Softening in Hard Times

I am writing from a weird, in between place: my daughter hasn’t broken up for the summer holidays yet even though most state schools have, my son hasn’t been to school since Easter and I don’t know if or when he’s going back, I am neither a mainstream mum nor a home educating mum, neither on holiday nor in term time, neither working full-time nor ever really not working (as well as juggling paid work, being a writer and a mum are states of being rather than jobs), and I honestly have no idea what I’m doing a lot of the time. All of this is happening in the context of an ever maddening news cycle and during the peculiar pause after the solstice but before Lammas, when late summer takes hold and the year begins to exhale. The in between.

Despite its beauty and lushness, high summer is not my time. I feel hot, tense and frequently overwhelmed. Sweat gathers underneath my boobs and on my forehead, my hips feel tight and I need the comfort of a cup of strong sweet tea every morning after waking. The shockwaves of global events are rippling through all of our nervous systems at the moment, and collapse shows up in our lives in different ways: for me this looks like giving myself permission to be honest about the fact that it is hard being an unmothered mother, it is hard being a mother in patriarchal capitalism, and it is hard being a mother without a village. And I’ve been doing it for a bloody long time.

I am 43 now and in the season of perimenopause. The other day I’m pretty sure I had my first proper hot flush: I was putting the shopping away when an intense, burning heat began to radiate from me like I was a sun collapsing under the weight of its own gravity. Even with M - ever calm and steady, my rock - holding me through the chaos, lately I have been feeling more out at sea than ever. I long for the cool, mellow months of autumn, and for the quiet sanctuary of winter, where it feels safe to hide.

My thoughts move differently when I am by myself. Solitude is a kind of oxygen for me, and I have been starved of it for months. I feel as though I have to make the impossible choice between self obliteration or abandoning my sweet-hearted, neuro-sparkly, rebellion-spirited son to a school system that was never designed for children like him (or, I am increasingly convinced, for any children at all). There are no neat answers. I wish it wasn’t so.

“Women have always created in fragments” says Prajna O'Hara. In the early mornings and evenings, I write in snatched moments in between attending to the needs of everyone else, and sometimes not at all. I am supposedly somewhere in the messy middle of a manuscript, wracked with self doubt about whether it is publishable or even readable, but glad, still, to have the current of it running through my life. The internet, for the most part, feels harsh, noisy: I question whether I want to add to the grief and outrage or whether I should just get a proper job, retreat into drawing and gardening, and sink most of all into the temporal bliss of sleep and dreams. I am sleeping well at the moment, at least. To my slightly younger self, mothering two children back to back who did not sleep until they were through toddlerhood, that would have been everything (if you are reading from the outer reaches of that same wilderness, I send you the all the love I can muster. To convince mothers that they should shoulder it alone is total bullshit).

And yet, we thank our lucky stars now to go to sleep under the same roof as our loved ones, safe from bombs and snipers and hunger and infection. How far this grotesque experiment in moral degeneracy can go feels crushing and dehumanising for every single one of us, even those of us who are lucky enough to live far from the unimaginable horrors of life in Gaza, Sudan and elsewhere. I am tired of all of it, of waiting for the world to make a better kind of sense, of waiting for kindness to win. I may be sleeping well, but I am bone-tired.

A summer rainstorm after a drought, and a few precious moments alone in the house while M takes the eight year old for a swim. Summer rain has always been my favourite kind of weather: I watch the raindrops slide down the windows and feel my thoughts begin to filter and settle for the first time in weeks. Later I go for an evening walk. The air is bright and clear after the rain, everything shimmering and lustrous like the early stages of a mushroom trip. A beech hedge is alive with the chatter of sparrows and the road verges are abundant with ragwort, willowherb, hogweed and meadowsweet. The latter, sun-warm and wet with rain, smells like heaven.

I pass through the village churchyard, walk the circular path around an 11th century church built on a ‘ciric’, an ancient Celtic burial mound built where two rivers converge, back when all the Weald was a thick forest. Stopping to greet my favourite Scots pine tree, I notice that the church doors are open, and spontaneously wander inside the empty building. There is a familiar musty smell of old English churches, like paper and carpet and varnished wood and rope, when a young man, a teenager, unexpectedly follows me inside. He is achingly sweet and polite and deliberately non-threatening, explaining that he is far from home and needs to charge his phone to call a friend to come and collect him. I help him locate a socket and plug his charger in until there is enough charge to make the call. He seems to think I am something to do with the church; I tell him I’m not, slightly amused that I appear old and frumpy enough for him to make the assumption, but as we part ways, he still thanks me profusely for ‘letting’ him charge his phone in the church. It’s a community building, I tell him. It’s the least they can do.

It is practically nothing, but it feels meaningful, somehow, to be given an opportunity to help a stranger find their way home inside a thousand year old building on an ancient sacred site. Small kindnesses sustain our humanity, and there are thousands of ways to subvert this empire of horrors by being good to one another. In hard times, we can also seek out ways to soften as sources of sustenance, and trust that those things may also be seeking us. The earth still wants to mother us, I think.

One evening when I desperately need to get out of the house, I drive over the Downs and go to the beach for a couple of hours on my own. The beach is eerily quiet for a weekday in July. Dense sea mist obscures the horizon and wraps itself around me as I bob in the warm salty water, long, brown strings of seaweed tangling themselves around my wrists and hair as I swim. A fine spray of rain begins to fall, specks landing on my cheeks and on the back of my neck, making little circles on the surface, and for a time I float inside a blue-grey symphony of air and water and the quiet, rhythmic music of the sea.

Afterwards I lie on the pebbles for a long time. Let the drizzle and the sound of the waves merge with my breath, visualise some of the heaviness draining away from my body, being pulled down through the stones and the shingle and away into the sea, which is always big enough to hold me. In the magic of alone time and in the liminal space between land, sea and sky, I resolve to enjoy the sweet, golden months ahead - my last summer holidays before my daughter becomes a teenager - until another autumn rolls around. To let everything unravel, to soften as much as I can and to go with the easy flow of the season. I hope you are doing OK out there. I hope your days mean love.

Thank you for reading 💙