Imagine a woman with an eighteen-month-old daughter. She has just migrated from England to New Zealand. Now she knows how big and how small the world can be and how lost she is within it. She has just discovered she’s pregnant again. This was me.
My husband worked long hours and I spent long hours watching crappy daytime TV that reminded me of home – Judge Rinder anyone? That was the beginning of me beginning to be a writer. No, it didn’t really begin there. It began in my teens, memorising Plath and Larkin and rolling somebody else’s poems around my mouth with my tongue. Writing my own terrible poems on scraps of paper. Hiding what I could not bear to throw away. No, it began before, at age ten when I realised that creative writing was the only thing I was better than average at doing. It began at Bronte, at Blake, at Blyton. It began, for me, in early childhood and it stayed in my pocket like a button I kept meaning to sew onto something. Amid the crying of my first daughter and the fear of having another and how was I going to be able to wipe two bottoms at once? Wondering how to carry everything that needed to be carried and shush and rock everything that needed to be shushed and rocked. The thing that began with me when I began, became more immediate when I became a mother.
So I wrote.
I wrote a short memoir piece about saying goodbye. Leaving England, leaving a sister who couldn’t forgive me. I tried to write everything I had tried and failed to explain to her. I wrote about making her favourite meal and how everything tasted of iron and salt. I didn’t know cream brulee could stick in your throat, but it can, and not just because I burnt it. I wrote the memoir and paid $20 I could not afford to enter it into a competition and be told… nothing. Nothing at all. It didn’t win. Of course it didn’t win. A year later I reread the memoir that I once thought was shit hot and I realised it was piss weak. This is the gift of writing; you realise your old stuff is dreadful. You smile. Keep smiling: it means you’re getting better.
When I first started to write I pretended that it was a hobby. If you find yourself in the place I was – lonely and bored (because either motherhood is boring or I’m doing it wrong), and you want to find a hobby: don’t write. If knitting will do; do knitting. Writing is quicksand. If it has to be writing then find a writing group. People say that writing is lonely, and it is. And it isn’t. To me, a writer who doesn’t want to be read is a strange creature – like a pig that wants to be eaten. Writing depends on others and so it creates a dependency in you. Find other writers, and embrace them.
Know, before you begin, what writing will cost you, firstly: time. It is known as the ten-thousand-hour rule – the key to achieving true expertise in any skill. But writing is complicated, after ten thousand hours you might be an expert but you may not be a success. For me, raising a young family, writing cost me family trips to the park and days out to the beach. It cost me my patience. It cost gallons of coffee and hours of quiet contentment while my little ones slept. It cost me a career in social work that I once found fulfilling. Writing is a worm under the skin.
Not writing would have cost me more.
Writing is an ignorant house guest. Whatever you give is not enough. It is never sated. It takes up more room than you have to offer. It complains when you don’t give it enough attention, or if you don’t make it comfortable. It finds fault; first with your better, then with your best. You have no choice but to grow, so you grow. I find that getting up early in the morning works for me. The house is cold, but quiet. Most importantly, the children are sleeping. If you can’t write; read. If you can’t read; listen to audio books. Carry paper and a pen, or a pencil, or a half-eaten crayon. It doesn’t matter. Write with hope. Give up the things that don’t make your writing better – things like a tidy house. It has been years since I watched Judge Rinder, and I don’t miss it.
Mockingbird Writers 
Looking forward to reading more.
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