Reflect | March
reflections on my writing life this month: first draft progress, ashes and sunlight, submitting my work, family archives, always for love
This is the third instalment of my monthly Reflect posts: process notes from the trenches of writing a first draft of my memoir, a check in with my writing goals for the month that’s ending, and ponderings on any interesting thoughts or findings emerging from what I’ve working on.
Keep writing the first draft of my memoir
I’ve completed the first two of my writing goals for March: the April 2016 section of chapter 1 is finished, and I’ve planned out and started writing the next chapter (covering November 2015 and March 2016). It’s been a messier process than the first chapter, which was focussed on two specific events (my mum’s brain surgery in October 2014 and my younger son’s birth in April 2016) and was written almost entirely from the present tense perspective of me at those times. I have a much less clear idea of what I want the second chapter to cover, particularly for the earlier timeline. The November 2014 section has gone to places I didn’t expect it to: there’s a whole subsection written from the perspective of me now, the Ellen of March 2025. I’m letting it be what it wants to be for now. I don’t know if or where it will fit into the overall narrative, but for now the most important thing is to keep writing. To let myself tell the story in the way it wants to be told. Once I’ve completed the first draft I can start thinking more about themes and structure and imposing some order on the narrative.
I wrote the core of the March 2016 section when I took
’s Memoir in a Month course last autumn. It’s focussed on the day that we scattered Mum’s ashes on Ainsdale Sands, north of Liverpool, and the hare I saw earlier that morning. Now I’m building and expanding on what I wrote six months ago, filling in the gaps and writing about what happened before those moments, what happened after. I’m pleased with what I wrote last autumn: I’ve left it mostly unchanged, but I can tell how my writing style (or the way I’m approaching my topic?) has changed and evolved since then. Another subsection written from the perspective of current me has appeared, linking back to the earlier timeline covered in this second chapter. As with that timeline, I’m fretting a little about how the overall narrative of this section fits together, whether it flows in the way I want it to or if it will need extensive editing and rewriting. For now though, I plough on, mostly writing in the early mornings before anyone else is awake.
Sort through Mum’s notebooks and hospital letters
I haven’t even started this task. The box sits untouched below my writing desk in a corner of the dining room. I think I’m avoiding it - no, I know I’m avoiding it. I went through all Mum’s papers in a fever of activity when we visited my dad over Christmas: skim reading her notes and doctors’ letters, deciding what to bring back with me and what to leave for now; trying to ignore the growing hard knot of grief in my stomach as her handwriting slowly became messier, more uncertain, her notes changed from sentences to disjointed individual words. I boxed up the notebooks and papers I’d chosen and put them in the boot of the car, then unloaded them at the other end and stashed them under my desk. I haven’t looked at them since.
Essentially, I’m scared. It’s almost ten years since she died but it still feels too soon, too raw, to go through her papers with my family archivist hat on: identifying probable dates when she wrote different notes, annotating and adding my own comments. I worry that reading through her papers in detail - studying them - will bring up all the emotions that I felt when we were living through those final months of her life. It’s a pointless worry in a way. Of course it will bring up all those emotions: that’s why I brought the papers home with me in the first place, to help me re-embody some of the thoughts and feelings I experienced then so that I can write about them now. So I suppose my worry is more about what the impact of doing so - of reading Mum’s papers, of reliving those feelings - might have on my life now. Will I be able to do this work alongside all my normal everyday tasks, or do I need to set some dedicated time aside to focus on it? How much time - a few hours, a day, two days? Will I be a mess afterwards?
Give myself some space and time to sit with all of the above
I deliberately didn’t set myself a word count target this month. Mostly it was to help support this goal, but I was also interested to find out what would happen if I wasn’t trying to reach a specific total word count in March. Would I end up writing more or less than last month? Looking at my word count so far, I think it’s going to come out about the same as February’s.
I’ve also taken a few (short) breaks from working on my memoir this month. There have been two or three days where I haven’t written at all - either through choice or because these lighter mornings mean that sometimes my children wake up earlier than usual and invade my writing time. On those days (once I’ve got over my frustration) I’ve focussed instead on reading. I’ve been making good use of my local library and borrowing as many memoirs as my library ticket will allow. I’m enjoying being a critical reader: reading for the story, yes, but also looking under the bonnet and thinking about how the authors have crafted those stories. How they’ve moved from the past to the present and back again, or the way they use motifs or repeated imagery to lead the reader through the narrative.
I’ve spent a fair amount of time writing something other than my memoir. This month I will have published three rather than two posts (essays?) here on Substack; in addition to my Compost and Reflect posts, I’ve written about all the houses I lived in over the first twenty years of my life. I’m planning to make that into a mini-series, and publish part two sometime next month.
I’m also in the very early stages of drafting another post: a slightly sideways response to one of the prompts from week 1 of Ruth Allen’s Weathering Book Slow Read. It started out as a reflection on the different layers in my personal geology but has morphed into an examination of my relationship with academia (reader, we broke up fifteen years ago but I still feel guilty about it sometimes).
Finally, I have written and submitted a short piece in response to a creative prompt from
.A Place You Have Watched Change – Write about a landscape, city, or home that has transformed over time. What has shifted? What remains? How has your connection to it evolved?
It’s a topic closely related to my memoir project, but approaches it from a slightly different angle. I enjoyed the challenge of writing a (much) shorter piece. It offered me a fresh perspective on some of the themes I’m writing about in my memoir: motherhood and mothering, home and memory, and the ways in which our relationships with a loved one change but continue after their death. The process of actually submitting this piece was an emotional rollercoaster though: that frozen moment of bravery and doubt before you plunge into cold water to swim. I felt excited and nervous, proud of myself for taking a small step towards being a “proper” writer … but I also felt a bone-deep sense imposter syndrome: who am I to do this thing? It’s probably rubbish - what if people laugh at me? Worse, what if they pity me but are very kind about it?
Celebrate Mum’s 75th birthday
I marked Mum’s birthday by filling the house with daffodils, their cheerful yellow trumpets reminding me of home (Wales) and that the world is filled with cycles of death and rebirth. That it’s OK to be sad and to miss her, it’s OK to still be furious that she died - even 10 years later - but that I can also remember her with love and gratitude. She was a brilliant mum and I feel very lucky that she was mine, and that we were able to enjoy a decade or more of our relationship where we both adults - which we would not have been able to do so if she had died when she was first diagnosed with a brain tumour in 2003. I’m grateful for the wonders of modern medicine which mean that a brain tumour doesn’t always have to be a death sentence.
We also went on a walk along the edge of the moors in the warmth and sunshine of a false spring day. The blue skies were full of the calls of lapwings and curlews, and it was one of the first days this year where it was possible to truly believe that the winter would end and the world would be green and abundant once more. I even spotted my first lambs of the season on the twenty minute drive from our house to the moors. Mum hated moorland, she used to say that it was always bleak and muddy and cold. I used to think the same, but I’ve changed my mind since we moved to our house on the edge of the North Pennines. I’ve realised that moorland is like a landlocked sea: great rolling waves of heather and cottongrass receding towards the horizon, and the way the light shifts and changes as clouds move across them. Walking along the edge of the moors, as we often so, is similar to walking along a coastline. I can look out across a seemingly empty land (or sea) scape to a distant horizon, there’s no human settlements or structures to draw the eye.
Being by or on the moors gives me a sense of perspective that I need, that I’ve badly missed since living inland without ever quite being able to articulate what I’m missing. I often feel hemmed in, living as we do at the bottom of a river valley; the horizons are too close, often the hills looming above me to the north, or reaching only as far as the next bend in the path or the road. On the moors, there’s space to breathe more deeply, just as there is by the sea. I feel like my mind can relax more deeply when I’m there, can uncoil from its usual well-worn busy paths and start to explore.
A few days after Mum’s birthday, I woke up from a dream in which I was getting another tattoo done. In the dream it had gone slightly wrong, it wasn’t quite what I’d asked for, but I woke up with a really clear of what I wanted it to look like. I’m seriously considering booking an appointment and making it a reality.
I currently have two tattoos, both marking significant turning points in my life. The first is a vaguely tribal tangle of thick black lines on my lower back that I got aged 18 in freshers’ week. I slightly regret the design - chosen at random from a sheet of flash - but I like that it marks the week that my independent adult life began. The second is a yin-yang inspired Pisces symbol on my right forearm - two fish swimming in opposite directions, one light, one dark - that I got aged 35, two years after Mum’s death. She was a Pisces so it's a tattoo in her memory, but it also commemorates the period of intense grief and intense joy, all tangled up together, that characterised so much of 2014-2017 for me.
The dream-inspired tattoo I’m considering now is a hare, endlessly loping around my left wrist. Like the Pisces tattoo, it would be in memory of Mum and to commemorate the tenth anniversary of her death. It would be an echo of the hare that I saw on the morning we scattered her ashes. I’m torn between seizing the moment and booking an appointment - making the dream tattoo a reality - or waiting and letting the idea settle until I’m sure.