Wordless, again

It's done. I can't pretty it up yet or wrap the right words around the raw spiky places. As emergency surgery goes it was easy and she's fine now the half-teeth are gone. As fine as a stubborn and extremely miffed five year old can be when she lacks the vocabulary to express discomfort and just howls and howls for hours at a time.

I've been so anxious about this I haven't even written about her birthday, or Christmas knitting, or crafts, or the learning they are all engaged in. I feel really stuck. At least now it's more literally physically stuck what with trying to make her immediate world feel a little less horrible - rather than the emotional stuck of not-really-coping-with-anything and awaiting boiler repairs and surgery and landlord's inspection and more appointments at the same time as getting last orders out and saying goodbye to my mum as she flies out to Estonia to meet my new nephew...

Oh look, a few dozen words. Quick, shut them down before they overflow everywhere.

Ten

Morgan celebrated ten years yesterday. She has recently grown up so much and looking at her through milestone-primed eyes was a disturbing experience. I mean, look at her! Where have ten years gone?

Ten years ago I wrote her birth story. Nine years ago I secretly wondered if her adorable little elf ears would ever be even. Eight years ago I laughed at her pixie antics. Seven years ago I quaked at the depth of her determination. Six years ago I worried she might never really connect with other children apart from her worshipped older sister. Five years ago I enjoyed taking the slow route with her every time. Four years ago I marveled at how she went from never even having drawn a human-like figure to writing her name on the bathroom wall almost overnight. Three years ago I loved her happy dreamy little bubble. Two years ago I rejoiced with her as she started making real friendships. A year ago I wished fiercely that I could be more, for her, have more hours in my day just for quiet with her.

She's a dreamy little mouse, and she's immovable when she does finally fix on something she wants. She's accommodating and she's stubborn and loud when she has been pushed too far. She's thoughtful and yet cannot ever look where she's going. She's scarily smart and analytical, and she falls over her words (and her own feet). She's like a much younger child in some ways, and yet look how far she has come from a child who seemed always so alone and so unaware of anything outside her bubble!

Her current style is really quite punk, with elements of the floral layers she used to wear so often. Punk with lightness and pastel pink. Hippy with an edge of huge boots and black leather jacket. Her favourite things are prime numbers, red lipstick, board games, tacos, Pentatonix, Lego, and notebooks with plain paper inside.

Little starlight baby born under the Christmas tree, tall and strong and brave and bright.

Seven Days in which I don't have time to remember my own name

1: Advent in full swing, Saint Nicholas Day shoes
2: Crafting
3: And craft fayres (two successful charity events in one week)
4: She might not love board game cafes or board games but she's certainly a fan of attached comic book shops
5: Incredible art at Derby QUAD ("What a Loving and Beautiful World")

I don't know whether I'm coming or going this week. So much going on, and I'm not fully on top of any of it (except posting orders out, I am up to date with that and only have one more bag to take to the post office before Christmas). One out of the two back-to-back birthdays. Two craft fayres. Assorted attempts to get the house chaos back under control. Yeah. My head is a bit of a mess; this year I have found each birthday really emotionally hard. Something to do with not being able to make them perfectly happy and perfectly peaceful any more. Something to do with being afraid that I'm not as good a mother as I used to be (or not as confident a person, or something, I don't know). The elusive feeling of striving for good enough and not being sure I'm ever close.

Seven days in which I coax Morgan to eat, and we mess around at a garden centre

1: Rowan cuddling her baby cardigan
2: Walking a friend to dance class
3: Life goal; I would like to live in such a way that I deserve an introduction like this
4: Candle making
5: Snowflakes and babysitting
6: The obnoxious worksheet book (which Talia loves) has stickers. She put a star sticker on my arm and told me it was for being a lovely mummy.
7: Helping Ash pick out her tree. Lots of giggling and silliness at the garden centre, abd a photobombing dino.

After her sickness last week getting Morgan to eat food has been a mammoth task. It was Tuesday before she ate an actual meal. So even though she was doing better, and was much perkier last weekend, I've still had quite a worried week. On the other hand I'm laughing more, and this bunch of sillies have been immensely delighted by Advent activities again.

Every year I wonder if this will be the last year Jenna wants to do these things with us, and every year she is delighted by the simple and ordinary sharing. I'm glad they're not growing toooo fast.

Seven Days during which I have a birthday and feel sort of lonely and quietly desperate

1: Gradients, because yarn makes things better (always)
2: Changed over Winter decorations in a fit of pique at it being rainy and bitterly cold, having a sick kid on a day I wanted to see people, and generally feeling blue
3: Stacking things
4: Birthday walk
5: The lights in town, photographed by a giddy Jenna
6: Snuggly not-a-baby excited about stickers
7: There's this Christmas fayre we go to every year which I loved as a child and tolerate as an adult. The children adore it, of course. Compensation in the form of vintage tea set.
8: Basically after two huge meltdowns this week (mine) I gave up and we decorated on the first Sunday in Advent. It worked. Prettying things and familiar traditions helped a lot.

I need a calmer week.

Beneath everything this week has been huge painful anxiety about Morgan. She was ill on Monday and better on Tuesday, but continued to refuse any solid food all week. Eventually I told her she had to have a bite of food every hour and her appetite gradually returned. I can't accurately describe the heartbroken sobbing every time I stood over her and insisted she ate something, but goodness, she was so floppy and listless. I'm not yet really able to sort it out into words. And I feel like a failure for coercing her AND for not coercing her sooner. But also so grateful she's perky again and asking for food.

What a week.

Ugly

I want to pour out words here about never feeling enough, about sabotaging good healthy friendships with this damn anxiety, about feeling like I'm always making excuses and ought to just "pull myself together"...

And every time I try to shape passages of real, raw, beautiful, healing, it comes out ugly and self pitying and dark.

Honestly things aren't actually all that dark. I'm as safe and supported as I've ever been, home and family are stable and healthy (bar Winter bugs). My mood has been better (I self-inventory, again, and worry that I'm thinking about it too much, again). 

Then, whahey, darkness from nowhere, petty triggers and insufficient sleep. And I lash out and hide, self protective and small, and what USE is it? I don't WANT small and safe. I want whole. I want to be kinder than I feel.

What does one do with this mess of darkness that clings and pushes and chokes?

I want it to be redemptive. I want to pour it into love and I fail at this over and over. I want it to mean something.

Seven Days during which I sort of start to kick anxiety's behind again

1: Doctor Who Club snuggles
2: Cinnamon playdough
3: Blue skies walking to an Into Film showing of Kubo and the Two Strings (following tears and anxiety getting out of the house)
4: Dissecting owl pellets with a friend
5: Knitting, Star Trek, general background adorableness
6: Board game cafe again, as an extra large extended family
7: Fireworks party

We saw friends every day this week, usually several friends a day. There has been much general Getting Out of the House. And it has been a lot of hard work. But after a fantastic and really busy Friday and then a restful evening, I woke up on Saturday feeling full of energy again. Just in time for monkey bread for breakfast at mum's, shopping with dad, and a huge fireworks party.

I do sometimes wonder if I genuinely just need to stop charting the ups and downs of my mental health. Where does noticing a pattern become reinforcing it? But then again, that could be the same old "it's your fault you are this way, you should snap out if it, you deserve to be depressed" that I can't remember ever not flinging at myself in some form. I don't believe my own inner monologue. It's not very reliable.

It's such a relief to wake up not feeling anxious though. To actually want to get out of bed and not think that things will probably be shit and pointless.

Yarn Along - actually casting something on

Lots of reading and not much knitting still but I have cast on a pilot cap for a sweet little toddler without procrastination which is something of a miracle.

Reading: Accidental Saints by Nadia Bolz-Webber which is funny, deep, challenging abd warm. Its theological standpoint (liberal but Lutheran) is somewhat different to mine (sort of Messianic nerdy-studious ultra-liberal Celtic-inspired mishmash), and to the one I grew up with (conservative but Evangelical), so it's interesting to explore. After a couple of years of, to be honest, barely identifying as Christian, I'm reading the Bible again and picking up the kinds of books I think are likely to challenge my views of what the Bible says and what it means to be a follower of Christ.

Aaand also I'm re-reading Hellblazer. Because Constantine.

Some days in which I didn't photograph much, again, but, life.

1. Quick creativity and cooold hands (heating on the blink)
2. New Science workbook
3. Legion

It has been an odd week. Lots of joyful peaceful ordinary. Some sadness. Some weird confusion about my younger kids fighting over workbooks and asking to do handwriting practice everyday and reading aloud to me. What the heck? All good fun though.

*free pixie hat pattern this weekend*

Just a quick note to say I've set my Leafy Pixie Hat pattern as a free gift on Ravelry until Monday night. If you add it to your cart it will show as completely free to download.

It's not much, I just wanted to spread some love because the world seems so horribly broken in ways I just can't do a thing about (and probably frequently participate in, no matter how hard I try to make things better).

Happy knitting, lovelies.

It's still Autumn until my birthday

The cold weather has floored me, a little. Our boiler has stopped working twice now for no real reason and I'm at the wearing-mittens-indoors stage of the year already. My mental health is like a pendulum. I'm sort of trying to ignore it, actually, the general anxiety increase from examining these fluctuations is worse than the unpredictability.

Still, it's Autumn until the end of November, the trees are still colourful, I'm not yet feeling dragged down by the greyness. It's not all that long until my birthday and the start of Advent. I have a good stack of books to read and cinnamon candles and so many more plans before the Christmas season.

I haven't been making very much. My knitting mojo has vanished and I'm just plodding on methodically with orders and not feeling enthused about any of the potential next cast-ons. I did tie some shiny bark leaves to some yarn for the window. This totally counts as crafting, and is sufficient adulting to negate the need to clean the windows. Right?

Seven Days of Very Seasonal Everything

1: Fog and a necklace of raindrops
2: Packing chip skeletons
3: Ugly but delicious toffee apples
4: Hedgehog bread
5: What happens when I say, "We don't really do workbooks!"
6: Undyed, dyed.
7: Fireworks walking, the perks of living in the middle of a council estate