Mothers Are Like Rainbows

Posted on 9 May 2012

The title is from a book of pro-mother quotes you might give your mum for mother’s day. In my imagination. Honestly, I could have sworn it was a real book title spotted in a thrift store, but there is no book to be found online, just a poem (with an apostrophe! brilliant!) although there is a book called Grandmothers Are Like Snowflakes, so most likely I made it up from that.

Anyway, Mothers Are Like Rainbow’s (the poem) (I love that apostrophe!) takes the reasonable path of appreciating mothers for inspiring you whether things are going well or horribly, whereas what I had in mind with this appliqued muumuu was actually even more literal (in the metaphorical sense of literal…) where mothers actually consist of the water plus the sunshine, the job embodying misery and bliss at the same time, pretty much all of the time, if you know what I mean. It’s this arch standing over everything, a bit like the McDonalds arches, holding sway over everything beneath. I’m a mother with a bit of a God complex (a fairly normal psychosis for mums IMO) but essentially this is meant to be a Power Icon Of Motherhood that makes you feel really bloody good about your job. Of having Created The World. (That’s right, feel good about yourself, it’s OK!)

So, the world you see is quite idealised in a kids’ book kind of way, although I don’t make perfect sewing (it’s more like trying to paint with fabric for me) so things are rough round the edges, and maybe weird. The stuffed VW van is velcroed onto the bridge over the river, down which various random items of junk are being washed. The junk is just as decorative as the houses, trees, flowers and the weather. The sheep are fuzzy, of course. And there are no people, because everything here really represents human beings anyway. We’re all children, even if we’re parents. So, everything is a person, loads of people. Just not literally. Metaphorically.

Anyway, it’s fun, and it says what I think about mothering, and you could actually even wear it if you really wanted to look like an utter, utter loon.

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blogging about blogging

Posted on 24 January 2012

When blogging was first invented, I used to blog a lot. And I had, ten years ago, what felt like a lot of readers: 200 hits a day! Maybe that’s still a lot now, for a random person with a blog, or maybe it’s even a lot for a medium blog. Who knows. But I have been wanting, meaning and longing to go back to blogging regularly ever since not-blogging, and not figured out a way how. Blogging is such a lovely literary art form; short, straightforward, punchy, powerful, fresh, potentially prosaic and poetic at the same time, and the most direct connection to your audience possible for a piece of self-published writing. Which is wonderful.

But blogging has changed since 2002, obviously, and trying to figure out how the hell to make it work is something that has kept me from doing it for the last few years.

When you talk to people about blogging, they always have advice. Here are some of the arguments about blogging I think are wrong:

1. Just go ahead and blog what you want.
Blogging is self-publishing your writing, and publishing is a public act. There’s no such thing as a personal essay that happens to be in public, like the original “online journals” used to pretend to be. Publishing stuff for entirely selfish reasons is pretty much pointless: you get nothing out of it and neither does anybody else. Better to knit soft toys for the children’s hospital, if you have that much spare time.

2. Pick something you want to learn about, and blog about the process.
What for? It’s hard enough learning something without then having to expose everything you’re learning to whoever wants to tell you how to do it better. I am learning how to have a small business right now, and sharing most of the important things I learn would be really stupid because they would make me look incompetent. Seriously, people who say they are sharing their learning are only sharing bits of it. The bits they consider fit for public consumption, that don’t make them look bad. If they share the bits that make them look bad, they are either alienating their audience or their audience is there for the wrong reasons.

I know someone like Penelope Trunk has billions of comments by people saying, “I’m so glad you blogged about the miscarriage, nobody ever talks about those things and it really helped me,” but not many people can walk the line she walks between integrity and disaster. Most of us share what we really think with close people we trust, and there’s a good reason for that: difficult learning requires a safe space in which to happen. That’s why AA has the word “anonymous” in the title. Not so much now, but back when it was founded, being an alcoholic was something you did not tell people about. For many of us, the real learning process would hardly even make sense when put into words, from a stranger’s point of view, never mind being helpful or appropriate.

And that’s OK; it’s healthy.

3. Become an expert at something, and blog about that.
This works great unless there are already fifty eight thousand experts in the same field. What do people want experts in? Getting rich. Having a great career. Happiness. An idyllic lifestyle of farming and homeschooling and baking and taking heartbreakingly beautiful photos of your American Dream Come True. Maybe a new blog by an expert in antique mirrors or Siamese kitten health could find an audience, but the smaller the field, the more narrowly obsessed you must be to enjoy writing about it.

Anyway, as far as I know I am not an expert in anything or likely to become one, and the fields as yet un-experted seem few and far between, to me. So, no go there.

And here are some kinds of blog that I think can work now, for individuals:

1. Blogging about your business.
It’s not essential as there are other social media ways to open up your business as an online reality and deepen your relationship with your audience, but blogging can be one of those. I use my business’s facebook page to do this, about all things Brit-related. Endless posts about “our new product!” from other small businesses drive me personally mad, so I don’t want to be writing them for my audience. Maybe I’m wrong though.

2. Blogging about yourself for your career audience.
This can work if your career involves an audience, say if you are a writer and they want to know about you and what you think about stuff, or if your job involves meeting thousands of people and they like to feel they know more about you personally but you can’t meet them all for dinner the whole time (or don’t want to).

But I am still stuck when it comes to What Blogging Would Do For Me; which basically means the same as, What I Could Do Through Blogging That Would Be Of Value To Other People.

Because in the end, there’s no point in publishing stuff that nobody wants to read BECAUSE nobody wants to read it! Publishing should be about what other people do want. That doesn’t mean what they want right now: it can be something you believe in, that they may want later on, once you have spread the word. And it’s OK to try and fail in that too. But you need a vision for that.

So I guess what I’m saying is I’ve been waiting for my own vision or intuition of How To Blog, and it has not yet arrived. When I used to ask my now-defunct blog audience what to write about, they always said “you” or “just your ideas”. And I don’t see any way of making that viable as a blog now. Input welcome!

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And now, a poem.

Posted on 22 November 2011

I started reading this biography of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, and got inspired to write about some of the things it brought up, mostly to do with love and art and death, but this one turned out to be a war poem. Hughes’ father fought in World War I and was one of only seventeen men in his regiment to return from Gallipoli, and the war was an influence on Hughes throughout his career.

***

The Curse

There were so many men buried underneath the valleys and the moors
they couldn’t fit them all in, so
many had to be left where they were, overseas,
decorated with those little red flowers that make some cry
and others angry.

And the ghosts wandering up and down hills and standing staring at the mists
there were not so many of those, but some
could stand with sticks, and others still used
their hands to make something during the day,
although at night they lay there moaning
in the deep dirt, their cries buried in a blanket of blasts surrounding,
but we heard them alone, across the landing,
never going home.

There was no getting better. There was no better.
Just the past they had come back to try to live in,
that wanted to enclose them in its long dead arms, not knowing it had passed.
No-one knew who were the real ghosts.
We were too unprepared for this. It was beyond
anything we had heard in Homer or the Bible. Times had been moving
into some kind of love and poetry and thinking, and then
to see it all slashed open in the guts; it made no sense to us.
We were quite lost.
We knew no better.
We stopped our mouths and quietly laid the table
and sat down to eat
in rectangles.

If you start to look at all of this it rears its rampant ugly burning daemon head
right at you, and snarls and threatens to suck you in, and you will feel absolutely compelled to
go there, as if it were some act of compassion
that could help, as if it could bring back
some semblance of dignity or respect to those who lost their minds
hearts guts families souls and faith.
But there is no way. They wouldn’t want it.
They only want to keep their secrets from us
and let us live.

If you can stop the raging in your stomach, calm the indignation in your mind,
and feel a lifeline reaching back to a quiet attempt to serve
the daily bread, whatever the cost, even the highest price of those we know
and wish so hard to help; if you can let them go,
and say it was God’s will, and believe it,
and sit down at table and dissect your supper with a knife and fork,
and say your Grace and eat it;
if you can be a better man than me,
perhaps, my friend, you may just live to see
the Daemon turn away.

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Things I’ve Learned in Business so far #1: Get Advice, and then Ignore it.

Posted on 16 November 2011

When I was a La Leche League Leader, we had an expression that was used in meetings when people were not sure about the ideas they were hearing, which happens from time to time when you are trying to help a bunch of people with different parenting styles feel empowered and confident about sharing what works for them. The expression was, “take what you want and leave the rest behind”. It’s good because it works. The only time it doesn’t work is when people don’t do it, for instance by taking other people’s choices as a personal criticism of their own choices, or by expecting their experience to correlate with all the facts and research, which does not always happen.

But empowering mothers means encouraging them to trust their own feelings and judgement. You can’t nurture a child when you are hating whatever process you are in at the time, when things just feel all wrong to you. So sometimes the reason you need advice is to listen, consider, and then ignore it and follow your intuition instead.

When I feel unsure about what I’m doing, or things seem out of control in a way that is beyond me, I seek advice. But seeking advice can be a dangerous business when you are just less confident than you need to be, which is me a lot of the time (anxious, over-thinking, obsessive). You can end up doing stuff that is completely wrong just because someone cleverer than you recommended it, when you did not even give them the full story from which to advise (which would take me all year, if it was possible, what with being anxious, over-thinking and obsessive).

My business is still in its early stages, not into profit yet, and money is always tight, and before we had a cafe we were a food business for several years using a rented kitchen. These days everyone knows that the way to start a food business is to sell food from a van, avoiding the phenomenal and mafioso-like costs and payouts and taxes and (effectively) club membership charges designed to make sure that McDonalds keeps thriving and small businesses that don’t operate like McDonalds have very little chance in hell. Every time you blink there is a special certificate for blinking in a food-production place that has to be paid, and every piece of equipment has to be tested and certified and every time you get a new certificate the 10 minute visit and piece of paper costs several hundred dollars to perform.

So when I was having money woes and the esteemed and kindly Chris Yeh generously offered his valuable advice in an attempt to help, his thought was very reasonably that as the cafe premises is the most expensive part of our operation, it might be worth losing that, in order to make things more manageable financially. I thought this was very sensible and decided to go ahead with a two-stage plan of testing the waters better, then considering downsizing. I knew how lucky I was to have Chris offering his ideas, and I knew that he knew what he was talking about.

Then I went ahead and completely ignored everything we had said and faffed around doing other stuff instead, like crossing my fingers and watching Beverley Hills Housewives and trying to write my book.

I did not really know why, but thinking about losing the cafe just felt wrong. It was something to do with what my daughter said when I brought it up with her- “You can’t lose the cafe, it’s the coolest thing about what you do!” It was partly because when my friend Naomi visited from London, she also thought the cafe was really cool, and only suggested putting more stuff in it. I just had a feeling that the cafe was, in some way, the heart of the business. It should be working, even if it was not working. I panicked about money, fantasised about running away, going bankrupt, becoming a midwive ($10k to train in Austin, plus I’d be rubbish), becoming the new J.K. Rowling.

I’m an introvert. I spend a lot of time alone and don’t always find it exactly energising to be around a lot of people. I’m also built like whatever the opposite of a brick outside loo is, and pretty feeble when it comes to spending hours and hours on my feet cooking, washing-up and waitressing. Sometimes, opening a public eating place seems like the last thing I should ever have done.

But my idea for the Full English Cafe was not just about food. It was about hospitality. I would not invite guests to dinner and then serve them hot dogs from a caravan in a car park, and I wanted the people who visited the cafe- the business itself, Full English- to be comfortable, feel looked after, spend time sharing the space, have an extra pot of tea, sit and chat, play a game of Cluedo, bring some sewing, mess around with music, watch some telly and have a good time. So we still struggle every day to make that happen. I wouldn’t say it’s a dream, and I don’t have a grand vision for the future of how it will all turn out. There’s just this feeling that this is supposed to be how things are, which compells me to continue with it. Even though there’s nothing profitable about having people stay for hours playing Cluedo.

Plus there aren’t too many people right now who want to buy an eccentrically-converted cafe/kitchen behind a convenience store in deep South Austin anyway.

When my daughter was small, she was very easily bored indeed. We would spend a lot of time going through ideas and suggestions for what her next activity might be, which went something like this:
Me: “How about some drawing? We’ve got new pens, or you could chalk on the driveway instead… another craft activity? There’s wool, fabric, how about glittering?…. Do you feel like cooking, we could make some bread, or toffee, or a treacle tart?” This went on and on, with every idea rejected, until finally the jackpot was struck:
Daughter: “I know! I’m going to make a hardware store in the attic!” or somesuch. This process was somewhat frustrating to me for a long time, until someone told me it was normal and happens a lot with kids who are used to self-directed learning. They need to come up with their own idea. That’s the whole point of the process. It’s about much more than just finding something to do.

When you have a business, you need to come up with your own idea too. Not for the sake of it, but because it needs to be true to who you are. Because who you are is what makes the business worthwhile.

Not always, necessarily. But for some of us, definitely.

So I just want to thank everyone who has offered me their thoughts about Full English. Your contribution was always appreciated and helpful in my process of learning to do whatever this thing is that we are doing.

It might seem arrogant, and perhaps usually is arrogant (who knows) but there are many of us who would do better not by trying to conform to facts or research or the views of our elders and betters, but simply by developing our own ability to steer from the heart, through the ups and downs along the way. Take what you want and leave the rest behind; this is not a very macho way of business, but we don’t all want to be Donald Trump, and maybe there is a different way that can also work.

Well, there is always a different way that can work, it just might be uncharted, is all.

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Hello!

Posted on 31 May 2011

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