The Room & the Womb

She hears them out there. They have the sound of her mother’s sighs, her children’s cries, the hollow echo of all the lies she tells herself; sometimes the simpering of dreams curing in the dark. Mostly, they sound like the slow gnawing of guilt—guilt for all the times she wanted to write, craved it, but the baby was ruddy with teething, the cat had eaten a bait, the dishes formed impossible puzzles in the sink, and her fingers hovered and stilled on the keypad, and her eyelids fluttered, and sleep claimed her.

Other times, when she sat empty and angry as the right words congealed on the page in the wrong order. Too fat. Too thin. Too disordered. The too-ready backspace. The fingernails, ragged to the quick with the need to just get it out, to inhabit some other moment than this. Some other body. Some other world.

Or the times she starved herself, knowing that poems pay nothing, or so little, certainly never enough to fill the gaping mouths and tiny, grasping hands. Can you feed an entire world on pretty lies? Yet her hunger was still there, swole-bellied, keen-eyed, dormant. Until the flimsy, devilish safety net of self-esteem murmuring, ‘You can’t fail if you don’t try!’

So she took other words, schooled them, measured the weight of phrases by the heavy huddle of coins in her purse. But even that security, that gravity, was not enough to satiate her. Because she knew the hungry words would return—lurking transitions, slavering sentences, the unfolding enjambment of night.

Money and a ‘Room of One’s Own’—the two things Virigina Woolf said a woman needed if she wanted to write. That was close to a century ago now, in 1929; yet for most women today, that money, that space, that room to write remains a beautiful, impossible dream.

For many, the space is little more than the cramped inside of a cranium. Even there, words jostle elbows with grocery lists, school crazy hair days, car services, with birthday and bills and bras losing their elastic. Creativity in an unspoken fight club with day jobs and familial duties and caring.

The battle of what’s between her legs and what’s between her ears. A womb of her own or a room of her own. She cannot truly have both.

And if children clamber up her mind-mound to the zenith, where they crow and cling—secure, triumphant in their supremacy, their space, their own latent, unfocussed dreams and buoyant talent—then she will stand like a mountain beneath them, hold them up to the light, feel the weight of them in her knees, and let go herself.

For the middle-aged woman, poor of time and money but rich in love and laughter and the lucidity of a world slowly folding up around her, every day without the time or space or money to write feels like a fade to black.

‘There’ll be time,’ some will promise. ‘Kids grow up and fly the coop, and then you’ll have all the time in the world.’ But they never talk about those women whose time trickled out big-bellied with cysts or skeletal with cancer, or about the ticking biological clock of Alzheimer’s—that creeping thief of thought.

‘All the time in the world’ is a nothing, a concept, another ephemeral platitude seeking a more permanent path to a page. Words with no time to write themselves.

‘Oh, well you chose to have children.’

‘You need a richer husband.’

‘You’re just not being disciplined enough.’

'Believe in yourself.'

‘Some can make it work,’ said with a sniff.

‘Maybe it’s time-management.’

'You need to hustle.’

Like hustling crams in more hours, prints money, spoons food into maws, reads bedtime stories, leaves the light on. Like hustling is a cure for a life with a slow leak.

‘People make time for the things they love,’ she whispers to herself as she tucks a little toe under a blanket after midnight, stuffs a wet sheet into the washer, mops up vomit, refills the cat’s dish, puts the spoons away, locks tight the doors.

‘People make time for the things that really matter,’ she hears, as she makes love to her husband, folds pastry into pies, attends puppy preschool, rings her mother, posts a birthday gift, covers for her colleague, sits before a blank screen staring at a bank balance—feeling as empty herself.

Blank this! Blank that!

You cannot make time that isn’t there. You cannot spend money that doesn’t exist. You cannot live on love alone.

‘But surely that is enough. A love of family, a love of service, a love of words.’

Enough. Enough. Enough!

For a woman who writes, it is never enough. Maybe she is greedy. Maybe she is arrogant for wanting to outlive herself, to outfox death, to outlast love. Or maybe for her, the words do not settle themselves to sleep. The words do not use their good manners. The words crave conflict. The words come at a cost. And they do not grow older, only she does as she finally sits and plucks out the thread of a half-finished novel and weaves it into this month's tiny patchwork square of world.

For her, there is no denouement but death. And the words’ only room is in her head—always with the wolves at the door, ever with the elephant of need cramming its bulk into an already too-tight slot. She cannot buy time. The best she can do is hope to rent some space in the worlds within her mind.