interview

‘Stop thinking about it’, says my daughter, on a bush walk before dinner. ‘Just do it or don’t do it.’ ‘She’s right’, I say to myself, choosing not to respond. But then since when did the other person being right help anyone make a big decision?

When Tolstoy was plagued by indecision, about whether or not to marry, he wrote two lists in a notebook, one for marriage and one against it. By the time he’d done each of his lists was about even. Here are my two lists, very nearly equal, one for doing a drawing course, the other for not doing it.

For:

1. To develop a skill that is native but rusty, and that might push me in a good way.
2. To have a sabbatical after twenty years of writing part-time and being with family much of the time. To give me a perspective on my life by focusing on something outside myself – drawing in a studio – which would be a break from pushing myself as a writer and being there for my family.
3. To be released from a particular version of myself, the existential equivalent of travel, without leaving a city I like living in.
4. To have the instruction of two art teachers who, from first impressions, I like.
5. To work around others rather than working alone as a writer.
6. To make the most of my kids leaving home by doing something constructive, that I otherwise may not have done.

Against:

1. Rather than seeing my kid’s absence as a chance to write full-time, I distract myself by doing a half-time course which takes me in another direction.
2. Not earning money, confirming my financial dependence on others.
3. Turning a private passion into a kind of work – fifteen hours a week in a studio – puncturing my fantasy of drawing as an escape from daily life, challenging me in new and not always welcome ways.
4. Being an older student among predominantly younger students.
5. Making myself busy as a defence against loneliness.
6. Practical problems. Being locked into a timetable of school terms which conflict with my daughter’s university semesters. Putting our reactive dog in daycare when I’m at school – expense etc. Being at home less to support my hard-working husband. Lots of standing at an easel, which may require more yoga?
7. A drawing course seems indulgent, increasing my existential angst for the future. Fear of failure.

+     +     +

 Now that I’ve been interviewed for the drawing course – 45 minutes with a lecturer looking at my portfolio and discussing the pros and cons of my suitability for the course – the decision has passed out of my hands. I can accept or not accept a place, but I can’t offer it. Probably should have been less honest.

Fingers crossed!

 

life drawing death cleaning

Late last Wednesday, when I should have been in bed, I watched a youtube clip for the book The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning and found myself admiring the author’s simple audacity. Intrigued, on Sunday afternoon I dropped into our local bookshop to pick up a copy. It was shortly before closing and one of the booksellers, who happens to be a friend, serves me. ‘Death cleaning’, he repeats after me, a query in his voice. ‘Oh, I know. It’s on our landfill table’. And he escorts me to the front of the shop where a selection of dubious titles are piled high on a folding table. Feeling admonished, I flick through The Gentle Art of Death Cleaning standing up, return it to the table, and wave goodbye to the bookseller.

 

Even after a quick flick through, I grasp the book’s message. It isn’t morbid, as the title suggests. Nor is it complicated. Margareta Magnusson, an artist who wisely chooses not to reveal her age, is upbeat on the page. The message I glean from her book is straightforward. If I can conquer my resistance to clearing out my study cupboard, I’ll make room for my life to come. By losing some of my past, I’ll clear space for the future. More down to earth, dare I say more European, than Marie Kondo, Magnusson is alive to the meaning of things beyond our death. She isn’t about blitzing mess; her message is more subtle, more unsettling, than that. If you can’t deal with your things while you’re still alive, she writes drily, why should you kids or partner be any better at dealing with them when you’re gone?

 

Magnusson’s message is confronting, but it isn’t harsh. It speaks to my life in the here and now, rather than any life to come. If I’m to make enough mental space to live fully in the present, in the weeks and months ahead, she’s telling me that I need to give up enough of my past to make my way into it, especially as I age and the past – regrets, anyone? – starts dragging in my wake. To fully inhabit the present, to avoid living in a museum of lost dreams and what ifs, she’s telling me that I have to let go of quite a lot of stuff. Magnussen isn’t anti-sentimental. Stern, perhaps; but she isn’t a Swedish quiet reaper. While she’s all for keeping important objects that tie us into ourselves, she’s scathing when it comes to boxing things up and shutting cupboard doors and hoping for the best.

 

What I glean from Death Cleaning gives me hope. If I can conquer my dread of my study cupboard, if I can throw the doors wide and chuck out whatever is holding me back, even without my knowing it, the next time I open my study cupboard I won’t have to suppress an inner sigh, a moment of self-disgust, comfortable in the knowledge that my creative future doesn’t depend on twenty years’ worth of notes, admin, notebooks, school reports, and magazine stories stacked up inside. In short I won’t have to avoid my study, for fear of my study cupboard.

 

The house is quiet and mostly dark. In my study the lights are on. The window is open to encourage a breeze. The dog is asleep in her chair next door. My husband is working late in his wooden temple at the bottom of the garden. Tipping over my fifteen-minute timer, I watch as particles of sand drop through the tiny-waisted funnel. Kneeling on a cushion, I turn away from the timer, face my study cupboard, and start pulling out files.

 

Fifteen minutes later, tipping over the timer again, I open the broom cupboard next to my file cupboard. Even as I pull the knobs I sense this isn’t death cleaning. Reaching into the broom cupboard I take out two large sketchbooks leaning vertically against the side of the cupboard, next to the vacuum and broom. I sit on a chair and turn the pages, drawn back to the woman I was when I drew on them. Far more powerfully than the reams of handwritten and typed pages, these drawings are more alive to me than the banks of notebooks strewn on the floor by my feet. Bird song across the years, they express a left behind part of myself which, occasionally revisited on a Sunday afternoon, I’ve lost touch with.

 

Three trips to our rubbish bins and two hours later, I head up to bed. Sitting on the street, awaiting the morning’s collection, both bins are full to the brim with notebooks and typescripts and domestic appliance manuals and utility bills and school textbooks.

 

The bin truck comes as I lie in bed, sunlight flooding through chinks in the curtains. Hearing the bins lifted and emptied, I feel lighter. Empty too, yet lighter. Tripping downstairs in my pyjamas, to let the dog out and open the blinds, even before scrolling through the morning news on my phone, I enter my study for the sheer pleasure of opening the cupboard doors and not being sucked entropically into twenty years’ worth of notebooks, admin, guilt and notes, stacked up and demanding attention. In the cupboard next door, loyal and patient, sit two dog-eared sketchbooks.

 

letting go

All those years of being needed, of coming when I’m called, are coming to an end. My kids still need me; but even more they need me to let go, and for their not to feel bad about leaving me dangling. They’re leaving the door open; prompting me with emails, beckoning by texts. They just don’t want me in their field of vision. They love me not less, but differently.

 

For years my mother warned me of the roadblock that lay ahead. ‘Before you know it’, she’d say, ‘they’ll be off and away’. But I never believed her. How could I? For twenty years my kids were in the middle of everything, of the everything that was my life. For twenty years it felt natural to drop everything when the school nurse called, when my kids wanted driving lessons, or when an open-ended conversation in the hall needed more time.

 

I’ve always admired women who seemed more single-minded in their career than I’ve managed to be. However none of us chooses our emotional makeup and I made peace with mine long ago. Whatever I gave up, whatever sacrifices I made along the way, were as much for my sake – stress hater that I am – as for my kids. Besides whatever I gave up was more than made up for by intimacy with them. Yet this is the treasure that I feel I must let go if they’re to find their feet and go their own way. Just as my mother waved me off at the airport, thirty years ago, not knowing when she’d see me next, now it’s my turn. Like a bird flying out of opening hands into the waiting sky.

 

These days it’s my job not to know too much, to hug the shadows and to cheer from the sidelines. It’s my job not to start sentences with, ‘Why don’t you…?’ Instead it’s my job to shrink the richness and intensity of childhood into easy commonplaces like, ‘You’ll be fine’. Or, ‘Everything that you need to be you, you’ve got already’. Or, as if they’ve ever doubted it, ‘I’ll always be here for you’.

 

In an email sent from the airport in Buenos Aires, my son tells me that a photo I just put up on facebook, of him waving down from high up a wooden mast, wasn’t taken in Antarctica earlier this month, as I’d supposed, but in Greenland last July. He laughs at my mistake. And yet despite all that distance – Drakes Passage and four-hour shifts and weeks out of contact at sea – I don’t feel out of touch with my son. Though for much of the time I have no idea of his geographical whereabouts, I still know who he is; for all his travels I still feel able to reach him. I feel hugely grateful for this. It helps a lot in making up for his not being around day to day. I’ve already told him that from now on he belongs to the world, not his family; and I meant it.

 

Ten days ago, surprising us both, my daughter put up her hand to leave home. At that moment I heard the other shoe drop. She too, it turns out, needs space to find out who she is and what life can be, without me in the picture. She too, like her brother, is leaving home earlier than I did, pushed into it by circumstance. She laughs when I tell her that her hummus-eating mother could ever have sprinkled a packet of Twisties into a roll and called it lunch when she started university; but I did. She finds it exciting that, in a month’s time, when she buys an icecream and calls it lunch, I won’t be there to scold.

 

‘You won’t know yourself’, my mother would say over the phone, the night before a long school holiday ended. She was right. The shift from ‘What shall we do today?’ to ‘What shall I do today?’ was huge. Even after a long weekend, moving from ‘we’ to ‘I’ felt like a blessed a relief. It still is. Only this time, when my daughter goes to university in a month’s time, the question won’t have such an easy answer. At least at the beginning, she’ll be back for weekends, so it’s not total abandonment. But it’s still a lot of windy time to fill, meals to cook, walks with our reactive dog. Already I can feel the ‘what shall I do?’ question staring me down, like a too bright sun.

 

My husband is having dancing lessons. He says he’s wanted them for ages. Perhaps I should join him. But my heart doesn’t leap at the prospect. Besides, in order to keep my sanity, in the flurry of family life, I stopped following my husband’s lead a few years ago. Rather than living closely in conflict, we chose to live side by side in harmony. And I prefer it this way.

 

It was always my plan, from the time I fell pregnant, to devote myself to family knowing that there’d be plenty of time left, once my kids had left home, to do my own thing. However all those years ago, when I made this calculation, I left out an essential bit. I left out all the ways in which having children would change me, making it impossible to slip back into the old way of being me. Nor do I know what doing my own thing is anymore. My friends smile and say that this is all part of the journey, of letting go, of becoming free. Let’s hope they’re right.