Veronica Foale

Author: Veronica Foale

  • It smells of green

    Watching the cursor blink makes me want to walk away from the computer and stick my head in a bucket of sand.

    ***
    It smells like Summer outside, all warm air and green growing things. The garden is alternating between dead and alive, depending on how tasty the plants are to slugs at any given time. I’ve hidden pools of water in nooks and crannies, all the better to coax the birds in, but the cats seem to think that I’m delivering small feathered treats just for them and the slugs continue to eat everything in sight.

    This morning made me wish for a laptop and a space to sit in the early morning sun and write, but never mind. Here I am, one battered window away from the outside, writing while my children leap and scream around me.

    ***

    Warmth is like a balm to my soul. I hadn’t realised how much I was hating the cold and grey until it lifted and I felt my insides loosen. Did you know that you can hold all of your muscles tightly clenched for months at a time? It doesn’t change anything, but there you go.

    You could do it too I bet.

    Maybe you already are.

    ***

    Breathe.

    Relax.

    Feel your insides unclench and your sadness rise to the top.

    Stop pushing it down.

    Carrying a brick is just as heavy even if you’ve forgotten that it’s there, in the pit of your stomach.

  • If you do what you love…

    I had a baby at seventeen, which contrary to popular belief did not ruin my life, or destroy my future. You’d be surprised at how many people will console you on a pregnancy if they feel that you are younger than the “perfect” age to be a mother. You would also be surprised at the treatment that young mothers receive from people in positions of authority, but I digress.

    I could list all of my reasons for falling pregnant, but I’ve written them down so many times before that they sound trite. Needless to say, it was the right decision for me and my family and here we are, six years later.

    When I was pregnant, and then a new mother, no one asked me what I “did”. Which suited me, because I didn’t know at that point. I was a mother, but my daughter was too screamy for me to think about what else I could do. My entire life was wrapped up in keeping the baby happy, feeding the baby, stopping the baby biting my nipple. While my friends were heading off to Uni, I was changing nappies and discovering just how in love you can fall with something you’ve created.

    Two years after my daughter was born, I was pregnant again, with my son. When you’re pregnant, no one asks you what you “do”. You’re just a gestating vessel, the means to an end, a giant egg waiting to crack. Men avoid your eye (is pregnancy catching?) and women ask strange questions about your internal organs. Pregnancy is the only time it is deemed socially acceptable to ask a woman about her cervix.

    As is the usual course of events when everything goes well, my son was born, cried some, grew some and eventually got to the age where I could leave him with his Daddy to go and DO things – which is when the inevitable questions start.

    I was at an exhibition opening and someone asked me “what do you do?” and instead of saying “I’m a mother” I found myself saying the (only slightly practised in front of a mirror) line: “I am a writer.”

    Which then leads to the inevitable questions about what do you write and where and so on. It took a few more months in front of the mirror to get those coming out smoothly.

    You see, no one really cares what you DO, it’s just a way to start conversation.

    I write things and I publish them on the Internet and 90% of society thinks that I’m a bit weird because of it – but I can ignore them. Anyone can be a writer, that is the beauty of it. Just like anyone can be an artist, or a musician, or a sculptor.

    No one cares what you do to earn money – they care about what you DO because you love it. People aren’t interested in how you pay the bills (unless you might be helpful to them), they are interested in passion.

    This is what I do. I am a writer and when people ask what I write, I tell them: I write a blog. It’s quite popular now and I really enjoy it.

    Try it. The next time someone asks what you do, tell them what you love to do, rather than where you work. They might surprise you.

  • The time my father tried to stab me in the eye with a nail

    When my daughter was a baby and I was eighteen, I was visiting my parents.

    My daughter was a screamy baby, prone to jagged fits of wailing that sometimes lasted hours, but we had discovered on a previous visit that she loved the baby swing. Yellow and plastic, my parents had picked it up second hand and hung it with some rope from the veranda. No electronic swinging baby devices here, this swing had a piece of rope tied to the back, so that I could sit back comfortably and still swing the baby.

    That day, it was too cold to sit outside and eventually my mother and I convinced Dad that he should put some nails in the roof beams in his shed, so that we could move the swing inside and I could actually put the baby down.

    Grumbling slightly (he grumbles about everything – I suspect it’s so that my mother and I don’t get complacent and take him and his amazing building and making skills for granted), he went to get the six inch nails and his hammer.

    As he started to hammer, I moved to the other side of the eight ball table, jiggling and rocking Amy as I went.

    Suddenly, Dad hit the nail wrong and it jumped out of the beam, flew across the room and hit me just above the eye.

    All of this happened so fast, that my father was still looking around to see where the nail had fallen, and no one else was quite sure what they’d seen.

    To my credit, while I was shocked, I didn’t drop the baby, or burst into tears, choosing instead to yell “YOU JUST HIT ME IN THE HEAD WITH A NAIL!”

    Luckily (and I do mean luckily – because if you’ve just been hit in the head with a nail, you have to look for some positives) it flew end over end and hit me with the head of the nail, rather than the sharp end.

    Dad was suitably apologetic, Mum produced an ice-pack, while Nathan jiggled Amy and I prodded at my eyebrow to make sure it was still there.

    I developed a pretty bruise just above my eyebrow and a hefty worry about standing near someone hammering nails into wood. Nails are unpredictable.

    And that is how my father tried to take out my eye with a nail.

  • I was running.

    I dreamt I was running, fast, across a paddock. I was exhilarated and my body was strong and did what it was meant to do. Legs pumping, I remember thinking “YES! I can do this, if I just try. Why didn’t I do this sooner?”

    There was no worry about dislocated joints, or torn ligaments. No fear that my body would break down half way through, or that I would do irreparable damage to myself.

    It felt amazing.

    And then I woke up and reality slapped me in the face.

    I was cold and stiff, with a dislocated ankle, something wrong with my shoulder and a stabbing muscle spasm low in my back.

    I don’t run, not anymore. Not for a long time and it’s been even longer since running felt good.

    Now I walk carefully, with a crunch click in my hip and a mind to making sure I don’t dislocate anything that will leave me screaming in public.

    Usually, I don’t remember what I’m missing. Not until my dream self goes and does something amazing.

    Like running.

  • It’s chaos here. Don’t mind me.

    The point of getting up forty minutes before everyone else was to write a blog post, I grumble to myself.

    It appears that the plans I make for myself don’t always work as well as I would like and my son wakes up three minutes before my alarm, demanding a warm drink and the middle of the bed as he rubs his eyes.

    My daughter follows shortly thereafter, shouting at me that she doesn’t want to get dressed and WHERE IS MY PILLOW?

    I’m not entirely sure how her pillow has disappeared in the five minutes between getting out of bed and shouting at me, but it turns out that she means the other pillow (no, not that one, the other OTHER pillow) that her brother is lying on.

    Hilarity ensues, if by hilarity you mean heartbroken screaming and a little bit of shoving. Which I do.

    ‘It will be fine, STOP SHOUTING. There, do I have your attention? Share the pillows, make some breakfast, Mummy needs five minutes to THINK.’

    Five minutes is a very long time when you are only five and three and I manage to get thirty seconds alone, hiding in the bathroom, before I am needed (loudly) elsewhere.

    Such is my life and I suspect, such are the quality of blog posts you can expect from me this month.