Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.
Two things are due on October 14 this year. One is this tiny new life I am carrying inside of me, who will, if history repeats be at least one week late. The other is this book that I am scrawling down on paper this very moment.
The first due date is absolute. The second is arbitrary because I have no one waiting for it save my own expectation, fuelled by a certainty that if this is not completed before this new life is ready then there is a good chance of two terrible things occurring.
One. I never go into labour, so terrified am I of the manuscript remaining unfinished. I have that kind of magic in me. My first child was two weeks overdue, with no sign of labour at all. Eventually they had to cut him out of me. Due to the peculiar circumstances of my life at the time, the primal part of me must have believed the only way to keep him safe was to house him inside my body forever.
Two. I know that I will drown if I do not complete this, my virgin manuscript. I will drown in nappies and breast milk and fat rolls and stretch marks and human shit. And I will drown in metaphoric shit that has in fact been choking me since I was 18 when I first recognised that the only thing that matters is this. To write.
There is only one thing I really, really want to birth before I die. Or before I turn 40 preferably. Which takes nothing away from the babies I have birthed and am still yet to birth. They are great. Really. But one way or another they were coming out (to date one via caesarean and one vaginally. Let’s see what number three has in store). But a book has no such inevitability. It’s growth and appearance in the world has everything to do with my conscious mind, alas, with its entire sub-conscious, self-limiting, metaphoric faeces producing doubt.
I am over this. Do you hear me? Now. The urgency is tangible. If I do not produce this manuscript by the time little person number three comes along, I will die. Maybe not all of me. But certainly the part of me I most like. And so I must write. Just as baby must grow. She grows as she is programmed to do so and this time I take the same approach to my words. They must grow. And then, and only then, the baby can be born.
The deal is made.