The Cerebral Mum

Soooo… Mum changed her flight schedule and arrived Thursday morning, which entailed a 5am drive to the airport which, living out on the peninsular, is at the opposite end of the earth. But all my work with Caspar, trying to get him excited about Oma coming on an aeroplane, paid off because he went running toward her as she emerged from customs.

After a couple of days catching up, last night I went to bed early and slept late and then we spent the day out visiting friends and family and now I am gloriously tired and not planning on writing very much more than this.

Did I say I had more important, meaning-of-life stuff to talk about?

Er… Not today.

But I do think this constitutes a Smiley Saturday post. Because I’m smiling.

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Honestly. I’m drawing a blank.

Why is it when I’m away from the blog for a while, I feel like I need to post everyday kind of news and “catch up” rather than just write about something more important or interesting to me? There are many things I’ve been thinking about lately - you know, the meaning of life and all that - but I feel like I need to ease back in. Perhaps it has something to do with connection and relating. Because most often it is those we share the mundane parts of our lives with who matter the most, and it is the people we share that with who care about our more difficult thoughts.

Isn’t it? Maybe. I really have no idea.

The problem is… I am terrible at small talk. The fact that I call it small talk is a probably a problem in itself. I don’t have any idea what to say. Nothing seems pressing enough for words and when time has lapsed, “catching up” is a strain. For me, anyway.

I have friends who can draw out the minutiae of life from the postman. Friends who remember little things and make them significant. Who make the minutiae of other people’s lives significant. It’s a social skill I admire and one I lack entirely. In some ways, this is probably due to a certain kind of selfishness or vanity or… whatever. I guess it’s that artistic arrogance I talked about once. I would probably feel worse about it if my own lack of social skill wasn’t balanced by a lack of expectation of it in others.

I’ve never minded if people don’t call me regularly or remember my birthday. Hell, I’d forget my own birthday if other people didn’t remind me. Half the time I couldn’t tell you what month it is. But everyone has their limits, I guess, and there are friends who have gone MIA when I’ve forgotten the way this social stuff works. Friends who have minded when I haven’t called.

My guess is that a blog is kind of the same. That readers are the same as friends, and some people’s ropes are longer than other’s.

Right now, in real life, I probably have some repair work to do on a couple of relationships that I do value because I have been MIA myself for a long time. There are calls to make and questions to ask. And I’m terrible at asking other people questions about their lives. Mostly, I just appear unexpectedly and assume that things will be the same. That isn’t always the case.

But I also have friends who know exactly how selfish useless I am and love me anyway so I guess it is all okay.

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Yes, a rare photo of Cas AND his Mum.

We went to see The Medieval Imagination exhibition at the State Library a little while ago with a couple of friends; Brett from Airminded, and HG, who wrote that beautiful guest post for me. That meant there was somebody other than me to hold the camera and that is, I think, one of the best presents you can give a single parent.

In other news…

I haven’t been very well, hence my long absence.

I haven’t been very well, hence 1st semester uni was really screwed up. I’ll do better next time.

A girlfriend gave me her old car. Hooray for being able to grocery shopping with ease! (And see friends at the State Library). The car is sadly purple but my friend still rocks, obviously.

We’ve received some parcels for WinterWarm, which is also great, and I’ll be working on some blog posts for that this week.

There is a couple of other (possible) good news items but I don’t want to jinx them so… we’ll see.

And my Mum will be visiting soon which means I will get to have a sleep in for the first time in a year.

I’ll also be able to get to see my doctor, with Mum babysitting and me in my shiny, purple car. So hopefully health won’t be an issue for much longer.

Hugs to everyone I’ve abandoned and I will be trying to catch up with you all soon.

xx

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[story continued from Amnesty, Part One]

It wasn’t until after the bottle of wine had been drunk and her packet of cigarettes finished that she spoke, but I was content just to be there with her in the darkness. She talked to me about her marriage and her childhood and the men in her life as though I were an adult. I listened, rapt. She told me she had gone to my father’s surgery at lunch time and found him in the back room with the nurse. She told me about other affairs he’d had. After the first few times, she had forced herself to stop being suspicious: She didn’t want to live like that. She couldn’t leave because she loved my father. She told me the story of how they met and, looking more often at the blue curtain outside the car than at me, she told me what he had been like. Then. I didn’t quite believe her. And then she rounded on me, hammered questions at me. I found it hard to answer most of them. Her eyes were very bright. Maybe she was a little crazy.

“…I like my room…I don’t really like living here…I like being by myself…I like writing…I would like to live in England or in a city at least…Because there would be other things to do apart from sport…I don’t like sport, I’m no good at it…The kids don’t like you if you don’t play sport…I wish that you had let me learn the flute…I wish that I lived just with you Mum, or all by myself…”

“…I wish that Dad didn’t drink…He makes me feel embarrassed…He makes me uncomfortable…Sometimes I’m afraid Mum…I don’t like the way he hangs over me when he talks to me…I don’t like the things he says…I like being by myself…That’s what I would like the most…Just to be by myself…To be by myself…”

My mother took the wine from my hands and swallowed it all. Without it, I felt naked and the air outside seemed to grow thicker. She said, “We’re leaving,” and I thought she meant that we were going home. I wanted to now because I didn’t have the cup in my hand and everything was dangerous. I wanted to be in my room. I put my seatbelt on. She wasn’t looking at me.

“We’re leaving. I’ve got the money. I’ve got enough money to go to Melbourne and find a flat and find a job and the schools are better there. I can’t go on forgiving him for the rest of my life. Besides, I’m afraid of him too sometimes and he won’t stop drinking. We’re leaving.”

I wanted to so much. I was shivering with the idea. I wanted to scream Are we really? Are we really? and to throw my arms around her neck. But I didn’t. I was scared she would change her mind. She started the car. I didn’t know what to do with all my energy while we drove home and it seeped out in little choking noises. My mother didn’t notice.

She didn’t say anything more, not while we drove and not when we arrived home. She walked slowly up the stairs to her bedroom. The light was on. It was the only light on in the house. I rushed to my room and rushed to my alcove, pulling a box clumsily through the sliding doors of my cupboard on the way. I filled it with books. I went out to the kitchen to find more boxes and I filled them with books too. I crawled beneath my bed and gathered up all the brown paper lunchbags I had hidden under there. I gathered them up and put them in the box my rollerskates had come in. I hugged the skatebox to me tightly. My eyes were glazed and my room had taken on the unreality that rooms always do at 3:00am. The rims of my eyes were burning, itchy and pleasant. I was tired without realising it. My mind was already searching for a flat in Melbourne. What would it be like? Wonderful. The city was an ocean. I would be a fish, and I wouldn’t flounder any more in all this fresh air. I looked at my boxes, wondering if I should take them out to the car. With my skatebox still hugged to my chest, I walked out to the hall, to the family room, to the bottom of the stairs. I stood staring at the blank wall where the stairs turned left and waited for my mother. Maybe she was packing too.

After a while, I sat down. It was cold because the fire had gone out and I shivered. The grey walls of our new house glared at me, reflecting the light which came out from under the door of my room and from my mother’s room upstairs. I didn’t care that the walls were mean. I didn’t have to live here any more. I shivered again and then the light upstairs went out. I sat for a little longer and then I went back to my room. I put my lunchbags back and I put my skates back in their box. I unpacked my books and got into bed. I was glad that I had turned my electric blanket on before my mother had come in to tell me that I was going with her.

The material in this post is protected by copyright. It cannot be reproduced, in whole or in part, without the author’s express permission. © www.cerebralmum.com

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What follows is a short story written when I was, I think, 20 years old. I would probably consider it juvenilia partly because it isn’t an accomplished piece of writing but more particularly because at the time I did not possess the faculty of fictionalising biographical events or themes in the way I do now. I think it also lacks a certain subtlety, especially in the dialogue and the lack of nuance in the depiction of the adults in the story. When I next get a chance to write, there are some thoughts I want to discuss which this story in some ways relate to, but before I write that, I will also post an excerpt from my novel-in-progress which feeds into those ideas as well, though in a far more fictionalised way.

Amnesty (Part One)

It wasn’t late but it was dark. I wasn’t afraid. It was winter. The car was parked at the edge of Rotary Creek and we were hidden from the highway and the town’s light by trees and a children’s playground. For a long time now we had been sitting quite still in the front seat of the car. My mother was smoking and her window was open. I wasn’t afraid. I was thirteen. The air was mountain blue and the smoke from my mother’s cigarette floated out through the window and into it, disappearing slowly like a deep breath. The bottle was at my feet but empty now and my mother’s polystyrene cup lay beside it. The cup was empty too. My cup I still nursed in both my hands; the golden-yellow liquid in it had grown warm. My mother ashed her cigarette and turned to me. Relaxed now.

Not long before my father was due home I had gotten that suspicious, nervy feeling. I always did around that time. It made me sneaky. I acted like a spy. When he did get home, the door, instead of slamming against the door-frame and bouncing back an inch or two, glided slowly into place and startled me. I had been in my room underneath the stairs where my bookshelves were and writing and when I sprang the steady-tray that had been on my knees fell to the floor. I folded the paper I had been writing on and stuffed it into a brown paper lunchbag. I stuffed the lunchbag under my bed. Then I hurried to my door so I could close it, so I could sever my room from the brand-new Jennings house that we lived in and be by myself. I closed the door and stood waiting for the house to fade away. I heard my parents’ voices and I opened my door a crack to see what was going on. Spying. My parents were squared off in the kitchen and my father was flushed although he couldn’t have been drinking yet; he’d just got home from work. I opened the door a crack more and tried to hear.

My room and the kitchen were separated by a huge, grey family room with a slanting roof that stretched up to the second floor where my parents’ bedroom was and I couldn’t hear clearly. My father kept saying, “Nothing…” and my mother seemed to say nothing at all. Most of their words rose like heat to the ceiling or got lost in the crackle of the wood-stove which was burning furiously in the family room. Then I heard my mother clearly.

“Alex, you had no shirt on.” There was almost a laugh in her voice. Maybe they weren’t fighting after all. I couldn’t hear properly.

“You had no shirt on.” She said it again. They were fighting.

I opened the door and tried to look as if I was going to the toilet. Neither of them noticed me. I didn’t go to the toilet; I stopped where the hallway finished, where they couldn’t see me, and squatted down still trying to hear. None of it upset me though. I was just curious, fascinated by the argument the way some people are fascinated by Jack the Ripper. I still couldn’t hear anything so I went back to my room, this time closing the door behind me. I reached underneath the bed for the poem I had been writing and pulled out several brown lunchbags. I had to open five before I found the right one. I heard a few slamming noises so I turned my stereo on loud and went back to my alcove. I didn’t read my poem and I didn’t hear the music. I heard footsteps coming towards my room and then the door opened. It was my mother and I was glad.

“You’re coming with me.”

And I got up and followed her. We didn’t see my father as we walked through the kitchen where my mother grabbed the wine and the cups. I followed her through the front door.

It was only when we reached the highway that I asked my mother where we were going. She didn’t know. We were almost abreast with the entrance to Rotary Park when she decided to turn in and park the car beside the creek. I thought that we were going to drive straight into the water. She lit her first cigarette with shaking hands and there was something wonderful about it all.

[continued… Amnesty, Part 2]

The material in this post is protected by copyright. It cannot be reproduced, in whole or in part, without the author’s express permission. © www.cerebralmum.com

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I mentioned in my first history tutorial notes over in my egregiously behind study blog that I didn’t find the small group discussions very productive, but when I finally went again last week (I’ve missed tutorials due tothe ovarian cyst), I was expecting something a little better than what I got. Yes, we were put into small groups again and, not knowing anyone, I just joined those I was closest to.

We were given questions to discuss. Did anyone talk about them? Not at all. Even when the tutor sat with us they didn’t stay on topic. It was so bloody annoying that I eventually got up and moved to another group. (Way to make friends, eh? Chalk me down as another obnoxious mature-age student.) The second group were not talking about history either, but at least they were discussing another university subject and not football.

For philosophy I have only missed one class and that tutorial is fairly quiet as well. I have to give them credit though, because Plato is pretty difficult to engage with as well as being somewhat daunting. I’m think that when we start on Nietzsche next week, they’ll have more than can relate to and more will be said.

But this brings me back to my sexism. I’ve actually spent some time talking to my female tutors and I like and respect them both but while we (okay, it’s only me) are in sexual stereotyping mode I’ll just say that there is one teaching style I like which seems to be fairly rare amongst the women: The Martinet.

I like The Martinet. He gets down to business. He knows that you’re in class for one reason and one reason only. He expects you to talk, and he expects you to do your reading. And so you do. Because if you don’t, you look like a dick.(If you can’t imagine the kind of person I mean, think of The Nazi on Grey’s Anatomy and remember me kindly because I have provided a female, though fictitious, example.)

Captain Slusher, an old teacher of mine that I’ve mentioned before, was a perfect Martinet. He came into class for the very first time, towering over us all, and gave us a lecture about his expectations; about what he would and would not tolerate, about what constituted an excuse and what did not. It’s pretty hard (for me, anyway) to dislike someone who is up front about where he stands and then applies those principles; who is hard but fair. And it has the added benefit that when you’ve done well, you know that you have done really well.

Perhaps that is a weakness on my part - wanting an external impetus - but I like to be pushed. If I can just breeze through a subject with high marks, I guess that’s okay, but I’d prefer to be stretched. I like having to earn every last percentage point.

Incidentally, I have only received one mark so far, for a 500 word answer to a weekly question for philosophy. I only wrote 350 words and I thought my answer was fairly shite. I got 95%. Don’t get me wrong: I was really chuffed (and surprised) by that and I probably did a happy dance for two days straight. It was the first mark I’d received in over a decade. Who wouldn’t be chuffed?

But I’m looking forward to getting marked harder and getting whipped into shape as expectations rise over the course of my degree. (Don’t throw that in my face if I don’t get an HD for my first history essay next week. Just let me cry.)

And I’ve been wondering… What will I be like when I start teaching? Will I be a soft touch? Or will I try out The Martinet style and have it come across as though I have some repressed, chip-on-my-shoulder issue with my womanhood. (Another pretty awful stereotype.) Because, you see, the beauty of Captain Slusher was not only that he was uncompromising in his standards; he was also bloody funny.

And I’m not. Funny, I mean. I’m too serious, too intense, too everything. And my sense of humour is obscure and personal. Whatever game face I decide to go with, it’s going to need a lot of work.

[Btw, there was an interesting review of the movie Smart People which discusses the stereotypes of academics. I might be biased, because I have a blog crush on Jake Pure Pedantry but it’s worth a read. It might even be worth watching the movie. ]

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Me, I’m an exhausted girl. With a headache. But I just wanted to quickly let everyone know that The WinterWarm Project is now live.

It took me much longer to get running than expected, not because the work was hard, but because I seem to have minimal skills at coping with pressure these days. I’m working on that.

Anyway, the site is finally here. At the moment, in order to get the knitted items to us, we only have a Melbourne post box, so items will need to be sent to us. Melburnians can use the contact form on the site to organise a pick up or drop off. The delivery options will increase throughout the year though, and we’ll be doing a lot of work when Mum is here in July, organising freight sponsorship to help us with that.

Anyway…

Run on over and check it out. (You get to see what my Mum looks like!)
Spread the word if you can. (I’ll be adding a few different images you can use in your sidebars over the next couple of weeks.)
Help out with the knitting/crocheting if you can. (We’ll slowly begin to add free patterns to the site, so subscribe.)

Anyway, we’re excited!

xx cm

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