My ex-husband used to say to me, with fondness to begin with: How can you be so unaware? You’re meant to be a writer.
It’s true in a sense. Sometimes I don’t notice anything. I don’t notice the cat mewling fanatically at the back door. I don’t notice my phone beeping messages at me. I don’t notice the bag of rotten baby carrots at the back of the crisper. Women are supposed to be marvellous multi-taskers. I am not one of those women.
My son told me, just this evening, that he is glad I am his mother because I always forget that I’ve told him he has five minutes until bedtime. If only everyone could see it so positively.
My primary school teachers used to complain that I was a daydreamer – an educator’s euphemism of course – I’m familiar with these now. A lot of the time I was just bored; never disruptive enough to warrant attention. A quiet kid. One of my strongest memories from childhood is watching the sunlight making its slow way into the classroom each afternoon; its rays pale through the dusty windows. To amuse myself, I’d choose one leaf – just one single, curled leaf – on the eucalypts outside, and see how long I could keep it in my sight as the wind blew. I’d look away and look back; try to find it again. Sometimes I would imagine I was a gumnut baby or some other kind of tiny tree-dwelling being, and try to imagine the view from up there on my leaf-swing. I’d try to feel the silence of the empty schoolyard, the wind on my skin. I’d listen for the distant hum of passing cars. Other times I would imagine I was some other family member – my mother at home, eating cheese and crackers between loads of washing, or my brother in the prep classroom at the other end of the school, cutting messy outlines out of coloured paper with his left-handed scissors.
Now, as an adult, I can see that I was always more interested in multiple perspectives than multiple observations; far more likely to pick up an interesting river-rock and turn it over and over in my hands than to splash and play with the other children, seeing and feeling everything at once. And so, there was a shred of truth to the facetious rebuttals I’d serve up to my ex when accused of being unaware of things going on around me. It isn't that I'm not aware, it's just that I'm aware of different things; depth rather than breadth. In the end, I’m not really a writer of fiction, taking detailed inner notes on the world around me; I’m a writer of poetry. A ruminator. Singular in focus. My best work actually does come from the “navel-gazing self-indulgence” he found so terribly obnoxious and adolescent; from my use of that dreaded prefix, “I”.
Unfortunately though, I don’t know any other way to be. It would be nice if I did. It’s not always easy going through through life with a tendency to deconstruct and reconstruct, hash and rehash, obsess and process. It does kind of make you crazy… But then that is for later. If you get that far.
