Month: October 2015

16:10pm (On the train back from Manchester)

Train etiquette. I have forgotten about this, about how to navigate the adult world. It is black. Stare at screens. Excuse me. Gates. Barriers. Ticket. Check.

I got caught between the bus doors as I was jumping off to avoid the que of traffic caused by road works and the tory party conference at the Midland Hotel. Why oh why did they have their conference in Manchester? To rub our noises in it? Why did they bring their nasty ideas to my home city? Least we protested. Least we showed our dissent. The people of the north are beautiful and outspoken and we don’t like our visitors. The blue go home today, after racist words, after cruel policies with no thought to the poor, the vulnerable or the disenfranchised.

I hate this government and we are only at the start, the monopoly game has just begun. Life under the conservatives is uncertain. I just saw a post on my Facebook wall a picture of potatoes at a food bank, that was all there was, just potatoes. This is all wrong and cruel and sickening and I am left with an image of Van Gogh’s The Potatoe Eaters in my mind.

Make up. Coats. iPads.

My friend is looking after Naoise. She collected him from school. I need to get back for my friend and collect Naoise from her so that she can get out, and do what she needs to get done. I was glad to leave the conference. There is only so much listening that can be done. It was good to be a listener without the pressure to talk and partake.

Striped shirt. Gold jewellery. Head phones. Adults not communicating just commuting. Zoning out. Black leather bags.

A little girl with a doll dangling from her hand is waiting with her mum on the platform. A teddy bear rucksack on her back.

Whistle blows. Sounds the trains movement.

The little girl dances around the lamp post. She must be about four.

Tower buildings. Regeneration. Flats named after the suffragists. Sylvia, Emmeline, Crystabell.

Social housing. North Manchester.

Buddleia. Willow. Silver birch. Nature clinging to the edges of the wild but the rails.

Razor wire.

A burnt out car.

Beer Barrels

Overhead Electric Wires

There was no time to capture the rocket on the playground tarmac. There was no time to think today.

I ate a mars bar for breakfast. I shouldn’t have stayed up till midnight staring at screens, and waiting for P to finish work. Work. Work Work. Work does not make you free.I ate a mars bar breakfast because it felt naughty and I found it easier to pass over 65p rather than £1.35 for the more healthy alternative minuscule flapjack. The flapjack possibly does contain as much sugar and fat as the mars bar. Who cares. I am in adult space and in adult space I feel like a child again, and the kids cannot see that mum is rebelling.

P is always at work. Coding. Burning his eyes out. He could right a year long blog Dads stories, it would be good to have his perspective. Dependency on one income is not good for me or P.

This is the adult world. The paid worker. The commuter. Speeding. Trying not to touch another human. Constantly at work even when on the train.

No sunlight all grey.

Syd sends me a text asking when I will be home. He is not used to being at home alone after school  . I was a latch door kid. I was able to survive on toast and tea and tv company. I liked the freedom of the house to myself. It was lonely though. Having brothers and sisters did not make up for my parents not being around. I would have loved to have come home to mum.

I need to remember how privileged I am. I have been lucky to have been at home to welcome my children, but it is not sustainable for our family to survive on one income alone. We have somehow survived but the tipping point has been tipping for too long. Under this government we will have no choice but to work harder than ever and see our children less.

Research

Exhibition seeks to open debate on childbirth, Dani Garavelli, Saturday 3rd October, The Scotsman

Why is our idea of motherhood still based around self-sacrifice?, The New Statesman, Tuesday 6th October, by Glosswitch

Chantal Akerman, pioneering Belgian film director and theorist, dies aged 65, Catherine Shoard, Tuesday 6th October, The Guardian

 

11.43am (home working on the table in the front room)

Drunk too much coffee over a chat about life, work, being a mother, and our shared anxieties. Its good to talk. Its hard sometimes to just decide to pause and connect and relate. To take time aside for simple socialising. Mothers/workers/artists timetables are always brimming with to do.

I am not getting beyond paper work and writing this term, and I am not just talking about my own paper work. I dug out six forms to complete to send to Naoise school this morning. There is so much bureaucracy involved in simply keeping up with the basics of organising a child’s life, nasal flu sprays, parents evening slip, theatre trip slip, workshops for parents to volunteer in school slip, music lesson form, school book bag to buy, cans for the food bank, and on and on. It is endless and this is just for one of my children. Thankfully Syd is growing more and more independent and is needing my personal assistant and taxi service’s less and less. 

I am looking forward to the  2020 + Art, Society & Public Health conference tomorrow organised by Clive Parkinson of Arts for Health at Manchester Metropolitan University. I would have loved to have been presenting at the conference but discovered the call out after the deadline had long passed. I am happy to be attending. It is just as important to listen as it is to speak. I am looking forward to some of the networking opportunities and the opportunity to consider positively my work as an artist and how to realise some of the arts and health projects that I have been formulating.

I am also due this week to attend to the Parenting and Mental Health conference in Halifax organised by Healthy Minds, where I will participate and set up an information stall about my work and this project.

Such a busy week, there will be no space for making art other than writing this blog. This will have to be enough.

Research

Early parenthood and mental health:

Mother and baby fell to deaths ‘before hospital reported them missing’ Steven Morris, The Guardian, Wednesday 30th September

9.22am (at home sitting on sofa)

There is a constant sound of water moving on the main road outside as the cars pass. Got Naoise to school despite his protestations that he did not want to go, that he was too tired.

“We are all tired on Monday Naoise we all have to go to work or school.”

“I can come with you to work mummy” was his clever answer.

Somehow we made it. We made it because I distracted him with a fossil, some rocks and a skeleton of a seahorse to take with him into school. We just got there on time, both of us scootering through the wet of the pavement. This scootering arrangement works well, I can keep up with him and I am less anxious about the dangers of the road.

I organised a time to go in and read at his school. I must keep up with my responsibilities. I must make my actions frequent, consistent and reliable.

Volunteering is a strange thing. Volunteering in Naoise school makes sense. I need to be careful and strategic with what I do with my time. There is nothing worse than being somewhere that is not right for you, where you don’t fit and you are not even being paid. I cannot afford to work for free. It makes less sense when you have children. Time with my family is precious, I see that.

I see that going on The Peoples Assembly march against austerity yesterday was a rewarding thing to do and a lovely way to spend time with my family. I felt that it was the first positive thing that we had done together as a family in a longtime. A family not only needs nourishing, feeding and maintaining with the basics of life, it is good to share a common goal, politics, activism and stand up and speak out about things that we believe in. To try and make a change for the better. There is hope for others and ourselves. I hope to do more protesting. I was glad that I chose to protest, it was the best way to spend my time over the weekend.

I must try and remain honest and true and authentic to my belief structure, I cannot be something that I am not. I need to find work that is right for me. I am not good at repackaging and restructuring myself. I am not a commodity to be bought and sold.

I have learnt this weekend that the best place for an arts workshop is in an arts context, or at least one that is set up to accommodate such an activity. Art cannot be squeezed into a box that it is not.

Art is your human right

-Bob and Roberta Smith

23.16pm ( sat up in bed writing)

Poverty is the worst form of violence

-Mahatma Ghandi

Actions speak louder than words, Good feeling to march with thousands of others in peaceful, organised, solidarity. Proud of my family today.

The Peoples Assembly Against Austerity

22.39pm (sitting up in bed, on my own, Naoise asleep in attic)

When eventually I got to where I was gong today with Naoise I had some fun. Once I had got over the stress of getting hideously lost in parts of Yorkshire that I never knew existed nor needed to know existed when my sat nav failed three times. Three hours of being lost. Driving around in circles. Blind. Old school map reading and writing down instructions on a piece of paper is so much better. I will not rely on sat nav again. I have a good sense of direction. I don’t normally get lost.

P was working so we were out. I feel very singular. Perhaps I am singular. I am glad that at least I have Naoise hand to hold. Naoise to keep me company. Little things can be hard when you are out with a child on your own. I had to leave him on a bench so I could run back to get his coat from the car.  I couldn’t see him, I just had to trust that all would be ok. I don’t think child kidnapping is common. I also had to leave him sleeping in the car unattended so that I could get the things that I needed from the studio for tomorrows Family Mandala workshop.

We saw giant pumkins growing,  stole raspberries, smelled flowers, admired hand painted chinese wall paper, pictures of posh people, a harpsichord that could no longer make a sound,  we tried not to be too naughty in the rambling house. I was lonely of adult company and spoke to every single volunteer on the way around. We played on the zip wire and the tire swings. We sat in the wooden hut on the climbing frame. We collected acorns and looked at empty conker shells. We shared a hot chocolate between us.

The sun was glorious when it broke the mist and fog.

Wish I had had the energy to go out tonight and get some adult company. Never mind. No energy for this today. Can’t write the truth. This is surface. This is dull. This is not anything. Its just filling space with words. The words are my company. I talk to myself these days. I don’t mind this self talk.

Research

Exhibition:

MOTHER OF THE YEAR Between Empowerment and Crisis: Images of Motherhood from 1900 to Today, Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz 

 

The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love, and to be greater than our suffering

-Ben Okri

We carry our children from our bodies, we give birth to our children and we hold them close, feed them from the milk in our breasts and when our children are too heavy and fidgety to carry any more we carry their love  in our minds and hearts. We carry their love in our bodies till our own bodies and minds disintegrate and can no longer carry these thoughts, these fragment, these memories these people that are ours and our future.

Till our skin shrinks and pocks and marks and wrinkles and blue veins fail to red and our skin withers and becomes translucent and thin and dries like the crisping of the autumn leaves. Till our bodies struggle to carry our own bones and flesh let alone that of another. Till our bones become apart of the dry stone walls. Till our flesh rots back into the earth. Life and all its cycles. The vivid green of spring shouting out  hope and renewal,  the crimson and russet and yellow ochre of autumn holding on, letting go, falling and dying back.

I have drunk too much wine. Its friday so it is the wine doing the talking. My tongue is slipping and scootering over tarmac.

Patrick is reading Naoise to sleep. Syd is out with his friends enjoying the last of the milder evenings, but its dark now and although he is clever and independent and tall and strong I still worry. I will be anxious until he returns. I wonder what it is he does with his teenage freedom. He is kicking out. Growing. Maturing. Challenging me. Asking and demanding and crying and shouting. Asserting himself and his independence. Striving for more and shirking his embarrassing parents.

I am glad that it is the end of a long week. The end of a week when each day I was late to school with Naoise, that is until today. I wasn’t late to school today because I put Naoise back to bed yesterday. When I could’nt even spoon feed him yoghurt for breakfast as I watched his head hang heavy and could see that he could hardly keep his eyes open I sent him back to bed. I sent him back to bed and he was s happy and relieved and he slept for over three hours and when he awoke he thought that only five minutes had passed.

I spent the day staring into space with blind panic. Panic about money and art and studios and money and children and what to do next. I thought about giving up being an artist altogther. I often have wobbles I often feeling like throwing the towel in. To hell with it !, There are mild wobbles and there are semi earthquakes. Yesterday was a quake. All was dark and impossible. I had become something I was not. I was deep inside a cave of self pity. I was running home to my mother. I was telling her about the wrongs of the world. I was desperate.

Naoise got me out after waking, eating, showering, and doing the worlds biggest poo we got out. I scootered along side him on Syds scooter to the local shop and we bought chocolate bars to eat. It was so warm in the autumn sunshine, elderly people, cats, dogs all were sunbathing, and catching the last warmth of the year. The birds were chirping as if it were a spring celebration and the butterflies were busying themselves on buddeia.

What was it that I was going to write. Something about artists and their generosity. I proclaimed my minor nervous breakdown on Facebook. There are too many reasons to explain my sadness. It would be too self indulgent to list them and I don’t want to.

Artists wobble. They wobble for a reason. They carry insight and hope and dreams and they imagine another world beyond this one. They look beyond plastic and television and money and look at dew clinging to a silken web. A mother/artist feels small. She feels. She feels her children’s worries. She negotiates. She shows them humility and compassion and kindness. She is far from perfect and shouts and gets irate and worries abut things that she shouldn’t worry about. She tells off her child for being cruel for calling another child names. She internalises her childs anxieties. She lets her teenage child play out with his friends when she would rather feel his presence in the home. She realises that he is wanting more and more to be in the company of his friends than in hers.

She spins her  web. She throws out her thread and her wobble to the world and her friends send her a virtual hug and she is carried by this kindness and support and she wraps her arms around their thoughtfulness.

I have Jeremy Corbyn to thank for the Ben Okri quote.

I have got to the end of a long week when I was failing and slipping into black when I was crying and breaking down in front of my children and when they were carrying me. We carry and we are carried from womb and back to earth.

Its been a good day, I have a job interview and a promise of inclusion in an exhibition. I am relieved, I can just breath and relax for a little bit. Its friday. Thank goodness for Friday.

 

 

9.44am (at home not the studio as planned)

I tried and tried to get Naoise to wake up. I put him in the shower, I dressed him gently, I told hm stories about what he used to do when I dressed him as a baby. I told him that he used to roll over and giggle and tease me as I struggled to put clothes on him. He is so so sleepy. He is even more tired than usual because he was awake in the night.

After dressing him he wanted to go back to bed. I persuaded him out of the bed by promising him eight stars to come downstairs with no more fussing. I sat him at the table in front of a large bowl of plain yoghurt and a warm cup of milky tea. He sat with snuffly in hand and nodded back and forth on his chair. I said I would feed him if he wanted. He refused the help and began sliding off the chair asking to lie down. It was so late. I knew we would be late again, despite my efforts and diligence.

I thought about the situation, it must be day 4 at least of being consistently late. While I am not in official work, I can make decisions to place wellbeing first. He is over tired. Clearly totally shattered. I am an adult and was up in the night with him and I don’t feel able to function so I am sure he cannot either. I decide to send him back to bed. He is so relieved when I tell him he can jump into bed and go back to sleep. I am sure that just for today that this is the right thing to do.
I ring the school and I am blatantly honest. He has exhaustion illness. There is no point in pretending its a lurgy. He might have anaemia I tell them, which is totally possible as he has suffered from the condition many times before.

I look at the jobs online and I find more job descriptions asking for essential criteria that I do not possess. I am over qualified and I feel undervalued and under utilised. This bridge back to work feels impossible to cross. I am going around in perpetual circles. Perhaps dropping my arts training is not even a possibility. Locally there is care work, cafe work, or support work in schools. The support work in schools is impossibly competitive. Do I dumb down or try to look at what I have done and work more effectively with that. Transferable skills or returning to trying to be an artist, making that work.  I am struggling to shrug off my identity as an artist. I don’t want to let go of it. I am so passionate about art, I have struggled this far.

Giving up I thought would be easy, clearly it is not. There are less opportunities than I thought there would be. The rolls of cleaner, carer, support assistant are poorly paid. The hours of support staff would mean that I would struggle to access my studio, so I would’nt be able to continue with my practice, what is the point of all this? Should I let go of my studio that I struggle to get to let alone work in.? Where would I put all my stuff? There is no room here in this house. Should I look at funded PhD’s again? Should I try and self fund my arts projects and services. I don’t have enough money to properly function as an artist, cannot afford my studio let alone material and money. I couldn’t afford to attend an opening that would have been really helpful. All seems hopeless and impossible.

I sound ridiculously immature. I don’t really have a choice. Do I ? Its not enough to look after the children and keep the home in order. Its not enough just to care. Its not enough just to write this. We need cash. Childrearing requires cash and I have failed at providing that.

Ahhhhhhhhh what to do , what to do ?

The first day of October is a black one. I am confused. I am dull and dark. I am fed up of this person. I am sad. I spotted a post on Facebook via Natalie Loveless, a video by a performance artist Verónica Ruth Frías. THE ABRAMOVIC METHOD practiced by Verónica Ruth Frías (does not work when you have children) Have a look it is so brilliant and clever and funny.

I need to make more light of my dark. Just get on with it. Stop being so serious. Its impossible not to be an artist when that is what you want to be. It is impossible not to be a mother when that is what you have to be. Love is the bridge between the two. Neither is perfect, not at all ideal. I cannot shrug mother and I cannot shrug artist. FIND CREATIVITY HELEN. FIND A WAY.