The Cerebral Mum

So, I’ve had a cup of coffee and read my morning feeds and now, just for today, I’m making the rule that I will not come back to the computer at all until Cas is in bed for the evening. It’s sunny out. Today is external work day. I will get some things done. I don’t know how much, but I’ll try to differentiate between the physical exhaustion and the mental exhaustion. That is so much harder than it seems. It is amazing the impact of your psyche on your physiology. I will push through, I will take breaks. But I want one small thing done every hour. And then I shall come back here for my reward.

That is my plan for today. Not for the next week, not for the next month, just for today. Anything else is too much for me to imagine.

A while ago, for the 30 Poems in 30 days challenge, I wrote a poem critical of Robert Frost’s A Minor Bird…

I do not need
to speak of birds
I can say the word
Depression. _{A Minor Depression}

So here’s the word: I am depressed.

I mean “clinically” depressed: I have all the symptoms. Constant and complete exhaustion, physical aches, headaches, no will, no confidence, no pleasure, inability to concentrate, inability to sleep, a sense of being overwhelmed, a nebulous sense of guilt, and no sense of myself as a person. So I’ve said the word. It’s long overdue, but I’ve said it.

The first thing I want to say about this is that this has absolutely and categorically nothing to do with becoming a mother. Motherhood has not effected my sleep or my energy levels, it has not challenged my identity or made me lose perspective, it has not restricted my freedom or challenged my confidence. If anything, it has been a boon in every respect. But it has also forced me to slow down, to stop pushing my body to its limits in terms of hunger, thirst and sleeplessness, to stop filling my life with so much work and responsibility that there was never time to think or breathe, all in order to avoid my state of mind.

Why do I want to make that clear? Because I think there is a very real problem with our current social narrative about motherhood. I think that it is negative, and I do not want to be associated with it in any way. I do not want to give tacit support to it and I do not want people to assume that I am evidence of it. Because for all the very real women about there with very real problems, like post natal depression, there are dozens of self-aggrandizing women ignorantly promoting their narcissistic-martyr-complexes-with-a-twist-of-consumerism as the quintessential, modern day truth about motherhood, instead of what it really is - a sly imitation of age old stereotypes, hidden amongst words and ideas which were once a powerful call for change but have now been perverted for the same old purpose: Maintaining the status quo. If these women like their status quo, that’s their damage. But I don’t like the way that it is peddled, and I don’t want to be perceived as part of it.

Leading up to taking a week off, I started so many posts about things which are going on in the world, about societal problems, about philosophical problems, about other people’s problems. (A post entitled Motherhood is the easy part… was one of them.) I struggled with my writing, I laboured for the right words. I finished none of them. I posted none of them. I truly believe that words are the only thing that has ever changed the world - and there is so much that needs changing - but it slowly dawned on me as I wrote that I do not have the emotional resources to be a voice right now. It slowly dawned on me that this was yet another pressure I was adding to my life to distract me from what I really need to do.

Physician, heal thyself.

So healing myself is what I am going to do right now, before I again take the burdens of the world on my shoulders. Voices are clearer when we are standing on rocks than when we are sinking in quicksand. I have healed myself before, and I can do it again. But this is what is going to happen:

This blog is going to literally be my journal: The place where I spew my stream of consciousness writing, my dreams, my unleashed emotions, all of my mess. It will be uncensored, possibly unintelligible. I will post what I post, when I post. My guess is that I will probably post a lot. In the past, trying to come to terms with the things inside of me, my best and most powerful tool has been to let them out. I don’t know if I really remember how to do that, but it is a place to start. I will not only be “thinking my way back to myself” but writing my way back to myself.

I don’t have the luxury to release all the fucked up shit inside my head in my daily life. I have to throw balls to a beautiful boy who cannot catch them, and teach him that the triangle goes in the triangle shaped hole. I have to prepare three meals a day and peel bananas and mandarins I do not eat. I have to go to the park and run baths and wash nappies. So this blog will be my luxury. For the time being, it will be written solely for me.

Everyone is welcome to stick around, welcome to comment, but I won’t be offended if you don’t want to. I will probably say vicious, nasty things. I will probably be cruel and unkind, especially to me. I will probably go off on tangents. I will ramble about symbols in a language made of pictures. I will say things that are “wrong” and I will not explain myself. I will dig around in the archives of my history looking for breadcrumbs. I might do weird exercises. I might write in the second person. Or the third person. There will be no structure, no conclusions. There will be posts without narrative or opinion. I probably will not make sense.

So this post is the warning sign at the beginning of a journey. I don’t know how long that journey will take, or where it will take me. I don’t know what monsters are in my closet, or what beasts will block my path. I do not know what I will see when I look in the mirror.

All hope abandon ye who enter here. _{dante alighieri}

30 poems in 30 days. A simple enough task. It is now Day 22 and I have written only 10 poems for the project. I have never been very good at finishing things. I am a great procrastinator. Take for example my novel and this painful confession:

I began it in 1994.

Even allowing for 3 computer disasters (which left me computerless for roughly 5 of those 13 years), a lost manuscript (recovered after 7 torturous months) and a ritual burning of about 200 pages (somewhere around the turn of the century), it is a fairly unimpressive effort. At the moment I could not even tell you what state it is in. I hadn’t finished word processing the copious notebooks and scrap paper I filled with my insane scrawls during the penultimate computer crash before the last one occurred.

And then I got pregnant.

I worked my butt off during my pregnancy to save as much money as I could before entering the realm of single motherhood and have not touched my novel since. And I won’t. Work will not begin again until Cas and I have moved back into the city and I am no longer in the in-between. My rough estimate is that about 60% of it is written but it will require some major structural editing as I have been writing it disjointedly for years.

When it does get published, we’ll just avoid mentioning the year 1994 to the critics. Marcel Proust I am not.

But back to that original thought I haven’t yet finished. I am 12 poems behind with only 8 days left. Even excusing myself for the days I was hanging over the toilet bowl as though I were in my first trimester, that too is a fairly unimpressive effort. I’m not being hard on myself. It’s just a fact.

So do I try and catch up? Do I give up? Do I let it go and finish each assignment at my leisure?

I would like to finish the 30 poems in the allotted time; because I chose to participate; because it is hard; because leaving everything to the last minute, until it seems everything is about to implode, is no longer a habit that works for me.

I am a mother.

I used to thrive under pressure; write papers which earned High Distinctions on the night before they were due, work 17 hour shifts on two hours sleep and then go back for more, frantically fill page after page until I was dizzy from the pace of it and I could no longer see. It’s not that I don’t have the stamina any more: I never had it. It’s because I don’t have the drug.

Adrenaline.

I was an adrenaline junkie. Life just pushed so hard that there was never a chance to be tired, and if it didn’t push me hard enough, I made it. I ran on my second wind for years and I loved it. Motherhood has its own hormonal highs but it is nothing like that rush of blood to the head. Motherhood is not strenuous. It is neither a sprint or a marathon. Motherhood is a slow shift.

I was about to launch into a long paragraph about how working in hospitality is like being a rock star but that would be another digression. Let’s just say that it is driving, physical work and it has it’s own momentum. It generates energy and you feed off it. You get caned all night then you clean up and hang out, drinking and smoking and seeing who can tell the most scurrilous stories about the guests.

But the slow shifts - the ones where you’ve polished every bottle, restocked every fridge and wiped every surface twice - those shifts are the killers. Your body isn’t pumping sugars to your brain and you have time to think. Usually, I would think about all the other things I could be doing if I wasn’t trapped in that bar or restaurant, standing at attention like a palace guard. I would be annoyed by the lack of customers, and then annoyed when a customer interrupted whatever boondoggly task I’d found to do.

Babies aren’t very demanding. Their needs are simple, they sleep a lot, their movements are limited and they are easily amused. But in that first year we have to stand at attention constantly and all the things that used to get done in large blocks of time have to get done in pieces. We cannot let the house go to wrack and ruin while we play at whatever is more interesting and then tidy it in a frenzy all in one day. We can’t immerse ourselves in a book and read it cover to cover. Babies’ needs are too constant and not constant enough. There is too little to do but you aren’t free to go and do something else.

This manic insomniac who burnt the candle at both ends until she crashed and and then lit the next one with glee needs to find new ways to get things done. There is not enough pressure but there is no valve to release what is there if it builds up. You can’t put babies on hold. You can’t call in sick. You can’t take a mental health day. You can’t just say, Stuff it - I’m going to the beach.

So I will try and get my poems done but in all likelihood some won’t make it within the 30 days. I’m trying to realign the way my energy works with the requirements of my new life (which I love!) but it is a trial and error process and I don’t have the answers yet.

I do know, however, that it hasn’t done me in!

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.