Motherload

Daily ritual — absolutely crucial if you want to do any kind of creative work. The other ingredient? Self-belief. Here's what I know: 1. There's no such thing as writer's block. 2. Getting up early is the best way to marshal your wakening brain with your deepest energy. 3. Good coffee. 4. No alcohol. 5. No internet (doh). 6. Knowing what task you need to start on. 7. Only attempting one task. 8. Continually feeding your memory of yourself as in love with art. Galleries, books, films. And make notes on what you see. 9. Walk everywhere. 10. Never react to other people's messy excess. 11. Talk about your work with others who actually feed rather than crushing you. But don't talk about how hard it is to write (nothing is more boring either to say or to hear), just about how to solve the technical problem you're grappling with. Writing is both solitary and collaborative — after all, you're doing it to be read, aren't you? 12. List...

Last Saturday I had the privilege of attending the Batmitzvah ceremony of one of my daughter's schoolfriends. The candidate was only just twelve, and the ceremony was held in an orthodox synagogue, very much by the book. I was expecting an impenetrable event, something completely foreign to my lapsed Protestant understanding. As I entered the Synagogue with my blonde hair and blue eyes, I felt like an intruder. Instead I was invited into and witnessed a true rite of passage. The young girl had prepared over many months for this event. For her Mitzvah, she had decided to paint a series of six canvases to represent the six days of Creation, and she spoke eloquently about how each canvas had come about. She had understood early on that, although she had wanted to create something out of nothing, in fact, as a created being herself, she was only capable of creating something out of something — she was not able to create raw materials for her art ex nihilo . Only an ultimate Creator...

Professor Jonathan Gershuny of the Centre for Time Use Research in Oxford was making depressing and familiar points on  Woman’s Hour this week  (‘ Chore Wars ’). W omen have been completely done over in the modern world, he said. Because women cannot expect marriage to last (statistically), they'd better keep earning, plus they can still expect to shoulder the majority of the unpaid work at home.   This isn't news to me, but it's depressing to hear a Professor say it. I found it a little simplistic: what about how women cop the unpaid work at   work   as well? All those emotional dynamics, the presenteeism, the bringing in of fattening cakes, and, frankly, the menial   paid   parts of jobs.  Be that as it may, Professor Gershuny's argument was that domestic labour has been progressively 'feminised', through labour-saving devices like boilers, dishwashers and hoovers. He argues that men used to lay the fires in the average home. Domestic jo...

Yesterday, Mumsnet asked me to write a guest post for them on their current Chores Survey. You can read the post here , and I've added it for convenience below. Enjoy! "On Monday I met a friend for lunch. I'd put ‘Luncheon with Janet’ in the calendar, because it made us both laugh to think of ourselves as Ladies who Lunch. As we were sitting chatting, my husband walked into the cafe, carrying a big bag of food shopping. He looked rather dashing, actually, all six foot three of him; he had on one of his dark work jackets, and those deep chocolate brown eyes were twinkling. He wanted to know whether I had the car with me, so he could put the shopping in the boot and walk home. As he left the cafe, we flirted with each other, and he pulled an imaginary forelock, Clifford to my Lady Chatterley. How are we to interpret this silly little anecdote? My heart burst with pride to see my husband in an unaccustomed context and to see him caring for the family, but the tra...

I was absolutely delighted to be asked to write a guest post for a blog I follow, on combining creativity and motherhood. The blog is called Studio Mothers : enjoy! The Sugar Log

As my son 'revised key words for year 4', it became clear that his list of spellings this week contained all the proof you need to refute the teaching of reading and spelling through phonics.  I present… five ways to pronounce '-ough' in English: English is not a phonetic language In the last couple of years in the UK, the methodology of phonics has, delightfully, been converted into a government-devised and compulsory ' phonics screening check ' at the end of year 1.  Kids who know how to read can fail this check , if they baulk at pronouncing made-up words using the rules of phonics.  They are then given remedial attention — to get better at phonics.  Which is then abandoned as children move through primary education… because it stops working once you are writing anything beyond 'cat'. For example, 'Kate'. Or 'Keith'. Or 'knight'. I know, I know, the 'phonics method' is really about helpin...

Thank goodness I saw Helen McCrory's sublime Medea courtesy of National Theatre Live  last week. Otherwise I might find myself becoming complacent about being happy in motherhood. Yup, I am that age. I cannot go out to the theatre any more, because of young children, recession (don't tell me it's over), and exorbitant ticket and babysitting fees. But I CAN go to the local cinema with a friend and some popcorn, and sit amongst a throng of grey-haired ladies and gentlemen, all pretending we are what we once were, and down on the South Bank. It is a strange experience to hear big-voiced theatrical projection and see facial expressions meant for the back of a proscenium theatre, brought to you in close up on a cinema screen. An old friend of mine was also in the production, and frankly, looked as if he was gurning. Others have assured me that from the stalls, he was excellent. So it is not a perfect transmission of the theatrical experience, but it would not have matte...

In the wake of what I now call the Cardiff fandango , I have been having a summer of hardline parenting, research into Manipulative and Strong-Willed Children, and experimentation. Here's what happened and what I learnt: 1. Getting the kids to do chores I don't want to do, but need to get done (aka washing the car, weeding the path), and paying them for it, can be incredibly good fun. Learning: if it costs a bob or two, don't sweat it. They did the work, they earnt it. 2. Always seize the opportunity to pick blackberries when out and about. A sure sign that the summer holidays are coming to an end, and absolutely free. Learning: take a hat, you never know when you'll need extra storage. 3. Put up a tent in the garden , and let the children stay out overnight. The first night son was back in twenty minutes, afraid of foxes. But once daughter had made it, he screwed his courage to his sticking plaster, and stayed put, even in the rain. Learning: sibling ri...

We came home from abortive trip to Cardiff yesterday, where I discovered son's new vocation as a hairdresser: Fringe drama Today we got up, and I promptly missed an early morning yoga class, because, despite all my good intentions (my plans to get up at 6am, my plans to re-read my manuscript, get close to my material, find points to integrate other voices), I feel keel-hauled every matins by the shenanigans of the day before. Luckily my husband was there to wake up son, before leaving for work and then a trip to watch cricket in Manchester for a couple of days, an event I have studiously failed to understand was on the horizon. After yelling at the children to get dressed, put their stuff away, do their teeth, and stop making me say the SAME THINGS EVERY SINGLE DAY, as I am going completely bananas, I heard myself say to my son, "If you wash the car, I'll pay you £6." Once this job had been handed out, my daughter wanted to earn some cash too, so I set her to ...

This was the year I was going to crack it. I was determined to enjoy the summer holidays and family time. My daughter has just finished primary school, and this is her last summer before secondary. It feels like the right moment to push a little harder to get her to step gingerly out of the nest and start flapping her little wings. And it also feels like the right moment to get her to help clean the nest up, frankly. I put some activities in the diary, and sat back, thinking, "And they can amuse themselves around that skeleton structure". In those words, damn my hubris. As I sit here this evening, catatonic, I look back at the diary, and realise we've done an awful lot, and that I am simply tired. In the last fortnight, we have been to Sussex, the Cotswolds, and Wales, our son has starred in Frozen , I've had reflexology, and started running, I've worked on a book my daughter and I are writing, picked pounds of summer fruit, gone to an urban beach, daughter h...

Race for life This weekend, my daughter and I did the local 5k Race for Life ( thank you, you can still donate! ), to raise money for research into cancer. This is the third time we've done it, and it's become a bit of a tradition to see whether we can beat the previous year's time. Logically this should work, because as my daughter gets older, she gets taller and faster. We won't go into what happens to her mother.  I didn't sleep well, and woke already tired and fretful. The rain had bucketed the night before, and the terrain was soggy, so I suggested that she and I head into the runners' group, so that we'd have a fresh start — we weren't going for a runner's time, we just didn't want to be slipping over in the churn.  Within only a few moments, daughter was straggling and slowing to a walk. Not yet well breathed, I was hopping up and down and urging her forwards in what I hoped wasn't too obviously a stentorian manner. She seem...

I was at the pub last night with some fellow parents from school. We were chatting about this and that, and then suddenly the conversation kicked up a gear. I was droning on about how rubbish mothers' lives are, as usual, when a friend of mine, who is a lawyer, interjected to say, 'Way before I had children, I was working in private practice. A partner sat me down and said, "You have the potential to go all the way, and make partner, as long as you focus completely on your work, and stop doing all this creative writing stuff".' My friend was writing a novel in her spare time, and had an agent. She went on, 'What I thought was, "Stuff that, I just don't want to sell my soul into lawyering if it means I can't do what I want". It made me realise that having a baby was actually a radical  thing to do, when there was such a weight of assumption that all I would want to do was make partner .' It felt as though a ray of light had burst into ...

I've been having trouble with hearing voices for years now. Don't worry, I'm not going nuts, or no more than usual. The problem I have is a writing problem. How do you convey multiple voices in a narrative? How do you do polyphony convincingly? When you're in the school playground, on the bus, in a restaurant, in a cafe surrounded by mothers, when you're in a park, or waiting outside some activity or other, you are surrounded by conversation. People — especially women — chat about their lives constantly. While it's very difficult to define what the 'stuff of life' really is (once you've identified DNA, you realise you don't even know what consciousness is), we are indubitably brilliant at using language to continually construct, shape and reshape our reality, and that's what conversation is all about. So at least capturing conversation might help you convey 'reality'? I've been trying to write Motherload  for something like ...

When my little girl was very much littler, she began a correspondence with the tooth fairy. Each time a tooth came out, the tooth fairy wrote back, no matter how busy or tired she was. It was quite a chore, remembering the world I'd constructed. Often it felt like a total pain in the neck, and I moaned about it, and about the Motherload that went with it — what was I trying to prove? That I was a Perfect Mother? I was an idiot, trapped in my own sentimentality. Rage rage, write write. One day the tooth fairy even sent a photo of her shadow. The little girl was utterly enchanted, and the correspondence grew apace. This week, my daughter's last baby tooth, a molar, came out. We were staying with friends, and she said in dismay, "I'll have to write to the tooth fairy and say goodbye!" I felt secretly pleased — that was one chore out of the way then. Phew! That night she wrapped the tooth in tissue paper, and slipped it under her pillow with her note. Late...

Jacqueline Rose's review of a recent glut of publishing on motherhood makes, as ever, brilliant and thought-provoking reading. But, oh dear, I struggled to read it — not remotely because what she says is somehow inaccessible or highfaluting, or jargon-filled (the usual accusations made against 'academic' writing, mostly without bothering to read it). What she says is limpid and multi-layered, suggestive, provocative, and I agree with it. I struggled because there is just no bridge today between academia and other areas of life, and it causes me pain every day. She opens on Tim Minchin's Matilda , noting the wry critique he offers of vicious perfectionism in childrearing. Music to my ears. Try, however, actually saying anything like this about Matilda in Muswell Hill. What it means here is the summer workshop at the local performing arts centre, populated by little girls, whose parents are assuring them constantly that they are (and must remain) miracles while pus...

Last night I went to Mudchute, and saw a brilliant play. The Inner Life of Sophie Taylor is a play written and devised by Roisin Rae, for and with Prams in the Hall. It's been on this week at The Space , a fringe theatre on the Isle of Dogs with a fabulous bar. Prams in the Hall is a theatre company that explicitly aims to be inclusive to people with children. They offer actors, directors and writers the option of having their children with them in the rehearsal space, and also offer flexible working hours. For audiences, they put on watch-with-baby performances, although it's crucial to stress that their work is for adults, not for children. The Inner Life of Sophie Taylor is about a busy mum who is also an artist. She has not been able to work for six years — they have three children, whom she looks after while their father goes out to work. Out of the blue, she is asked to contribute to an exhibition, and desperately wants to make two new pieces, although she only ha...

Last night I went to Watford. There was a good reason – an old friend of mine from college days was doing a one-woman play at the Watford Palace Theatre. Getting into Watford is like driving into  Solaris , a one-way spiral to concrete hell. The Palace car park is a triumph of function over design, lowering across the town centre like a premonition of the world's end. I had to do the circuit at least twice to get into it. Once I was in the theatre, things brightened up a lot – the Palace is a cheerful Edwardian theatre covered in gilt and red velvet, with comfortably bulging balconies. There I sat with my plastic glass of beer, resplendently alone on my night out, waiting to see my lovely friend perform. Fourteen  is a kind of cross between The Diary of Adrian Mole and Kindertransport . It's about a girl with brilliant academic promise growing up in Watford in 1984. She is an only child, and her parents seem to fight a lot. We see her upstairs in her bedroom, chatting to ...