Weathering the storms

The world outside my window is raging.

I made my coffee in the semi-dark this morning—reluctant to wake my marshmallow brain with artificial light. I misjudged the dosage and now I’m sitting up in bed, one curtain open so I can watch the wind rage across the garden, drinking coffee as weak and grey as the morning light. 

Outside, a November storm is whirling around our low, hilltop bungalow, catching in a leaf-rattling eddy at the corner of the bedroom. The already bare shrubs are whipping back and forth and our neighbour’s wind chimes are tangling with every clatter and gust. I won’t miss them when they knot themselves into a silent ball. I’m not a fan of wind chimes. Give me the rage of the wind through trees over that alien metallic tinkle any day.

When we first moved here—before we’d had the roof assessed and repaired, when the fence was still built from flimsy timber sails that bent and snapped in even moderate winds—these night time storms would keep me anxious and awake—calculating the likely cost of every gust.

Now that I know everything is safe, built by us to earthquake standards, I can enjoy the view and the surround-sound audio without excessive worry. The occasional upturned plant pot can be righted. The plastic shed that migrates a little further across the patio with every puff can be re-placed.

This is the best that Sunday can offer. Safe. Warm. Coffee on one side of me. Dog on the other. Laptop in front of me. Silence from the human world.

I chose Sunday as my regular publishing day because weekends feel safe. Inviolate. The moment Monday rolls around, my awareness shifts to what the outside world might ask of me. Primarily, what clients might expect—and when I might be able to escape and see the sun, the sea, the silence, especially now that we exist in a global world where work isn’t bound by time zones.

It’s not just work though, Any obligation in my day—a meeting, Zoom call, dentist appointment—makes it impossible for me to focus on anything else until that obligation is passed. It doesn’t matter how pleasant the scheduled task. Switching back and forth between the personal and the professional is not something I can do. I’ve tried—for decades I’ve tried—to manage the two alongside each other. I just don’t know how.

Publishing on a Sunday was supposed to give me the maximum breathing space before publication. Time to edit, record and format without the voices in my head telling me I should be paying attention to something—to someone else. Which is all well and good when the world is steady on its axis.

But it doesn’t take much to dislodge me from my own mooring. There are circumstances and people who still have the ability to knock me off centre with the slightest wibble.

These last few weeks have been—challenging. 

Along with half the world, I’ve felt the global losses in my core. At home, I’ve seen men, fortified and made brave by the silencing of female voices, verbally attack, threaten and belittle women in the street.

I couldn’t write about those things when they were so close. I will—but not yet. I couldn’t write at all, and so I missed my self-imposed Sunday publishing deadline twice. In the middle of last week, I managed to gather together a few words and some photos and shared a less global, less individual, but still painful loss—our local garden that’s been sold and closed. I focussed on the beauty instead of the pain and shared pictures of a place that will be missed by many.

But there’s another, very personal thing that I really wanted to talk/write about these last couple of weeks. Again, I’ve been too close to see it. Again, it’s been too all-enveloping to allow me talk/write about anything else. And so I retreated into silence. As I do.

About a month ago, I published the first part of what I expected to be a multi-part post, titled “I’ll wait until you’re dead”. 

It was a first stab at talking about why I’m breaking a careless promise to my mother to wait until she’s no longer here before I write about her. I also touched on my mother’s uncanny ability to somehow know things she can’t possibly know. And for our infrequent interactions to result in her finger-tip crawling her way into my subconscious so subtly that I don’t even notice she’s there. Not until I start feeling and behaving ever so slightly off-kilter. 

Off-kilter. Like not publishing anything for two weeks because I can’t find a coherent thread through the thoughts bubbling in my head.

Less than two weeks after I published that piece, I had an email from my father.

It was a round-robin email to all the usual suspects—immediate and extended family as well as his personal meme email list.

An email to say my mother has tongue cancer.

The total head-fuckery that this inspired turned my brain to jelly and sent me back into a days-long mental diet of Netflix and Facebook reels. Not the healthiest response, but it sure beats living in the magical thinking that I somehow willed my mother’s cancer into being with my post. Or that she’d known for weeks and chose to wait until after I’d published that piece to tell me.

I’m over the magical thinking. I’m through the narcissistic belief that I have that level of power over anything. And I’m grateful for the Sunday silence (barring the gale outside my window) that’s giving me the space and time to finally begin to form my thoughts into words and those words into a story of a sorts. 

I’m grateful too for you. Thank you for being here. 

When I first published “I’ll wait until you’re dead”, a startling number of people (for someone with a very small subscriber list) chose to unsubscribe. I posted a plaintive and narcissistic “Nobody loves me!” note the Substack app. Ugh.

That note was slightly tongue in cheek—I know not everything everyone writes will be for everyone else and that’s okay—but it inspired several very lovely responses from people who might not otherwise have read the post.

Since then, it seems to have taken on a new life—it’s now attracted nearly four times as many new subscribers as those who noped out, as well as a heartening/heartbreaking number of people who’ve said some version of “me too—I recognise that dynamic”. Whether it’s parents or siblings or partners, this kind of relationship is even more common than I knew. 

There’s a comfort in that solidarity. There’s a sadness too. We all deserved better. We all deserved someone who’d listen when we spoke and encourage us to find our voice instead of drowing us in their own.

And so I have a choice.

I can either listen to that old internal voice that tells me to keep quiet, to stay small, to avoid anything that might bring my writing into my mother’s line of sight. Or I can listen to the collective voices of people who recognise the pain and confusion of difficult families—and keep talking about it. 

I choose the second option. I choose you. 

That’s not to say that this is all I’ll be writing about. I still want to share the joy of nature and mud in words and images, I want to share ideas for unearthing your own memories and telling your own story. I want to get stuck into the psychology and mechanics of storytelling as a tool for connection.

I’ve taken a small diversion away from my regularly scheduled programming in recent weeks. But that was always the purpose of my cow plan. It’s a plan I hold lightly and that allows me the opportunity to indulge in a small diversion here and there, or to take a quick peep over an adjacent hedge. 

Regarding my mother’s health—the good news is that the news is as good as it can be. The cancer has been caught early and will be removed in a matter of weeks under local anaesthetic. She’ll be home the same day. In an out in a matter of minutes. No need for radiotherapy or chemo. Much as my mother drives me insane, I don’t wish her any ill (especially now that my own writing is no longer dependent on her life or death) so I’m grateful for this news. 

I’m grateful too, to have found my way back into the Sunday writing and publishing swing. Kind of. Even if I’m writing this on the morning of publication. 

In the spirit of not allowing imperfection to drive me off course, I’ll record the audio version of this post later in the week. The gale is still howling outside my window and the neighbour’s fecking wind chimes are still clattering away in the background. I’ll do it when the world is quieter.

Until then, Pickle and I will be heading to the seafront to watch the waves. 

Will you join us?

The next part of “I’ll wait until you’re dead”, where I delve into why it’s taken me so long to tell my part of the family story, is still in progress. If you’d like to know when the next part is published, subscribe now.