Motherload

I had a fascinating exchange of texts with a friend yesterday. She felt that I should be writing under my real name, which is Ingrid Wassenaar. I replied that I was keen to write under a pseudonym, Ingrid Kirkegaard, because I married a man with that surname, and it has always struck me as hilarious. He is an Aussie, utterly irreverent, charming, lightning quick, and always says of his own name that, "It's unfortunate that the real Søren Kierkegaard only sired bastards". One of the many things I find funny is the sheer number of 'a's in our names. When we married, many friends asked whether we would have a double-barrelled surname. We laughed, and just said that I wasn't changing my name. In Holland, it's usual for married women to add their husband's name to their own, as a kind of patronymic. It seemed too cumbersome for us, and I didn't see why I had to go around adjusting my name on every official document — it was bad enough getting my tit...

How do I bring this experience to an end? I have just been given the most generous gift possible by my husband, my children, and my friends — a month, by myself, in the country. To come away from my everyday life for a whole, fire-filled, walk-soaked, wind-wakened month, to be able to write exactly what I wanted and have been trying to write for so very long — the release from a bottle I have to stuff myself inside most of the time — has been… calm. The whole point about being here has been its understatement. To be able to escape the hysteria of exams, schools, Forest School clothes, what Doris Lessing calls 'the housewife's disease' through her character Anna Wulf in The Golden Notebook: The tension in me, so that peace has already gone away from me, is because the current has been switched on: I-must-dress-Janet-get-her-breakfast-send-her-off-to-school-get-Michael's-breakfast-don't-forget-I'm-out-of-tea.-etc.  Each morning I have been able to wake when...

I've never really understood the fuss about the Theory of Relativity. Essentially Albert Einstein took the idea of 3D and thought, "What would this look like over time?" Time is the obvious fourth dimension. What complicates time — I guess this is the bit that I would call poetry or Proust and Einstein would call physics — is our experience of it. We understand that time passes because coasts erode, buses leave without us, and because we used to be children and will die. What we find much harder to understand and explain is that a single moment can feel as if it has expanded to infinity, and conversely, that we have no memory of our babies, now seven, now ten, now teenage, now adult, now gone. They rush through our fingers, and leave photos behind, but we cannot remember them as they were. Our children are like palimpsests — my daughter boils down to a steady stare, over the edge of her nasty plastic cot in UCH hospital, the night after I delivered her. Days passing...

I was watching Bridesmaids  (2011) again tonight, and was reminded of a fabulous scene: Annie's Pity Party, and the  pep talk  she gets from Megan. We have watched Annie be edged out by a competitive female, Helen, who has stolen her best friend, Lillian, and her rightful place as Lillian's Maid of Honor, trumping Annie at every stage of the wedding preparations with lavish outlay, and making her look a fool if ever she does get the chance to organise anything. Annie has, to boot, lost her cupcake business, her flat, her new job in a jewellery shop, her car, her nascent relationship with a new man, and has had to move back in with her mother. She is sitting on her mum's sofa in the daytime, watching Castaway  and crying, when in comes Megan, sister of the groom, with the nine puppies she has taken from the bridal shower party. Megan has witnessed Annie's tribulations, although until this point we have no sense that she understands or sympathises with Annie...