Irresistable

I just purchased this gorgeous print from etsy. I'm not sure if I've previously confessed my love affair with that place of homemade heaven, but it's my weakness.

When this image was featured on one of my favourite craft blogs (yes, I really am that sad) it immediately recalled my second-favourite-in-the-world-ever poem by Gwen Harwood on the nature of marriage and female identity. I think it is something in the turn of the girl's face, the direct stare of the lion. Regardless, it jolted me back to a sudden recollection of Harwood's work. Even when I first read her work when I was 16 the poem gave me chills.

I was never a poetry buff, really. I think it comes from being such an impatient reader. I'm rarely able to take the time to let a poem wash over me, but Harwood's work spoke to me so directly from the moment I picked it up. Years later, when I suffered a miscarriage, I went back to a poem she had written about her own miscarriage. It was the only thing that seemed to come close to reflecting the questions and the grief I had about this strange loss; the loss of possibilities, of paths I would never take or a person I would never meet.

Anyway, here is the poem that the artwork reminded me of (which gave me the excuse to purchase it straight away).

The Lion's Bride

I loved her softness, her warm human smell,
her dark mane flowing loose. Sometimes, stirred by
rank longing, laid my muzzle on her thigh.
Her father, faithful keeper, fed me well,
but she came daily with my special bowl
barefoot into my cage, and set it down:
our love feast. We became the talk of town,
brute king and tender woman, soul to soul.

Until today: an icy spectre sheathed
in silk, minced to my side on pointed feet.
I ripped the scented veil from its unreal
head and engorged the painted lips that breathed
our secret names. A ghost has bones, and meat!
Come soon, my love, my bride, and share this meal.

This, and many of her other poems, evoke such powerful senses of the loss, betrayal, joy and compromise it takes to be a wife and mother. She was so courageous in laying open her struggles to reconcile the creative musician and poet with doting mother and supportive wife (her husband was also an intellectual of some repute and much of her life was spent supporting his career), particularly in the 1950s. I'm not sure how, when I didn't really understand feminist theory as a construct, but I really felt that this was a struggle which all women must have to deal with. Even at 16, it seemed obvious to me that to be the kind of wife I saw reflected all around me in many families I knew, including my own, must take enormous compromise of your own desires. I dare anyone to read her poem Suburban Sonnet and stay starry-eyed about the prospect of motherhood. Strange though, that she never comes across as bitter. Mostly weary, happy to admit the pleasure of simple life but never forgetting her creative urges as they pull, reminding her about the 'what ifs'.

Over ten years later, the poem still gives me the same sense of foreboding as it did back then. I don't read it particularly differently, but I think I understand it in a wider feminist context, and I can certainly appreciate the knife-edge idea of how quickly marriage can eat you, spit you out, change your boundaries... turn on you. How a wooing can lead to a devouring of your previous self. How two people could become unrecognisable to each other once they wear the trappings of tradition. It is so very hard to hold on to yourself some days.

Where to from here?

I'm wondering about this blog... do I really need a whole separate blog to talk about these aspects of my life? I feel like I do, but mostly because I find it something I do separate quite severely in my regular life. I didn't talk about my upcoming wedding non-stop in the lead up, and I don't talk incessantly about my marriage and relationship post-wedding either.

Sometimes, though, it feels like I leave it out of my discussions (including my blog) because I feel like it's something that should be apart from the rest of my life. I think that also comes from working with Himself. You sort of learn to compartmentalise. What I've realised, though, is that I haven't been compartmentalising. It's more like I've been pretending it's a whole area of my life that doesn't exist. And my relationship, my marriage, my work-partnership with Himself is obviously a huge aspect of my life. One that throws up dilemmas for me every day. And not so much in the let's-talk-about-my-husband-and-his-bad-habits way, but the ways that make me consider how I feel about feminism in my own life, how I relate to other women because of my "not single" status, how I balance or manage that part of my life with everything else and how it grows and changes.

I went out of my way to start publishing a lot more honestly about my experiences with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome on my other blog not so long ago. I did the same thing earlier with being more open about my experiences of depression, or even my earlier miscarriage. Every time I've gone through one of these experiences, which are characterised often by people being embarrassed or ashamed of them, I have realised that the only way not to play into the idea stigma that already exists is to be open about them. If I won't talk about depression honestly, if I let myself feel as if I ought to be ashamed of my own depression, then I'm saying it is something to hide, to feel shit over and to let rule your life in silence. I don't think any less of anyone else who has suffered from depression, or a miscarriage, or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, so why let other people's misconceptions rule my behaviour?

It's also a way to remove some of the barriers I tend to put up. I often don't want to admit that I need help, or I feel isolated... but then I blame others for not being there, or not helping. Again, I think it does raise the question of whether this blog is really required, or I should just stop separating my life so much... for the time being, though, I'll post over here and see how we go.

Feminist blogging

I've been making my way through lots of feminist blogs lately (a big part of the reason I've been so keen to keep posting here), and so many of them are warming my shackles. I'm not sure what my shackles are, or why they need to be warmed, or even if I've spelt them correctly... but boy are they warm.I've been slowly making my way through one which is, put simply, delightful.

Blue Milk is a feminist, a mother, a comedian (not really, I just mean she makes me laugh), a partner, a social commentator and many other things, asI am discovering. It's such a great experience to read someone's blog from the start, knowing that there are pages and pages of their life to discover. Harking back to some of my recent posts on marriage, this old post of hers includes some great comments from her readers where feminists share their thoughts on the good old surname question. Anyone who has/is/will face this as a question might find it as interesting as I did to see how people came to their decisions.

She also manages to indulge my love for stories from feminist parents, single mothers and gay parents. I'm sure this makes me seem like I'm aiming for some kind of political correctness rainbow award, but these non-traditional role models are really encouraging for me. I love that these women (and men) are creating their own rules, making their families work outside the box. It's what I want to do in my own life, and they balance out all the mainstream bullshit and fairytales we are fed about women, family and gender roles. She's honest about her good times and bad times, which I love.

This post made me giggle out loud (at work) and made people look at me like I was crazy. And it wasn't exactly easy to explain. I guess it just tickled my fancy as being just absurd enough to make up for the banality that mothering often seems (from the outside). As someone points out, you do have to remember sometimes that you're dealing with a child's mind.On the other hand, a single sentance from this post made me shiver.

"Parenthood can feel like flirting with your own disintegration"

Is it just me, or is that equal parts beautiful and terrifying?I don't doubt it's truth, which is why even though I look forward to being a mother I simulataneously wonder if I'll make it out alive... or resembling the woman I was going in. This blog really balances my hope and my fears. Which I think is positive.

x posted

Post wedding catch up

We're married. It's done. I'm really regretting not having the chance to write more about the experience because there were some crazy (good and bad) parts.

When all is said and done though, we managed to make it through our wedding with our morals intact, we were pretty happy with how everything turned out and we shared an important occassion with our family and friends. That really was the greatest gift, having so many people there to celebrate with us.

To be honest, our aim wasn't really achieved. It wasn't a stress-free wedding at all. The night before we ended up in a huge argument that was the culmination of a horrible few months. The argument was horrible, and in retrospect I can see that the wedding made it worse. In normal life it would have been just a bad argument, due to the timing it overshadowed what should have been a happier night. That's not to say we didn't enjoy ourselves or we were arguing or anything, just that we kind of did our own thing, and we didn't approach it with as much joy as we really could have.

On the positive side, the horrible stuff wasn't about the wedding. It was thanks to the not-so-subtle fracturing of our life thanks to my Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (something I talk about a lot more in my other blog), and the pressures that added to my life as I became progressively sicker, the business that we co-run ending up in serious trouble when I could no longer get everything done and Himself's workload became out of control. Not to mention we became progressively poorer (and more panicked) due to my inability to work either my day job or our side business (which still had costs of its own building up).

It's taken me ages to come back to this blog and even write about the wedding, mostly because I really did feel pretty shitty about it for ages. I didn't want to write some false, happy-happy post about our brilliant life together when the simple truth is it was more complicated than we wanted it to be. I want to write a bit more about this, and I also think some posts I've made on my regular blog are probably more suitable for a space like this. I want to keep this blog running. Originally I thought of it as a space to talk about a non-crazy bride kind of wedding, but really it's always been about what it feels like to think of yourself as a woman who doesn't fit the framework a lot of other women define themselves by. What it's like to try to find personal meaning and your own brand of feminism in your regular life, even when you're doing things that in themselves probably aren't feminist according to many views.

So let's reimagine this blog then, and instead of being an anti-bride tale, can it be makings of a modern woman?