Honey attracts more bees than vinegar

Honestly

I used to say that having babies felt like I was on the end of a line. It could be paid out, imperceptibly, for a fair distance. And then, a pull backwards. No more slack – I must go home with my breasts to feed someone. There was no point fighting it, frustrating as it was.

It was hard to get used to, this notion of being never-quite-free.

In her book ‘a life’s work, on becoming a mother’, Rachel Cusk writes about the same thing. In fact, looking it up now nearly two decades later, in the well-worn copy that sat on my bedside table for years, I see that Cusk writes about it in almost the same way. Possibly she’s where I got the idea from. It’s all a blur, now, of breastmilk and sleepless nights, so apologies if I’ve borrowed your thought, Rachel. Or maybe you borrowed mine, it’s impossible to tell. What I can say is that yours was the only voice I would listen to, in those days. I emailed you once to tell you that.

i wanted you to know that it was the book that got me through

…is what I said, weirdly all in lower case. Possibly I was too tired to press shift.

I read this book by Rachel Cusk like the Bible when my children were babies. Probably more than the Bible, to tell the truth. It’s got an edge of realism I could relate to, even though I was having a wonderful time being a mother. But nothing is ever only one thing. Having a baby can be amazing, and also awful, and I’d offer my after-three-babies body to you as proof if I had to. Still beautiful, but definitely not the same as my before-three-babies body. Nowhere near. Not even close. The struggle of getting used to that change was real, and no amount of private despair could ever reverse it.

I found that other mothers didn’t want to discuss this real side of things at the time, which was possibly why I was trying to connect with an author, a perfect stranger, on a personal level! It was weird to me that in this new world of motherhood, it was OK - expected in fact - to swop horrifying birth stories in exaggerated whispers, but not OK to frankly mention you wanted to throw the baby out of the window. Fine to want to go back to work, not fine to report you’d screamed into the pram in the park at 7am. It was perfectly acceptable to struggle with breastfeeding, somehow, but very unacceptable to wonder out loud if you’d ever have sex again. Voicing the things no one wanted to admit – to stunned silence - seemed to be my speciality in the posh coffee mornings of expensive houses along the Thames.

In motherland in the early 2000s, there was a strong, unspoken rulebook of what was right and wrong to express, and it felt like no one dared break it. Except, perhaps, this little hardback book by Rachel Cusk.

And that’s why I liked it so much.

It’s honest.

Learning about masking – the camouflaging autistic people do to fit in, has been illuminating. It comes with a question: Have I just been lying to everyone all along?

Well, yes, but not deliberately, and no. Yes (but not deliberately) because if you don’t shut up about the real stuff at coffee mornings, you won’t get invited to coffee mornings, and like it or not, those people are your cast of characters, right now, until you find people who get you. And no, because you’re the one bringing up real stuff at posh coffee mornings in the first place.

Someone once told me:

‘People will always misunderstand you, Trude, because you speak the truth.’

I’d rather speak the truth than die stifled by small talk, and ironically, that’s all I meant when I told that friend after my diagnosis that this is war and I’m on the frontline. If the wires to No Man’s Land are a symbol for speaking the truth about being different, about what it means and how it feels, then I’m going over the top. I don’t care if I get shot down, not if it advances us towards justice and my children’s children get to be different without all this ridiculous fuss. That’s worth fighting for. Not that long ago, it was illegal to be gay, and thankfully we’ve moved on a little bit from that. I hope neurodivergence will be similar, but I think that we’re going to have to be way more open about the whole thing to gain some sort of critical mass. An army of protest calling for acceptance, if you like.

Another time, my friend told me about a quiet revolution happening around neurodiversity. I lost my mind at that too, and my poor lovely friend took flight, unsurprisingly. But my point was – and still is – were the Stonewall riots in 1969 quiet?

Was Black Lives Matter in 2019 quiet? Was any uprising quiet? Will it ever be? I am not into violence, nor suggesting it, but revolutions are not quiet.

Keeping things comfortable rarely makes any material change in the world, at least not fast enough. It’s the equivalent of a coffee morning dripping in affluence. Everyone having a nice time, while the world burns outside.

Honey attracts more bees than vinegar, they say. Don’t be so shrill! Be polite so people listen.

But vinegar cleans things. It’s useful, effective. It deodorises, can shift mould and gets rid of stubborn stains.

Vinegar also smells like itself, and it might make you wrinkle your nose… but that’s not the fault of the vinegar.

Honestly.

Love.

Trudi

x

What’s tone policing? A good explanation here.

https://everydayfeminism.com/2015/12/tone-policing-and-privilege/

More on Rachel Cusk’s book ‘a life’s work’ here:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/mar/21/biography.women

NB: *I understand it’s a privileged position to be able to talk openly about autism in the first place. Not everyone can, or maybe even should. That’s why I think *I* should, even though writing this blog brings me much angst :)

More on intersectionality here:

https://autisticprideday.org/autism-basics/intersectionality/

I’ll go home now, sorry ;) *Backs out*