Chaos and Caramel

I have a small army of children. Seven, to be precise. Four years ago, I developed the sudden urge to return to education. Something my mother said to me many moons ago was suddenly replaying in my mind: Monkey see, monkey do. I wanted better for my kids than the life I’d made for myself. Don’t get me wrong, I love my children. I imagined, somewhat romantically, that we were a little like the Weasleys: eccentric, financially stretched, but loveable, and - perhaps more importantly - loving. We made do. Still, something nagged at me for long enough that I made the jump and returned to education. My life best resembles the checkout at the supermarket: rapid-fire administrations of food and clothing on a production line, and some days are better than others. Mostly, it’s the others. What I haven’t mentioned yet is that I applied to study for a full-time degree at university in spite of the fact that my seven Weasleys were themselves educated at home. By me.

Have I set the scene? I do hope so. Imagine coffee stains on every surface, skipped (or forgotten) meals; political debates over dinner between the skimming of Shakespeare, the scansion of Shelley, or the sheer desperation on my face as I try to interpret what fronted adverbials are so that I might teach my children. I’m a first-class student and I still don’t understand. Some things, I have decided, are less important than others. Matching socks, plaited hair, fronted adverbials, and so on and so forth.

As you might imagine, I don’t have very much spare time for hobbies. Years ago, I would knit for my Weasleys. Socks, jumpers, blankets, and the occasional soft toy. I sewed up a storm. Crocheted amigurumi lined the shelves in the children’s bedrooms. I spun and dyed yarn with them in the brightest of colours. We painted and potted and grew things and made things from cardboard boxes, toilet tubes, and loose scraps of yarn. My attic is a shrine to the life we used to lead before I made the decision to change everything. Sometimes, parenthood is a lot like that; you make decisions and you won’t know for many years if they were the right ones. All you can do is hope.

What I have (or rather, make) time for, is writing. Always have, and likely always will. I sometimes make the odd pair of socks, of course. Just recently, a pair of rainbow-striped basics flew off my needles and onto my feet. I sometimes still paint, albeit digitally. But mostly, I write. People ask me why, and I don’t think I can fully articulate it. My life is so busy, so hectic, so chaotic, that sometimes I forget to even feel. He wants the blue cup, you see. Not the red one. She wants to know where her black leggings are. They want to know if we’ll make it to the beach this weekend, and sometimes (most of the time) I forget to check in-- with me, I mean. I forget, amidst the clamour of my wonderfully vibrant life, to ask myself about what I might want. How I might feel. What I might need. So then I sit at my computer and I put one word after the next, imagining that parts of me are out in the world - this one or the next, or no other world I’ve heard of until the moment the words land on the page - and I ask myself what those parts of me, in Jemima the paraglider, or Sarah the therapist, or Jacob the lawyer - might want.

It’s easier when Jemima competes with my children because Jemima feels important to me, somehow. She’s young and beautiful with a whole life ahead of her. Sarah’s the kind of woman who takes time out of her week for self-care. Jacob takes bullshit from nobody. So maybe Jemima feels like taking a long ass bath with candles - with the door locked - and I think, Wow, that sounds pretty good right now, actually. And maybe Jacob has had the fuck enough of refereeing fights between staff in the office, and I think, Huh, maybe they can settle the fight over the last jam tart by themselves. Life, not on the edge, but on the page.

I write because the characters in my mind remind me - on paper - that I’m a whole person composed of individual components, even if life doesn’t always let me see those parts. It reminds me that if it’s okay for Carmel to tell her brother she can’t be there this week, then it’s okay for me to say no, too. I write because of the intensity of emotion that flows when you love your characters like the very best of friends. Because they are your best friends. Between the laundry and the essays and the exams and the pandemonium of my day-to-day life, I write because it pulls the strands together with a level of cohesion that I can’t have right now.

Stories have happy endings - usually - and life is long, sometimes (mostly) painful, and we don’t know what the ending will be. We hope it’ll be a good one, but there’s no way of knowing until we’re done. Until the clock ticks over the finish line and into the land of the end. When my babies were nursing and things got hard, I repeated the mantra that so many mothers had told me in the small hours of the morning, as the dim light of the street lamps crept in through their windows: this too shall pass. How delicious that is. The thought of passage. Of ending. The ending of days, weeks, eras, and lifetimes. Whole stories contained within wall-to-wall bookshelves, the world over. How much more delicious to write them, to contain them within the wall-to-wall bookshelves of my mind.

Jemima bought a tall hot chocolate today. She almost walked away without asking for marshmallows, hearing the voice of her mother in the back of her head as she moved towards the stairs. “You’ll never fit into that bridesmaid’s dress if you don’t get your act together.” She stopped short of the top step, glanced at her watch, and in a simple act of defiance, returned to the kiosk. Marshmallows rained from above as she pushed them into the cup to make way for more. For the pièce de résistance, she poured lashings of caramel syrup over the whole thing. After all, why shouldn’t she have them? Why should she suffer in silence just so that Katie can have pretty pictures for the mantlepiece? What a crock of shit. As she descended the escalator in lieu of the stairs, the magnified taste of defiance lingered on her tongue long after all residue of caramel had left her palate. Delicious.

I think I’ll make that hot chocolate after all.