By the (frozen) rivers of Babylon

It was at the post office on an absolutely frigid day in January 2014. We had been in Canada little over six months, and as the coldest winter in 30 years was setting in, the novelty of my new life as an immigrant was wearing off.

I was sending something back home and making cheery chitchat with the lady behind the counter. We were on friendly enough terms and she was asking me how things were going. Then she asked me directly:

“But how are you, really?”

She wore her own status as a landed immigrant in her accent, and I knew exactly what she meant.

I’m ok. Everyone is very nice and I’m in a privileged position as an immigrant. I mean, my husband lived here as a child, so we know people, and we have contacts. At least I speak English! But…

“Do you have a job?”

Then in that suburban strip mall post office, the outpouring began. My newfound comrade took the reins of the conversation, explaining how she had moved from India 12 years earlier, and how difficult it had been to find work as an immigrant. How it didn’t matter what her qualifications were, or years of experience, because all anyone cared about was “Canadian experience,” and how her husband never really understood because he got to go to work and meet interesting people, but she was stuck inside in the depths of a foreign winter with the children going mad and no one to explain to her what to do, and no one was that interested in who she really was.

Her rant full of experience and her concern for me as an individual was a lifeline, because in my privilege as a white, English-speaking, highly-educated immigrant, I was denying the shock of being a stranger in a new land. It allowed me to get upset for the first time since we arrived.

I never came to Canada expecting to waltz into my dream job. I am an academic and a musician; we know the dream job is often an unattainable beast, but I expected to be given a chance. I was upset because this act of settlement had shown me with frightening clarity that without the context of your family, friends, work connections, and a general knowledge of your abilities, you are just a faceless applicant with a CV. Whether I stated it or not, my CV screamed woman in her 30s, mother of two young children. NEXT.

My time in Canada hasn’t been all bad by any stretch of the imagination. I have picked up teaching work, I have presented research, I have sung in a professional capacity, and I have made friends with locals and other highly-qualified-but-out-of-work immigrants alike. But I am leaving, returning to a sense of connectedness and community I never fully appreciated until now.

  

People who have never moved countries always talk about your family. “Oh, it must be so hard without your parents nearby.” Yes, but there’s more. It’s hard always having to ask where to get basic services, and always having to check the nature of some specific bureaucracy. It’s frustrating to suddenly realise that you can’t call your doctor friends to check if the specialist you’ve been referred to is any good, because it dawns on you that you don’t know any doctors here. Hang on, you don’t actually know any lawyers either should the need arise for something to be signed, and you’re in a new country so there’s always something that has to be signed. How do I not know any lawyers? It feels like half my family and university friends and their parents are lawyers back home. Hell’s teeth, in Auckland, I’m a phone call away from a friendly chat with a couple of QCs to clarify a point, if I ever needed. My family are by no means “society”, but you don’t live in a city for six generations without knowing a few people.

Even in Scotland, where I studied for my PhD, my status as an active member of a university department, not to mention singing with St. Giles Cathedral, gave me connections to public institutions, the arts, the medical fraternity, the Church of Scotland, the legal profession, even the Scottish Executive. Just knowing those contacts are there is an immense comfort when you are a young, single woman in a new country. It makes you feel like you belong.

For my first year in Canada, despite making friends, actively trying to find work, joining research groups and choirs, it felt like I was mostly at home, and that my only social role was at the school gate or signing permission forms for my children.

Nothing I had done previously was of much relevance to the people around me. I was starting over, which is extremely difficult when you’re in your 30s and your primary focus is your children. At this stage in your life, you rely on walking into a rehearsal or seminar and having people say, “hey, Erin! We haven’t seen you for a while. Kids keeping you busy? Oh, by the way, you’re a bit of an expert on Margaret Fuller, right? What’s the deal with that letter to Beethoven?” Or asking me if I can help organise something because they know I rock at telling musicians what to do.  

Instead, I got condescending smiles and indifference when I gave my apologies for next week because I couldn’t get babysitting.

I am leaving Canada in a few months and returning to Auckland, where I can’t swing a cat without it hitting someone I know. So, you might be wondering where this post is going. Well, whenever you hear someone make some ill-informed comment about refugees and immigrants coming over here (wherever here might me) and stealing jobs and services, just tell them to stop being so ridiculous. Tell them how difficult and lonely it can be even for those of us who immigrate in the very best of circumstances. Tell them to spare a thought for all the people who have to, for whatever reason, give up their communities and connections for the hope of a better life. Remind them that that “better life” can be one shrouded in daily indifference and at times active hostility from new neighbours. Tell them to take the time to ask a new immigrant, “But how are you, really?”

The nostalgia of illness

It was the 1980s and this little girl always got sick.

I have a little theory muddling around about nostalgia and the various arguments against vaccination.

Yes, nostalgia.

With a measles outbreak in the USA now entering Canada, not to mention mumps going round the players of the NHL (hope all those boys are vaccinated, unless they don’t mind the potential side-effect of sterility), there’s a lot about vaccines in the media at the moment. AS THERE BLOODY WELL SHOULD BE. Marvels of modern medicine they are, and we should count ourselves lucky that we live in a society that so freely gives them and also allows the vanity of deciding not to have them. Yes, vanity.  

But anyway, I don’t want to discuss the science or the pros and cons. There is nothing to debate. Unless there is some medically necessitous reason why your child cannot receive a vaccine, you should vaccinate your children. And, if you don’t, I think you more than a little foolish, certainly selfish, and agree with a recent article in the New Republic which says you’re an individualistic product of western capitalism.

Anyway, nostalgia. It’s a pretty powerful thing. The sense of a pre-digital, pre-industrial, prelapsarian time when we were natural, and children fought off illnesses because of their peck of dirt and healthy constitutions. It’s bollocks of course, because you only need to go through a graveyard to see the clusters of children buried during measles, diphtheria, and typhus outbreaks. Often groups of children from one family, buried within weeks of each other. The young adults who must have presumed they had dodged the contagious illness bullet, only to be struck down horribly in their prime. Go graveyard visiting sometime - it ain’t fun. Also, if there is an old family photo of a relative who died in childhood, frame and hang it on your wall to remind you that although your grandparents may have lived hale and hearty lives, some of their siblings and cousins, and aunts and uncles did not. 

However, we don’t do that. We think mostly of our own relatively mild cases of measles and the week or so we had off school, maybe watching the daytime soaps once we improved, and perhaps the trip to the toy shop we made when we got better, forgetting that we were actually vaccinated, so our case of measles was ridiculously mild compared with the full-blown disease, and we haven’t the first clue what we’re talking about. That is actually my memory of English measles at the age of nine. I don’t have to remember, like my parents’ generation, children at school dying – I remember receiving a new Sylvanian Family toy. SCORE! My memory of German Measles (Rubella), however, isn’t so complete. Why? I wasn’t vaccinated – you got the vaccine at 11 in those days - so I was actually very sick. I also got a secondary infection, so I probably suffered from delirium and don’t have pleasant days-off-school memories. Because being very sick sucks.

Worse still, we think about literary instances like Esther Summerson in Bleak House miraculously surviving the small pox. MIRACULOUSLY. There’s a clue somewhere in that word. Or we have in the back of our minds the romantic trope of illness and reconciliation, like Gilbert getting typhoid fever in Anne of the Island, and Anne suddenly realising that it was always him just as she was about to lose him. Gilbert “gets the turn” and recovers, but L.M. Montgomery doesn’t go into detail about the four week course of the illness that would have involved nearly a fortnight of raging fever; nor the dehydration, bleeding and diarrhoea that would have left Gilbert practically skeletal from the inability to consume anything. Montgomery didn’t need to because her audience understood. Her audience realised that even once Gilbert was past the point of danger, Anne wasn’t going near that place for another few weeks. There’s no rushing to the bedside with typhoid. 

Some of these illnesses, like typhoid, have been reduced by good hygiene and antibiotics, but the majority of those scourges of childhood have no treatment, and can only be prevented by the wonders of vaccines.  

Anyway, I don’t condemn this nostalgia. We all love a happy ending, but these narratives are not supposed to make us sentimental about illness, they’re meant to remind us how fortunate we are to be alive. I also don’t condemn this nostalgia because I experience it myself. I was a sick little girl for two months in 1985. I had an extremely bad strain of glandular fever and spent a month in bed. I then spent a second month recovering. I then spent another month slowly integrating back into school. It took a full five years to get over the disease properly. In my memory, those months were a golden autumn of kindly doctor attention, and days lying in bed listening to the hits of the 50s, 60s, and 70s on the radio. Of not having to go to school.

But, it’s important to remember that I wasn’t at risk of dying. Not even close. This was the best kind of illness: all the days off school and none of the stress; plenty of inconvenience for my parents, but none of the desperate worry.  

Nevertheless, the two songs I remember most from that time are illuminating:

“Help me, help me, help me sail away. Well give me two good reasons why I oughta stay.” [“Lazy Sunny Afternoon” The Kinks]

“Where do you go to, my lovely? When you’re alone in your bed? Tell me the thoughts that surround you; I want to look inside your head, yes I do.” [“Where do you go to my lovely” Peter Sarstedt]

Seven-year-olds aren’t very subtle, and maybe being sick wasn’t as fun as I remember.

However, it makes for a good story. A story of being sick and surviving, which can be so rare in our privileged times. Such stories have cultural capital.

My aunt and my mother have such stories. Of almost dying from now utterly avoidable childhood diseases – scarlet fever and polio, respectively. They are their stories to tell, but they could be so easily manipulated into the narratives of anti-vaccination. Or of tales about how the body heals itself and we are all the stronger for it.

Of course they are not such stories; they are tales of the wonders of modern medicine. Of the right doctors doing the right things when it was so desperately required. They are tales of how the body survives, but there is irreparable damage. They are tales of two women who nearly died from childhood diseases, who subsequently have other desperate health stories to tell you. How you fall victim to one serious illness and your body becomes more and more susceptible to others. How one illness can lead to another your whole long life.

So don’t fall victim to the nostalgic narrative that “we all had measles as kids and we were fine.” We all didn’t. Some of us live with the ongoing repercussions of our illnesses. Some of us didn’t live to tell that story at all.

Get your kids vaccinated for all our sakes.

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.