The Cure For Sleep: Choosing
Discover more from The Cure for Sleep with Tanya Shadrick
The Cure For Sleep: Choosing
Season 1, 004: in fairytale fashion
This month’s advance extract from The Cure For Sleep (W&N: 20 Jan 2022) is about choice: those rare moments in life when we are brought to a sudden need to decide on something that will alter the course of our days. After reading, do share a short true tale of your own - no more than 300 words – on this theme in the comments section.
Read the Season One stories contributed by readers over on The Cure For Sleep website: bedtime stories | memory games | bonding | choosing | promises | size & shape | time | desire | regret | faith | rebirth
june’s extract
The only thing missing for Nye and I now in our mid-twenties (or so we told ourselves) was a home of our own, and this we found soon after marriage on a single day of searching when we looked at just three terraced houses, the last of which had cupboards full of mouldering food left behind by its long-gone tenants.
Despite the stink, the disorder, we found ourselves checking every room, each feature, as if it were a newborn: See the old wood panelling under the stairs! The little lean-to beyond the living-room window – just like his Gran’s! The back door to it was locked, so we lifted the sash and climbed through to the porch.
That hot plastic smell of his childhood, mine!
We had to have it.
Whimsy. Fun. Instinct. Lightness. How some of the best – and worst – decisions of a life are made. Walking over a threshold and seeing a stranger, a set of rooms, and emptying one’s head, one’s pockets. Taking a hand, a key. Exchanging the milk cow for the magic beans. Thinking not of cost or profit. Refusing the call of future possibilities that will fall away when choosing this place, that person. The way it is done: from smell, sound, stomach; all the senses coming together to assay the moment.
Every spare hour we had found for the writing life, we gave over now to the removal of wallpaper, carpets and ceiling tiles, before eating soup cold from tins and reading by candlelight for the months it took to get the electrics made safe. Sleeping happy on a mattress on the floor surrounded by the strange confetti made by all the debris.
Work and home began to balance, and when either of us in a rare empty minute felt the lack of friends or our old literary ambition, we trusted to the future. We were young still; that time would come again.
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The Cure For Sleep: Choosing
The Courage to Grow .
Today, I am aware of the times that call for bravery and I have come to see that in life there are many times where it is required .
First I experience a rush of wild energy in my stomach, it is fear but not in the all-consuming sense , it has more of an excited tone and it seems to be enveloped by a knowing wisdom, a quiet voice that urges me to summon courage and push on for the natural evolution of things .
I remember now that facing things maybe uncomfortable and even painful but by moving towards and through that, there is growth and learning.
I couldn’t imagine being so mindful of how I was feeling when I was in the chaos of alcohol , besides it was the act of drinking that 'stopped' me from feeling, and that was what I thought I wanted , it was a kind of perverted courage. The fire in my belly from 'gin' had long been mistaken for something of mystical and heroic state to arrive in and all along it had been a deception, a complete and utter lie that I told myself , for so long that it had fabricated itself into a whole belief system. A backwards myth that I chose to believe so I didn’t have to face the truth and ‘feel’.
I knew it wasn’t fair to deprive him of children because I was scared of being unable to protect them. His longing had been thickly veiled, supportive as he was of my agency as a modern woman. It was painfully visible to me, observed on my daily rounds of the ward that was our relationship.
I couldn’t get past the fact that the harms I had known since age 9, were impossible to prevent. After all, I’d had a loving mother; a protector who would tell of the time she lost her shit when a wasp hovered over my cot. And yet.
I felt no desire for motherhood.
My therapist said to gently hush the concerns of my inner child. It was all in the past. My friends wanted me so badly to join their gang; there was no reason they could fathom for me not wanting to experience such profound love. Society told me in coffee shops, laundrettes and family parties that it was time to stop being selfish. My GP told me most people don’t think this hard about it. Just Do It. How I hated that thoughtless trope. God probably spent less time thinking about creating life than I did.
A decade of interrogating myself and us, meant there was little time left. With the chances now so slim, it was perhaps safe to leave to fate.
I was pregnant as soon as I allowed myself to be. That very day. My restlessness had, after all, been a signal to jump. Ambivalent action, the way forward. I felt vindicated for my years of indecision. It was always going to happen when it was meant to be.
That no longer felt true 12 weeks later. The first scan was a cause for celebration: the doctor was pleased I had managed to empty my womb safely the night before. My attempt to alter the course of my life, shown for what it was. I’d interfered along with the best of them.