Back to school vibes

By Kim Moore

Our commute to school

I’ve always loved September - even when I was in the trenches of being a teacher, even in my twelfth year of working in state schools, I still always felt excited and hopeful at the start of a new term. I loved the first few lessons when the excitement of the children at learning a new instrument rippled through the classroom and sometimes out into the corridors and disrupted everything.

There was a brief period of my life - when I was a full-time PhD student - when I wasn’t tied to the rhythms of the educational year. I still remember the feeling of freedom and giddy excitement that swept through me that first September when I realised September didn’t mean the same thing anymore and wouldn’t for a while.

Now I’m teaching again, but it’s a very different rhythm to my music teaching days. Our teaching doesn’t start till October, but there is preparation and induction events and emails and continued supervision of MA students and PhD students, and left over marking, and meetings and strategy days.

And now I’m a mother and I get to September with feelings of sadness and relief. I’m sad that another summer is over, and this one felt years long and days short. We spent eight days in Spain in a pool and my daughter swam all day, getting stronger and stronger and more confident in the water. I examined a PhD viva. We went to see the live filming of Gladiators. I finished a lyric essay on motherhood and it has been accepted for publication. We went camping with five other families in Cheshire. I marked all day and into the early hours of the morning. I spent all afternoon by the river and watched my daughter learn how to make a bow and arrow. I went away for a week and taught poetry. I went to the Museum of Childhood and watched my daughter shop in the pretend shop, get money from the pretend bank, post pretend letters. I edited my poetry collection. I played Junior Monopoly.

I gave up on trying to have two separate lives and just let them push up against each other. There were no clean borders - motherhood and my writing and my job are distilled into each other, like ink into water, although which is the clear water and which is the ink is beyond my knowing.

I’ve been reading Of Woman Born by Adrienne Rich over the summer, because of the lyric essay on motherhood. Before the summer holidays started, I read this paragraph and felt as if all the wind had been knocked from me. It’s a feeling I often get when reading Adrienne Rich.

From the fifties and early sixties, I remember a cycle. It began when I had picked up a book or began trying to write a letter, or even found myself on the telephone with someone toward whom my voice betrayed eagerness, a rush of sympathetic energy.  The child (or children) might be absorbed in busyness, in his own dreamworld; but as soon as he felt me gliding into a world which did not include him, he would come to pull at my hand, or ask for help, punch at the typewriter keys. And I would feel his wants at such a moment as fraudulent, as an attempt moreover to defraud me of living even for fifteen minutes as myself. My anger would rise; I would feel the futility of any attempt to salvage myself, and also the inequality between us; my needs always balanced against those of a child, and always losing. I could love so much better, I told myself, after even a quarter-hour of selfishness, of peace, of detachment from my children. A few minutes! But it was as if an invisible thread would pull taut between us and break, to the child's sense of  inconsolable abandonment, if I moved - not even physically, but in spirit - into a realm beyond our tightly circumscribed life together.

I read it to my husband and asked if he recognised what was described here. I was genuinely curious and thought he would say yes - we live in the same house after all, and I would say childcare is split pretty evenly between us. But he shook his head - he didn’t recognise the intensity, the invisible thread, the inability to live as himself, the desire for what Rich calls ‘a quarter-hour of selfishness’, the way my daughter also knows when I ‘glide into a world’ which does not include her.

That was before the summer holidays, half a lifetime away now, and things feel different again. It helped me to read this in Rich, to know I wasn’t imagining it, to read about that invisible thread, the tightly circumscribed life. It helped me in the wild borderlands of the school holidays, where every email starts with an apology for the delay, and any meeting can be interrupted with a request for a snack.

In What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics, there’s a very short essay called “As If Your Life Depended On It”. Adrienne Rich writes:

“To read as if your life depended on it would mean to let into your reading your beliefs, the swirl of your dreamlife, the physical sensations of your ordinary carnal life; and simultaneously, to allow what you’re reading to pierce routines, safe and impermeable, in which ordinary carnal life is tracked, charted, channeled.

I think I did this a little, this summer. I allowed Rich’s words to pierce my routines. I made time to go for a walk so I could be not just myself, but for myself. I gave myself permission to be present when we were walking in the woods, and I gave myself permission to be present without guilt when I was writing. My daughter is growing and moving inexorably further away, into her own wild self, and I’m finding my way towards a new, old, transformed, scattered, pieced together self. She is teaching me as much as I’m teaching her. These are the lessons we have to teach each other.

Here is Adrienne Rich again, from the later part of Of Woman Born:

"The quality of the mother's life - however embattled and unprotected - is her primary bequest to her daughter, because a woman who can believe in herself, who is a fighter, and who continues to struggle to create livable space around her, is demonstrating to her daughter that these possibilities exist"