The Cerebral Mum

It was 9:30pm and I was starting a post about our days at the park. I had pictures. I went over to the pram to grab my camera from the nappy bag hanging off the handles.

It wasn’t there.

And I’d been busy. There were so many photos I hadn’t yet had time to upload on that aptly-named memory card; photos from Mum’s visit, from Caspar’s surgery. Photos from today. Photos which marked an amazing change in Caspar as a little human being. Which I was going to write about.

I remembered putting the camera down beside the red slide when Caspar walked over to me. I remembered going to play on the see-saw, and going to have one last turn on the swings before Big Sis called to see if I would take her to the supermarket. So home we went.

Once my brain had taken that split second to process those movements, I was frozen. I had a sleeping baby in my bedroom but I had to go to the park. I’m lucky. I could. Big Sis, whose house I am living in, was only a step away, watching the football and waiting for pizza with her boyfriend in the house behind us on this dual occupancy lot. They came over to stay with Cas while I sped out onto the road and took a right. Parking half over the curb, I left the lights on and barefoot, wearing only a singlet, I ran outside into the winter, over the grass and over the bark to the red slide.

It wasn’t there.

I drove home still frozen. Big Sis and B came out to meet me and I burst into tears. Not just tears but those deep, sorrowful, heartbroken tears; the kind only a woman can cry, the kind you cry when you know your loss is irrevocable.

I walked into the house. I couldn’t speak. Big Sis, in her dressing gown, came toward me to envelop me in her Big Sis arms but she stepped away from me abruptly when she saw, plain as day, my camera sitting on top of Caspar’s bookshelf.

This is a really funny story. It should be funny. A blind panic from a mother whose brain is still not functioning at full capacity. A mind is a terrible thing to lose. That’s my punchline, right? But I’m not ready to laugh yet.

These digital remnants I get to keep are a drop in the ocean for a mother who, so many times a day, sees something new in her son, sees him grow, sees him change, sees him approach the world from different angles, sees him constantly becoming that little human being she already knew he was before she gave birth to him.

But they’re what I get to keep. They’re what I can look at now, while he’s sleeping, so I don’t go and pick him up and disturb his rest just so I can hold him. They’re what I will be able to look at when he’s grown and gone and I can no longer glance up from the dishes or my computer or the chopping board and be overcome by the transcendent perfection of this person I created and yet can take no credit for.

So thank you, Big Sis, for not laughing. Or, at least, for not laughing at me.

It’s too long since I’ve written. It was never this hard. It was never this hard knot in my chest that feels like tears. I’ve have too much to say. I have forgotten how to say it.

It was never this hard when I made myself jugs of coffee and brandy and typed through the night with the city lights creeping through my apartment, knowing all the while there were people still awake, still out in the streets, still living. It was never this hard when I was sitting in a corner of the Supper Club at 3am with my notebooks and a Pedro Ximénez, surrounded by people, alone but never lonely.

I hate living in the suburbs. When did I decide to stop being? I didn’t. It just came creeping and that’s far, far worse. It’s easy to live with the consequences of decision. You have answers to all your whys; you can respect your choices even when they’re wrong. But this creeping passivity, this loss of passion, this degrading slide into conformity…

I hate living in the suburbs. I hate this lack of will in me. I hate this non-entity I’m trapped inside. I hate being surrounded by clean concrete and new bricks and people who speak in nothings. I hate my hollow voice.

I guess there are things that have happened in my life, there are people, I could blame for where I am and I see the temptation but I refuse attribute my life to others. I refuse to abdicate. So instead, I don’t like myself. I am ashamed.

And after stating so categorically that I am a writer I cannot find words. There are times when reading breaks me down, breaks through that barrier freezing my fingers at the keyboard, but today was not one of them. Today, reading Girl’s Gone Child’s past and present futures, reading that she’s on the road again with a Kerouac quote in her pocket, I saw the sad echo of myself and had to face my stasis. Even her predilection for guitarists and Henry Miller was a mirror, an accusing reflection of who I am, or who I was, or that person I’ve failed by no longer being.

But the future is tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, and life doesn’t have to creep in this petty pace from day to day. Somewhere in me there is a breath. It is a hard knot in my chest that feels like tears and I will write it until I am no longer a walking shadow.

I’m in the middle of moving house and it’s not an out- of-here into-there kind of deal. The house I own is already empty (of people, at least) and Cas and I are living in my sister’s spare room until it is renovated and sold. My things currently have no home so I have to pack everything away for what may continue to be months (renovating is a slow process with a ten month old) and scale down my three-bedroom, double-garage, outdoor-entertaining contents to suit a city-size apartment.

No problem there. I can’t wait to be living close to the people who know how to make coffee again. The problem is that when I said three-bedroom, it was slightly misleading. My master bedroom hasn’t been a master bedroom since I moved in. The first thing I did was rip out the built-in robes to make room for The Library.

I have books. I’m not sure how many. I stopped counting a while ago.

Now, there is no chance on this green earth that my (partially Dewey Decimal catalogued) book collections will be scaled down but I can’t keep them with me while I’m in the in-between. They have to be boxed up and put into storage. I’m not a particularly dependent person but this process seems to engender a great deal of anxiety in me. What if I need one of them?

I have the capacity to be a very efficient person (Yes, Mum. I do.) but this particular part of packing up my life has been trying.

Yesterday I packed three boxes. Three boxes should take, say, ten or fifteen minutes all up? Unless of course you’re me and each one takes over an hour. Surely I could justify holding on to just this one? And that one… And that one…

There were a few I had no problems boxing. The red velvet covered book of love potions someone gave me? Nope. Don’t need that. The Complete Family Guide to Natural Healing? A quick flick through it, just in case. Herbs for anorexia and and go smell a flower, it will make you feel better? Nope. Don’t need that. Thomas Shelton’s 1612 translation of Don Quixote de la Mancha? No, thank you. As a mum I get more than my fair share of scatological humour daily. Into the box with you.

But then there were the more obscure things like Back to Basics and the time it took me to convince myself I didn’t need to know how to pasteurise my own milk or build a self-composting dunny if I was moving back to the inner city.

Or there was my Asana Dialogue which, when abridged, went something like this:

Hatha Yoga?
=> No. You just joined a gym.
But it doesn’t have yoga classes.
=> You have a DVD.
But…
=> No.
I could feature a posture each week on my blog…
=> Your blog is not about yoga.
I could use the symbolism of each asana to discuss different aspects of…
=> No. No. No.

Pausing to consider the fat Genet biography I’ve yet to get around to reading was perhaps more reasonable. It didn’t smack quite so much of desperation. But why does not having all my books on hand or, at least, just around the corner, make me feel so desperate?

Well you see, right here is where I would mention a passage from a novel. The narrator grew up in a house where the all the walls were lined with books, as I did, and she remembers wondering as a child, when she visited bookless homes, what it was that held the walls up. And that is symbolism which resonates with me.

But I can’t share that passage (which I think is in Joanna Murray-Smith’s Truce) because the book is locked away in a cage made of cardboard and packaging tape.

You never know which book you might need.

There is a happy ending though. I kept aside three books while packing my three boxes. The Penguin Opera Guide and Prima Donna: A History, which I need as reference materials for my own novel, and Wallace Stevens: The Collected Poems, a book I will be using to write a weekly feature on my blog, unlike the awful asana disaster.

I think three books for three boxes is fair. So I’ve made a deal with myself and tomorrow when I’m packing I get to hold on to fifteen extra books to make up for the boxes already lining the hallway.

The Camus doesn’t count of course. There can never be a cardboard cage for him.

When I first set up this site my intention was to create a vehicle to keep my friends and family in the loop with all things Caspar. His Oma and Grandad and most of the extended family are overseas or interstate and I’m terrible at staying in touch. And perhaps his father would read it and feel a little closer to the human being we created. He can’t be here, and that seems much harder to me than being a single mother. In the last couple of days, however, I’ve realised why I actually chose to communicate this way. After all, I could have just bulk-emailed a monthly newsletter.

It’s because I’m a writer. I have been ever since I learned to write. And I’m not good at small talk so those “newsy”, intimate posts I first added to this blog read like contextless babble from some entity other than myself. I don’t like her. Good writing always has context. Context exists within it the same way our consciousness is grounded in our bodies.

And I’m a good writer.

I know this because when I write my thoughts expand exponentially and the world becomes both clearer and more mysterious to me. I know this because when I write I recognise my skin. I become aware.

I know this whether I have an audience or not. And by audience, I mean those people who can or could hear me, not anyone and everyone who adds to my click count. I will always a have an audience of one: I can hear my self. And I know where I am: I am home.

So it’s time to remove those first Noodle Posts (What is a Noodle Post?) and let this blog be what it knew it was even when I didn’t.

There’s still a lot to do. I need to fix up my tags and categories and make this space organically functional for whoever chooses to read it. There are a couple of pages I want to add, a couple of design changes I’d like to make. I still have a lot to learn about feeds and and trackbacks and bookmarking. But all that pales in comparison to my need to write.

So the first, and probably the most important, lesson I have learned about blogging is to just get it working, then write. If that’s not why you started, maybe you’ll find it’s the reason you keep going. Not just in blogging, but in life.

I’ll still be posting Noodles for my special people, but I will pay them the respect of writing them. My noodles will be served with saffron.

In my reading yesterday I came across guest blogger, Edrei Zahari (Kamigoroshi), at Lorelle on Wordpress and his article Bringing Personal Blogging To Light. I liked what he had to say, and the way he said it, so I wandered over to his blog, Footsteps in the Mirror to read more.

What I discovered at Footsteps was that Kamigoroshi had brains for lunch.

There, on the page, was this luscious close-up: One tiny lamb’s brain in a pool of creamy sauce with a golden crust broken open to expose all that glorious succulence inside. It made my mouth water.

And it made me wonder, yet again, about people who are squeamish when it comes to food.

There are some things in this world that I cannot wrap my head around. There are some things that simply do not compute. I acknowledge the truth of their existence, but their existence is more baffling to me than the question, “Why are we here?”

What is it that makes a pig’s trotter repugnant to someone tucking in to a bacon double cheeseburger?

Why can’t a person who loves fish eat it when it’s “looking at them”?

Now vegetarianism, I get. It has an internal logic. It’s coherent. Not liking a particular food, I get. Genetics play a role in the configuration of our taste receptors, and the types of food favoured by our cultures influence us even in utero. But “not liking” a food you’ve never tasted? That, I do not get.

In fact, it gets my goat.

Ignoring the fact that what people don’t eat has no bearing on my life, picky eaters are not, in general, my sort of people. They’re simply perverse. To explain why fully I would have to rewrite Being and Nothingness but let’s just say I consider it an act of Bad Faith.

Besides, they’re exceedingly tedious to dine with.

Luckily for my obscure, particular prejudice, Caspar eats everything put in front of him. Whether it’s herrings in mustard sauce for breakfast or a fingerful of salmon roe when I’ve grabbed some Japanese take-away, he’ll always try it. And if it surprises him, he’ll try it again.

I really didn’t think that someone nine months old would try wasabi twice.

But here’s hoping he stays this way.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading today, filling my head with brilliant ideas on what to write about. A simple and shocking post from Dad Gone Mad has blown all of that out of the water. So instead of producing an erudite, layman’s commentary on pop-psychology and neuroscience or a lighthearted story about the pain of putting my books into storage for a few months, I am sitting at my desk in state somewhere between frozen and shaking, with my jaw clenched and August & Everything After playing on repeat in iTunes.

And I need to write about Death.

Today, DGM had to tell his son that his six-year-old friend had died. For me, his post brought to the forefront how much my attitude toward that inevitable part of life has changed since becoming a parent. The capital letter I used above is indicative of the shift.

BC (Before Caspar), Death never shook me. I had no tears when Opa, a very important figure in my life, died, and at Oma’s funeral I wanted to see her body before the cremation not to say goodbye but out of intellectual curiosity. That may seem bizarre and callous to some people in spite of the fact that I love her and miss her to this day. But there is a reason this blog isn’t called The Emo Mum.

When life is a wonderful, amazing, abstract experiment, it is easy to look, like Henry Miller, upon decay as being “just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth”, whether that decay is premature or not. It is easy to know that “to deny one is to deny the other”.

But children are not abstract. And…

Death is not for children. _DGM

So now Death is something I need distance from. It is no longer earthy. It no longer human. It is an awful presence incompatible with the effortless, all-encompassing care that exists within me as a parent.

Children are written in the future tense. So I have to try, like DGM and the Counting Crows, to tell myself the things I try to tell myself to make myself forget, and while i continue to know that life and death are inextricably bound together, I can no longer feel at ease with it.

So this is it. I don’t care anymore.

I think that I have spent over five hours today (interupted by changing nappies, making bananas on toast, playing on swings at the park, buying groceries, singing Klap eens in je handjes and going “sploring”) wading through the quagmire that is WP Theming in hopes of solving all my “lipstick” problems. Those five hours would have been more productively spent if I had been lost on the Yorkshire moors searching for Heathcliff.

So this is it. This is what my site will look like. It’s functional, and readable and I don’t care. I didn’t start this blog in order to spend my time “designing”. I started it so that i could WRITE, which is the one thing I haven’t been doing at all. It’s past time that I actually let everyone know that I was here and that they had a way to keep up with what’s going on in my life, and in my head, given that I’m so isolated at the moment.

And who admires the gilding on the cage when the bird doesn’t sing?

This blog may not turn out to be Solid Gold but I’ll be singing.

Klap eens in je handjes, ^{Clap in your little hands,}
Blij, blij, blij. ^{Happy, happy, happy.}
Op je boze bolletje, ^{On your angry head,}
Allebei. ^{Both of them.}

Handjes in de hoogte, ^{Little hands in the air,}
Handjes in je zij. ^{Little hands on your hips.}

Zo varen de scheepjes voorbij… ^{That’s the way the little ships sail away…}

^{Translation by Anchar}