This past week has been a weird one for me. Fractured and fragmented with poorly babes and waiting on news of things that may or may not happen…
A hold-your-breath, not-sure-what-happens next kind of time that seems to be the perpetual state of being for me right now…
My ability to write and work has been hampered by competing demands and a body that is tired and shorn by the tendrils of chronic illness that always seem to flare in me when others need me most. All week, all I have wanted to do is smooth the spiky edges, blur out the loss of time and find some way to claw back the space to write what I had planned for this post.
But that hasn’t happened… and is testament to life in all its messy glory.
Instead, some words that I had forgotten I had written appeared again.
(Motherhood has an uncanny way of making you forget things…. but more on that another time.)
I wrote these words last year in between the folds and the seams of summer… And they resurfaced again this week after I had hidden them away in shame. In all honesty, I submitted this piece to an anthology about creativity and motherhood. It was rejected and I let the words fall out of sight and mind, relegating them to the ever-growing pile of rejections that I have collected.
This particular rejection felt like a ragged papercut, one that really stung and left a mark, a lingering reminder of the ‘who do I think I am?’ voice in my head that appears whenever my words are rejected. But as I look to this year ahead and the relationship I want to cultivate with my writing, I’m going to stop placing unrealistic expectations upon myself and allow more space and time for things to collect some pocket lint.
It is so very tempting in this culture of over-consumption, over-production and monetization to put pressure on ourselves to churn out more shiny new things… Yet, very often, we already have the things we need within reach, we just need to look in our pockets…
The words jangle like loose change in my pockets, clamouring and clinking for my attention.
They grow in number as I collect more and more throughout the day. Expanding into the small gaps and chinks of space in my now baggy outline. Every now and then I reach to check that they are still there, that I can still find them.
In between the juggle of paid and unpaid work and the muddle, monotony and marvellousness of mothering, I keep these words held in between the seams and gaps.
Just like my son and daughter collect shells, sticks and other random curiosities whenever we go for a walk, I fill my pockets with wisps of poems, ribbons of prose and collections of tiny twinkling words that come to me when I least expect it.
Over the course of the day, the words get caught on the pocket lint and fluff, they linger too long without light and begin to tangle in the folds. As the insistent and persistent demands of parenting fill my day, I wonder when I will get the chance to hold those words firmly in my hands, the chance to turn down the volume on any interruption and use those pocketed treasures to make a sentence that sings.
For much of my mothering journey, I have found myself on the back foot racing to catch up with my own high expectations. Torn between feeling that my parenting and creativity should be a certain way and a burning desire to break convention and just do it my way.
So often, I feel like the load of my mothering will tip me over.
So often, all I want to do is slow things down to stop my brain from glitching, to stop myself from swimming in a sea of todos and uncertainty.
At the very beginning, I lamented the fact that there never seemed to be any time or space to write. I bemoaned the perpetual interruptions and chastised myself that the conditions for my creativity and writing to thrive had to be perfect. If I didn’t reach a certain word count or goal then I would deem myself to be a failure. Even calling myself a ‘Writer’ or ‘Poet’ has been a journey of self-doubt and self-loathing and my inner critic has had a field day shouting loud and proud that I can’t dare to call myself those things. And yet, despite the insistence of interruption that comes with parenting, my pockets have still filled up with words.
Curiosity and creativity are rather uncanny in that way, they seem to appear in spite of it all.
Over the years, I’ve come to see motherhood as not just a marathon of many seasons and phases but as a multitude of states of being that twist, turn and flicker. I see now that my actual mothering age is only that of my eldest child and that I too will invariably change and fluctuate. From the early milk stained baby days through to fledgling children who have outgrown my hugs and whose heads now pass my shoulders, as my own mothering bends and twists with time so does my writing.
I’ve realised that more often than not, my writing practice doesn’t look like actual writing. It finds form instead in quiet contemplation, in reading, in walking, in surrounding myself with friends and family; it even finds form in the very repetitive mundane tasks of caring like folding clothes or settling a small one to sleep, those little wisps of words still persist and arrive. Having tried so long to hold my creativity separately and wait for the perfect, ideal conditions for things to appear, I realise now that I need to allow time and space to just keep filling my pockets and that sometimes they fill up without me realising it.
For it all counts, from the interruptions to staring out a window, from the snatched moments typing furiously into my notes app to watching my children grow, the beginning of something can start with just one word, just one small piece of loose change found in a pocket.
Thank you so much for reading.
I’d love to hear, what’s in your pockets? What’s hiding in the folds and seams?
Thank you Lucy -- this resonates hugely. I try to catch some of the words and ideas and flashes of life that thunder like a waterfall... but often I feel all I have to catch them with is a leaky bucket! But I think that like a waterfall, creativity just keeps coming. It is generous, and will always be there, however it is that I’m able to meet it. (Though... I’m still just craving some alone time with a notebook!) Keep going... keep pressing send... your words matter... I’m trying to do that too and it’s scary and hard and fun and freeing 💚
It really does "all count" 💖