This newsletter appears in audio above: a little experiment. I’ve recorded both my books as audiobooks (available here and here) so I thought I’d give it a red hot amateur-hour go here. I know I like to listen to things while I go about my business. Maybe you do too? It’s just under twelve minutes long, if you like to work with timers. (ADHD, represent!) Let me know if the tech worked, and if you liked having a straight-to-the-ears option. x.
Welcome, lots of new readers. So lovely to have you. A little bit of bathroom backstory before the reveal.
Keith and I, along with our three kids and mangy, beloved mutt Biggles live in a small timber bungalow along the Coal Coast between Wollongong and Sydney, a narrow strip of villages tucked between the escarpment and the sea. The house is sustainably designed, without town water or sewer connections. Instead we have three large tanks and a composting dunny, and buy green power for our electricity. The house is rickety and ramshackle. Eldest child’s bedroom is a caravan. The dirt road washes away in the big rains. It’s not for everybody, but we love it.
This past winter, we turned our single bathroom/laundry into two rooms; a small bathtub retreat and a larger shower/laundry/toilet. It was a long-time-coming reno, after seventeen years in the original bathroom which was holding itself together with gaffer tape and mould. The building start date dragged into winter, when Child 2 became very ill and had to leave school, but it was impossible to reschedule, so we cracked on with the plan. Character building, we told ourselves. Character building!
With our only toilet deleted, we ordered a Portaloo for the duration and plumbed in an outdoor shower off the deck. Once the build began, the weather turned. In the following weeks we saw Wollongong’s coldest start to winter in decades, with temps in many spots reaching 2-5 degrees lower than average. How we laughed.
Six wet weekends in a row also meant six weeks of cancelled soccer games for Keith, who starts to pace the house like a silverback gorilla when he can’t exercise. Our house features lots of glass open to the trees, and no central heating or fire. It’s freeeeeezing in winter. Cutting a great big hole in the middle of it didn’t help things.
The build needed project-managing, and the kids needed lots of support. Eldest child, in her HSC year, was also deeply involved in the school musical. Middle child was home with me and very fragile, and youngest child was just starting high school; a wobbly period. Apart from anything else, I was desperately missing my bath, my daily line of defence against stress and back pain. Keith’s work was ramping up, but he was called from his backyard office often with building questions and child crises.
There were some tough days. Biggles suddenly needed surgery, adding a complicated medication regime and a home-cooked diet to my to-do list; and he battled the Cone of Shame hard, bruising my leg where he bumped it against me all day, searching for comfort. The council turned the power off one day, so that we had no lights, water or internet. The Portaloo attacked me. (I can’t give details without a trigger warning.)
The lounge room, stacked with all the items from the demolished linen and broom cupboards and featuring makeshift hair and ablution stations, was in a constant state of chaos. We navigated our way through laundry strung up to dry, across a floor that was always muddy from the traipsing in and out to the outside loo, shining our way with thin phone torches. Sharing a Portaloo with four family members and a series of tradies started to wear thin. If we built any more character, I worried, we were at risk of never being invited to a party again.
Throughout, I clung to my early mornings before the family woke up and the builders arrived. It was the time I could focus on my own work before each day of being pulled in all directions began. It was as close as I had to a ‘room of ones own’. I did my dawn wee in the crisp backyard grass, put on fluffy socks to combat the chill and settled at the dining table.
There I worked on my novel, drip-by-drip, in stuttering staccato rhythms: burst, delete, burst, delete. Like the bathroom reno, around every corner of this nascent, piecemeal world I was inventing, there was a new problem to be solved or a new question to be asked that could tilt the whole piece in one direction or another. Maybe ruinous, maybe magical. And like the bathroom, the whole thing required a faith in some fuzzy, amorphous mental picture of an ‘end product’ being conjured from what was currently a big, ugly emptiness.
One day the Portaloo was crated away from the front yard, and the toilet (still the good old waterless Rota-Loo; but now the most glamorous composting dunny in all of Disgustingtown) was back inside. And then my glorious bathtub was functional, and then the shower too; this crazy shower (maybe magical, maybe ruinous) that we positioned right at the back door.
Finally, the morning came when there were no builders for Biggles to bark at, anxious and fretful in his undignified cone, and we were free of being observed in the mundane oddness of family life. The hole was gone, replaced with two rooms we had conjured from our dreams.
I lay in the bathtub on the morning of my birthday. The plumber had managed to hook it all up the day before. The beginning of a whole new chapter, I thought, as I twiddled the taps with my toes.
The next day, I got the call that Mum was unwell, and life took a sharp and unexpected turn for the next month. I’ll talk about those events another time, but I lived largely in a hospital room for the next weeks and when home, my 1950’s bath in its little tangerine jewel box of a room was a great source of comfort.
The older I get, the more I realise that there is no coming to wisdom without cutting your feet on the sharp pathway that leads there. There’s no new gift of a bathroom without tearing a ragged hole violently into the comfortable house, without sharing a toilet seat with strangers, without stepping in the mud and pissing on your own feet in the cold dawn.
I suppose this newsletter is about embracing discomfort, and writing through it, and having faith that the psyche will reveal itself even when everything feels chaotic and unclear. Things are quieting. As the intensity of these last couple of months starts to fade, I’m left with a certain exhaustion, an adrenal fatigue, perhaps. This moment in motherhood still takes almost all my juice. I don’t have much left for the outside world. I still feel a little raw and detached. Sad, too. I still can’t quite believe there is no kind, interested Mum on the other end of the phone to listen to all my small worries and laugh at all my small jokes.
As for the bathroom, there are details to complete. Curtains and lights and painting finishes and indoor trees. But the period of tooth-brushing at the kitchen sink and tripping over the laundry racks and showering in the dark is over, and so is the gruelling, grief-by-increments period that followed.
I find myself spring-cleaning and decluttering, re-ordering the new shape of things and I’m daily surprised and buoyed by the two beautiful rooms we now have at our disposal. This morning, I sat at my business, admiring the lovely space I was in, and then I stood up, at which point I dropped my phone right into the pit of the composting toilet.
Swings and roundabouts, comrades. Swings and roundabouts.
Process Notes
When Mum was so sick, and after we lost her, I wrote a lot on Sandwich, my memoir manuscript; grief and distress needing that place to decant. And lately, when I think I’ll write a quick newsletter, the task will overtake me, my thoughts expanding and annoying me, refusing to corral themselves. It’s not something I can write quickly, and I don’t know what I’m doing here exactly. But I’m trying to honour my urge to write here, trying to bring vulnerability and honesty, and showing my workings. Mostly, though, in the pockets of time I have - brief and scattered - I have returned to my work on the novel.
I have confidence in the process, but not the work. Fiction doesn’t offer me the firm rooting of place and time and person that memoir offers. The core of it feels spongy; my characters shifting and morphing all the time as I record sudden voice memos and notes-to-self about them. Chas does this! Because of Jules! Because of her mother! I still can’t imagine showing anybody the ugly sentences with which I describe the world of Glamis, where my characters play and cry and struggle, but it’s real to me.
Like the bathrooms, this manuscript is in pieces now, but it could be beautiful, I remind myself. Have faith. I’m just over 50, 000 words into draft 1 now, working off the wild outlining mess of draft zero. In draft 1 I’m shaving some of the nuttier edges off, searching for the threads that tie the picture together and trying not to invest too much in the language while I’m still wrestling with this snake in a bag.
In the manuscript there’s a significant over-use of the signifier ‘tk’ ; a trick that means ‘sort this out later’. ‘Tk’ as a letter grouping is rarely found in English, and so when I’m editing, a word search will highlight all the points where I’ve added this ‘note to self’. ‘Tk what if…?’ ‘tk insert funny gag about warthogs’ ‘tk research’. ‘Tk blah blah blah.’ It ensures that my future self is driven mad by my monkey brain, but it keeps me on task. Just. Draft zero is almost all ‘tk.’ Draft 1 is where I’m facing the music.
Watching, Reading, Listening
In my bath, there’s been a lot of reading. All Fours by Miranda July was a cracker; a juicy tour-de-force about perimenopause. I loved the the wonderful, brutal memoir by Ariel Leve An Abbreviated Life; and David Mitchell’s Unruly, a romp through British history. I’ve been rereading Richard Glovers warm, sad and lovely Flesh Wounds, Helen Garner’s diaries, and the classic The Beautiful Room is Empty by Edmund White.
Re-re-re-watching The Office, catching up on an ep of The Block every day as I restore the kitchen, and Below Deck Med on the one delightful day a week it drops. Keith and I are enjoying The Assembly and the YouTube algorithm is serving me Ben Schwartz improv, various soporific activities of Rajiv Surendra: painting, cleaning, making a bed…and stories of the coldest village in the world. They’ve read me right, I can’t deny it.
Happy reading and writing this month, comrades. May your bathroom light glow orange and green and may your pain and discomfort wash down the drain in a swirl of bubbles that smell like lime and basil and mandarin; leaving just the layers of lessons learned on your skin. If you’re in a PortaLoo phase, solidarity. It’s character building, goddamit! (Message me privately if you’d like to be in an intimate sharing circle with those who have survived When PortaLoos Attack.)
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