School holidays in the study

It’s the fourth of school holidays in the Waikato. Today, the April sun is a welcome relief from the constant rainfall here. However, I can only catch a glimpse of it through the blinds at my workstation. My son, T, is watching Desperate Housewives. He reckons the storyline is compelling. He is fourteen. Miss P is working on her maths.  

As a PhD student, I must keep writing. I developed a routine during my master’s programme under Catherine Chidgey and Tracey Slaughter, which I found helpful. I adhered to my writing routine for the entire 18 months of the course, even during the Christmas break, a feat I’m quite proud of. We only had nine months to write the creative section of the thesis. As a writer and mum, I’ve come to learn it’s a balancing act, like it is with women in our patriarchal society. Although some believe we live in an equal society, most women, while working full-time jobs, still come back home to do the majority of the chores—cooking, cleaning, and taxiing kids around. Australian author Anna Funder discussed these issues in her book, Wifedom: The Invisible Life of Eileen Orwell.  

 Living with two kids without their workaholic dad here makes things more complicated. Although I have studied English all my life, it is still a second language. My writing process is slow. I jot down my thoughts in the first draft and continue editing until the work reaches a polished state. In other words, the school holidays doesn’t mean I’ll be waking up at 9 am rather than 4am to write. The holidays for me means while I can’t go to my office at the university from 8am to 4pm, I’ll keep to my usual weekend routine and find a couple of hours during the day to write if we are not on the road. 

When I started this semester in February, my desktop was clean. I tidied up, placing all my documents from my master’s thesis into folders. Today, my desktop is a mess. Despite my efforts to organise each document into a folder, my iMac and MacBook are overflowing with documents. It doesn’t help that my memory is failing. I have discovered that sometimes I forget I have written a piece. Despite my efforts to update a document every time I work on it, I still occasionally forget what I have worked on. I’ve heard tales of students losing their entire thesis project. That thought haunts me. To prevent that, I save several copies, but the problem is that it creates additional mess, and because I cannot remember which is which, it becomes complicated. The fact that I work both from home and at the university complicates matters. The kids find it amusing that both the iMac and the MacBook are cluttered with open tabs. I keep them open as a reminder. I can’t help but wonder if I’m alone in these habits. Is it my age or my inability to navigate this tech world since I grew up in Nigeria? Perhaps I’ll find some time in the next two weeks to tidy up again.  

I went for yoga this morning, which was great. Now, I’m working on a piece about fashion. Working on this piece is taking me back to my past—Nigeria. 

Growing up as a teenager in the 80s in Jos, a northern state in Nigeria under a military regime, both at school and at home meant that girls like me were taught early on what was expected of us: to be domesticated, submissive, and tamed. Our homes, pop culture, and religious institutions deeply embedded this mantle. For women, this was the reality. Our clothing reflected these values as well as our status in society. Knee-length skirts or gowns were deemed inappropriate for teenagers; only those deemed promiscuous dressed that way. Trousers, as we referred to them, were for men. However, that’s a tale best left for another time. 

 I’ve been considering starting a blog for a long time. For the first time, I’m actually trying. I wish I could say I’m jumping into it voluntarily. Unfortunately, I’m writing out of necessity. Apparently, it is common practice among publishers to require emerging writers to have an online presence, which may be appealing to extroverts but can be challenging for introverts like me. Hence, I’ve decided to write a blog that would serve as a journal through my PhD. I plan to maintain a candid and sometimes chaotic perspective as life unfolds. I aim to document this journey in a way that will both hold me accountable and impart valuable lessons. It would be a different writing style from my academic life and if it fosters connections with others, that would be an enormous benefit.  I must warn that sometimes it would be on heavy topics, like the first poem on my blog.  

That’s me keeping it real. There is a lot happening in the world today. Whether you live in the east or the west. It doesn’t matter if you reside in a first-world country or a third-world country. The ongoing chaos will impact everyone, albeit differently. As American writer and activist Alice Walker reminds us: 

‘Whatever is currently happening to humanity, it is happening to all of us. No matter how hidden the cruelty is—no matter how far off the screams of pain and terror— we live in this world. We are one people.’ 

There’s no time to muck around.