When I began writing this blog my daughters’ were still babies. We were just getting ready to move into the home we live in now and so, so many things were new and unchartered and like an open, unknown road ahead for us.

In those tender, early sweet years, I was learning to be a Mum, learning to be a Mum of twins in particular, and perhaps most of all learning how to be a parent when you are the only parent.

Making a decision to become a parent by myself, has meant I have always felt a responsibility to manage the realities of that decision with grace, commitment and strength but also with a sense of the huge privilege about the realities of being my kind of only parent..

I still remain very aware of my privilege to choose this particular path to motherhood. Many single parents are on their own for very different reasons, and those reasons have implications of the kind that can come with burdens I do not have. There is neither loss nor absence in our family.

I am aware, too, that I am separated only by a mere generation from a society in which choices of motherhood like mine were inconceivable. I can be the head of my own family as a woman and mother, and walk amongst my community with my daughters’ hands in mine, and all three of us with our shoulders back and our head held high.

To all those women who were never allowed this I want to represent them. I want to live well for them. What a glorious thing it is to experience feminine sovereignty in the most quietly subversive of ways.

Since I was very young and first read ‘Under Milk Wood’ ’ by Dylan Thomas, I have just adored the character of Polly Garter – the earthy town goddess who is at her happiest counting her fatherless babies, hanging out the washing and singing like an angel.

She delights in her status and is immune to the shame others would seek to impose upon her. She is glorious in her motherhood, her sexuality and to me she is utterly, utterley free.

I am quietly political in my support of the single mother and the ways in which they are still maligned in subtly discriminative ways in comparison to their counterparts who are married. I have seen and experienced how married Mums, irregardless of the success of their marriage, are still seen as the example of how to do motherhood properly. And I have experienced too the perception of others that a single Mum is other.

For me however, something I see in the single Mothers around me ( whether by choice or not) is the determination that runs through each and every one of them. It isn’t easy to hold the many, many differing responsibilities of parenthood from the small to the impossible. Let alone the demands of running a home, holding down a job ( sometimes several), being the bedrock for all of your children’s emotional, financial and practical needs.

But oh the joy of being sovereign, independent and knowing! For us single, or only parents, our instincts are honed to a razor sharp point. Because we make the decisions and we must stick to them. This is our world and we are the only one’s who can tend it. The confidence those kind of challenges reward you with are stratospheric. A woman who values and believes in herself because she has been given the opportunity to prove her worth to the world is a thing of sheer and profound beauty.

So when I do feel overwhelmed, it is with the kind of overwhelm that for many is privilege of the highest order. Perhaps I am tired from early mornings, or late nights (or sometimes both. ) Maybe my administrative work that pays my bills, allows us small luxuries and a little holiday, is busy with tight deadlines. Maybe I need to remember all the things I need to pack, purchase or wash for my daughters’ upcoming school residential. All of them a privilege I am so grateful for. Maybe I need to advertise my small holistic business a bit better and increase my clientele. That I even have that small bow to my name is golden.

But managing the demands of my own life and its pressures is something that becomes increasingly important to me over these past ten years of being a Mum. I recognise all too soon the signs when I am over tired both emotionally and physically: My head can feel noisy and wired, I can feel overwhelmed, prickly to others.

I have learnt to build a small set of rituals over these last ten years that quietly support me. These things are rituals that ground me and bring me to myself, and they return me to a less uneven state with a genuine regularity that is amazing.

My Woods

I walk these same woods near where I live most days with my two dogs. Taking a small single track lane that winds up and up, I feel this sense of wildness as soon as the steep climb begins.

These woods have become a place that have held me through the seasons and whom I have come to know intimately and closely like a dear friend. This landscape with its earthy, dark pine canopies and mystical Rowan trees provide me with a larger sense of purpose that balances out the petty trivialities that can get me down sometimes in the small, intimate village where I live.

Here in the woods I am often alone, stomping my way through cracking twigs and mossy fallen tree trunks. I see Fly Agaric in the Autumn, the occasional deer and Red Kite, and I love this powerful quiet time it offers me to think and reflect, or send my friend Chloe long interrupted voice notes about how I am feeling.

My Kitchen

When my children come home from school and are stuck into whatever it is they are doing and content, I make dinner and my kitchen becomes a warm, cosy place of relaxation after a day of work and duty. I listen to podcasts, music or audio books, occasionally interrupted by children wanting snacks, animals that need feeding; the small intimate rituals of family life I never really tire of. I love my kitchen. 🍃

In truth, these small, intimate, domestic moments are where I am happiest – and very often ground me in a way nothing else ever really does. I look around my home, when the fire is roaring or on a warm afternoon when the back door is open and the hens wander in and I feel this is the life I wanted.

My Books

I am nowhere near as prolific a reader as I once was – but my love for books is still something that defines me completely. I don’t have the same capacity to let go and be lost in a book, there’s always something pulling me into reality, whether that be a washing machine to empty, a school pick up to get to, or just the small endless demands of a family day.

But still, on a Saturday morning, when the bath is running and the bubbles are foaming, and I have a wonderful book to read for an hour without interruption, I honestly feel like I am such a lucky woman. This quiet, peaceful time can feel heavenly.

My Practice

Since becoming a Reiki therapist I have developed a set of grounding principles that bring me into my body and give me a connection beyond my own self. I have a beautiful little summer house in my garden that was here already when we moved to our home, and which I have since made into my therapy room.

This is also somewhere I come for my own healing rituals. Where I light a candle, say prayers, give myself the same attention and time I give the women who come to the room for treatments. It gives me the opportunity to be in touch with my softer side in this room.

So much of what I need to do is about being in action, it is not very often I get the chance to soften, to be held – to feel that somehow someone else is holding the reins and I can let go of that feeling of tension and of always being on alert.

Here I find I come to check in with my breathing, to remember to connect with something higher than the here and now and the right in front. It’s like a small act of devotion in this room and a place where I can come to give thanks.

This is a place for reflection but also of remembering – and in the remembering, making promises to create space in the future for myself – deserving of this kind of quiet, restorative care. 🍃

What an extraordinary ten years it has been. 🍃