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“It felt like a moral decision to come, just as it felt like a moral decision to become an author.”
Here, it is 7am and my 11-year-old boy is screaming, mouth agape, eyes fixed. He screams in rhythm with his breath. His distress stabs into the dawn. I don’t know how long his suffering will go on, or if it will end with this, in exhaustion, or with broken glass, or worse. This is usual in our home. We live like puppets, suspended on piano wire: when he is happy, we circle around him, smiling through our tension, expecting his delicate mask of contentment to melt at any moment and the cries to begin again, more piercing than before.

Now I am here, not there. And even though I have been here for more than two weeks, the contrast is still too great, too confusing. There have been some mornings when I literally could not believe where I was. I have woken, dry mouthed, from dreams haunted by elusive monsters and looked at the peaks of the Apennines ranged before me, hugging the sky. The hills dotted with ancient stone citadels like this one, enjoying the view.

How am I here? Where is my sense of duty? I’m without my daily frustrations. Unable to salve my child’s suffering, I cleave close to him, a martyr to the cause of motherhood. Here, I feel useless. A puppet, and someone has cut my strings.

It felt like a moral decision to come, just as it felt like a moral decision to become an author. What is it that feels moral about those decisions? Sometimes, I am a teacher, a mentor or an editor, and cannot face the word ‘writer’. Why pursue writing when my family could live more comfortably if I found something more lucrative to do? And why should I go to a writers’ retreat in Italy, leaving my neurodiverse child and long-term partner to fight through the neurotypical world alone for three and half weeks?

There is no screaming here, unless you count the cry of the two lonely peacocks. Squint hard, and down in the valley is a solitary, quiet road to the settlement of Sassuolo, and on to Modena. There are birds, so many, paired, lonely, singing, calling. At night the crickets and frogs take over. Fireflies tease the night. These hills hum with compassionate life.

We, the writers, exist temporarily in a workable wilderness, but it is a fantasy which cannot hold back the world forever. There are few cars, but plenty of enthusiastic mowers keeping the grass back where it belongs, behind the swimming pool. Each night I feel the vegetation might creep over its borders and take the house back to nature, back to a fecund wilderness, a dreamtime of uncontrolled abundance. The house, with its wonderfully thick walls and tiled floors, demands maintenance.

Have I done the right thing coming here, the good thing? This is my work, as well as my passion. Here, I have been a writer 24 hours a day, all the time. It has been a revelation to step away from ‘writer’ as a label – pretentious, precarious – and instead fully inhabit the function. To just wake up, get up and write every day is a revelation and a wonder.

Being here, I have discovered writing as neither good nor bad, as neither privilege nor indulgence, but as work. That other work, of raising a child who does not fit into the world, has receded – though it rears up in my mind so vividly tears follow, both grateful and longing. Even here, I still half live through him. He is my light, my care, and without him I am sometimes lost, a zombie of sorts, even in this paradise.

I could not have spent the time here alone. Here, the person I have become is a stranger. She has been carved out by the eyes of strangers, now friends, and from listening to them, learning how I am weak, where I am strong, how I am rich and where I am poor. Without them, I would not know who I am here. I would be haunting the corridors in a once-white nightie, a womb-emptied ghost woman – an even less substantial thing than either ‘writer’ or ‘mother’.

I will eventually return to those parts of myself I left behind in an everyday life. Relationships managed, traffic on Southover Street negotiated, school professionals pleased. There. But until then, I will stay here, hanging on in this ancient place, where fertile hills gesture to mountains disappearing into the blue. Here, where there have been centuries, countless years of ordinary days. Each one for the taking, too, before it slipped away. Each one that could have been unique. Could have been made beautiful.

My child is young; each day lasts an age to him, every week an eternity. But he slips through my fingers so quickly. Time, with the snows of age, falls slowly, but still drifts across my brow. It urges me on. Don’t waste me, don’t waste. Don’t. Just do your work.

Katy Massey

Katy Massey is a writer, teacher and editor of life writing and fiction. She has been widely published in magazines and anthologies, including Glimpse, Peepal Tree’s speculative fiction collection, and Common People, an anthology of working-class memoir, edited by Kit De Waal. She drew on her complicated childhood in Yorkshire for her Jhalak Prize shortlisted memoir Are we home yet? which was published in 2020. All Us Sinners, her novel about a group of female sex workers in the late 1970s, was published in 2024.

​ © Katy Massey
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