Sometimes being a professional mum feels a bit like this.

I pass this tree on the way to work sometimes. One side is reaching back to the house, one side reaching out to the transport infrastructure on the road. It might look like two trees from certain angles but it's still only one. The weight of the lateral branches might be risky in a storm, but otherwise the tree is thriving.











There is a 'thing' where a small number of women in their 50's, who have been through child-rearing and struggled on part-time and are now back to full attention on their career, have rocketed up various chains of command, apparently out of nowhere, and ended up in high-prominence public, political or corporate spots.

Is this when the two halves of the tree can join around the structural obstruction- when she can put all she has learned over time to grow in one direction?

The Pile (or 'How I learn about all these random things...')

 

Something strange keeps happening to me. People I hardly know give me things to read. Everyone does, in fact. Family, friends, colleagues - even my doctor, and the woman who runs the café in the foyer of my office tower, have all loaned me books. I think that’s how they tell me they like me. This doesn’t seem to happen to other people.

I have also noticed two side-effects. Firstly, I now have working knowledge with a lot of material I have never had actual contact with, including: beekeeping; archaeology; the market for secondhand earthmoving equipment; legal history. Secondly, I have also become the go-to person in many of my circles, for wide-ranging questions like how to fix a leaky toilet, how to choose health insurance, and which are the key differences between Polish and Swedish meatballs.

In my defence, I do read a lot. The stack of books on my bedside table is higher than the bedside table. It falls on me sometimes in the early morning. Current residents of the Pile include a gardening manual: ‘Espalier’; teen fiction: ‘The Mortal Instruments’ series; autobiographies of Billy Connoly and Madeleine Albright; a history of the cure for Smallpox; a book titled ‘Love & Math’ (I don’t know yet if it’s a romance novel or a science book or both, and I don’t much mind!) and a floppy mass of kids’ books, magazines, art books, craft patterns, and clippings. I will get through this pile in a month or so. I have a nifty fold-out cook book holder which I always use when I cook… to hold open whichever irresistible novel I might be reading while I fry the onions.

This morning I noticed that most of the books in the Pile were not my own choice. They are gifts from family, and loans or recommendations from friends and workmates. They find me in the lunch room and say “Oh Alex, I just finished this great book!” and press it into my hand. When we have a dinner party, people bring reading material instead of salad or a bunch of flowers. Then as I’m making the after-dinner pot of tea, I might come out to find them totally absorbed in some other book that I had sitting on the table next to the couch. (Not mentioning any names... you know who you are.... )

When I was 18, I had a crush on my next-door neighbour in the apartment block. He was a violin student, he had surfie-blond hair, he was hotness itself, charming and shy, gangly and graceful but very skinny, not yet filling his 6-foot frame. He hardly spoke to me. But one day, he knocked on my door, and with eyes looking at the carpet he said “I thought you might like this book”, then put it in my hands and fled. The book was Kahlil Gibran “The Prophet” - which, to an 18 year old girl, is itself a piece of hotness packaged in a neat 200 pages. I stayed up until dawn reading it, I cried, I couldn’t get it out of my mind, so I read it again the next night. When I returned it by sliding it under his door, I included a thankyou note - and an invitation for coffee - on my favourite page. It clearly wasn’t his favourite page, or else he didn't drink coffee. He never spoke to me again. In the hall, he avoided me until he moved out not long after. It was a very old-fashioned love affair – romantic, obsessive, a fundamental incompatibility was detected early, and hardly a word was spoken.

I recently got an e-reader and I love it but it's just not the same. How can a flat square e-reader or tablet compete with the thumbed cover of a precious text? How can a ‘share’ on Facebook or Twitter ever be as rich with human contact as actually sharing an object; of holding the physical weight of a thing someone else has selected, bought, read,  - and then held you and you alone in mind sufficient to lend it to you? What about the intimacy of margin scribbles, these tiny bits of someone’s thoughts to pace and contrast your own reading of it? And the symbolism in the trust they place in me with the care of the binding and corners, not to spill coffee on their book - although in my house, fried onions or lamb curry could be a bigger risk.
I suppose if I get a Kindle, I can also get an curry-proof cover for it.

Meanwhile, I accept every book and magazine offered to me graciously and I read it with care, because of the care that person took to choose it for me. And every month or two, I find that someone has lent me another Kahlil Gibran; another piece of text which pivots my perception, opens my soul, my mind or my imagination, changes my world. So I don’t mind the Pile collapsing on me in the middle of the night once in a while. And if you ever ask me, I might have some really good books to recommend for you.