My First ABC of Parenting

I returned to something I wrote nearly two years ago. Some things remain true. Some, thankfully, are less pertinent. Some have been replaced by exciting new worries...

My First ABC of Parenting

A is for anxiety, allergies, and anxiety about allergies.

B is for bath-and-bedtime, breastfeeding, babysitters and bribery (see also “s” for snacks).

C is for cake (allergen-free), CBeebies, Calpol and carseats.

D is for “Don’t lick the radiator/window/fence!”, “Don’t ride the baby!” Also, doctors’ waiting rooms and Disney (see also “f” for films).

E is for eating the children’s selection boxes/Easter eggs. How long can this go on for?

F is for films. And failure.

G is for Grandparents.

H is for how long does it take a two year old to put on gloves/shoes/come down the stairs when you’re late for nursery?

I is for immunisations.

J is for JOY.

K is for kisses that involve more teeth and saliva than you had ever previously experienced.

L is for love that is wilder, more overwhelming, exhausting and terrifying than you had ever imagined. Also, laughter. Also, labour.

M is for missing them when they are asleep.

N is for naptime. And nappies. Nappies. Nappies.

O is for other parents. And opinions. Other parents’ opinions. Opinions about other parents. Also, the discovery that small people also have opinions, in abundance, from a very early age.

P is for pasta. Also potty training, and parent-and-child parking spaces.

Q is for questions. One of the best things about two year olds. One of the worst things about health visitors.

R is for risk assessments. You have just become your own health and safety officer.

S is for snacks (your new magic word). Also, sitting in the car on the driveway/in a KFC carpark/during church because they fell asleep 30 seconds before you switched the engine off.

T is for TV boxsets, binge-watching of; trying not to stand on the squeaky floorboards; trying to fit two toddlers into a supermarket trolley. And terror.

U is for university fees. Do we start saving now?

V is for vomit.

W is for WHAT are you doing? WHERE do you think you’re putting that? WHY? Also, Wotsits.

X is for x-rays, because A & E is the most fun place to be with a toddler on a Friday night.

Z is for zebra, because it’s important that pre-schoolers living in the North of England can correctly identify their African wild animals.

Deferrals

[A foreword... Ironically, ha ha, I have deferred posting this for a week. The process of writing it, which was made possible mostly because of the support of some good friends, was therapeutic. So much so, that the next day my feelings were so far away from those described here that it felt a bit embarrassing and over-dramatic to publish this. However, I am determined to keep writing and posting, and trying to be honest. So here it is...]

“Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.” Proverbs 13:12.

“The process of doing a PhD and becoming an early career academic operates through a model of delayed gratification. It demands that you work extremely hard (research, teach, network, publish) and implies acceptance into the academic fold, esteem, and a lecturer’s salary as your reward. Leaving the sector meant coming to terms with the reality of a broken social contract which meant none of those things would be forthcoming for me.” Catherine Oakley, “How I left academia: An honest look at the challenges and benefits of leaving UK academia with a Humanities PhD, one year on.”  see article here

After a year of blogger’s block, I am stirring myself to return to writing.  This blog, and writing in general, has been deferred for many reasons in the past year. Some practical ones, like it’s been busy selling and buying houses, overseeing building work, decorating rooms… sometimes writing time has had to make way for the general duties of life: laundry, cleaning, child-related tasks… But, other people have these things in their lives, and still write. The major reason for my silence has been what the writer of Proverbs might have called heart sickness. Others might call it depression.

The root of this is probably my life-long tendency towards deferred gratification. I have always operated on the basis of ‘if I can just get through this, then it will be better’. This, as Catherine Oakley has recently pointed out, is actually the premise that most of our education system is based on, particularly at postgraduate level, and even more specifically, within the academic career trajectory. And when the promised academic career doesn’t happen, you find that you have done all of the deferring, but got none of the gratification. Instead, you get a gaping void where your aspirations had been, and a full-blown identity crisis.

This is not the only area of my life in which I have been deferring joy. It comes naturally to me. As a child, I was the one who would save up sweets in a box under my bed, while my brother devoured his the moment he got them. The knowledge that I had something to enjoy later was almost more gratifying than actually eating them. I deferred my entry to university, not because I had any gap-year plans, but just because deferring seemed like the thing to do. And in a sense, I was proved right. I had such a miserable year before university, which included a broken engagement and working 9-5 for the council, that the first year of my degree was a blissful time. So, this tendency to defer became a defining characteristic of my adult life.

My experience of parenthood is also in danger of going down this route. When you have a new-born baby, it’s easy to think, ‘This will be great… when we finally get some sleep/when we get feeding sorted/when we establish a routine/when we get our evenings back…’ This can become a habit. Over the last four and a half years I have continually found myself waiting for the next stage (particularly when it comes to finding space and time for myself, and for writing). I begin to believe that life will be easier when the kids can walk/talk/don’t need naps/go to nursery; that if I give all of myself at this point to being a mother, wife, household manager, I will eventually earn the right to be anything other than that (a writer, a poet, a voice that reaches beyond the four walls of my home). Now that the eldest child is preparing to start school, I need to face up to the reality that there will always be reasons to defer the things that I want to do for myself. Not all of these are good reasons. And endlessly deferring my own life makes me heart-sick, taking the joy out of everything, including my family. I want this to end. I want to bring joy to my children and husband, and to relish and treasure the joy that they are to me. I need to stop deferring my dreams.

Although this might not sound as inspirational as that last sentence, I need other people to help me do this. If it takes a village to raise a child, it certainly takes community to nurture creativity. If anyone reads this, please talk to me about what I'm writing, ask me for a poem, share your writing with me, tell me what you're reading, let me know where you find joy, or when you're in need of some encouragement.

The pain of requited love?

I am daily aware of, and hugely grateful for, the immense amount of privilege that I enjoy.

One of these huge joys is that I am loved by the people that I love most.  I endeavour not to take this for granted or to treat this gift too lightly.

Many of my early attempts at writing poetry, as a younger person, were based on experiences of unrequited love, or heartbreak, or mortifying misunderstandings. I have no doubt that the writing produced was not very accomplished. I have very little desire to trawl through old word documents to attempt to find any examples. Yet, at that time, I felt extremely motivated to express my feelings in poems.

In my current phase of life, I am searching for ways to write meaningfully about the relationships that I have with the people I love. One slightly paralysing consideration is that these people will probably read what I write – not usually a problem when writing about an ex, or about someone who doesn’t even know you exist. This was one factor that delayed my writing about my Grandad’s death. My Grandma might read it, my parents, my aunt: people who knew and loved him longer and better than me. I am still holding back on either writing or sharing elegies about other relatives and friends for the same reason. This is also why I struggle to write poems about, or for, my husband. This is why I worry about writing in too much detail about giving birth to my sons, or the subsequent experience of parenting them.

If I write too specifically about loved ones, especially in a ‘warts ‘n’ all’ fashion, am I betraying their trust? If I use my children’s names, is that a data protection issue? How do I avoid the ‘miserable mum’ genre without glossing over the fact that motherhood is the hardest thing I’ve experienced?

There are many people who have managed to do this very well. Carolyn Jess-Cooke’s poems about motherhood, for example. Ciaran Carson writing about his wife’s serious illness in his recent work. Writing about more mature relationships is the next step in my poetic development.

Heritage

Back in May, I attended the funeral of my grandad. The service was a thanksgiving for, and celebration of, the life of a well-loved man. He, like the majority of my family, had a strong Christian faith and there was a powerful sense of shared hope for a heavenly consolation as a packed church congregation sang together throughout the service.

Certain lines from the hymns stood out to me, and I hope to be able to write poems that echo them:

Drop thy still dews of quietness,

till all our strivings cease…

Mine is the sunlight

Mine is the morning

I looked to Jesus, and I found

In Him my Star, my Sun;

And in that Light of Life I’ll walk

Till trav’lling days are done.

This post was begun soon after the event, but I didn’t manage to finish it at the time. For many reasons – some of which I will blog about another time. But one reason was because of a poem I wrote for my Grandma about my Grandad. I gave it to her at the funeral. I believe she got it printed in that Sunday’s edition of Pew News, the notice bulletin handed out at her church. But it felt a bit too soon to go more ‘public’ with it (that is, pretending the readership of this blog extends further than my immediate family…).

Except…

The week after the funeral, I entered the poem in a poetry competition. In fact, it had been written to conform specifically to the exacting demands of the competition – an 821 poem, which has an initial stanza of 8 lines, followed by a couplet and ending with a single line, which should also contain a volta or ‘twist’ of some kind. The organisers also stated (as most competitions/publishers do) that the work must not have been published anywhere before, including on a personal blog. Luckily, my offering was met with a polite ‘no’ from the competition, which means that I can put it on here.

So, although it feels a bit morally ambiguous that I wrote a poem that was simultaneously for my Grandma as she mourns her husband, and also an entry for a competition, it is also my tribute to my Grandad.

Heritage

My grandad, with his northern vowels,

‘Let’s ‘av a luke’, ‘bring me that buke’.

Child-me thrilled at the way he spoke.

My grandad, on his daily strolls

‘cross Cookham Moor to the churchyard.

My grandad, the musical lad:

church organist, and taught my dad.

Now my sons caress the keyboard.

My grandad, who made pilgrimage,

and brought back stones from Galilee,

has come into his heritage.

Elegy for Nicholas Heiney: more questions than answers?

My PhD was about the elegy, a type of poem that laments a death. Although that sounds pretty straightforward, the idea of a work of art being inspired by grief can become quite complex.

Writing about a famous person or a well-known tragedy instantly becomes political (that is without the assumption that all poetry is political, but that’s a discussion for another time). Writing about your own loss involves processing your grief in a very public fashion (assuming that your poem will be read by others); and the loss of a person rarely only affects a single mourner, so the elegist’s personal grief response must also engage with or at least acknowledge the grief of the community of people mourning that loss. (More on this soon…)

Perhaps more complex is the idea of writing an elegy for a complete stranger. Is it ethical to create a work of art that expresses a grief that is not your own? Would the grief be ‘artificial’? (Is artifice a bad thing?) Can a poet be a ‘professional mourner’ on behalf of someone else? Do you need to get their permission, if so? Is it exploitative to make art, and perhaps a name for oneself as a writer, from someone else’s grief? (Did Milton capitalise on Edward King’s death when he wrote Lycidas; did Shelley, when he wrote Adonais for Keats? Did Andrew Motion jump on the People’s Princess bandwagon when he elegised Princess Diana?)

These questions were considered, in a largely theoretical way, during my research. They became more real a few months ago, when I was given a book by a good friend. The Silence at the Song’s End is a collection of writing – journals, sea logs and poems – by Nicholas Heiney, edited by his mother, Libby Purves, and his university tutor, Duncan Wu. Nicholas took his own life in 2006, while in his early twenties, after ‘a long and well-concealed battle with severe mental disturbance’. I loved this book: Nicholas was an excellent writer. Reading the collection, lovingly curated by his mother, was an emotional experience for me, and my response was the desire to write an elegy for Nicholas. Yet, I am somewhat paralysed by the questions I’ve already voiced here, and many more besides.

I do, however, believe that poetry can help to explore grief and mourning, and even seems to be a natural response to loss. Poems are often read at funerals and are almost always found at roadside tributes and sites of tragedy. So I will continue wrestling with these questions, and try to write elegies for strangers like Nicholas, and also for the lost ones dear to me.

Poems and preschoolers

With two young children at home, it often feels like there is no time for writing. Yet, making hurried notes to myself on my phone has sometimes been a small sanity-saver, reminding me that there is beauty and worth in what I’m doing with my kids, and also that there is more to life, and to me, than being a bottom-wiper/tidier-upper/toddler-referee...

The point of the notes is that they might eventually prompt poems. Often they are cryptic and ungrammatical, jumbled together in juxtaposing clusters. Perhaps these would be interesting poems in themselves? Example: ‘Mary played the marimba. // Boy sparrows bellow from rooftops. // Pitch for a parents’ cookery comp. Sestina??’

I have made some forays into harvesting from these notes, with varying degrees of success. One of the less successful was a poem about seagulls. Coming back to it, weeks later, the note seems like a better piece of writing than the poem that came from it. 

Seagulls

Outside a flock of seagulls kerfuffle, congregating on the pavement outside our neighbour’s front wall. The boys watch. The little one is momentarily lifted from his teething grump to giggle and lift his hands to the fluttering whirl of wings passing the window. The bigger boy asks why we can’t hear these birds singing. I realise that we can’t hear them, only the electronic squawk of one of the educational Christmas presents; ‘square!’, ‘square!’, ‘square!’. Although, the toy’s got an accent and pronounces it ‘squeer!’, to the two-year-old’s endless amusement. I tire, quicker than the children, of the feeding frenzy in the street. Opening the front door lets in the seaside sound of squabbling birds, as incongruous in this suburb of Durham as it was in the school playground in Bristol. I find a discarded box of fish and chips by the neighbour’s driveway. It goes to join the pile of nappies in our bin. I return to the house, where the sounds of squabbling have now taken up residence.

A start

Quick, fill in some of this white space!

My hope for this blog is that it will make me do some writing. I toyed with the idea of setting up a home page where I describe myself as Naomi Marklew: writer. ('Poet' sounds far too pretentious, particularly when poems are yet to be written.)

I am not yet that bold. Hence, the 'potential' bit of this blog's title. Also, having had a bash at academia, and now in the throes of stay-at-home motherhood, I am not entirely sure how to describe myself these days. Dr Mummy? Perhaps, but only when wearing my three-year-old's plastic stethoscope.

I had more confidence in my writing 'career' as much younger person. At primary school I wrote a story about a bear called Harold, which I was then invited to read to the reception class. (The teacher took over after about one and a half excruciating sentences.) As a teenager I kept notebooks of my ideas for novels. I hope/dread that some of these will come to light next time I move house - more mortifying than an angst-ridden diary, I expect. My undergraduate English degree produced some essays in which some rather astonishing claims are made about canonical writers, with seemingly unshakable confidence. Taking a module on poetry writing for my MA got me writing and giving readings alongside some enthusiastic (and very talented) classmates at small student events in Durham. This was a highlight of my creative writing career. A PhD in poetry later, I can confirm that my confidence was extremely susceptible to shaking. Almost seven years on, I am still recovering from my PhD viva.

After the birth of my first child, and entering a whole new period of existential crisis, I thought about trying to write poetry again. Not much happened, and I soon got a bit busy having a second baby. But I recently came across a small attempt from that time of early motherhood, more a passing thought than a poem, which (rather feebly) documents my decision to explore my own poetic potential.

Find a book to write it down.

Find the smallest book, the most unnoticeable.

Write it quick, before you change your mind.

Already it’s passing, the moment of belief.

Cross out, falter, stop…

Find a place to hide it again.