where I've been

This is where I went on Friday in the late afternoon, after I'd folded the washing and swept the kitchen floor. I said good bye to the girls and got in the car and drove the hour and a half trip here alone. I walked in the door with only my own bags. As soon as I got here I set my laptop up on that table you see and started writing. It was my first twenty-four hours completely alone for at least eight years.

It was a vague idea we've had for a while, that I could come out here to Mum's bach alone and work on the novel. It was one of those ideas that could have taken forever to make happen, or possibly never have happened at all. I booked the bach for all of us at first, I couldn't quite believe that I was going to get to come on my own. Now that I've done it once I'll do it again. And again.

I only wrote a thousand and something words but I finished the re-structuring I started a month ago and got my head around the part of this thing that I've been most scared of; the historical part. I'm not a natural academic. This is a big admission for me, and something I've literally only just come to terms with. It's to do with dyspraxia and the fact that my eldest daughter is not the only one in this family whose brain doesn't run in straight lines. I faced the fear that I wasn't capable of writing history. I'd had it in my head that I had to have all the facts straight before I could write, that I had to have an arsenal of verifiable and referenced details before I could do anything. But I'm  not writing a paper, I'm writing fiction. I can write whatever I like.

I drove back home with this deep sense of peace. I had spent a day and a night devoted to the the thing I want to do almost more than anything. I felt like a writer.

slowing to notice

This is what I've seen lately, on the days I've slowed down enough to notice. I posted an article on facebook a friend had shared a couple of weeks ago called  "Slow Down to Save Time" , mostly because I liked the title. Slow down to save time. It resonated with me. Some how, intuitively, I knew it was true.

There's not much logic to this habit I've developed of washing the dishes by hand. It definitely takes more time than loading up the dishwasher and only hand washing what won't go in.  It's been nearly a month now, and the repercussions are obvious. The house is messier. Paddy doesn't get it. He uses the dishwasher at the weekends when I try to bow out of the kitchen. He thinks I should give up so I can get on with everything else, and he'd like me to hang out with him. I'd like him to hang out with me, in the kitchen. I like a man with a tea towel. It's not that he won't help when I need it, it's just that he can't see the benefits.

The girls are really getting the hang of washing and drying the dishes. They do it most days, at least once or twice. It's a fantastic way to get us hanging out altogether in the kitchen, and it's a nice uncomplicated job for them to do, in chunks if necessary. Sometimes they just need a bit of focus, they just need to be reminded that we are all in this together, and the dishes do that perfectly. We have fun in the kitchen. When they are in there with me doing the dishes they often get to help me cooking or baking as well. We talk. I'm not saying it's all Little House on the Prairie and there's never any complaining, not at all. But once they get over themselves and get on with the job we enjoy being together, and I really appreciate them.

But I'm actually doing the dishes by hand for myself. I find this space when I'm washing the dishes that I don't find any other way. My hands get on with the cleaning, and my mind is free. I think, I pray, I sing, I write... all in my head. I process the events of the day, or go over what's ahead of us. I can't rush, there's no point, I'd only break something. I get into a slow rhythm. I notice things.

In the evenings when I'm tired I find washing the dishes by hand easier than loading up the dishwasher. I know it sounds crazy, but I think it's something to do with that dyspraxia story that's brewing. Washing a bowl in one sink, and then slipping it into the rinsing water in the other requires hardly any conscious thought. I find myself at peace. My breath slows. I enjoy it. And when the job  is finished (even if sometimes it's not finished till the next day) I'm satisfied. The dishes are often cleaner than they were out of the dishwasher, and sitting on the dish rack over night they are drier. And a bench of dishes is easier to put away than a whole load in the dishwasher. I used to get the girls to unload the dishwasher in the mornings but that was a big task, and I had to keep them focused the whole time. Now I do a bit, and they do a bit, and before we know it it's done.

The fact that the house is messier hasn't bothered me, and that's a surprise. I've realised how many hours, literally, I would spend tidying up each week. Perhaps I've dropped my standards, but I think actually it's more that I've found a truer, more genuine standard, one that reflects what's important to me. And it's been very clear to me that I was obviously doing too much of this tidying up business on my own. It was time for a bit more labour division.

I had a talk to the girls last week about the bomb site their rooms had become. I got a big storage container and "paid" them in stamps on their stamp charts to put as many of the messy, clutter-creating toys in it. I encouraged them to put in the plastic ones especially. We filled an 80 litre box easily. I told them we'd get it out at the end of Lent and then decide what we'll keep and what we'll give away. At that point it will be high stakes. I will present them with a bowl of gold coins and pay them for each toy that stays in there.

I've cleared out their rooms before, but I've never done it this thoroughly. Isobella especially seems to produce "stuff" on a daily basis. Notes and letters and plans and creations and random treasures from all over the place. They gather on her desk, in her drawers, on the shelves in her cupboard, they spread everywhere. And once they are there, she doesn't know what to do with  them. She can't order or classify them, and asking her to decide what she wants to keep and what she wants to throw out pushes her over the edge. That's another story too, about the hidden dyslexia that we've discovered she battles with.  I've taken out the shelves from her cupboard, and removed a whole piece of furniture from her room. And there's been a fair bit of rubbish smuggling going on, I can tell you that. But the girls are happy with the result. Their rooms are so much easier to tidy. And they are more peaceful, easier to play in.

I don't know if I'll keep up washing dishes by hand after Lent. I hope so, because it feels good to me. But it does mean it's harder for me to get to bed, and if I don't get to bed early, I can't get up early and write. I really want to get the first draft of that novel finished this year. I have to write.

But I'm wondering whether, as time goes by, I'll be able to find a rhythm for myself that will include washing the dishes. There's something that makes sense about what I've been doing, as crazy as it sounds. My world has shrunk, in many ways. It has shrunk to this big old camp kitchen of mine. I cook, I bake bread, I feed the girls, I wash the dishes, all in this one big space with windows overlooking the garden, and an opening into the dining room where I can look out to the bush and the water. Time slows when I'm in the kitchen. Whole mornings go by when I haven't ventured any further than this one space. There's something very good and simple about that. And when I slow and time slows, my mind expands. Stories brew, sit bubbling away on the stove in my mind. Their ingredients laid out on the bench, being gathered and prepared, bit by bit.

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.