The Queen of Swords vs The Queen of Cups

I wrote an essay for a uni assignment just recently. It was a personal essay of sorts because it was exploring my motivations for writing, but it was very uni-fied. No, that isn’t a word, but it should be. You see, university changes people – usually for the better, but not always. For some of us it becomes an emotional battleground – the head versing the heart.

Don’t get me wrong, I love going to university. I love that for brief periods I get to forget about my responsibilities and just focus on me. When I walk out the front door, the deadlock latches and the me that lives for my family doesn’t get to follow. Or so I thought. Who am I kidding? She is me. Walking away from her to play intellectual is fun. I love the learning. I love having my mind stretched and being introduced to new ideas, new ways of thinking, and potential new ways of being. But, before long, the battle lines are drawn and I can’t decide which side I want to fight for.

I’m sitting here at my desk, my tarot cards pushed to the side – yes tarot cards, nothing even slightly intellectual seeming there – feeling the need to write this essay. When I’m at university, I think. I think a lot. I read everything I am told to read plus as much of what is suggested as is humanly possible. I look for connections. I seek to join invisible dots. I seek ways to connect my English, sociology, history and philosophy studies in a way that makes my choices make sense. To me in some way they do, and I doubt Bourdieu or Foucault will ever be erased from my thinking, especially Foucault who managed to straddle every discipline I have studied. And, I am grateful to the people that introduced me to these different ways of viewing the world. Yet the more I learn the more I feel I lose myself. I know I should be growing, but towards what?

I become caught up in the thinking of others and forget my own way of thinking. I write with “I am,” “they are,” “will not,” rather than “I’m,” “they’re” and “won’t.” “Moreover,” “thus,” and “further” roll onto the page without conscious thought. When did they become part of my used vocabulary? When did I start writing closing arguments for the prosecution rather than explorations on what it feels like to be in my head, in my world? When did I forget the joy I feel in watching the lizards, the clouds, the birds, the day? My 6.7 GPA suggests I have a pretty good grasp on academic speak, but at what price? What scale can I use to grade what I have left behind as a result?

I have noticed that Eula Biss’s essay, The Pain Scale, is listed under the Honours reading list, as is David Foster Wallace’s, Consider the Lobster. They are two of my favourite essays. Up until now I have wondered what made them so good. I connected with them straight away, and obviously those in the know who allocated them for study recognised them, but I couldn’t work out why. Now I have a feeling as to why they resonate with me like they do. Biss’s essay explores how we can grade winds with the Beaufort Scale, how the Celsius and Fahrenheit scales came to be, the improbability of zero, the infinity of the possibilities between numbers and of numbers themselves, and she showcases their complete inadequacy to measure pain.

We have become so accustomed to measuring things numerically, of grading things, and labelling things, that we have forgotten to consider the impossibility of accurately doing so. As my lecturer questioned in one of my English classes, how do you measure one assessment against another? And yet, that is exactly what is done. How do we rank one person’s pain, one person’s happiness, one person’s purpose, against another’s? It seems impossible and yet we live in such a way as to pretend it can be done. Money, status, our address, our clothing size, the size of our chest, our grades, and a plethora of other markers supposedly determine our worth, and yet to who, for who, for what, and most importantly, how and why?

I came to university as a high school dropout at a point in my life when I felt lost. Home schooling my children had come to an end. The Department of Education overseers that had monitored my progress suggested I should be a teacher. Apparently they liked my innovative approaches. For me, I was just trying to cater to my two children as individuals with different learning styles, interests and abilities. I knew I would never became a primary or a high school teacher. Too many rules, too much red tape, too many boxes. Suddenly though, I wasn’t sure what to do with myself. I considered going back to being a Massage Therapist but sometimes I think we need to move forward rather than going back. I wonder if I’m right in thinking that or whether I’m just too restless a soul for my own good. My answer? It depends on the day.

In the end I decided to tick something off my “bucket list.” I’d never stepped foot on a university campus because I doubted I belonged there, but something made me decide to see if this way of thinking was in fact true. I chose Open Foundation, an enabling program available through the University of Newcastle, as my testing ground. Upon completion I was told I had earned the highest grade ever achieved in Social Enquiry and I was either the third or fourth student in the history of the program to achieve 100% across every maths exam, even the ones I could drop. I was as surprised as everyone else. I had just wanted to know that I could succeed in some way at this level. Suddenly, my results suggested I should continue my studies, but in what? I had no idea. I never stopped to consider whether I even wanted to remain a university student.

Maybe I should have left after Open Foundation, but I didn’t. It was too late. I had bought into the idea that my worth was equated with my academic achievements. I had spent years teaching my kids to seek answers, to love learning and discovery, to think for themselves, only to abandon my own creed. I learnt uni speak and I forgot Mel speak. My results meant I could enrol in any degree except medicine and yet I struggled to choose. At that point, maybe I should have listened, but I didn’t. I enrolled in the Bachelor of Social Science. I loved research and sociology so it seemed the best fit. I was caught up in my own hype. Not many people blow sunshine up your bum for being a mum.

Suddenly I was an active part of society again. So, even though I don’t believe you can scale people’s worth, people’s emotions, people’s value to others, or people’s value to society in the way we tend to measure them, I felt more comfortable. Why, because I’m human and part of me really wants to fit in. Even though I believe the system is flawed, I am forced to acknowledge it’s the norm. Like many others, I’m sure, I ignore my own knowledge and experience in favour of the collective viewpoint way too often.

I have two very different fathers. I have come to love them both for very different reasons. I don’t like things about either of them for very different reasons too. I know how society would judge them but based on what? Your address doesn’t make you a better person. Neither does you job title, your marriage status or your religion. Eula Biss’s essay touched on all of this for me and that is its power. It wasn’t about a pain scale for me. It was about the impossibility of judging, charting, or assessing abstractions.

This is where we can learn so much from young children. My grandson’s word bank is limited to ‘shoes,’ ‘nan,’ ‘mum,’ ‘dad,’ ‘pop,’ his own version of Willow, ‘more,’ ‘this,’ ‘that,’ and a few other words. So, when he was in hospital no-one asked him to rate his pain on a scale of 1-10. Biss mentions in her essay that the Wong-Baker Pain Scale uses pictures of people’s facial expressions to grade pain rather than numbers, but I struggled with those drawings. Now, I’m an adult, which may be why these drawings confused me, but I found it difficult to pick if some of those faces were caused by pain or ecstasy.

I loved that no-one asked my grandson to grade his pain. They looked at him. They watched how he moved, and how he reacted. They considered whether he was eating, his facial expressions, and so on to assess how he was feeling. Most of the time he made it quite clear. Determining his pain and his state of mind was derived directly from observation, not a number. Why do we stop doing this with, and as, adults? And, what are the consequences? Biss’s experiences, shared through her essay, suggest they are not positive.

I mentioned David Foster Wallace’s essay before too. When I read his essay I was unaware of his reputation. His was just the second last essay in Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: Work from 1970 to Present. Since that first experience I have read more. In fact, I became a bit obsessed. I watched interviews. I watched the movie, The End of the Tour, and I read the reactions of those that knew him, and of course I read more of his work. Although not as much as I would have like since I seem dedicated to choosing university subjects with large, to huge, to unreasonable, reading expectations.

But back to Consider the Lobster, since this essay had such an impact on me. In fact, I stopped writing this to go and reread it in full and I’m glad I did. Written in 2004, obviously before “just Google it” became part of our everyday, I loved the line, ‘All this is right there in the encyclopedia.’ He had been informing readers about lobsters, their taxonomy and the etymology of their name – something we are all free to do at any time. Now, it’s easier than ever to educate ourselves on anything and yet how many of us do so? One tiny line in a fifteen-page essay stood out like a short, fat girl at a high-fashion modelling shoot. Yes, I know that mightn’t be PC, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

Obviously, it wasn’t that line that made me fall for the essay and develop a school-girl type crush though. It was the blending of research, his powers of observation, his self-reflection, and his ability to infuriate me and then placate me. It was his willingness to ask the questions we don’t want to consider. It was his willingness to challenge our eating choices in a culinary magazine. And it was his willingness to admit to potentially unfavourable viewpoints and to raise issues that he can’t answer in the hope that others may think about them. If I was to rewrite my “Why I Write” essay now, I would remember these qualities. I may be being too hard on myself or maybe not hard enough. Or maybe we just bite off too much and we need to go on an intellectual diet. Maybe the issue with some of my writing is getting caught at the buffet and wanting to sample a bit of everything without savouring anything.

I wonder what I would have found if I had burrowed down further into why I write rather than focusing on intellectualising the whole thing. I might have written about why I write rather than talk. I might have written about why, and how, writing is both good and bad for my mental health too. But I didn’t, I couldn’t. I don’t want to be that person and yet it is who I am. It’s not part of university persona though.

That’s why university is both good and bad for me. It takes me out of myself. It makes me busy. It stops me from considering why I feel and react the way I do. It encourages me to pick apart other people’s reasonings rather than my own. I search for the contradictions, the unsupportable, as if the perfect argument exists. I look for faults rather than strengths. Is that any way to be? Does that make me feel better about myself? Or does that drag me into a negative way of viewing myself, life, and others. After all, intellectualising is more comfortable. Life, feelings, thoughts and beliefs are much harder to express, especially since even simple things are hard to pin down.

For example, am I a cat or a dog person? I have both. I have a stunning full male German Shepherd that I feel guilty leaving behind every time I go somewhere without him. I am even more of a dog person when anyone comes to my front door in the hope of selling me something. An angry forty-kilo-plus dog barking and lunging at the screen door helps to speed up their presentations somewhat. And as for the guy that thought I wasn’t inside when he tried to open my screen door … I’m sure he won’t be back. I’ve never seen Ash as aggressive before or since. And, unlike my husband, (okay and me when I have the grandkids asleep), I love that he lets people know he’s here if they choose to stop out the front of our house. I know he’s gentle and sweet and affectionate. I also know that my son and son-in-law learnt pretty quickly that it’s not a good idea to lean over the top of me if I’m sitting down. Only my husband can do that. Although Ash likes to keep us a safe distance apart when we’re together on the couch. So yes, I’m a dog person, even more so when we go camping and there’s nothing more than a thin piece of fabric between me and the rest of the world.

I am also the person that at one stage had six cats. No, I’m not a crazy cat lady, yet. My cat had kittens and we couldn’t bear to part with any of them. Unfortunately, the road, illness, someone else’s dog, and a disappearing act has lessened the number to two now. But as I sit here in this moment looking out my window, I see them curled up in an expanded yin yang kind of way with a shrub growing up between them. Mother and son peacefully resting together and yet apart.

I have grown up with cats, many that have acted like dogs, so I laughed when I read some of the Goodreads reviews for A Man Called Ove. Ove’s cat follows him around, and people thought that was unrealistic. They are either not cat people or their cats aren’t people cats. I have had cats that try and follow us on dog walks; one that used to meet me at the corner each afternoon having left me there in the morning; another that would happily jump in the car or onto the bonnet when we were reversing up the driveway; and one that wouldn’t let me go to the toilet in peace. So, cats are not nearly as antisocial as those that don’t like them make out. Maybe that’s why I love them.

It’s probably clear that if you asked me to choose between a cat or a dog, I’d say both. Trying to get me to choose one over the other is like asking me to choose my son over my daughter. They too are both so different and yet my love for them is indistinguishable. They would probably argue this point, but they are getting older and the competitive sibling streak seems to be abating. I thing they now realise that I adore them both. Fortunately there isn’t some random Rate-Your-Children Scale.

Somehow the question of whether I’m the Mel my husband loves or the Mel others praise is akin to the cat verses dog debate. Here too I have taken the “both” option and I continue to do so, but I wonder at what cost and why. My family loved me before I became a uni student. Now they pretend to like me going to uni because they sense it’s important to me. What I can’t tell them, or myself, is why. Yes I flirt with the idea of Honours and a PhD, and if parallel universes existed and I was single, or had made very different choices much earlier in life, I would be bashing down the door of those that could help make further study a reality. Of that I am sure. I know it’s a part of me, but it’s not the part of me that wanted to go and get married young and buy a property for my horses, my rescue dogs and cats, my books, and my four kids.

We all make compromises. I am no exception. I only had two children and I don’t live on acreage. And, even though only two of us live in the three bedroom house that at one stage was home for six adults, many of my books are relegated to the six foot bookshelves that line our storage shed. Yes, I pay rent to house my books. So I acknowledge that I might be able to take the institutionalised student out of myself, but never the desire to learn, to seek, to explore, to read, and to write.

That is a person I really wouldn’t know. For years I would start my day with the discipline of writing two thousand words before coffee. I imagine I would have maintained my slim and fit body if I had used the time to exercise instead, but something had to give. The time I used to spend exploring the bush at the end of my street is now spent reading articles and writing versions of essays that meet academic criteria. I miss those days. I miss the very things I have have felt the need to abandon.

Meanwhile, my husband patiently sits in another room while I obsess over a comma, a semicolon, or a full stop. He offers me yet another cup of coffee while I wrestle with my insecurities over an assessment I’m editing for the umpteenth time. He tells me he admires my dedication and yet he misses me like I miss him. I have lost balance. Even when I am not “studying,” I am thinking about what I should be doing. There is always something I should be reading, something I should be trying to fit somewhere within an assessment that is already stretching the plus 10% word count. It’s overwhelming and yet never enough.

I wrote a reflective essay on my own writing and ended up with three pages of references, twenty-four sources in total, not including the multitude I read but didn’t end up using. My notes alone on personal essays, memory, and truth totalled closer to ten thousand words than nine. And for what? I learnt a lot and I unearthed a lot of material that may make its way into something down the track, but the time away from my family, what happens to that? I learnt about how memory works rather than spending time making them.

You would think that the decision becomes easy but as I glance over at A Writing Life: Helen Garner and Her Work and William Gass’s, Habitations of the Word, still waiting to be returned to the library, I become torn once again. I only borrowed the Gass essay collection to read ‘Emerson and the Essay’ in full since we are told not to use “quoted in” where possible. I ended up reading the whole book even though I had several deadlines looming. The most pressing being my grandson’s surgery.

His impending operation meant that I strove to complete all my assessments two weeks earlier than they were due, so I was free to be there for my daughter. Yes I do note the irony in writing this when I could be completing one last edit, or two. But I had to make the decision to let them go otherwise I would have added uni stress to the sleepless nights I was already experiencing. The early completion is normal. Not editing right up until the due date is a first.

I wish someone could tell me how to reconcile these battling aspects of myself. I wish people had better answers than just finish your degree so it’s done. I see the logic in that. I have thirty units to go, in effect one semester, but my daughter is having a baby at the beginning of next semester and since I have been there completely for the first two I doubt I will do anything less for this baby boy when he comes. I cringe every time I hear a young student say ‘P’s get degrees’ but as time goes by I envy them a little also. P’s do get degrees and if I don’t go on to further study then my degree has been largely for nothing more than validation of my intellect. Is that enough? Every word I write leaves me asking more questions.

When I began this essay, I mentioned I had tarot cards scattered around me. They are the Cook’s Tarot. You would have to know me better to know straight up how strange a choice this deck is for me. Some people love to cook. I cook because that is what wives and mothers and grandmothers do. Sometimes I take delight in making something appealing for my granddaughter to eat – she takes tiny servings to a la carte extremes. Yet sometimes, just sometimes, we get the pleasure of watching her demolish a plate of food as excitedly as her younger brother. He runs to the kitchen like an Olympic sprinter whenever you mention breakfast, lunch or dinner. Those moments, those memories, and the after-meal mess cannot be replaced, cannot be replicated and shouldn’t be missed.

Now I firmly advocate that tarot cards aren’t there to tell the future. Rather, they tell us a story that we can interpret just as readily as we interpret any book we read. At best, they suggest possibilities. I am not a fortune teller. Nor am I devoid of intelligence, common sense or a questioning mind. I don’t know what the future will hold. I don’t know where I want that future to take me either. But I do know that I am grateful that, at the age of sixteen, a lost, self-destructive girl living on her own met a boy that said, “we’ve got this” and that he chose to stand by her side through the good times, the bad times, the dark times, and the confusion and self-destruction of her mind imploding times.

Family life and being a wife and mum might not get the recognition it deserves but sometimes we need to acknowledge the opinions of those we love and that love us, over the judgments and opinions of strangers. I may experience wife guilt, mother guilt, and even study guilt, but each serve as a reminder of how privileged my life has been.

MJ

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Deck used in main image is The Light Seer’s Tarot by Chris-Anne published by Hay House

Since writing this I have gone on to complete my studies, earning a Bachelor of Arts (English) with Distinction and I’ve been awarded a College Medal by the University. I don’t say that to brag. I just want to show what’s possible. Through working with the tarot, chance encounters, and the love, support and kindness of those closest to me I’ve discovered a lot. If you’ve made it this far and you’re interested, stay tuned because no doubt there will be another instalment.