Morning Pages: Of Mice and Money

The mice come in the small hours.

Not night. The small hours are not night. Night has dignity, edges, a beginning and an end. The small hours are ungoverned territory, stateless, where the ordinary rules of what can be borne do not apply and the thoughts do what they want and what they want is never anything useful. And enough to frighten the b’jesus out of every woman throughout generations of my family.

Here is what I should be doing. I should be writing. I am always supposed to be writing. Even in the dead of hours like this one. Twenty-one years of supposed to be writing and here I am sitting on the bed which is the island which is all there is of me right now, listening.

Listening for the mice. There is a noise under the floorboard that is either the building settling or something living and I cannot tell which is worse. The building. The something.

I have sprinkled peppermint oil along every skirting board.

So the room smells of humbugs and low-grade dread and I am marooned on my island frozen in the kind of irrational fright even my somewhat jelly-like nervous system finds preposterous.

The mice are indifferent. They were always going to be indifferent weren’t they? This is, I am coming to understand, a personality trait of mine: believing that the thing I have read about will work. Believing, specifically, that it will work for me. The peppermint. The system. The new framework. The relaunch. The course that will be the one that finally -

The mice do not care about my belief in their ability to see that the sprinkling of peppermint oil is a gentle “please leave or else I will die”.

***

The contracts have not been signed yet.

So Lancashire still. For now. This one room, this squeaking IKEA bed with its ludicrous French iron flourishes dependant on an Allen key, its squeak a scream every time I move, that says yes, I taste it too, the forgery of it. The grey sofa. The fish and chips going cold in their paper.

The mice. The mice the mice the mice.

I cannot write here.

I want to be pulling into Hebden Bridge station. That is what I want. I want the particular feeling of a train slowing and stone coming into view and the canal sitting fat and dark alongside the platform and the sense, physical, like pressure change, of arriving somewhere that contains people I do not have to explain myself to. Therapists. Writers. Women who make things with their hands and sell them from small shops that smell of beeswax. Canal boat people who have chosen a life the width of a corridor and called it enough. Aromatherapists. Men in good coats, clutching bitter and reading poetry in bars on weekdays. The ones who left.

I want to be one of the ones who left.

Although left what, exactly?

Here is the thing about being displaced: you are never quite sure from what. There is the city, which I have wanted and wanted and wanted and which will likely be our next stop. And there are the moors, which I have not yet earned, which are waiting in a way that feels almost patient. The canal. The stone. The sky that does that thing in Yorkshire, that particular northern thing where the light apologises for itself and then turns suddenly violent and beautiful and you think yes. Yes. That.

Finn calls every day. Sometimes twice. We have built a cord out of distance and I hold my end of it on the grey sofa with the stench of vinegered fish going cold beside me and I listen to my son and I think this is enough and it is not enough and I think it anyway.

Enough.

Enough.

But my chest says otherwise. My chest has always known the difference between a phone call and a room with my child in it no matter how old the child no matter how wide the field you opened the gate on. Offered him freedom to run and run and run.

Finn has been brave since he was two years old. I don’t know how else to say it. Two years old and already negotiating a world that was not built for his mind, finding his way through it with a tenacity I did not teach him, that arrived in him fully formed like a gift he gave himself. The special interests that became his language: the intricate passionate consuming devotions that other people called phases and were not phases, were never phases, were the way he organised the world into something he could love. He took the time, patient extraordinary time, to teach me that language. To explain why this mattered, why this specific thing, why the depth of it was not excess but necessity. He handed me a dictionary I did not know I needed and I have been reading it ever since.

And now he is twenty-two and in his field and I phone him every day and he phones me and we speak in the language he taught me and it is the most fluent I have ever been in anything and he is in another town and I miss him in the chest, below language, in the place where the language he taught me lives.

I gave him the field because I thought freedom was love.

He says it is and maybe he’s right.

But I’m still not sure.

***

Two in the morning now.

Money terror is not the same thing as money worry and this distinction matters more than I can explain at two in the morning but I will try. Money worry has levers. Money worry is a problem with a shape, a spreadsheet, a potential solution somewhere in the middle distance. Money terror is older. Bodily. It lives at a frequency just below panic that has been running so long I sometimes forget it is not just the sound my body makes, forget it is not simply the noise of being alive, this low hum of not enough not enough not enough.

Two decades of necessary self-employment because it is quite possible I am unemployable. The muchiness of me and this sprawling mind unable to just accept things and do them in the way probably required. So it becomes every version of the work. Every pivot, every relaunch, every 3 AM when the invoices arrange themselves in the dark like a jury.

The email not answered. The month the renewals didn’t come in the right number. The tax bill arriving like a personal insult. The years of making something true and beautiful and still, still, the hum.

The ADHD tax is its own specific grief and I have never added it up because it would be like counting the dropped twigs and I am not ready to count the dropped twigs. The subscription used for six weeks. The tool that was going to change everything. The rebrand commissioned when the actual problem was I couldn’t sit still long enough to understand what I was building. The launch that went before it was ready because waiting is physiologically difficult and then the quiet cost of that, the trust spent, the correction sent, the small internal collapsing. The invoice forgotten. The month the direct debits went into nothing like stones dropped in dark water.

And still.

The brain that costs this much is also the brain that finds the world genuinely, physically astonishing. That has written one point three million words in twenty-one years. That holds a hundred threads at once, drops eighty-seven, and still believes, with a faith that is possibly delusional and possibly the only thing keeping any of this going, that the next one might be the one that holds.

****

The nest.

Yes. Let’s talk about the nest.

Twenty-one years and the nest is BrocanteHome and the nest is every home I have ever made and the nest is me. The self I have been building and unbuilding and rebuilding in public for two decades. And the problem is not only that I drop twigs.

I throw them.

I need you to understand the difference. Dropping implies accident, implies the twig simply fell, implies passivity, implies I would have kept it if I could. But sometimes I pick a twig up and I carry it and I weave it in and I look at it and I feel the dopamine leave and what remains is just the work, the unglamorous patient structural work, the maintenance, and I am not built for maintenance. I am built for beginning. So I throw the twig and there is a moment of relief, shameful relief, the relief of a person who has set something down without finishing what they were carrying it for.

The courses built to eighty percent. The membership structures with their good bones and their gaps borne of muddle, the cold coming in through the weaving, the rebrands that were really just new twigs laid over old holes. The content strategies I devised in high dopamine optimism,

Twigs chucked or dropped. Holes in the nest where the mice of my life get in.

Not metaphor. Literally. The gaps in BrocanteHome, the promises half-kept but oh so meant, the offerings half-finished, the communities half-held, the audience that didn’t know what I was, not quite this not quite that, and drifted away through the holes. The well meaning women who take the time to point out the holes and say this is why. The income lost between versions. The trust that requires more consistency than I have always managed to give.

The mice are always the holes.

The holes are always the thrown twigs.

The mice. The money. The months in this beautiful temporary life that I am failing to be grateful for because my body is in full nocturnal emergency and gratitude requires a kind of groundedness I cannot locate at 3 AM when something is moving under the floor.

Twenty-one years I have been a writer. Not in the way that means I have written things and then stopped. In the way that means I have not once, in twenty-one years, had a different answer to the question what do you do. I write. I have always written. I will always write. And the money. The money the money the money.

I want to write about the money without the shame of it because the shame is a lie, the shame is something that was handed to me and does not belong to me, but the shame is also just there, just present, the way the mice are present, under everything. Two decades of self-employment and the money has never not been a problem and I have written beautifully and at length about abundance and intention and the sufficiency of small beautiful things and every word was true and also: the money. The particular low-frequency dread of it that lives in the throat. Not panic. Not the acute thing. The chronic thing. The almost-background thing that turns up the volume in the small hours when I am already lying very still listening for mice.

What I have made, in twenty-one years: a body of work that looks, from one angle, like evidence of a rich and ranging mind. From another angle it looks like someone walked a very long way dropping things.

And the home. The actual home. I have written about home for twenty-one years and made and unmade and remade more rooms than most people I know and here is the thing I have been circling without landing: I make beautiful nests. I know light and texture and the weight of a good blanket and the particular mercy of a room that has been thought about. I know all of this. And I have left holes in every home I have made, literal and otherwise, places where the weaving came loose because the money terror got in, because I got bored of the weaving, because I threw the twig that would have provided stability toward something that looked newer and more interesting.

There are women who build one nest and tend it. Who find in the tending itself a sufficient ongoing meaning. I have watched these women with a longing I don’t always admit and with something else too, a fear: that the part of my brain that makes me a writer, that makes me see everything as material, that makes me perpetually fascinated by the not-yet-attempted, is the same part that makes me constitutionally unable to tend.

The gift AND the tax.

Again.

Always.

BrocanteHome is twenty-one years old and it is a nest of a thousand beautiful twigs and as many holes and it is the most sustained thing I have ever done sustained despite the throwing and the dropping and the boredom and the bewilderment and the pivots and the re-pivots, the course that became a different course that became a community that became a philosophy that became -

What.

What is it now?

I have been building it for twenty-one years and I still don’t entirely know and not knowing is both the failure and, I am starting to think, the work itself.

The holes let the mice in.

The mice are what I lie awake listening to. All those questions.

Maybe the nest was never meant to be finished. Maybe the gloriously messy woman who cannot stop seeing twigs, who throws some and drops others and weaves badly and leaves holes and goes back and finds new twigs and keeps weaving keeps weaving keeps weaving…

Maybe she is not building wrong.

Maybe that is what a home is.

***

Three in the morning.

Twenty-one years though! I have been writing online for twenty-one years. Do you know what that means? It means I started when Finn was a baby and the internet was mostly curiosity and I had something to say about housekeeping, of all things. The domestic arts. The ritual of making a home beautiful and intentional and soft. And I meant it. That is the thing I need to say: I meant every word of it, every single carefully arranged vintage thing, every pressed linen instruction, every joyful declarative sentence about the ordinary holiness of a clean window on a winter morning. I meant it.

And now I am fifty-three sitting on a squeaking IKEA bed listening for mice and twenty-one years of meaning it has produced what, exactly. A body of work that looks, from a certain angle, like a trail of breadcrumbs dropped by someone walking in circles. A bit of this. A bit of that. The ADHD making magpie of me, everything shiny, nothing held. I pick up an idea and carry it as far as my arms will reach and then I see another one. Twigs. I am always dropping twigs. I have been building a nest for twenty-one years and every morning I find I have dropped most of it somewhere on the path back.

A Substack. A community. An app. A novel. A practice. A course. A course. Another course. The seasonal essays, the long-form pieces, the philosophy of the glorious mess, which is real, which is something I genuinely believe, which is that the undone life is not a failed life, which is that the woman who cannot hold her own attention is not broken, she is just a different kind of whole. And these are the fragments of her offerings, sincerely gifted.

I do not know if I am a writer who has not yet written the thing or a writer who has been writing the thing all along in fragments and the fragments are the thing. I do not know if the bewilderment is a problem to be solved or a condition to be inhabited. I do not know if I am becoming more myself or less myself or whether those are even different directions. I have believed, for twenty-one years, that the next version would be more coherent. More arrived. More the thing.

And there is something in the not-arriving that I am starting to think might be the point.

I believe this. I do believe this.

Some days I believe this.

But on the nights when the despair about the bills and the lack of bricks gets in, really gets in, under the door, past the peppermint, past everything, Ben opens the red wine.

And then, only then: New Order.

The bass line comes under the bedroom door and slips out on to the cobbled lanes he grew up in and I know exactly what it means. It means the day found the gap in him. It means we are both, in our separate heads, doing what we do with defeat.

I have been thinking about Joy Division becoming New Order. What that meant. What it cost. They did not stop when Ia Curtis died, did not pretend to be a different band. They metabolised the grief and kept going and the darkness stayed, structural, load-bearing, but something shifted in the rhythm, in the possibility, in the sense that joy had not been cancelled but rearranged around the loss.

I think about this.

Fifty-three years old. Things lost that didn’t announce themselves as losses. The self I was certain I was becoming. The certainties I reached for that had dissolved while I wasn’t looking. The version of this life I was so sure about at thirty, at forty.

Joy Division into New Order.

The grief still in the bass line.

The body still moving.

I love Ben like a tooth. The way you only know a tooth when it aches or when it is suddenly not there, when it makes itself known with a specificity that stops you mid-thought: how did I not know my whole jaw was built around this. The red wine nights. The bass line. My jaw.

And also

First thing in the morning, I need him not to come back into the room, after the nights we spend in separate beds. I need him to be asleep in the other room. Or reading. He does one of these things at any given moment and I love him for his separateness and I need him for his warmth and sometimes, terrible thing to say but this is morning pages and morning pages is where the terrible things go, sometimes I think what I want most in all the world is to not see him for four days. Not because I don’t love him. Because I love my work too and my work requires a kind of silence that is not just the absence of noise, it is the absence of the obligation to be witnessed.

When Ben is here I am always slightly performing being okay.

When Ben is here I cannot disappear into the place where the writing lives.

And when Ben is not here I miss him like a tooth.

Four days unwitnessed and I think I could find the self that lives below the self that is always arranging its face into the face of a woman who is managing. Ben doesn’t ask for it. I know that. But love witnesses. Presence witnesses. Even the kindest witness requires from the witnessed some minimal arrangement.

I want to be un-arranged.

Unmaintained.

Dangerously, productively, fully unmaintained.

By morning I will have missed him like the tooth.

***

Here is the bewilderment.

It is not confusion. Confusion implies a correct answer temporarily mislaid. The bewilderment is more total, more ambient, more like climate than question. I have been bewildered for as long as I can remember and I have kept moving inside it, kept writing inside it, kept building inside it, and somewhere along the way I assumed it was temporary, assumed it was a condition of youth or uncertainty, that one day I would arrive and the landscape would be legible.

Fifty-three years old.

Still bewildered!

My Dad is seventy-eight and as bewildered as I am and he is in Devon and Devon is not the other side of the world and is also, at 3 AM, at 4 AM when the thoughts go strange, another world entirely, a place where he is seventy-eight and still answering the phone when I call and I love him so hard right now with a love that has a quality of preparation in it, of the pre-emptive missing, the loving him now as practice for the loss I cannot practise for. The numbers will not lie flat. Him at seventy-eight. Me at fifty-four in two weeks. Finn at twenty-two. The sum of a life I cannot solve.

78 + 54 + 22

I miss people in different keys, you know?

Finn in the chest, daily, the physical absence of him like a weather system that arrives each evening. His bravery since he was two years old and never stopped being brave, never stopped finding his way through a world not designed for his mind. The way he taught me his language, the special interests that were never phases, the careful time he took to make sure I understood what he loved and why. I speak that language every day. I spoke it on the phone this evening with the chips going cold beside me and it is the most fluent I have ever been and he is not here and the fluency is not enough.

My Dad in a longer slower register, the Devon distance, the seventy-eight, the not-yet-loss that is already a kind of loss because Devon to she who can barely fathom the logistics of a supermarket is overwhelmed by what it would take to spirit her way to his side.

And then the other missing, the strangest one: the self I thought I would be by now. The woman who was carrying all her twigs and believed she had all the time in the world to build something with them. She was so certain. I envy her the certainty. I envy her every time I lie on the squeaking bed in the dark and listen for the mice.

***

Four in the morning.

This is the hour.

This is when the thoughts stop being thoughts and start being terror. When the money terror turns into something more shapeless, when the list of invoices becomes something more like grief, when my father in Devon becomes seventy-eight in a way that is not a fact but a feeling, when I am not a writer with a plan but just a woman lying on an island of a bed in a room that smells of peppermint listening to something she cannot see.

***

Lancashire → Manchester → Hebden Bridge.

The spell. The route. Manchester first: tall building, tall windows, the light doing things in the afternoon that light cannot do in this room. We will go there to right ourselves.

I think about what luxury does, therapeutically. Not indulgence but medicine. The infinite sky beyond the skyscraper giving thoughts more room. The light that finds the glass of water on the sill and makes it briefly luminous and says: you are allowed to feel this indulged. For as long as it takes to go again. For women who have spent a lifetime editing themselves smaller, that permission is not nothing. That is, in fact, quite a lot.

And then the countryside does the opposite and the same. The moors do not offer permission. The moors are indifferent to whether you take up space. The moors were here before you and will be here after and what they offer is scale, the particular medicine of being reminded you are small and this is fine, your smallness is not a failure, the hills require nothing from you at all.

I need both. The ceiling and the sky. The light that says you matter and the Yorkshire weather that says you don’t have to.

Then Hebden Bridge.

The train slowing. The stone coming. The canal appearing alongside the platform the way it does, as though it was always going to be there, as though the canal has been patient. The pressure change in the body before the mind catches up. Not recognition. Pre-recognition. The self leaning forward into somewhere it has not been yet but already knows.

The cottage. The narrowboat. The kettle. The sound of water. The life the width of a corridor that is somehow wider than anything.

There are people on that platform I have not met who are already my people.

***

I am aware of how this reads.

I am aware that many of the women who read me live in houses that are not temporary. Fixed addresses, joint incomes, savings accounts that exist, the particular quiet freedom of knowing without having to check that the numbers are approximately fine. From inside that life this life must look like a choice. Bohemianism. The romantic instability of a woman who cannot settle, who makes a philosophy of her disorder, who writes beautifully about the glorious mess and is perhaps just, in the end, a mess.

Maybe that is fair.

And my friends. Who love me. Who I love too deeper than they could ever know. Who have known me across versions of myself I can barely remember. Who live in their safe houses with their certainties and their lives financed by a currency I used to speak, or thought I could. I have felt lately the specific loneliness of having lost the vocabulary. Comfort and certainty and the calm assumption of continuity: the words are still there but they come out wrong, slightly mistranslated, the way you speak a language you once knew fluently but have been away from too long. They are not foreign to me but I think I have become foreign to them. I have become the friend who lives somewhere they cannot find on the map, who loves them across a distance that has nothing to do with miles.

It isn’t their fault.

It’s just what happens when lives diverge the way money makes them diverge, which is quietly, and then suddenly, and then in a way that makes ordinary conversation require a translation neither person wants to name.

***

And Ben.

Writing about a partner the way I write about Ben is not what most women do. Not how they speak of the shadows standing behind them.The convention is soft-focus. The supportive husband. The good woman in the background, mentioned only for what she provides, never for who she is, what it costs and what it gives to love someone this close this honestly. The shadow behind the rhetoric. Permitted to hold things up but not to be known. A caricature assembled from function: supportive, kind, makes the tea. As though the people who share our beds and our money terrors and our red wine despair nights are only furniture in the story of our becoming.

I have never understood this. How you write or talk honestly about a life and leave the person at the centre of it in silhouette.

Ben is not a silhouette. He is the bass line on the red wine nights. Ben is the jaw. The other person in the room who says what if we just stayed and means it and doesn’t mean it, who holds two contradictory true things at once with the ease of someone who has always known that true things do not have to resolve. Two neurodivergent people in a room that smells of peppermint building a life twig by twig, throwing some, weaving badly, leaving holes, starting again.

The shadows behind the lives other women describe are people. They are shaping everything. They deserve to be known.

Ben deserves to be known. Not all of him. Not here. But enough to say he is real and particular and this is not the same story without him and I will not pretend otherwise for a convention I have never believed in. Here is a man whose back hurts, who loves dogs and Land Rovers and a song by Sam Fender that makes him cry. Here he is with his private education and lost dreams, the grey hair pushed back from wild blue eyes, the nights when he is alive with possibility and we laugh till we cry and express ludicrous remorse that others do not know us the way we are when we are like this: that they do not know the whole of us because we share a shyness that makes knowing us in this way impossible.

***

Here is what I did not expect to discover in the mouse room:

That sometimes, in the evenings, when the chips are warm in their paper and Ben is beside me on the grey sofa and the town is doing its dark glittering thing outside and the mice are going about their business and the contracts are not signed and the money terror is at its usual frequency and my Dad is in Devon being seventy-eight and Finn is in his field and the bass line is not yet playing because this is not yet a red wine night, this is just a Wednesday

Because it is true. Sometimes we look at each other and one of us says: what if we just stayed.

We don’t mean it.

(We mean it completely).

We mean it the way you mean things when the defences are down and the real self, the bewildered hopeful exhausted tender real self, is the only one still awake. What if this were enough. This specific inadequate beautiful temporary room. The mice just mice. The contracts never coming and us staying, contained in each other, safe in the smallness of it, the enforced simplicity, the way this one room has stripped everything down to what is actually required.

Each other. The phone calls with Finn in his language. Ella and Izzy. The chips. The bass line when the despair gets in.

We would not stay. We are going. Lancashire → Manchester → Hebden Bridge, the spell, the route, the real life assembling itself twig by dropped twig by found twig.

But the fact that we can imagine it. That the mouse room contains enough love to make it imaginable, even for a moment, even on a Wednesday

That is not nothing.

That is, I think, what I have been trying to say.

***

The small hours.

Nearly five now. My eyes sandpapered apart, and still I write.

The bass line stopped hours ago. Ben sleeps. Finn’s phone is dark somewhere in another county. Dad is in Devon being seventy-eight. The contracts are unsigned. The peppermint has not worked. Has never worked. Will not work.

The mice are living their lives beneath me with complete indifference to mine. To the novel I write in peculiar fragments as I brush my teeth and pause life to write another sentence before mouthwash. To the money. To the moors. To the man I love like a tooth. To the son I miss in the chest in his language I learned from him. To the Dad in Devon I am already pre-emptively grieving. To all of it.

Joy Division became New Order.

The grief in the bass line.

The body still moving.

I am still here. I am still, after everything, bewildered and building and full of an embarrassing unstoppable hope.

(That might be the most authentic thing I have ever written).

Or I am still becoming the person it will be true of. Or both.

The building does nothing. The something moves.

Joy Division into New Order.