A Snippet from my Suburban Birds Zine

It's only a week to go until my exhibition and zine launch!

I am simultaneously excited and terrified.

And busy.  There is always more to do.

Consequently, I did not post a blog yesterday.  So decided instead, to post a snippet from my zine for your perusal.  Enjoy!  The zine will be released next Saturday (25th of November) and you can purchase it from me for $15.  OR ask your local library if they'd like to buy a copy.  It's registered with an ISBN so totally easy for them to buy.

 Me in the pink - a country kid                

Nostalgia and Sense of Self               

 

This project was born of nostalgia.  Growing up on farms one of my favourite things to do was to lie in the paddocks' long grass and wait.  Eventually, the curious cattle would move so close I could peer right up into their wet noses and grass stained grins.  I would lie prone as long as my little body could hold the suspense, then leap up chortling at the terror I unleashed in the eyes of my horrified friends.  I climbed low branched trees and perched, with pen and paper, to write poems and short fictions while watching the birds above and the sheep below.              

For a time, at a very deep level of my consciousness this aspect of my person seemed lost.  Moving to the suburbs to start a family reinforced this sense of loss.  I never expected to raise children in the suburbs.  I never expected this because I could not imagine anything more amazing than growing up in the isolated country as I did.  And I naively assumed that either I would never have children, or that somehow having children would herald a return to rural life.

So I never expected to be a suburban housewife.  Most of the previous ten years of my life near the city I lived a frenetic life: day jobs, art projects, nights filled with gigs, openings and book launches.  

   Me featured in Black Magazine -
     Crazy knitting housewife lady

But somehow I simultaneously predicted this future.  I parodied housewifery through my work at design school.  I printed scenes of my family scrap-booking.  I knitted mundane objects – like life-size lamp-posts to poke fun at the every day.  My work investigated the meditative qualities of repetition, and its relationship to the female experience.  Life in the suburbs always struck me as so banal, so boring.  And in my view of my self – an art student who made ridiculous unmarketable objects - I was neither of those things.

But there I was, another suburban housewife.  Two children in under two years, pushing a Mountain Buggy with one hand, while pulling a reluctant toddler along with the other.  It felt simultaneously unreal and like the natural trajectory of my life.  I both missed my former life, and felt grateful for the excuse (children) to no longer live it.

But the longer I stayed away from my the book launches and exhibition openings the more invisible I began to feel.  I felt an enormous sense of loss, not just in the divide between myself and my childless friends, but in my sense of self.  I have always been a creative - but becoming a Mum sapped me of creative energy.  Before pregnancy I always planned on my kids having the most amazing knitted clothing and toys.  Pregnancy stole my brain; I locked the workplace toilet key in the toilet four times, I couldn't write my own patterns any more.

 Motherhood: Completely changed my world

And once my first child was born I couldn't write poetry either.  Holding this small thing my partner and I had made and were wholly responsible for made poetry seem pretty redundant.  How could anything matter as much as this small person?  How could I ever write anything as meaningful as her existence?  I attempted writing many times and deleted every line.  It all felt so dishonest.

Whilst genuinely enjoying the journey of motherhood, this inability to create fed my anxiety.

In times of difficulty in managing my mental health I have regularly returned to gratitude.  Regular contemplation of the things you are grateful for is a researched, proven and simple method to manage depression.  And it's a method that has always worked for me.  On one of my many excursions into getting well I realised how regularly what I was most grateful for, was the birds.

 

A rosella would flit briefly into the macrocarpa tree overhanging our driveway.  A sparrow would turn its head just so and throw me a cheeky look.  A blackbird would perch on the neighbours rooftop and its sing its little heart out just to mark the coming dusk.

In discovering how much of a salve birds were to my mental state, I began to wonder why.  Why did these little brown sparrows have the capacity to impact my life so profoundly?

Photograph from Day 6

I realised it was because I felt akin to the sparrows.  As a housewife, I felt like I had become invisible.  I was there, I existed, I went places and I did things, but because of my feelings of what it meant to be 'just a housewife' I did not really exist.  The sparrows were the same.  They were everywhere, they are brown and dull.  But looking closely you come to see them as individuals.  Like us, they live their lives in patterns, but moment to moment they can be dazzling and funny and beautiful.  Capturing a bird in a moment of joy is a window into a glorious life.

Seeing this in the birds, truly seeing it, day after day began to give my life more relevance.  Not only mine, but the lives of my peers.

In writing off my suburban parenthood as invisible, I had written off the value of my friends and family who were also parents.  This was not a conscious thing.  I am a feminist.  I strongly value women's work and experience, particularly that of parents.  But my belief in the value of the varied experiences of women was meaningless if I couldn't apply it to myself.

The birds brought back the little girl laid out in the paddock.  They built the bridge back through time to the suspense before the joy of simple things.  They showed me I had the capacity to completely engage with nature where-ever I was.  Because it was part of who I was.  They helped me value my experience, and the experiences of other suburban Mums. 

Discovering the birds reconnected me to my creative self.

 Fantail - drawing from earlier this week