30 April 2021: I happened upon this yesterday, written three years ago. I haven’t completed but I plug away…
It was hard to fathom why a 64 year old woman (in two weeks), slightly overweight (25 kilos in truth), who drinks wine every night (two standard drinks too many by all the health advisories), who has moved back to the town she had fled forty-five years before, and has resumed smoking after a six year break, would part with a few thousand dollars to sign up for a First Draft Novel writing course. Talk about making a late run.
Any early potential she had been gifted had long been pissed up against a wall, to her mind at least: a ready mind, a facility with language, and keen ability to read people. She explained it as an inability to successfully traverse the cultural divide; between the culturally deprived circumstances of her family and the offerings available to her by virtue of her ability. A sophisticated explanation for sure, but failure is failure after all.
So instead, her life followed a pathway carved by a series of decisions, or no-decisions, which took her down a very different path than that offered by her early promise. Instead of the law and the Bar (she had imagined the United Nations at the very least), she opted for the bar, the racetrack, the building site and the characters who resided therein. In fact she married one, but that’s a whole other story, about passion’s insufficiency in overcoming intellectual and cultural divides.
The first real existential jolt came when her two year-old son became seriously ill. Recognising that she should take her fate into her own hands where she could, she resumed studies, psychology and counseling this time, and got herself into a decent career stream. Divorced now, she did OK; making her way through support organisations working with people with cancer, brain injury, sexual assault, women’s health and landed in government. After 16 years she had enough for a comfortable retirement and embarked on making up for lost time with travel and the arts.
The second existential jolt came this year, when her 60-year-old brother sustained severe spinal injuries in a farm accident. With their parents now frail and elderly (but no less difficult), she pulled up stakes and moved back to the small town to care for them and support her brother and his wife through his rehabilitation.
And so here she finds herself, among all the broken people, stripped of the pleasurable distractions of her usual life, a world away in the parallel universe of her family of origin. She wonders why it seems to take a disaster to stir her into action, but she can’t afford to dwell. Best get on with it, she says, no looking back; just begin from here. She loves writing but has never persevered, so this is what she will do. Take her interest in people, good and bad, whatever talent she’s retained and turn this time into something constructive and enriching.
By evening, she will have ferried the parents to multiple medical appointments, dressed suppurating skin cancers, fitted compression stockings, entertained equally ageing relatives and friends, cleaned the house and washed up after meals they barely touch. Then she’ll sit down and try to write.
She is both excited and terrified but knows that writing lifts her out of the noise in her head. She has a collection of fragments of things she has written – confetti really. Now is a perfect opportunity to show up and do the work. Finally, she might have run out of excuses.
She wants to learn how to craft and build an engaging story and she can tap into a lifetime of learning about herself and others. Who knows, she might pull it off. Completion will be her main achievement (she admits herself that finishing has never been her strong point). Anything else, who can tell? I certainly wish her well.
