The Five Strands of A Sedentary Empress

Go Ask Alice

"Faith doesn't dig ditches, they say; faith doesn't scrape the burn from the bottom of the pot. Ultimately, faith gives freedom, and discipline, its sister, makes sure the job gets done. Rarely do we discuss our own attempts at poetry even though it is the poetry of others that routinely charges us with enough faith to go on."--Alice Sebold, writer.

I love that quote. There's a lot in it which I understand and relate to right now. I've been resting on hope and faith for too long, now, and it's not getting things done. My cynicism is lurking under the quilt of openness and belief, ready to jump out and say 'gotcha!', and the only person who doesn't acknowledge that it's there is me. I want to be open about things, I want to be the person who walks around smiling and believing in my happiness but it isn't who I am. I am the person who thinks too much, and all that thinking keeps me too busy to smile. I need discipline, and not in a 'hit me baby, one more time' kind of way.

The bit about the poetry of others...it's like I wrote it. I need the poetry of others or I wouldn't write at all. I need the happiness of others or I'd never laugh. I need the misery of others to feel good about where I am, and the hatred of others to bring about my deepest, bloodiest voice. I lie in the hot water of the bathtub and I read, thinking that words will fall from the pages into the water, like snowflakes, or slivered coconut from the sides of a cake, and that somehow they will move into me, through the water, through the heat, and I will become pregnant with stories which I'll one day deliver.

Sometimes I see poetry in the strangest things and it amuses me because five years ago I didn't see anything. I might have written exclusively about love, back then, and it was redundant and uninspiring and always fell short of what I thought I was feeling. Then, last week, I saw poetry in the single strand of hair I let fly from the bathroom window. I started to write something about it, but it sits unfinished, a thin layer of dust on each shaky, unmarried word. I'll get around to it, at some point.

The trouble with 'real life', is that it isn't free, and that when you make the decision to follow the more travelled path of work, marriage/relationship and children, it makes for creative suicide. Oh, there are exceptions, sure, but I recently read a book of essays by female writers who discussed the troubles associated with balancing a family with their passion to write. Nearly all of them were divorced or on the verge of it, and many were close to impoverished. Choosing to follow the dream of exploring one's imagination comes with a price it seems, and while, again, there are exceptions, I think it would be foolish of me to say that I would consider leaving behind convention in order to type out my thoughts in the hope that others might care to read them. I don't know why I get a charge out of writing but it's the one thing about myself which I can say feels the least contrived. I was born with a head full of letters and grew a great big ego. Put those two things together and you have someone who wants their ideas in print.

I met another 'mom' from the neighbourhood today. She lives around the corner, has a four-year-old named Fiona, both of whom M knew from his park mornings when he used to take the wee one for her daily bit of socializing. He ended up having coffee with Fiona and her parents on Sunday and they made plans for a playdate this morning at our house. I was up early, blearily made my way to the kitchen and whipped up a dozen banana crumb muffins to offer them. Ten a.m. seems early for a gal like myself who prefers the night over morning, but I managed to get everything ready in time. In came L. with her wee Fiona and even more wee Simon, a ten-month-old with huge heather-coloured eyes. L. is cheerful, the kind of woman who looks more like herself when she smiles, I think, and she kept step with my conversation topics which I'm sure came at her like machine gun fire. She didn't ask many questions, but she wasn't cold and detached either, and the hour and a half flew by. We drank tea, ate muffins and watched as our daughters ran around in circles dressed in glittery princess garb. She left when the baby started to wail, needing a nap and some attention, and though we made no further plans to get together, I don't think she'd be against another playdate. She was pleasant, plain-faced yet attractive, talked about travelling and hinted at liking film, but I'm not sure there was any kind of kindred spark between us. I know I prattled, which I do when I'm a little nervous, and I was conscious of how I had come to own the conversation between us, but I'd stop talking now and then to let her initiate a topic or two, which she did. By the time she left, I was exhausted, a combination of hormones, lack of sleep and overall nervous anxiety from the last few days, but still I gathered my book bag and walked over to the school for computer class. I can't deny liking feeling as though my day had purpose, though. It might even be enough to push me toward finishing my hair poem.

I apologized to M. for being 'a bit of a sourpuss' these past few days, and he laughed and said 'correction! colossal sourpuss!'. I know, I said sheepishly. When he'd asked me last night how I was, I unleashed a torrent of misery unlike anything he'd ever seen before. I went on and on about hating where I'm at right now, the restrictions I'm faced with daily, the struggling I never thought I'd be dealing with at this stage of my life. I hate the lack of happy surprises, the uselessness I feel hourly, the fact that even buying milk seems extravagant at the moment, and I really, really hate that I'm the only person in my small world of friends and family who is in this predicament. I know he took it personally, as though I were blaming him for the way things are, and maybe I was a little. A highly educated man who seems so sure of himself at all times, it never makes sense to me that he wouldn't use his accomplishments to get himself a job that pays well. He chooses to do what he does, and that's fine because he's happy, but when the mortgage is due, when we want meat for dinner, when we need the kind of toilet paper that doesn't peel delicate skin away, I have trouble feeling supportive about the path he's chosen. What it means is that I have to be accountable for those things on a more even scale than any other woman I know, and it isn't easy, dealing with the weight of it. He doesn't understand why I have trouble with this, considers a marriage/relationship to be a partnership in the literal sense, and he doesn't understand the concept of a man 'supporting' his wife because he equates this with leeching. I do not agree with this philosophy at all, so I spewed with rebellion and vented with defiance, my lip curled and my tone thick as pond ice. I admitted to feeling miserable with the pressure I'm under, a persistent tension that has existed since we moved into this house, I could see in his face that he believed I was hinting that I hated my life with him. Such hurt and worry, all because of the thoughts I felt I had to get out of me, thoughts which might have been born of insecurity and shades of crazy. How long?, his voice was husky and shaky, and I knew I'd taken my self pity too far. I made some sort of unintelligible remark about needing new socks, new makeup and black clothes which are actually black, and then we left it at that because there was nowhere else for it to go.

Then, today. I took a step back from the situation and saw that I am worrying when worrying can do nothing for me. Action will, but worry won't. I know it, and I am still frozen, but at least I know. Feeling uncertain, without a clear goal or a visible path toward the horizon is a strange kind of hell. It's a free-floating sensation, one that holds no pleasure because you are always aware that gravity will betray you, and you could hit the ground at any moment. I don't like chairlifts, rollercoasters, or heights for this reason. I like to be strapped in, to know I can't fall off, and to see the point of safety.

Things break down when you choose to stop believing in what you can accomplish. You get lazy, you root to the floor and find that you forget how to use your legs and brain; a weeping willow to sway in the blue night wind.