the kinks…

I am a dedicated follower of doing things that work wonders for other people. Over the years I have tiptoed and trespassed across other people’s experiences with similar problems in order to solve my own. I am not original. I am my literary heroines. Nothing I do is unique. I love to deep dive into the lives of other people – literature, film, poetry, art, memoirs and story-telling. I deep dive into the lives and souls of other people and collect pearls, oysters and ormers to make into necklaces (not without consent). I turn words into wine and devour each morsel, getting high on the fumes. At the moment I am sea swimming – inspired by other people it wasn’t my idea at all.

Sea swimming is good for the mind and soul

“O reader, do not ask of me how I
grew faint and frozen then – I cannot write it:
all words would fall far short of what it was.
I did not die, and I was not alive;
think for yourself, if you have any wit,
what I became, deprived of life and death.”
– The Ninth Circle of Hell from Dante’s Inferno

 

The Mighty Boosh…

“But if there’s trouble she’s got the moves 
She’s taking an elementary class in kung fu.

I left my washing in the launderette
You can put some money on it, you can place a little bet
That when I see my washing
The black will be grey and the white will be grey
But the blues are still blue…”

(Belle & Sebastian)

Travelling through the Dante’esque midst of motherhood makes me wonder why the landscape hasn’t been re-imagined or redefined. ‘The Baby Blues’ sounds like the name of a junior football team, right? All of the terms I know about motherhood have been entirely unrelatable to the experience, in my world, they just don’t cut it! The reality of postpartum life is nothing like I have read or heard about, online, in-books or in-person.

(Chalice Well Gardens, Glastonbury, Spring Equinox 2018)

It’s an orgasmic chill, an ecstatic whiplash, a guttural cry, a wild stranger, a cosmic ride at the theme park of existence! For me, it was an unbearable and unimagined state of fierce being, like serving a sentence at the Emotional State Penitentiary and being put on laundrette duties even though you would be better in the kitchen because you can be a brilliant cook with the right recipe books and a well structured artisan-style pinafore, right? My eyes held their own private sacrificial tsunamis at any time without any given warning, fuelled by the mighty hormonal fires of creating another tiny human. I had been indulging in a bit of Frankie Boyle’s ‘New World Order’ on Mother’s Day when my partner walked in with a huge bunch of flowers. In a split-second I turned into a wailing walrus of overwhelming hormonal bittersweet bliss, my cheeks were instantly saturated like a pair of ponchos on a wet bank holiday weekend. I had been quite happily laughing along with Frankie and then suddenly my eyelids were The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Hokusai. It’s been insane in the membrane. I wish there were better words to paint the picture.