Presence

Spill wine on your table

From my Instagram

Another Kind of Presence

I find that my husband has written a love note to me on the chalk board pantry door.

‘Best Wife

Best Mum

Best Woman

Best Ghost Hunter’

The last line is a private joke between my husband and son and me, but I can’t help notice that it is also a very apt metaphor for this time in my life. Hunting ghosts. I am exorcising something that found its way in, and I am digging through old memories to uncover the ghosts of the past. I am full of introspection and mother guilt.

Starlight

All night, this soft rain from the distant past.

No wonder I sometimes waken as a child.

Ted Kooser, 2012

Moonstruck

10 Reasons to (re)watch this film:

1. It’s almost a Christmas movie. It is set in the Italian district of New York just before Christmas, and it snows briefly. It is so Italian and so charming. Unbelievably charming.

2. The film is about the messiness of passion and family. And the importance of looking at the night sky.

3. This is more than just a film about the desirability of a middle aged woman, it is also about the desires of a middle aged woman. “You’re mad at him. Take it out on me. Take your revenge out on me. Leave nothing left for him to marry, leave nothing but the skin over my bones”. Actually, Loretta is only 38 years old, but she has visible grey hair and wears an older woman’s clothes, and this was the 80s when the late thirties were considered middle aged, so in your mind upgrade her to 48.

4. The decor and light inside Ronny’s apartment. Not just any single man here!

5. The traditional Italian aesthetic inside Loretta’s parents’ beautiful, huge apartment. I loved looking around this home during the scenes set inside there.

6. Post-makeover Cher going to the opera looks like Sharon Van Etten.

7. The significance of luck.

8. Ronny, with the devoted torment of Healthcliffe and the sweaty singlet and seething masculinity of Stanley. His acting is also deliciously eccentric! He’s since been aped to the point of becoming a meme, but you have to watch films like this the way you watch old David Lynch films, and that is remembering that when they were made they were original. Everyone loves “Get in my bed” and it is a very sexy line, but Ronny trying to convince you to live less cautiously is also seductive - “We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and die”.

9. It’s funny.

10. Throughout this film, women are allowed to hold men to account - whether it be a man in denial about his part in his demise or an old man feeding your cooking to his dogs or a university professor who dates students or a cheating husband.. you are allowed to not be ok with it.

Christmas Night Sky

December nights in the subtropics, which are all blinking Christmas lights and the flashes of lightning from huge pending storms.

An Email Saying Give the Gift of Resilience

..which turns out to be an advertisement for strong stockings.

On Trauma

If you are not reading Brandon Taylor already then I suggest you change that. Here he is in ‘trauma is a ghost, who knew’ from his newsletter, Sweater Weather. Subscribe. He is second to none, at the moment, for talking about novels and film. Why? Because he is talking not just about the craft, but about the emotions we are trying to grasp and make sense of through the art.

I like movies where people talk a lot. Where the primary action is the talking or failing to talk. And then, the unfolding drama around confrontation and consequences. I love it when you can’t bear to look at the thing unfolding on the screen because it’s too much. Too uncomfortable, too visceral. I don’t know that it feels honest. I think we’d like to say that such a thing feels honest, but in truth, most of us look away all the time from difficult moments. We shut down hard conversations and bail out. We skirt and avoid. So I don’t think it’s honest storytelling about the kinds of conversations we have. But I do think it’s honest about the kinds of conflicts we have. Those conflicts in which there are no easy resolutions. And no one really escapes. Those moments when you lay awake long after everyone has gone to bed, still fuming. Still burning up to make your point. I think I love movies like that because it feels like a reality I’d want to live in. Where you had to just keep talking until you both died.

I wonder what my dad would say if we could get into one of those conversations. About everything. The last time I tried, he kept saying, “I didn’t know.” And I thought, how could you not. When I told you. But I couldn’t say that because he was professing not to know. And I thought, here is someone who desperately wants to stop this conversation. Who wants to live in a reality in which he did not know about what was happening to me. And that is fine. He can live in that reality. But he cannot live in that reality and have me live in it too.

This all really fucking sucks.

But there are good things. There are good people. There are friends. There is the sky. There is autumn, finally, in the air. There are sweaters and good coffee and the virtues of staying busy. I’m going to clean my apartment today. I’m going to drink water and go to the park and read more Zola. And then I might watch a movie, who knows.

I feel a little uneasy about selecting this particular post, because as Taylor talks about elsewhere, you cannot be a white audience for Black art about trauma without altering the space of that art - without somehow tainting, and perhaps exploiting that art. White people have a “vast hunger for the calamities of others”¹.

I was trying to work out my feelings about black subjectivity as it would be consumed on the page by progressive white liberals – as a black person, am I complicit in the consumption of my own calamity?

He is also someone who argues for slowing down and taking in properly whatever art it is that you are enjoying. I feel strongly about slowing down.

Give it your attention. Be present.

I think a lot about the relationship between attention and addiction, too. Partly, because my husband works professionally in the area of harm-minimisation therapy², and partly because more of us are experiencing addiction than ever before now with our encounters with social media. You are getting a glimpse of the emptiness, nice and close, yourself.

Here is Brandon Taylor in another of his newsletters, ‘some rural negro memories’ talking about all the ‘needing’ that is behind addiction and the ways in which poverty and inter-generational trauma makes tinder out of people.

That’s how it was when the gambling came. Everyone had already been worn down by the drinking and the drugs and the hardness of life—by hunger, by fatigue, by working too hard for too little for too long, by great need. That’s how it was. All that needing had turned them dry and made them perfect for the burning.

Trauma kills people. And there are few things you could increase public spending on that would deliver a better return than spending on mental health.

Home

These days I am thinking a lot about home and what it means to me. In many ways I have lost my way. I am humbled by my failures.

I have had to question whether what I struck out to do was wrong or if the path was just more complicated than anticipated.

So often in my mothering my question has boiled down to whether I am surrendering to a necessary acceptance or simply giving up.

Text From My Male Friend

Up for a chat or you in bed reading to your husband?

I love that this is his picture of us in the evening.

Gentleman Farmer

Tomato plants spring up intermittently in our courtyard. One of our Italian Greyhounds picks cherry tomatoes for himself off the vine in the back garden. He chews the tomatoes, while lying in the courtyard, and sends little seeds into the gravel.

About Our Other Italian Greyhound

On whether the dog will manage being taken on public transport in a bag carried by my teenage daughter, my mother says, he will be fine, he was bred for neurotic women.

My 12 Year Old Son on the Importance of Working with Autonomy

“Sometimes in group work I don’t put in any effort if I am being bossed around by another kid. I am not getting micromanaged by someone six months younger than me. I am not having it”.

Talking About Pocket Money

Me: I don’t make the pocket money for the kids about doing chores. It is just money to live life, because we’re all part of this together. But, if you want more money than that then you need to do extra work.

Husband: It’s Andie’s UBI³.

On the Young Adult Child Visiting Home

First Thanksgiving

When she comes back, from college, I will see

the skin of her upper arms, cool,

matte, glossy. She will hug me, my old

soupy chest against her breasts,

I will smell her hair! She will sleep in this apartment,

her sleep like an untamed, good object, like a

soul in a body. She came into my life the

second great arrival, fresh

from the other world - which lay, from within him,

within me. Those nights, I fed her to sleep,

week after week, the moon rising,

and setting, and waxing - whirling, over the months,

in a steady blur, around our planet.

Now she doesn’t need love like that, she has

had it. She will walk in glowing, we will talk,

and then, when she’s fast asleep, I’ll exult

to have her in that room again,

behind that door! As a child, I caught

bees, by the wings, and held them, some seconds,

looked into their wild faces,

listened to them sing, then tossed them back

into the air - I remember the moment the

arc of my toss swerved, and they entered

the corrected curve of their departure.

-Sharon Olds

Is ‘Good Enough Mothering’ Good Enough?

Recently, I have been re-thinking the concept of ‘good enough mothering’. This is something of a departure from previous thinking in my early days of feminist mothering, when I was seeking to avoid the intensification of mothering that was increasingly prevalent. Now, I am wondering what role for reflection and repair in this?

And, when you’re ready to hear something, you hear it everywhere.

Dr Becky Kennedy spoke here about not using ‘good enough’ to avoid accountability:

We all need to be self-aware enough to ask, Where do I fall on that scale? Being “good enough” makes me feel like, “I’m going to mess up; I’m going to do things, and at least some of those times I’m going to repair after”.

I don’t even have to be perfect at the repair. But the repair moments are huge. I hear what you’re saying, though: There’s no perfect parent. But I also don’t think “good enough” parenting is defined by Eh, it probably ends up OK. We have to hold ourselves accountable.

Antonella Gambotto-Burke⁴ spoke about the consequences of denying the existence of bad mothering, which include denying the damage done by it, as well as the opportunity to consider its causes.

It’s a cultural myth that all mothers do their best.

The capacity for love (in our society) has been very damaged.

Families are fracturing because it is very difficult to raise children and work. We are all trying to survive and we’ve lost a lot of intimacy. Capacity for intimacy was generally higher in the past. But, we've been in a long period of ‘fucked up’ parenting. If an advocate of family intimacy, then can’t be in favour of the 1950s nuclear family model either.

Being loved gives you a sense of your own self-worth.

Disconnection from one’s children is the cause of so much misery for people. Strengthen the attachment with your babies for the sake of your future happiness.

Dr Petra Bueskens gave a guest lecture for the Child Psychoanalytic Association of Australia that I attended recently and described how brittle we are culturally at the moment in the face of any criticism of mothering.

Positioning the neglectful parent as the mother is now considered taboo.

This Whole Interview is About the Role of Self-Reflection in Parenting

This whole interview with Dr Becky Kennedy in The New York Times by David Marchese is excellent! (It is hard for me to think of better parenting advice than this, below, which is that you should help your children become comfortable with sitting with the difficult feeling of frustration. It may, literally, save their life).

People say to me, “How do I not have an entitled kid?” But entitlement, what does that mean? It’s the entitlement to not feel frustrated. Because when a kid is like, “You didn’t get me a first-class ticket,” it’s not that they expect “first class” so much as they feel that they shouldn’t have to be frustrated. It’s so easy to look at kids like that and think, What a [expletive] kid. But I would take the other side: That kid must be having a terrifying experience in their body to feel something that they’ve learned they should never feel. Using money to always avoid disappointment can lead to that. This is not, like, Families with money, poor you. But those parents almost have to think, Where is frustration built into my kid’s life? So that when those frustrating moments come, the kid’s body says, “Oh, this is part of living; I know how to do this” instead of, “This should not be happening; I have no skills to deal with it.” Which is actually very sad.

It’s a Time For Brutal Honesty

Yes, it is entirely possible to transform the ways we work and to shift expectations around our jobs and careers. Our current dysfunctional relationship to work is not some natural state; it’s a culture we’ve forced on ourselves. My favorite bit of research from the book is a testimonial from a 19th-century English hosiery manufacturer, who wrote about how workers absolutely hated the constrictions of a newly industrialized environment:

I found the utmost distaste . . . on the part of the men, to any regular hours or regular habits . . . the men themselves were considerably dissatisfied, because they could not go in and out as they pleased, and have what holidays they pleased, and go on just as they had been used to do.

We’ve always bristled at the way work confines and restricts us. If we harness that fundamental yearning, change is possible! But. We can’t do it alone. This is why the question—What can people do to cultivate a better sense of work/life balance?—is so frustrating.

There are plenty of things a person can and must do to craft a healthy, flexible relationship to work. You can start by honestly assessing how much you work, and compare that to an honest assessment of how much work there really is to be done (for example, is some of that work performative?). You can then sort out which work is rigid and which is flexible and begin to craft routines around it. You can take a brutally honest look at what you value about your personal life and your job and find ways to bring that relationship into balance. Personally, this process has been really difficult and has included the revelations that I’ve been, at times: a shitty friend, an absent partner, so laser-focused on a narrow definition of career success that I barely even know what I like outside of being told I’m “doing a good job” at my job. If you’re honest and intentional, it’s a hard but ultimately rewarding exercise.

But it only goes so far. All the hard planning and self-inventorying and commitment to decentering work and cultivating a rich personal life means very little if you are trapped in a system that refuses to give you space, and actively rewards those who refuse to erect boundaries between their work and personal lives.

From Charlie Warzel in ‘We Are Running in ‘Degraded Mode’ in The Atlantic.

On the Relationship Between Coziness and Messiness

Whatever the origins of the aesthetic of coziness online might be, it started out as a feeling, not a collection of objects. The aesthetic tries to conjure the feeling, and I have two questions: How well does it succeed, and why do we want that feeling so bad? 

Instagram representations of coziness are primarily about safety and comfort, but they are also about order and control. Everything in its right place. The house is cleaned, the candles lit. No unexpected intrusions can disturb the feeling. Just as important as what we see -- the couch, the socks, the candle -- are the things we don’t see: Mess, disorder, the unpredictable reality of the world outside. 

And

I also think of coziness as a heightened, almost erotic feeling of belonging. You are in your own space, and if there’s anyone in there with you, they are allies who truly know you, because you wouldn’t share this sock-footed intimacy with just anyone. This is, I think, the melty core of coziness. This is the dragon we’re all chasing. 

And

Instagram does a bad job of representing the actual experience of being human. That’s where the overlap between my momfluencers research and this coziness obsession of mine is located — around the impossibility of expressing the actual experience through pictures on a screen. Family life is so thick with meaning, and I am forever fascinated with the way we expect momfluencers to do that justice with tools — their iPhones — that are completely inadequate. Same deal with coziness. In both cases, what’s being attempted is the commodification of the uncommodifiable. It’s challenging work.

And

I’m reminded of an edition of Blackbird Spyplane from earlier this year where Jonah is basically giving the most rigid taste-cops of his flock permission to spill wine on their own tables. 

He argues in favour of the “Life Well-Lived Mindset” (L.W.L.M.) and, Hashem bless him, he’s trying to help. Some people who spend a ton of money making their spaces perfect have no idea how to go about living in their spaces. Circulating in the rarefied milieu that he does, I’m sure Jonah has met his share of these types, and with the trademark gentleness and humour of BBSP, he’s suggesting to them that obsessive control over their material surroundings might be antithetical to a feeling of convivial belonging! Make a little mess, Tyler! It feels nice.

Cozy season on social media might be a cry for help.

From Kathryn Jezer-Morton in her newsletter, Mothers Under the Influence.

Talking About the Shadow Self

Me: In a strange way, I think she wants all this chaotic energy. Maybe she missed it. Moving there has given her instability.

Husband: And we shall call it ‘therapeutic instability’.

On the Problem with Nuclear Families

I’m not a huge fan of Brooks’ conservatism, but this is a very useful article for the discussion of a few of my favourite topics - connection and individualism; inequality and mothering; capitalism and feminism; and reciprocity and emotional intimacy - and also, because it ends with a call for redefining kinship⁵ and ‘forged families’, which is a big part of my own thinking these days.

Some key points below:

When we have debates about how to strengthen the family, we are thinking of the two-parent nuclear family, with one or two kids, probably living in some detached family home on some suburban street. We take it as the norm, even though this wasn’t the way most humans lived during the tens of thousands of years before 1950, and it isn’t the way most humans have lived during the 55 years since 1965.

And

A detached nuclear family, by contrast, is an intense set of relationships among, say, four people. If one relationship breaks, there are no shock absorbers. In a nuclear family, the end of the marriage means the end of the family as it was previously understood.

And

Our culture is oddly stuck. We want stability and rootedness, but also mobility, dynamic capitalism, and the liberty to adopt the lifestyle we choose. We want close families, but not the legal, cultural, and sociological constraints that made them possible. We’ve seen the wreckage left behind by the collapse of the detached nuclear family. We’ve seen the rise of opioid addiction, of suicide, of depression, of inequality—all products, in part, of a family structure that is too fragile, and a society that is too detached, disconnected, and distrustful. And yet we can’t quite return to a more collective world.

His article raises two important, and almost, contradictory points too.

Among the highly educated, family patterns are almost as stable as they were in the 1950s; among the less fortunate, family life is often utter chaos. There’s a reason for that divide: Affluent people have the resources to effectively buy extended family, in order to shore themselves up. Think of all the child-rearing labor affluent parents now buy that used to be done by extended kin: babysitting, professional child care, tutoring, coaching, therapy, expensive after-school programs. (For that matter, think of how the affluent can hire therapists and life coaches for themselves, as replacement for kin or close friends.) These expensive tools and services not only support children’s development and help prepare them to compete in the meritocracy; by reducing stress and time commitments for parents, they preserve the amity of marriage. Affluent conservatives often pat themselves on the back for having stable nuclear families. They preach that everybody else should build stable families too. But then they ignore one of the main reasons their own families are stable: They can afford to purchase the support that extended family used to provide—and that the people they preach at, further down the income scale, cannot.

Yes, income inequality is masking the true wretchedness of the nuclear family, but the class lens also means a failure to recognise the ways in which community survives (and thrives) outside of the white middle class experience.

Mia Birdsong, the author of the forthcoming book How We Show Up, told me recently. “The reality is, black families are expansive, fluid, and brilliantly rely on the support, knowledge, and capacity of ‘the village’ to take care of each other. Here’s an illustration: The white researcher/social worker/whatever sees a child moving between their mother’s house, their grandparents’ house, and their uncle’s house and sees that as ‘instability.’ But what’s actually happening is the family (extended and chosen) is leveraging all of its resources to raise that child.”

From David Brooks in The Atlantic with ‘The Nuclear Family was a Mistake’.

Personally, I now think for many teenagers the ‘extended and chosen family’ is key to successfully transitioning to adulthood. It might be offering something vital that is missing from a nuclear family or single home base.

On the Richness of Single Parent Households and the Vulnerability We Impose Upon Them

Mother:

We have to be totally honest, and I like that. He is one of the few people who wants me to be myself, not out of love for me, but because as an only child of an only parent he is vulnerable, and needs to know how things are.

Son:

I loved my mother so much that the idea that I would lose her, lose the life she had built for us absolutely terrified me.

From ‘A wild mother and her loving son’ on ABC Conversations with the writer, Ianto Ware.

While Discussing Her Film, Which Happens to Be My Favourite Film of 2021

When she writes, she often sits on the great island of her bed and does nothing else. One reason she liked the Jungian dream work, she said, is that the analyst’s language matched some of her own philosophy. “She says it’s like throwing chum out, seeing what surfaces,” she said. This is what writing feels like for her. “It’s an amazing moment when you realize there’s a channel. In my case it was just like sitting down for four hours. That was it. Something comes to you. You write. You don’t read, you don’t use the phone, you don’t do anything else, because then the psyche starts to trust the time.”

“So many writers have an aversion to just sitting down and waiting,” I said.

Campion nodded and then paused. “I think it makes them afraid.”

From “Inside Jane Campion’s ‘Cinema of Tenderness and Brutality” in The New York Times Magazine by Jordan Kisner on ‘The Power of the Dog’.

I Am Also Watching the Peter Jackson Documentary, Get Back, With My Husband Because He Loves the Whole Chemistry of Bands Making Music Together⁶ and For Me, Not So Insignificantly, Paul McCartney Was Having Quite a Hot Moment in His Life at That Time⁷

Things to love about this:

• Scotland

• Farms in Kintyre

• Cups of tea and coffee

• Being out with our cameras

• Jumpers

• Beards

• Brown eyes

Through Which Known and Strange Things Pass

Cole’s attention to the texture of things makes for extraordinarily vivid writing. He evokes doom in the paintings of Caravaggio and imaginative abundance in the photography of Marie Cosindas and Lorna Simpson. He conjures the sensory pleasure of having a human body when he writes about nature, nowhere more luxuriantly than in his essay Experience: “With my eyes I see the bright light on the water, with my ears hear the thrum and splash of the water, with my nose smell the grass and alpine flowers. I bring water to my mouth and I can taste its mineral intensity … My fingers touch the stones rough and smooth, the bedlike grass, the marblelike pebbles, the fugitive water.” For Cole, such moments in art and literature and nature are, in the words of Seamus Heaney, like a “hurry through which known and strange things pass”.

From Black Paper by Teju Cole review - a spark of hope in dark times by Simukai Chigudu in The Guardian.

The Only Phone Messages I Listen To

Subscribe to Patti Smith’s phone messages. This is the best. Play them aloud, while you are pouring a cup of tea or coffee in the morning, like she is your mother. “Though things have been a bit scattered, you can count on me that I will keep in touch with you”. How reassuring.

On Being in Love at Forty

This love is such a quiet thing. It’s a peace that almost takes your breath away as it gives you oxygen so pure that you aren’t sure your lungs can expand to take it all in. And then they do, and it just becomes the air that you breathe.

From Ijeoma Oluo.

Goodbye bell hooks

Genuine love is rarely an emotional space where needs are instantly gratified. To know love we have to invest time and commitment.. dreaming that love will save us, solve all our problems or provide a steady state of bliss or security only keeps us stuck in wishful fantasy, undermining the real power of love - which is to transform us.

About Parenting Teenagers/Young Adults and How Exhausting It All Is

Mother/Artist Friend: “Like I know they’re amazing but also — fuck off”.

Thank you for all the lovely messages. For some reason I get a little overcome with shyness whenever I receive them and, so, take forever to respond to them, but know that they make my day and that I love reading them.

1. Brandon Taylor: ‘I grew up reading my aunt’s nursing-home manuals and bodice-rippers’ | Fiction | The Guardian

2. This is a therapy model in direct contrast to abstinence.

3. Universal Basic Income.

4. I’m paraphrasing here because it was a long podcast and there is no transcript.

5. Queer kinship is an excellent way of redefining this.

6. It’s almost ‘slow cinema’.

7. ‘Get Back’ was one of the style aesthetics my husband and I used for planning our wedding outfits