Last week my younger son left for university and many of my friends (both online and in real life) were kindly empathising with me and asking how I would cope with an empty nest. Well, other than the fact that the house makes noises at night that I can no longer blame on the boys or the cat, I am coping very well. And, clearly my experience is echoed by quite a few of my friends, who all coincidentally (or perhaps not so coincidentally) have been single mums for a number of years, and who seem to be having the time of their lives now, finally getting to travel, meeting friends, embarking upon new courses, changing jobs, thinking about themselves for once.
Photo credit: Sandy Millar on Unsplash.
It is funny how people often perceive me as this very motherly person, who’s always looking after others, but in fact I’m more of a friend or auntie, not a naturally maternal person. Once I took on the ‘project’ of motherhood, I committed fully to it, but I cannot claim to have found it utterly fulfilling. I enjoy playing with children for a limited amount of time, but I need time on my own, to read, write, research. Occasionally, it was magical to discover something new (like the joy of Christmas) through the eyes of your child, but most of the time it’s endless repetitions of ‘One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish’ (and that’s the best case scenario, because fortunately my children were not all that keen on the Teletubbies or poor dull Thomas the Tank Engine).
Then, when they grow a little older, you have the endless circular arguments, or the grunts, or the worries about their moods and friends (or lack thereof). I’m very much a ‘live and let live’ kind of person, very avoidant of conflict, so having to enforce rules and discipline was really challenging for me. It didn’t help that I was to all intents and purposes the sensible project-manager parent.
It’s not fair to blame motherhood for all of the things I didn’t get to do over the past twenty years. Had I been in a more supportive marriage, had I not lost all of my financial cushioning in the divorce, I might have been able to progress my career more or, even more importantly, my extracurricular interests. I try to focus on the things I did do (volunteering for many different things; improving my language skills in French and Italian; running races, half-marathons and even one marathon; some travelling; writing, translating and reviewing; a bit of salsa; setting up a training business and then a publishing house) rather than on what I could have done better, or more of.
So the current ‘planet with satellites’ situation suits me very well: they are at a distance, but we keep in touch. When they come home, we have time to chat, relax or plan nice things together, instead of getting on each other’s nerves. I love to see them developing their own interests, without me having to organise things in the background. And I finally get to do all the things I want to do, guilt-free, without worrying that I’m spending too much time apart from the children. This week alone, for example, I have either an online or live event planned every single day except Sunday: book clubs, webinars, author talks, crime festival ChilternKills… and another opera and a poetry reading next week, before I gallivant off to a wedding in Romania.
It’s not all leisure either. I’m also writing an academic article, preparing an application for a translation residency, preparing some promotional materials and newsletter for Corylus and so much more.
Unfortunately, just as I’m finding my wings, my body is starting to let me down. My hip is arthritic and in great pain. I’m struggling to find the right kind of exercise that will make it better rather than worse. My cervical vertebrae continue to be vulnerable. It takes me longer and longer to reduce stiffness every day. My days of wearing high heels are over – no great loss, perhaps – but my days of dancing, running and skiing might also be over and that hurts.
It’s not all bad news (she says, after gnashing her teeth and wailing for a couple of weeks since the X-ray results). It helps to focus the mind. If I have far less energy than previously, if I now have fewer child/school-related commitments but need to spend more time oiling those joints, what do I want to spend my precious time on?
I think I know the answer to that. Now I just need to prove it.
I’m not sure if I should talk about this yet, as I’m still trying to come to terms with it and things haven’t been resolved yet. This will be a very unfiltered, unedited post, which I might delete later. It is about grief and guilt.
In just one week my sweet, affectionate, inquisitive, funny and beloved Maxi turned into a demon who scared us all so much that we decided we could not cope with her anymore.
We adopted her on Orthodox Easter Sunday (16th of April) and she was instantly snuggly, delightful, playful, inquisitive – although she didn’t eat properly for over 48 hours, which worried me at the time. Then she settled down, was sleeping on my bed, playing with the boys, even allowing me to groom her a little… She was a bit cheeky and we called her Maxi the Minx, but to be honest, her only fault was a tendency to scratch the underside of the sofa, and even create a sort of burrow for herself there. But we bought plenty of scratchposts to deal with that, and she liked to use them. She didn’t mind being picked up, she instantly came onto our laps, she seemed like a far less fearful creature than Zoe ever was.
Until suddenly, on the 28th of April, she became ill and declined so rapidly that the vet called the animal hospital for an endoscopy and other tests, but she had to be stabilised first as she couldn’t be given a sedative with her erratic heartbeat and breathing. Twice we thought we were losing her over that Bank Holiday weekend, but then she recovered, winning the hearts of all the medical staff in the process, as she escaped from the oxygen tank and explored the cat ward thoroughly.
We never quite figured out what caused the accumulation of fluid on her lungs, but a slight congenital heart impairment was suspected and she was on medication for a while. She was as good as gold at taking her medication, and we tried to be mindful and not encourage her to run too madly when we played with her. The vets told us that she was an overly stimulated creature (and boy, was it difficult to monitor her resting respiratory rate, as she would rest so seldom!). As a born explorer, I was keen to make the garden safe for her once the vet gave her the all-clear to go outside, but with the benefit of hindsight, that might have been a mistake. One fencing guy did not show up on the day he promised, it took me a while to find another who was prepared to catproof fences, then another couple of weeks to measure and find appropriate materials, so in the meantime we took her out for about an hour a day with a harness.
She seemed fine with the harness, and soon was climbing up by herself on the table in the hallway for me to put it on her, because she knew it meant going out afterwards (to be followed by supper). However, Battersea think it could have caused some frustration in her – so I feel guilty about worrying too much about her physical safety (from the busy road at the bottom of the garden) and not about her mental welfare.
On the 5th of June my older son had a bit of temper tantrum about not being able to log on to reserve his university accommodation for next year and was shouting from the bottom of the stairs that he had already checked his spam folder a hundred times. Suddenly, Maxi flew at him and scratched his legs (luckily, he was wearing jeans, but even so, he was bleeding). We managed to get her into her ‘safe space’, i.e. my bedroom, where she’d spent the first few days of settling in after adoption and where she had food, water and litter tray all at her disposal. In an hour or so, she’d calmed down and was allowing herself to be stroked by me and my younger son. My older son was scared and went to stay with his dad overnight (and then had to leave for university anyway). That night, she slept curled up right next to me on the pillow, her paw on my arm, as if to apologise for the outburst.
All seemed well again, until the evening of the 7th, when I came back from a day of work in London. She snoozed beside me in my study on the windowsill while I replied to some urgent emails, and then reminded me with a gentle meow about dinner. I followed her down the corridor to prepare her food and suddenly she turned and attacked me, scratching and biting my legs and arms quite badly. This time she did not calm down easily and later tried to attack both me and my younger son again. I had to isolate her once more, and she continued to snarl and lunge at me every time I approached.
I spent most of the intervening days – Thursday to Sunday – speaking to vets and other specialists, reading up on cat behaviour, trying the various remedies they proposed. I acquired plug-ins and sprays, left her to wander freely in and out of the house by leaving the back door open (she has the run of the garden, conservatory and living room, with all her familiar stuff in there), dug out my knee-high boots and improvised elbow-length gloves so that I could feed her and clean out the litter tray without fearing for my life. The first couple of days there was no improvement, but Saturday evening and Sunday morning she seemed calmer. I was aching to give her a second (third?) chance – and perhaps I would have if I were living completely on my own. It really breaks my heart to see how she eagerly runs towards me when called (she learned her new name, Maxi, very quickly) and asks for strokes, fuss and even kisses, even before she pays attention to her food bowl.
I give her plenty of strokes, but with a deep-seated wariness and fear that I can’t shake off. We dan’t let her into the rest of the house, especially since the stairs seem to be the place where she can display her full ninja attacks. My sons, who are as fond of her as I am, have already said that they cannot trust her anymore. The problem is, we don’t know what triggered her aggression and we don’t know when it might happen again. Who would be able to look after her for two weeks in August when we are in Japan? Would we ever be allowed to have visitors in our house again? She is such a confident little creature that there are no warning signs of stress or fear; the changes in behaviour are instantaneous and impossible to predict, 0 to 100 in a split second.
Battersea told us when we adopted her that she’d shown some aggression with her previous owners, but that may have been because they had a dog that she fought with and she hadn’t yet been spayed at the time. In the four months since she was given up for adoption, including the first 7 weeks of her 8 weeks with us, she showed no signs of aggression at all, on the contrary.
I feel like such a failure for not being able to keep her, for being so fearful, for giving up on her. I love her so much, especially after the health scare we’d been through together. She is possibly a little neurodivergent – an ADHD cat, if you will, or perhaps slightly bipolar (I know we cannot project our human conditions onto animals, but whatever the feline equivalent is) – and it feels horrible to put that label on her and think that no one might want to adopt her in the future because of that. As someone who is bipolar myself, it feels particularly cruel. And yet… the tension that I feel when she approaches, the involuntary spasm whenever she moves quickly behind me, the way we eat our meals in our bedrooms so that we don’t disturb her in the living room, the reduction of physical interactions and cuddles to a minimum, the guilt when we see her face peering at us through the glass door to the kitchen… all this is not sustainable and probably not the best quality of life for either side.
Many cat rescues will either not accept or advise one to put down a cat that is not suitable for rehoming, which would really break my heart. As my older son (the one who was attacked first) says: ‘It’s so unfair, she is such a young girl, with so much to give, and a perfect cat for 95% of the time!’ I hope Maxi can find someone experienced with cats and behavioural problems, with a big plot of land where she can roam freely without meeting other cats or dogs and without hearing any loud noises. I am exploring all possible avenues, including possibly removing her canines – not ideal to remove healthy teeth, but certainly preferable to euthanasia. I still believe she is an adorable little girl, with so much love to give… and I just feel heartbroken that I wasn’t the best owner for her.
After losing Barney, Zoe and then having several disappointments while trying to adopt another cat, as well as the anxiety about Maxi’s health soon after we adopted her, I’m beginning to think that I’m just not lucky with cats, although I’ve loved and longed for them all my life.
My favourite picture of Maxi, chilling out to Mozart’s piano sonatas.
The holiday in Yorkshire that I had been looking forward to for months… did not quite work out according to plan. Yes, the landscape was beautiful, and the weather, despite some wuthering gusts of rain, had its sunny moments… but I was felled by migraines and nausea for four of my six full days there. So I returned to the same old work pressures and home repairs pressure with not much rest and just a bit of a backlog.
However, just when you start thinking you must have reached the end of your epic of woes, and that things will start looking up again… something else happens. Something that makes you realise what/who the most important things or people in your life really are.
Suddenly, nothing else, not even insane politics or economic woes, not even my own health, seems to matter as much. Books are my escape, as always, but it’s just endless reading, I don’t have the focus or patience to write any coherent sentences right now.
Ten years ago I started a new personal blog (as opposed to my professional one) and wrote a timid first post, in which I made a promise to myself.
This is where I can be myself, not a mother, not a daughter, not a wife, not a businesswoman. And not a scribbler, but most definitely a writer.
Morita Rieko: Double-flowered camellia tree.
This was not the first time I resolved to be a writer. Aged six, I had decided age that I was going to win the Nobel Literature Prize for Romania, wrote plays for my friends and me to perform (I also directed, earning me the nickname ‘Bossyboots’), stories and novels, diaries, letters, and above all poetry. Throughout secondary school and university, I wrote and wrote, almost always in English, the strongest of my three childhood languages.
But then I started working, often four jobs at once to make ends meet (at first as a school teacher and secretary, later as a university lecturer, private tutor, copyeditor and translator), and my writing fell by the wayside. I went abroad for postgraduate studies, then got married, started working in a completely different and very demanding field, had children, moved jobs, moved countries, became self-employed and worked crazy hours after the children went to bed to establish my business. I was still dreaming of writing creatively at some point, but that point just receded further and further away. I went into creative hibernation for twenty years.
Then, in the autumn of 2011, we moved to Geneva for the second time. After all of the administrative hassle of renovating and renting out our house in the UK, packing and unpacking, settling the children in at school, doing lots and lots of French admin, I found myself stuck at home with nothing much to do. I had lost many of my clients because of my move abroad and had not yet established myself in the new environment. The time to pursue my writing dream was now or never, I felt, especially after I attended the conference of the Geneva Writers’ Group in early 2012.
I jumped in with both feet, set up a blog and a Twitter account, discovered the storytelling site of Cowbird (now an archive) and started writing something every day. I resolved to never allow life to get in the way of my love of writing again.
But life had other plans for me.
The last five years have been all about survival. With hindsight, I wish I had used the previous five years in Geneva mostly for writing, but I hated being dependant on a man for money. So I worked and travelled to exhaustion, put up with all sorts of corporate (and marital) humiliations, only to then watch that money flow into my husband’s pocket during our acrimonious, long-drawn-out divorce. Because I was travelling so much at the time, I felt guilty about neglecting the children, so tried to give them as many happy memories when we were together as I could. My writing once again came last. And guess what? They don’t remember all that much about the years when I was pretending to be happy and doing so much motherly stuff with them, neither the good nor the bad. I’ve often thought what an outstanding husband, father, career man and writer I could have been, with half the amount of effort I put into things because of my gender.
That’s why it doesn’t feel like I have much to show for the ten years of ‘taking writing seriously’. Other than 165K of tweets (and many lost hours), and over 1 million words of blogging. Enough to have written around eleven average novels, countless short stories or poems, but no book to show for any of that. I’ve seen other bloggers become judges for literary prizes, get invited to speak on radio or at literary festivals, interview famous authors. That is not the reason I started this blog, but it’s only human to feel an occasional pang of envy – or of failure – that all that work has not led to more visibility and has settled down to a pleasing but not astonishing number of 4000-5000 views per month. Many years of book reviewing and volunteering for various literary organisations have not led to any startling insights or superb industry contacts or even a job in publishing, even though I was prepared to take a drop in income so I could do the thing I love.
Yes, yes, I know that it’s too easy to focus on the things you have NOT done, so let me remind myself of the things I have achieved. I have 38 publications in print and online journals, although for about 3-4 years I didn’t submit a single thing. I have co-founded a publishing company Corylus Books which is trying, by hook or by crook, to introduce the English-speaking world to a greater variety of languages and countries in crime fiction. I have translated two crime novels (published) and am working on a third, a play and a poem (although I said I would never translate poetry), and am busy pitching other novels to publishers. When I have the time to do it for longer than frantic ten minute bursts, I enjoy the actual writing as much as when I was a child. I have finished the second draft of my first novel and the first draft of my second. Above all, it’s the quality not the quantity of blog readers that really matters. I have made many excellent literary friends via blogging and social media, but also in real life, and they are often the people I consult most nowadays.
All the time, in the background, that relentless tick-tock, the clock being run down. How much longer can I afford to ignore it? No wonder ‘tick, tick… BOOM!’ resonated with me – although it was quite funny to hear the Jonathan Larson character complain that he is nearly thirty and still hasn’t achieved anything. At thirty I was just establishing my career for the second time in a new country after my Ph.D.
It’s been ten years since I vowed to prioritise writing. I never thought I would still be so close to the starting line after ten years. As Tillie Olsen says in her hugely influential work Silences, do I really want to remain mute and let writing die over and over again in me?
Work interrupted, deferred, postponed, makes blockage — at best, lesser accomplishment. Unused capacities atrophy, cease to be. … The habits of a lifetime when everything else had to come before writing is not easily broken, even when circumstances now often make it possible for writing to be first; habits of years — response to others, distractibility, responsibility for daily matters — mark you, become you.
Forgive the self-indulgenct and self-pitying tone of this post. Two years of Covid have brought the fragility and transience of our human lives to the forefront. Call it foolish or egotistic, I will never not be preoccupied with my legacy. I don’t mean my children – they are their own people, and I was never the kind who felt the biological urge to perpetuate my line. I may not have the talent or the single-mindedness to succeed. But when the camellia falls, what is left behind? A blog that will be archived in some corner of the internet? Half-finished projects? A scattering of publications in journals that disappear as quickly as they appear?
A long, long time ago, back in December 2014, I struggled to think of positives for a year that I thought was a particular low for me. How I laugh now at my innocence! Because, in the intervening years, my personal challenges grew and grew, while the world also seemed determined to go through one major crisis after another.
‘There are years that ask questions and years that answer‘, Zora Neale Hurston said once. 2020 has once again been the questioning kind: Are you focusing on the right things? If you were to die tomorrow, what would you leave behind? Is this how you want to be remembered? Tick tock!
So let me start by reminding myself of all the ways in which I’ve been fortunate this year. My children have managed to stay healthy, in spite of the start/infect/ stop/isolate/start again rhythm of schools this past term and the impact it might have on exams. But you know what, life and careers depend on so many things other than exams! They have learnt to be careful and think about others, they have been helpful and sweet… and only occasionally made me lose my temper. I asked them to give me Christmas presents that didn’t involve money but some care and thought, so the younger one baked a cake of my choice, while the older one created a symphony of lights for me in the living room.
I think I might leave this up until March…
My parents are safe, in spite of their age and underlying conditions and the huge distance separating us. Even my mother’s pointed arrows have stopped hitting their target as I get more sentimental at the thought that I might lose them.
I’ve kept my job, although universities are in dire financial straits and are asking for voluntary redundancies. I’ve been able to work from home, which seems particularly sweet when I get the occasional notification about train delays or cancellations on my phone. Even though the hours I’ve gained from commuting seem to have been lost to more and more work.
So no, I have not written King Lear, or baked my own bread, or learnt a foreign language or even worked out every day, but I’ve certainly not had a minute’s boredom either.
At our traditional Christmas party for my local writing group (a Zoom pub crawl this year, obviously), we typically reflect on the past year and see whether we’ve achieved our writing goals. I was pleasantly surprised to see that I had done most of the things I had set out for myself.
Submitting more: 25 submissions, of which 19 rejections, 2 acceptances and the rest in limbo.
Invest in self – allow myself time and space to write. I was going to go on a writing retreat or two, but of course they got cancelled. However, I attended a few workshops, which really helped to kickstart my writing. And I started a daily accountability system with a writing buddy, we are now on Day 202!
Start editing the novel. Yes, and loving it!
Put together the poetry collection. Done – and have been sending it out to a few competitions.
Start publishing company: launch three books in the first year, including my first full-length translation. Well, see below…
We started Corylus Books in one of the worst possible years for independent publishing. Despite no festivals, no big names, no budget, no distributor, we’ve managed to publish four books in our first year, while relying solely on word of mouth recommendations and reviews from those wonderful, blessed people known as book bloggers. A huge, huge thanks to you all! I am delighted to say that both Sword by Bogdan Teodorescu, which I translated from Romanian in a few feverish weeks at the start of 2020, and The Fox by Solveig Pálsdóttir, translated by Quentin Bates, have been praised and incorporated into ‘best of the year’ lists by connoisseurs of crime fiction such as Ian Rankin, Barry Forshaw, Sonja van der Westhuizen, Paul Burke, Ewa Sherman and Crime Fiction Lover.
I am as proud of the authors, readers and reviewers as if they were my family and can only hope that 2021, with its additional Brexit red tape and costs, will not prove to be our downfall. I hope Corylus can continue to focus on bringing good crime books from new authors from lesser-known European languages to the English-speaking world.
At the same time, I have to admit that I am anxious and exhausted, and that this year, on top of so many previous difficult years, has knocked the stuffing out of me a little. But that’s probably true for pretty much all of us, other than the entitled, privileged few who can’t or won’t or don’t need to face reality.
I’ve missed all the plays and exibitions, the literary events and crime festivals, the meeting up with friends, proper holidays somewhere further than thirty minutes away from my front door. These were the things that kept me going and gave me hope for the past six years, but were sadly absent this year. Luckily I’ve found some comfort in books, films and two beautiful cats, at least for a while. I’ve missed having a grown-up nearby to hug and talk to, although I’ve caught up with dear friends from all over the world on Zoom. But I’ve managed to sleep reasonably OK, haven’t had to go back on anti-depressants, haven’t been drinking every single day and have even chosen exercise over hibernation on many occasions. So I call that a HUGE win!
Some of my friends and their relatives have not been so lucky, so I hope that your year has been a reasonable one under the circumstances, and wish with all my heart that 2021 is much gentler, kinder and more hopeful.
I’ll have a separate blog post for my favourite books or cultural events of the decade, but first for something rather personal. It’s been a long, hard old decade for me. I started off with a moribund marriage but tried desperately to keep it alive for another 4 years or so. Then to hide its disintegration from the children for two more years. Then another 3.5 years to finally untangle property and finances. So you can imagine I will not be looking back fondly upon this decade. However, there have been good moments, mostly relating to the five years we spent in my beloved Geneva area.
So I’ll start with my favourite posts from the blog I started in Geneva in February 2012. Not quite 10 years old, but boy, has it accumulated a lot of material! Expect a mammoth post:
The Victor and His Family. This is a bit how this decade has felt like for me.
Before I started this blog, I had a professional blog for my business as a coach and trainer for all matters intercultural. Some of the posts were quite business-like, but some wittered on about expat experiences and my family. Here are a few posts that bring back fond memories:
I wanted to close this post with a picture of the Mont Blanc peak, which has been such a huge part of my decade. But when I did a search for Mont Blanc through my saved pictures, I found this special edition Virginia Woolf pen by Mont Blanc instead…
Have I set myself up for failure in October, by taking on too many things?
Possibly.
The reason for that is that October is my quietest month at work. The students have come back, my colleagues are very busy, so no one has time for my training courses and webinars. Although I am preparing some behind-the-scenes improvements, it is not as busy as the summer period, when I had no holiday at all. On the personal front as well, things start falling into place after the back to school frenzy. So the plan was to take some days off, but just stay home, rest, tidy up my study, focus on reading and writing.
The reality is…
I’ll be visiting my parents in Romania toward the end of the month (apparently to discuss funeral arrangements and elder care issues, so that will be fun!), plus it’s an opportunity to get some of the boys’ paperwork done so they can get Romanian passports. I also have additional paperwork to prepare and check, as right after we return from Romania, I will be appearing in court for financial settlement in this never-ending divorce case. [For all the wimps who shout ‘Get Brexit Done!’ and cannot handle 3.5 years of Brexit negotiations, they should try 4-5 years of divorce negotiations!] I’ll also be helping out a friend by looking after her children while she is away on a business trip, so cooking for six instead of three and four different schools to handle instead of just two. The last of the admin type issues I’m tackling this month involves something more joyful: it’s still secret and very early stages, but let me just say it might involve a translation of books from Romanian type project.
Joyful though my cultural and social events are, I seem to have agreed to an awful lot of them this month: from the Kenneth Branagh Awards at the Windsor Fringe Festival, to films, plays, opera, taking my son to Duke of Edinburgh Awards-related events, quiz night at my son’s school, the very last university open day (I hope)… as well as trying to go to the gym regularly.
Last but not least, my cup of joyful reading is in danger of running over too. Switzerland in October is a-go, I’ve already read the first (disappointingly un-Swiss) book by Pascale Kramer and have now embarked on Ramuz. Then there is the 1930 Book Club, for which I am very tempted to re-read Camil Petrescu’s Last Night of Love, First Night of War, a Romanian classic. I might feel differently about him and the book now, after reading how he behaved to Mihail Sebastian in the late 1930s. October is also the Orenda month, and I cannot go past it without picking up at least one (or two) of their most recent books! I am also continuing to read the ‘one entry a day’ readalong for Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries on the Mookse and Gripes site and am trying to stay clear of the temptation to reread Proust in preparation for Backlisted Pod’s Christmas special. The #EU27Project needs to finally conclude at some point. Plus, that pesky library keeps pestering me with some China Mieville, Iain Banks and Nicola Barker books that I also want to read…
What I absolutely must do, even if it comes at the expense of anything else on the above list, is edit my poems and start putting them together for a chapbook. The need for artistic ‘selfishness’ has become obvious, as this article on the dangers of kindness points out.
Why can’t I learn to relax like Zoë (pronounced Zo-eh, with trema, as my boys keep pointing out, rather than Zoey)?
It’s ironic, isn’t it? I often complain that people nowadays are incapable of talking to each other without a device to mediate between them. I despise people who bring their phones wherever they go… and actually answer them or check messages while they are having lunch or dinner with you. I can happily live without a single glance online while on holiday, surrounded by my physical books, good food, stunning landscapes – with only a minor urge to immortalise that moment in a photograph. I advocate (or should that be nag?) that families should unplug from the internet and spend more time together.
But then our internet and phone connection fails completely and I go mad with rage. My dear online friend, fellow crime lover, academic and author Margot Kinberg wrote a post about this very recently.
The meltdown is not instant, you understand.
The first day, I’m quite relieved to be untraceable. I happily finish a book (or two) guilt-free, write my WIP with relish. The second day, I even take on additional tasks which have been put off for far too long: tidying out wardrobes and the garage. I bake cakes with my sons and try to keep snails as pets in a glass jar. Yes! Quality time!
By the third day, I miss the companionship of Twitter and blogs, but I can just about live with it. And yes, before you ask, it IS different from being offline during a holiday, because it’s not my own decision. It’s being forced upon me, and I have no idea how long it will last, so cannot make plans.
On the fourth day, I start to feel incredibly isolated and frustrated, especially when the calls on my mobile to the internet service provider Numericable prove fruitless. Did I tell you that mobile reception is rubbish in my house, so I have to either hang halfway out the window in the bedroom upstairs, stand in a corner of the garden where my neighbours can hear every word, or be on hold for 20 minutes with outrageous Swiss roaming charges? (We live on the border, and sometimes the Swiss signal is far stronger than the French one).
McDonald’s to the rescue…
Yes, yes, first world problems, I can see you roll your eyes just now. I’ve done it myself in the past. I’ve had to remind myself of others who’ve fled home with no belongings, perhaps no families, only their lives and a few memories. I came across a woman in one of the McDonald’s I found refuge in, who gave me a bit of reality check: left penniless after an acrimonious divorce, living in a part of France with high unemployment, she had made her way to this part of the world, in the hope of finding a job in or near Geneva. She was sleeping in her car, having a shower at the swimming pool and applying for jobs online while nursing a cup of coffee for hours at McDo. Life could be worse.
Of course, my parents live happily without a landline, internet or computer. But they are retired, live in the countryside, walk daily to the marketplace to buy their food and newspapers, and spend most of the day in the garden. They also forget to take their mobile with them into the garden, so I seldom can reach them during the day. They don’t even have a proper aerial for their TV, so can only watch one channel, shaky at that.
So, yes, life like that is possible and undoubtedly very peaceful.
I have it neither so good, nor so bad as some others.
I merely have to move a family, a household full of goods, a cat and some broken pieces of myself back to the UK this summer. All I need to do is ensure a smooth handover of schools, orthodontists, doctors, banks, utilities companies… well, I don’t need to go on about this, you all have experienced a move, and I’ve done it many times before, so I could handle it if I could do my research online and then phone. But I can do neither.
If I were like this, maybe I could spread myself all over and please all people…
In the meantime, all the usual end of school year craziness is amplified, because it is the LAST one EVER (I am using my teenage son’s emphatic style), and they also want to have farewell parties and birthday parties and do memorable things which you’d always meant to do, as well as return to all their favourite places in the area to say goodbye. No matter how often I repeat to myself: ‘You can’t make everyone happy. You are not chocolate’, I still fall into the trap of trying, partly because of the guilt about disrupting the children’s life by moving again.
Just to add to the mess, there are a couple of deadlines for writing competitions, debut novels or debut poetry chapbooks which I want to make sure that I don’t miss. Besides, I do also have a day job, even if it’s become nearly invisible of late. I’m supposed to facilitate a few courses in mid-June, but so far have been unable to access the (very large) files, because public WiFi does not like Dropbox and other such sharing platforms. Ironically, one of the courses is on working in virtual teams…
In fact, life is full of irony at the moment. I could share such funny stories with you! How I sit in a car outside someone’s house because I know they don’t have a security key on their WiFi (this must be illegal in at least 50 countries). How I buy a cup of coffee (although I don’t really want another one) in a neighbourhood café and sit down with a sigh for an action-packed morning of work, only to discover that their own WiFi isn’t working. How I then rush back to McDonald’s, where the lady at the counter already knows I avoid their coffee and prefer a smoothie (why do they no longer provide their classical strawberry milkshake, for heaven’s sake?). I can never stay for more than an hour there, before it gets too busy and noisy at lunchtime, or all day really, as there are construction sites just outside, cleaning staff mopping underneath your feet in the morning, team meetings in the ‘quiet’ corner in the afternoon. I could share with you strategies for switching on/off/on/off even at these public WiFi spots, so that the simplest cut and paste from a Word document to a website only takes five times longer than it should, instead of ten times.
Why don’t you buy some temporary internet access via your mobile phone? Why don’t you use your neighbours’ networks? I’ve been asked all that. The answer is that you awake each day with renewed belief that today is the day when the problem will be fixed. You are not told from the beginning that it will take 3 weeks (or more?). Unless you are my older son, who had his own meltdown about not being able to use his tablet to search for film reviews or cheat sheets for video games. Now he gloomily predicts that internet will never come back until we go to England.
Image courtesy of 247homerescue.co.uk
I can also write a film script for a farce about how my neighbours felt sorry for me and gave me the key to their house to use their WiFi, but forgot to switch off their alarm. To make things worse, the key was for the cellar door, so I looked doubly sneaky, but luckily, I was spotted trying to smuggle a laptop into the house, rather than out of it. The second time I try this, having been told the alarm is most definitely off now, I discover the key doesn’t actually turn in the lock.
I could also tell you the classic tale of Cinderella after everyone went to the ball. How I sat at home all day waiting for the engineer to come and fix this problem, biting my cuticles, not wanting to start any serious writing for fear of being interrupted, popping out the front door at the sound of every car or even bicycle, only to be stood up like a wallflower. Of course, it was then reported back to HQ that he did come to our address, but there was no one home and the phone (yes, the one that hasn’t had a dial tone in 3 weeks) was engaged.
Oh, so many potential sources of Mr. Beanish confusions! Being held up at the border in the UK because I have not filled in the right forms for our cat. The French Tax Office sending a Jean Reno in Leon look-alike professional to shoot me for not filling my tax returns in time (which, from this year on, can only be done online). How I will wing it for the workshops, having never seen the slides before that day: ‘Oh, look, and that’s another thing I should be talking about, but I don’t know what it means!’ Last but not least, a domestic noir brief about a wife murdering a husband who not only doesn’t shoulder any of the burden (other than to murmur supportively that he misses watching BBC iPlayer and Netflix), but actually forwards you (via email) the one and only enquiry you get from posting a few sales items on his company intranet, because you have not had much joy with Facebook sales postings even when you could access them daily. Why? It was in French, of course, and one can’t be expected to speak any French after studying it in high school over twenty years ago and living in France for 8 years in total.
Some day in the distant, rosy horizon of a future where all our thoughts can be uploaded instantly and transmitted to whom we like, when we like and only if we like, without depending on any cables or optic fibres or the people who put them in the ground, and without any ‘oops, wrong button’ moments…
Some day, when Numericable company bosses will have died a slow and agonising death, not before paying out a large compensation to all those unhappy customers who have not been able to do their work or live their lives for so many weeks…
Some day, when this madness will have passed, when your health and sanity will have returned, when husbands will have been buried and courts will have been clement because you had ample provocation…
Some day, this too shall pass and seem hilarious! Until then… ohmmmmm….
I finally worked up my courage to write this post after reading Matt Haig’s outstanding book ‘Reasons to Stay Alive’ and David Mark’s article a few days ago about access to mental health services in the UK.
Image from socialworktutor.com
‘Well, the blood tests seem fine. It’s just age – you’re not getting any younger, you know.’
And my French family doctor smiles ruefully, as if to apologise for being so ridiculously young and glamorous in the face of my galloping infirmity. I had been complaining of weight gain, migraines, insomnia, lack of energy, occasional palpitations. She suspects menopause or a shade of hypochondria.
I cannot complain that she is not helpful. After all, I am not entirely honest with her as a patient. I am reluctant to share my whole story, and not just because I fear breaking down in tears and using up all of the tissues from the box she has so thoughtfully placed on her desk. I also fear being labelled, once and for all, as mentally deficient or unstable or somehow missing that even keel that most people seem to be able to find. If most people can balance on choppy waters and tack against strong winds, why can’t I?
My mother tells me off each time we speak on the phone: ‘You’re just too bloody sensitive. It’s all in your head. Stop dwelling on things.’ This comes amidst many other helpful suggestions on how to fight obesity, be a better parent, earn more money and be more docile, loving wife. Unsurprisingly, our telephone conversations often end in shouting matches, so are becoming less and less frequent. But I fear she may be right (about the sensitivity bit) and I chide myself for being so weak, so helpless.
The other thing I fear is being given pills to dull my senses and make me gain even more weight. Pills speak of lifelong dependency rather than a temporary measure: it’s about acknowledging a long-term condition rather than a momentary blip in the system. Visions of 1984 hover in the sidelines. Fears of being sanitised and lobotomised swim towards me like shark fins. How will I be able to keep up with my children’s sprightly chatter and constant requests if I am dull as a cow laid out in pastures with grass too high for her to comprehend?
When I was younger, the periods of grim depression beset me mainly in winter, and were offset by manic bursts of activity for the rest of the year. As I get older, those moments of frenetic energy have become too strenuous and it’s greyness evermore. Everything is slowed down to the point of unbearable. I cannot think of more than one thing at a time and I’m forever forgetting what I was supposed to be searching for, where I left my papers, whether I’ve paid a bill or not. I leave everything for later because it is too difficult to do immediately or today or tomorrow or … soon. I get caught out without winter tyres when the snow begins to fall, so my car lurches and sloshes from kerb to ditch.
A sunny day makes me want to crawl under the duvet. You don’t even want to know or imagine what a rainy day makes me feel like. Above all, I want to dig my nails into my flesh, to escape this inner pain which seems to find no release, day after day after day.
When the self-pity has had its play with me, guilt and sneering take their turn. Middle-class ‘woman of leisure’ problems! The world is burning and this here woman can think of naught else but combing her hair! There are hundreds of people starving or dying or losing their homes all over the world at this very moment, while I’m boo-hooing about getting old, failing to live out my childish dreams of being a writer and an academic, being stuck to a faithless husband who doesn’t understand me – the oldest cliché in the book -, children grunting their way towards their teens, a family life which seems as alien to me as if I’d been parachuted somewhere in Papua New Guinea. Only the cargo cults don’t worship me – they despise and can’t wait for my ship to sail away.
My shepherd ancestors – tough cookies one and all – would despise my whingeing. They witnessed the rise and fall of empires, tyrants, wars, forced collectivisation, betrayals in the name of the fatherland or the Communist ideal or simply greed for one’s neighbour’s land or herd. ‘Life is hard, yes, but grit your teeth and carry on! Don’t expect anyone to help, love or understand you. Go up the mountains, all by yourself, find some peace and a mountain stream.’
But I’ve always been a weak urban sapling. The mountains I climbed, the streams that I found, I wanted to rejoice in them with others. I needed to believe that someone cared, that I could be my anxious, failing self and still be respected and loveable. Now I know that all love is conditional. And compassion is not an endlessly renewable source of water. Sharing is a weakness and each one of us is alone – that is the only thing we can count on in life.
‘My therapy is writing and reading,’ I used to say in my twenties with a faraway look in my eyes, hoping I resembled Emily Dickinson rather than Sylvia Plath, Jane Austen rather than Virginia Woolf. But, in truth, it has become more reading than writing now. How can I give voice to my grief and doubts without becoming annoyed with my privileged, spoilt self? How can I deal with the confetti of time left after anxieties, night sweats, endless To Do lists, yet another last-minute catch-up for work, yet another change of plan regarding parents’ evening? What words (other than swear words) will come when I tremble with fury after yet another point-scoring conversation drowning in logical circles? I cannot trust my own thoughts, my own words. I have to feed on the words (and pain and grapplings) of others. It gives me perspective, it makes me feel less alone.
Meanwhile, other than my compulsive reading, all I can do is flounder and flail. Now I understand my childhood nightmare of drowning. It was in fact not water but ash and sand in my mouth. The struggle to appear normal and smiley. The need to carry on.
JK Simmons receiving his Oscar, photo by John Shearer by AP Photo.
Warning: this post is incredibly loud and extremely personal. Viewers of a more generalist or nervous disposition should skip ahead to the next book review.
I heard that, with small exceptions, the Oscars ceremony on Sunday night was overly long and dull. I was never planning to watch it and was only mildly interested in the winners. [I have only seen 2-3 of the films across all nominated categories, most of them on airplanes, such is my social life]. But I struggled downstairs with a terrible migraine, so got to see live reactions on Twitter to the music, the surprise awards, the speeches.
Ah, the speeches! Some of them were political, rebellious, personal, memorable… good for them. Typical acceptance speeches, of course, are all about gratitude, acknowledgement and thanks to collaborators and supporters. ‘I thank my parents, my spouse, my children, my dog…’
What to do, however, if those nearest and dearest are not at all supportive? I’ve written about it before. I’ve written a poem about it from the point of view of the supportive (and hitherto neglected) spouse. I’m not going to repeat myself. I don’t want to whine. I’ll just share with you a collection of anecdotes. Some of them are personal, some of them have been told to me by others. I suspect there is a glint of universality in most of them.
I really, really want to become a writer. All my teachers tell me I have talent. — What a waste of your intellectual capacities! You could do so many other things. Do that as a hobby, once you have got a good job under your belt, such as medicine or economics.
I did get to study what I was passionate about: languages and then anthropology. I even briefly got to work as an academic, but … it’s not like social sciences are real sciences, right? Surely an academic job in real science takes precedence. Why don’t you find a nice portable job, that you can take with you wherever you have to go to follow your husband?
This consultancy job is taking off, and you may be paid three times as much as your spouse, but it’s not really conducive to family life, is it? If you want to raise happy children, shouldn’t you find something more part-time, more flexible, even if it’s lower paid?
Patricia Arquette’s rousing speech on gender equality. Photo from the Daily Mail.
Oh, come off it, being a trailing spouse isn’t that bad, is it? So you had to quit your job, but just look at your lifestyle in what is considered one of the most livable cities in the world! You can meet your lady friends for coffee and lunch, you can go to the gym, or, better still, explore the lovely nature surrounding you. You’ve got time on your hands, such a luxury! Lonely – psha! You can Skype your friends and family anytime. Anyone would envy you!
What do you mean, you want to start your own business? But who is going to handle all the organisational things this family needs? After all, you’re the only one who can speak the language…
What do you mean, you want to cut back on your work to focus on your writing? Writing will never pay the bills. If you’re not the next J K Rowling, you might as well not bother. Focus on your real job – just don’t travel so much with it. I can’t handle the kids all day – there’s very little time to do anything while they are in school.
OK, sure, honey, I’m supportive. When are you going to finish that book? Why are you wasting time on poetry? What have you been doing all day, why are you so tired? When are you going to get your book contract? Why should I go to the parents’ evening instead of you, so you can write – haven’t you had enough time during the day?
Marion Cotillard in 2008. Photo: Digital Spy.
This past weekend I had good news. After years of unseen labour and cold showers, I had very positive and personalised feedback about my writing from editors and agents at a conference organised by the Geneva Writers’ Group. They encouraged me to keep going, to finish my second novel as quickly as possible and to send it to them. Yes, I know there’s a long, hard road still ahead of me, that there are no guarantees. But it’s that first step, and so much better than I had ever allowed myself to hope for.
I come home in a disbelieving, golden haze, basking in their warm words. I open the door very nearly breathless, eager to celebrate with my loved ones, bring out the bugles, roll out the red carpet, open the champagne. Instead, I don’t even get the question: ‘So, how did it go?’
I’m realistic about the attention span and degree of empathy of little boys. In my exuberance, I pour out my joy regardless… but soon get bogged down in dinner questions, homework completed, cooking, setting the table and preparing schoolbags for the first day back after the holidays. I get to hear about levels completed on Super Mario Galaxy during my absence, while the older ‘child’ barely raises his head from his phone to listen to my anecdotes about the day. I expect to be brought down to earth by family commitments and daily life – but not necessarily a ball and chain weighing me down just as I am soaring.
Finally, at supper, I open a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé that I’ve been keeping for special occasions and say, ‘Here’s to me!’ as we clinked our glasses.
‘Oh,’ replies my supportive spouse, ‘Why you?’
This is whom I’m going to mention in my acceptance speech:
findingtimetowrite 