Category: Uncategorized

I am a scatter brain

I have been at my thesis part time for nearly six years now. I have two more years in which to complete it. These are the difficult years. This is when I will need to stick to the basics of my academic housework, to set up indexes, footnotes, paragraphing etc. But before I do this, I need to get the body of the thesis held together. I need a skeleton, one on which I can pile flesh, jam in organs and stick on limbs.

This is my task today – to construct a thesis skeleton. But I am a Jill of all trades, and a mistress of none. I hobble from one thought to the next and cannot settle on a single idea, a single image, a single notion to follow.

Another person might move to someone else’s writing for direction, but I do not want to read yet, not another person’s writing, not yet, not anymore. Another person’s writing will become for me yet another distraction and I am already awash with them.

This thesis matters to me. It matters to me as one way of overcoming the wretched sense of failure, which I endured some nineteen years ago when certain powers-that-were decided that I should no longer continue in my training.

I had invested so much in this training to be a psychoanalyst that at the point where my mentor told me I was no longer wanted, my world seemed to collapse, and for a time it did. I survived then by putting one foot in front of the other, one step at a time.

One day I took myself off to the Immaculate Conception Church in Hawthorn in search of comfort. I no longer believed in the healing power of God and his angels but I still held faith in my memory of those times when I could find comfort in the quiet, musty corridors of an empty church. I tried to breathe in the feel of the past, myself as a child, a child who could be comforted by the belief that someone out there was looking out for me and that all would be well in the end.

In March 1993 the playwright, Dennis Potter spoke about his life.
‘You start defining your dignity by your ability to work,’ he said, and then he paraphrased the words of an unnamed American theologian.

‘There is a child crying in a room and the mother comes in and picks it up and says, “There, there. Everything’s all right.”

Outside there might be bombs and starvation. Is she lying? The answer, in my opinion, is that she is not. No matter how corrupt, wicked, cruel, disastrous the world is, some little tributary of feeling says, “It’s all right.” That is where writing comes from.’

Blogging has become one way of practising my writing but it is also a distraction, as if I am cleaning my house and move from one room to the next, never quite settling on a task before I move onto the next.

Today I must brainstorm my thesis. I must stick with the task.

It is Good Friday. The one day of the year when most things stop. I allocated this day in my mind the last time I sat with my supervisor.

‘You are going to need to sit down with these ideas and work out a structure,’ my supervisor said. ‘You are going to need to pull it together’.

Pull it together. Who me? Not me, I am a scatter brain. I am fearful of structure, the way it ties you into a forced form , like a straitjacket, the way it narrows the roads along which you might travel.

This is not true, another inside voice says. Structure will allow you to follow multiple roads. It will create a sense that each road is clear and separate, each leading somewhere different.

The way it is now your roads begin but they end in cul de sacs. They end in incomplete bits of pavement. They end nowhere.

I fear I have already imposed too much structure on my thesis but it is not a creative text per se.

The creative text can form one road, my now internal supervisor says to me, but it needs a description of what you are on about, otherwise your examiners will fail you – again.

Again you will fail. As you failed mental arithmetic in grade six and Mother Mary John handed back your report card and said
‘I knew you were bad, but I did not realise how bad.’’

Strange how some words stick. How some words come to colour your entire life.

I have slipped into the second person. Forgive me. I am trying to include the rest of you in this, my fellow bloggers. I imagine you too know what it is to feel damned to failure for the rest of your life.

It is a damnable position from which you never quite recover.

My Cleaning Lady is not a Slave

Two months into the year and already my desktop is cluttered with papers. It happens so quickly. I scarcely notice them piled up one after the other. I cannot complain. After all I am the one who puts them there. I am the one who leaves them there each day with the thought I will file them later. But I keep putting it off.

The woman who cleans our house is away for two weeks and I am mindful that I will need to try harder to keep abreast of all the mess that builds up over time elsewhere, not just here on my writing desk.

I had intended to write the words ‘cleaning lady’, but such words speak to me of class privilege and superiority. It took years before I allowed myself the privilege of a cleaning lady. Is it a privilege, or as some of my friends and colleagues at the time suggested, merely a more sensible use of my time? Besides, I rationalise, it involves giving someone else a job.

The woman who cleans for me is my equal. She is not a servant. She is not a slave. I pay her well, but still the concept bothers me and I hesitate to write it down here, to write about it for fear that readers might consider me to be blue blooded, well heeled, a snob, all those things that smack of class privilege from over one hundred years ago.

I used to be quite a housekeeper myself. Before this woman came to help with the cleaning on Fridays, I spent the better part of each weekend cleaning out the house, the toilets, the bathroom, the dusting, the vacuum cleaning, and the changing of sheets on beds.

I took pleasure in my efforts in those days when my children were young. Not now. Now I hate housework. I do whatever is necessary on a daily basis to get dirty dishes into the dishwasher after meals, to wipe down bench tops, to wash, hang and fold away clothes, but otherwise I keep my domestic habits to a minimum.

These days I spend almost every spare minute I have beyond my paid work, and the shopping, and the occasional task I must share with one of my now essentially adult children, to the business of writing.

In between my efforts at writing I read. But it is the writing that offers me greatest pleasure. I have an ergonomically designed chair to protect my back from the ill effects of sitting for too long each day and I visit the optometrist every two years to get my glasses adjusted so that my aging eyes can cope with the glare and proximity of the computer screen.

Let’s face it. Writing is a prosaic activity. The sight of someone hunched in front of a computer screen tapping away at a key board is one that does not inspire much confidence in said person. It is not like watching someone dive into a swimming pool, smash a tennis racket against a ball or climb the slopes of a mountain. The sight of someone who taps away at a keyboard has a quality of excluding the onlooker. I know this from memory.

Many years ago before I started to take my own writing seriously, when my children were still little and I spent many more hours at housework than I do today, my husband went back to university to study for a law degree. He was a conscientious student and although he tried hard to confine his studying to the nine to five life of a university student, he still needed to bring work home and to study on weekends, especially around exam time.

I remember well the resentment I felt as I watched him tap away at the keyboard in those days on one of the first computers that then existed, while I swept the floor or chopped vegetables. In those days we had no room for a study and he worked in the central living area, which continues today as the place in this household where people gather to eat, to talk and to play. I felt left out then, as if he were engaged in deep conversation with a beloved friend and there was no room for me.

I think of this memory often these days because now it is my turn to be so deeply involved in conversation with my keyboard, and others – my husband and my children – are the ones who must suffer from this sense of exclusion.
‘That’s all you ever do,’ my children lament. ‘You tap away at your computer.’

I resist a defensive response. I know it is true. If you want to find me these days, if I am not in the kitchen preparing food or tidying up after adult children, who still sometimes neglect to return the lid to the vegemite jar or fail to put their dirty dishes into the dishwasher, you will find me here, where I am now writing down endless words, writing into the ether to an imaginary audience.

I drive my car past my old primary school often. We still live in the neighbourhood where I spent a large chunk of my childhood, from five to fourteen years of age.

Our Lady of Good Counsel, OLGC sits alongside the church of the same name on Whitehorse Road in Deepdene. It is a prestigious neighbourhood. It is now, it was then, maybe more so now, but even as a child I knew that our neighbours and the children with whom I struggled to learn every day were from well to do families who seemed not to understand the struggle that my parents endured daily.

We lived on the fringes of the zone that took in the catchment area for this school. In more ways than one. Each day we walked to school, past the mansions on Mont Albert Road and the well appointed houses of Camberwell. We wore a typical uniform, the girls in blue and white gingham dresses in summer, tunics and pale blue shirts in winter, the boys in blue shirts and grey trousers, shorts all year round while at primary school. Our school jumper was grey, our school colours blue and gold. Hair ribbons were meant to be pale blue but somehow such ribbons if they ever found their way into our house soon found their way out, and more often than not, I tied my hair together with a rubber band, which the head mistress of the school, Mother Mary John, despised.
‘You’re a disgrace to the school, without wearing the proper school uniform and that includes the regulation ribbons’.

On Sundays we walked to Mass through the same tree lined streets but this time accompanied by our mother who gazed longingly into people’s gardens day dreaming of the time when she might own a house of her own. At that time we rented and already I knew the stigma attached to renting a house in Australia, the country in which home ownership is a must.

When she was a girl my mother lived in a two-storey house on the Marnixplein in Haarlem, Holland. Her parents employed a housekeeper to help her mother with her five sons and two daughters. My mother was the oldest. She told us often of how she would spend hours on her bed with a book avoiding the work that had been allocated to her as the oldest girl, notwithstanding the housekeeper. She hated housework then, as a child. She hated it as an adult when she was in the care herself of nine children and could ill afford the help of a housekeeper. Here I am more than half a century or so later complaining of the same lot.

I am the most slovenly of my three sisters, perhaps even of my five brothers, four of whom have wives who might clean up after them. I have given up on the call to domesticity, I am ashamed to say, but proud as well. It is an act of defiance.

In one of my writing classes many years ago, our then teacher, Olga Lorenzo, talked about the need for us women writers in particular to forgo the demands of domesticity and even of paid work in other fields to make time to write.
‘What do you want to have written on your gravestone?’ she asked. ‘That she wrote that she kept a tidy house or that she wrote a good book?’

The answer is obvious.