Conversations with myself.

Rain or Shine, by Cathy Cullis

Ugh, what am I doing with my life?

Right now? You're walking the dog.

No, not right now. Overall, with my life. What am I for? What's is the point of me? What do I doooooo?

Well you walk the dog, you take care of your family, this morning you did some laundry and hoovered the hall and sometimes you get paid to answer other people's emails...'

Uh huh. That's not really helping.

What do you want to do with your life?

Write. And take pictures.

And what did you spend this morning doing?

Writing. And taking pictures.

Interesting...

But there was no point to it, no one paid me to do it, it didn't make any money...

Oh. So money is the point. You want to get paid?

It would be nice, yeah.

Do you need to get paid?

I don't understand the question. 

I mean do you need to get paid? Do you need more money?

It would be nice.

Yes, but do you, right now, need money? Are there things missing in your life that you need that you can only have if you get paid for what you do? 

Um.... Well... No, not really.

Interesting. 

But if I'm not getting paid then what's the point? 

Are you happy? Are you getting better at what you do?

Yes. 

Maybe that's the point?

Oh shut up. What do you know. 

I know that you want to write and take pictures. I know that you do write and take pictures. I know that you want to get paid but you don't financially need to get paid. Maybe you would like to get paid, maybe emotionally and mentally you need to get paid but right now, this week, you are not getting paid.Yet there is the potential, that in the future, once you have scrubbed your step, you might be in the position to get paid. Is that correct?

Yes. 

Okay good, glad we sorted that out. Now maybe we can get on with doing what we do and worry about getting paid later? When we need to?

Maybe. 

You know we're very lucky that we don't need to worry about getting paid right now?

I do. I also know you added that bit so the Internet wouldn't hate us and think we're a whiny ungrateful bitch. 

I did. 

Thanks for looking out for us. 

You're welcome. 

'Dear, you never have it'

Poem for a Daughter

by Anne Stevenson 

'I think I'm going to have it,'
I said, joking between pains.
The midwife rolled competent
sleeves over corpulent milky arms.
'Dear, you never have it,
we deliver it.'
A judgement the years proved true.
Certainly I've never had you

as you still have me, Caroline.
Why does a mother need a daughter?
Heart's needle, hostage to fortune,
freedom's end. Yet nothing's more perfect
than that bleating, razor-shaped cry
that delivers a mother to her baby.
The bloodcord snaps that held
their sphere together. The child,
tiny and alone, creates the mother.

A woman's life is her own
until it is taken away
by a first, particular cry.
Then she is not alone
but a part of the premises
of everything there is:
a time, a tribe, a war.
When we belong to the world
we become what we are.

monkeys, babies, creative blocks.

Everywhere around me people are having or are about to have babies and I had this lovely idea that I was going to knit something for them all. HA! The one that came first was the lucky one, he got all of my knitting mojo and then I decided that if I was going to put that much time into making something then it was going to be for me. I'm giving like that. So now I'm making myself a scarf, at the rate I'm knitting it should be finished by winter 2016.

I made the kid a monkey. Everyone I showed it to was surprised, the people who had seen my hot water bottle cover were the most so. "It looks like a monkey," they said. "An actual monkey." I took the opportunity to practise my modesty by quietly smiling and offering a demure shrug but inside I was shouting 'DAMN RIGHT it looks like a monkey motherfuckers.'

I really wanted to keep him, I'm not going to lie. But then I also really wanted to show off a) how much I care about the new baby and b) what a genius I am, so I packaged him up with a bottle of whiskey, some books, a set of ear plugs and some mini eggs and posted him off to be puked on and thrown in puddles.

We met the baby for the first time last week and he's kind of adorable. I spotted the monkey sitting on a shelf and I briefly considered stuffing it in my bag and taking it home but then I looked at the kid and I looked at the monkey and I looked at the kid again and he gave me this ridiculous, gummy, whole-face-creasing-up smile and I thought 'Fine, I suppose you can keep him. For now.' Then later, when he schnuzzled his nose into that gap between my boob and my armpit and fell fast asleep, I briefly considered sticking him in my bag instead; the kid for the monkey seemed like a fair swap. Then I remembered that I'm done with babies. They're nice and all that, but I'm done.

Sometimes when I'm feeling creatively stuck (all the time at the moment), when my photographs don't look right and my words come in the wrong order, if at all, I have this urge to make another baby. If you like making stuff, objects, then babies are pretty fulfilling. While it can be a pain in the ass getting the project off the ground, once it's ticking away you don't need to put much work in. The end product is, from a technical point of view, likely the most impressive thing you will ever make from two ingredients. Spending time with an actual baby helps to add a little perspective to that genius idea though, helps to remind you that while you might end up with a very nicely constructed craft project, the end result is a bit more of a commitment than the photos your struggling with or the words that just won't come.

I think that maybe I need to learnt to sew. Clothes seem like the next most impressing thing you can make, after people. Then again, maybe I should just stick with the photos and the words, as infuriating as they both are. I stuck the kids out from two and a half through to three and a half and they seem to have come out the other side of that shit-fest (literally) of a year so maybe the words and photos will too.

A letter to my daughters, on the eve of their 3rd birthday.

Dearest girls, tomorrow you will be three. You have been two for one day less than a year and let me tell you, what a year it's been.

We spent your second birthday travelling back to our funny little steading house in Evanton. We were renting it before we moved to London. Three weeks after your second birthday we moved. Your daddy drove us to the airport, your great-granny met us there, together they put us on the plane to London, your great-granny cried. There was a hairy moment as we were climbing the steps to the plane door, Ella heard the engine and froze, Ammie tried to keep climbing but the steps were too tall for her little legs, and as we were the first to board every single passenger on the flight stood on the steps and the runway, waiting behind us while I tried to persuade Ella to keep walking and help Ammie up off her knees. Eventually we were in our seats and I started unpacking my survival kit that I had been putting together in a desperate attempt to get through a flight by myself with two two year olds. You were perfect. You spent the whole journey playing, ripping up the wax from your tiny cheeses and dividing it between the plastic cups the air steward had given you. You weren't quiet but then I've never expected children to be quiet. Fuck them if they don't like your noise, you be heard. When we got to Gatwick you ran off down the glass tunnel over the baggage reclaim and every time I've gone down that tunnel since I've seen Ella in her tiny teal woollen coat, greeting her life in London with toddler sized glee. Then you both got tired and grumpy and mummy needed coffeeand I'm almost certain that you cried and grizzled all the way into London on the train until you eventually fell asleep in your pushchair, for the first time in months. That night you slept sprawled on a blanket on the floor, like tiny romper-clad drunks. We had moved to London.

This year has been hard, I won't deny it. That thing people say about terrible twos? Like most things people say it has some truth in it. There were tears and screaming and collapsing on the floor, from all of us. Two is hard, it's hard for parents and it was really hard for you. You were learning but not fast enough to give you the freedom and understanding that you wanted. You so desperately wanted to do things but you could not possibly understand why you weren't allowed and when you weren't allowed you were furious. You were getting bored but you were also so tired, your growth spurts exhausting you so that you still needed a good big nap in the middle of the day. You were curious and grumpy and completely unreasonable. Punishing us when we left you, treating us with disdain whenever one of your grannies was around, wilfully ignoring everything we said and telling us that were naughty, bad, silly, smelly. It sounds funny now but the vehemence with which you threw those words at us cut us to the bone. But oh the sweetness, the sweetness of two made all of it worthwhile. 'Mummy, are you sad?' 'Mummy, do you need a hug?', your awareness that other people have feelings was a milestone, your willingness to give affection and your desire to comfort others came just at the right time, just when it seemed that you were really trying to kill us with your demands and tantrums. And you started to seem to like each other, which I won't deny was a relief. When you didn't think we were looking you started playing together, inventing games and sharing and cooperating, then you realised we were watching and went back to fighting and whinging and more often than seemed necessary biting, scratching and gouging. Ella learned that she was faster and taller, Ammie that she was stronger and that her rage burned brighter. Ella, when she could, stole Ammie's things, not because she wanted them but because she wanted to hide them from her, knowing that it would make her incandescent with rage. Ammie in return would bite, push, scratch and yell.

Ammie, over the last few months you've worked so hard to learn some self-control and I am so proud of you for it. I know how hard you struggle, how strong your emotions are, that they rise like a flood tide through you and you can not see anything but injustice, feel anything but tage and despair. The day when instead of biting Ella, you clenched her fists and yelled 'ARGHHHHH BITE YOU' at her I was so proud of you that my heart ached. I know how hard it was for you not to just clamp your teeth around her arm and use your tiny powerful jaw to express all the fury was coursing through you. Emotions are hard, I struggle with that too. So often I just want to scream and yell and throw myself on the ground crying. So often these days it's only wanting to set you a good example that stops me. I hope one day you will understand that we will always have at least that in common. Alongside your rage comes the greatest, warmest love in the world. As intensely as you feel anger and desperation you feel love and affection and joy. Ammie, you give the greatest hugs that there ever was. You wrap your little strong arms around my neck and you squeeze me so tightly that it hurts. Then you kiss me, little sloppy open mouthed kisses that leave my face wet. Anyone who gets one of your 'great big hugs' is very luck. I love the strength and the power in you. I love your rage and your fury and your love and your fire. You are always warm, you don't get cold hands, your limbs are soft and kneadable like warm bread dough and when you curl in my lap to read a book or watch tv, your wild curls tickling my chin, you are my hot water bottle. You look more and more like your daddy and I see his concentration and determination glowering from your brow when you are confronted with something that doesn't make sense or just something really quire serious that demands a lot of respect, like milk.

Ella, your independence and your brightness astound me daily. You are always learning, always listening. Your sense of humour is more sophisticated than most of the adults I know. You do voices and accents, you play with language and you take delight in making us laugh. You will not perform on demand though, your urge to do your own thing outweighs your urge to entertain. Your urge to do your own thing, never to give in, outweighs everything. On your more difficult days I call it stubbornness, your daddy; sheer bloody mindedness. You would rather miss out on something you really really want than give in and do something someone else has told you to. You remind me so much of me that it scares me. One day I will tell you the stories about the Easter chick and the back seat of the bus and I hope that you will believe that we are made from something similar. I am learning to only pick the really important battles with you but I think that it will be a long road. A while back you went through an extreme independent phase. Maybe once a week you would agree to a hug, never a kiss, and while your sister was revelling in being 'a little baby' you were quite determined that you were 'a big boy', telling us so many times a day, dressing only in trousers, only in blue and getting really very cross if anyone suggested that you were either a baby or a girl. Then, just as suddenly as it arrived, it passed and now you are neither girl nor boy but 'a baby bunny'. You will let us hug and kiss you again and I am so glad. I love to feel your long arms and legs wrapped around me, to stroke your delicate shoulder blades and feel your whispy fine hair tickle my nose. I love to feel that for a little while longer you are my baby, because I can see you striding off into the world on those wonderfully long legs any day now and while I know great things wait for you out there, I don't want to let you go.

Both of you have the most wonderful language skills and pretty much daily something you say makes us laugh. You have parents who love language and who will rarely tell you that you'rve got a word wrong, often preferring your version anyway. As such you will likely go to nursery and be mocked mercilessly. I'm sorry about that. Even if being laughed at is too much for your lexicon to survive, it's very unlikely that your daddy and I will drop the wonderful things you said in that year you were two from ours. Our clothes will never again be too small or too big but always 'too fit'. Going out for dinner will always be 'fahncy', not fancy. It's unlikely that either of us will evera sk to be excused but always 'please maybe squoozed' and on cold mornings I will always brew my coffee in a chocolatey ear.

My girls, tomorrow you will be three and it seems so sudden. I remember this night, three years ago, as clearly as any night. In fact infinitely more clearly than any of the nights since, because you two have royally scrambled my brain. Early fireworks popping and whizzing as I lay quietly in the darkness waiting for you to arrive. Tomorrow we will take you to see your first firework display, you'll probably hate it and complain of the cold and the darkness and the noise because as much I would love to imagine otherwise, I'm almost certain that the irascibility of two does not stop with three. In fact I've heard it gets worse. Oh well. Along with everything that might get worse with this coming year I am absolutely, entirely certain that you're going to keep getting better too. That your love and your sense of humour and your curiosity and your conversation and your friendship with each other is going to grow and grow and grow and that your daddy and I will continue to think that you are two of the best people to ever walk this earth. Happy birthday baby girls. 

Home Truths

'The work in Home Truths: Photography, Motherhood and Identity aims to challenge long held stereotypes and sentimental views of motherhood. Set against a backdrop of the seemingly insatiable appetite for pictures of celebrity mums, streams of Instagram bumps and babies and a history of the Madonna motif in art history, the work here addresses changing conditions of power, gender, domesticity, the maternal body and familial relations. It is a critical space for the representation of mothers to exist aside from more reductive cultural assumptions of mothering.'

Hanna Putz, Untitled, (LL1), 2012 © Hanna Putz

This exhibition opens today at the Photographers' Gallery in London, with an accompanying exhibition on the theme of motherhood and loss (sob) at the Foundling Museum. Looking through the preview gallery for the main exhibition I see a combination of really beautiful photographs of mothers and motherhood (Elinor Carucci's The First Week literally took my breath away, for obvious reasons) and a fair bit of conceptual work, which isn't exactly my bag, but I'm really looking forward to going to both. It's been a while since I wrote a Things I've Done in London post (because I haven't been doing owt) so maybe I'll reprise that series once I've been! 

Motherhood and (self) employment.

A friend asked me if I could write about how it was being a self-employed mother who had to go back to work after 3 months, in a society where the mothers around us are for the most part taking a year's maternity leave.

Friend,  like me, is a wedding photographer. And Friend, like me, gave birth in November and had to start shooting weddings again in the Spring when her baby was around four months old. I'd imagine though, that also like me, she started answering work emails and fitting in little bits of admin after only a few weeks. Not because she wanted to but because when your livelihood relies on bookings made 6 months to a year (or two in crazypants situations) advance you're painfully aware that the emails you don’t answer now are the weddings you're not going to be shooting a year down the line, when presumably, you're going to need some dough.

So, four weeks after W&P were born I started working again. Just an hour or two while they were sleeping. Let's back up and look at this situation from afar: four weeks after giving birth to twins, haemorrhaging, having a blood transfusion, spending a week in hospital, coming home with TWO BABIES that I had fuck-all idea how to look after and who spent most of the night awake, who were struggling to breastfeed, who I was struggling to breastfeed, who were complete fucking alien tyrants, I decided to start working again. More specifically, to start communicating with people, people who I wanted to think that we were capable of a) photographing their weddings and b) behaving like normal human beings at their weddings. It was a bad scene. But it was essential, both to our livelihood and actually, to me. I kind of enjoyed having a role other than 'mother' to fulfil. This might be when you ask 'why wasn't Nye answering emails? Aren't you a partnership?' which, yes. Yes we are. But Nye, the dear man, was up all night with the tyrants while I slept a blissful six hours on the sofa. So that I was capable of sustaining our business. The simple fact of the matter is that I don't cope well on interrupted sleep and he's painfully dyslexic. Reversing our roles so that I was up all night and he was writing to clients would have been a total shitstorm, (Quite possibly literally with TWO BABIES and a woman who throws things when she's tired and angry.) At this point I could write an entire essay on our mental schedule during the first year of the girls lives, but I won't because Friend didn't ask what it was like being two people who were trying to keep their babies and their business and each other alive. But that's a good story too.

What did she ask again? Oh yes, self-employed mother, going back to work. Focus.

So at four weeks I went back to answering emails and other administration stuff and Nye continued to look after the babies (after being up all night), patting me on the shoulder to (try to) feed them when they were hungry. I know who had the better deal out of that ride. The truth is, as I said, I enjoyed being back at work. But the truth also is that 'work' was a few hours of emails that I could write in my pyjamas, ten feet from the sofa I slept on and much more importantly that I had an immeasurably amazing partner who looked after the children and allowed me to get enough sleep that I was able to function. In fact I should probably just stop writing here because I have fuck-all idea how anyone does this shit without someone else at home all day. Show me a self-employed mother who is trying to work and look after her new baby while her partner is at work outside the house and I'll show you a fucking superhero. A crazy, tearful, unwashed superhero but a superhero nonetheless. I'm very very aware that our situation is fairly unusual and that I can't really talk for all those women who have just had babies and are still feeling the pressure not to let their businesses die a speedy death from neglect.

Let's assume you survive the first few months of parenthood and you find yourself at the point where you have to actually leave the house, and the baby/babies to shoot a wedding. Holy crap. Before the girls were even born I spent days and weeks fretting over this point, sobbing 'I don't want to leave them, I don't want to go back to work. How are we going to do this?' 'It'll be fine, don't worry' said Nye. Unsaid: 'we don't have any choice, we have to work so suck it up.'

The thing was, we worked as a team, so we both had to leave the house so we had to leave the girls with someone. 'Someone' was our parents, so at least they were being left with people who loved them, but that didn't alleviate the terror that a) the caretakers would forget to feed them/ drop them/ sit on them/ go out for a fag and let the door slam behind them (that none of our parents smoke is probably worth mentioning. This particular fear may have been born of hormone-induced insanity.) or b) I would cry through the whole wedding, aching with longing to be back with my babies.

I contemplated the logistics of combining working with feeding my babies; the babies would just have to come to. Whoever was looking after them would have to bring them to weddings and I would just pop out to feed them (because brides and grooms wouldn't mind that sort of thing at all). And the weddings that we had to travel overnight for? Well my mum would just have to come too and we would all share a family room at the travel lodge and it would be fine. HA!

Let's just consider this a parable in the pointlessness of sobbing over things that have not yet happened. In the event, by the time we shot our first wedding, I had given up on breastfeeding altogether, (it being just too soul-destroying to continue with) which removed that problem. The girls were happy to take bottles so there would be no need for me to pop outside to whip out my floppity milkers during the vows. Secondly, by March, when the girls were four months old, I was really really really ready to spend a day without them. REALLY ready. As we closed the door behind us to head off for our first wedding I did a little skip and a hop, feeling my charpei belly wobble under my work outfit (still Gap maternity trousers, FYI.) 'Are you worried?' asked Nye. 'Nope, are you?' 'No!'. I don't know that I've ever enjoyed photographing a wedding as much as I enjoyed that first one.

I hope I don't need to say this, but the internet is stupid so I'm going to say it anyway; I loved my babies and I loved being a mother but I also loved working and I couldn't and can't see a single reason to feel guilty about that. Maybe if I was leaving my kids alone with a couple of milk bottles tied upside down to the bars of their cot, like hamster water bottles, I'd have felt guilty. But they were being left with a kind, caring, terrified Grandmother, they were going to be fine. We worked all day and when we got home late that night I was absolutely ready to see my little bears, to sniff their milky necks and hold them close. Then go to bed while Nye stayed up all night trying to convince them to sleep. The next morning was tough, I got up at 6am to send Nye to bed for his 6 hours sleep and take over parenting duties and dear god, it hurt. Two weeks later we left for an overnight trip, two nights actually. That was pretty good too. I don't think my mum enjoyed it quite as much, when we got home she looked ready to flee, but everyone survived to tell the tale.

I don't understand the cultural noise that says we're supposed to want to be with our babies and our children all of the time, and I mean ALL. There is an understanding that leaving your baby with someone else, even for a few hours, is somehow not only shirking your parental responsibility but depriving your child and reveals that you are in fact, entirely heartless and unloving. Men don't feel this and I get it; breastfeeding. Breastfed babies have a dependency on their mothers that is important and undeniable, so swanning off on a week's holiday and leaving them with someone else is probably unwise. But even when they're older, when they're no longer breastfeeding we're supposed to want to be with them all the time and personally, I'm calling bullshit. I'm sure there are mothers who do feel that, who genuinely want to be with their offspring 24/7 and who would genuinely ache were they separated for more than an hour. It's just that I don't know any of them and I'm not one of them.

The status quo in the UK is for mothers to take the full year that they're entitled to on maternity leave and at the end of it to either return to their jobs, start a new career or to quit working and continue to be full time parents. I couldn't possibly say how many take which path, seeing as I went out of my way to avoid spending time with other mothers in that first year, but I feel that going back to the job you left is not the prevailing trend, I may be wrong. It seems that the freedom that a paid year of maternity leave offers rarely comes in tandem with the flexibility most mothers are after once their child is a year old. 

To be completely honest, I don't feel qualified to provide any comfort at all to mothers who have to go back to work before that year is up and who are unhappy about that fact.  I can offer comfort to mothers who are worried about this coming up and say 'hey, it might not be that bad! You might enjoy getting away from your kid for a while, AND THAT'S FINE!' But for the mothers who are actually struggling with leaving their kids at home while they go off to earn the readies; all I have is my sympathies. It sucks to have to do things you don't want to do and I'm sorry that there isn't an easier way.

Weirdly, talking about our parenting situations seems to be taboo, we are quick to be defensive or self-depreciating, to see other people's decisions as either an attack on or a validation of our own. It's only by having these conversation that we can begin to place our own experiences in context. I'd really love to hear other people's experiences of returning to work, or not, after their allotted maternity leave, be that a week or a year, is up.

* DISCLAIMER. Again, because the internet is Stupid, I'd like to say: I have shared my experience, my situation and my feelings. I am in no way suggesting that this is or should be anyone else's experience, situation or feelings. I am neither insinuating that everyone should be glad to go back to work or that those who don't want to leave their infants with a babysitter are in some way lacking and I have huge sympathy with almost any and all alternative experiences. Call my naive, but I do essentially believe that we are all just trying to get by and do our best. By sharing my experience I am not publicly validating it as either healthy or desirable. Just because I felt it was both is in no way to imply that you should. I am well aware that I may be deficient in many ways and that the chances that I am completely fucking up my children are high. In fact just yesterday I referenced a dog training manual in conversation about childrearing and was surprised when people laughed/baulked.*