I slept in. I did not get out of bed until 10am. I spent the day in my pyjamas almost cracking the cryptic crossword and reading the paper then watching a dvd. This is a huge thing because I am a work-holic! About 2pm, I began to feel really unwell and spent the rest of the day wrapped in blankets lying on the couch referee-ing my daughters and appreciating that the family WAS okay to operate without my hands-on interference.
Two or three or four times a day (daily this past month), I open the file called Birthright first draft . I scroll through what I've done and tinker here and there. But I have no mojo to go into the second half of the second act. I seriously envy writers who, um, write and have no other distractions save the washing or dusting or gardening. The ones who don't have other jobs. The ones who don't have teenagers or small children or needy family members which may or may not include a mash-up of the former groups. The ones who are grounded in healthy habits and solid self-esteem.
Someone made an off-hand comment to me today and it hurt and the person immediately understood that the comment was wrong time wrong place and tried to make amends but, me being tired and mourning real and imagined tragedies, cried for about an hour.
I was heartened by seeing the youtube clip of this song which is one of my current favourites and is No 1 in NZ and then going on to read 'the story' of how they all came to be.
Just now, I have stood in my kitchen listening to one of my children cry about her frustrations that she can not be what she has been and what everyone expects of her and what she wants for herself. She is tired. She misses her boy. She has been working hard. She still does not have 100% health. But she gives gives gives [love love love] to others who have not had the good she's had. It could have been me standing in her shoes.
All I could offer was: it is hard.
Yup. And sometimes it feels like it is harder being a writer than it is being a parent, teacher, waitress, farm labourer, fleeso, cleaner, child, aunt, Head of Department, participator in creating a new school or reviewing the nation's English curriculum.
Being a writer means that the interwoven strands of your thinking, your life, your emotions are pulled out and laid bare on a gravel road for all others to trample over.
Both my children are gifted artists. One has gone down the music road though she is graphically artistic; the other has gone down the art road though she has a sensitive ear for music. Both care about the way the world treats the inhabitants of the world.
Both had still experienced the harshness of living in a fallen world despite our best efforts to protect them. They are great girls and hubby and I love them to bits. That's why I cry when they cry.
I could keep going about where our minds should be with the stuff happening in the other parts of the world....
The one things which comes back to me again and again and helps ground me is this:
I lift eyes to the hills.
Where does my help come from home?
It comes from the maker of heaven and earth....
Go look up the rest but it sums up for me The Windhover of GM Hopkins. Get out there and do what I need to do...
11th C Scotland is currently a more desirable place than the 21st C
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