without the help of drugs, labour loudly. ‘Because we are individuals, our birthing behaviour is also individual. Some women become quiet, withdrawn and “in control”.’ *** A woman’s response to labour is not a choice or about ability to cope, but instinct. ‘Our birthing behaviour originates in the limbic system, the area of the brain shared by all mammals. To labour well we need to shut down our neo-cortex – the thinking human part of the brain.’****

After my son’s safe arrival to planet earth, the administrator struggled to enter our records into the hospital system. This was because the computer wasn’t programmed for births that occur inside the hospital yet outside of the labour ward. My quiet, highly strenuous, yet not actually painful, labour was labelled ‘pre-labour’ and consequently, I was denied access to the proper ward. Thus, what should have been a beautiful and straightforward experience was one that was unsafe, unsanitary and mentally scaring. My labouring against stereotype led to poor advice, insults, condescending comments and commands that, had they been followed, would have put my son’s life at risk. If only someone had actually noticed my son had crowned, my husband would have been spared the traumatic experience of seeing a foetal heart monitor persistently displaying a flat line no matter what the experts did.

We were unusual, they said. An exception to the rule. But when I attended a mummy and baby group I met a woman whose experience practically echoed mine word for word.  Then I heard another similar tale. And another. Friends of mine gave birth in hospital bathrooms, or without proper staff present– more and more exceptions – these women who find labour intense work, but do not scream, who supposedly give birth more promptly than the ‘norm’ and thus are ignored.

I wonder if it is like a gift of a thousand compliments. People can shower a person with praise, but one voice of criticism is the comment that lodges in the brain. Whether in movies or novels, fiction’s refusal to portray anything but the stereotypical birth, the not-so-unexceptional experience is constantly disbelieved despite the fact it is happening in reality – all the time – but discounted.

So I ask:

1. How many more inaccurate portraits do the strange lies of fiction perpetuate: of women, masculinity, the supposed innate differences between young boys and girls, of life and of death?

2. Does ‘stranger than fiction’ ever hurt fiction writers’ ability to accurately challenge the myths which cloud issues such as eating disorders, sexual abuse, rape, sexism, racism, religion and marriage?

3. Is our understanding of nations, cultures, religions and even the difference between small town life and suburbia struggling to rise above cliché and stereotype due to the truth being too hard to believe?

4. What are the ethics, if any, of the writers, the editors, the movie producers in the part they play in this Catch-22?

* http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ScreamingBirth)

** http://midwifethinking.com

*** http://midwifethinking.com/2011/04/09/judging-birth/

**** as above

New Shorts: Before and After

Before Today:

‘A letter from a spinster (age 50) to a gentleman (age 28)‘ was published in itch.

I don’t know why I stayed. Or, now that I consider it, why you asked.

‘Shall we dance?’

Such an overused line, but then again, I had never been asked it before by a man when he was naked.

After Today:

‘Cordelia, age 26’ will appear in Dye Hard Press: The Edge of Things

Some grandmothers might have such conversations with their granddaughter over a pot of tea and a slice of cake. Or suggest a chat over a cup of coffee while sitting on the porch swing. Mine wants to have a discussion while beheading chickens.