Before I begin: I’m teaching two creative writing classes for moms at Writer House in Charlottesville, and there are still some spaces left on the second course, beginning this Saturday at 11am EST. The classes take place on Zoom and you can find out more about what to expect, and sign up, here.
January 25, 2024
Early in the new year, I discovered how to place holds on library books through my online account and request them for pickup at my local branch. The simple pleasure of this, and the ease of picking up my holds when I visited the library with my son, gave me a feeling of expansive possibility. Library books! And even though I am very aware that there is no way to get anything “back” from one’s life before having a child—this is a lesson I’ve found freeing mostly—I still thought: Maybe this year I’ll really get my reading back on track.
Just two weeks later, the creative writing program at UVA needed a last-minute substitute fiction teacher for the semester and at the same time, the class I’m teaching at a local nonprofit added another section, so I went from teaching one class per week to teaching four classes per week, and the library books came to seem like a naive dream. They are all overdue. I’m still responsible for the full-time job of taking care of my son.
Elliott wants me to build him a host of impossible things. A cardboard car. A ‘compartment building’. A fire station. “In a few minutes, Elliott,” I respond. “But mama,” he pleads, “my heart.” I stop what I’m doing (emailing) and look over at him. He’s standing in a pile of cardboard and bubble wrap, getting himself tangled in blue masking tape. The look on his face can only be described as beseeching. “It’s my heart,” he says. “You’re breaking it.”
There’s a diary entry I wrote in January of 1996 in which I describe my parents’ often complicated work schedules. My mother was working shifts at the hotel some weekdays and weekends. She usually left for her late shifts when we arrived home from school, and we’d either stay with a neighbor or a babysitter would be with us until my dad got home from work later that evening. Sometimes, our grandmother—Nanny—came up from Kilkenny to stay with us. On this particular day, Thursday January 28th, 1996, Nanny was with us, and my mother was working. I was looking forward to the following week when she would, I wrote, be off for three days in a row. That evening, after he had returned from work and we had eaten dinner, I went for a walk with my dad and our dog Ben. Afterwards, my dad had to go back to work at the hotel so he could do stock taking, a once-monthly occurrence.
I am reluctant to mention any of this because my parents, who are faithful readers and supporters of this newsletter, will no doubt feel sad and guilty about my mentioning it, and about my having written those things almost 30 years ago. I don’t want them to feel sad or guilty for working to provide everything we had. It’s clear to me now that a child is always, always greedy for more parent, no matter how much time you spend with them. It will never be enough.
And the thing is, I know now how good it feels to leave the house dressed in real clothes and do something unrelated to the work of taking care of a family. I like walking across campus with my bag of teaching materials over my shoulder. I feel very clever when I’m able to answer my students’ questions, puffed up with pride when they enjoy the reading I assign or the writing prompts I offer. I feel the urge to apologize for saying this, but to whom would I direct such an apology?
My mother once told me that when she worked on the reception desk at the hotel, she sometimes answered calls from people who spoke with stutters. They needed to practice speaking on the phone, so they’d call up to make general inquiries about prices, availability, services, or they wouldn’t get that far. They prevailed or they hung up. She described it to me kindly, as if advocating for patience on behalf of all stutterers, and I felt glad that she had been the one to pick up the phone that day at the hotel.
My wonderfully generous and thoughtful friend Sarah sent me a gift in the mail a couple of weeks back: a book called Mothers’ Days (July 15, 2019), compiled by the artist Lenka Clayton. I’ve enjoyed sinking into the rhythm of some of the days contained within it.
On January 17th, I attempted to keep my own account of my day. It was an unusually busy one. How much seemed to keep happening all the time. And how aware I am now, reading it back, of the privilege of it all.
5:57am: Elliott wakes up and starts banging around his room trying to wake me up even though his OK-to-Wake clock is still very much set to Not OK (orange light).
6.45: His clock turns green. When I go in, he asks if his police costume has arrived yet. He's mad when I tell him no.
7am: It's 15f outside, 57f downstairs, so Elliott comes into our bed. He says he's going to go back to sleep but I'm not falling for that one.
7.15: Adam brings tea and bagels and we eat in bed.
7.45: School is on a two hour delay due to snow and ice so Elliott plays while I work in bed for a bit.
8.05: I try to print copies of my syllabus for my first undergrad creative writing class this evening but run out of ink after 5 copies.
9:00: Try to convince Elliott to get dressed.
9.10: Finally dressed.
9.40: Adam drops Elliott off at school.
9.50: Get dressed.
10:00: Hoovering. [American: vacuuming]
10.15: Upload readings to student portal for my class, struggle to figure out the interface.
10.30: Tea and toast round 2.
11:00: Write a long note in the group diary for my writing group.
11.30: Print syllabus and roster for class (Adam went to CVS, then Staples looking for printer ink after drop off).
11.35: Brush teeth and wash face.
12:00: arrive to pick up Elliott from school. It's 20 degrees outside and he's standing waiting for me, crying, in wet pants and socks. Mama I'm so cold he wails. I get him in the car and pull off his boots, strip off the wet socks and then cover him with a blanket to try to warm him up. He's still crying about how much it hurts to be so cold. I crank up the heat in the car.
12.15: Home, I help him change into warm, dry clothes.
12.30: HIS POLICE COSTUME ARRIVES.
12:35: He looks very cute dressed up like a pawn of fascist oppression.
12:40: I'm arrested and jailed.
1:00: I make lunch, leftover chicken for me, a pb&j for Elliott.
1:45: We feel sorry for the birds pecking at our empty feeder in the cold so we refill it.
2:00: TV on, snacks provided, I rush to my computer to take care of admin stuff.
2:15: A zoom call with Elliott's teachers. They’re concerned because he won’t stop talking about war.
3:00: Feel sad.
3:15: Change clothes again, feeling self-conscious about being in a room full of teenagers.
3:45: Drive to campus, park in the expensive parking garage.
4:15: Arrive at the English department, head straight for the MFA lounge out of habit. Don't know anyone there but spend about half an hour chatting with Jeb.
4:50: Go find my classroom, a few students sitting in there already with the lights off. I turn on the lights, then ask them to arrange the desks in a circle.
5:00: Start class. Nervous, but I think it goes well.
6:10: Listen to Doppelgänger by Naomi Klein as I drive home. Very good.
6:30: Get in the door and run upstairs to read to Elliott. We’re reading The Magic Treehouse series.
6:45: Potty and brush teeth, then Adam tells a long story while I go unpack my stuff and change out of my uncomfortable pants.
7:00: I go in and snuggle Elliott and tell him I'll be back in a minute to check on him.
7:01: True to my word, I deliver the ‘last kiss ‘til morning’. Check UVA email, I already have an email from a student who missed class.
7:20: Lose a bunch of time to my phone.
8:15: Adam puts sausage rolls in the oven for me while I make my to-do list for tomorrow.
8:40: I heat up some baked beans to go with my sausage rolls. Eat on the couch catching up with Adam. He gives me some ideas for writing exercises. We talk about Elliott.
9:20: I go upstairs to read.
10:00: Put away phone, read Nothing Special by Nicole Flattery.
He has been talking a lot about war, but also ancient Egyptians, and mummies, and skeletons, graveyards, and generally skirting around the biggest question he will ever ask. Every time we mention a family member or a person from our childhoods, he asks: are they still around? Are they ancestors? Are ancestors skeletons? And eventually, this week, he arrives at the question: Mama, will you die? I answer him honestly, and he’s upset, and I hug him while he cries, and try not to show him that I’m crying too.
Here’s one final tangent: the very best thing I’ve read recently is this essay by Hilary Mantel, published in the London Review of Books in 2003. The whole thing is incredible, but I want to put this paragraph here because it made me think that there’s really only one reason why anyone writes, and this is it:
“I am not writing to solicit any special sympathy. Plenty of people have survived cancer and never put pen to paper. I am writing in order to take charge of the story of my childhood and my childlessness, which until now has been a story told by other people; and in order to locate myself, if not within a body, then in the narrow space between one letter and the next, between the lines where the ghosts of meaning are. Spirit needs a house and lodges where it can; you don’t kill yourself just because you need loose covers rather than frocks. There are other people who, like me, have had the roots of their personality torn up. You need to find yourself, in the maze of social expectation, the thickets of memory: just which bits of you are left intact? I have been so mauled by medical procedures, so sabotaged and made over, so thin and so fat, that sometimes I feel that each morning it is necessary to write myself into being – even if the writing is aimless doodling that no one will ever read, or the diary that no one can see till I’m dead.”
Yours,
Helen.
Well done Helen, your diaries are taking on a life of their own, its about a little nuclear family making their way in this world, making it work. Always here for you sweetheart.