Sleepless Nights

Author: Veronica

  • My creativity well runs dry

    If you walk out through my kitchen door and keep walking, down to the end of the semi-enclosed barbeque area, you will find a shed. Full of odds and ends – old shelves, Christmas decorations, kittens – it is the perfect size for an office, and I spend long minutes dreaming of the day when it’s cleaned out, revamped and mine (MINE!) to write in. There’s a small window, looking towards the poppy fields.

    I want to write. I wake up and I juggle fiction around breakfasts and school lunches, showers and dishes.

    Shush children, Mummy is writing.

    I wonder if I’m doing them a disservice by keeping this small part of me intact, unsullied by motherhood. But I think I’d be doing myself a disservice if I give everything I am to my children.

    I have projects on the go everywhere, and nothing is getting my full attention.

    Before Evelyn, I used to write best of an afternoon. Now we start our days at 5am and by 8pm I am dead on my feet.

    But isn’t this the refrain of tired parents everywhere?

    Children are demanding, housework is insidious, creativity drips from the end of our washing up gloves until we’re dried out and used up, unable to do much more than read a bedtime story and fall into bed ourselves.

    Yesterday I sent all three of my children outside to frolic in the mid-afternoon sun while I locked myself in my bedroom and wrote the things I needed to get out of my head. Writing is like that. I can’t ignore it, even as I procrastinate around it.

    NaNoWriMo is looming on my horizon and I’m torn between wanting desperately to participate and knowing how good it is for me, to dreading feeling the pressure. But then pressure is good. I work best under pressure, right?

    Right.

    Basically, to summerise: My life is hard, fiction is hard, children are hard; I wouldn’t change a single moment.

    Stamen

     

  • Beating my dead horse

    (Which is better than beating a live goat, just for the record)

    And in case you haven’t read enough of my dramatics and opinions lately, I wrote a satirical piece about Tree People and how we ought to deal with them in an ideal world. You know you want to read it.

  • Whoops, sorry, did I express my disappointment?

    that's what I meant

    What I obviously meant to say was:

    “Hail to our New Liberal Lizard Overlords. I bow down before you, a humble servant.

    Please don’t report me to the Internet Police for daring to hold an unfortunate minority view.

    I welcome this new age of hating everybody equally.”

  • And then everything flew away because I am AWESOME at tying knots.

    It’s Amy’s Birthday Party Day.

    I am inside blowing up balloons with three children when Nathan sticks his head in through the kitchen window.

    “Honey, I have absolutely no problem with your knot tying abilities. When it comes to tying knots, you’re excellent.”

    I give him a strange look as he continues.

    “But when it comes to your judgement of structural integrity? Well, sometimes, you’re not so great at it.”

    By this stage I am confused. Structural integrity? Of what? NO IDEA.

    “The balloons you tied to the front fence? They blew away.”

    Oh. There’s the problem.

    “But your knot didn’t come undone. They flew away, with the nail.”

    Ah.

    Next time: Don’t tie balloons to a nail.

  • Bittersweet Spring

    It’s nearly Spring and I am holding on by the skin of my teeth. I’ve been poking the fruit trees, hoping that my attention will make them bud and blossom faster. It’s not working. We filled two above ground gardens that Nathan made out of old water tanks. I planted beetroot, onions, chard and chamomile and thanked the previous owner for leaving his rubbish behind. Ruined water tanks make great gardens.

    Evelyn has learned to screech like a banshee and she does this every time things don’t go her way. My baby is turning into a toddler, full of feelpinions and angst. She tried to breastfeed upside down, her hands clutching at my nipple and her body contorting into wonderfully strange positions.

    Oh I thought. Is this where we’re up to? Upside down breastfeeding and biting. I remember this.

    Nostalgia filled me briefly, for these moments with Amy, when she was small and her opinions were small also. What shoes to wear, what cup she wanted, whether carrots or apples were better. Now I am traversing new terrain, fielding questions like “Is it better to be skinny?” and “Why are some people so mean?” and “Why do things have to die?”

    No and I don’t know and it hardly seems fair, does it.

    My grandmother’s cat died, on the road that has claimed too many of my animals. All the fencing in the world won’t keep the road from impinging on my life and here we are, another animal down, yet again. I felt guilty for my relief that she was dead, for the calm that came over the other cats. She was a bitchy cat, prone to purposely swiping at your face just for looking at her. Now she’s gone and I’m vaguely sad because it feels like the connections to my grandmother are slipping away, slowly and surely.

    Evelyn’s hair curls and reminds me of a photo taken of my grandmother at the same age. I wonder how far the similarities will carry and it’s bittersweet to see Evelyn looking like this.

    Spring is coming and the emotion I pushed down in the depths of Winter is coming with it, but that’s okay. I can deal with anything when there are blossoms, a baby who wants to breastfeed upside down and the warmth of sunshine on my skin.

    Evelyn 13 months