The Cure for Sleep: Open House
Season 3, 007: use a room in your current house or a former home to tell us a story of your values, your habits: where you've lived, what you've lived for...
Welcome to the final writing prompt in Season Three of The Cure for Sleep on Substack: this companion project to my memoir of waking up, breaking free and making a more creative life. It’s a space where you can explore your own most important memories and motivations in the company of others who are also interested in the art of life-writing.
While I will be keeping all three seasons of prompts open to comments for as long as I am able, I won’t be offering any more new ones. After so many very public seasons, I need now to turn inwards and tend to my late mother’s last home, reflecting in private on that tender process of leave-taking.
A very warm welcome to the many hundreds of you who are recent new arrivals here, however. I hope you will enjoy exploring other subscribers’ work in the story archive as well as writing yourself for as many of the themes as you wish.
now to this month’s prompt…
If you’ve already read The Cure for Sleep, you know how preoccupied I am by the concept of home life, as the only child of a marriage that ended before I had language to protest its loss. My first home was a contested space (my father and his new partner battled in the courts for ownership) and then, after my mother’s awful remarriage, things began to happen in those isolated rooms that had me escape into fantasies of home ownership and house-keeping:
Only ever interested in the mechanical world until then so that my few first toys had been trucks and toolsets, now I asked for dolls, just as other girls were throwing them aside. In my last year at primary, I pretended at my classmates’ new interest in school discos and music magazines, while only wanting to be safe with my Sindys, my Barbies. I braided their hair (Mother had always kept mine short), stitched them clothes. Begged my gruff and only grandfather to build me a huge doll’s house, taller than I was, which I minded with wifely care, back turned to the home I lived in. Things in the bungalow might get broken, and smell now of cooked meat, cigarettes and my stepfather’s aftershave, yet in the rooms I owned everything was tended and intact.
That household was an unsettling early lesson in the gap that can exist between outward appearances and private reality, and I’ve been fascinated ever since by how we behave behind closed doors. As a new mother, alone long hours with sole responsibility of two small children, this manifested itself for a while as a genuine fear of being unseen and unaccountable, so that I devised a way of living as if I were in a doll’s house, open always to view:
So many games I improvised to meet their need for hours of play and close attention when I was too disabled by back pain to move very much.
Catching the Moon. Torch beam that I bounced around a darkened room in the last excruciating hour before their father came home each evening – letting it linger on a spot until they grabbed at it, only to send the light skipping off and away from them once again.
Mechanical Dancer. Me as an old rusted doll they’d found, who had to be dusted and oiled before they could wind me up – and then I’d begin, slowly, very slowly, to move just a little . . . a finger, then a toe – and then my eyes opened and I rose to my feet, turning about like the ballerina in a jewellery box. Pointed toes, pirouettes – until my spring was unwound and I lay myself back down.
These and other amusements, all played out behind our big bay windows that I kept curtainless, even after dusk in winter, so anyone outside could look in. Not exhibitionism but a safety mechanism. The terrible things in my childhood took place in private, behind thick net curtains. What if such fury came one day roaring out through my mouth and hands when Nye was not home to rescue our children? Being always on show in rooms illuminated and open to view like a doll’s house – this, I felt, would keep me in check, and them protected.
Yes, the standards we set for ourselves, even when there is no one there to see, to know: that is central to my purpose in The Cure for Sleep, and I kept this quote from Thoreau’s journals in view as I wrote:
“Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are. Every sentence is the result of a long probation. The author’s character is read from title-page to end. Of this he never corrects the proofs. We read it as the essential character of a handwriting without regard to the flourishes. And so of the rest of our actions; it runs as straight as a ruled line through them all, no matter how many curvets about it. Our whole life is taxed for the least thing well done; it is its net result. How we eat, drink, sleep, and use our desultory hours, now in these indifferent days, with no eye to observe and no occasion [to] excite us, determines our authority and capacity for the time to come.”
Now I invite you to write to me from your home life in turn. What scenes, what routines, can you find to show (as in Thoreau’s subtitle to Walden) where you live and what you live for?
how to take part
Use the comments field below this post on Substack to submit your response (limit is 300 words).
[Please read the guidelines for contributors if this is your first submission to the project.]
about tanya
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It took me six months to acclimatise to the dark. As my circadian rhythm performed its nightly imbalance I’d blink, trying to break through the pitch.
Waking up in the night started long before we moved here, when I was pregnant. ‘It will take you a year’ had actually only taken one half-hearted attempt. Surprise turned surprisingly quickly to dread.
The generous time estimate had been my buffer. One year to cement my fledgling career enough to come back to it. One year to make sure Tom was father material. One year to grow up.
My breasts swelled and insomnia became the third figure in our London bed. A silent and cumbersome guest as the city barged past the window. Otherwise paralysed, my eyes would track the car headlights that blanched the ceiling, intermittently breaking up the street lamps until it all faded into the dawn.
In my fifth month, during a rare unconscious moment, I dreamt that I was trying to win a horse race astride a dachshund. The tiny dog, sweating and exhausted, couldn't reach the finish line. I woke up to an unsettling sticky warmth between my legs.
A scan confirmed the miscarriage. In the amber nights that followed, resentment and doubt morphed into a turgid wrestle between relief and guilt. It took several months to deal with everything, and then we limped northwards towards the reassuring embrace of wild air, peace. A Fresh Start.
Like a dog with a rag, insomnia held my scent and followed us up the road.
In the seventh month Tom bought a clock radio. Then the neon glow of the numbers cast a ghostly sheen through the water glass, etching an outline of the duvet.
CG.
A yew tree grew in the garden of the house where I was born. Needled, bitter green, studded acid red with berries tempting as fruit. Some remnant of Victorian planting, incongruous in our moss green northern valley of Beech and Oak.
I’d climb, high into its wide embrace, of sun dapple, skin shadow, branch, twig and scented bark. Beneath the tree, slippery flagstones, slimed with fallen berries and the leaf matter of years.
The tree loomed high above valley slopes so precipitous I felt, if I only ran fast enough, I could leap from our side to the other, high over the river, the stony fields, and weaving walls, to where sheep grazed on ridges grooved horizontally into the sloping earth.
I knew my way down to the river pool; the damp home smell of lime plaster, and scorched tang of the electric fire. Knew, when the sheep began to bleat incessantly in summer, that their babies had been taken. I wondered, when they stopped, whether they had forgotten.
I was eight when we left. To brick cul de sacs, borrowed army furniture. Straight privet hedges and neat flat lawns. The smell of hot tarmac made soft by a southern sun.
I returned only once. Walking down the steep track from the Shap Road, where my parents once cleaved a path through deep snowdrift, my new sister in a carrycot on my father’s shoulders. Down the ridged valley, past the river pool, where in summer we swam naked in clear water, emerging, dripping, at dusk.
The Yew tree was gone, leaving only a raw wound of naked wood, ringed with stone. The house had the vulnerable, naked look of a newly shorn sheep without the dark old tree centring it, and the flagstones were dry and clean.