I was outside with my camera, watching the weather come in. The wind was quick and bitter and the sun was just disappearing behind the clouds. Winter is on its way, as the plants die back and the grass returns to green.

In a last ditch effort to reproduce, helped along by a few days of rain, the grubs have come out, and with them, the birds. Flying fast in a group overhead, turning together, there is beauty in their movement.

Look at them, flying together. Not one bird flying backwards, or attempting to move in a different direction. One group, one mind. I expect the birds that fly out of sync have been ostracised long ago, to die a lonely death.

Animals don’t like differences.

It’s not that I want my children to be sicker – no, I don’t. I just want them to be silent, for a little while. The elder one is on day three of an ear infection (but there is no vomiting today so far) and the younger one is on large amounts of prescribed laxatives. Just enough to make them both grumpy and screechy and for my nerves to be, ultimately, shattered.

And so I hide from them, stealing all the good jelly beans and locking myself into the bedroom. I hide and even though I’m not alone, being bothered instead by a kicking uterine resident, a peeping duckling and a smooching tomcat, no one is actively whining at me and that improves things, rather a lot.

Some days are easier than others, but then, some days do not contain fluffy ducklings and jelly beans. So even if today is not the easiest of the lot of them, I am practising being thankful, just as I practise being unavailable right now.

Sorry, your mother is taking a mental health break. Leave a message at the door and she’ll get back to you, just as soon as she finishes downloading the words from her brain and eating this chocolate bar. BEEEEEP

I smiled at a mother as I walked into the school grounds the other day. She looked me up and down, before looking away pointedly. I smiled more and continued walking. Maybe a smile is too hard for you to share, but mine is not and you are welcome to it.

The school yard contains sour faced women with lips pursed like they’ve been eating lemons. I wonder if this is the only time they get to themselves and how long has it been since they had an orgasm that made them gasp and curled their toes, blackening their vision at the edges. Too long, I suspect, they look like they need one.

I wander through, smiling, noticing who smiles back, who looks uncomfortable and who avoids eye contact. I don’t judge them. Everyone has a story and I don’t know theirs – even though I’d like to.

Give me your broken, your dark, your deep. I want to collect your stories and collate them, turning them into a work of art.

Who are you?

What makes you smile secretly to yourself?

Tell me these things and I will keep them safe, right here with me.

As I leave the school, having collected my small skipping daughter, we chat to each other and she complains loudly that home is where we’re headed. I cite things to do, but really, it’s the urge to write pretty words and the exhaustion from the shopping centres that sends us straight home at the end of the day.

We leave, passing the groups of women, huddled in corners, all with their own stories to tell.

I wonder if they consider themselves cliquey and then realise that you can’t see the clique once you’re inside it.

Mirrored glass walls protect you from the smiles of strangers and I am left wondering:

What is their story?

The blogosphere is all persnickety snark and nobody loves me and I’m tired of it. It’s all did you see what she’s doing and why didn’t I get chosen and why is she popular anyway. We’re all spending so much time trying to work out why everyone else is doing well that no one is paying attention anymore.

We’re all exactly the same.

We’ve ended up cookie cuttered into lovehearts and kittens.

Not the real kind of kitten that shits behind the couch and scratches your toddler for no reason either.

No, we’ve gotten basket kittens with cute expressions and no yowling at 3am.

Basket kittens are boring. Clean is boring.

There is nothing amazing happening here and the same conversation just keeps happening in a never ending circle.

—-

No one becomes amazing by being the same as everyone else. Every brilliant mind has a stroke of insanity in there, a little bit of fuck what everyone else is doing and why can’t I do it my way.

I don’t get inspired by a clean house, or decorated cookies, halloween costumes and bento box lunchboxes.

Cough. Spit.

My inspiration comes from grit and grime, from the blood that boils under the surface and the ways that the puzzle pieces refuse to sit together. I’m inspired by pieces of crazy, by The Bloggess aiming at being furiously happy and Amanda Palmer being exactly who she is. I admire women who do exactly what the fuck they want and damn society and its boxes.

I don’t want to be that person who has no imagination left. I want to write words and drown in them, to tell untruthful stories and have them read.

I don’t want a perfect house, or tidy silent children.

I want brilliance.

—-

What is your inspiration? What makes you feel like you’re achieving something? Is it dark and gritty, or is it shiny and pretty?

Life got crazy and the unessential parts of me got neglected. Not that I stopped writing blog posts in my head at 2am, I just stopped getting out of bed to type them out. Which I’m certain is sensible, but it’s also pretty slack.

I managed to get married, without any hiccups, except the rain and an impatient celebrant.

And then I miscarried.

There is a certain miserablness to watching a pregnancy slide down your legs. Even more so when you wonder, if you’d rested more, would this be happening? (probably) The week leading up to the wedding was crazy, with hospitalisations (Isaac) and bleeding (me) and vomiting (me) and arguments (also, me) and shouting (Amy) and stress (Nathan). But we did it.

And then I took a mental holiday, as December tried to suck out my soul and my brain simutaneously. It wasn’t pleasant, as I finished miscarrying at a school pageant in which religion was mentioned more times than I felt comfortable wish.

But we all survived (except the fetus, which didn’t have a chance) and my body decided to magically work and get pregnant again. Not that the actual conception was magical (fun is a better word). There will be no religions based around an immaculate conception here. The fact I ovulated at all is magical, let alone twice in 8 weeks.

My body is kind of a fuckwit, given to practical jokes and refusals to do anything normally.

Now I sit here, nine weeks pregnant, hot, pukey and still pretty sure I’m missing both my soul and my brain.

Never mind. They can go and join my sanity in the cupboard, if December decides to release them.

Or, you could call it the day of quietly stressing out and then forgetting that you need to write a blog post.

Crap.

Isaac is improving and the wedding is in four days.

This is where I can be found this afternoon, watching the dress rehersal for This Uncharted Hour at the Theatre Royal.

Tickets are limited, so if you’ve got a spare hour this weekend and you’re in Tasmania, head along. You can hear what I’ve got to say about it on twitter this afternoon.

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.

There is silence in the house and I am still bleary eyed, but I have made the effort to get out of bed 40 minutes early so that I can start writing here. It’s got nothing to do with the fact that I am so busy today that I won’t have time later. Hello November. You’ve sort of snuck up there, haven’t you?

***

There is a psych appointment scheduled today. It’s been cathartic to go along each fortnight and just talk. Like every other mother however, last week I found myself dicussing my children. My fears and my stresses and the frustration I feel when I walk into the bedroom to find my daughter perched on top of my closet, eating my chocolate. She’s the perfect candidate for “owling” except for the screaming when she realises that she can’t get down.

Real owls have wings daughter, if you’re going to climb up, you have to learn how to get down. Just don’t break anything.

I spent an hour talking about my children last time, before the therapist gently mentioned that maybe we ought to talk more about me?

Silly girl. She’s not worked with many (any?) mothers, I would put money on it. The children are me and I am them. The fears for their future are not things I can separate from my personal anxiety and the frustration I feel at untriggered meltdowns is just as real as frustration with other adults. Tempered with a lot more love, of course.

I shouldn’t call her silly, in fact she is lovely – even if it is a bit disconcerting to be discussing the tangled web inside my brain with someone my own age.

But that is okay.

The main question is: Do you think she will help me work out how to get a cat into the roof, to eat the baby starlings that have hatched right above my desk? Because it’s hard enough to write a blog post half asleep, without adding shouting babies to the mix.

Have you read this post by Sara Douglass?

She died today.

I hope her family were there to hold her hand and watch her last breath. I hope she wasn’t alone.

The Silence of the Dying