gate

We lost the house we were planning to move to and also found out about a major structural issue in our flat, meaning putting on long pause the dream of the family home I’d been conjuring since I was a little girl.

And during the hottest summer on UK record, on those terrifying days when the temperature spiked 40 - a heat like I’d never known on this damp isle, a land where people sat on blustery beaches and ate soggy sandwiches, where you always packed a brolly on a day out and unbearable heat was unimaginable - it felt impossible to ignore this collective loss, the thing that is really happening, with everything it might mean for our way of life and our very right to life.

Every Tuesday afternoon my husband was with the kids, and I would go and work in the garden of Dulwich Picture Gallery, sitting on a deck chair and making the most of their free wifi. I even went on the hottest day of the heatwave, when not a single other person was there and the whole building had closed to keep everyone safe. On those afternoons I often cried a lot, not necessarily for one obvious reason but perhaps for multiple, from the feeling if not the understanding that something needed to be processed in my body, it needed to come out.

And yet. Amongst every moment of fear or hopelessness or sadness, in life and in motherhood, there are spikes of joy and connection, of reasons to live and reasons to hope. I started writing a piece about grief and change, motherhood and art this summer. It came together slowly, as everything does in this phase of life, when loud cries interrupt stolen moments and projects inch to completion at an agonisingly slow pace.

There were major flashpoint where things seemed to fall into place with this piece of writing, where a scene was set or connections were drawn. One of them was in the garden at Charleston, one of my favourite places on earth, somewhere I think I’ll always experience epiphanies. So often we have to move, to change location for things to start making sense to us. In the intensity of motherhood, it’s often when we move away from the volume of others people’s requirements of us that we can remember ourselves.

This is Gate. I hope it resonates for you. You can listen to me reading it or you can read the full text below. If you enjoy it, please consider making a small donation to a fund I set up so that people who can’t normally afford to can come to my classes and events at reduced or no cost. Time away from the intensity of life is essential for mental health, especially in motherhood, so your donation will be gratefully received and put to very good use.

Gate

An exploration of creativity, grief and change in motherhood

By Chloe George

There’s a great bit of stand up from American comic Tig Notaro called Can You Believe It? where she mimics her friends who have children and their shock at their kids growing up and doing age-appropriate things. Can I believe that your five year old is starting kindergarten? Yeah, I can totally wrap my head around that. 

I laughed a lot before I had children but like all cliches about parenting, when you become a parent you find yourself doing the very thing you’d scorned. All at once we’re exclaiming in amazement at how much a baby has grown or feeling genuine shock when we see our child in their school uniform for the first time. It seems that as humans we struggle with understanding the basic properties of time: we feel continuously surprised that it passes. We find it so hard to live in the present, longing for some indeterminate time in the future when some problem is solved, or obsessing about the past and what we could have done differently, or wishing we could go back to it. But we also get lost in the present, distracted by it, and it translates as an unexamined assumption that it’s here to stay. 

When things change, we feel the pain of loss. That pain can feel profound because we know these passing moments are related to the greater march of time and the essential grief attached to that. The end of summer. The twilight years of our parents, or of our selves. Ageing, mortality, change as a tide we cannot stem

I’ve spent so much time wishing my kids would get past some annoying phase, then being struck with genuine terror and sadness when I realise something major is over. Like the baby not being a baby any more. Like when the babbling stops and real speech begins, or the moment I realised my daughter was long and lean and would never be a squishy little person again. When it’s clear the way they need you has fundamentally shifted, it’s lessened. That thing you longed would end really is over. It’s easy to regret the moment that’s passed, to feel guilty that you didn’t love every moment of it. But there’s another way to look at it, which is acknowledging both facts - that something can be precious in its fleeting nature, in its significance as the mark of a necessary, tender, fledgling bond - and it can be intense and demanding too. That wishing something would finish and being sad it’s finished are companion statements, not opposing ones.

When my son was 16 months old, I went away for 2 nights. I was staying just down the road from Charleston, the Sussex home of the collective of mid-century artists known as the Bloomsbury group. I’d been there before, pre-kids, and like so many people beguiled by this group of unhappy artistic geniuses, had fallen in love with the place, the way it looked and felt and the radical ideas it held. Returning that day, I hadn’t managed to get a ticket to see the house but I thought I’d head down anyway and have a wander round. I didn’t think the garden would be accessible without a ticket, but as I walked up to the gate it was open, and if felt like it was like that just for me, as if it was inviting me in. 

I walked past the pond and through another door into the garden. It hadn’t been summer when I’d visited before, but now it was June, and it was filled with an abundance of roses and poppies and foxgloves and lupins and peonies and daisies and fruit trees and cornflowers in pick-and-mix colours. Bees buzzed and everything had grown tall and this slightly wild, sprawling feeling felt fitting for this place where experiments in art had flourished, where things had been allowed to keep growing. There was some kind of comforting form in the very classic choice of plants for an English country garden but there were no neat lines. It was familiar and original, like home and also something bolder. As a very amateur gardener, I could only imagine how much energy and skill had gone into creating this. 

It reminded me of the gardens my parents had taken me and my sister to as children, the National Trusts and the Royal Horticultural Societies, only now I could appreciate places like this, making my parents’ efforts to put up with our moaning maybe worth it. In fact, I didn’t just appreciate this place, I felt lit up by it. I felt the beauty of that garden in my whole body. The feeling seemed to start somewhere in my chest and radiate outwards to the borders of my body, a tingle in the skin of my fingers and toes. I felt the wonder of it bang loudly in my heart and drop me heavily into my heels like an exclamation, a conclusion. That was it. There could be nothing better, nothing I could love more, not ever anywhere. 

Standing there, I was aware that I was partly feeling so much because I had been away from my children for two days, not because I missed them - though I did - but because being away had afforded me time and space to connect with myself again, with parts of me that were there before them, that had existed independently from them and which now had to reshape and recalibrate in some new form. Being away from them allowed me to connect with this place where so much had been made and remade, and with the grief of what was lost. Because becoming a parent always entails loss, even if some of it is temporary. There are the things you can’t do any more that make you feel like you. The things you don’t have time or space to feel. The things you will never do because you are busy being a parent. I thought of my own garden that lay so neglected because I had been tending to my children. 

You cannot have it all. And mostly, most of the time, I feel a sense of acceptance about that, and also I sometimes feel sad for what is no more and what will not be.

Charleston, home of artists, also moved something in me in the same way that all centres of art and culture had since I’d become a mother. In the natural shrinking of your world when you have a child, here is a reminder of something bigger than you, here is a sense of connection when you feel so unmoored, here is a source when the well feels dry. 

At so many points I felt that I didn’t have time to connect with my own creativity because I had children. I had contended with my sense of loss when I felt stuck and longing for more time of my own. But over time I’ve started to suspect that the relationship between me and motherhood and creativity is a more complex one. Partly it’s just the absence of precious time that has made me value it more, made me more determined to make something in the time I do have. Partly it’s that everything I’ve written about since I’ve become a mother is about being a mother, suggesting this experience is a genuine source of inspiration, even or especially in ways I can’t always acknowledge or understand, and maybe never will. Partly it’s that, in strange and unexpected moments, I’ve felt my creative self awaken while I’m parenting, whether through some particularly awesome method of creating a den or having to find a solution to a particular stubborn quirk or foible innate in one of my children.

But also it’s that the part of me I have felt so guilty about - the part that longs for more time to myself so I can be creative, so I can make things - is not so different to the part of me that loves my children. The way I adore them and my longing to make things are different expressions of a similar kind of aliveness, a proof of life, a devotion, something I can channel but not control. Khalil Gibran wrote about children: They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself. I wonder if art is the same, the love - from life - for more life. Gibran said, children come through you but not from you. We always want to own things. But some things we cannot. We can only stand to the side and say, wow. How did that happen? Art is the desire to try and understand mysteries, to create feeling, to make meaning. Julia Cameron wrote about creativity as a force unto itself, that comes from outside us. We are guardians or stewards of this power, just as we are for our children. 

My guilt over wanting this time for myself remains, but I try to disregard it as a product of things I have absorbed that are simply untrue. I try and get rid of it from my body, crisply shaking it off even if my mind keeps piping up. I get it out of my body when I write or garden or dance or laugh with my friends in a bar, living my life as my children surely ultimately want, mainly there alongside them to steer a steady ship but also sometimes absent while they are safe. As they want me and life wants me, open, embracing. I think of Seamus Heaney with his pen, digging. I get to my desk and I get in my garden and I write and I dig. My whole body aches and I can barely get out of bed the next day but new plants are planted in my garden and 1000 new words are on the page and my children are fine, they are more than fine. 

* * * * * * * 

A few months later me and the kids go to look at a garden that has been designed to withstand the extremes of climate breakdown - floods, droughts, storms. There’s gravel, a sandy desert feel, hardy plants, a spikier architecture. It’s beautiful but there’s no denying how different it is to the garden at Charleston. If I’m honest I admire it greatly, but I don’t love it as much. It is not in my bones, my memories, collective and individual. When we visit it’s a few days since the hottest day on UK record, and it feels clear that so much in the way of what humans have built, planned and grown is no longer appropriate or sustainable. There’s so much that’s going to have to change.a My nostalgia for English country gardens isn’t just for my own childhood, the madeleine moment we’re all susceptible to, but for a country that’s shifting irrevocably, a world that is doing the same. My sadness comes from the hard truth that childhoods don’t last forever, everything changes and the idea that it doesn’t is just an illusion that comforts us temporarily. 

Adapt or die, so the phrase goes. We can be brave and wise enough to acknowledge change will come, or not, but either way, it will come. When I think back to expecting a baby for the first time, there were so many things I could not have known. Information I could not have received, even if someone had tried to pass it on to me. I wasn’t ready, but it happened anyway. We are required to let go of old things with as much grace as we can muster. Otherwise we end up clinging on desperately, flailing and failing to accept change and open our eyes to the opportunities in front of us. I’ll fail a million times but I’d rather try and move with time, not attempting to be in control but perhaps in some kind of partnership. Because when I stop and notice, I do get to be in that moment. Perhaps it’s the closest to ownership we ever get.

When faced with change and challenge, some people retreat and others reach out. Some people shut down and others feel they can only survive it by painting a picture, or writing music, or digging a garden, or writing a story. Sometimes we freeze for months or years but it all comes out in the end, in plants and on canvas and on paper and in our bodies. An expression or a way of surviving. 

Being a mother has both prevented and galvanised me to make things, to find new ways of expression and new reasons for survival. Having a child is an act of creation and it’s also an act of hope. Recently I stopped looking after my garden because we were hoping to move house, but with no certainty over when or if it would happen, I eventually started again, reasoning like so many wise people before me, that surely the point wasn’t just the destination, but the journey. If it really was the end of days, wouldn’t I want to keep going anyway, finding joy in the experience of continuing on with the small, simple things? I recently heard the writer Padraig O Tuama say this about hope: “hope is certainly bolstered by evidence, but hope that’s only based on evidence isn’t strong enough, because hope is most needed where it’s least seen”. In a broken world, sometimes with all evidence to the contrary, we orient ourselves towards hope. I often think of something my friend Becky says, “Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up”. When something big has changed, we often need to rest, to process, to reevaluate, to let something go. And after that, we get moving again. We work, we marvel, we create, we try and make sense of what’s happening. We try to find courage. We open a gate and walk through and there’s a whole new world, right there waiting for us.