Testing testing

 Don’t be deceived by the deafening digital silence. I’ve been writing copiously, usually on the most sleepless of nights. Pixelated reams of nonsense or otherwise obfuscatory metaphors have come bursting out of me like the shit out of my precious daughter’s nappies. And it’s all been just that: the yellowest of shit. I know you’ll understand how I’ve been too scared to publish most of it, for fear of being completely seen through. Or, worse yet, seen and believed that is all there is to it. To me. Shallow shallow language for a shallow little girl, not even deep enough to tickle a babe’s chubby ankles. This is some of what I’ve felt and, having put the sum of it out here, I feel a bit too exposed and cold (but you know what we say about the cold).

 I’ve been thinking maybe anger becomes overrated past a certain point. Sometimes it hits like foul flatulence released noisily into a crowded gathering, making everyone a little annoyed and uncomfortable until it disperses and only awkwardness lingers. I feel like I’m getting everything so wrong this time around. For once I don’t know what else to say - life has become something besides my own, which makes it all the more difficult for this long-time naval-gazer to examine it properly and report back on. If I had a mentor to turn to right now I’m sure she’d ask one question over and over and over again: what exactly are you trying to say? 

Then say it.

The Grace of God has come down from on high to sit right next to me, just like I’ve been pleading for so long. I, in turn, sit here behaving as though she is a stranger I have never seen before. What am I to say to her this time? What am I not to say? Something better left off these bare white pages either way. I don’t know what I’m becoming and I’d rather not explain whatever it is as I am unfurling & discovering. 

Thirties approaching - a brief reflection

Nope, don't panic. I'm not 30 yet. I've only just entered the final year of my twenties (hbd2m, yay!). I simply felt obliged to offer a somwhat brief reflection on this precipice of an age because why not. Perhaps you will make sense of, and even relate to, some of it.

First I must confess: I've been looking forward to the start of my thirties ever since the first time I caught myself trying to figure out a precise formula for whatever it meant to be a happy and successful mature adult woman in the prime of her life. Second confession incoming: I started seriously pondering and then trying to work towards such grand theories from a weirdly young age. I remember ten year old Seunny watching all those 00s rom coms with their frazzled leading ladies at the ripe 'old' age of 30 and clutching at varying levels of shit-togetherness, thinking 'I wonder what I'll get right/wrong when I get there... I can't wait to get there'. 

Bourdain & Mother

 Do you remember, ma? We used to devour episodes of No Reservations together in front of that bulky silver Hitachi thing that stood in the corner of our mouldy ground floor flat like a three-legged robotic rhinoceros. You’d sometimes let me stay up late watching it with you and we would gobble up together every morsel of the familiar ease, the nobullshit take on cultures and their cuisines, the simplistic escape to places we could never even imagine taking breath in, the heartfelt meals and the many many people across this earth with whom he would converse and eat. 

Food was the language we all shared as we crossed over and passed through those borders, partakers all in his culinary pilgrimage. We ate and drank and burped with the gumbo shack regulars in the Deep South and the noodle stall hawkers in Thailand or wherever it was he’d bring us to. Those minutes spent sat before his world, nestled in next to you, were absolutely everything to me. Do you remember, mama? It’s why feeding and being fed are sacred and deep acts of care to me. It’s why travel is not mere escape, but a wholehearted embrace of the familiar within the other. It’s why I have so often sought out that experience of being unmoored and unfamiliar as we all felt we were then. But it’s how I've often ended up finding home and comfort buried in the pockets of a hand turned pastry or long broiled stew…

Bourdain & Mother blessed me with a gift of loving home in places, faces and foods I never thought I’d find it. 

Notary Votary

 So I’ve decided, realised, come to the conclusion that I cannot be a full time artist however much I would like to. My whole adolescence was filled with the tussle between two denominations: art & literature. I know more about the former and have a deep passion for it that’s actually a part of my lineage on both sides of the family, but the latter seems to be what is in my marrow when I’m cut open.

Besides, I’ve not got a disciplined enough bone in my body to practise something so ruthlessly talent-based as painting or drawing or sculpting. That requires quite a lot of skill, grit, focus, selfmastery, clarity of vision. I’m too hazy and vague and ‘meh’ to consecrate myself to it...

That’s why I will stick my votives under the shrine of writing, where 90 percent is bullshit that passes for masterful work and the rest is pure truth, so I’ve decided. You, I will let decide what side of the percentage my words fall. But before you do, I will confess: there’s always been one great shadow dodging my light. In truth, if that’s what we’re really going for here, I’ve always made the worst student of literature. Despite having read English at Oxford (did you know?) where I was  forced to build up out of nowhere an appetite to devour 20+ texts a week - I never was very well-read.

Short Satire: A Complaint of Karens

 The crown of a gently braised egg was cracked and ripped open with merciless routine and a heavy silver table knife, the latter no doubt a gift either from one of her three ill-fated weddings, or from the legion of dead and distant relatives that always gave up useless heirlooms at their expiration. Never just a boxful of cash with those ones. 

Once silver and crown were lain aside with neither care nor haste, in fell those warm, golden soldiers. Fell one, then the other - yielding soft and delicious crunches in place of screams - until the prompt 06:45 ritual sacrifice was complete, betraying no more of itself than briskly swept crumbs and a half empty shell, dipped of all its golden goodness. 

Karen was a good woman, a devout one even, so she often said. Nobody ever dared meet her quietly hateful and routinely condescending gaze to ask why she felt so often the need to assert that statement aloud when it was so very clearly far from the truth of her. They all knew and saw, but were never quite sure if she ever suspected herself deep down, and all were reluctant to be the doomed lamb who would turn her head into the mirror to finally observe the small town tyrant they had watched her grow into over nearly five decades. None of that was really their problem.  No, so long as they were spared her petulant and entitled attacks for one day more. 

One day like this

Every hour is our whole life, or something like that. How do these hours anoint my soul?

Sam is in the kitchen already preparing fresh coffee in his cafetière. An act performed in the softness of dawn and total habitual abandon. He’s probably listening to the cricket, or more likely a YouTube video about last night’s AEW tag team tournament. 

I am woken with the same soft light upstairs, by my baby boy shouting ‘mummy’ across the corridor as he too wakes. I say my simple line of morning prayer and go to greet him with a big cuddle and, let’s be real, a heaving and stinking nappy.  

I change him, we go downstairs to greet daddy in the kitchen and the breakfast ritual begins for the two of them - they must have their own things, as must I. 

Expression of Interest in Frenzied Tones

I will kiss myself in the name of the Lord, I will
ask open-handed and allow the voice at the door
in the unknown hour of night into my throne so that I
may receive.

My son, my love and I will hold hands in the gale,
we will form a ring and shout and laugh
and run round each other, with each other, to each other. 

This is our year of plenty, of wilderness and home,
of light thought.

We come from one another, we will not fold
unless to Truth. We show our glinting mystery
to the vastness and, still, are more
than it can take. 

This is so much that I have held, so much I have held away,
it would be sin, now, to place it anywhere but here on the pedestal. 

I’m here too, screaming, crying, smiling, kneeling,
confessing the red ruthlessness of my whole being and oh my God, 

I love this and don’t understand it.
I love me so much, I love you, Sam and baby boy, yes!
I love this world (but I am confused),
the whole world, the one in his hands, so much. 

I am not done.

My village came

 Mama has power, but has she enough strength? I have found an old definition of motherhood and it is simply, complicatedly, ‘Everything’. 

 My village arrived in drips during the weeks after the birth of our son. To tell you the truth, I do not really remember anything other than the relief & gratitude I felt whenever my door would swing wide to the smiles and coos of some warm person I loved so much, often bearing food or open arms. 

 There were photos, of course there were, with our new bundle where he should be: at the centre of all of them. And I was there too - not the headless, bodiless arms that were only there to hold him up so others could see. But me, my whole self, my whole bloated and sagging and lifegiving body. We were there and my people held me as I held my baby and I swear it was God on Earth all over again. 

 There is power here, oh yes, power in abundance. And deep within my village there is more strength than could be told. 

The Devoutness of Father John Misty

 The first chords of Only Son of a Lady’s Man struck me with stars and spangles right in my spiritually war-torn teenage heart. O did that music grip me like a mystical fever, burning up every question and potential answer in me, sticking to my skin like the sweat from weeks of heated worship or illness.

The Nursery

 F ck, I’m almost livid at myself for being this  silly heap of a mess. . I am staring at our doorway, cracked open & showing a sliver of dim hallway,  and i wait for my baby to need me. The  sentinel - a monitor which very tenuously links the two of us by no sense other than sound - silently betrays the fact that, right now, he does not. .      Need me.  

‘Don’t ask me what any of this means’ - 2022

 I scrolled through hazy pictures, grainy with the heat of adventure and youth, and felt that same dull prod of jealousy that often appears when observing the lives of my peers through the small lens of that app. 

 My idea of the word Adventure has been under most strenuous interrogation this past year. I thought as a late-twenty-something year old that the definition lay in the very obvious physical sense of exploration – the one constantly tugging at me, pulling my mind from country to country, allowing me to roam freely, to taste new cultures, to converse with strangers, to know the earth and its fullness and all that wonderful, thrilling, romantic stuff. ‘Adventure’ had at some point been sold to me as a specific type of youth, entwined with an even more specific kind of freedom, and I happily bought it all up. 

I’m Looking Forward

To being able to carelessly fold and tuck my body into itself with no bumps or barriers to worry about.

To having whole lungfuls of air at my disposal whenever I command a breath.

To wearing jeans again.

To not constantly having my heart and stomach and intestines burning in my throat at once.

To sunshine and warm breezes, and walking too quickly round the parks for people with short legs or slow gaits to keep up with.

To being Wanted and Needed.

To wearing jeans again.

To watching and hearing from the outside, rather than feeling on my insides, every precious and uncomfortable little twist, kick and hiccough.

To holding you in trembling arms that have waited far longer than nine months for the weight of your precious self to fill them.

To the hope of maybe one day being okay with the equal batterings of fear and peace, utter elation and sinking overwhelm, that will invade my already full heart all at once, every single time I look at you. 

To finally putting on my jeans and being your mother.

written: 32-33 weeks

Slow walker

 I have become one by necessity. Our child gently reminds me with each rise and fall of my legs that I can only go so fast and certainly no faster. I waddle now, sometimes shuffle when the painful stretching sensation on the right side of my groin gets too much to bear lifting a foot for.

 Motherhood is already transforming me in ways I’d not thought of - small and profound ways, often creeping into my being as I try to get on with things as best as I can; without more than a whisper, appearing out of nowhere over days and weeks and now months as I look back. In reality, I sort of expected this bafflingly new phase of my life to hit me like a boom between the ears, and then keep hitting and hitting as we hit each new milestone… but the blows have been soft yet somehow more powerful whenever they have come, and they have always come unexpectedly.

 So with this particular blow, I am now a slow walker, and I should be content with that. I can no longer keep up. I should no longer try to keep up. And really this is the thing that I have waited and prayed for as I grew into whatever the next phase of my life would bring, but it’s also the thing I kept fighting because I just did not want to let go of how far and how fast I have come. My path is far more different & honestly more difficult now than I could ever have prepared myself for, and I cannot continue to pretend I’m able to straddle both it and the one the infamous ‘Everyone Else’s of the world walk. I am not on ‘their’ path. They are not even on ‘their path’ as far as my limited perception & shallow glimpses of other peoples’ lives will ever allow me to imagine… Motherhood tells me it’s time I leave behind such shallow ways of looking at myself, at others and at the world. 

 I will have much bigger things to care for soon enough and none of this will even matter in the end. That makes me so happy to think about. Anxious, but so unbelievably happy. . .

written: 32 weeks

Some learnings, 2021

This year of learning really did teach me a few gaping truths about myself and about those that I love. It was uncomfortable in that wonderful ‘becoming-anew’ kind of way - you know the one where every molecule of your being is painfully transforming under varying levels of heat and pressure, and there’s nothing you can do about it but it’s what you’ve always wanted for yourself, and besides, you’re actually quite excited to see what of your currently recognisable self survives the crucible. If anything. 

A lot survived. A lot was refined. A lot died too, and I find myself rejoicing and mourning at once on the eve of this new year. 

I am too far down

 The line. 

We are all floating in a line, 

arms stretched wide and only hands, 

fingers, 

skin, 

sweat, 

holding us 

together.

We are all trying to belong 

to each other: a group. 

But we can’t 

because it’s only one person to two – one either side of you – 

some grasping tightly, interlocked,

some barely holding on,

all one after the other. 

We can’t turn to see each other down the line.  

And what or who tethers us to the earth below 

as we all drift outwards, unfurling

like one long ribbon into space? 

Who is holding your hand?

Where does it end?

I couldn’t tell you, for

I am too far down the line

to know. 

Small rebirth

 My gut clenched and I did things. I just did them, went into them head first eyes closed and it felt like I was really me for a good while. Got my baby sibling (they’re not babies anymore yea I know) to pierce my ears, had my first two driving lessons after years of promising jouna habibi I would. We bought a house. We bought a ma f*ckin house yo. And you know what? Although I never foresaw this one as my gracious lot, it’s been the (second) best damn thing I’ve ever dived right into. head first. eyes closed. Always with him and with Him. 

 And no. It does not feel like me anymore. Not the one I’ve known, nor the one I’m used to spotting at the corner of my eye. But there’s this discomforting sensation of skin slowly peeling from me - almost like it’s happening from the inside out - and I know that this is God’s way of signalling to me that I am becoming new. 

I have always lived & loved for these small rebirths. 

Going, Staying

I want calm,

I want excitement.

I want up and she wants down.

You want round and I want round,

And we want round and round and round. 

My Speech Will Be The Silence

I think you have come to sit here before me 

for a little while, to look at me and expect something. 

(Don’t worry, I expected it too - something).

I don’t know who you are, or perhaps I do. 

But maybe I’ll be sitting here for years to come, 

when you have come and gone a thousand times,

and my words have chipped away at each other

until they and I are piles of nothing beneath nothing

And my speech will be the silence. 

Long-Awaited Child

 Kayin told me not to move or to blink and so I am sitting here with my eyes wide open, breathing. 

This wind is merciless and takes tears from my eyes without permission. My God, it smarts, and I don’t know how long she has kept me like this. Where is she? Where are you my Kayin? 

The blackness dissolves my vision from the outside in and soon it will be a single speck, searching in the dark. I will not be able to see you when you come back for me, my Kayin. Where are you my Kayin?

I sent you to the house to bring me my wrapper and my fan, but the wind has gone and the sun has gone and you are not here, my Kayin. Where are you my Kayin?

Can you still hear the hawkers in the closingdown markets calling your name for me, Kayin? Can you see my lips open in the darkness as they ceaselessly cry out these two syllables for you, Kayin? Where are you my Kayin?

I am crying for you, Kayin, my child. I am crying like I did not know you before you left my side to wander home. I am searching for you, Kayin. I am longing for you like I never had you. 

Though I cannot move because you told me to be still and wait, I will shake and shake all because of you, my Kayin. 

“Small, but means so much” - A Study of Hands

My hands are anything but small. I paused my typing just now to take a look at them, turn them over and over again in front of me, observing them in equal parts intrigue and disgust as I often do. I have hated my hands for a long time. Big palms, long and spindly fingers like my father’s, protruding knuckles, awkward man hands.

But I read an article last year, from which my titular quote has been pulled. It was an interview with Nicole Farhi - one of my favourite designers way back when I was a fashion obsessed teen - that told of her quite literally selling her name (the eponymous fashion label) to become a full time sculptor. The focus of her second solo exhibition in 2016? ‘The Human Hand’.