Motherload

Thank you to Suzy Banks Baum, who very kindly asked if I would write something for her site, Laundry Line Divine .   Here's what I sent her. It's about the problem of combining creativity and discipline. I've also copied it below for ease of reading: The Language of Discipline I have had to learn whole new ways of speaking since becoming a mother. In my childfree life, I wrote about Marcel Proust and his obsession with time passing. For me, as for him, the obsession with time passing amounted to an obsession with self passing — how, as your life goes by, your identity shifts continually. Different parts of who you are come to rigidify or dissolve. What was once frozen with fear expands to airy liberation. Elements of yourself you thought you could never do without become redundant or obstructive and have to be jettisoned, like empty rocket boosters. The characteristics you held closest to your heart ossify and desiccate. For example, how, from uptight teenager, you l...

Christmas seems to me the most preposterous process of emotional line-drawing and dread.  'Advent' turns out not to mean anticipating the coming of the Lord — or even Father Christmas. Or rather the true meaning of 'anticipation' is searching nightly through the contents of your soul, memory and wallet for a full month, while trying to hold down a job, and cope with everyone else's unfiltered greed (if they are children) or unmitigated disappointment (if they are adults).  All through December I feel I am wading through the treacle of my own and everyone else's expectations and anxieties. I am measuring myself up, working out what didn't get done, what I hoped would happen and didn't, combing back over the year in a cloud of sadness for time lost, and by extension, sifting through all the previous years, now gone for ever. We are all working and living a kind of double time, trying to fit in everyone else's activities (aka hopes and dreams), h...