The Cerebral Mum

[story continued from Amnesty, Part One]

It wasn’t until after the bottle of wine had been drunk and her packet of cigarettes finished that she spoke, but I was content just to be there with her in the darkness. She talked to me about her marriage and her childhood and the men in her life as though I were an adult. I listened, rapt. She told me she had gone to my father’s surgery at lunch time and found him in the back room with the nurse. She told me about other affairs he’d had. After the first few times, she had forced herself to stop being suspicious: She didn’t want to live like that. She couldn’t leave because she loved my father. She told me the story of how they met and, looking more often at the blue curtain outside the car than at me, she told me what he had been like. Then. I didn’t quite believe her. And then she rounded on me, hammered questions at me. I found it hard to answer most of them. Her eyes were very bright. Maybe she was a little crazy.

“…I like my room…I don’t really like living here…I like being by myself…I like writing…I would like to live in England or in a city at least…Because there would be other things to do apart from sport…I don’t like sport, I’m no good at it…The kids don’t like you if you don’t play sport…I wish that you had let me learn the flute…I wish that I lived just with you Mum, or all by myself…”

“…I wish that Dad didn’t drink…He makes me feel embarrassed…He makes me uncomfortable…Sometimes I’m afraid Mum…I don’t like the way he hangs over me when he talks to me…I don’t like the things he says…I like being by myself…That’s what I would like the most…Just to be by myself…To be by myself…”

My mother took the wine from my hands and swallowed it all. Without it, I felt naked and the air outside seemed to grow thicker. She said, “We’re leaving,” and I thought she meant that we were going home. I wanted to now because I didn’t have the cup in my hand and everything was dangerous. I wanted to be in my room. I put my seatbelt on. She wasn’t looking at me.

“We’re leaving. I’ve got the money. I’ve got enough money to go to Melbourne and find a flat and find a job and the schools are better there. I can’t go on forgiving him for the rest of my life. Besides, I’m afraid of him too sometimes and he won’t stop drinking. We’re leaving.”

I wanted to so much. I was shivering with the idea. I wanted to scream Are we really? Are we really? and to throw my arms around her neck. But I didn’t. I was scared she would change her mind. She started the car. I didn’t know what to do with all my energy while we drove home and it seeped out in little choking noises. My mother didn’t notice.

She didn’t say anything more, not while we drove and not when we arrived home. She walked slowly up the stairs to her bedroom. The light was on. It was the only light on in the house. I rushed to my room and rushed to my alcove, pulling a box clumsily through the sliding doors of my cupboard on the way. I filled it with books. I went out to the kitchen to find more boxes and I filled them with books too. I crawled beneath my bed and gathered up all the brown paper lunchbags I had hidden under there. I gathered them up and put them in the box my rollerskates had come in. I hugged the skatebox to me tightly. My eyes were glazed and my room had taken on the unreality that rooms always do at 3:00am. The rims of my eyes were burning, itchy and pleasant. I was tired without realising it. My mind was already searching for a flat in Melbourne. What would it be like? Wonderful. The city was an ocean. I would be a fish, and I wouldn’t flounder any more in all this fresh air. I looked at my boxes, wondering if I should take them out to the car. With my skatebox still hugged to my chest, I walked out to the hall, to the family room, to the bottom of the stairs. I stood staring at the blank wall where the stairs turned left and waited for my mother. Maybe she was packing too.

After a while, I sat down. It was cold because the fire had gone out and I shivered. The grey walls of our new house glared at me, reflecting the light which came out from under the door of my room and from my mother’s room upstairs. I didn’t care that the walls were mean. I didn’t have to live here any more. I shivered again and then the light upstairs went out. I sat for a little longer and then I went back to my room. I put my lunchbags back and I put my skates back in their box. I unpacked my books and got into bed. I was glad that I had turned my electric blanket on before my mother had come in to tell me that I was going with her.

The material in this post is protected by copyright. It cannot be reproduced, in whole or in part, without the author’s express permission. © www.cerebralmum.com

Related Posts

• Counselling to me… (1)
• 2007: My Favourite Five (9)
• Last night… (2)
• SMS: Gone Daddy Gone… (8)

What follows is a short story written when I was, I think, 20 years old. I would probably consider it juvenilia partly because it isn’t an accomplished piece of writing but more particularly because at the time I did not possess the faculty of fictionalising biographical events or themes in the way I do now. I think it also lacks a certain subtlety, especially in the dialogue and the lack of nuance in the depiction of the adults in the story. When I next get a chance to write, there are some thoughts I want to discuss which this story in some ways relate to, but before I write that, I will also post an excerpt from my novel-in-progress which feeds into those ideas as well, though in a far more fictionalised way.

Amnesty (Part One)

It wasn’t late but it was dark. I wasn’t afraid. It was winter. The car was parked at the edge of Rotary Creek and we were hidden from the highway and the town’s light by trees and a children’s playground. For a long time now we had been sitting quite still in the front seat of the car. My mother was smoking and her window was open. I wasn’t afraid. I was thirteen. The air was mountain blue and the smoke from my mother’s cigarette floated out through the window and into it, disappearing slowly like a deep breath. The bottle was at my feet but empty now and my mother’s polystyrene cup lay beside it. The cup was empty too. My cup I still nursed in both my hands; the golden-yellow liquid in it had grown warm. My mother ashed her cigarette and turned to me. Relaxed now.

Not long before my father was due home I had gotten that suspicious, nervy feeling. I always did around that time. It made me sneaky. I acted like a spy. When he did get home, the door, instead of slamming against the door-frame and bouncing back an inch or two, glided slowly into place and startled me. I had been in my room underneath the stairs where my bookshelves were and writing and when I sprang the steady-tray that had been on my knees fell to the floor. I folded the paper I had been writing on and stuffed it into a brown paper lunchbag. I stuffed the lunchbag under my bed. Then I hurried to my door so I could close it, so I could sever my room from the brand-new Jennings house that we lived in and be by myself. I closed the door and stood waiting for the house to fade away. I heard my parents’ voices and I opened my door a crack to see what was going on. Spying. My parents were squared off in the kitchen and my father was flushed although he couldn’t have been drinking yet; he’d just got home from work. I opened the door a crack more and tried to hear.

My room and the kitchen were separated by a huge, grey family room with a slanting roof that stretched up to the second floor where my parents’ bedroom was and I couldn’t hear clearly. My father kept saying, “Nothing…” and my mother seemed to say nothing at all. Most of their words rose like heat to the ceiling or got lost in the crackle of the wood-stove which was burning furiously in the family room. Then I heard my mother clearly.

“Alex, you had no shirt on.” There was almost a laugh in her voice. Maybe they weren’t fighting after all. I couldn’t hear properly.

“You had no shirt on.” She said it again. They were fighting.

I opened the door and tried to look as if I was going to the toilet. Neither of them noticed me. I didn’t go to the toilet; I stopped where the hallway finished, where they couldn’t see me, and squatted down still trying to hear. None of it upset me though. I was just curious, fascinated by the argument the way some people are fascinated by Jack the Ripper. I still couldn’t hear anything so I went back to my room, this time closing the door behind me. I reached underneath the bed for the poem I had been writing and pulled out several brown lunchbags. I had to open five before I found the right one. I heard a few slamming noises so I turned my stereo on loud and went back to my alcove. I didn’t read my poem and I didn’t hear the music. I heard footsteps coming towards my room and then the door opened. It was my mother and I was glad.

“You’re coming with me.”

And I got up and followed her. We didn’t see my father as we walked through the kitchen where my mother grabbed the wine and the cups. I followed her through the front door.

It was only when we reached the highway that I asked my mother where we were going. She didn’t know. We were almost abreast with the entrance to Rotary Park when she decided to turn in and park the car beside the creek. I thought that we were going to drive straight into the water. She lit her first cigarette with shaking hands and there was something wonderful about it all.

[continued… Amnesty, Part 2]

The material in this post is protected by copyright. It cannot be reproduced, in whole or in part, without the author’s express permission. © www.cerebralmum.com

Related Posts

• The fable my tattoo tells me… (3)
• Monday’s Child: Why he doesn’t care whose birthday it is… (10)
• Drought… (0)
• Last night… (2)

Caspar loving gadgets as he does quite some time ago ate my phone, which involved so my drool that he fried the circuits and I was phoneless for quite some time. That didn’t bother me too much, because I’m somewhat phone-phobic and hate talking on the damn things. I do however, like SMSing. It’s short, to the point, and happens in my own time frame. And useful for things like “Get milk” or ‘Home in 5. Make coffee.” So after a while a long suffering friend, who I don’t talk to enough, posted me an old one of hers. And when I say old, I mean old.

Smessing (That’s what I call it - Spread it around.) on it is a pain it the butt. The screen is microscopic and it takes a dozen button presses just to get to the smess screen and you can’t even set the default to predictive text. But it serves its minimal purposes, and all my numbers and old saved smesses were on my SIM card so nothing was lost. But another thing about it that doesn’t function well is that there is no keypad lock. Left alone in my bag or pocket, it’s free to dial people I haven’t spoken to for years, or people that would barely remember me whose numbers I really should just delete. I can live with that. The amount I use it, a couple of random calls won’t increase my monthly $20 bill.

Today, however, it did something very bad.

It deleted all my saved smesses. Including the few I had kept from Caspar’s dad.

They weren’t really important, I guess, in the scheme of things. There were just a few simple things. A line from one of our favourite songs, a one word message which said, Tulips, and other things in the private language of our short-lived, ill-fated, star-crossed romance. And I know that I don’t need the “evidence” that our relationship was meaningful - because I know it was despite its end - but it made me sad that they were gone. All I have left now of him which is concrete is the worn Ralph Lauren Polo cardigan he loaned to me which never got returned and a letter opener in the shape of Richard the Lionheart’s sword, and the empty envelope from the flowers which arrived after Cas was born; the ones that did not need a card. It isn’t much.

It isn’t like I looked at them every day, or even think of him frequently. He’s there in the background, in my memories - as a good memory - and life moves on. But now I’m feeling a little tristesse. Perhaps I’m sentimental but I guess that that is a far better thing for a single Mum to be than angry or hurt or bitter. Well… I might be a little angry.

At that damn phone.

Related Posts

• Seriously, man, what is your problem? (7)
• Summer Cinquain… Winter Tanka… (0)
• Amnesty (Part One) (1)
• Caspar learns how to say no… (5)

I didn’t write a Christmas post, or a New Year post so this will be my Year-That-Was post.

Guera, one of my new favourite people, who writes one of my new favourite blogs, A Roaming Aussie Mum, has challenged me to the Favourite Five Meme.

I say challenged because I’m pretty sure that I will find this hard. You see, the meme is this…

Post 5 links to 5 of your previously written posts, one relating to each of these key words:

1. Family
2. Friend
3. Yourself
4. Your love
5. Anything you like

The only thing I ever write about is No. 3. Yes, I am that self absorbed. But I shall give it a shot. You just hold the line while I go hunting.

I wouldn’t recommend holding your breath.

(Some time later…)

1. Family

Not just sibling rivalry… is probably the post in which I’ve talked the most about my relationship with my sister, whose house I currently live in. Although I mention her often, I don’t really discuss the details of our relationship, or its ups and down. I don’t discuss those kinds of details for any of my real life relationships, because words are permanent and I hope that I am wise enough to use only the ones I can stand by, and that I have enough integrity to not lash out in an arena where there other has no means to defend themselves. Our relationship isn’t easy, and I talk about that a little in this post, but the overwhelming emphasis is on what is strong and good. As depressed as I may be, as difficult as life sometimes is, I do try to always focus on that.

2. Friend

There wasn’t an obvious choice for this one. There is a post that written for a specific friend in a specific circumstance, Because you remember what I remember…, but my care for her was written obliquely within my thoughts on the nature of friendship. I know it reached her, however and that she understood all that I was trying to say so it is an important post to me. And then there is the The first birthday party…, with a long list of appreciation for many friends who too often get lost in the darkness of my mind. As awful as it is to feel alone and abandoned, it seems somehow worse to fail to recognise those people who do not abandon you and who light your way. This is the post I wrote for them.

3. Myself

Oh, a wealth of choices! I think that makes this an even harder choice. I have a favourite but I have linked to it in several other posts so I’m going to choose the most special one, one I didn’t write myself: The Cerebral Mum, from another perspective. I was so grateful to HG for doing this for me, to help me see myself from someone else’s point of view. It is such a wonderful post in it’s own right, but it also made me feel fortunate to have people like HG in my life, and that perhaps I wasn’t so lost as I imagined.

4. My Love

Love takes many forms, I know, but many of them have been covered by the other key words. The obvious choice is Caspar, but I do not think that I have ever captured in a single post the breadth of my love for him. And I cannot help but read this as meaning an adult love, they kind you have for your partner. I don’t have one, I have written nothing about one., so I’m sitting this one out. At some stage, I will probably write about this kind of love, theoretically, and the way it befuddles me. But that post doesn’t exist yet. The bonus post under “Friend” will have to suffice.

5. Anything I Like

My failed attempt to complete 30 Poems in 30 Days yielded one poem that I love, Sapphics of the deep, so that is my choice. It is imperfect. It was written in a difficult metre that I was unfamiliar with, but to me the words are rich; dense with symbolism and mouth-filling. Those not familiar with the Sapphic may not recognise the rigid form in which it was constructed but for an undisciplined person like myself, restricting my writing in this way and still being able to create something large remains a source of pride.

And now the tagging. I generally don’t tag people for memes. Instead I ask anyone who would like to participate to let me know so that I can add their link. But often no one ever does so today I’ll break that habit and and invite…

1. Karen from Miscellaneous Adventures of an Aussie Mum
2. Mountainmama from Careful What You Wish For…
3. Anonymum from The Nook of Oz
4. Missy from Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch
5. Stewart from The New USSR, Illustrated
6. Marj aka Thriver from Survivors Can Thrive

There are of course other people I’d like to tag but I’m only supposed to do 5 and January is half gone so many people have already written their retrospectives. If you want to be added, however, let me know because I was never that good at following senseless rules.

Related Posts

• Broken resolutions… (9)
• The fable my tattoo tells me… (3)
• Summer Cinquain… Winter Tanka… (0)
• Sandbox Sunday: 10 Steps to Installing a Favicon in Wordpress (6)

Ahh, counselling. Not my favourite idea. I’ve tried it twice in the past. Or tried to try it, anyway.

In a crisis frame of mind when I first started dealing with the child sexual abuse, I found a counsellor. I wanted to talk about it. I hadn’t really talked about it before. After a few weeks of talking about my toilet training, and my juvenile medical problems, I was no longer in a crisis state of mind, and had no patience for it. The psychologist was nice, and I think I understood her need to build a fuller picture of the person she was dealing with. Maybe she was gathering useful information. But it wasn’t useful to me. If it had the potential to be, well, it wasn’t quick enough. Or cheap enough.

My second attempt was for an eating disorder. I started throwing up between the end of high school and the beginning of university. That gap meant I had no Austudy - Australia’s income support for students. I had no income. And I had nowhere to live. I had been living in a school funded apartment with another “homeless” student, and once I graduated I had to move out.

The people at what was then the Dept of Employmen, Education and Training were very helpful. They wanted me to go on unemployment benefits, but that required me to sign a statement that I was seeking a permanent full time position, and I wasn’t because I was waiting to get into University. The officer I dealt with pulled strings, and the Department put me on the dole without me signing the paper. I found somewhere to live. And then I found a temporary job. Goodbye dole, and hello waiting a month for my first paycheck.

I walked for nearly three hours every day to get to that job. Each way. With the money I had, I bought rice and popcorn to eat. Popcorn is the cheapest food there is when you have no money. A 90 cent packet makes a lot of popcorn. Sometimes, I would pinch a little of my housemate’s tomato sauce to flavour my rice.

I guess the exercise and the limited diet triggered the problem, but when I had a little money again for food and the bus, I would buy a packet of biscuits, eat them all, and throw up. then I would run on the spot until my calves were so tense I could barely walk. This behaviour settled down then flared up every so often over the next few years. And then it got really bad. I couldn’t eat so much as a lettuce leaf without feeling an overwhelming urge to purge myself of it. I would eat in secret ten times a day and throw up ten times a day. I was getting very sick. My hair started to fall out.

I didn’t mean to meander back through the past so much. Counselling.

When it got bad, I tried every related helpline I could find. Every single one was disconnected. So I tried unrelated helplines and eventually got put through to the Eating Disorder unit of the closest Psych ward. Where I was asked to leave a message for the one doctor who was qualified to talk to me. I didn’t want to leave a message. I tried again every day that week, but could never reach anyone. So I quit my day job and spent the summer at the beach and got better by myself.

So much for my counselling experience.

But this weekend (ie; crisis point) I noticed over at Life In The Country, a post entitled Combat Strategies: Fighting Depression so I clicked through and followed the link to Lifeline and searched there for my local health service. I tried the email link. The email was returned undelivered. I went to their homepage and used the email address there. It was returned undelivered. I sent an email, in the end, to their PR Department, asking them to forward my details to someone appropriate.

(Let me just say, this is a pretty sorry state of affairs and I often wonder what the experience is like for people whose lives are actually on the line.)

Anyway, that email went through and yesterday I got a reply back from the PR department that simply said…

>Thankyou for your e-mail which has just been passed on to our Community Health Service. Someone will follow you up early next week. Regards.

It made me cry. There is something shocking and confronting about the possibility of being helped. Later that day I got a phone number to call and spoke briefly on the phone with someone who has put me on the waiting list. That made me cry too and afterwards I went outside and paced in figure eights on the driveway, the paving warm on my bare feet.

Unexpected offers of help are stressful. I don’t know why. I don’t even think counselling is helpful. The fact is that the hard work can only be done by me. The most I expect really, is a place away from my responsibilities, where Caspar can not see me, where I might give myself some room to really cry. But soon enough, I expect, I will become frustrated with talking to someone who wants to help, but does not know me. Who wants to help, but has a procedure which doesn’t respond to me. Who wants to help, but cannot help me.

I am the only one that can do it. Other peoples opinions and perceptions and perspectives are great too, but it hasn’t been my experience that counsellors give you those. It is such a synthetic process and psychologists seem so blank. If I am going to talk to a wall, I think I would rather it was made of paper and it spoke back to me with my own pen. I know many people have found counselling so helpful and perhaps that’s why, when it feels like a crisis, I call. But I just can’t imagine it working with me.

I’ll try it anyway.

Related Posts

• Beyond the atrium… (12)
• Is it getting thin? (16)
• Summer Cinquain… Winter Tanka… (0)
• The fable my tattoo tells me… (3)

The October edition of the Blog Carnival Against Child Abuse has been posted over at Survivors Can Thrive and I read all of it today. One of the posts which particularly caught my interest was Weaknesses and Submission for Survival. The writer, Austin, talks about the barriers between her and her sister as they grew up in an abusive household, exacerbated by their different ways of coping.

I relate to this strongly. It may seem to those of you who have been reading this blog for a while now, that Big Sis and I have a wonderful relationship. And we do. But it is not always an easy one, and it is something that both of us have worked very hard to obtain. One of the many, many things that those who have not experienced an abusive family environment often do not understand is the way in which it damages all the family relationships. It is simple. The rule is this:

Divide and Conquer.

Often, I hear people who are shocked and disgusted by the lack of support individual victims receive from the other members of their family. It seems so unnatural to them. Mothers who remain with the partners who have abused their children, for example, are vilified. Unfortunately, more often than not it is unnatural, but not because these mothers lack maternal instincts, not because they are as heinous as the abuser themselves, but because they are victims as well. It is a vicious cycle. We should celebrate when someone, anyone!, breaks it, but we should ache as well for all those who can’t.

I would like everyone, next time they read a story in the newspaper or see a story on TV to wonder not at the inhumanity of these people, but at what they must have gone through themselves to be so incapable of defending their loved ones. I do not say this to give everyone a free pass - not everyone deserves one - but it is indeed possible that they deserve as much sympathy as the primary victim. (From strangers, anyway: A victim’s anger towards those in their life who were blind or who enabled their abuser is always justified. If they rediscover their relationships, that’s fine. If they don’t, well, they have no obligation for forgiveness. Their most important role is to find a way to heal themselves.)

So, divided and conquered they stand. Abusers are often subtle. Abuse is often subtle. Often, the things we perceive as stolen from children when they are raped and tortured have been taken long before, in painful increments which erode the child’s sense of self-worth along with their connection to the people around them. Their connection to the people they could tell. As they know less and less safety in their lives, the abuser becomes more and more secure. And so more is permitted.

And what is safety, to a child? Safety is home, it is family. It is that thing they are sure of; the haven which allows them to venture out into the world, knowing always that there is a place, and its people, to return to. If someone in the family wants to abuse a child, that place must be stripped bare of inhabitants.

…the mother made certain my sister and I stayed divided. With my sister’s cunning plans and my thinking ability to see it through we would have been unstoppable. The mother couldn’t have that now could she? Two kids who put their heads together to overthrow a tyrant, two kids completely different putting young resources together to survive that tyrant would have been something to contend with. There was no way in hell the mother could afford for us to be friends. _AUSTIN

There was no way in hell my adoptive father could afford for my sister and I to be friends. There is no way he could afford for us to trust each other, to see each other clearly. Together, we would have found the words to tell our mother, to make explicit that thing none of us alone could face.

Looking back, it is difficult to determine precisely the causes of the wedge between us. We are very different. Our minds work differently. Perhaps we would have disliked each other for those differences anyway. Perhaps we would have gone through a normal sibling rivalry. But what I remember most is this:

The way in which he ridiculed her, the way he made direct attacks upon her self-esteem. The way she never spoke back to him. The way she existed in the world outside our family, popular, talkative, confident and loving. The way all the good things about her became her mask instead of herself. The way she fulfilled every prophecy of failure he gave to her. The way he told her she was fat and ugly and stupid and the awful way she believed him.

The way he told me constantly how clever I was, how I was destined to be somebody. The way I argued passionately with him while my family, craving peace, left the room. The way I lived with fairies. The way the world inside my head was more real to me than daily things. The way he was proud of me, the way he bragged about me. And the awful way this separated me from my sister.

Picture this: In late primary school, I go to my mother crying. I ask her not why is he so mean to Big Sis, but why doesn’t he treat me the same way he treats her. I am crying because I am singled out. I cannot understand why. I do not want to be singled out. I do not want to be different, separate, from my sister. But how could I comprehend that then?

In many ways, abusers are smart. They are perceptive. They recognise the weaknesses they can exploit. My sister’s weaknesses and mine were different: I loved thinking, my sister loved people. For both of us, the other was the image we were battered with. Our mere presence was enough to hurt each other for a long, long time.

There is one thing that unites an abusive family, and that is silence. They show one face - one family face - to the world but within their own walls there are no real words between them. To speak would be to shatter the masks, and the masks are what holds the individuals together while holding the people apart. Our psyches can only take so much before our defence mechanisms kick in. That may sound like jargon but it is an accurate description. They are mechanisms, like breathing. They are not conscious and they override what would have been our normal functioning. My sister lost herself in a world of people, hiding from the fact that she felt worthy of none of them. I lost myself in the world of my imagination, hiding from the imperfection of my life.

When we grew to adulthood, I remained the image she was battered with. She remained, to my mind of pictures, less real than me. It took a lot of years, a lot of talking and a lot of arduous respect to learn each other’s language and find the things we shared. It took a lot of years to learn the other was not what we despised, and not the thing we should have been.

There are worse childhoods than mine. I come from a cycle which has been broken. By all of us: My mother, my Big Sis and me. I have the gift of an extraordinarily strong family which will never be taken for granted. Not all victims of abuse are so fortunate. Please feel for them. All of them.

Related Posts

• Blog Carnival Against Child Abuse - November Edition (4)
• Sleep is calling… (0)
• It’s all in the pitch, bitch… (3)
• Other kinds of babies… (8)

Yes, she is. And I don’t like the sound of her voice. She’s a nag.

Three nights in a row I have fallen asleep on the couch after putting Caspar to bed at 7pm. I think Sleep is trying to tell me something. But I hate sleeping. I always have. It’s not something I have ever been good at. As a child, I had an early bedtimes. Today it seems like children don’t have bedtimes at all but back in the day… So I went to bed. But not to sleep.

Growing up in north east Victoria we had long, hot summers, hot enough to melt the roads and it seemed like the sun never went down. I would read and read and read, squinting at the pages in the half-light until I had to admit defeat, no longer able to make out the words. Then I used a torch, which was confiscated from me regularly. I recall one night waiting until my parents were asleep before going outside to crawl under the house and retrieve it from it’s hiding place. And I remember hours spent overnight in the toilet with a book, working on the theory that if my parents awoke and discovered me, I had an excuse at hand.

I also remember waking early, around 4am, and reading some more. I would leave the house before 7am, still reading as I walked the 15 minute walk to school. School didn’t start until 9am.

So I didn’t sleep but I spent a lot of time in bed. With my books. In 40°+ heat ( that’s 104+ in fahrenheit for my American friends) I would be snuggled under the doona with Enid Blyton or Judy Blume or Jane Austen. Lost in their worlds, I had no concept of time or what was going on outside. The day I read R.D. Blackmore’s Lorna Doone, in the year of the Ash Wednesday fires which wiped out half the state (I was nearly 11), it was hot, really hot. When I finished it, in bed with my electric blanket on in the middle of the day at the height of summer, I was surprised to look outside and see it wasn’t snowing. That the air, sweltering, was a burning jewel.

After leaving home, there was no longer any bedtime and my sleepless nights continued. Sometimes, I worked late at a McDonald’s in the city, a 17 year old girl working her way through her last year at high school. Occasionally I went out to a club, stumbling from the early tram into my school-funded apartment for a long bath before classes. But mostly I read, now grown into Plath and Sartre and Camus. And I wrote.

As an adult, I succumbed briefly to the 9 to 5 life but continued living without sleep, spending dark hours at the computer working on my novel. Sleep is boring, I would say. I started working nights on top of my day job, just to stay awake, before doing away with the day job altogether and surrendering once more to my vampire life. I closed my eyes only when I could keep them open no longer.

Now I am not working at all and I am unable to sleep whenever my body wins its battle with me because of that small, warm, perfect boy now peacefully snuffle-snoring in my room. Still, I find myself again and again at my computer at 3am, writing this blog. My body is fighting me for its time; it’s time to recuperate, to rejuvenate my mind, to replenish itself, rebuild itself. It is not winning. It is ten minutes to one and after a restless nap on the sofa, I am here writing.

I confess, O nagging Sleep, that it is my bedtime. I will submit to that much.

But I am taking a book with me.

Related Posts

• Caspar and me… (2)
• Avoiding depression… (11)
• The fable my tattoo tells me… (3)
• Imagine if… (11)