What the hell am I doing here?

What happened to all this free time I was supposed to have once both children were in full time education? Even before my youngest had got her uniform and book bag, I'd transferred to the full time degree course, filling up the next two years before I could say Geoffrey Chaucer. I'm the same with money; I've spent it before I have it. Never in credit. I would have filled (wasted) the time anyway; I like being busy. So much for having weekends to spend with the family. I've just spent most of it reading Sir Gawain and The Green Knight and trying to understand the Middle English. And then I spent Sunday afternoon trying to free my father from his bathroom. But that's another story involving unidentified spare keys, jumping over fences, shouting through windows of empty bathrooms (he was stuck in the ensuite) and a pair of tweezers.

So now I have to get my head around Sylvia Plath and Bret Easton Ellis, with some difficulty as my mind is still full of knights in shining armour, headless horsemen and married noblewomen offering themselves to young knights while their husbands are out hunting.

I really enjoyed The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. It wasn't anywhere near as depressing as I thought it would be. It's a witty, unsentimental account of a young girl's spiralling depression. And no traumatic reason for the depression; proving that you don't have to have a reason.

Although it is fiction and was originally published in the UK under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, it was undoubtedly based on Plath's life. But what struck me as disturbing was that she killed herself shortly after it was published. And she was only 30. I couldn't get that out of my mind while I was reading it. The mother in me thinks about her young children being left without their mum.

I could relate to this book; I have had anxiety and depression on and off since my late teens and spent most of my late twenties and early thirties 'in therapy'. There have been times where I've thought a stay in a mental institution would equate to a bit of holiday; being devoid of responsibility and getting a good meal (my appetite never dwindled in my depression). But it wasn't a feeling that lasted long enough to be put into fruition. I remember the anxiety I always felt towards the end of a course of psychotherapy or cognitive behavioural therapy; being scared of 'going it alone'.

I'd never read much of Plath, but The Bell Jar made me want to plough through my poetry anthologies looking for her work; looking for answers in her writing: 'why did you want to die so young?'

***

Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis was uncomfortable and compelling. I'm old enough to remember the materialistic glitz of the 80's. Big perms, shoulder pads and power-dressing. As a teenager in the 80's, I can remember being impressed by the Hollywood image of being young, rich, good looking and driving down Sunset Boulevard in a Ferrari 308 GTS. I wanted to be American. I wanted to be in Beverly Hills.

Now I'm older, I see things very differently. I got annoyed at Clay and his friends. These privileged kids have everything, but are deprived of emotion. What's the point of all that opportunity if you're going to snort it up your nose? (I would have written a very different response fifteen years ago when I thought gonzo journalism was an ideal career option. However, it apparently wasn't appropriate for the Dudley News.)

As for some of the more controversial descriptions in Brett Easton Ellis's account of 80's Los Angeles, I've already been desensitised by reading A.M Home's The End of Alice last year. Where do you go from there?

***

The writing exercise for Reading and Writing the Self's seminar this week is to pick out a memory we'd written about and fictionalise it. I thought distancing myself from my own reality would be easier, but for some reason it's not. I'm limited in my choice of memories and I've only written about the day mum died in specific detail, and now I've written it as a true account, I don't see the point of turning it into fiction. If it had been the other way around and I wrote a fictionalised version first, it may have been easier then to go on re-writing it as myself, as if it were a rehearsal for the real thing.

I do want to work with this particular memory, but I'm not sure how different it would be as a fictional story. However, what if I was a child in the same situation, struggling to understand what was happening?

 

 

Perhaps it’s time I opened up

My youngest daughter has started school full-time today. This is it. This is where I find the part of me which has been lying dormant for six years. I can now get 'me' back. Whatever that is. I'm not sure I know me anymore. I have become a lot more focussed since having children. I have learned how valuable free time is and you grab it where you can, before other responsibilities take over your time and the space in your head. I can now put a lot more hours into studying. This will make a change from snatched hours here and there; between breaking up fights over Barbies, Lego and Play-Doh; sorting out hair and clothes crises (they start young these days); washing and cooking for my family and for the constant stream of foreign students who stay with us while they learn English. I still have to walk the dog, but at least I'm not bribing a four-year-old with the promise of sweets if we do one more lap of the park.

Thinking back to the class last Thursday, I found myself wondering why I was so guarded when we did an exercise to write down the different slices of ourselves. My list consisted mainly of jobs I've had. These weren't even fabulous careers I couldn't wait to show off. They were just jobs. 'Mother' was listed way down and I didn't even touch on the various roles that make up being a mum. When I heard other people's lists, I realised I didn't write anything emotional about myself at all. I hid behind a few job titles and left out the rest. At first I thought I was being a bit thick. But I've had enough psychotherapy (here we go, I'm opening up) to know that my natural instinct is to avoid revealing myself too early. Perhaps I'll go much deeper when I write about a recent memory. I'm still deciding which one. How recent is recent? To me, 15 years ago is fairly recent. But to some of the younger students in our group, that would be as far as their memories go back.

I've been very distracted this week by the five-year-old girl in the news who went missing from outside her home in Wales. April Jones was the same age as my eldest daughter and their smiles are similar. What is so wrong with society that you can't let a young child play with her friends outside her own house? Machynlleth is a small town in Powys, with a population of just over 2,000 (as measured in the 2001 Census). That's not a lot of people. Everyone must know everyone. It is the last place you'd expect something like this to happen. You shouldn't have to watch them every second of the day. Once they start school you have to start trusting other people.

The times I've let mine wander off a bit further out of reach, possibly a little out of sight in our local park. It's fairly wide open with an enclosed playground in one corner. My thinking has been that they're fairly sensible, they won't talk to strangers. Then they always come back, feeling proud that they have been trusted to be grown up. It's okay there's some other parents nearby. I don't know them, but I've seen them at the school. They have children; they won't let anything happen to them, will they? On the BBC's website, it reported: About 500 children under 16 are abducted each year - but the majority of these are parental abductions, according to the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop). It's extremely rare for children to be abducted by strangers, so who do we trust? How paranoid does a parent have to be to keep their child safe?

Back to the recent memory. I'm still thinking about this. I lived in a garage for a while; perhaps I could elaborate on that? This memory came up as I'm writing in our sun lounge (fancy lean-to and there's no sun) at the moment. The Writing Room is still out of commission. And it suddenly struck me that the garage I lived in with my boyfriend really wasn't much bigger than the sun lounge, maybe just a little wider.

Writing Rooms and Good Parenting Tips

I have my own Writing Room. It was partly the reason we chose this house. A spare room in the attic where I could write any time I wanted. Five years on, it’s still a junk room with a computer somewhere in the corner. It was tidy for a couple of days and I made the most of it by using it to write a short story about a girl who slowly turns into a marionette puppet. Then it soon returned to the purgatory for household items and clothes which we can’t quite throw away. The room has now become so inaccessible that I have bought a laptop so I can write anywhere else, but the Writing Room.

So I sit on the bed next to an antique writing desk, where not a single word has been written. This is partly because I don’t have a stool or chair to go with it. At the moment I have to sit on the bed and lean forward at a 45˚ angle. It’s currently home to the laptop, a pile of books on medieval literature, sunglasses, my daughter’s pink hair clips, The Little Book of Cockney Rhyming Slang, a duster, a lace scarf and a copy of Camberwell Beauty by Jenny Eclair. In between these objects is a light covering of dust, highlighted by the afternoon sun.

My husband has taken the girls out to ‘give mum some peace’. The closest I get to silence is the dog snoring and low level Tinnitus, leftover from a particularly bad ear infection. Even so, I usually end up falling asleep. Today has been different. I feel I’m ‘in the zone’. I have spent three hours deciphering The Miller’s Tale in Middle English and I’m now wondering what it would be like to speak Middle English and perhaps write some kind of time-travelling thriller/horror. Cadfael meets Life on Mars with a sinister twist?

I have been reading ‘I Remember’ by Joe Brainard, which almost reads like prose poetry. I have found it quite inspiring and will try something like it myself to trigger memories and see what comes out of it. We did a similar exercise in the poetry module in Stage 1. I like its style. The lack of details say so much more than the actual words.

4pm. I’m now reading an excerpt from Jeanette Winterson’s ‘Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit.’ I’ve come to the conclusion it’s an advantage to have crazy parents if you want to be a successful artiste. Something to do with childhood trauma setting off new neural pathways into the creative part of the brain. I feel like the weight of guilt has been lifted. I’m not a bad parent, just a bit lazy and perhaps a little selfish. They’ll thank me for it one day. Perhaps Caitlin will give me a mention at the unveiling of her new painting: The Girl Surrounded by Nude Barbies:

‘If it wasn’t for my mother refusing take me and my sister to all the music and dance classes all our friends went to, because she believed spoon-feeding activities was the killer of creativity, I wouldn’t be here now. I was given a choice of an HB pencil and cartridge paper; or a musty oboe she found on Ebay, which came with a Tune a Day book for Beginners and said “Take your pick and teach yourself, I’m off to finish an assignment”. So I picked up the pencil and never looked back. My sister now teaches music in secondary schools. The oboe still plays.’