The Cure for Sleep: Friends
The Cure for Sleep: Friends
Season 2, 004: How did they begin - our great friendships? What words or gestures were risked - and rewarded?
my thoughts on this month’s theme
How humble I’ve felt in these last six months since the publication of The Cure for Sleep: good friends from my years as a young mother who I’ve been hiding from since the mistakes in love and life I describe in the book - they’ve read my story now and every single one has welcomed me back into their homes. No shame, no blame. Just love and understanding.
And so this is the theme from the book most on my mind, as I begin now to spend less time alone with words, and more hours outdoors back in the company of others: even meeting some of you in this story-sharing community for the first time in real time/place!
If you’ve read the book, you’ll know that in the minutes of my near-death I apprehend fully the shames and regrets of my fearful first life. And what I suffered from most was not a lack of worldly status, but a sorrow that at 33 my last real friendships (husband and work colleagues aside) were already decades in the past.
So the first work of my second life - alongside becoming a reliable caregiver to my new son - was to find a way to meet and make friends with other parents. And even though my story builds from that obscurity in a small town to being photographed and filmed in public… I still believe the time (& chapter) of my greatest courage was the one where I (shy and friendless so long) take my son to the local playgroup for new parents and their babies [this month’s extract].
your invitation to write
This month’s invitation to write for the story archive is as follows: Tell me about a great or surprising friendship in your life: how it began - or was repaired after a rift or long silence. Or tell me about an ideal form of friendship you still hope to find…
[Please read the guidelines for contributors if this is your first submission to the project.]
And a suggestion for more work around this: Think about the great friendships from your favourite novels or biographies - how much of those qualities do you bring to your relationships, or get from them? How might you get more of that in your life?
You can read the stories already contributed by readers over on The Cure For Sleep website: bedtime stories | memory games | bonding | choosing | promises | size & shape| time | desire | regret | faith | rebirth | play | hands | mirrors | friends
(All themes are still open for contributions, so that subscribers with time or health limits have the opportunity to take part as and when they are able.)
the cure for sleep: june extract
My father’s closed door, the unrest of my childhood home, all the house moves, the nerve-fray: this had made me an outcast. But like so many who feel tender and unsure, I’d pretended arrogance until it became me: scales on my eyes and a hard shell around self made from layer after layer of refused opportunities.
Graduations, birthdays, christenings, weddings: these official threshold events have photographs that help us celebrate and remember. Our small, private steps from fear into courage are rarely recorded this way, so it is easy to forget their importance. How life can be transformed by taking a breath and walking through a door on an ordinary day.
There is no photo that shows me pushing through the stiff entrance to a converted church one spring morning, come with my son to its playgroup. Finding a space among the toys spread out. Laying my baby on one of the mats, heart hammering, before making shy upward glances at others who had come alone.
A few familiar faces. Women I’d seen in clinics? At the supermarket? And over there – stranger with a cloud of dark hair who spoke to her boy in a calm, quiet voice I admired.
If she was on the radio, I’d listen all day.
I thought this and smiled.
She smiled back.
These simple exchanges that change everything.
Shadrick, Tanya. The Cure for Sleep (pp. 127-128). Orion. Kindle Edition.
this month’s extra
Listen to Tanya in a depth-conversation with Miriam Robinson, host of podcast My Unlived Life - discussing what her life would have been like if at 13 she’d felt confident enough to go to a pool party being thrown by a very intriguing & bohemian new boy at her school…
about tanya
author site | book site | twitter | instagram
Last night I had a strange image of putting my head down onto Christy’s kitchen table and all of my body parts became segmented and fell off. Shattering, but orderly, like all of a puppet’s strings untied, let loose, no longer a cohesive whole, a crash test dummy with no seat belt, no car, no blood. My parts were wooden and worn smooth, light like maple, a faint fiddleback grain, kiln dried, now just bits and bobs on the floor, at rest, no energy to roll away, kinetic defeat.
Christy’s mom told her that as a baby she would stare at her hands, perhaps wondering when they would start to create all that was held within her tiny soul. She is a potter, making good things from mud spinning in circles. A chunk of clay reimagined.
A friend offering her table as a good place to fall apart and return, reimagined.
The first thing I noticed was tension between her and the chain-smoker, a woman she seemed to know. But J was in professional mode as she led us through the landscape, offering us all the subtleties of greys and glimmers on a misty fenland afternoon. The expedition ended with a fireside gathering, our spot marked out with fairy lights.
J and I made friends on the river and in the forest. I think it was the third time we met up that she invited me to her home. She lived on a tiny houseboat named after my favourite bird. After a walk on the Washes under a sky full of birds we climbed aboard. She was wild-moored in the middle of nowhere.
I sat cross-legged on a tiny chair by the woodburner. While she cooked something special I looked through J’s paintings. Sated by wildfowl sounds and waterlogged footsteps, hot food and the glow of fire and talk, it felt like I was being seduced. I bought a painting (tiny). But in my bliss my body urged caution, urged me to flee, urged me to fear.
In the dark, remote night J steered us to the only signs of civilisation: a pub decked out with cheery Christmas lights. We said goodbye as I disembarked. Four years and three more paintings later (two of them gifts from her) I suspect that the scariest things about this friend are the very things that scare me about myself.