Starting again

When I was in grade 1, I tried to rub out an error in my handwriting by licking my finger and rubbing the paper until all that was left was a small, dirty hole. My teacher, Mrs Rogers, glanced over her shoulder and reeled in horror at the ugly mark in the middle of my story. The rubbing out made the mistake so much worse. There was no way of patching the hole. After chastising me, she explained that all I needed to do was mark a line through the mistake, and try again.

I did as I was told, as good girls do, but it set the tone for a life where my finger is poised to rub out any mistakes, despite the irreparable holes that may leave. In year 7, I ended a toxic friendship by moving schools and no longer speaking to anyone who I knew before, even though we had been friends since early primary school. At university I dealt with social anxiety in lectures by avoiding classes altogether, then enrolling in film subjects because it was the only class where the lights were (for the most part) switched off. I further went on to choose subjects that only assessed through essays or exams. I do not do oral presentations. At 31 and ¾ years, avoidance has now become my trademark, my modus operandi.

For the sake of my word count, I’m just going to file this under ‘inappropriate coping mechanisms’.

I was supposed to start my writing course last week after spending the whole summer in a state of indecision over whether or not I should go ahead with it. It’s one thing to apply, it’s another thing to show up. The issue was compounded by a crumby timetable, and my first day of classes being only 2 days after First Born’s first day at school, leaving no time for him to adjust before I whisked myself away from him. It would be hard to gauge if my ducks were in a row if I weren’t actually there to check.

Last week, when First Born had his first day of school, I decided it was his year and I would defer, or, if this were not possible, I would withdraw from the writing program entirely. I needed to be around for the boys, to be available, to be the contingency we will most likely need when winter comes and we’re all sick and we need one parent available to ride the merry-go-round of childhood illnesses. Historically this parent has been me, because Mr Karen is The Earner. Letting go of this mantel has proven harder than I imagined in the heady days of filling out tertiary admission forms.

My consolation to staying at home was that if I could find the time, I would attempt to write a book (though in the back of my mind I was already talking this down to anything longer than 1000 words).

That night, with my decision made, I lay down on the couch, put my head on Mr Karen’s lap and mourned my future. I cried. I felt bruised and sad and completely lost. I was staying at home in spite of myself. I realised that while I might have the reserves to work hard at writing a book, I am not a person with natural reserves of confidence and buoyancy in times of doubt. I am the freak up the back of the lifeboat, screaming “We’re sinking!!! We’re going to die!” In short, my plan was to stay at home, and not write.

Please, feel free to hit me with your oar.

So much of life has transpired and still, when faced with a big life decision, I ruminate until I become exhausted and emotional and wear my nerves down to a point where starting again seems like the most simple way to proceed.

I can’t tell you how I ended up on the city train on Friday morning. It had nothing to do with the overthinking that happened between Christmas and the day before my first class. It had everything to do with a gut feeling that I would regret not having tried to make this work. It had everything to do with a supportive mum and husband, a car full of petrol, a packed lunch, and legs that propelled me from the carpark to the ticket machine to the train platform. Legs that propelled me, despite my worried mind. Legs that knew better than my brain.

It was a pleasure to sit in classes at the end of my mothering week. I met more new friends in one day than I have in my entire time as a stay at home mum. And they all speak fluent book nerd. I found I didn’t have to edit my ramblings to avoid boring the pants off anyone. The program is populated by like-minded people, though we all come from different parts of the country, and differ in age, background and history.

Never mind the 2-hour commute, the parking at Frankston station, the childcare, and the silent treatment First Born dealt me when I finally arrived home after 12 hours away. I’ve made the right decision. It’s not the prettiest, but it’s better than rubbing out this whole chapter with my finger.

Break in transmission

Having a blog sometimes feels like you’ve got someone on the other end of the phone waiting for you to speak … if too many days go by between posts, you start to feel bad, like you’ve left someone hanging. Even though sometimes you mightn’t have anything to say.

I feel like I owe it to you all to tell you I won’t be posting here for a while. It’s been fun kids, but I’ve got some real life things to work out and I need some space to do that. It sounds so dramatic! But really, it’s not. I just need to hang up the phone for a while.

Thanks for being lovely listeners and excellent sharers. I’ll be around the traps (of course!) but if you see me procrastinating by the water cooler, give me a kick in the pants and tell me to go do my homework.

Cheers!

Karen

The blank-page tan

January is always so full of good intentions, and then she turns around and kicks you in the nuts. Then when you’re doubled over, guffawing and wheeshing all your shoulda-coulda-wouldas she’s gone with a flick of her straight, blonde hair.

I was going to write so much over the summer break. I haven’t. I’ve been spending time with my family, and resting, two things I won’t be able to do much of this year now that I’ll be studying.

When I was a kid, January was always back to school month. My big sister and I would spend a whole day shopping for school supplies; an afternoon looking for the perfect school shoes; and a whole day luxuriantly labelling stationary, covering books and weaving a delicate web of expectation for the year ahead. It was a Festival of Geekdom. Her bedroom was the hub of all back to school activities, a main stage for the big acts of nerdiness: she was the festival director, and I the obedient ticket collecting, bin-emptying volunteer, just happy to be on board. The air in her room was sweet with enthusiasm, and ankle deep in plastic wrap and woody pencil shavings.

Back in my own room, with my stack of neatly contacted books and sharp pencils, I would pull out my notepaper and practice my handwriting while listening to my one and only cassette, The Beach Boys Greatest Hits (purchased under the guidance of said big sister). I often worried that I’d forgot how to write, that somehow I’d lose my ability to write between Carols by Candlelight and the first rally of the Australian Open. Nobody in the world has ever felt so heavy while listening to Little Deuce Coupe. With that first New Year hold of the pencil, my whole hand felt like lead.

I feel that way sitting here at my laptop. I have officially donned my summer colour, in my comically thong-tan-lined feet. Everything else is still as lily white as it was last Summer, and the one before. As white as a blank page.

It’s not that I haven’t been thinking about writing. I’ve been reading my way through a massive pile of Amazing!! books after several unmentionable disappointing reads last year. I’ve also been reading the paper every Saturday and working my way through half a year’s worth of writing magazines which I’ve been stockpiling in the hope of catching up. Half of my office looks like an actual place of work, the other half looks like a Chinese laundry as I catch up on half a year’s worth of ironing, mending, and making the odd row of bunting, just for kicks. The longer I sit at the laptop, the more I look longingly towards the sewing machine, even though I would not call myself a sewer per se, moreover someone who feels compelled to sew things to other things.

Unlike my 8 year old self, I’m big and ugly enough to know why I’ve got the wobbles with writing. A few of my writing pieces have been published recently to a wider audience, and it was underwhelming.  People misunderstood the message I was trying to send, or just plain took offence, and I found myself backtracking trying to find the loop when all of my careful stitching became unravelled. Writing for me has always held its appeal in being the neatest, tidiest, smartest version of reality I can render. But seeing my little paper planes launched into the real world – to be read by complete strangers – and seeing them crumpled up or disregarded or misdirected is certainly making me think deeper about the kind of writing I want to do. Perhaps instead of putting on my big brave boots, I should stick with the thongs?

I’m looking forward to heading off to school and delving into non-fiction and research and editing, where there is right and wrong, and everything is delightfully (safely) black and white. Or in my case, mostly white.

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What have you been reading this Summer (or Winter, for those in the northern hemisphere)? If you start reading something and don’t like it, do you finish it anyway, or do you just move on to the next book in the pile? I’ve always tried to finish everything I begin to read, but I’m beginning to think life’s too short for crap books. Thoughts?

Plugging in to Life version 2.0

One of the more difficult parts of returning to study this year (where study = the world outside our house) is connecting back into an overwhelmingly digital world.

It’s not that I fear technology. For the best part of my four years as a stay at home mum, I have stayed connected through wireless technology, Facebook, and more recently blogging and a smart phone. I’ve friended my teenage nieces on Facebook. Compared to Nan and Aunty Marisa, I’m up with the cool kids. And yet whenever there’s a new network or device, I feel a strange tug to try to keep up.

Where I become lost is in the sheer number of connections it seems we need. And the fear that if we don’t connect, we will be left behind.

Yesterday Mr Karen bought a new multifunction centre (read: car sized device to digitalize various bits of paper) for my office to prepare for my re-entry into tertiary education. It has taken me the good part of the morning to set it up and connect it, but only after the children have been taken out of the house to give me the requisite peace and quiet to focus and gradually meltdown as I realize this isn’t as straightforward as plugging in the stick mixer and mashing up some baby food.

As a mum of three under 6, I have become so accustomed to being interrupted mid-task, my brain now aborts tasks by default when they become complex or involved. The assumption is I’m about to be interrupted, so I do the bare minimum, because that is all I know I can achieve during daylight hours. The bare minimum usually involves opening the box, pulling out the instructions, and the minute the 3 year old starts ‘helping’, I give up until after their bedtime.

It appears my brain has been reshaped by the process of mothering, where ‘making do’ is the order of the day. Computers do not take kindly to my approximate, ‘that’ll do’ approach to living; they are precise, exact and painfully literal. In lodging an application for further study online late last year, I discovered I cannot, in fact, ‘round up’ the version of my operating system. OS X 10.58 is not the same thing as OS X 10.6, not even close. In the digital world they are worlds apart, even though – temporally speaking – they were probably born into the world within weeks of each other. Practically twins!

Technology is not sympathetic to this approximated way of living. You can’t just half connect, you have to follow steps 1 through 20, download, upload, and recharge. And when you do, you realize they’ve only given you a 1.5 metre cable, and you need one at least 2 metres, if not 2.5, long. Frankly, it’s a pain in the proverbial.

I thought technology was driven by a desire to make life simpler, more streamlined. Instead, it feels more complicated: wires or no wires, there are more connections that need to be made. And it’s unclear what is the cost of not connecting.

My recent experience of applying for university was vastly different from my first experience back in 1997, my final year of high school. I can still recall keying in my VTAC number and course preferences into the wall phone in mum’s kitchen: the process felt entirely mechanical and solid. The buttons connected to a phone on a wall in a solid brick house. This time around, I found the entire application process other-worldly. I keyed data into a laptop via wifi. There was no contact number to call for help (which I could have used, people!). The process was entirely paperless, voiceless and lifeless. It felt as though I had just, by waving of my digital wand, lodged my application to Hogwarts via owl, and was sitting waiting for a response by the fireplace.

Now I’ve received a place, and I’ve enrolled (I think) in my associate degree and I await the next set of hoops to jump through. My solace is that I now have a printer so if I lose my bearing or fall behind in this digital landscape, at least I will have a paper trail to follow back to the real world.

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Do you live in a paperless world? How do you keep your bearings? How do you keep up to date, in the real world and online?

Kids and happy endings

We’re rounding out the last few moments of our summer holidays, and so ends the halcyon days where I gorge myself with fiction.

When I sit down to read a fiction book, I never go in with the intention of finding out the ending. But inevitably curiosity gets the better of me and I end up reading the end after having only read a few chapters. I then spend the rest of the read trying to figure out how the writer ties all the storylines together. I think the synapses in my brain have been shaped by me watching far too many episodes of The Wonder Years. You know, always craving that neat, sweet-sour ending that leaves a heavy feeling deep in your chest.

It occurred to me today, reading this post over at Mamamia, that I parent in the same way I read. I think I know the ending and I’m forever trying to guess the best way of getting there. With our three boys, it’s trying to figure out who they will be when they’re older, why they are the way they are and whether or not it’s because of something I’ve done or not done. It’s all in the name of giving them their best life. But while my heart is in the right place, this approach often ties me in knots. Life doesn’t always read like fiction: it’s far more messy than that.

I am particularly guilty of this when it comes to First Born. Perhaps it’s that he looks like me. Possibly I’m trying to help him avoid making the same mistakes I did. As he grows, there are more influences in his life (school, friends, teachers). All of a sudden we’ve gone from a cast of five (our family unit) to an ensemble cast and the story is becoming unwieldy and hard to follow.

This post makes me question the premise that I already know the kind of people my children will become. Summer Goldwin suggests that while family may affect the choices and experiences a child has, “ultimately you are who you are”. She writes “[my 15 year old son] is one of the most grounded, lovely and well adjusted people I know. He’s always had a quiet confidence and self assurance. He has a great sense of humour. And I certainly didn’t teach him that.”

In the stories of our children’s lives, maybe the parents aren’t holding the pen. The parents may have given them a beginning, but the story itself is written each day in the child’s choices and actions. In the context of our three sons, perhaps our parental contributions have long been made (in the form of their genes), and our job is just to sit back and watch the story unfold, trying really hard not to second-guess the ending.

While the temptation to gun for that happy ending is a noble one – complete with awesome, spine tingling soundtrack of 60s rock – it takes the fun out of the adventure that is parenting.

Do you think ‘you are who you are’? What role do you think parents play in determining the kind of person their child grows into?

January and the lofty idea

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January makes me dizzy. I have a billion ideas in my head. Clean sheets will do that to do. Clean sheets on the bed. New stationery. New notebooks, new pens. New hope. 365 brand spanking days to make life shinier, better, best.

I know this is deluded, but my bloodstream is flooded with adrenaline as I let myself off the leash and indulge in these ideas which at any other point in the year I would immediately disregard as fanciful or over-ambitious. January is mating season for lofty ideas.

So what do I do with these ideas? I buy some new notebooks to write it all down. Then comes the decision over how many new notebooks I need for the year. I am on a creative pilgrimage, and there are apparently no shops along the way, so this feels like the most important decision I have faced thus far. The success of the entire journey depends on the perfect choice of stationary: do I go ball point or hybrid gel, even though I know that the gel pens don’t last as long? Do I go pretty hardcover with a chenille jacquard cover, or do I stick with utilitarian yellow Spirax? I hesitate near the glue sticks. A fresh faced stationery store worker eyeballs me, and I wonder if he notices I am flushed and I may even be sweating.

I hover and wander the lino tiles while my gym shoes squeak and broadcast my every indecisive move. I hesitate and put things back on shelves, then in one final smash and grab I find myself with a full basket and I’m at the checkout. The bag feels heavy and promising in my hands as I put it in the passenger seat footrest, where, once I arrive home it stays for a few days. Suddenly the wild dance of ideas has slowed to that part of the night where the lights are on and it seems like you’ll be going home alone and completely sober.

I think this is why people write books: to build a bridge between that wild flurry of ideas, and the stony, immoveable nature of reality: to tie these ideas down with strings of sentences, lest they vaporize into the blue sky like a bunch of helium balloons. The more sentences, the more weight to hold them down. At least, that’s the theory.

My bags are packed. I’m ready. I think.

Does January make you dizzy too?

Good night, moon: 2011 in review

Children the world over have gone to sleep dreaming of the stars: wrapped in their rocket pyjamas, and covered in a blanket of night, they’d sleep and dream of adventure.

As we round the last week of 2011, amid the newsreels of earthquakes, disasters and war, the space shuttle program’s demise strikes the gong of doom as to where our planet is heading. For we will always fight, there will always be natural disasters: there is little we can consciously do to change these devastating realities. But it cannot be said we will always be able to travel to space. Skills will be lost, but more significantly, our world view will change irreversibly.

In July this year, NASA grounded its space shuttle program, and it barely registered as a blip on the world’s radar. The Kardashian wedding and its subsequent 72 day marriage however streamed 24/7 into our screens, homes and workplaces. The story was that this was a newsworthy story. Oh, the irony.

Future plans for shuttles are in limbo. There are many factors for this, but the upshot is that the US government does not see the value in running the program anymore. It is expensive and dangerous to human life. It would seem space is not the new frontier anymore. The new frontier is the Wild, Wild Web.

Whereas space encouraged the expansion of our world, through exploring our planet and universe for the benefit of all humankind, the internet and related technologies turns our attention inward, at warp speed.

We – the First World – have answered life’s eternal problems of staying fed, sheltered and warm, and now we’re turning to making our lives better. With the basic needs out of the way, now we are working our way through our list of ‘wants’. It’s all about ‘What’s in it for me’.

As we all move our lives onto the internet – setting up Facebook accounts, conducting our business and personal shopping online – the internet is becoming one massive mirror through which we see ourselves. Our lives are faster, shinier; we look good in digital form. We can airbrush our flaws away, edit away the boring bits on our Facebook profile, shop at 3am and talk to friends regardless of location or time. We take and put up pictures of ourselves, where 100 years ago people may have only had one photograph taken of them in a whole lifetime, and at great cost. In contrast, I have 574 instagram photos on my iPhone alone, and I’ve only had it for 3 months.

The technology removes us from the moment we are in, and transports us somewhere else. It is not within the world, or even outside the world. It’s an interior space within us. Our focus is narrowed down to the 15 inch laptop screen, and our mood and worldview depends entirely on whether or not the Wifi is working. Advances in technology mean devices become smaller, faster: which in turns makes our lives smaller and faster.

After a year of living on the web, I know I don’t want my life to be smaller or faster. I want it to be full of meaning, and to run at a pace where I can appreciate its fullness.

The internet enables us to talk to each other, but what are we saying? Are we getting the meaning of the messages we’re trying to send, or are they lost in the cacophony that is the world wide web?

At the moment we treat the internet as the planet we move to when the Earth is so damaged it becomes unlivable. It disconnects us from our bodies, from our real lives, and often doesn’t offer real life solutions to real life problems. We come here to swim in a digital pool, and we’re still fascinated that we come out of that pool bone dry.

We don’t fly to space anymore. We don’t notice the stars because we are dazzled by the glow of our screen. Our future, which we once imagined in space, is now in front of us and it’s not clear who’s driving the rocket.

Kids will soon go to bed, wrapped up in a Google pyjamas, where they shut down for the night. Who knows what their future will look like.

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