how it is in january

At the beginning of the month we had a lovely visit from my good friend Marita who lives in Sydney. I got to meet her husband and gorgeous baby girl for the first time. We walked down through our bush to the beach, and then back up and along the bush walk that follows the cliff at the edge of the beach. I still pinch myself sometimes. I can't believe that we live so close to all of this.

I've been taking the dog for a quick walk along that bush walk most mornings. I can leave the kids watching TV for twenty minutes, (which doesn't seem too much like neglect when there's usually at least one other adult somewhere in the building!) and get a brisk walk in the bush.We walk along a winding path and then up a steep set of stairs to get to the view you see in the third photograph. That's a stand of young kauri trees right on the edge of the cliff. They are so small, they really look like they've only just begun and yet they could be one hundred, two hundred years old. Then we walk back down the stairs again and as we descend it's like entering a vast room, with the green canopy above us, and the morning sunlight streaming in, the gaps in the trees our windows.

It's really only just started feeling like summer. It rained for the first half of the month. We are going away to Mum's bach on the Manukau heads today, our first holiday. If we had a boat, we could boat over there in about twenty minutes. Instead we will drive back into town and all the way around this enormous harbour, and get to the other side in about an hour an a half. It seems funny to live on one side of the harbour, and holiday on the other, but would it matter if we spent our lives exploring and knowing only one small part of the world? Would that be any less fulfilling than knowing many places superficially? Actually, I want both. I want to know my corner of the world so well that I can read the land, the water, the trees like a book. And then I want to go everywhere else at least once.

I wrote last time about the madness of cleaning this huge house with the girls home on holiday, but mostly it's been anything but mad around here. The girls have got into this lovely groove of playing together and exploring and making things. They are more content and happy with themselves than I've seen for ages. I know most other mums will be saying that their kids can't wait to get back to school, and that they can't wait for them to go either, but I'm just not like that. The girls are are supposed to start school next week but to be honest, I'm having trouble drumming up any enthusiasm for it. The holidays have left me wistful and wondering, and that's all I have to say about that, for now.

monday

I had a bit of a melt down on Monday. Monday is the day I try to get most of the cleaning done. As a teenager and young adult I resisted my mother's weekly cleaning schedule kicking and screaming all the way, but as the years have gone by and I've added on a husband and children, weekly cleaning has seemed more and more reasonable. Now that we are out here in this enormous house in the bush, it's a necessity. By the time a week rolls around you can see the dust piled up in the corners, and the dog hair and the sand, and the mud and the dead insects. So Monday is cleaning day, and that's just how it is.

It's still holidays of course, so getting the house cleaned with three tag-alongs is an undertaking, even in the best of circumstances. I decided to turn it into challenge for the two big girls, with manageable tasks, and plenty of rewards. We started off really well. They tidied the floors of their bedrooms, cleaned the vanities in the two bathrooms, and had a go at cleaning the toilets too, after I'd done most of the job . They were pretty happy, but I hadn't even started the vacuuming, because I had to manage them all the way, and we were more than half-way through the morning. I started vacuuming while they carried on in the bedrooms and unloaded the dishwasher, and then it all fell apart. Abigail had turned the dishwasher on while we weren't looking, and it had run long enough to make all the clean dishes wet again. So Greer, very gallantly at first, had to dry everything before she could put it away. Ella was supposed to be carrying on tidying up the piles of chaos in her room where she'd cleared the floor by just picking stuff up and dumping it somewhere else, but, as usual, her tidying kept turning into playing or reading. Greer was slowly getting the dishwasher unloaded, but she had Abigail as a very keen helper, and by the time I went to check on them a bit later, unloading the dishwasher had become a vast picnic game, with every single dish from the dishwasher laid out  in an arc on the floor. The floor that hadn't been vacuumed yet, let alone washed. I think you can imagine.

I stayed calm, at least I thought I stayed calm, and left them to undo their playing, because all I really wanted to do was get on with the vacuuming. I like vacumming, as long as I don't get too many interruptions, but here it takes hours, so I really had to get on with it. A few minutes later Greer was standing in front of me, telling me that she had been carrying some plates and one of them had tipped onto the floor and broken. My heart sank. I followed her to the kitchen. Sure enough, one of my favourite plates was lying in pieces on the floor. I walked out with tears in my eyes. I didn't want to talk to them, and I couldn't face cleaning it up. I walked down to the hall, shut the doors behind me, sat by the bookcase and started putting the books that were on the floor carefully back on the shelves. The tears kept rolling.

I wasn't sad, and I wasn't stressed, but my brain felt like it was full of exploding fireworks, and I was exhausted. Micro-managing three children while trying to clean the whole house had done me in. I sat on the floor crying over the books for ages. The girls kept coming to see how I was and to ask when they could have their next marshmallow. All they wanted was ticks and rewards and a prize-giving and it just made me feel small and tired and taken for granted.

I managed to pull myself together, but I was quiet and slow for the rest of the day. I told the girls I wasn't ready to do ticks on the chart or marshmallows, and so they eventually stopped asking and went off to play. I sat and ate lunch by myself with a good book, and then I read something that was a revelation.

I'm reading "Intimacy and Solitude: balancing closeness and independence" by Stephanie Dowrick. I'm reading it with a pencil for a book mark and I'm underlining and scribbling notes everywhere, because it's that good. The part I was reading was was about the development of "inner security" through a child's early relationships. This was what jumped out at me;

"When things are going well for an infant, the mother stands in for the parts of the infant which are helplessly immature, and comforts the infant through the stages of learning which teach the child that although need is felt within, it must be met from without."

I realised in a flash that what had worn me down wasn't the cleaning, or trying to do it with three children tagging along; it wasn't the broken plate, or the fact that the day was more than half over and I still had so much to do, although it all contributed, it was Isobella's room. Isobella is a whirlwind, her brain is like a whirlwind, and her room mirrors this exactly. For her, tidying up is torture. It is nigh on impossible for her to sort through her chaos and create even a modicum of order. I have been her chief tidy up-er for nearly eight years. I never expect her to tidy up completely on her own. I always have to make her tidy up, and always micro-managing. "Put that there, move those over here, throw those things out."  And I always carry on where she gives up. I have been "standing in" for her need for order her whole life. And for the first time I admitted to myself that this causes me to feel a constant low-level, often unnoticed, stress. It was time to stop "standing in."

I know I am making this out to be simpler than it is. There are all sorts of questions that arise, such as, does Isobella really have a need for order, or am I projecting my own need for order onto her? But the fact of the matter is that I need her floor to be clear so that I can vacuum it, and she needs to be able to clear her surfaces so that we can dust, mostly because Greer is allergic to dust, but also because I think it's important for her to have use-able space in her room and for her to learn take care of her possessions.

The back-story here is that a couple of months ago I figured out I am pretty dyspraxic. That's another story for another post, but I'll tell you this much. It means that I have enough trouble keeping my own stuff ordered and organised, let alone anyone else's. So my daughter's chief tidy up-er is, by nature, an average tidy up-er herself. And Paddy is no more skilled in this area than I am. I tell you, it's the blind leading the blind.

I've written about my struggles with chaos before, and order was my word for 2011. I wrote about chaos and order, and sought to find my own version of order, well before I even knew what Dyspraxia was. I was searching for some kind of ordered nirvana, and yet, instinctively, I knew my order was never going to look like any one else's.

If tidiness is just not on your radar, or you're happy with whatever level of tidiness is achievable on any given day, then you might have come to my house as a visitor and thought it looked pretty tidy. If you are a sworn and proud tidy person (like my sister and Mum are) then you'll have come to my house and seen that there is always something that needs doing. Always a basket of washing sitting somewhere, dishes on the bench, a cupboard in disarray, or a bedroom down the hall that hasn't been tidied for a week. And this is my reality; I actually like a certain amount of order and cleanliness. Clutter and mess for me are like visual white noise. So whatever tidiness and order you see on any day, it will be the best that I could do, and was probably hard-won.

This is quite an admission. I spent the first part of my life trying to rebel against my mother's strict sense of order. I was labelled the "messy one" in the family. As I grew older I realised I wasn't that messy at all, and decided that I had been unfairly labelled. Nevertheless, chaos was always my default setting. I never could quite understand why no matter how hard I tried to be organised, chaos was only a scratch under the surface. I partly came to terms with this last year, when I wrote a post about having grown up living in two worlds. That was really a breakthrough. As soon as I admitted I had my father's relaxed and anti-establishment home-making genes, as well as my mother's, I somehow gave myself permission to be tidy, as contradictory as that sounds. I gave up my rebellion against order once and for all, or so I thought. The house was definitely tidier.

Then we moved here, where it takes half an hour just to vacuum the lounge and dining room, and where dirt, in every form, is a daily part of our lives. The girls spread out from one bedroom to three, and for the first time Isobella had her own desk, her own bedside table, her own dresser, and her own wardrobe. You might think that would make it easier for her to keep her room tidy, but it's actually had the opposite effect. She now has three or four times as much surface area to spread out her creations and clutter, piles and treasures.

Right now I'm writing at the dining table while the girls play around me. I'm not ignoring them, but I am getting the words out while I can, because this story is good for me to write. They have taken out pretty much every puzzle we own, and have spread the pieces around on baking trays and tins as "biscuits" and put them all in the oven. They are happy, and they are occupied. Right now I don't care about the inevitable chaos. The puzzle pieces that will be strewn from the kitchen and down the hall to the lounge. I don't care that the puzzles will be all mixed up, and I don't care that someone, probably me, hopefully with helping hands, will have to sit down and re-order it all. I'm happy because they are happy, and I'm happy because I'm getting these words out.

You see, I can handle chaos. I've grown up with it close, either from within or without. I've learnt to control it, and when I need to I can. But my brain is like a tight rubber band that has to let go with a ping and unravel regularly, and that's exactly what my environment is like too. Chaos and order come and go like the tide. It's the two worlds of my upbringing, it's my wild brain, and it's the dyspraxia. It's just the way I am.

I can't expect any more of my eldest daughter than I expect of myself. Her brain is even wilder and harder to control than my own. But I don't need to take responsibility for something she's old enough to take responsibility for herself, even though she may seem to be less than capable in that area. So I am resigning as her chief tidy up-er. I'm not saying I don't care how messy her room gets, not at all. But the micro-managing is over. I am making peace with her precious chaos.

a for app, b for book

I went book shopping last weekend. It's funny how that doesn't have a ring to it in the way that clothes shopping does. Book shopping. But that's what we did. I got a few Whitcoulls book vouchers for Christmas, one from my little sister Esme, and the others from the girls. I didn't want to go to just any branch, partly because I wanted to have a good selection, and partly because I spent three years working at the big store in Queen St what seems like a lifetime ago, back when I wondered what on earth I was going to do with my life.

So into town we went. It rained all weekend, it was raining when we left. The drive right into town takes about forty minutes, and we drove in with the tires hissing on wet road all the way. I was really looking forward to having a nice time browsing and then coming out with a handful of treasures. I have good memories of working there all those years ago, and I remember clearly the layout of the fiction section where I spent most of the three years I worked there. It had a wall of fantasy and sci-fi, half a wall of classics, three stands of what we called "contemporary fiction" and a long wall filled with bestselling, money-making paperbacks. I spent my days dusting and tidying shelves, bringing armfuls of books down from upstairs and re-stocking, helping customers find or choose books, and serving at the counter when it was busy. The fiction section was tucked in behind at the back of the store, and it was a quiet oasis.

But I knew something was up as soon as we walked into the store. I could see cards where there used to be books, and cook books where there should have been NZ fiction. I walked around to where the fiction section should have been and my heart sank. It was a funny mix of business, craft and reference which melded around the corner into fiction. The entire fiction section fitted into the same floor space that the greeting cards used to take up. I found a few books I was happy with, but I didn't want to browse. It just felt wrong. We went upstairs and my unease grew. Stationery was spread out unevenly over the top floor, and sidled up to it were rows and rows of a complete mix-up of books, all with coloured stickers, most of them blue-stickered, meaning 75% off. I felt like I was at the bedside of a terminally sick relative.

Then we went up to Borders (now owned by the same company as Whitcoulls.) It was the last day of their closing down sale. If being in Whitcoulls had been like being in a hospice, then being in Borders was like standing in the desert and watching vultures consume the remains of a carcass. The once grand three level store had been reduced to one small level, and what books there were scattered on tables and stands there were random and dog-eared. I found a few things, but everyone was hungry and Abigail was starting to lose it, so we left.

I remember being horrified when I first heard about e-readers and the prediction that one day real books would be a thing of the past. I couldn't think of anything worse than no real books. How could you be truly reading without holding a book in your hands and feeling the weight of it? What was a book without pages, spine, cover?

Just before Christmas I read this post at Gluten-Free Girl and the Chef. It's about a recipe and the gorgeous Holiday Food app that the recipe came from. And it's about iPads and the creative potential that exists with apps. I was completely taken. I've got an iphone but I never used a reader on it, and I've never been interested in having an e-reader. But something in my brain came alive when I read that post. I spent the day with this bubbling going on inside, this incredible sudden alive-ness in my brain. I couldn't stop dreaming about apps.

So when Paddy came home with a surprise Christmas present for the both of us, I was petrified and desperately hopeful that he'd gone out and bought an iPad. And when my hopeful fears were fulfilled, there was no way I could tell him off for spending so much money because I was too happy. We bought the Holiday food app that introduced me to iPads, and it was even better than I imagined. It is luscious. Beautifully designed, easy to use, and full of recipes and how-to's. It has crisp, vivid photographs, and video too. I would never have thought that anything could be more beautiful than a beautiful book. But this app is even more beautiful than a book.

I can't believe I just wrote that.

At the end of our book shopping expedition I didn't feel sad any more. By the time I'd made my way round two stores, one trying to re-make itself to survive, the other already dead, I'd worked through my grief. E-books are here to stay. Within twenty years I expect that most of us will read more books in electronic form than we'll read printed on paper. But that doesn't mean it's the end of books, and it certainly doesn't mean it's the end of writers. Digital publishing means that more books will get to more people more easily. And writers will still get paid. But I don't have the same confidence for the publishing industry as we know it. Publishing survives on paper and ink and mass production and will have to re-invent itself several times over to avoid becoming a relic.

I'll tell you what I do have confidence for, and that is for small publishing houses who specialise in very special books, treasures that will be works of art in themselves, and the small but clever book stores who will sell them. I don't believe we will see the demise of all booksellers, but I do think the bell has tolled for supermarket-style booksellers, the ones who think they can sell lots of everything without really knowing the books they sell or the customers who come to buy them. The kind of stores who have no idea about range other than to make sure that they have a good stack of bestsellers and a handful of whatever has been recently published.

I hope I get more book vouchers next Christmas, but this time I'll ask for vouchers for Time Out or The Women's Bookshop, both veritable institutions who have weathered the rise and demise of the supermarket bookstore. They both have a loyal following of customers, and both have a genuine online presence. In the future stores like these will become treasuries and precious links to the past. Books will be collectors items, and families will pass them down like heirlooms. And writers? We'll keep on writing.

black sand dreaming

We came out here for a picnic tea twice this week. This is Whatipu, the beach right at the entrance of the harbour. It's not that far from our place, but most of the way there the road is narrow and windy and unsealed, so it takes a while. The road leaves Little Huia, a handful of houses at the edge of the water, and winds up the hills through thick bush. Occasionally you can see through the bush to the mouth of the harbour below. The sun was setting on the cliffs on the other side of the harbour each time we came, and they towered bright white above the blue sea. I've written to you before about wild places, but this is as wild as it gets.  This is why we live where we do.

It's the kind of place that makes me feel like anything is possible. As if every idea is waiting for me there hidden in the black sand, or carried by the sea gulls as they glide above us from the huge sand dunes to the enormous rock that sits on the edge of the water, guarding the entrance to the harbour. I was lying on the sand listening to the rhythmic crash of the waves on the beach and watching Paddy and the girls splashing in the shallows, when a novel idea came to me. That is, an idea for a novel. Which really only means one thing. That I have to hurry up and finish the one I started, so I can get on to the next one.

I was standing in the laundry at the beginning of this week putting a load of washing on. The Laundry is tacked on to the back of the house, with a separate entrance, and it's where we dump our dirty shoes and gumboots, rubbish bags waiting to go out, recycling, and anything else we need to keep out of the house. It's filthy. The corners of the windows are filled with spider webs and the window sills are littered with dead insects. I was looking down at the dried mud on the floor as I loaded in the clothes, and wondering when I was ever going to find the time to get in there and clean, when suddenly, completely out of nowhere, came a word, and I knew as soon as I thought it that it was my word for this year. Industry.

You see the other thing I've been doing this week, besides walking on wild beaches, is planning. Somehow I've got this year by the scruff of the neck, like a small dog with a large bone, and I'm not letting go. This year will conform to our requirements, we will wring it out like a wet towel, trample on it like a load of grapes in a barrel, eek out of it every bit of fruitfulness and success we possibly can. I'm going to take a day a week to sit in the office and make sure we do. I will be the managing juggler, doing my best to keep all our balls in the air.

So how will I write that novel in a year which will be as busy as a city? I'll tell you how. I will start every morning in the country. I will start every day at this desk, in the dark silence of dawn. How exactly I will manage this I'm not sure. Over Christmas it was impossible to get to bed as early as I wanted to. But I kept trying. Every day I've said to myself, I will go to bed early. And on the mornings where I haven't gone to bed early enough to get up and write, I've taken the dog and walked down to the beach while the sun is new and cool, and discovered that walking is almost as good as writing. But even when I haven't written or walked I've gone often to the little desk in the corner of my mind, the one where the words pile up like snowdrifts, where they come in without any one to stop them or any guard to keep them out, where they congregate in clumps and huddles, where they feel already written, even before they are.