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matildainmotion · 4 years ago

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What if Self-Love is Not About the Self? By Natasha Fowler and Matilda Leyser

This blog is a collage.

A collaboration

A conversation between my words -Matilda’s- and….

….Mine, Natasha’s

It’s a blog about looking after yourself, ourselves, and how I, you, we go about doing that.

It is in two parts. You can also listen to the blog if you go HERE:

PART ONE:

First, to introduce ourselves:

Matilda: I am a mother, writer, theatre-maker, co-director of Mothers Who Make, wife, daughter, insomniac.

Natasha: I am a friend, a lover, a guardian, a wounded human. I am a White woman, descendant from my ancestors. I make art, share what I know and raise children.

We met at an international MWM meeting.

I’m trying to finish a draft of my novel by Christmas, so I am not writing any blogs. Instead, I send an email to Natasha, in Amsterdam….

Hi Natasha, Please let me know if you wish to write a MWM blog for the month of November. The only requirement is that it ends with a question, relevant to the theme of mothering and making, that can become the focus for the month’s meetings should people wish to take it up. Let me know….. Matilda

Thank you, Matilda, yes. I started work on the self-care article yesterday. I’m going to edit today and share with a few friends. I can commit to having it to you by Wednesday. I hope you have a good steady day of eating, working, caring and resting. I have stretched, washed and consciously dressed but my teeth are not cleaned yet (3/4 of my morning routine). Time to get off emails! Natasha

Late Wednesday, I receive Natasha’s first draft. I see it come into my inbox at nine pm, as I am about to read bedtime stories to my daughter – I think, ‘I won’t read that now, or I won’t sleep.’ I close down my laptop.

I don’t sleep anyway. One of the worst things about insomnia is the radical loneliness – an irrational sense that no one else in the world is still awake.

The next day, tired, wired, I read Natasha’s blog. I know I am a word control freak -I have been known to edit, and re-edit, a text message - but I feel uncertain about publishing Natasha’s draft in the MWM blog spot. I want more mothering and making in it. This also seems a very dubious response- to invite new, diverse people to write a blog and, when they don’t sound like me, to want to edit them to make them sound more so…..and yet, at the same time, I think there is something valid in wanting to look after the particular space that MWM holds, in meetings, online, in writings. After dithering for a few days, I email Natasha –

Hi Natasha, first a disclaimer: I am not in a great place right now. My chronic insomnia has become acute and I am not functioning well, so my critical faculties are pretty ropey! …But would you be willing, to include a little more about your mothering and making in the writing….?

Hi Matilda, It makes sense to me that my approaches and the boundaries of the blog are having a conversation. I am curious about why I don’t talk about mothering and making in a way that meets the criteria. I have an imaginative block for what that’d look like - which tells me I’m categorising the requirement differently to you. It’s a familiar thought cul-de-sac that comes with this Neurodiverse mind I operate in.

Neurodiverse. It’s a term that is relatively new to me and suddenly tremendously potent: at the end of September my son at last received an autism diagnosis. “I get it,” he said when my husband and I told him, “My brain does this” – he drew a detailed picture in the air of different, curved and diagonal connections between invisible points of meaning– “And other peoples’ do this,” he said, drawing a series of straight, right-angled lines.

Hi Natasha, as part of my learning in this area I would be very interested to hear a little more about how you name and describe your neurodiversity. Please send me a few lines articulating your sense of it - why does our exchange feel like ‘a familiar cul-de-sac’ to you? Tell me more about the cul-de-sac and the other streets and highways of your mind :-) Thank you again for your openness, integrity, and all your work on this. Matilda xxx

The cul-de-sac I talk about is a place I get stuck when I've been given a task and I have no imaginable concept of what that would look like. With a long conversation and lots of back and forth clarification, I would probably discover that I do know what you're talking about but I learned a long time ago not to try and clarify everything so precisely, it was not practical/ possible and probably led to people being annoyed by my questions.

Part of my response to the task is to think "but I made the writing - that's the making" and "I am a mother, so if I speak, I'm speaking from the experience of mothering".

In the end I understand the labels autism/ADHD/dyslexia/neurodiversity to be bureaucratic necessities in a world obsessed with 'normal'. The necessary diversity of human experience is medicalised, categorised in order for us to get the money from the system that is needed to exist in the system. I am disabled by what I live in and my race/class/gender identity have protected me from that disabling being far more consequential.

I can’t and don’t want to argue with any of this. I feel dismayed at the idea that my requirements for the MWM blog might actually in themselves be exclusive. I don’t feel good about wading in and making Natasha’s voice more acceptable within my idea of what the text should sound like. So, I think instead I will be transparent – I will leave her words as they are and add some of mine – put in the mothering and the making that I feel the need to include. As it happens, Natasha’s chosen theme, of the need for self-care to be a process that takes place as a collective, community act, could not be more relevant to my experience of mothering and making this month.

Here we go then….

PART TWO:

Natasha: I ran out of self-love this summer, overwhelmed by stories of all my faults, what I’d lost and not done. I spent too much time subject to a cruel inner tyranny. I held onto the idea that I could take care of the situation alone. That I could create the self-love I needed. I could not. I needed to depend on something beyond my self. Although I had vowed to love myself first only two years ago, I was now raising questions about this individualised ideal of self-love.

Matilda: Take care, people say. I still struggle to do this. I sit on the stairs at 3am. My husband is asleep. My son and daughter are asleep. They are 8 and 4. I am 46. I ought to be able to rest too - how can I possibly take care of them, if I cannot take care of myself in this fundamental way? Self-soothing is a skill that babies, some say, are meant to have learnt after only a few months. I tell myself this when I get to the sobbing stage at 4am. I fantasize about a mother figure– not my real mother who is 79 now, also in my care, also asleep – but some great giant of a mother coming walking through the woods outside. She is coming to take me up in her arms, hold me against her, above the trees, hold me, grown as I am, until I fall asleep. Because tomorrow I have other people to take care of– the children, my mother. And I have another chapter of my novel to write. I know I cannot write when I haven’t slept.

Natasha: I finally gave up the idea that self-love is my sole responsibility. I began to accept the dependence that exists, the vulnerability of my well being. My self-love became communal. Just like the child raising that I do along with my partner, our friends and family; just like the neighbourhood garden my wee boy and I joined in preparing for winter last week.

But how did I end up believing self-love is something I have to do by myself? Born in 1978, independence and individuality were highly prized values when I was growing up. To be able to do things yourself without help was a given. To be free of the demands of a group was important. The myth of singular heroes was all over the culture, from lonesome superheroes to introvert inventors and brave explorers. The heroes saved the vulnerable, and the vulnerable were symbolised as young, straight, thin, white women. The stories of everyone around the inventor and all that they did were edited out. The people who were there before the explorer even set his foot down were erased. The values of independence of individuality, invulnerability are seeped into my bones.

Matilda: Did you sleep? My husband asks me in the morning. I shake my head. He is worried. I am worried. I don’t know what to do. I have tried so many things. I tell him I might put a post about it on the Mothers Who Make Facebook group– “You should,” he says. “That’s what it’s for.” True. I started it, but I find it hard to reach out for support. I have a kind of pride, almost a snobbery, that has often stopped me sharing. ‘What’s on your mind?’ FB asks me – so many things, but I don’t want to place them in that white public space. It feels immodest to do so, to turn my life into a headline. But the truth is, I am afraid.

I recognise this. It is also why I find it hard to share my work. I hold onto it. I have been working on this novel for ten years, and hardly anyone has read it. It is the same reason I edit, re-edit text messages. I do not let people see the mess. The missed comas. The words out of place. I feel safest when sealed off, private, when only carefully crafted images of vulnerability are revealed. And yet, when I am sobbing at 4am, all I want is company. A giant mother. Someone, anyone, to see me, to see the mess of me.

Natasha: I am communally made. My ideas of who I am, what I do, what is the value in me are made during my relationships. Maybe I always knew that like the self-hate I was carrying, my self-love was a communal responsibility. I suspect there is something about the experience of being a mother in my culture that helped me forget. It seems to be an experience that isolates and calcifies our individual sense of responsibility. The International mothers who make calls were part of my communal self-love recovery. Getting to turn up to a new group and hear me tell my story and listen to so much good company. I hope we might all give and receive the love that we need to maintain a sense of our self being loved. I hope we are all learning what we need to learn to be able to do that.

Matilda: So I did it – I put the post on Facebook. I need some help, I wrote, I don’t sleep and I can no longer blame my children for this. My children are sleeping – I am not. Many of you reading this, may have seen it and responded. It was extraordinary for me to see such a huge number of compassionate, wise, responses so fast. Humbling. Profoundly helpful – not just the resources, but the act itself of reaching out and finding so many hands writing back. After only an hour, I went online to look and I could see the wavy line that appears when someone, somewhere is in the process of typing something. A real person out there, taking care. Not just one. Over a hundred. A giant number of mothers.

I wrote back to Natasha:

P.s. The amazing response I received to my insomnia post rather wonderfully proves your point - we don’t have to do this self-care thing on our own. Xxxxx

Don’t have to – can’t even – whoever you are, how ever your mind works, however brilliant you are, however vulnerable, however divergent, however alone you feel.

It sounds so simple. So obvious. We are interconnected. All the streets link up, even the cul-de-sacs have passages leading onto one another. There is no such thing as social distancing. Physical distancing, yes, but social – two metres apart between your thoughts and mine, your experience and mine, your words and mine – is just not possible.

Here then is Natasha’s, my, your, our question for the month:

How do you understand self-love, is it clearly something you must do for yourself? Or something you share? or maybe you practise other ideals of compassion? Maybe you carry some communally made self-hate too? How do you sustain yourself when overwhelmed?

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