Stepping Back From The Brink

Not quitting yet, although putting this MS to one side

My psychotherapist once told me I see everything in black and white. The world is either coming to an end or it’s fantastic – there’s nothing in between. Unfortunately, true as it is, she didn’t give me a way to tackle it.

I have become better at keeping perspective, finding the positive, crawling away from the pit of despair (with a little medicinal assistance). But when I’m sleep-deprived and premenstrual all bets are off, drugs or no drugs. Then, a day or so later, I look back and roll my eyes. Get a grip.

And so it is this morning. When I think about my point of nadir yesterday – triggered by thinking I can’t write – I realise what went wrong. I took someone’s judgement of my first ever children’s book – and an early draft at that – as an indictment against ALL my writing.

Who did I think I was? Did I really think I could work on a novel for a couple of months – in a new genre – and it be anything other than pants? Particularly a novel written for a reason, rather than because the story demanded to be captured. My other novels took months, often with a big gap between first and second draft. The characters lived with me and demanded a voice.

So, I’ve eaten a snickers and stopped being a Diva. I got my first short but charming comment on Class Act today (“A very engaging romance”) after offering it free for a few weeks to get reviews. Phew! And I’ve come up with a new plan to fill my time until the end of term. It’s a crazy plan, but it’ll keep me busy.

I just wish I hadn’t involved the editor in my should I/shouldn’t I dramatics. I doubt she’ll ever work with me again, and she was really very good. I’m trying to remind myself of the phrase What someone else thinks of you is none of your business.

Hmmm. That one might need some work.

Writing Research and Pre-Holiday Blues

Birthday boy (a week early)

I’m supposed to be packing for holiday this morning but I am beyond exhausted. In the last two weeks I’ve written 30,000 words, done four hours of live art, spent a whole day arranging a fundraising site for a friend with much more on her plate than I have. I’ve had children home poorly from school, sourced an editor for my children’s book, had the edits back for Class Act and lost a day’s childcare to a ‘bonus trip to the zoo’ to which I had to escort my own child and pay to get in. (Don’t get me started…)

And to top it all off I spent Friday chasing prescriptions and getting lost when I was meant to be finalising my Montegrappa Scholastic competition entry and doing ten loads of laundry and ironing for the holiday. Saturday was out because we celebrated hubbie’s birthday a week early so the house had to be found under the weeks of accumulated dirt, and lunch for six needed cooking.

The only upside of the chaos was that getting lost was great research for my children’s novel. A large part of the action is set in an over-grown bramble-buried forest, and that’s not far off where I ended up for an hour on Friday. I only stopped to let the dog have a run. She’d had to sit in the car for an hour after I ‘popped in’ on the way back from the vets to get hubbie’s prescription and discovered it hadn’t been ordered.

Ready for editing…

I decided to try a new walk I’d seen before, that looked like a straight forward walk across fields into a wood. When I got there it was beautiful – all meandering tracks shaded from the hot sun, with bracken and woodland flowers. So off we went. But I have NO sense of direction and before long I was starting to panic. I headed in the direction I thought would take me to my car, but ended up at what looked like a disused quarry. Unlike Claire, in Two-Hundred Steps Home, I don’t have a smart phone with GPS. So I rang hubbie and he tried to work out where I was and to give me directions. Unfortunately he couldn’t work out my location (turns out he was looking at the wrong quarry.)

In a panic I hung up and decided to follow the dog in case, you know, she turned out to be Lassie or something. She led me towards the flooded quarry so I climbed a barbed wire fence and headed in. Of course I forgot she loves puddles and hates trees and her only motivation was to get out in the open. When we got in she jumped in a puddle and looked at me as if to say, ‘now what?’

The disused quarry looked remarkably like an off-road course and after I’d scrambled up and down a few sheer muddy tracks (in a skirt and sandals) I realised where I was. And it was a long way from the car.

Panic was escalating: being lost terrifies me, especially when I have a zillion things to do and the kids to pick up in three hours. So I ran back across the land-rover off-road course, having realised it was a dead end. I climbed through a bramble bush, catching my long skirt and nearly falling down the bank, and badly stinging my arm. I raced across a sheep field, realised I couldn’t get out, and walked the full length to the gate.

Being a field for livestock there was no way the dog was scrambling under the wire. So I picked her up – all 28kg of her (the vet told me off for her being overweight) – and I threw her over a four-foot barbed-wire topped gate. She landed on her back and for a moment I thought we’d be going back to the vets. Thankfully she was fine. We were about a mile from the car in 25 degree heat and inappropriate clothing. But we made it. My ‘quick walk’ took over an hour.

No wonder I find myself too tired to get out of bed and deal with the hyped-up mega whining children this morning.

I need a holiday.

Live Art, Loud Preaching and Lovely People

That’s me!

This Saturday I picked up my brushes for the first time in a couple of years and did a live art session for a gallery in Peterborough. I tried hard not to think about it beforehand, because it’s been so long since I did any painting. I needn’t have worried. Turns out it’s a bit like riding a bike. Actually, much of my nerves was about putting myself ‘out there’ to be criticised. When I’ve had pieces in exhibitions in the past there’s always been someone ready to say that abstract isn’t real art or their five year old could do better. It’s one thing coping with one-star book reviews, or even sarky comments in a guest book, and another to have it said to your face.

It didn’t start well, as I misunderstood a joke made by one of the gallery volunteers when he said “It doesn’t matter if you’re rusty – you paint abstracts, no one will notice that you can’t paint.”

I was later assured by the manager that it was a joke, but it did leaving me a bit sensitive. Once I started painting, however, it was fine. I love my painting style and I’m not precious: it isn’t fine art but it is fun. A bit like literary fiction versus genre fiction; there’s lots of snobbery nonsense said about both but in the end people like what they like and we’re all on the same side trying to make a living out of something we love.

Working hard

The other challenges were the heat (acrylic dries very quickly in direct sunlight) and the evangelicals preaching via loud-hailer a few metres away. So much for a relaxing few hours away from the children: there wasn’t much restful about an afternoon listening to the denouncement of sinners and fornicators. Each to their own, of course, and I’m all for the freedom of speech, but if it had been me I’d rather have sat down the pub with a cool drink.

The best part was talking to all the people who stopped by to watch. I met a lovely couple of singers and encouraged the man to go right now and buy paint, because he kept saying he’d love to try painting abstracts ‘one day’. I met an old lady who loves Lowry and a young girl of seven or eight who will definitely be a children’s book illustrator one day. I wish I’d taken her name. Her mother showed me drawings of giraffes she had done and they were brilliant. I like to think I suggested a career path in illustration that she hadn’t thought of before.

I met a pregnant artist hoping to find time to paint when the baby is born, and a man who apparently comes to the gallery every day, who thought my red painting looked like a volcano erupting.

It was a rewarding day, despite the headache, and I look forward to doing it again. Next time I’ll take ear plugs!

My studio!

The volcano!

All Quiet on the Blogging Front

Busy busy…

This is just a quick note to explain my silence on the blog recently and to say that normal service will hopefully resume in a week or two.

This week I’ve been concentrating on drafting my children’s book (working title George and the Arch, but that will change!) I’m around a third through, at 22,000 words, and have realised that writing a first draft uses ALL my energy and inspiration.

My daughter’s school teacher pointed out that there are only 11 full weeks of school left before the summer vacation, which means I have that much time to get George ready for the Chicken House competition AND get Class Act ready to publish (I haven’t even sourced an editor yet). Argh!

The reason for my silence over the next two weeks (more specifically the next four days) is that the children are on their Easter Holidays. In four hours the children and I will drive to Skegness to stay in a static caravan for the week with my good friend and her two children. I’m terrified. Please God don’t let it rain!

I’m looking forward to it too, but the idea of four days in a small box with four kids aged 2-6 does fill me with fear! Ear plugs and wine at the ready! 😉 I don’t even know if there will be internet…

So, enjoy the peace and quiet and I’ll hopefully have some new things to write about when I get back! Wish me luck.

A Mothering Sunday

Homemade climbing complex

This Mothering Sunday I have mothered. The day started with cuddles at 5.30/6.30am (the clocks went forward), followed by gifts, breakfast and a lie-in. Lovely. When I got up, I discovered the children had watched a movie and were starting on their second, breakfast half-eaten and the house a state.

I started my usual morning routine of making beds, carrying laundry downstairs, putting the washing machine on, emptying and re-filling the dishwasher, letting the dog out, clearing the breakfast things away and making a second cup of tea. Then I helped the children plant seeds and baked pain au chocolat for everyone. Eventually the kids went out to play, and I realised that – with the clocks changing – it was too late to go out for lunch.

I had only one request for Mother’s Day – that we could go out for a roast lunch so I could eat a meal I hadn’t had to cook. When it was decided that we weren’t going to go I was pretty cross and stomped round the kitchen preparing a roast lunch, to make up for the one I missed.

I even made a kebab on request for my daughter (that she didn’t eat) and carrots for my son (which he didn’t eat.) By the end of lunch my mood hadn’t really improved. In an effort to buy some time to read my book, I opened and raked over the sandpit, before clearing away the dishes.

Homemade is best

Somewhere admidst it all, I realised I was enjoying providing for my family, making yummy meals and watching the kids cause carnage in the garden. I gave in to domesticity and made an apple crumble for after dinner (hubbie’s favourite, because he needs cheering up.) I did all the ironing. Finally I snuck upstairs to read my book for an hour, until a screaming child took me back downstairs.

While I was preparing lunch I felt irritated that I was having to cook, rather than being taken out, and I wished for a family who pampered me on Mother’s Day, who bought chocolates and flowers and booked a table for lunch. But then I realised this is our first day at home for weeks, because of all the birthday parties, and it was lovely. Hubbie pottered round the garden, building a makeshift climbing frame for the kids and sorting out the accumulated junk. The kids ran and dug in the sand and played with water. Unwatched and unfettered (mostly) as I want them to be.

And do you know what? I’ve enjoyed my domestic day much more than I would have enjoyed a day alone to read (too guilty! Besides I can do that tomorrow) or a day out (too stressful, noisy, busy, expensive.) Homemade apple crumble was just as nice as chocolates and the last flowers my daughter bought me ‘just because’ are still (dead) in the vase.

Mothers of small children don’t really get a day off. But I got a day to do my thing, up to a point (cooking curry for dinner while watching Homes Under the Hammer without being pestered by children IS a day off!)

So, thank you family. Today I have felt useful and nurturing, like a mother. I feel loved.

Insomnia, Anhedonia and The Unbearable Politeness of Being

I just had to reblog this post: It decribes exactly how I feel at the moment, only much more eloquently than I could ever put it. The comments beneath are worth reading too.

The Belle Jar

Right now my favourite part of the day is the last half hour or so, which is the time I spend fighting the effects of my prescription sleeping pill. I get to ride this wave of sleepy euphoria, where the whirring, clanking machinery inside my head slows down and all of my limbs are loose and relaxed. It’s like being drunk or high, except that it feels very calm and safe — unlike other altered states of consciousness, I know that nothing can go wrong. When I finally do lie down, with the thought that I have several hours of blissful unconsciousness to look forward to, I feel everything draw away from me, my body suspended in a dark sea as I wait for sleep to gather at the edge of the horizon and then come crashing over me.

This is what I look forward to, from the time I wake up until…

View original post 1,267 more words

Fading Scars

Dad, me and sis at the beach

Yesterday marked the 8th anniversary of the unexpected death of my father, and for the first time the day drifted by in mundane normality. I couldn’t have imagined, back then, that the pain of his passing would ever be anything but raw and unbearable. Despite having a complicated and often turbulent relationship with my dad, and despite not having lived with him for more than a few weeks at a time since I was nine, his death left a huge hole in my life. The last years saw us come to an understanding and we had a friendship, a shared view of the world, that I’ve never found with anyone else.

The tragedy of my father’s death is that it came before any of his grandchildren were born. I believe that spending time with his two granddaughters and two grandsons would have completed my father’s journey. Despite my in many ways awful childhood, Dad was much better with small people in later life. He would have been an amazing grandfather, taking the children fishing and to cricket matches and for walks along the canal.

What hurts most, now I’ve become a parent, is that I now understand my father and my childhood and utterly forgive him for all his flaws. He wasn’t a great Dad at times and I’m certain he was a terrible husband. But he didn’t have the best upbringing himself, with two volatile parents, and a dominating, controlling mother.

Dad as I remember him

Like me, he had little patience and a quick temper. Like me, I imagine he found it hard to be home with the children, trying to fix cars and mind the kids, while Mum worked a 9-5 job. But he didn’t have the support network that I have. There were no Dads Groups in the 1970s, no blogs and online forums. I’ve never hit my children, but I’ve come close. And I’m pretty certain I’ve repeated every terrible thing I heard as a child. The difference is I can cry and apologise and explain. I can’t imagine Dad doing the same.

My hope and fear is that my dad was reborn in my son. He reminds me of Dad in so many ways. It gives me hope for the future, that Dad’s memory and legacy are not lost. But fear that, just as happened 8 years ago, my son may also be taken from me, suddenly, without warning, with no chance to say goodbye. If I’m an over-protective, worrying, clingy parent, it is for that reason. All the love I couldn’t show my dad, that I didn’t know I had until it was too late, is lavished on a cheeky, naughty, charming little boy. And maybe, somewhere, Dad is watching. I hope so.

Too Many Words!

Why can’t they all be nice and quiet like the dog..?

After my day of zen on Friday I had a bit of a relapse on Saturday, culminating in me loudly biting out the words “just shut up” to my son in the middle of a busy supermarket. I so love making other parents feel better about themselves.

The problem is the talking. The endless, incessant, dual voiced, competing in stereo, “Mummy, mummy, mummy” talking. Alone or together, my kids are driving me nuts.

The irony, of course, is that I am a chatterbox. A talker rather than a listener. I have spent my whole life being teased for having too much to say.

My mum thinks it’s hilarious that the kids are driving me crazy. Of course, as the office-based parent when I was growing up, with my father the working-from-home one who presumably looked after us (I don’t remember) she didn’t have as much first-hand experience as she might think.

For six hours a day on nursery days and twelve on days when they’re at home, I’m expected to be able to hold two or three concurrent conversations, and tantrums ensue if anyone isn’t answered directly. And I do try. Because it upset me so much to be ignored as a child or to be ridiculed for having too many words, I try so hard to answer every query with patience.

But oh my the repetition.

Chatterbox Children

In the twenty minutes preceding my loss of control in Tesco, my son had said the same sentence a dozen times. Like a Chinese water torture it broke through even medicated calm.

I suppose the difference is that, instead of blowing up at them, ranting and bellowing, then sobbing and apologising, I’ve had no release, so I’ve been snapping at them all afternoon. Frustratingly to the same end result that my daughter sobbed through dinner because of something mummy said: albeit in a snappy voice rather than a sergeant major shout.

It seems that maybe the bellowing rage works as a release valve and without it I’m just a mean mummy instead of a monster. I read a beautiful post on Amy Saab’s 2me4art blog today saying she is trying to listen to her ten year old son because she knows it won’t be long before he stops wanting to talk. I found myself looking forward to the surly uncommunicative teenage years today.

I’ve heard people say ‘listen properly to the small things or they won’t ever tell you the big things’, but how can you listen and listen and listen when you’re a talker? A ‘babbling brook’ as Gary Chapman describes it in The Five Love Languages. And as my children are talkers rather than listeners they’re not even happy using up their words on each other: I’ve taught them not to talk over people so all I hear is “he talked over me!” “but she wasn’t listening to me” followed by a tantrum, tears or a thump, because no one hates being ignored more than a three-year-old second child.

I don’t know what the answer is. The more I sit in silence the harder it is to be abused by the torrent of noise. And, is it me, but do they use fewer words at school than nursery? I suppose it’s all that listening they have to do. Certainly my daughter seems to need more of my attention than she did before she started school. I might have to go back to plugging them into Cbeebies before we all go mad.

Medicate Me: Day Fifteen

Sleeping Family

Day fifteen on my antidepressants and I have found a love for life. I laugh more. I am more gentle on myself. I take time to read my book with a cup of tea, or cook dinner while watching Homes Under the Hammer on the iPad, instead of trying to blog, fold laundry and iron at the same time, doing all four things badly.

I leave early for the school run and read my book in the car, arriving at the school gate with a smile on my face. I walk the dog mid-morning rather than running around ten minutes before I need to collect the children. I sleep when I need to, preferably in a sunbeam in the playroom.

I haven’t bellowed at the children or sworn at them in a fortnight.

I’m still not sleeping. I still feel anxious about lots of things (schools, food, teeth!) My writing and particularly the blog have taken a back seat. I miss it. I miss logging on in the morning and seeing blog post likes and new comments. I worry I’ll lose everything I fought so hard to build up last year. But not having to come up with a new topic to discuss everyday is giving me time to breathe. Not having to make time to take pictures to go with my posts is increasing my reading time.

I’m awake!

It isn’t all a result of the medication. Reading The Five Love Languages brought smiles and understanding back to my marriage and increased my ability to see when the children need my time or a cuddle. The longer days, the sunshine and warmer weather are all mood enhancers, especially for me.

But most of all I have given myself permission to heal. I’ve accepted I don’t have to do everything all the time. I don’t have to fill every minute with sixty seconds run. I accept I am the luckiest woman in the world to be able to cook dinner calmly at 11am while watching TV, or to be able to read my book.

But also I acknowledge that I get up at 5am to wipe bums, crawl out of warm covers at 2am to replace blankets that have fallen off chilly children, and fold laundry at midnight when hubbie is already asleep.

Mine is the responsibility to cook, clean, empty the bins, iron and shop. Mine is the juggling routine of remembering when to collect the children and when to make them packed lunches or sign forms.

I realise I’ve been competing mentally against working mums, needing to prove I work just as hard as they do. Why? What does it matter if I don’t? We made choices for me to be at home. We go without meals out, babysitters, expensive holidays. Surely a happy mummy is an important part of that?

It reminds me of the poem I read at my Mum’s wedding; the Desiderata: “Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence … Be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.”

Words to live by.

Medicate Me: Day Three

Having a cuddle

Day three since starting on anti-depressants:

My inner thoughts are scattered and harder to get hold of, like troublesome toddlers or helium balloons bobbing just out of reach. Normally while walking the dog I have several conversations running in my mind at once. Today it was just broken and random words.

At night I’m exhausted but can’t sleep. I feel the tiredness but am wide awake as if I have jetlag. This is new. My previous experience of SSRIs is one of endless sleep.

I found it harder to read to my son earlier but that could be the sleep deprivation slurring my words. The dizziness and sickness from day one and two is subsiding slightly but I do seem prone to hot flushes. My brain itches, just beneath the skin. I imagine it’s as frustrating to wear a plaster cast though I have no direct experience. Hubbie – who has history with this drug and is merrily nodding at each new symptom – says the brain itching is new to him. Nice to have something original.

I don’t feel like crying; scrap that, I don’t feel capable of crying. I take this as a good thing although the remoteness of emotions is what has held me off from taking the drugs for so long. All I remember from my last time on anti-depressants was the feeling of living in a bubble, with the world just pretty pictures moving around me. This time I feel rather like I’m underwater, in a cloudy sea with limited visibility. I have to remind myself this is temporary.

I’m still getting cross and frustrated easily with the children but haven’t yelled at them once. That might be because I’m still not working as such – no writing in two weeks and precious little housework. The quietening of the voices in my head makes me worry that I might not be able to write at all, once the drugs have fully taken hold. I have to remember hubbie’s dose is much higher and he’s written two books in recent years.

I do feel anxious and have had the odd palpitation. I seem to be taking it in my stride, largely thanks to hubbie’s support and the fact that I’ve stopped working for a bit. I am strangely reassured by these things as they confirm to me that I wasn’t ready to go through this two years ago. Not with this little impact certainly.

All in all, Day Three and all is well. I’ll keep you posted.