The Gallery: Motherhood
It was a long night last night.
A very, VERY long night….
… but we’re still smiling this morning.
To my boy. Who always makes the sun come out again regardless of how little sleep you gave me the night before.
I love you.
Now, mummy’s just going to lie here a while. No, no I’m not sleeping, I’m just pretending. Yes, it’s a game. It requires you to be very, very quiet and still. Oh, no? You’d rather play trains? Oh, ok…
Zzzzzzzz……
This post was written for Week 15 of The Gallery.
The theme was Motherhood.
Writing Workshop #27 – Faith, magic and genetic inheritance
Welcome back to your weekly Writing Workshop.
For any newbies (and it’s never to late to join in), here’s how it works: I’m going to give you 5 writing/blogging prompts. Pick one, pick two, or do them all if you’re really keen – it’s up to you. How you respond is your choice. You could share a real-life story, or make one up. You could write a poem or just free-write without thinking too hard and see what happens. It can be funny; it can be serious; it can be emotional. It can be whatever you want it to be. The only rule is to enjoy writing your post and get something out of the process.
Prompts each week take their inspiration from blogs, current affairs, daily life, or just whatever everyone happened to be talking about that week. If you’d like to suggest a prompt for a future workshop then send me an email or catch me on Twitter – I would love to hear your ideas.
So here’s this week’s prompts!
1. What qualities or traits do you think your children have inherited from you, you partner, or even from your extended family?
- Inspired by this gorgeous photo taken by Mummy Musings: Like Father, Like Daughter.
2. Write about an event that restored your faith in something.
- Inspired by From Marketing to Milk and a dream that restored her belief (just a little bit).
3. What’s your magical power? Or what would you like it to be?
- Inspired by the Moiderer and her lovely post about being a magic mummy.
4. Tell us about a time when you didn’t feel welcome.
- Inspired by Notes from Lapland and her reflections on whether England is Child Unfriendly.
And finally, the last prompt now is going to be just one word. This should allow you a bit more creative freedom if you feel like taking the safety harness that particular week.
5. Your word for the week is: She
- Inspired by the beautiful poem on Life Slightly Used’s blog this week.
Now here’s what you have to do. Write your post and publish it on your blog between now and THURSDAY. On Thursday come back and use the widget that will be up to paste in the URL of your post to share. Then take some time to read some of the other entries and leave some comment love! We’re not here to critique – just to have fun and support each other in our writing experiments. So be kind please. Anyone who would like to submit something via email, or even anonymously will be more than welcome to do so. I’ll post them on the site here and include the link in Thursday’s round-up.
Feel free to use the Workshop badge on your blog or as part of your post if you like. Code is here:
Note: I’m told Blogger does something a bit funny with the code so you’ll need to copy and paste it and then retype the quotation marks (“) as Blogger changes them for some reason. See you Thursday then!
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This Writing Workshop is brought to you in association with Mama Kat’s Losin’ It – who’s lovely author came up with the concept and runs her own workshop over in the U.S.
What’s my age again?
Recent ways in which I have spectacularly failed to be a grown-up, a responsible human being, or even remotely sensible:
- Re-discovering the joy of walking along, music loud in my ears, and singing as if no one is watching or listening. The problem is that, of course, quite a few people ARE watching and listening. I fear I may start to be known as “that crazy girl” in my home town after accidentally making several people jump with sudden bursts of “I am a mountain!” while standing at traffic lights.
- Sitting down in the middle of the pavement and crying. Twice.
- Deciding that my hairdresser had cut my hair too short, wailing nonsensically at my reflection for several minutes and vowing to spend the next month in bed until it had grown back.
- Making a very silly video. Forgetting that said silly video would be viewed by many people. Sensible people. Including a PR from Microsoft who may have sent me an email saying that he “wasn’t sure he could eat Frazzles that way”.
- Managing, on a single day, to run out of nappies, milk and clean pants for my husband.
- Wearing a floaty dress on a windy day. And having said floaty dress blow straight up over my head Marilyn Munroe stylee. In front of two open mouthed pedestrians.
- Consuming enough rum to keep several small islands in economic security for several months and then spending an evening unabashedly leching over the male bar staff of a popular Mexican restaurant. There may have been Twitpics. Of their bottoms. (I am mostly holding @cosmicgirlie responsible for this one – love you lady, thanks for a fab night).
- Becoming embroiled in some kind of random game of Mallett’s Mallet with a mysterious texter, the conversation of which appears below (thanks to random Twitter peeps for help in decided what to text back)
Texter: “Irish”
Texter: “Knowsley”
Me: “Asparagus”
Texter: “Twat”
Me: “DESPAIR”
Texter: “Put yer teeth in”
Me: “Pee into the wind”
Texter: “Oh dear its his old number, sorry”
- Being quite disappointed that the above exchange did not mean I was being drawn into some Da Vinci code-esque mystery in which I would eventually discover Jesus hiding somewhere in Knowsley.
- Being generally unstable, moody, needy, selfish, paranoid, manic and forgetting to think before speaking.
- Letting my heart rule my head.
- Many, many more things too numerous to count.
Ways in which I have sort-of redeemed myself this proving that there may still be hope for me yet:
- Keeping a family of three fed, watered, alive and mostly in clean clothes for another week.
- Folding and putting away the enormous pile of clothes that has been growing ever bigger in our bedroom and developing its own weather system.
- Mostly remembering to wear sensible underwear. I am especially glad of this one in light of the Marilyn Monroe incident.
- Getting up off the pavement and carrying on walking.
- Deciding that my hair wasn’t that bad after all and getting over myself.
- Not giving out my phone number to any of the male bar staff OR touching them inappropriately. Go me.
- Generally remembering to eat.
- Recognising when my mood was dipping and doing sensible things to make myself feel better. Like going for a walk, and singing, and sleeping.
- Not getting on the wrong train. On purpose.
- Letting my head rescue my heart before it did too much damage.
All in all I think this means I’m doing OK.
- See? Not *too* bad…. sob.
How to Eat Frazzles With Your Feet – a challenge
I’m tagging the people that made me do this but you know, if you like embarrassing yourself in public then this is for you too:
Victoria from It’s a Small World After All
Emma from Me the Man and the Baby
Heather from Young and Younger
Uri from Urban Vox
And also, because I love them and they WILL do this, I tag
My bestest buddy Jay from Journey of the Mocha bean(s) and Mummy
and Heather from Notes from Lapland
Go forth readers. Find strange things and eat them with your feet. BE FREE…..
Writing Workshop : Lost Art
Welcome back to your Writing Workshop!
At the bottom of this post you’ll find the widget to link up your posts – I’m looking forward to having a good read through them later. Thank you, as always, for your contributions.
First of all though, it’s my turn. I’ve chosen prompts number 2 – a part of my myself I lost and would like to find again…
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It’s strange how some weeks, the workshop seems to give me a prompt that is just what I need to say at that particular time.
I rediscovered a part of myself this week. Well, I am discovering quite a few lost aspects of myself at the moment, but this was an especially significant one for me, for this is a side of myself that was very, very lost. I thought irretrievably so.
You have all been so kind and supportive and encouraging in your comments about my art work, giving me strength to keep going with this, so, if you don’t mind, I will share the story of why I stopped. I’m feeling brave, and it feels right.
I’ve talked about confidence before on this blog, about it is always something I have struggled with. Thanks to this blog, and you lot, and special people in my life who have made me feel like it’s ok to be me again, confidence isn’t as elusive as it once was. I’m actually fostering something these days that is feels something like self-belief, probably for the first time ever. I’m not perfect, far from it, full of deep flaws and scars. I fail a lot, and often. But actually, I’m alright with that. I quite like that. I quite like being me.
But this has been a long time coming. For a long, long time I had no confidence at all.
Art for me has always been a big part of who I am. I was always the creative one in the family, our house usually taken over with whatever project I was working on. You always knew where I’d been from the creative mess I left: splodges of paint, snippets of yarn and fabric, my mum trying to get the waste from erasers and endless rubbing out out from the cracks in our big oak table.
It was just how I expressed myself, along with words, although I lost those too along the way, pouring meaning out on to paper and canvas and the walls around me. Making some sense of what I felt and how I saw the world in the things I made.
When I got sick, the world stopped making sense for a long while. *I* stopped making sense. I didn’t understand why I was ill, why it seemed so hard to get better. As weeks dragged into months and into years, the magic ran out of my life in huge, rainbow runs like a watercolour painting held under the tap, leaving only grey, grey and more grey.
I felt worthless. I seemed incapable of functioning as a proper human being. Every time I tried to achieve something, I would get sicker and end up having to pack it in. Everything that seemed to make other people ‘something’, I didn’t have. No job, no degree, no social life. Just a pale ghost spending most of her day in bed. As much as those that loved me tried to support me, I felt very judged. They didn’t understand why I was ill either.
It felt like it was all my fault. Like it was because I was doing something wrong. Like I deserved to be ill.
I become intensely self-critical to the point of complete self-destruction. It was not good enough, not ever. I had to be better. I had to prove that I was worth something. And even as my body started to get better this remained. In fact, it got worse. I became harder and harder on myself.
At about the time that this was all reaching its peak, I painted a painting that changed my life. It was for my mum’s birthday. I spent two weeks intensely focused on the folds of petals, being drawn into its centre in something like a trance. I don’t remember thinking at all. It was the most significant period of just BEING that I remember. I don’t have memories of painting it, just of it slowly appearing on the canvas in front of me.
When it was finished I got very afraid. It was good, it was very good. Even me, so hard on myself, could see it was good.
My mum loved it. Everyone loved it. And on a whim I entered it into a competition.
It won. And from that exposure someone representing a gallery in Spain contacted me about producing a range for them.
And I panicked.
You’d have thought that this would have been everything I had been looking for, all the validation I had been so intensely seeking. But I was too far gone for that.
The pressures of self-perfection made it intensely difficult for me to begin anything. I’d convinced myself I would fail even before I started, that there was no point even trying. I developed the most intense case of artist’s block, too scared to even pick up a pencil, knowing I would never be able to paint anything as good again. Knowing I would just disappoint.
I began to destroy a lot of what I had made, entire sketch books ending up in the bin in a fit of frustration and despair. Canvases painted over. It was not good enough. Nothing was good enough.
A lot of you have been asking to see some of my work but the truth is that pretty soon there was nothing left, except the one painting that still survives on the wall at my mum’s and which I’ve shared a photo of at the bottom of this post – a constant reminder of what I could do but was too afraid to try at. A constant reminder of my weakness.
Time passed. I pushed down a lot of my creative urges, letting it out in ‘safe’ doses – knitting that followed a pattern, for example.
Anyway. You know the rest. You know I am being woken up.
I want to be the artist again, that lost herself in creating. I don’t want to be afraid to try. I want to make mistakes and smile at those mistakes and display them proudly. I don’t want to be perfect any more. I just want to DO. I want to go back to describing how beautiful I find the world in big daubs of colour, along with my words. For both are who I am.
And I will. Time are a’changing. On Tuesday night I looked down at my hands, black with charcoal, the table covered with my creative mess once again and I smiled a smile that made my face ache and my eyes run.
I’m not losing that again.
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So now it’s your turn. What prompt did you choose?
1. Have you ever had a holiday romance? If not, perhaps you’d like to make up a story where you did!
- Inspired by Nappy Valley Housewife and her wonderful post about a summer love (and yes, I sang Grease songs the whole time reading it and you will too…)
2. What part of you is lost that you would like to find again?
- Inspired by Toulouse Confessions’ beautifully self-reflective post.
3. Take a walk around your garden. What do you see there? Or tell us what you dream of seeing when you step out of your back door.
- Inspired by Kelly from A Place of My Own AND Livi from Livi’s Little Bubble who both took us round gardens, imagined or otherwise.
4. Write about one moment with all of richest, imaginative sensory description you can muster. It could be anything: something mundane, very domestic, or something more exotic and unique. I want metaphors and similes people!
- Inspired by Victoria at It’s a Small World After All and her description of what Summer feels like.
And finally, from now on the last prompt is going to be just one word, like last tie. This should allow you a bit more creative freedom if you feel like taking the safety harness that particular week.
5. Your word for the week is: Time
- Inspired by Baking Mad Mama and her retrospective through summer’s past.
Leave your name and the URL to your post in the MckLinky below (the URL should be to your post not just to your blog) and leave me a comment to let me know you’ve taken part. If you have the time it would be great if you could try and read and comment on at least two other entries. And be kind! It’s supposed to be a bit of fun – we’re not looking for the next Booker Prize winner here.
If you haven’t had chance to respond yet, then you’ve still got till Sunday to enter your link! Or just wait till next week, when there’ll be five brand new prompts to get you thinking.
This Writing Workshop is brought to you in association with Mama Kat’s Losin’ It – who’s lovely author came up with the concept and runs her own workshop over in the U.S.
Work in Progress
You aren’t going to understand this.
I’ve never even MENTIONED it before. It’s my big secret. My biggest secret.
I will come back and tell you the story another day, for now I just have to do this.
You knew I was a writer. A writer finding her feet more and more every day, words tumbling out of her like water.
You did NOT know I was an artist.
I am a recovering artist. Who lost her confidence in a very, very big way a few years ago and hasn’t been able to pick up a pencil or a brush since.
Some things are changing in my life quite significantly. I am changing. I am being woken up. Certain special people in my life are responsible for this, through their support, their friendship, their love. They know who they are, though not all of them know this. I’m sorry for the surprise there, I just needed to get this out there before I lost my nerve.
Tonight in the quiet I picked up charcoal and I drew. There were no thoughts. Just the lines and tones and the music in my ears. For the first time in as long as I can remember.
I have missed this more than you will ever, ever know.
I feel fixed.
I feel brand new.
This is just the beginning.
Writing Workshop #26 – A walk around your garden and holiday romance.
Morning.
Welcome back to your weekly Writing Workshop. Thanks for your patience last week – a week off meant I got my course finished and some much needed head-space rearranging done. I always feel bad letting you down, the grown up voice in my head that like to say these kind of things tells me consistency is important, but I’m not a very consistent person so apologies if that happens from time to time.
If you remember, two weeks ago I set you all a bit of a challenge to write your OWN prompts inspired from 5 words or phrases. I promised the best ones a treat and to use them for the next workshop. So, have I mentioned you? If I have then email me your address and I’ll post you something yummy.
For any newbies to our weekly workshop (and it’s never to late to join in), here’s how it works: I’m going to give you 5 writing/blogging prompts. Pick one, pick two, or do them all if you’re really keen – it’s up to you. How you respond is your choice. You could share a real-life story, or make one up. You could write a poem or just free-write without thinking too hard and see what happens. It can be funny; it can be serious; it can be emotional. It can be whatever you want it to be. The only rule is to enjoy writing your post and get something out of the process.
Prompts each week take their inspiration from blogs, current affairs, daily life, or just whatever everyone happened to be talking about that week. If you’d like to suggest a prompt for a future workshop then send me an email or catch me on Twitter – I would love to hear your ideas.
So here’s this week’s prompts!
1. Have you ever had a holiday romance? If not, perhaps you’d like to make up a story where you did!
- Inspired by Nappy Valley Housewife and her wonderful post about a summer love (and yes, I sang Grease songs the whole time reading it and you will too…)
2. What part of you is lost that you would like to find again?
- Inspired by Toulouse Confessions’ beautifully self-reflective post.
3. Take a walk around your garden. What do you see there? Or tell us what you dream of seeing when you step out of your back door.
- Inspired by Kelly from A Place of My Own AND Livi from Livi’s Little Bubble who both took us round gardens, imagined or otherwise.
4. Write about one moment with all of richest, imaginative sensory description you can muster. It could be anything: something mundane, very domestic, or something more exotic and unique. I want metaphors and similes people!
- Inspired by Victoria at It’s a Small World After All and her description of what Summer feels like.
And finally, from now on the last prompt is going to be just one word, like last tie. This should allow you a bit more creative freedom if you feel like taking the safety harness that particular week.
5. Your word for the week is: Time
- Inspired by Baking Mad Mama and her retrospective through summer’s past.
Now here’s what you have to do. Write your post and publish it on your blog between now and THURSDAY. On Thursday come back and use the widget that will be up to paste in the URL of your post to share. Then take some time to read some of the other entries and leave some comment love! We’re not here to critique – just to have fun and support each other in our writing experiments. So be kind please. Anyone who would like to submit something via email, or even anonymously will be more than welcome to do so. I’ll post them on the site here and include the link in Thursday’s round-up.
Feel free to use the Workshop badge on your blog or as part of your post if you like. Code is here:
Note: I’m told Blogger does something a bit funny with the code so you’ll need to copy and paste it and then retype the quotation marks (“) as Blogger changes them for some reason. See you Thursday then!
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This Writing Workshop is brought to you in association with Mama Kat’s Losin’ It – who’s lovely author came up with the concept and runs her own workshop over in the U.S.
Sponge Fettling and Dirty Bottoms – A Trip to the Emma Bridgewater factory
Something I love more than anything about blogging at the moment is the opportunities it is bringing me to see new places and meet new people. I feel like the whole world is opening up to me. I have new friends from across the globe, and occasionally now the odd invitation to do something exciting is landing in my lap.
Last week I was very kindly invited down the road to Stoke on Trent to take a tour of the Emma Bridgewater factory. Emma Bridgewater pottery celebrates its 25th year this year and takes pride in the fact that every piece is still completely hand-made and hand-painted on-site in the Potteries. At a time when so much local industry is out-sourced with the local towns gradually losing their colour and the things that make them unique, the Emma Bridgewater ethos of creative fun, design, and innovation is one that very much appeals.
Jamie, the project manager who greeted us on site, was everything you’d expect of a front-man to this vibrant company. Larger-than-life, super friendly, and proudly bouncing around the newly-opening cafe and seating area, Jamie seemed perfectly at home in the beautiful light, colourful and energy-filled space of the converted warehouse from which this gorgeous retreat had been created.
(You can click on the images to see them bigger, in fact, I insist you do…)
I loved it. The fresh-flowers, the shelves of beautiful ceramics, the spotty custom-made Aga. This was a very ‘me’ space. Full of the sensual and the rustic. Oh, and there was fresh coffee too. Perfect.
Fairy dust, I mean, ceramic dust on my shoes...
In fact, the whole day was one of immense sensuality, of soul-food. From the light bouncing off old factory windows and cut glass, to the smell of roses in the rain, to the dust on my shoes.
I should probably tell you here all about the manufacturing processes, how it all works. We were shown round the factory and introduced to every process but to be honest, the thing I came away with weren’t facts but a huge sensory impression of the whole industry.
Wonderful phrases stick in my brain: sponge fettling, blunger, dirty bottom wiping, biscuit selector… Meeting Bill, the man that has been hand throwing plates in Stoke for 50 years and giggling with English Mum that, lovely as he was, he probably wasn’t our perfect ‘Ghost’ fantasy figure.
And then there is the pottery itself, of course, that comes out of the casting process a beautiful, rough, cream, so suited to it’s name ‘biscuit ware’. Hand painted designs are applied with brush and sponges (now THERE’S a job I’d love) in soft colours, which I almost preferred to the post-glazed hues. Pastel pinks, browns, purples, yellows, which once glazed shine with richness.
A lovely lunch of sandwiches and delicious fresh meat pies, was a good time to catch up with some of the other bloggers who were sharing my day: English Mum and her fabulous boys who I could have all taken home with me and all three of whom brought out in me an intense desire to misbehave; lovely Racheal from Marathon Mummy and Tales from the Village and her gorgeously smiley and exuberant son, a real kindred spirit there; new friend Kitchen Critic; and the wonderful kind-hearted MadHouse family, completely with the two little bundles of fun and energy that are the Mini-Mads, all of whom Kai took a huge shine too and who were enormously thoughtful and sensitive company.
Tables were cleared to make way for us to throw our own hands at pottery painting, with Kai and I both spending almost an hour consumed experimenting with our paints. Sometimes his intense focus comes in very handy – he LOVED it, his little face bunched up in concentration and pleasure as he mixed and spread and splodged.
Ta-Da!
And yes, I thought my own attempts were pretty good too. What? Over-achiever? Me?
A short walk up the (steep) hill (with me gallantly trailing with the pushchair) meant a trip to the Bridgewater Exhibition at the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery for more sights and sounds, with Kai and his new friends making tea in miniature Emma Bridgewater tea set and me taking a sneaky kip on the sofa under the pretence of watching an informative video. We even got to wander round their new cottage garden, meet the chickens, and hear about the amazing roof-top greenhouses under construction which will soon be providing tomatoes for the cafe salads.
It was a fabulous day. Full of fun, and good company, and so many beautiful things that I went home with my head pounding and my eyes stinging, completely overwhelmed with everything I had seen and heard.
I highly recommend you go, if only for the tea room and pottery painting which is open daily and is an incredibly relaxing and enjoying way to spend an afternoon. Tours of the factory can be arranged to gain an insight into this amazing creative process.
And you’ll only be twenty minutes down the road from me too, so maybe I’ll join you, because I definitely want to go back soon.
If only for another slice of that pie, and to immerse myself in such a gorgeously rich and colourful world once again.
Thanks so much to all the staff at Emma Bridgewater and to Lewis PR for giving us such a special day. Especially to Jamie for making me smile, and Eb for being lovely company and holding my brolly.
Living with Fear – A survivor’s tale
We have an anonymous guest post on the blog today.
I was very touched yesterday when this special person made contact with me. Her story is so brave, it is, no matter what she says, and made me ache for her and everything she has been through. Reliving this kind of experience takes an awful lot of courage. I am so pleased to be able to provide a safe space for her to share her story. I hope you’ll give it, and her, the amazing support you always give me.
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The terrible unfolding events of a gun massacre in Cumbria have made some very unsettling feelings resurface for me, and I feel the need to get something down in writing – some sort of catharsis is needed. It doesn’t matter if you think you know who I am, or can work out my identity at the end of this piece. That matters little to me, because I know that my ex-husband will never read this and that makes it safe to write without fear of retribution. It also means I can talk about a part of my past that I was ashamed of, and have tried to push to the back of my mind but every so often – especially at times like this – it resurfaces.
My ex-husband threatened me with violence on many occasions, actually hurt me on others, but mainly it was the emotional and psychological violence that pervaded our marriage towards the end.
Our marriage really started to fall apart during my second pregnancy when we started to have money problems. He had been made redundant from work, and with our second child on the way it was a difficult time. What I didn’t expect was for his already volatile nature to take a dramatic turn for the worse. Three days before the baby was born I nearly walked out of the house with our toddler because of his behaviour, but for some reason – fear, hope, I don’t know what – I stayed. When the baby was born I remember having a conversation with the health visitor about post-natal depression (PND) and she instinctively invited me to go along to a clinic to talk to someone about it. My husband came with me saying he didn’t trust health visitors and that if we said the wrong thing they would probably take the children into care. He watched me as I filled in a questionnaire about PND and I felt compelled to give the safe answers, anyway I wasn’t lying was I? Because I didn’t have PND, I was severely depressed and had been for months.
Some months passed before I was prescribed anti-depressants and I tried to keep them a secret from him, knowing that he would use it against me in some way. Inevitably, he found the tablets one day (looking through my bag for something, or just checking up on me?) and the glint in his eye was one of joy. Euphoria almost. He’d uncovered my Achilles heel. The taunting about my mental illness – which he always said in a whisper, as though he was protecting me, was unmerciful and he took every opportunity to smile knowingly and tell me how he would take care of things because I wasn’t capable of looking after the children on my own.
Even when he found a new job the aggression didn’t stop as I’d hoped it would. He started pushing me around and taunting me for my weight problem/poor parenting skills/domestic skills, whatever he could think of. He rarely drank alcohol so I couldn’t blame it on that, but if I ever bought a bottle of wine he would talk to me in a quiet, menacing voice about how he might have to talk to someone about my drink problem. The message was clear – do anything rash and you will lose the children.
Somehow, without actually saying the words he knew that I wanted a divorce. I was too scared to say it to him, he was so unpredictable, but he must have known how miserable I was and that in the two years since our second child was born I’d become an emotional wreck. I remember driving to a nearby town, where nobody knew us, and attending an appointment I’d secretly arranged with a solicitor. I wanted to know where I stood if I went down the divorce route. Could he take the children from me? Would my real and imagined issues be held against me? It was when the solicitor asked me for my personal details and the children’s names that it became real and I broke down. I think I sat sobbing in the solicitor’s office for a good twenty minutes, and although the solicitor was sympathetic he warned me that things could get very nasty if I wanted to proceed with a divorce, and I should prepare myself for that. He asked me “what’s the worst thing your husband could do?” My immediate reply was “He could kill me.”
I went home to face the nightmare that was my marriage. On the face of it we were doing so well. We had a nice home in a good part of town, two healthy children. My husband had a professional job; he was intelligent, good-looking, well-dressed and extremely charming. Who was going to believe me against him? After all, I was one the one with the problems wasn’t I?
Then, just after the visit to the solicitor, there was a news story about a policeman who killed his family. The headline said “There’ll be no divorce, the only way out is death”. It was a horrific, gruesome episode where the father had killed his wife and two of their children rather than get a divorce. My ex lauded him as a hero saying ‘that’s the way to go’. The worrying this was my husband was ex-military and at the time was a firearms officer in the local Army Cadets, so had access to guns. You can guess where my mind was, and I feared for my life and my children’s.
I decided to take a chance and speak to his parents, who had always been very supportive and knew of his volatile nature. Their response was to look at me pityingly and say that it must be something I was doing because he would never normally behave like that. Of course, they asked him about it and he reluctantly confided in them about my mental illness and fondness for the drink.
Then not long after that, as we ate our evening meal one night our 5 year-old calmly announced that she’d told her teacher that Daddy had pulled Mummy over by the throat and made her lie on the floor. As horrifying as it was too hear, I knew that this was a possible escape route, that if I could talk to the teacher about it she might be able to get some help for us. But my husband took the next day off work to escort me as I took our daughter to and from school and somehow managed to charm and laugh with the teacher about the silly things children say. The teacher commented on how strange she had thought it was, but of course they both laughed it off. If only she’d looked at me she would have noticed I wasn’t laughing. My escape route had snatched away and I was devastated.
It wasn’t long after that that something incredible happened. He had been out visiting a ‘friend’ and when he came home he asked, incredibly, “Are we ever going to have sex again?” I shook my head. “OK, then I think the best thing is for me to move out.” I could only nod in agreement, but in my head I was screaming “Oh thank you, sweet Jesus. Please, please make him go through with it.”
A few weeks later he was gone. He moved out, and hasn’t come back. Isn’t wanted back, never has been. And now, this current news story about the ‘quiet man’ who suddenly snapped has brought this all back to the surface again. I can remember that feeling of being terrified of what he might do. What he might be capable of. And it was this sort of carnage that lived in fear of.
When I contacted Josie and asked for her advice about writing this piece, her advice was to get it written and then work out what we could do with it. She described me as brave to write about this, but sadly the one thing I can’t claim to be is brave. I do feel stronger for having survived this, and I feel proud of having raised my two children on my own and see them grow into loving, warm, responsible young people. But even now, several years later, and despite the fact he’s not allowed into my home I’m still afraid of him. So I’m grateful, yes. Lucky, certainly. But brave, no.
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Domestic abuse is real, it happens, and it is a subject very close to my heart. If you are in a situation where you are made to feel frightened, emotionally or physically, speak out. Please.
The National Domestic Violence Helpline: 0808 2000 247
Excellent Souls
No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness. ~ Aristotle
I am beginning to realise that I may be ever so slightly mad.
This is a good thing though. I am actually really starting to like it.
An article on the relationship between creativity and madness on the BBC news website this week suggests I’m not the only one to find walking the line between creative expression and mental illness a rather fine one. Turns out that intense creative thinking mimics some of the brain patterns of schizophrenia.
I am being drawn into something at the moment. It is to do with words, and artistic potential, and growth and self discovery and all the rest. It is about love and passion and connection and meaning. It is waking me up to the world again. It is changing me. It is about finding out who I really am.
I was always going to be that kind of writer.
Emotions like rocket-fuel, as someone so beautifully described to me this week. You could plot this blog on a graph and watch the deep troughs followed by the intense highs. I don’t know how to be any different. It is as fundamental to my nature as is my need for quiet and space and beauty. Feeling deeply means I feel, and it means I can write.
How can I write about colours on the wind if I don’t see them? How can I divine pattern and meaning in the way the dust has settled on my shoes if I don’t allow my thinking to bend and stretch a little?
It is scary sometimes. The article quote “… like looking through a shattered mirror” is about right. But it is a good scary. An exciting scary.
If good writing means being slightly insane then sign me up. If it sucks me up and spins me round and spits me out but in the process means I can create something extraordinary, if it means I can be something extraordinary then it will be worth it.
Because I feel very alive and the world is beautiful.
(this is Kai playing with fibre optics, by the way. If I half close my eyes the world looks like this)
P.S. Thank you for all your lovely messages about finishing my course. I completed and posted my work yesterday, a day early. Now the fun can really begin.
