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After The End. 2 Apr 2020 11:58 AM (5 years ago)

I had a lot of vague but relatively grand plans for Freddie’s 10th birthday. Somewhere in my head I decided, years ago now, that this would be the point where I would have reached a serene understanding and acceptance of my little baby boy dying without ever leaving a hospital. I thought this would be the point where I would be able to start making sense of a long ago time when I learned fast about medical words and machines that breathed for babies and drugs with long names that kept him asleep when I wanted him awake but seemed like the best idea at the time. I’ve planned for a long time for this to be the day when – for one last time – we had a family day out and then I read his notes and cried but remembered some things I had forgotten. I planned to spend the next 11 days writing those things into a timeline with photos and combining them with my texts and memories of the day. And I thought there would be one last round of candles, if I managed to take the evening off work, and perhaps we’d finally have had that conversation about what to do with his ashes, and we’d make it a special evening somehow and then I’d tidy it all up in a package and put it away forever. I remember knowing someone a long time ago who had lost a baby boy ten years before I met her and she seemed to have reached a wistful equilibrium and I thought perhaps I’d reach that on this day too.

Truth is, I’ve not really felt much like that for a long time. Work is too busy to give much headspace to ritual now and I’m just not that person anymore. So it probably wouldn’t have happened. Honestly, I don’t know if I’ll ever open that envelope; I’m too afraid of what reading all those memories would do to me and I’m just not sure it is worth the risk. I prefer feeling less these days – less emotions overall takes its toll on some of the good things, but it is a compromise I’ve learned to like.

But then the pandemic happened, and while it’s quite true that there was never going to be a good time for that, for it to coincide with these weeks – in this PARTICULAR YEAR – does feel a bit brutal. The last thing I need right now is to be looking at beloved photos of one of my children on a ventilator, because I’m all too aware that in a few weeks I could be wishing like hell that not only was there a ventilator for one of my children, but that I was allowed to be there with them. There’s a PTSD trigger right there and you can be sure I’m feeling it. And I’m not sure anyone in the world right now wants to be reminded that sometimes the cleverest people in the world can’t make it okay for someone, no matter how much it would be fair if that was so.

A month or so ago, tragedy hit a family I’ve had a long affinity for; they had 4 boys, I had 4 girls, they lost a child and I lost a child – I knew them well when I was young, though I haven’t recently. And for them, it has happened again recently – another loss, another child. It was a brutal reminder that you don’t get inoculated against tragedy just by having bad luck once – it can happen again at any time. For anyone sitting at home at the moment with the anxious feeling in the pit of their stomach wondering if they are going to become a number, another statistic… that’s how I’ve lived the last 10 years. It’s how everyone who watches their child die lives; you just spend your life waiting for the other shoe to drop. Right now, it’s nearly outside my comprehension to imagine us all making it through this. We’ve been the unlucky ones once, I just don’t expect to get lucky ever again.

They lit up the arena behind our house blue tonight, for the NHS. It was lovely. I appreciate them, I’ve always appreciated them; I got 11 precious days with my boy because instead of giving up, they did everything they could. I’m grateful and I clapped. But I also had a slightly wry moment at it being lit up blue – Freddie’s colour – on his 10th birthday. An odd salute for him too – accidentally – and one I think we all wish wasn’t having to happen.

I don’t have the words for a 10th birthday for a little boy who lived 11 days instead of 10 years. I’m horribly aware that had we pulled him through that we’d almost certainly have lost him in this. I don’t have any words, I don’t have any tears, I don’t have the headspace or the energy to even do a decent job of a photo of candles (I’ve used last years). The garden daffodils were finished and there are none to buy in the shop and while all the kids are home from uni there was no day out to remember him on and we’ve all – by common consent – studiously ignored the date. It is what it is.

I just really REALLY don’t want to have to go through that again. I remember sitting on my bed after he died and imagining the rest of my life feeling that empty and bleak and thinking ‘well it won’t be for long because there is no way I can survive 10 years like this even if she did’ and not believing at all that I’d be like that other mum. But I did. I clawed my way back and I’ve made it a good life, even if it doesn’t have him in it.

But I really, really don’t want to have to do that again. So please, stay home when you can. Follow the rules. I don’t want you to have to do it either.

The End. 19 Oct 2017 2:43 AM (7 years ago)

I’ve said it all before. I’ve tried to find the urge to blog again too, in various times and in various ways.

But honestly? I don’t believe in it any more. I don’t feel safe doing it. The idea of writing something controversial and the meanness of what some people will do with that horrifies me, the idea of writing something that appeals, something that I put my heart into, and people thinking that I wrote it for hits, for kudos, for stats and PR approval disgusts me.

There have been so many times when I’ve wanted to write about how life is now, so many years after the most cataclysmic event of my life and worried that people would think I was using grief and Freddie’s name to generate attention. And so I didn’t write and in a funny way that was a grief too and in a funny way it silenced me in ways that were freeing and damaging all at once. I feel less deeply than I used to – and I’m not sure, in that damaged state, if you can write in a way that lays your feelings bare.

And then, the internet is not what it was, my children are all grown up with friends – or not such friends – who could google and wound and sneer and I’ve become a more private person because of that. Nor do I want them to read all my thoughts either, so that worry silenced me too. But in all honesty, the feeling that I could never match the searing need to write after Freddie’s death did it most, along with the anxiety of being seen to capitalise that.

I knew, when I was put in a position of having to monetise my blog, that it would ruin it for me and I was right, but I’m profoundly grateful for the lifeline that was at the time, without which we would have sunk hard and fast. But it did ruin it and I can’t ever go back to that. The thought of worrying about my Klout score, my stats, my standing in any community makes me feel a bit dirty now, even though I know it is still (and quite rightly and fairly) a driving force and a source of stability and self worth for many. That’s great, if you need it, or it pulls your strings, but it stopped doing so for me.  It ended up being just somewhere else for me to feel inadequate. The friends though, the opportunities for contact and fun and laughter and community – oh how I loved that, and how I miss it. Even if I don’t want to be part of the endless hashtagging of my life, I’ll miss that community and I hope many of those people will continue to be in my future.

I knew, when I didn’t blog Fran’s finished crocheted 18th birthday blanket, or my first chick reaching 18 for that matter, that it was over. She left home 3 weeks ago and I didn’t blog that either. Maybe I no longer want to remember how all these things make me feel. I can’t document the enormous sense of inadequacy that children with anxiety, depression or frustrated rage give me either; my story role in that process is something I need to keep to myself – my burden and distress is part of the story that their right to privacy demands stays hidden. I don’t think I want to remember that I’m a part time, schooling mum to Bene, who I wanted so much, or a human who struggles with her weight and can’t get off the anti-depressants, or who seems to have lost her knack for just doing everything – well – all the time. So why would you have a blog if you can’t write those things?

So many bits of my life have moved on how from how I spend my week with my own children to the kids I coach each night at gymnastics or the ones I mentor at Young Enterprise and all of that is guarded by a need to privacy. And so am I, my marriage, my sense of self preservation. And once that has gone, so has blogging.

I’m not who I was in 2003 when I started these pages, nor is the world or the www what it was either. And so, I don’t think I’ll be back and, probably, I’ll be archiving much of what has been recorded here too. I have a sort of odd, half baked plan of moving some things elsewhere and writing in some new way, but I don’t know if I will. If I do ever come back to blogging, it will be in my other place, the person I grew into, not here, the blog of everything that once was.

Thanks for reading all these years. It’s been a privilege.

“The last thing I want to do is document it all.” 19 Jan 2017 4:46 AM (8 years ago)

I said this last week (to Who’s the Mummy, as it happens), to explain why I never blog any more. And, to be fair (to coin an overused phrase favourite of of of my teens, the run up to Xmas felt fairly miserable, for not even the right reason of our shops being nice and busy. It was just hectic and relentless and full of the type of minor problems and irritations that having 5 kids and 2 jobs and a variety of voluntary roles tends to produce.

But…. actually, it’s not really like that.

The trouble with me is I’m the sort of person who isn’t much good at settling at one thing but also gets frustrated if she doesn’t have enough time to really get some teeth into a problem. And my short/medium term memory is pretty awful, so I spend a lot of time relearning skills to achieve small jobs because I just can’t remember skills I learn in a hurry. Example: I’ve run a business for 14 years but I still have to text Max to ask how to take the VAT off a price. I just CAN NOT remember stuff like that. So a life that is full of squeezing essential website maintenance and so forth into tiny spaces of time isn’t something I’m great at. I either need to do something of that sort every day (and get bored) or not a time. I’m temperamentally unsuited to writing notes too – I’d lose them.

Our new ‘all in school’ status lasted a term and now Josie has returned to home ed, which I don’t mind since she’s good and easy company and likes doing work and reading. And is nearly as antisocial as I am.Bene still loves school so aside from that top and tailing my day with a school run – which I couple with a village walk each day to stretch my legs while the traffic back into the city subsides – that’s all good. He’s happy and doing things and I can just about handle feeling SO MUCH OLDER than everyone else at the school gate. The all have younger children in buggies. I feel like a wizened old crone.

I’m fat again. Which is annoying.

I can’t really seem to summon the enthusiasm to make the business a success again (if that’s possible) but shutting a business is awfully hard. We went through a whirl of misery last year when we had to make a long standing staff member redundant, which pushed me into all sorts of grown-upness I didn’t want to do but the net result of a skilled up part time staff member has freed me up a lot – but also let me off a hook that really and truly is still dangling there and very much needing me. I just…. well, I find it hard to find the heart for it these days. I’ve moved on.

Fran is getting ready to leave home, with uni applications in and Maddy is preparing to do the same; in 18 months time, neither will be here. That’s a scary thought. Amelie is finding the teenager years somewhat harder than her sisters did (quelle surprise) and I have firmly discovered that parenting teen girls has little to do with how good you are at it or how much to think you will ‘allow’ them to act up. It’s been tough, on her as well as on everyone else. Far too tough to write about to be honest, so at least it will fade eventually into the same inexplicable fuzz that Maddy’s most Asperger toddler years also did.

What I do love is my new job as a coach; again, that’s really not something I can blog much about because I’m acutely aware, as anyone involved in kids has to be, of their privacy. I work 3 nights a week and some of Saturday and they are (almost) always, some of the high points of the week. The 50 or so kids I personally spend time with are teaching me an awful lot; having to learn to do a complex and dangerous job without the background of being a gymnast has pushed me to learn – and develop ways of learning – in a way I never have before. In all the jobs I ever did, I was always ‘good’ and generally ‘too good’ for what I was doing; in coaching, I’m acutely aware all the time I’m working on the edges of my ability and understanding, but I love that it pushes me to learn to do more. I’ve never worked so hard at anything.

It takes up a lot of time though.

Another part of my week has been coaching a group of sixth formers to run a Young Enterprise business; again I’m learning but in this case it is that I’m better at pushing businesses through the embryo stage and thinking creatively, than I am at long term running of my own. It’s another role where privacy is essential, but it is gratifying to watch mentoring have an effect on a group of young adults.

It’s been such a rough year globally that these are the things that keep me breathing – I just keep thinking that if we can inspire young people to work hard and better themselves, when school seems to be about dumbing down and thinking small (a pressure that seems to come from peers when it doesn’t come from government and is clearly crushing teachers), we still have a chance to turn this awful political climate around. There is no point in thinking “someone should do something” any more. WE have to do it, even if it is tiny efforts in tiny corners. We can’t all do the big protests.

And then, I remember to take my kids out to catch Pokemon and some of the most perfect moments of the Christmas holidays were last minute freezing walks at the rowing lakes, laughing at the number of grown men and their ‘pretending I’m not playing too’ girlfriends down at the rowing lakes without even the children as a cover story.

Last thing at night, when Bene is asleep (still 10pm every night :X ) and Max and I are too tired to talk, I make things and hope my marriage will still be there when the taxi service job is done and the house is far too quiet.

I told myself last year I was too tired to be creative. I did 2 courses, really heavy duty ones for someone with all those other commitments but I loved them and they whet my appreciate for more study. But what I miss most is writing. I keep thinking at that now, at 43, I can’t keep saying ‘when I’m older’ – how much can any of us rely on time being there any more?

So this year I’m trying really hard to write again, creatively, privately, without the need for hashtagging needily or showing it off. I’m just writing, to see if i really can nail that long held dream.

This lot are growing up.

I just don’t want to be the mum who never quite fulfilled her dreams.

 

Big Changes. 3 Sep 2016 12:34 PM (8 years ago)

I’ve thought of myself as a home educator for years, even recently when the kids were in and out of school, though “home educator at heart” is, probably quite rightly, sniffed at by pure home educators. But it was how I felt, my life has been kid centric, both family and educational provision, for 18 years. 18 years is a long time to be at home bringing up small people, particularly if you pack in some of the loops and bends that we’ve rollercoastered through over the last 18 years, never mind the whole running a business alongside home educating and the late restarting of our family.

I’ve tried not to be, but I’m burned out. I home educated Josie this year because she needed it and because what was best for her was a quiet year of regrouping and refinding her feet. She’s very self motivated, studious, young in her mind and a hard worker and I enjoyed her company and she enjoyed not doing SATs. But really I knew that I was done; I will always think home educating is the most brilliant option and that school, for me, is something to be wary of at best, but I’m not sure I can home educate anymore, not unless critical need reappears. My passion for the concept isn’t any less, but my ability to be everything to everyone and recover that enthusiasm again is all gone. I just can’t do another dinosaur project or another learning to do column addition. I’m worn out.

This Autumn, with Fran having turned 18 and started her gap year, Maddy moves to a new 6th form that ticks the boxes needed for all her passions, Amelie starts GCSE and Josie returns to Year 7. Of all of them, I have the most regrets about her; both of us know she may or may not thrive and may have to leave again and I am sad that the girl who would have been the easiest and most satisfying to home educate has ended up with the least of that life, and the least of my energy. In all honesty, I’ve been sad and grief altered for almost all of her life; she doesn’t know the person I was once at all.

And then there is Bene, the baby I wanted to have so much. I’ve loved being at home with him and I’m sad that economics meant he always went to nursery for some of the week but I think we might have had the nicest time on the days he wasn’t that we ever could have. I’m a dabbler, I think, and not cut out for endless of the same. Having Freddie changed me too much, I would never have coped with toddler groups and Musical Singalong Club and not ideally suited to being home at week either. So he’s off to school, a gorgeous little one that I couldn’t like more, and going part time to start with so we both get used to it.

 

This sudden sense of shaking off the old is beguiling; with the finale of my home educator performance opens up doors that have been wafting tantalisingly in front of me for some time. Last year was tough; kids in 4 different establishments needing lifts and collecting and shuttling and parent evening and medical appointment time, a business that needed more time than I could give it, a marriage which badly needed some time for conversation and enjoyment, husband returning to employment and a volunteer job I loved but which was sucking up so much of my time, the tail end of a social media business/lifestyle and a desperate and unquenched desire to make time to write and be creative sidelined by 4 courses I needed to do and enjoyed but left me wrung out.

With the kids going to school, a window has opened on time for me and even better, a precious year with daughter number 1 and I able to do things together. There will be almost no school run this year, my business has new staff who can run it almost without my input and my volunteer job has become a paid one, albeit a job/vocation which seems to have more naturally occurring unpaid hours than anything but teaching I’m optimistic that the tiny spaces of time I’ve found this summer to make things might even make it into big spaces; up till Christmas I’ll settle for getting back to crafting and a bit of light decorating but after Xmas I’m committed to getting back to that half written book. 42 is too old not to have addressed that burning desire I have to prove I can write fiction.

Coaching. Who would have thought that a chance terrible event in a gym club would turn out to set me on a path of finally having a job I love at the age of 42? Gymnastics has been the one sport I loved since I was a little girl (although only to watch after the gymnastics club teacher at my school laughed at me and sent me away *angry face*) I’ve loved my girls doing it and always watched avidly, trying to understand and be part of what made them love it. I’m now a qualified judge and last year I took my Level 1 General Gymnastics course.

But the crowning glory was this.

I have never had to work so hard for anything in my whole life; I had to learn every move to look at from scratch, learn to support kids flying at me in the air when they frankly scared the bejeezus out of me (and I got the bruises to prove it), get quicker, more alert, learn how to describe something to a kid, how to correct, change, prepare a move, work in a team of coaches, plan, evaluate. It was a monumental challenge and I don’t think anyone thought I would do it.

But I did.

 

And it is that which has finally brought about the change in me; everything that I loved about home educating now resides in coaching and along with that has come the huge relief at no longer needing to sell toys forever or prostitute my blog in a way that ruined blogging for me. I have a new path and I love it. I have 24 or so little girls to encourage and care for and a passion for getting girls who, like me, would once have been laughed out of a gym club, to aspire and achieve. I won’t let what happened to me ever happen, though thankfully gymnastics has changed that within itself anyway.

Yesterday I went through my twitter account and trimmed out people I don’t know, brands I felt I had to follow, people in a phase of life that no longer resonates with me. I turned off retweets everywhere. I’ve gone beyond a point where I want, or am prepared, to collect numbers. I want to collect people and meaning. These last few years have been filled with amazing people – parents, coaches, bloggers, friends, children but I’ve struggled to see anything in the noise. This week the autoresponder will go on to the blog email and it will stop being a place I try to make money. The business will gradually be handed over to the person I can trust to run it better than I can and I’ll start going about life as a parent, just doing the parent bits, a coach and someone who would actually like to focus on herself for a change, and not in the exhausted, blurred out self defence way the last years have felt like.

It’s the most zen I’ve felt in years. I’ll be doing yoga next.

 

A Toy or Two to Tempt me to Blog. 24 May 2016 8:07 AM (8 years ago)

I have been gone so long from this blog, even though I promised faithfully to get back to writing. A while ago I wrote something to explain what had happened to make me so very absent; even though my chemically enhanced brainbox makes all that feel very distant now, time has marched on so fast with children, gym coaching, courses and the infernal but finally finished blanket for Fran’s 18th, that blogging has gone by the by.

When I finished my CBT, I promised I would make a space for writing in my life, both mentally and physically. I’m a bit all or nothing though and what I want is to be writing my novel again. I miss it, much as I miss the time for writing. But make a space for physical writing I did, in our living room, my favourite spot in the house.

My little bureau feels very Bronté in its space when I get a chance to sit in it at all, with the added advantage of being tucked in a corner of a room behind a door where people sometimes forget I’m there. At least that works well enough unless the boy wants to play on the Wii, since the TV is wall mounted just behind.

Making emotional space to write is somewhat harder; I never quite know what to say these days. It can feel somewhat self-indulgent, rather young, to splurge feelings out loud like that. I’m not sure it’s what a 42 year old should do. And then, if I’m honest, I’ve never felt quite the same since the urge to blog about grief and Freddie left me. How do you top that? I can’t (I fervently hope) ever plumb the depths and write from my soul again like that. (Please don’t make anything happen so I have to). If I unleash my feelings like that again, I think it would be through fiction.

However, life does, of course continue to have the internet woven tightly through it. I love to browse as much as the next person, photos must always been stored and checked through, Ravelry perused, blog templates and websites fixed and altered. (That being, it is true, another thing that has kept me quiet; I redesigned 2 whole shops, ran them on my own for a while, employed and trained new staff). And there are always some things that can’t be done on a phone satisfactorily; I’ve never really liked blogging from it.

Enter the rather ace Venturer BravoWin, sent to me to review slightly too long ago for me not to have to blush a bit about it. (Ace Venturer, did you see what I did there?) It’s a dinky Mini windows Notebook with – *tech crush* a removable screen that becomes a Windows tablet. With a 10″ screen, it is lightweight, quick to start up and perfect for a handbag or suitcase. It has Windows 10, which I like having sworn not to buy anything with Windows 8, 32gb of memory and 8 hours of battery life.

The memory might not seem a lot, but it comes with Mobile Office which has One Drive, something I’m newly loving as a way of keeping all my desperately disparate photos, files and faffery together.I have a folder on there called “Random Weird” which is basically every back up on every computer I can find all consolidated into one place until I can find time to sort it out (Probably in 2025 at the earliest.) While I’ve used Dropbox for years, I have to admit the vast amount of storage on OneDrive does make it incredibly easy to be able to have access to absolutely everything just as soon as you want it.

The Venturer is fun to use sat at a desk or on the sofa; while a Notebook sized keyboard took a bit of getting used to for me, it is light enough to balance on a sofa arm for browsing, or a quick blog or Facebook post and at a desk, it works perfectly well for longer pieces like this. The screen detaches easily and reattaches with a magnet and the user experience is good overall; in fact really my only gripe is the shift key occasionally lets my capitalising down! With mobile Word, Excel and more to hand I can work or edit on the go, make notes for that novel or hand it as a tablet to the boy for a bit of entertainment without worrying about keyboard hinge trauma occurring.

Other notable additions are forward and backward cameras, USB port (it has a mousepad but I can’t live without a real mouse), plenty of audio options and an HDMi slot.

All of which really only leaves me with a novel to write.

 

 

 

 

11 days.  13 Apr 2016 12:02 AM (8 years ago)

It passes in a flash these days, those 11 days between a birthday trip out and these minutes, when I was holding him in my arms and watching him drift away forever. 11 nights of candles, 11 days of quietly mulling over what was happening each day and where we were in that beautiful, hellish journey locked inside the walls of scbu. 

I still can’t walk into a hot room without panicking, I still can’t listen to a repeated beep, even a long narrow bathroom makes my heart thud. 

But 6 years ago I was holding him in my arms for the last time, accepting he didn’t want to fight, walking to a quiet, sunny room to spend some previous minutes. The only time I held him and walked. 

Remarkable really. 

Horrifying. 

People used to say, ‘at least you didn’t have him for long enough to really know and love him.’ They don’t say it any more, thank goodness. 11 days is more than long enough for that. It’s just not long enough for everything else that should have been. 

We still miss you, Freddie. I wish you were 6. Fly high, little boy. 

  

Not 6.  2 Apr 2016 2:40 AM (9 years ago)

It really gets me every year that these were my last few happy minutes, minutes where really I’d never had anything to be utterly crushed by, ever again. 

It doesn’t really work like that of course. There are plenty of happy moments, not least because I learned to be grateful for Freddie in so many ways, and also because we just learned to live with his absence. 

It catches up at times. It’s caught up this week because today, for the first time ever since he was born, this day has another event in it that can’t be moved, so I’ll be at a gym competition with a couple of the girls at a time I’d normally be lighting candles on the doorstep and the lawn for him. So I can’t. I’ve fretted all week about it. 

Actually, it’s going to rain, so I couldn’t have anyway. Maybe that’s him saying it’s okay. I don’t know. 

If you are home and feel inclined, perhaps you could light one for my daffodil boy. I’d be very grateful. He really was so beautiful and there was so much hope and love ready for him. 

 We still miss him.  

Buying for Dad: Perfect presents for all ages 1 Apr 2016 1:25 AM (9 years ago)

Dads can be hard to buy for and their tastes can vary greatly depending on their age, which is why this great gift guide has been put together for you to take your pick of the best pressie ideas for Dads of all ages – whether it’s Father’s Day or his birthday.

The gadget loving early 30s Dad

This Dad is more than likely all about his gadgets, which is why you should buy him something like the…

iKettle  

Perfect for busy working Dads in their 30s, the iKettle 2.0 allows him to start the kettle boiling via his smartphone from the comfort of his bed, so he can enjoy an extra minute or two under the covers.

The adrenaline junkie mid-40s Dad

Dads around this age like to start testing the boundaries, they’ve probably picked up a gym membership and a brand new car they like to drive at the weekend, so indulge their newfound lease for life with this gift idea…

Racing car experience day

If your Dad has always dreamed of skidding round a track in a Ferrari and has a need for speed, then an experience day might be just the ticket.

The ‘in his prime’ 50s Dad

This Dad probably enjoys spending his weekend eating delicious food, trying new restaurants and getting creative with the BBQ grill. With this in mind here’s a ‘grate’ gift idea:

Personalised cheese board

Is your Dad a bit of a cheese connoisseur? Does he skip the usual dessert and ask for some La Luna to go with his cheese biscuits? Then one of these cheeseboards, that you can have engraved and comes with cheese knives, will go down well.

The swinging 60s Dad

Is your Dad still playing the same old CD – or even vinyl – from his glory days? Then this gift should make him happy:

A pint sized record player

Record players are no longer those hefty machines you remember as a child, now they come compact and ready to play your favourite records. Pick him up one of these recommended record players and enjoy listening to some of his favourite classics together on that special occasion.

The taking it slow 70s Dad

Dads start getting sentimental at this age, reminiscing on happy times and fun they had with their family years ago. Grab him something that will keep those precious memories alive such as:

A personalised photo gift

Sites such as PhotoBox allow you to create fun, personalised photo gifts that can feature images he loves. A photo mug with an image of you and your siblings as kids will make him smile while he drinks his morning cup of tea or a pillow with a photo of his grandchildren printed on it is a great gift he can look at fondly and make use of.

This is an editorial information post.

Memories of Paris from my teens – and my teen. 25 Mar 2016 2:50 AM (9 years ago)

On Monday, Expedia invited me to write about Paris and my memories of visiting there when I was younger. I wrote the post and had it ready to post on Tuesday morning. I’ve held it back until this morning and mulled all week about my feelings regarding travel, anxiety and living life without fear. The end of the post had already been written and the events of this week have consolidated my much evolved feelings about not letting anxiety shape the experience of my life. It’s more important than ever to get out there and live, visit and be; that’s the only real resistance.

More than 30 years ago, my sister spent a summer term doing a junior school project on Paris . I was insanely jealous of this, since by then I was firmly ensconced  in senior school grammar and Latin and maths that made me cry. Since it was long before the days of the internet – and we really were not a public library sort of family – she and my parents wrote off to embassies and tourism boards and packages full of information and pictures and exotic places to visit came back. I remember trying so hard to do something similar myself but homework and school just interfering too much. So I watched her scrapbook pages full of the Eiffel Tower and pictures of delicious French cuisine in pretty pavement cafes and got back to my essay writing and comprehensions.

When we started home educating, it was one of the memories of engaged education that called to me and we went in for immersive projects like that as much as we could. Of course by then the internet made hunting for information and pictures much easier. I’m not sure if we ever indulged much in a Paris focused frenzy of learning but if we had, I’d have known far more about it since I had my (one time only) trip there with my family when I was a teenager. We did a couple of touring holidays in the summer which took in as many cities in as many European countries as we could manage and Paris was one of our stopovers. I remember wandering through the streets of Montmartre, revelling in the ornamental houses and the faded glory of the winding streets. It was a hot couple of days and even the Metro seemed alien compared to the familiar grimy comfort of our aging Underground, people playing music inside the trains and a cheerful busker confidently asking people to contribute for his time. The clearest memory I have – we saw a lot of cities in a very short time – is of climbing the steps of the Sacre Coeur, baked white and glaring in the heat and testing my far from fit young body to the hilt and feeling like I had climbed pretty much to the top of the world by the time we reached the summit. Turning round to lean against the wall and survey Paris below us, I was stunned to see the Eiffel Tower looming so far above the minimised flat of the city. I had no idea it was so tall!

Paris has had its pain in the last year, but Amelie visited last summer – on the hottest day of the year when the temperature spiked over 43c, which undoubtedly dwarfs the heat of my visit! – and had a wonderful time. Her school took her to Notre Dame, “pretty!” in her eloquent words where she was moved enough to light a candle for her brother, and peeped at the glass pyramid of the Louvre. She climbed to the second floor of the Eiffel Tower (”quite high enough, thank you very much!”) and experienced a French supermarket just for the heck of a different shopping experience. Naturally, of course the highlight was the day trip to Parc Asterix and the *insert sarcastic face* marvellous winning of a life sized tiger toy!

Over the last few months I’ve been learning to face some fears and anxieties and quite close to the top of my list now is going on the Eurotunnel. Paris is the obvious destination, somewhere Max and I have never been together. I’m not going to let anything stop me.

A mother’s day. 7 Mar 2016 12:02 AM (9 years ago)

I watched Mother’s Day drift past yesterday with a sort of wry amusement; 17 years on from my first, I’ve long got over the fact that if you build it up as a day where you expect a combination of the most thoughtless elements of the house (children) combined with the least slushy and demonstrative element of the house (husband/male partner/ I have no idea how a female partner might manage this) to fete and honour you, you are pretty much doomed to disappointment. The rule of thumb on such things, I’ve concluded, is that you’ll get full on feted for birthday, Xmas or Mother’s Day, roughly once every 5 years. The rest of the time, unless you’ve recently given birth, you might consider yourself lucky with a late night home made card and quite possibly getting a cup of tea brought to you.

And you know what, that’s fine. Really, it is. Mother’s Day isn’t about having your worth demonstrated in quantities of chocolate, hastily or lovingly bought flowers, or an orchestrated show of love. If you went in for motherhood for commercial gain, I can only assure you that’s as mad as thinking that at least an extra child will be paid for in the additional child benefit. Motherhood is about being last in the pecking order every single time, about smiling with gritted teeth when you get a microwave for your birthday ‘because we needed one’ (just for a moment I thought it might have been a Mac… but no…) and loving the tat that Brownies dreamed up for you. Besides, at best here in the UK it is a religious bygone from when girls in service had a half day to visit their mum; at worst, it has become yet another reason for the retail world to cash in on your money and the guilt laden race for partners to find something that proves a woman’s worth. Is that really what you want? To know you are worth at least the cost of a bunch of flowers and a box of chocolates?

My Mother’s Day began yesterday with me getting up to make tea because I wanted the husband to give up his morning and drive me to a place to collect a bureau. I didn’t want to go on my own and he didn’t question it. So the very least I could do was get up and make tea. By 8.30am I had dealt with an emergency small boy poo, put on a load of washing and a load of drying and squirted bleach down 2 toilets. I had an enjoyable trip down the A1 with 3 of the family, lunch in a service station I bought myself, bought my own bureau, tidied the house and rearranged the living room (much dusting) and eventually reminded my children that I’d given them 2 gifts to give me that I bought myself and they’d forgotten to hand over.

But I also got a lovingly created breakfast that one child dreamed up and was a total surprise and another made even though she had only just woken when she was whisperingly asked to go and do it. I also got 2 cards – one toddler made and one teenager independently bought and given. And I spent the day creating a space for myself to write again, avoiding bickering kids and choosing not to nag them for it and eventually retiring to the bath to soak in the company of one of the candles in a gift set that Yankee Candle sent me to review. Very nice by the way, gorgeous smell, last nearly forever, plus endless entertainment for small boys by showing him you can make the flame go out by putting the lid on. And also, that tin. Oh the things I will find to put in that tin! When I came down from my Xmas Lush, candlelit bath, I enjoyed the face cream that I bought the other week and then thought “Oh, I’ll give that to the kids to give me for Mother’s Day.”

And then I wrestled the boy into bed.

I’ve been learning a lot about self care lately, something that got terribly lost in amongst all the “blog it, live it, be happy, be grateful, keep moving forward” mess of the last few years. It made me sad to see so many people made unhappy by a day that is only like another day and seems to reduce the joy of being a mum to wages in demonstrated affection. Self care is what I did, not bitterly, not regretfully, not ‘putting on a brave face’, not ‘making the best of it’ but just being, tootling, doing my own thing. I had moved furniture so I made a little place to honour the missing boy in this house so his blanket can still be near me.

 

And that’s it, in a nutshell. I count myself fortunate that for all that small boy will never make me an scruffy cake case flower card and I’d give nearly anything for him to be here to forget Mother’s Day, I had another 5 kids to nag and grumble at all day if I chose. There are plenty of people far worse off. Plenty of people without the husband or partner who were part of the journey, plenty of women facing Mother’s Day without a baby or child to distract them or take them for granted. It’s just a day – your day, if you are a mum – whether your children are in your arms or heart, so there would need to be a very, very good reason for it to make you miserable.