A shortened version of this appeared in Third Way in April 2014: https://thirdway.hymnsam.co.uk/editions/april-2014/features/space-to-create.aspx
It is rare to have the hush of an empty house all to myself. But right now all I can hear is the hum of the computer screen, the creak of a door being slammed outside, the footsteps of the cat coming in and going out. My heart rate slows.
All morning my husband and I have been cooped up with the children, in our tiny house in the June rain. We have been winding ourselves up and up. I don’t understand why sometimes it is harder when we are both here, why we are not allowed to have a conversation together, why my son makes that awful screeching noise as soon as we try to talk. And so at the peak of another dispute, I slam down the lid of the biscuit tin, and march off with my half eaten cookie. I almost cry, but I am too tired. And so instead, I get into bed and wait until my husband comes up and says that he will take the kids out and I hear the back door slam and the silence in the house descend. I feel guilty and immensely thankful at once. Some days I wonder if I will go insane.
I have been realising what I’m missing lately. As a writer and a mother, I crave time, but not just any old time. If I’m out with just my youngest in the pushchair, I have time, of a sort. I have space to think, I have a break from her chirps because when she is in the pushchair, she just looks or sleeps. I have the buzz of normal life around me. I might wander aimlessly around shops, and if I’m at home and she’s sleeping, I will clean, which for some reason, seems nobler to me than to do what I really want to do which is to write. And if I don’t feel too exhausted in the evenings, I will attempt to get on with writing.
But last night, after tidying, I sat down to watch the news and then my daughter woke with a temperature. And an hour later, there I was typing in my bedroom, my son asleep behind me on the bed, my daughter crying for me in the other room. Even when they are asleep (or supposed to be asleep) they tend to encroach upon every corner of my life.
And even when all goes to plan; when they are both asleep in their beds, I boot up the computer, sure that by the time my fingers hit the keys, I will have achieved some inspiration or have some inkling of where to take my story next. But in reality, I often sit there with a blank screen and a blank mind, thinking of the things I need to pick up the next day at Sainsbury’s.
But what I want is the daytime. To be sitting at a desk in a room with a cup of tea and the sunlight streaming in. I want to be able to have my notepads lined up at the back of the desk. I want to have all the books that I so love lined up in front of me, my heroes to cheer me on to the finish line. I want to have the willpower to not ‘google’ things at the drop of a hat but to make a list and do it later. I want time that is set aside, precious and protected even though I might not achieve anything.
I long for time when I am awake enough that should a moment of clarity come surging through then I would be ready and waiting for it. One day, I will have this time, but perhaps not yet. Time is certainly the greatest luxury that I took for granted before I became a parent.
There is another baby on the way, after our lovely two, a boy and a girl. I adore his independence, growing like that all by himself, without me even suspecting for two months. The audacity, the beauty! So it will be a long time, I fear, before I am able to sit like I dream of doing, at a table, with a window, in the daytime. And to think that I did it all those years ago and didn’t realise my good fortune. I handed in my notice to the bookshop where I was working because I was angry at the management and thought I was making a statement. Shot myself in the foot rather, gave myself ‘the fear’ a little too much. And then I had it; a desk, and an empty house all day long. I was doing an MA in Creative Writing and told myself that it would look okay on my CV but in reality we couldn’t afford the rent. Knowing that it would only be for a short time, I did try to make the most of it, but I didn’t perceive it as the shining jewel that it was. I was scared by it; I was depressed by it. I held it at arm’s length, when I should have just got on with it; and written for all that I was worth.
But then maybe I had not quite become myself fully, for I feel that I became more of myself when I became a mother. More and at the same time less. And that is what so defines me and that is what I berate myself for. That there is no choice but to give up everything to go to them in the night time, and that sometimes even my husband sometimes comes second to the children. But also that I have become stronger, have realised that I can cope and keep going/inventing/sticking/feeding, that there is no such thing as a mummy sick day.
There have been times, whilst sitting on the carpet playing Duplo when a poem has flitted through the room like a butterfly. I have heard a brief line of it before it has flown out of the window and gone; forgotten or trampled over, before I had the time to snatch and it and write it down. And for a while I thought fine, let them go, there is no time to catch them. But now I am ready to wait for them again.
I have heard it said that writing is as much about staring at the empty page as it is about hitting keys and I love that. It takes the pressure off; it gives permission to dream. It allows for the fact that the words have a life of their own, as Nabokov said in Lectures on Literature, that they will arrive when they are ready: ‘the pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamouring to become visible.’
I have seen this with several of my stories, that you write through the unknowing and things just write themselves into happening before you, underneath your pen. It is the most wonderful thing. I love the thought of the story having its own existence, and that our job, as writers is to listen and wait for it, a bit like the new baby, arriving, settling in my womb, announcing quietly that he was there through my sudden distaste for tea.
Virginia Woolf notes this necessity of waiting, of making space to dream in A Room of One’s Own:
‘By hook or by crook, I hope that you will do whatever it takes to possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.’
Did you hear that? To idle! Yes, I say. Yes to that. My husband, the composer Tiny Leaves found the lack of time and space a catalyst for creativity as illustrated in his EP In These Narrow Spaces which spoke of this tension. And of course there is always beauty to be found, whether we are losing the plot whilst staying at home looking after toddlers, or bored to tears in a day job that just pays the rent. A poet who shows this wonderfully is Fred Voss, who finds inspiration on the shop floor of a metal workshop. In ‘Poetry Jackpot’, he paints such a vivid picture of seeing and not seeing, the distinction is quite beautiful:
‘I wish the machinists around me in this shop could feel the joy I feel
Each morning as I wait for the poems to come to me. …I cannot wait to open my toolbox each morning and look for poems […] while these machinists around me drag their feet like they are dead’
For the beauty is always there, he says, you just have to take the time, open your eyes and perceive it. But then, Virginia Woolf says, in A Room of One’s Own, that this is the great gift of an artist, – the seeing where others do not see:
What is meant by ‘reality’? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable — now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. […] It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech […]. Now the writer, as I think, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of this reality. It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us.
Similarly, Raymond Carver says in his essay ‘On Writing’, ‘a writer sometimes needs to be able to stand and gape at this or that thing – a sunset or an old shoe- in absolute and simple amazement.’
How wonderful our mission statement as creatives! To live, to see, to idle, to communicate wonder! For there is the space to create but also the permission to dream. The Indian chief Smohalla said: ‘My young men shall never work. Men who work cannot dream; and wisdom comes to us in dreams’. What a beautiful idea, to value the dream over the toil of life. And if there is a dream in your heart, then you must fight for it. Listen to what the apostle Paul said in the letter to the Hebrews:
‘Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that so easily entangles, and let us run the race marked out for us.’
Whatever the race marked out for you is; run it, go headlong into it. I know that for me, my race is to write.
Dreaming lengthens the perspective; it opens up all sorts of possibilities. I write out scenarios in my journal, imagining five years from now, what I hope to have achieved, the house I dream of owning then. The space and permission to dream is my little bit of reclaiming myself, of putting back up the boundaries to my life that have been taken down and trampled on by toddlers. I need time, a silent pause in the barrage of words spoken at me simultaneously, to think coherent thoughts that do not get snatched away mid-flight. And if all this takes is two hours at a desk, in the morning, then that is what I am fighting for.
The early Christian poet Caedmon couldn’t sing in tune but loved to hear others worshipping. He was visited by an angel who gave him a beautiful voice to sing which radically changed the direction of his life. A liturgy remembering him called ‘In Declaration of a Dream’ in Celtic Daily Prayer: Inspirational prayers and readings from the Northumbria Community reads:
This world has become a world of broken dreams where dreamers are hard to find. Lord be the gatherer of our dreams, you set the countless stars in place, and found room for each of them to shine. You listen for us in your heaven-bright hall.
How beautiful that God is the gatherer of our dreams, and that he waits and listens for them. How wonderful that we are assured that there is room for each of us to shine. For let us not forget that God is a dreamer too.
And as my Father dreams, so too will I dream, and I will wait for the poems to come with my butterfly net, poised and ready as they come.
elisabeth pike 