“There’s no rule on how it is to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly. Sometimes it is like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.”
Ernest Hemingway
It’s been really easy to let the days pass by with the doing of the things. Time can pass so swiftly and, before you even know it, it is the end of the day of good intentions, where you are surrounded by chocolate wrappers and fighting sleep into the wee small hours to watch the last moments of a streamed TV series you’ve just binged. No productivity, having only the unsatisfactory sensation of having lost the time without even feeling it.
In the warm the time passes on a glacial but heat-stifled gauge during the days, until the sudden realisation that the sweeping in of darkness is when they call time at the nearby public house. Even sat at a desk in front of your keyboard in the sunlight leads to easy distraction – my mind often tethers itself to the lone cloud in the sky, soaring beyond the horizon with my attention. I’m learning even a brightly coloured top can prove a distraction to my brain, the reflection in the screen alarming to my eyes as I push through to see the display beyond and it becomes difficult to reign myself back in and push on.
This is where discipline comes in. You have to sit down and just write. Just get on with it. I have made the space of my desk and tidied, then re-tidied the area. I just have to write.
Just write.
Hemingway was right. Some times it flows easily. A few weeks ago, after fitful and anxious sleep, I woke and felt an urge to sit and write. I was emotional about the passage of time and, feeling myself so very small and powerless in the forward torrent of time, I was able to anchor myself and weave the upset into words. It flowed and was release. Happy enough with the piece that emptied itself from my fear, I took courage and put the story forward for a competition.
At the moment I have set aside my drilling equipment and I’m having to lay the charges. Not an idea to be seen and all efforts feel disingenuous and full of artifice. But I am writing.
As long as I have the passion enough to get up each day and sit down before the computer screen, to open the file and to set down words to tell a story, even if it is just my story, it is enough. It is all I can ask of myself.
I’m finding myself often sitting and gazing at my now four month old twin daughters.
They already seem so big already. I am right there, close by each day and already I feel like I am missing out on so much. It is all passing by so quickly, their faces shifting in shape from newborn to the chubby faces of their age, almost between blinks. Every minute they seem to pick up fragments of personality, new skills, onwards towards the next stage. Sometimes I find myself, as they cry in my arms through no other cause than tiredness, looking at them warmly and steadily with rapt love, so aware that this stage will be over all too soon.
Their older siblings make things no easier. My biggest girl, my first born and for so long my little side-kick, is moving through the years at school at an alarming pace, becoming more and more independent and I’m painfully aware I’ve missed so much. Ever since my first period of maternity leave for her I have worked full time, often with overtime, to allow our life of the two of us to continue forward with security. I’ve missed school performances, despite my best efforts, and exhaustion has often meant I’ve not been entirely present for so much of our free time. That realisation, that admission, is devastating.
Recently, ever aware of time passing me by, I’ve started to fret that I’m not remembering enough. I find myself desperately trying to soak up the detail of each moment, trying to hold down every sensation – how the light falls across the babies smiles, how their skin feels on mine, the exact sound of their coos. These are the details of the times I will have to use to sustain me when I have to be away from them, as they put these early months behind them, develop and grow.
In this second maternity leave, I find myself dreading my return to work. I’m equally cursed and blessed you see. A well paying job but having to sacrifice time with my babies to make it work. All the security, but so little time to be with the very thing I am working for.
I know, it’s rare these days for anyone to have the luxury of staying at home to see their children grow up and it might as well be a pipe dream. It is what everyone would have, would that they could. But some people do – don’t they – they have the best of both worlds? Security and the time to make the most of precious moments?
This, surely, is something I can make work? I am creative, I seem to be able to write things people want to read. Would this be even possible? I have ideas for novels, for books, for projects. What would it take for me to advance this in a real way to try and make our dreams come true?
It started with a simple dream, a hammock under a tree…
What’s left when you draw back all the stuff?
Stuff. It’s a bind isn’t it. I’ve been accumulating it like lint for years. I’ve never been wealthy. Much like everyone else just modest gains in income, but roughly breaking even each month after consumerist drives have led me to the acquisition of a cool what-not, the must have doo-dad or the pretty, shiny thing. Stuff that keeps me in the exact same position I’ve been in all my life – treading water.
Don’t get me wrong – it’s a fortunate comatose position to be in – but lord knows it’s a waste of a life if stuff is all you have to show for it at the end.
In finding the boy, my soulmate (a concept I never believed in, much less daring to hope he was an actual, real person) I found a real dream. First mooted as a donkey sanctuary, where I could rest my weary head in a pretty, flower covered straw hat, it evolved into the simple idea of a house in a wood with a hammock. Security and a home in which to go the long way round for coffee (coffee via stopping for a kiss naturally). We wanted a home where we could run as close to self sufficiency as we could – green energy, harvested water and a garden to eat. We didn’t want for much, just a simple and quiet life spent with our babies and each other.
But, over the last year this dream has seemed to become ever distant with the pressures of work, the new challenges of housing a family which all of a sudden was being added to by two new girls and trying to accommodate the wants and desires of our older, more vocal brood. With these pressures come little oddities. The need for “spoiling” ourselves which, roughly translated, was just spending money on a takeaway, or two, or more a week – because of convenience and exhaustion. Little treats to myself included buying books, many of which are on a pile of books that I continue to have little time to read; items for the babies – often which are not needed but that I wish to have just in case; objets- little bits of art, ephemera and, for the want of a better word, tat; finally food – spending on what I fancied at the time rather than engaging in the tedious exercise of packed lunches or cooking what I had in (which in turn has led to obscene levels of waste.
As I say, although I’ve had the luxury of being able to sustain these behaviours, I’m not wealthy and it has been just enough. The boy, bless his heart, has quietly and without comment left me to this wasteful waistrel approach to my disposable income whilst using all his earnings to support our family and to ensure he is able to drive the many miles to collect his children each weekend. He has no space in that to treat himself.
But this accumulation of stuff has brought us no closer to the dream of hammocks by a house in the woods. It has simply given us more things to move, more things to dust and less freedom to make our modest dream come true.
I can’t even tell you where my attachment to things began, but it has been a long standing fixation it seems. I remember being a precious child about the tea chest of toys I had. My mother couldn’t afford much when we were growing up – until I was two she was a single mum, having given birth to me at 18 years old – even with the support of my adoptive father as he became – we didn’t have much for many years. Even so, I had an old tea chest, enterprisingly coated in a piece of poly-vinyl faux matt leather, about a foot and a half cubed (I recall emptying it out and sitting within it – a toy that held toys). It was full of toys – some home made such as the full wardrobe of Sindy clothes lovingly produced by my mother and aunt – many second hand or donated to us – with the rest made up of the biannual occasion of new toys at Christmas and birthdays. All in all my parents did well for us on a limited budget. The point of this segue into nostalgia is that I would cherish each and every fragment in that tea chest – right down to the broken bits in the bottom – and would never cede an item when it came to being persuaded that some of it had to go.
This continued into my adolescence when I became increasingly precious about stuff. I’d walk a portion of my two bus route across town to school to save the fare and would take to spending it on things in charity shops along the route. Things only ramped up when I remained at home and went to uni for a year, a squandered period in which I invested my student loan in clothes, things and going out – further supplementing my habit with money from my part time job. As I embarked on a career aged 20 – already with a substantial cache of crap – I left home and continued to buy, buy, buy unfettered by the criticism of my parents.
I moved several times, each time hauling a greater and greater quantity of things, moved in with partners and broke up with partners. I never allowed the disposal of more than a handful of items each time. It wasn’t until, after one break up which meant I had to store all my earthly belongings in my parents garage and my precious stuff was destroyed by a fire, that my collection was reduced.
I remember a friend of my mother’s remarking at the time that, although devastating to me, it would be liberating in the long run. I didn’t see it like that then, especially as I was aware of that friend’s own attachment to things, so I picked up where I left off.
By the time I met my future ex-husband I had less stuff and it wasn’t until our marriage fell apart and I moved out that I realised how little I had. I remember moving into my own flat for the first time, the first property I had ever owned, and scraping together what free furniture I could to put in it so my then toddler daughter and I could build a home. From this starting point I dedicated myself to filling that place, taking my solo earnings and investing them as and when I could, with pieces of second hand furniture and new bits and bobs. I did so and by the time I met the boy I had once again stuffed a space with things. Fortunately, due to his own disasters, he came with very little, so once again I got away with maintaining the collection. He even diligently moved all of this when it came to moving into a bigger house, which circumstances meant could only be a rental property, literally filling the house with all this stuff.
The time has now come where, with the arrival of our twins, any gains I’ve made in savings are being put into the luxury of maintaining my maternity leave. The dream is no closer and I have to reflect on my role, or lack of therein, in that. I cannot change my income situation and the boy does his thing to just try and keep the plates spinning. I’m certainly in no need of handouts and would not accept them – so I have to think of what I can do to change these circumstances.
In honest reflection it means I have to deal with the stuff and my need for the stuff. It has to make a contribution to our lives or it has to go and contribute for its previous upkeep by being sold. It is of such volume I’m not even certain where to start, but go it must and not for any sort of zen, tackling the clutter reason. I have to accept that my attachment to things stands between us and a dream.
Now, the last time I did a silly minded challenge to self was in ridding myself of a wardrobe full of clothes in 2016 – what a ludicrously decadent thing to be able to do – but it meant I was able to shake off my fast fashion habit (chronicled at my Quiet Radicals blog).
I’m giving myself a year, yet again, a year to turn it around. I’ve no expectation of that meaning by this time next year we’ll be ensconced in our house in the woods. What I’m aiming for is a turnaround in my behaviour and laying a foundation to make that dream a reality, to save (for) that dream.
Just Real Ruby 