All by myself (I wanna be)

The view from my last room of my own. (Edinburgh 2004)

Last night I was playing hide and seek with my children, and for a few glorious minutes I shut myself in my wardrobe and was alone in the dark. Until they found me. The blighters.

I had forgotten how wonderful it is to be alone in the dark. From the numerous nights we fall asleep while putting the kids to bed and wake up at 2am realising that practically every light in the house is still on (not to mention the TV and a couple of computers), to even the “proper” evenings when we’re all asleep at a socially acceptable hour but the landing light has been left on to facilitate safe midnight ablutions, I don’t think I’ve experienced proper darkness in years.

More to the point, I’m very rarely on my own anymore. So much so, that when my friend posted this amusing link on Facebook last night, my first thought was “screw the kids, think of the parents!” We are never allowed to ignore our children. We have to be with them all the time, and we're all utterly sick of each other. 

Now, I am by no means the first person to make this observation (and if you know me or have read this blog, this is by no means the first time I've discussed it) and there is even a significant study showing that mothers today spend more one-on-one time with their children than mothers did in the late 1960s – pretty much the height of stay-at-home motherness. The author of this study is the late Suzanne Bianchi from the University of Maryland, but it’s detailed in this Washington Post article: "Despite 'Mommy Guilt,' Time with Kids Increasing."

Mommy guilt aside, the biggest social change is how children are no longer allowed to be left unattended. This is for very good reason, of course, but frustrating when social norms dictate that you can’t just send your children outside to play while you have a quiet cup of tea. Furthermore, everything from school to children’s activities is a series of mandated parent drop-offs or outright compulsory parent attendance. If, like us, you don’t have extended family on hand, sometimes the only way you can get a moment to yourself is to pay for it. And if you’re a stay-at-home mother, that’s not always financially viable.

One of the things you’ll find mothers going back to work delight in is the time alone, whether it be on the commute or during lunch break. This is short-lived, however, because work mostly involves dealing with other people. For me, I go from dealing with the needs and demands of my own small children to the needs and demands of college students. Sometimes they don’t seem too dissimilar.

Like anything, it is money and privilege that buys you time alone. As Virginia Woolf wrote, £500 per annum and A Room of One’s Own. For me as a scholar and a writer, this has been the biggest blow of motherhood, and I probably should have listened to Woolf, but, you know, I had this CRAZY idea that things might be different in the 21st century. As it turned out, I was not fortunate enough to be in a proper job when I had my children, so there was no paid maternity leave or a position to go back to that allowed for research and writing time. I get the contract teaching I can, I grab the childcare I can afford, and I snatch the time to plan lessons and mark papers, often in the middle of the night when the children are asleep. I don’t know about other children, but mine do not leave me alone to work. It is a miracle I've published anything in the last six years, but I have.

And here’s the rub. I am a daydreamer. I can be annoyingly extroverted and organised, but mostly I’m the type of person who needs space to work into an idea. A walk through a city, a mental warm up in the library, a room of my own in which to ruminate. I need the time to sing. I get emotionally bogged down by domestic toing and froing, driving hither and thither, and mundane paperwork. I will not accept the requirements of my quotidian existence, so ruminate on them instead. You could say, I’m more than capable when I put my mind to it, but prone to distraction.

There are brilliant scholars out there who can compartmentalise their time: get the kids to school, teach a class, go to a meeting, library in the afternoon, be at home for dinner, get the children to bed, and then write for 2 hours in the evening. 

I am not one of those people and I suspect they have staff anyway. Or a wife. I certainly don’t have an answer for all this, but it seems that modern life, be it parental or professorial, no longer allows for eccentricity. Everything is bound by efficiency and regulation. I can no longer be the mother who sits in organised chaos, benignly neglecting her children while still providing them with love and art and music and ideas.  Sometimes food. Similarly, I may no longer be the scholar with an eclectic take on the world who is given the space to sit in the darkness or light or whatever, and come up with proper ideas. And by proper ideas, I do not mean the relentless publication schedule required to achieve tenure. But that’s a subject for another post.

Discuss.    

Human Godwits

Cockle Bay April 2005

A few months ago, I changed my blog name to Godwit Tales. Not that anyone noticed or anything. Thanks for asking. Anyway, Dr. Atchison and Mrs. Evans is probably a cooler title, but I suddenly decided I didn’t need my name – indeed both my names – in such a prominent position. Without any requests for an explanation, I will, in the grand tradition of blogs, give you an explanation for the Godwit.

I’ve always had a thing for godwits, which are of course coastal wading birds known for their impressive migratory journeys. The bar-tailed godwits notably migrant in March and April from New Zealand to Alaska and Siberia, with only a short stop in China on the way. They breed in the arctic and then make the return journey as the northern summer ends. It’s the longest non-stop flight of any bird.

Growing up by the mudflats and inlets of Cockle Bay, near Auckland, I knew about godwits. I also have a rather lovely memory from primary school of the intercom coming on in class one day and the voice of our excited principal telling all classes to go out onto the field to watch the godwits pass overhead. In my no doubt incorrect recollection he said something like, “Excuse me all classes, the godwits are flying, the godwits are flying!”

Several years later at university, I read Robin Hyde’s The Godwit’s Fly (1938) and latched myself ideologically onto her wonderful foreword “Concerning Godwits” with its perfect description of how we New Zealanders are “human godwits” and “our north is mostly England.”

Our youth, our best, our intelligent, brave and beautiful, must make the long migration, under a compulsion they hardly understand; or else be dissatisfied all their lives long. They are the godwits. The light bones of the mother knew it before the chick was hatched from the eggshell.

I knew Hyde’s poetry quite well, thanks to all those wonderful choral settings by David Hamilton, my school music teacher, and I was privileged to learn about Hyde’s place in New Zealand literature from Poet Laureate herself, Michele Leggott. But Hyde is one of those writers who unsettles me by articulating so clearly many of the things I always felt about New Zealand and my place in it, even though she died nearly forty years before I was born. It certainly helped that she set her novel Wednesday’s Children (1937) on an island in the mudflats of Cockle Bay. Anyone from Howick will know exactly the island she means. The rest of you can look at the photo above. 

So in honour of being a human godwit trying to live out the endless migratory compulsion written into my bones, I recommend to you her foreword. Hopefully in the process, it will remind me that “Only fools, said the sparse-ribbed rock, are ever lonely.”

http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/authors/hyde/godwit.asp

Be prepared for a pop quiz.