astonishment

https://helenhayward.substack.com/p/astonishment?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

hi everyone, here is my second substack post with at least half of it voice recorded! best helen

goodbye wordpress and thank you

If you’re reading this you’ve made such a difference to my life by reading my posts over the years, some of you since 2013.

Over the last months, I’ve been toying with jumping ship to Substack, where most of the posts I read myself are stabled. And today I have done the thing.

Hopefully you’ll receive a link next friday with my first substack post – ‘why we hate housekeeping’.

I look forward to welcoming you there.

Gratefully, Helen

@helenhayward1 on substack from friday 11th august

what’s cooking?

There are lots of reasons why big dinners have become an exception rather than the rule these days. It takes courage to ask people you don’t that well to sit around a table to share food and chat to people they don’t know that well, if at all. Covid has made us all wary of social intimacy – and just perhaps, it’s made us know each other a little less well. On top of this, most of us have seen through or become weary of or grown out of status-seeking dinner parties. Also, we’re just not that impressed by hectic cooking shows to aspire to that kind of mastery. And we’re loathe to put each other under the kind of pressure that cooking for any number tends to be.

Yet I still I happen to think that big dinners are worth giving. Inviting friends for dinner, in my experience, is akin to lighting a wood fire. For this, I start with 6 pieces of scrunched up newspaper in the grate. Then comes pinecones and broken sticks from the garden. Above that I balance, like Jenga blocks, a couple of chopped up fence palings. Only then, when I’m lucky and after opening the flue, do the logs above catch fire. And it’s similar when I invite friends for dinner. It helps, for the evening to catch alight, if a few of the people I’ve invited already know each other (I might tell them this in advance). It also helps, when I bring guests into the house, if the fire is burning and music is playing and my dog isn’t growling or generally drawing attention to himself. Even more, it helps if I can accept a short period of awkwardness in which people stand round in a big group making small talk, before breaking off into smaller, more relaxed groups. It helps too if I’m not nervous. Although recently I’ve come to accept that I just do feel nervous in these early minutes. I have to wait for the chatter in my head to quieten down enough that I can hear what is actually happening in the room, rather than what my inner voice thinks/fears/hopes might be happening.

None of this has anything to do with what is or isn’t cooking in the kitchen. However, it has a lot to do with my experience of having more than three people for dinner.

All the time that I was married, having friends for dinner was something that Paul and I agreed about. When we first started living together in London, we had weekend lunches on a trestle in the living room. We didn’t always agree on the details of how we entertained. Paul liked lots of wine and smoking breaks on the balcony with a select few, while I like super simple food and enough people around the table that the conversation naturally broke up into twos or threes. Even so, throughout our years together, we kept our love of hospitality alive. It was an important part of who we were as a couple.

Bringing back big dinners has been an important part of my healing, of stepping back into the river and of not feeling awkward about being single at a point in my life that I never expected to be. I’ve found a real freedom in being able to entertain in my own way. I can play music I like, invite a mix of people, and cook food which doesn’t stress me out in the kitchen. I’ve never cooked to impress, but rather to satisfy in a way that allows people to focus on what interests them more than what’s on their fork. I cook food that I like and hope guests will like too – though with an increase in food intolerances this has been more challenging.

Paul used to like it when a dinner stretched past midnight. For him it was proof that the people round the table had connected and the evening had gone well. Perhaps because I don’t drink alcohol and expend a lot of energy just before friends arrive, I usually tire before midnight. Still, I do enjoy late-night conversations when the lights are low and people start to reveal more, risk more, trust more.

We don’t talk about hospitality much these days (apart from in relation to the food industry). However, in my mind being generous at home is an important of part of who I am. Besides, I sometimes wonder, what is the point of having a lovely home if I don’t share it? Cooking for friends is a way of giving back, of flagging my appreciation of others. Everyone I know works hard at being themselves and at keeping their lives afloat. Like me, they don’t always feel worthy of their good fortune. And like me, they’re relatively powerless to right the wrongs of the world. Moreover, I get something valuable from being able to extend to others a generosity that has been extended to me, over and over, across the years. Love, hope, friendship – whatever it’s called, it’s the over and above that lights up a room.

I have no expectation of being invited back by the friends who come to my place for dinner. I hate the idea that my gesture might be viewed as some kind of pot-latch or covert repayment system. I wouldn’t want anyone who comes to my place for dinner to feel under that kind of pressure. I cook for friends in order to create the kind of world that I want to live in, and to suspend external demands on everyone in the room for a while. All of us spend our days doing our best, and occasionally it seems right to salute this.

renovating

We don’t just travel to see new places. We also go away in order to come back and see our home in a new light. We go to have a break from the same-old, same old that otherwise dictates our days. We travel to leave behind the tables and chairs that we brush past so often we don’t see them truly, if we look at them at all. We go away to experience, for a split second, what our home looks like when we reopen the front door and wonder, ‘Do I really live here?’

A scene in The Wind in the Willows captures this. Fed up with being at home, alone in his burrow, Mole packs up, closes the hatch and takes to the road with his friends Toad and Rattie. Many happy months pass, full of joys and mishaps. But once summer turns to autumn and then a bitter winter, Mole starts missing home and determines to find his burrow, despite a raging storm and menacing taunts from the weasels and ferrets of the wild wood, on the edge of which Mole lives. Just as Mole is abandoning his search, his whiskers twitch at the scent of home. Together, Rattie and Mole dig through snow to lift the entrance hatch. However, once they descend the ladder and shine a lantern into the gloom, Mole loses heart. The burrow is dark, dank and derelict – not at all the warm cosy home Mole has been longing for. Noticing his friend’s tears, Rattie springs into action, sending off a team of baby mice to fetch provisions. Meanwhile, the two friends bustle about cleaning up debris and reversing the gloom. In no time, a fire is burning in the grate with chestnuts roasting on the coals. When the mice return they all share a modest feast. Then Mole sinks into his chair by the fire – home at last.

This story speaks to something deep in me. I’m always struck by Mole’s fierce determination to find his burrow, followed by his embarrassment at discovering its neglect. I like that Rattie rallies to support his friend, and that the mice are excited by Mole’s return. It may surprise you for me to say, but in my mind this story captures the essence of renovating.

When, during an on-line design course, I was asked to create a mood board for homework, I left it till the last minute. Why would I want to buy expensive design magazines only to flip through them backwards? However, conscientious student that I am, on the final weekend I bought two European design magazines and flipped through them at the kitchen table, stopping at pages that spoke to me. After a while, I stopped reading the text and just looked at the pictures. Then I started snipping pages from the magazines and put them, collage like, on the table. I didn’t really know what I was doing, and figured that it might be better not to. The critical part of my mind quietened as I played with the images on the table. I wasn’t scaring my unconscious with how much time, money and skill I’d need to carry out my ideas, I was just playing.

It can be hard to admit that you don’t know what you like. Our ego doesn’t like uncertainty, the blurring of edges. However, I’ve come around to thinking that not knowing what you like might be a necessary preliminary to finding out what appeals as you and your life changes over time. There is something honest about laying yourself open to shifts in your own taste.

Renovating, I like to think, isn’t about shelling out big dollars at a hardware store the size of a plane-hanger. It isn’t about bettering your Instagram feed. Nor is it about creating your dream home. Renovating is about reaching deep inside yourself to bring to life spaces that speak to you, that sing to you, in the present. Renovating is about entering a nether land in which the gap between fantasy and reality shrinks – if only momentarily, if only in your minyd’s eye.

When I was interviewing people for my project about domestic life, my ears pricked up when several women mentioned that their mothers ‘never really owned the place they lived in’. These mothers, so their daughters thought, were convinced that the living room had to look a certain way, following an unspoken convention. The inner longings of these mothers – their wildest dreams – didn’t get a look in when it came to decorating the rooms they spent most time in. One woman I spoke to, the daughter of one of these mothers, shared with me her own kitchen renovation fantasy. In this fantasy, Amy had a day-bed in the kitchen so that she’ was always on hand to take a cake from the oven. ‘I would so love to be that girl in the lovely home’, she said, ‘surrounded by old friends and vegetable swaps’. And yet in her next breath she confessed that, in real life, she’d moved house eighteen times in twenty years, and that while she spent a large proportion of her income on good food, she hadn’t the patience to grow her own vegetables.

It was clear that Amy felt something important was missing from the home she grew up in. Soul, perhaps. A liveliness that, when it came time to set up her own home, she sought to create for herself. She would create a home in which she could flourish, be her whole self, uncramped by inhibition or convention.

Most of us grew up listening to stories in which a Ulysses-like hero ventures forth to foreign lands in search of adventure, only returning home once he has developed a sufficiently complex character to want to settle down. However, there is another version of this story which gets told less often. In this reverse hero story, the hero doesn’t have to engage in years of travel in order to find herself. In this story, the hero keeps herself and her home buoyant, the opposite of staid and dull. She is forever engaged in updating where she lives. She keeps moving things about so that she can better see her home – so that it can surprise her. She goes away and comes back in order to play with her home in her mind, creating new links between ideas and objects, leading to new arrangements that refresh her eye.

For most of us, it isn’t enough just to be comfortable at home, to live without hardship there. If we’re to find contentment at home, we have to actively seek it. Like Rattie and Mole met by dirt and cobwebs, we have to be willing to do the work of translating our fantasies into reality. We have to accept the constraints that go with renovating – the tight timelines and finite budgets and the liaising with trades people.

Holding space for oneself is incredibly hard to describe. Still, we know it when we feel it, when we achieve it for ourselves. We know it when our home holds us in a way that inspires and contains us, when it asks neither too much nor too little from us.

Some say, with disdain in their voice, that renovating is a first-world problem. Perhaps it is. Then again, I’m yet to discover a culture that doesn’t decorate their homes and bodies.

When we renovate, we change our surroundings in line with our changing self. Like Rattie and Mole, we make good. We sweep the floor, light the fire, get provisions in and invite friends over. In ways like these we demonstrate that our home, and our life in it, isn’t fixed, but is as changeable as we are.

Why is this so hard? Why does renovating lead us to roll our eyes, to swear freely and to mutter under our breath, ‘never again’? A big reason why renovating is hard is because it isn’t natural. Our instinct is to take the easy path, the comfortable and less effortful path. It isn’t to make that special effort, to go that extra mile, to paint that final coat. Renovating is also hard because we secretly hate it. We hate our painting clothes rolled up at the back of the cupboard. We hate that there aren’t fairies that come in the night to do our work for us. We hate the mess and the smells, the money and the time that DIY consumes.

Ultimately renovating is hard because it punctures our fantasy of what our home could look like. It means accepting the good enough in the here and now, rather than an ideal in the far-off future. At the end of the day, it means settling for less than the best.

Just as well that there is a flip side, a positive side to renovating. Which is that because it isn’t a fantasy, it offers real satisfaction.

I perhaps should add that Mole doesn’t stay by his fireside toasting his toes forever. Soon enough, Rattie gets restless and persuades his friend to join him on further adventures. And so the tension between home and away, between keeping warm by the fire and freedom on the open road, continues.

homely/unhomely

‘The people we love are built into us’. May Sarton

I used to think that this was true only for me, however, I now realise that nearly all of us have a relationship with home that is nearly as important as the relationships we have with the people that we share it with. Even if we live on our own, we have an ongoing dialogue with home. When we ignore it, it answers back. When we let the housekeeping slip, it keeps a tab. It has needs of its own that we ignore at our peril. There is only so much avoidance, only so much time away, that our home will accept.

Our home doesn’t have a life of its own, an independent existence distinct from ourselves. It’s not a magic toyshop which comes to life when we’re not there. Rather our home is a touchstone that we fill with hopes, longings and dreads that we’re often too caught up doing other things to be aware of.

Most of us accept that we have a spiritual side, that we’re more than our physical body. But we also have a domestic side, a side of ourselves that relates to the objects, spaces and atmosphere of home. A side that lights up in pleasant surroundings and bristles in unsympathetic ones. A side that draws us to certain shapes and smells, to plays of light and shadow, to a particular ambiance – and that feels an almost visceral repulsion from others. It’s hard to describe this side of ourselves. Then again, it’s hard to overlook it. Some may think of it in terms of style or taste, but I think it goes deeper than this.

This domestic side of ourselves tends to complicate our relationships with the people we live with. Why is this? I think it’s because the people we live with relate to the same objects and spaces according to their own aesthetic, in line with their own sense of home. Inevitably this leads to tensions. Perhaps we blame our partners and kids for being messy or careless. Or perhaps they blame us for caring too much about things that don’t matter to them.

‘The people we love are built into us’. The people we love become part of our inner fabric, the map by which we make sense of our life. In similar unseen ways, our home is built into us. When we go away and come back to it, for a fraction of a second we experience it as a visitor might. We see it truly. Then the moment passes and the tables, windows and light fittings turn back into a familiar background presence.

For many of us, particularly as we creep into middle age, our relationship to home mirrors our relationship to ourselves. There is a way in which when we get on with our home we also get on with ourselves. To the point that when we look after our home, it looks after us in return.

One of the most subtle yet powerful things that we do at home is to hold space for ourselves. Parents do this for their children in the most natural way. They set the scene, creating the conditions in which their children can lose themselves in play, confident in the knowledge that when they get tired and hungry food will appear on the table and clean sheets are on the bed. Growing up means leaving all this taken for grantedness behind. It means accepting responsibility for creating the conditions in which we can be fully ourselves at home. This is what we do when we hold space for ourselves. We create the conditions in which we can flourish. This is a huge, never-ending responsibility which, for this reason, most of us never quite accept. A childish part of ourselves refuses to step up to this challenge. We continue to expect to be looked after decades after it’s realistic to expect it.

A home can be many things, according to our mood. One afternoon we can be at home alone and feel in touch with everyone who has ever loved us. A week later, in a darker mood, we can be at home alone and feel abandoned by everyone, prey to prickly fears and dreads. Other days, we have the uncomfortable sense that our home is so critical of us, so super-egoic, that we would rather not spend time there. Freud used the world ‘unheimlich’ to describe this unhomely, uncanny side of domestic life.

Thankfully, there is a flip side to not feeling at home at home. On hygge days we can potter around at home, toppling one task after another. Tasks that, while not mattering in the grand scheme of things, give us a deep sense of ease. On these days, feeling loving and creative, we are inspired to create a warmth and cosiness that draws others in.

There is a way in which our home knows way too much about us. It knows all about our lazinesses, our slip-ups and our shortcomings. However, it also doesn’t know nearly enough about us. What does it know of our hopes and dreams, our what ifs and maybes?

So much is up to us at home. In winter, we can light the fire (if we have one) and warm the whole house. Alternatively, we can heat just one room and let our home’s bones grow cold. In spring, we can plant daffodil bulbs. Equally, we can refuse to repaint the kitchen no matter scuffed it looks. We can choose to invite friends for dinner. Then again, we can fall back on take-outs. We can decide to move furniture and objects about every so often just because it’s time. Or we can keep the same arrangement of furniture, objects and pictures in unconscious protest against the passage of time.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that some of us never settle down, that we refuse to put down roots. And yet if we don’t settle, if we never surrender to the demands of home, who are we?

Most of us spend the first half of our life trying to resolve the contradictions that life presents us with, in trying to square the circle. The rest of it we spend knowing that we never will. And, hopefully, smiling.

(picture by charlotte ghaie)

what did I do today?

Most weeks I get away with a basic house clean – a quick vacuum and dust and, before putting the vacuum away, a groom of the dog. Now and then I’ll clean skirting boards, mop floorboards and wipe a few windows, mirrors and switches. When the spirit moves me I’ll put flowers in a vase and generally move things about. I might riffle through the freezer and check the bottom of the fridge for loiterers, or sort through bags in the basket in which I keep dry goods to refill kitchen jars – nuts, muesli, rice. And before my energy flags, I might rinse plastic cream/milk/pesto/yoghurt/hummus containers and take all the rubbish out to the bins.

Usually I clean the house late afternoon, once my other work – my real work – is done. Often I’ll put on my apron so that my brain knows not to waylay me. Typically, once I get past a basic clean, my housekeeping will snowball into tasks which come to seem important in a way that they didn’t before I put on my apron.

Yesterday, after teaching yoga and having breakfast out while working on an essay, most of the rest of my day was swallowed up by housekeeping. By the time I put a pan of fish croquettes in the middle of the table around 7pm (mashed potato, tinned tuna, chopped spring onions, grated parmesan, lemon zest and ground pepper bound with a whisked egg, shaped into disks with breadcrumbs and fried in a heavy pan – cook’s note, shape the mashed potato cold) I felt the need to get out my notebook and write down what I’d spent the previous 6 hours doing.

Here is my list:

•             open windows and doors (it was a warm day after many cold ones)

•             clean bathroom (including scrubbing basin, bath and loo)

•             vacuum house

•             pour boiling water and ½ cup washing soda down kitchen and bathroom basin drains (old house = bad plumbing)

•             put on 2 loads of washing (hang up wet washing, fold dry washing)

•             clean cupboard under kitchen sink (this called out to me because my sister is planning a visit from interstate)

•             clean sticky remains from stickers off fridge door and wipe down fridge shelves (plus peering into freezer and quickly closing it, thinking better of it)

•             scrub kitchen sinks, stainless steel hob and hood with paste and scratchy thing

• extract small watering can from bottom of old sports equipment basket to water my daughter’s 10 indoor plants which are living in my study

•             fill 2 big buckets with tip-shop donations (old hockey sticks, tennis rackets, hedge clippers, ex-husband’s computer speakers) and put them in boot of car  

• rake leaves in driveway and put in compost

•             overshoot the 3pm limit that I’d agreed with myself at 11am

•             decide not to look at my phone for fear of being distracted

• undo dishwasher and wash out filter

•             move absurdly heavy chair made by my daughter out of my study (until a week ago, her temporary bedroom) into the basement with much heavy lifting and cursing and feeling guilty when I scraped the arm on the basement steps, before replacing it with another less heavy chair from the spare room

•             scrub, chop and steam potatoes for dinner (croquettes)

•             find and change light globe in standing lamp in my study – swap out desk lamp for bedside lamp from spare room – take daughter’s pictures off study walls and draw a blank as to what to put in their place

Even after writing down how I’d spent the previous 6 hours, I still couldn’t explain where they’d gone. All that time and energy had gone somewhere. But where exactly? I felt spent. And yet despite my fatigue, the bossy part of my mind was jumpy with all the other things – the emails, the dropped balls – I should have poured my precious afternoon into. Now that I was sitting down, and was no longer answerable to my inner housekeeper, I was instead being admonished by my inner critic.

But then this morning, after emptying the plastic buckets from the boot of my car at the tip shop, I felt something inside me shift. I felt lighter. I hadn’t planned – there was no mark in my diary – for yesterday’s housekeeping. All I’d agreed with myself was to catch up on the cleaning I’d overlooked during a busy week. It was only once I was over the hump that I always face when I housekeep – after I’d vacuumed, dusted and groomed the dog – that the magic happened.

Something which, just yesterday morning, had seemed impossible – to reclaim my study after my daughter’s departure – became doable. Not a problem to shrug off for another day (when, ever?) but a change that was in my power to do. And it was in letting myself potter from one thing to another, all the while wishing that afternoon wasn’t passing into evening, that I began to feel on top of the running of my home.

Psychologists claim that, after a certain point in life, we fear being out of control more than we fear being in physical danger. For me, feeling out of control at home isn’t something I feel consciously. I don’t go around feeling as if Rome is falling about my ears. Rather, the falling apart thing is more suppressed and pervasive. The fluff balls in the corners of rooms bug me. The jar full of plastic lids that I’ve gone to the trouble of collecting and now don’t know where to take for recycling beckon to me whenever I open that cupboard. I feel weirdly responsible for such things, while also knowing that they don’t, in the scheme of things, really matter.

Then again, I just do feel better about myself when I’m feeling good about my home. I know that not everyone feels like this. And I’m not one bit suggesting they should. Domestic life is challenging, however we live it. However, for me it gets a whole lot more challenging when I won’t accept – when I can’t find it in myself to accept – just how much time, energy and love go into keeping my home a place that I like to be.

how to be creative @home

 ‘I can’t be really creative until I have a clear horizon

and all the road is clear ahead – then I can be as happy as can be’.

Alfred Hitchcock  

I fell into writing because it gave me a cover to think in print. It gave me time to think big things through in the quiet of my mind. It was low risk. I didn’t court readers or try to persuade anyone of anything. If someone stumbled on a blog post of mine, great. Yet even on the pages I scribbled – I always scribble first – I never told all, revealed all.

Until I realised that keeping quiet while the media blew a gale around me was never going to get my ideas out. Like a baby turtle, I would have to wriggle out of my burrow and waddle across the sand towards the waiting waves. No-one else could do this for me. I had to do it on my own – and I’m not there yet.

Initially I asked if I could publish my next book, HomeWork: essays on love and housekeeping, under a pseudonym. However, no surprise, the publisher refused. So here I am, staring at a blank page, wondering how to inspire other people to make the quarter of the day that they spend looking after themselves, their home and the people they love most feel more valuable. This is my mission. It’s to get more of us to place a higher value on the housekeeping that we do, to do with grace what we have to do anyway. Not as an end in itself, because it isn’t, but as a gateway to expressing ourselves creatively at home.

My aim is to encourage us to make friends with our domestic side – or simply to recognise that we have one. I focus on housekeeping not housework, because housekeeping is hands down the bigger animal of the two. Housekeeping includes deciding what to cook for dinner, finding time to make something for a friend’s birthday, noticing an ailing plant on your way to the front door, and remembering the wet washing in the machine as you fall into bed.

Misconceptions about housekeeping abound. Some people are convinced that the domestic realm is inward-looking, that it’s menial and without meaning. Others feel that, on balance, keeping up an attractive home isn’t a good use of their precious time and energy. Even those of us, like myself, who feel proud of their home, view housekeeping as a stealthy enemy.

Except that housekeeping needn’t be any of these things. And what we do at home really does matter. When we care for where we live, in a loving way, we’re also caring about life itself. Housekeeping has a ripple-on effect. If you make an effort to recycle, as I do, you’re likely to be concerned for the wildlife whose future depends on plastics not ending up in the soil.

Few people read Sigmund Freud’s essays these days. Admittedly, his Pelican paperbacks now sit atop our piano more for their colourful spines than for easy reference. Even so, Freud’s thinking still informs mine and I owe him a lot. ‘You’re not responsible for your parents’, he wrote, ‘your circumstances or, to a large extent, your character and your fate. You are however responsible for discovering what you find satisfying and for pursuing that.’ This is my second hunch about the home. Home is important because it offers us time and space in which to seek our own satisfaction. Seeking satisfaction is mysterious. What satisfies me might not satisfy you; what leaves me content, on a Sunday evening, may not touch you at all. Our satisfactions and contentments are more individual and subtle,than are our pleasures; they feed our soul rather than our ego.

Also, as we get older, the activities that we find satisfying change. What excited us when we were young often isn’t what we end up liking as the years pass. Even so, satisfaction isn’t simply an effect of maturity. If we’re to end the day feeling content, satisfied with how our life is, we need to begin our day in an unstressed, unanxious frame of mind. We need to be able to suspend our disbelief long enough to explore whatever creative possibilities arise across the day, and to do this in a curious, un-judgy way.

We don’t get more satisfaction from an activity because we’re good at it. Often satisfaction is our reward for engaging in activities that we aren’t especially good at. Rather than expertise, what we need most is patience. Especially at the start, we need to be able to push over the hump that all creative activities present us with, and to keep on going until we reach a state of flow in which we lose a sense of time, and of ourselves, as we tap into the energy behind the surface of things. Being in flow is the creative equivalent of being tipsy.

‘Rest’, observed Virginia Woolf, ‘isn’t lying down. It’s doing something that is different’. When we engage in an activity that is new, and that we aren’t particularly good at, we sharpen the lens through which we see the world. We come out the other side of it feeling a tiny bit more complex. Even five minutes, spent in this way, refreshes us, renews us. It doesn’t relax us so much as engage us. It leads to a sense of satisfaction that, though we may struggle to find words for it, is unmistakable to feel. Such feelings don’t last, of course; we have to go back again and again to feel satisfied the next time.

It seems ironic that most of us find it easier to achieve a state of flow at work than at home. However, as American psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmilhayi has shown, we do. When we’re at work we overcome our natural state of awareness, that of distraction, by operating within a framework and a set of expectations that keep us on task and that invite flow. Whereas at home, where there’s less structure and not much feedback, we’re tempted to dally, to fall into self-doubt and to question the value of our efforts. We struggle to work from home (or, as Esther Perel observed, ‘with home’). It’s not just the laundry basket and the leaves in need of raking that distract us. We do too.

When we were young – assuming we were lucky – our parents and carers looked after the basics for us. Food appeared at mealtimes, bedlinen was washed and dental appointments were made. This lack of responsibility allowed us free rein to explore our creativity. However, once we become adult, the necessities of life can no longer be escaped. The dust-balls under the sofa and the empty fridge stare us down. Unless we’re easy-going to the point of slovenly, or are very good at delegating, or can pay someone else to do the housekeeping for us, if we’re to express ourselves creatively at home we have to stay on top of the housekeeping. We have to do household tasks that we wouldn’t otherwise choose to do, in order to make space (‘a clear horizon’) for more interesting things to unfold. Because it’s only once the housekeeping is done that can we give ourselves over to the kind of things that we love doing, and that challenge us in a deeper way than a clean home. All of which explains why, if we’re to flourish at home, we need a good, strong relationship with ourselves.

This, it turns out, is one of the biggest challenges that home life presents us with. It’s to get ourselves to do what needs to be done, in terms of basic necessities, to make space for activities that are creative, restful and satisfying. Cooking, gardening, renovating, making things – activities like these are restful because they engage us, challenge us and – because they defy mastery and are never ‘finished’ – keep us coming back to them.

We don’t usually think about the home in these terms. We don’t assume that our relationship to home is as important as our relationship to the people we share it with – or, if we live alone, as important as our relationship to ourselves. Often as not, we avoid talking about domesticity altogether out of fear that doing for others is to subordinate our needs to the demands of unappreciative loved ones. Or we worry that the work we do at home is a siphoning off of our precious energy into an existential cul-de-sac. Why else would we fail to mention the quarter of our day that we spend keeping heart and soul together?

This, however, isn’t my experience of home life – nor that of the 60 people I interviewed for this project. Rather, I came out of these conversations feeling inspired, and a touch more ambitious for my own home life. I came away believing that when you embrace the work that supports a pleasant home – for good food, clean clothes and attractive living spaces – you open yourself to the love that makes everything that you do at home feel worthwhile.

on not being child free

Lately I’ve read numerous blog posts by women in their 30s in which they ponder whether or not to have children. It’s almost become a new offspring of feminism, this desire not to have your life shaped by the love and responsibility that springs from bringing kids into the world. The assumption seems to be that having children risks misshaping your life in some fundamental way, especially if you’re a woman, that pregnancy and beyond lures you from your best life, and that being the parent of a primary-school-age child might prove a bar to your destiny. In simple terms, if you’re fated to be the next George Eliot, Virginia Woolf or Elon Musk, then having children might jeopardise that.

Of course, women had mixed feelings at the prospect of childbearing when I had my kids over 20 years ago. I was ambivalent myself, and needed quite a lot of persuasion before taking a leap into the unknown. What seems different is that, back then, this ambivalence was directed towards early motherhood – time constraints, hormonal flux, loss of sleep, financial costs and career hiccups. Whereas, these days, younger women are airing mixed feelings for the impact that having children might have over the whole course of their life, and not just the years before kids grow old enough to be packed off to school.

Even the word childbearing is a giveaway, conveying the idea of bearing up against the weight of a child. Rather than childbearing making you into a bigger, richer version of yourself, it hints that having a child might crush you into a pancake of your former self.

Every woman who has a baby nurses the fear of turning into her mother. No matter how hard we strive to forge our own path, and to be our own person, we harbour a fear that becoming a mother will turn the screw that forever skews our sense of ourselves – and not for the better.

And guess what? We do turn into our mother when we have children. However – and this is a big however – I can’t help wondering, in retrospect, whether this transformation is less about genetic or cultural determinism, than it is about the logic of fairytales and of our unconscious: according to which what we least want to happen has a way of, abracadabra, coming to pass.

I don’t know what this rise in young female bloggers writing into the child-free space means. Five years ago, the two biggest worries that would-be parents worried about were the financial costs of bringing up a child and the future impact of climate change. These factors are still real – certainly the cost of living and environmental degradation are top of mind for most people. However, I also think that the emotional cost – the messy price of love – might comprise a good part of the tally, the pros and cons, that young people are now making.

As a society, we are more aware of mental health than ever before. Mental health – a clunky term but the one we have – is no longer housed in nondescript buildings on the high street with 6-month waitlists. Mental health is everywhere. It’s no longer a big deal to admit that we’re too much for ourselves and that we need a lot of help just to stay afloat; nor even that much of the existential and emotional support we receive initially comes from our parents, when we’re lucky – and, yes, especially from our mother.

Because it’s our mother who tends to be the one who, for years at a stretch, takes the emotional temperature and blood sugar levels of everyone at home. It’s our mother who is only as happy as her least happy child. It’s our mother who, once we cease to be a child, can only do and say the wrong thing – and who must gracefully accept her rejection as the price to be paid for her child’s separation from her.

And yet, of course, unless it has been crushed out of us, we remain that child. We’re always vulnerable, always in need of propping up, always seething with doubts – unless, of course, we veer towards blathering conviction (and so are insufferable to live with). The rest of us never outgrow our need for each other. Leonard Cohen was right; there’s always a wound, a break or a tear through which the light shines through, and that makes us interesting to others.

I am not sentimental. Nor do I believe in fate – nor in Mother’s Day, for that matter. I think that we make our own life, and that our life is shaped by forces outside our control – and that both of these are true. Like so many others, I live a both/and life. My definition of family love, for what it’s worth, at least for the last however many years, is this: ‘to be run over very slowly by the people I love most’. So, I am in no position to shepherd younger women on to the path that I myself took.

Childbearing aside, my thinking on big life decisions has always been incredibly simple. When I stand at the crossroads, looking at the arrows pointing in different directions, I take the most interesting path. That’s it. The beauty of this way of choosing is that no-one else – apart from my unconscious – can tell me which way I should go. Rather, if I stand still long enough, I just know. Thankfully, this way of thinking is not subject to regret. Like the stars in the night sky, my path – sometimes sandy, sometimes grassy, sometimes paved – just is.

My hunch, which I won’t elevate into a belief, is that as long as we can stay in a still calm place, for long enough, we really do know which path is beckoning to us – and that after this everything else follows. My other hunch is that I’m pretty certain that my dog’s daycare card, currently propped above the hob – ‘roses are pink, violets are blue, Digger loves daycare, but not as much as you!’ – is the only one I’ll be getting. Although, I do still get hugs from the kids who run me over, ever so considerately, now and then.

dinner for 13

I first heard the American negotiator Priya Parker speak on a Katherine May podcast in which May confessed to disliking social occasions. She said that she often declined them or attended out of guilt and then scuttled off home early from them. Intrigued by the podcast, I listened to Parker’s book The Art of Gathering – about the importance of getting people together for weddings and funerals and everything in between – while painting the front hall over Easter.

Katherine May has an adult autism diagnosis. Even so, after reading her books and working in mental health, the main difference I can tell between her and myself, a so-called normal person, is that May is willing to say out loud what most of us keep a lid on. So I was interested to hear her voice a view that while I don’t share I do have some sympathy for.

During my marriage, I often left social events before Paul, my ex-husband and a party person, did. Sometimes we made a tacit agreement in the car, on the way to the event, about leaving together at a certain time. However, as our kids got older and Paul worked harder, increasingly I left events before he did. I left because I don’t drink alcohol and tire before midnight. I left on behalf of the morning ahead, wanting to be up and ready for it. And I left because even when I was out I felt tied to home with invisible strings of love and responsibility which alcohol happily dissolved for Paul. Even so, I’ve always enjoyed social occasions and don’t fully understand it when people say they hate parties (though clearly they do).

Having people for dinner was something that Paul and I did well together. Apart from early parenting, it was perhaps as close to teamwork as we got. From the start, it was something we saw eye to eye on. Of course there were surface tensions. He liked a level of formality that I felt embarrassed by (he loved setting the table so it gleamed and had a thing about ironing napkins and having lots of candles). I liked it when people broke into intimate chats around the table whereas he liked to sit at one end and, at the start of dinner, orchestrate one big conversation on a giant theme.

Still, we both agreed that having friends for dinner was about the people not the food, and that a special kind of intimacy springs up around a table when the pressure is off and the lights are low.

It would be easy to romanticise the dinners that Paul and I gave in London, Melbourne and Hobart, when life seemed to be laid out before us – with more years before us than behind us – and when friends tended not to have food restrictions or babysitters or early morning gym sessions.

Even so, having large dinners is something I’ve missed since my marriage ended – two years in July. Over Easter, while painting the hall, I decided to change that. After chatting with a friend, I figured that the only thing holding me back was a lack of chairs to seat guests on. Apart from being an artist, Paul’s father dealt in antiques and, over the years, he passed on countless chairs to us; however, all these found new homes when Paul left for Italy. To remedy this, late one night I went on-line and bought 10 black fold-up IKEA chairs. Then I put a ring around a Friday night, in a few weeks’ time, and set about inviting friends.

Those few weeks have now elapsed, and tonight I’m expecting 12 for dinner, 13 including myself. Meanwhile I have the tail end of a cold that my daughter, who’s moved back home temporarily, gave me. And I have the hardest part of entertaining ahead of me – the prep. Cooking food and setting the table isn’t hard, exactly. The problem for me is that they take place in real time which I have a limited amount of. But it’s not just the time needed to prepare. The problem about entertaining, for me, is that it’s elective. It’s voluntary. No-one is forcing me to have a big dinner. And yet I still want to do it. I want to do it even though I’m socially shy and I’m not a great cook; and even though it means making time to do something I’m conscious that not many of us do nowadays. So why do I do it? Simple. I do it because I believe in the value of bringing people together, especially now that for multiple reasons we do it less often.

*     *     *

As I sit typing this at the kitchen table, the dishwasher whirs in the background. So, how did the dinner go? Well, my vegetarian and gluten-free friend turned out to be in the US and not South Hobart, which meant that my dietary-restricted Lasagne was in vain – although it was pretty nice nonetheless, and even though it could have been served hotter. Overall, I think the dinner was a success. Several times I was pulled out of the room to do something in the kitchen or to talk to my daughter and, from the loud hum of conversation next door I felt confident that I wasn’t missed – always a good sign.

The main thing is that I did the scary thing and had the dinner I wanted to have. I wasn’t put off by the hour-before-the-guests-arrive-nerves that hit me hard when, a rectangular casserole dish in my hands, the oven tray support broke away from the side of a hot oven and I had to beg my daughter to fix it before I lost it. All in all, I didn’t feel nostalgic for the dinners I once had with Paul and wish that I was seated at one of those. Nor do I remember minding not being part of a couple. After the main course, when I moved four people around to change things up, and managed to seat all the men at one end of the table, I decided to leave it and not to fuss. And just after midnight, when I cleaned up the kitchen before going up to bed, leaving the glasses on the table till morning, I felt less tired than I used to do after a big dinner.

my favourite yoga teachers

One of my favourite yoga teachers, who I consider a friend, ended her class yesterday with an announcement. She would, she told us, be overseas for the next two months and, she added, while she was away her two favourite yoga teachers would be covering her classes.

I already knew that Sadie would soon be teaching retreats in India and had read in the studio newletter, the day before, that Kate and Tracy would be taking her classes. Still, I felt a twinge of embarrassment that a room full of students had just heard that I wasn’t one of Sadie’s favourite teachers, even though I knew that in terms of technique and experience Kate and Tracy outstrip my ability as a teacher and also that, had I been in Sadie’s position, I’d have chosen them too. Complicated, no?

As I left the studio, not wanting Sadie to feel awkward about her comment, I told her that apart from her, Kate and Tracy were among my favourite teachers too, and that the studio was lucky to have them cover in her absence. Sadie pointed out that she hadn’t actually been to one of my classes – which I’d more than once told her would make me nervous – and so didn’t know what she thought of my teaching. Fair enough, I thought, as I sat on the wooden stairs fumbling to tie my shoelaces.

I’ve often wondered what it might have been like to have focused my career on just one thing, to have had one overriding passion that put everything else into the shade. To be so driven to be a yoga teacher, say, that every other life decision fell in around that. Of course I know this is a fantasy. I know that even if I’d set my heart on one thing, early on, there was no reason to assume I would have excelled in it.

I’ve never been on a yoga retreat – or any kind of retreat actually – probably because, in my heart of hearts, I prefer to wander off exploring on my own, with pen and paper and a good book in my bag. Still, I do do a lot of yoga – and now teach it too. It allows me to do all the physical things – gardening, surfing, Twister – that I enjoy doing despite the years piling up behind me. But while I love doing yoga, which cleanses and keeps me whole, I’m unlikely ever to learn Sanskrit or study the chakras.

Being on my own more recently has made it clear to me that I’m not the centre of the universe. This is obvious, of course it is. And yet, now that my kids need me less, and my marriage is in the past, it sometimes catches me unawares just how not special I am. I can respond in a knee-jerk way to my yoga teacher’s slight as just that. Or I can step back just far enough to see that her comment wasn’t intended as a slight, but rather as reassurance to a room full of students that she had done everything in her power to make sure they’d be in good hands while she was away.

Last night I spent an hour on Linked-in, marveling at all the things that people I know have been up to. As I scrolled, I could feel my ego tip-toe around the worldly concreteness of these endeavours. I didn’t feel anything as simple as envy, more quiet amazement at the different directions that people’s lives can go in. Admittedly, I felt a little rebuked by all this industry. But I didn’t only feel this.

Because what I now have, and never expected to have at this point of my life, is the blessing of time. I have time to respond to things and to come out the other side, knowing that whoeever and whatever I am, I’m more than my ego. Small mercy perhaps, though it feels big to me.