Things that occur to me during the process of sorting out my Office/Study within which great works are soon to be delivered.

Woodchip is bad. But I am too tired to take it away and turn it into tasteful, retro white with roses.

How will I get the Pilgrim’s Map of the Holy Land (Palestine) 1942 on the wall?

Why did I start colour-coding my books before sorting out all my books, now the Green Ones overfloweth?

Am I happy or sad that the view is the arse-end of terraces overlooking a railway track?

Yesterday was Flying Ant Day. I hate flying ant day and always have. One went down my bra as I was pushing a pram and holding a grizzling baby. Dis-GUSTING.

I can’t hear crying from here. Peace. Sublime.

If I cry, no one will hear me in here.

I have installed my husband’s dansette record player and am listening to Janis Ian on vinyl.

I think I will bring in the Hoya plant for its South Facing and sunny and the Hoya hasn’t flowered its weird alien flowers since we left East London.

THERE IS NO TRACE OF A NAPPY OR THOMAS THE TANK IN THIS ROOM.

Should I feel guilty that I bought some office supplies in craft design (meaning recycled ‘natural’) from Muji instead of cheaper plastic versions from Staples?

Am craving a snazzy stapler.

Why am I dancing in a long white dress, burning?

Why am I sipping a cocktail called the Flamingo a la Audrey Hepburn?

Why has the piano slipped away, far far away, melted into the railway tracks so the keys have become sleepers and sleep is gone?

no regrets coyote

Ok, Ok. The 20 minutes a day thing just isn’t working. I need longer to get ‘into’ it. It was a good idea…but tricky to get anywhere. I suppose tunnels have been burrowed by tiny spoons, and mountains can be moved by miniscule chipping aways, but for me, now, it’s time for a new tactic.

I am going to become a night person. Or, rather, an evening person. Babies are down by 9pm so will write/edit from 9 – 10pm every night. This is not my natural time to work. I prefer to do things in the full glare of the afternoon sun, but hey – I’ve always wanted to be more night-time arty. Channelling those Joni Mitchell lyrics from Hejira:

I’m up all night in the studios
And you’re up early on your ranch

And when I balk at this plan, when I think that it would be sooooo nice to have a long bath, or watch a film, or just sit in the garden for two minutes without a baby on me, looking at the moon, that’s when I have to think of the Impressive People. The DO-ERS. People like this person, whose New York life makes me dizzy, and this person, whose Paris life is a whirlwind of culture and productivity.

Or this person, whose dedication to writing and having a creative life is inspiring. So…no bath. Who needs a bath? Who needs clean hair, anyway…oh God, it’s 21:22.*

Onwards!

*No it isn’t, it’s 22:01 as my 2 year old just woke up….right…ok, onwards again!

giving

Today baby had a bad day. Someone took my 2 year old away so I had a few hours, a few golden hours. I thought baby would sleep (she did yesterday, for about 3 hours in the middle of the day, would have gone longer but I woke her up) and I could do stuff: write, bathe, sort stuff out, whatever. But instead, she was grizzly and awake, wanting to be held, all day – for hours – wouldn’t sleep or relax or be put down. Poor baby – belly ache or constipation or something – looking at me with her cat shaped eyes as if to say ‘make the pain go’ and I couldn’t. So I just held her, for hours. And she didn’t want to be still, sitting down, and the golden hours slipped by and my 2 year old came back and I had done nothing. Apart from comfort my baby, which isn’t nothing. But sometimes it’s hard.

a hummingbird in an endless meadow of flowers

I have been close to admitting defeat. Despite my self-cheering, my plans of 20-min a day activity, my determination to keep going despite babies filling my head, heart, house and sleep time, it has been almost impossible. I have done some editing work but now I’m thinking it’s all rubbish and that I will have to start again.

S is 7 weeks old. She is beautiful and teeny and we are doing well together (and the whole other myriad that has come along – the reconfiguration of emotions towards my son, the jostling and psychological chess piece moves that comes with carving space for another person in a crowded life – is all settling down, I think). But I still feel defeated. Or nearly. Must edit! Must write!

Or maybe the work I have done – in small snatches – hasn’t been a waste? Maybe it’s been useful somehow, keeping my thoughts on my book, my mind on the job (trying to be positive).

On a VERY positive note, I finally have my own room up and running. MY OWN ROOM. Inspired by a library I once stayed in in Yemen, I am currently arranging my books in colour, I’m aiming for this:

But it’s not quite there yet. Mine is more yellow woodchip wallpaper and cardboard boxes. Each time S is asleep I run in to put all my orange penguin paperbacks together on one shelf and my green Virago ladies on another – very satisfying. Of course, a quick online perusal brings up this on the whole concept of arranging books by colour.

And there is another defeat, despite my best efforts: reading. I’ve hardly done any. My brain is scattered and for goodness sake, if I can’t read a novel, how am I supposed to write one?? Garrison Keillor in this article sums up by brain perfectly:

“We live in a literate time, and our children are writing up a storm, often combining letters and numerals (U R 2 1derful), blogging like crazy, reading for hours off their little screens, surfing around from Henry James to Jesse James to the epistle of James to pajamas to Obama to Alabama to Alanon to non-sequiturs, sequins, penguins, penal institutions, and it’s all free, and you read freely, you’re not committed to anything the way you are when you shell out $30 for a book, you’re like a hummingbird in an endless meadow of flowers.”

How true. Here’s what I just read on my iphone whilst breastfeeding S to sleep:

A TravelBookshop twitter posting a photo of a book called ‘Two Middle Aged Women in Andalusia’ which led me to look up the book and see that it’s written by Penelope Chetwode:

She was married to Betjeman and had an affair with Evelyn Waugh, which led me to read a bit about her life, which in turn led me to this excellent LRB review of Betjeman.

The glorious, depressing, terrible line, ‘plump white fingers made to curl/Round some anaemic city girl’ (‘The City’) made me want to read the Collected Works of Betjeman (though I like him less now I know that ‘one might just as easily describe Betjeman as a silly little man with a taste for posh totty; though one wouldn’t, of course’. ) But I probably won’t read the actual collection of poems,because instead I’ll be online, skipping along on a similar loop.

I’m the hummingbird in an endless meadow of flowers and I’m not sure it’s a good thing.

hope is the thing with feathers

Birds in the Holy Quran

Yusuf Ali

… to the Children of Israel, (with this message): “‘I have come to you, with … , as it were, the figure of a bird, and breathe into it, and … quicken the dead, by Allah’s leave; and I declare to you what ye eat, and what ye store in your houses. Surely therein is … quran

Tafsir al-Jalalayn

… constant passing of hands over it. Among these [signs] are the fact that the reward for good deeds is multiplied in it and that birds never fly over it; and whoever enters it is in security, not liable therein to be killed or oppressed or otherwise. It is …  Quran

Tafsir al-Jalalayn

… that is, for the sake of His religion, as dead, but rather, that they are, living with their Lord, their spirits inside green birds that take wing freely wherever they wish in Paradise, as reported in a hadīth); provided for [by Him], with the fruits …

self-editing with babies

I’ve often scoffed at advice that whiffs of self-help, but recently I’ve been finding myself reach out for turns of phrases that will help me battle with the balance between baby-toddler-husband-writing (not to mention money making and keeping the house at the very least hygienic). Hemingway’s ‘work every day. No matter what has happened the day or night before, get up and bite on the nail’ is both annoying and true. And annoyingly true. It is true. You do have to write every day or you get Nowhere. You go in circles and never reach the end.

But I can’t imagine Hemmingway ever spent three hours entertaining, feeding, dressing, hauling into the garden, whipping off nappies, pulling twigs out of hair, chasing up stairs…and so on a 2 year old, only to send him out with his dad/granny/uncle for a break just as tiny baby refuses to sleep, has tummy ache, howls, grinds and wants to be held. And held in a specific upright position using the right hand making it impossible to type or write. Then eventually, just as the second baby goes down, maybe two hours later the door opens and in comes toddler shouting Mummmeeeee and there you are again: entertaining, feeding, dressing…

Life is a loop.

It’s glorious and full of sweet nectar moments (like baby today almost smiling for the first time, her eyes smiling and the twitch of her mouth, her eyes more and more conscious; like a bear hug from W ) but God: it’s also exhausting.

And TIME. Time! Time speeds up with children. Children gobble up time in a fury and I can truly see how you wake up one day and it’s 20 years later and you haven’t done all those things you intended to do. And so, there is panic. PANIC underlying everything. I’ve discovered that to keep the anxiety at bay, the sense of everything slipping, I have to do the following:

Have a to-do list (luckily I’ve found a brilliant to-do app for the phone wah ha ha) and stick to it. Prioritise the things on it, keep them realistic, and work through systematically in the odd moments of peace or stillness. The main consistent one is to work on the w.i.p for at least 20 mins a day.

In normal life, 20 mins is nothing, but in toddler/baby management life, 20 minutes is this golden, sublime stretch of time. And it works. Well, say, 3 days out of four I manage it, and I am chipping. Things are moving.

It helps that I’m editing rather than at the first creating/bashing out stage.

The other thing I do that keeps the baby blues/sleep deprivation insanity/too many nappies bonkersness/dissolution of self that comes with giving up most of your external signifiers (job, certain clothes, social life) away is put on make up and get dressed. Sometimes I don’t get the chance to do this till 2pm, but I do it, and it helps. To function.

Oh Lordy. Onwards with the editing! Am hacking at the smug bits a la Diana Athill:

“You don’t always have to go so far as to murder your darlings – those turns of phrase or images of which you felt extra proud when they appeared on the page – but go back and look at them with a very beady eye. Almost always it turns out that they’d be better dead. (Not every little twinge of satisfaction is suspect – it’s the ones which amount to a sort of smug glee you must watch out for.)”

When I’m picking the bits of spaghetti out of my hair, or filling up the dryer, I do repeat to myself in a soft voice, ‘To think, I used to fly to Cairo!’