Dawn Treader

Over the last few days I've been immersed in Doris Lessing's autobiography, a source of comfort while nursing my family through various health dramas. One of my favourite passages comes after she has moved from South Africa to London and is in the early stages of becoming an author. On an average morning, she writes, her son wakes her at five, and she entertains him until it is time for school. Then she goes back to bed for a few minutes (such a good idea) to subdue 'the feverish need to get this or that done – what I call the housewife's disease: “I must buy this, ring So-and-so, don't forget this, make a note of that”'. Then she is ready to write:
I do not sit down but wander about the room. I think on my feet, while I wash up a cup, tidy a drawer, drink a cup of tea, but my mind is not on these activities. I find myself in the chair by the machine. I write a sentence . . . will it stand? But never mind, look at it later, just get on with it, get the flow started. And so it goes on. I walk and I prowl, my hands busy with this and that. You'd think I was a paragon of concern for housekeeping if you judged by what you saw. I drop off to sleep for a few minutes, because I have wrought myself into a state of uncomfortable electric tension. I walk, I write. If the telephone rings I try to answer it without breaking concentration. And so it goes on, all day, until it is time to fetch the child.
It is all too rare in biographies and autobiographies for people to describe the mundane texture of their everyday lives like this. But Lessing was someone who saw that practical, homely details matter, that they make up a lot of who we are. 'I am brought up short,' she interrupts her recitation of famous names and dramatic happenings at another point in her autobiography. 'All this is outward, you'd think my life was all politics and personalities, though really most of the time I was alone in my flat, working.' 
 
I admire Lessing's perspective. And I admire how she combined single parenting, housekeeping on a shoestring and dynamic creativity with such – not ease exactly, but no-nonsense, workmanlike stoicism. It's an approach I aspire to, though my own daily balance has been completely toppled of late by illness. Hence 'Dawn Treader' at the top – a dream of pure creativity.


A young Lessing with many hyacinths, and after she won the Booker Prize (her solid stance reminds me so much of my matriarchal, farming grandmother)

A reminder, if you are thinking about Mother’s Day, that there are many cards and prints, and a few original paintings in my shop which fit the bill for this occasion perfectly (I hope!) – whether the joy of anticipation, or being in the middle of the melee of parenthood, or sitting in a wheelbarrow after the most exhausting part is over (you can get a sense below). I also have a few commission slots open later in the year.
 
Thank you so much for reading, and please do share this with anyone you think might like it. Sending you this amalgamation of highlights from my painting and my research on homemaking is one of my favourite parts of the month.
 
With love,
Anna
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