Category: Motherhood

gathering together, staying in & letting go.

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Happy New Year and hello to January of 2018.

I have been quiet for some time on my blog now. I have struggled these past two months or so, with a really difficult feeling of not knowing what to write, feeling awkward writing anything, and just experiencing a disquieting eerieness about the whole situation. I never usually have trouble writing, even if its just lines in my diary. I find the process soothing, and for me, a way of making sense of my days. So to be stuck in the middle of an unwelcome and bewildering silence has made me lose my confidence a little.

To be honest, writing now, feels like that first clumsy and stiff morning on your first day back at school from a long summer holiday; when you find yourself holding a new pencil in your hand, and it feels as though you are holding a plank of wood between your fingers.

The ideas and thoughts for this post, therefore, have come from that sense of alienation and worry I experienced, feeling a little lost without the words to express what I was thinking about, and in truth, not having any clarity of thought anyway. A combination of Christmas, the Winter Solstice, New Year and the enevitable quietness of January have all given me some time for reflection. And perhaps, afterall, that is what I have needed. Perhaps I just need to start from the beginning again.

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Coincidentally I have also spent most of this new year thinking and reflecting. I have been following a process called the January Book. Devised by the sylist and writer Hannah Bullivant (I found out about it via her amazing instagram account, and her beautiful website, which you can find at http://www.seedsandstitches.com), it is a way of outlining plans for your coming year by focusing on key areas of your life, dividing them into catergories such as family, career, finances and home, and by a process of reflecting on those areas, making a sustainable plan for the year ahead.

And in addition, we have been having a little more renovation to our home (from having a door made for the bathroom, where previously there was none) to having a partition wall put up between the living room and the sunroom (a rather grand term for what really is a little extension with a perspex roof) It has meant a lot of noise, a lot of mud and mess, and a feeling of being completely overwhelmed at having to tidy up ready for the next day, and not knowing where to begin.

But most of all I am really starting to notice a gathering change in my two little girls, as they are growing up from babies to little toddlers, and it is this realisation that has had the biggest emotional effect on me overall. I have loved every moment of them being babies – and the poignant reminder that if my IVF treatment hadn’t been succesful I would never have been able to experience any of it, has made it even more so.

And it is there I suspect all the answers to my wordless stories lie. Being quiet was neccesary for some thinking, and all my thinking was about change – and in reflecting on change, I began to see that it was all about letting go.

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Friends, sisters and Social Media

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I would love to have had a sister….

One of the things I loved most when I discovered I was expecting twin girls, was the thought that they would always have each another. From the very beginning, sharing a womb together, then when they were born, those first few days of being swaddled together in one blanket; their little noses pressed against one another.

When the nurse first came to me after they were born, she asked if I wanted them in separate cots. But I knew I wanted them to be kept together, it didn’t seem right to separate them so quickly and so decisively, with no discernible reason as to why it would need doing. I remember one night when Eliza was crying, I watched as Florence put her hand instinctively into Eliza’s mouth, and let her suck her fingers for comfort. It was the most beautiful thing I had seen and told me so much about how these two girls felt. in separate cots, there would have been little opportunity for them to comfort one another.

A year and a half later and they no longer share a cot, but each have their own, side by side with one another still. . They can see each other, and I often hear them gurgling and cooing to one another, after I have left the room and tiptoed away. On waking, they always give each other a big smile and a kiss. These small gestures fill me with hope for the kind of bond they will have between them. Be loving, I whisper to them. Be loving, and be kind.

 

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Sisters and friends…

When I was about 10 years old I had a notebook I carried around with me, and I would ask people to write things in it, poems, or doodles, drawings, elaborate signatures… I think I was looking for wisdom, back then, collecting folklore from people, and building up stories that people told me.  It was my Dad, who wrote a little verse that has stuck in my head ever since. This is it

Make new friends but keep the old

Some in silver 

Some in gold

At the time I remember him explaining that as we move through our life we meet, and make friends, with new and different people along the way. Some of them, the silver one’s, burn brightly and stay with us for awhile. Others, those in gold, stay by our sides, golden and eternal. It was something I desperately needed to hear at the time, I was being horribly bullied and desperately lonely at school. I wanted a friend, a best friend. It was something I asked my Mum all the time, when will I have a best friend? Having two daughters now, it breaks my heart a little to think of the little me that felt so lonely and wanted to make friends.

Fast forward a few years to a sixteen year old version of myself, with hennaed hair and Doc Martin boots; wearing White Musk by the Body Shop and obsessed with The Cure. I went to college and met my friend! A tall, graceful, curly haired girl with boots and thick black tights. I remember the toilets being flooded and feet sploshing in half a foot of water, we started talking – discovering in lightning quick time, as you are able to do at that age, that we had both been to Glastonbury and had lots and lots more in common.

That friendship was, and remains, the most important and cherished of my life so far. In my friendship I found all the things I was so desperate to find as a young girl – someone to share my secrets with, someone to laugh with and to talk about make up and boys with. And over the years we did just that. We grew up together, I guess,  and no matter in which direction either of us went, we always managed to stay in the parallel lanes; we could always follow and appreciate each others path.

So when, in our early thirties our friendship came to a startling and bewildering halt, it felt like all the certainties I had carried around with me, in terms of who I was and what I would be, were suddenly all changed. I no longer had my best friend and that isolation felt particularly poignant when I came to be a Mum.

I was very lucky to meet a wonderful circle of women who all had babies at the same time as me. The support I got from these women during those long, but oddly blissful nights of the first few months was fantastic. Late night, what’s app messages, where we shared fears, and questions and asked for advice from one another. Without a partner, it was so important for me to have these women who gave me confidence and encouraged me. And it also occurred to me how these late night messages, shared in real time between women, was a relatively new and hugely meaningful mode of communication. It made me think of the real loneliness I had heard mothers sometimes speak of, feeling unsure, bewildered and having no one to turn to, or to ask for advice and support. We were able to call on each other, and to speak across the silences of our little rooms, nursing our babies, and ask one another ‘am I doing this right?’

Sisters and Social Media

Since then, I have actively sought out on-line support from a circle of on-line women, who I have found, and who I am able to gather experience, advice, inspiration and encouragement from. I have discovered amazingly beautiful blogs, fabulous Instagram accounts with great content, that are both inspiring and creative. These mediums, offer women, who don’t necessarily have that real life sister, best friend, mother or mother-in-law close by, a wonderful circle of sisters to learn from.

And with that, I have to say a big thank you to the following ladies who have been such a support to me over these last few months. Their online presence has meant a lot.

 

http://www.tigerlillyquinn.com/

(a lovely, genuine kind, funny mum of two – you can find her on her website/blog, Instagram and YouTube)

http://www.seedsandstitches.com/

(A wonderfully creative and inspiring blog and also brilliant Instagram account)

http://www.thewoodlandwife.co.uk

(A thoughtful, inspiring, nurturing and ethical blog and Instagram account lady)

thatyogamum

(A totally amazing, supportive yoga teacher, who believes passionately in supporting mums and women, generally. Great Instagram account too).

 

 

 

 

A day like this

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What does an ordinary day look like? The sun rises, the sun sets and a there is a day’s worth of living in-between. And the living in-between is the thing. Sometimes, a day can feel like a lifetime, and others go by so quickly that you barely have chance to look around you, before it has all passed you by, and you are saying goodnight to the moon.

Since becoming a Mum, one of the many, unexpected, things that I have learnt is the way that a day will tumble into the next, and that there is never any time in-between to absorb and reflect on any of the amazing things that you see, feel and experience along the way. Your heart can swell with love one moment, then tears spring to your eyes the next. The smallest thing, like her first teeth showing in a cheeky smile, or a chubby hand clutching at a flower – and suddenly that deep unfathomable well of love, and pride and disbelief at the total amazing beauty if it all, comes rushing to the surface.

Yet, as my friend told me the other day, these deep feelings can arise out of a day that can be sometimes so unremarkable in its banality and ordinariness. Days where its all about the continuing cycle of breakfast and dish washing, clothes washing and drying, vacuuming, more tidying, more cooking, washing and ……

But it is within those routines and inevitabilities that the beauty comes through. in the knowledge that you are doing what you are doing for your family, that the sacred moments of heart stopping love sustain you like nothing else on earth, and that the routine, ordinariness, and rituals you create, are what gives your family shape and cohesion. The act of doing all that, however dreary, tiring and repetitive is ultimately that which creates security and safety.

You do what you do, for them, and you do what you do for them out of love.