Fourteen (?) days of this ordinary chaos, projects, and family

1: Living room bubble wrap stomping loveliness
2: Light table sorting and stacking
3: Glue plus little flower sprinkles
4: Lego marble maze
5: Rowan is always climbing things!
6: Mud pie kitchen and loose parts building in the garden (oh thank goodness for this sunshine!)
7: Anniversary Yo Sushi. Thirteen years.
8: Jenna reading everywhere, this week I've rarely seen her without her head in her book
9: Lemon cake (Talia told me very sweetly how much she LOVES baking with me so of course we had to immediately make a cake)
10: A hilltop climb with Ashleigh, a little adventure without the family again
11: Rowan conversing earnestly and politely with a bee! It made her week that it bumped her cheek as it flew away.

I've been horribly ill for most of the last couple of weeks, so we've been quite quiet. Fresh air and sunshine, sitting in the garden, and drinking lots of water, is all helping a bit.

Seven Days of extended holidaying

1: Talia fell asleep like this early on Monday evening
2: Chicken-whisperer Morgan
3: At my mum's house for tea, blue sky through her sycamore tree
4: Making friends
5: Another visit to the Stardisk (spot the Lego!)
6: Fox production line for a dear friend's due-December Peanut
7: Post-swim, wet hair, holding hands on the way back to the car

Martin had the entire week off, post-weekend-away, with our main aim being to pootle around at home a fair bit and get some household chores done to the point of me being less stressed out. At the start of last month when I was feeling quite down and under pressure, I asked Martin if he could take a day so we could work together and get on top of the house chaos. The next available day was this week, so he took the whole week off. Yes the house really was that bad. And a week hasn't improved it all that much. But I'll take what I can get. I'll miss this Mister next week.

Fourteen years in love

It is absolutely ridiculous that we have been together that long, and married for all but six months of that, it really is. As time goes on I have less and less wisdom to share about building a healthy happy marriage, but not because we're not healthy and happy.

All of the wise counsel, all of the philosophising about the nature of love, none of it helped in the really tough almost-impossible times of hopeless crying, and in all of these peaceful growing comfortable times I don't often think to affirm that I'm happy and things are good.

The biggest conclusion I have come to in fourteen years is that happiness depends primarily on putting in the deep hard work to not behave badly towards people ourselves, and on being lucky. That's it. We can't change other people or force them to accept the ways in which we change.

We're still doing this thing together, growing up a bit along the way, and trying to always be a bit kinder and a bit more generous with each other. It's still just as wonderful as that teenage love-at-first-sight.

Hiding under the blanket

We lost our sweet friend, P, a year ago today. Depression killed her, and at the time I had been well for months. Losing her felt like it would kill me, for a while. God, that sounds so self absorbed. She was a beautiful person, and I was hit by how much poorer the world was for her loss. My honest first reaction was to bargain, why her and not me? She was needed more!

I get to be weird and self-absorbed here, right?

Missing her feels like powerful waves, and today my life raft is just reading the sorrow and love of all the others she touched. If I'm swimming rather than drowning it's because I'm not alone.

A couple of weeks after she died, my marriage almost fell apart again. We'd been there before, the damaged trust and blame and words that can't be unspoken, and I was already hurting too much to stay and fight so I ran again, for a couple of days anyway. It helped. Somehow time passed and we worked things out. Not how I expected, but solidly and eventually happily.

Through it all I often thought of what P would say. Mostly she'd have laughed, probably, and said "fuck" a lot, and recommended eating all the chocolate, and sent me music when words didn't do it all justice.

A little later on I read a blog post with the words "no love is ever wasted" and I thought that would have been something she'd say, too. Maybe she'd say it to me now, wondering if she knew that we loved her - and love her now, and wish she was here.

I'm hiding under your blanket today, P. Maybe I'll stay here for a day or two.

So much for the Continuum Concept **

** I jest. ;)

Yesterday started with a jolt, at half past four I was woken by Martin's alarm and felt Talia's arms around me with profound gratitude. The alarm had interrupted a horrifically graphic dream about my two oldest children dying in an accident, and it took hours to stop feeling sick.

Our day was perfectly ordinary and pleasant. Nothing out of the usual run of things. My anxiety gradually steadied and I got on with laundry, and stories, and meals, and gardening, and discussions about snails and Shakespeare.

At teatime, Talia asked for mushrooms with her chilli and stood on her stool to help cook them. I went off to put the books back on their shelves while Martin supervised. I heard Rowan and Talia downstairs shouting at each other and then screaming. Not sibling screaming, pain screaming. Because Talia had put her hand on the pan whilst yelling at her sister.

Martin held her under lukewarm running water, Martin hugged and comforted her, Martin wrapped her hand in a cold cloth and took her to A&E. Anxiety doesn't paralyse me any more, and I was right there comforting and making sure she had a change of clothes in a bag, popping a cloth in the freezer for the car journey. But I'm not needed in the same way any more. Daddy is the parent who most often is wanted for cuddles. Funny how quickly that happened once she weaned last year!

(Rowan kindly rubbed that in a bit at bedtime when she told me that she wanted to wait up until Daddy got home because, "he's better"!)

The little hand is blistered but will be fine. Today I'm cuddling and playing (and getting a load of laundry away, hopefully) and ignoring the fluttering of my heart that says, "you can't protect them, not by keeping them away from all danger, not by carefully and attentively showing them how things work and supporting them exploring, YOU CAN'T PROTECT THEM ENTIRELY.” Shut up, anxiety. No, really. I'm doing my best.

This one and I

Probably everyone reading at this point have known this fella here through my writing for many years. He's not very articulate or very tech-inclined, so you've seen from my perspective as we adjust to parenting, heard my words as we hurt each other and come close to splitting up, seen through my eyes his reactions to our losses, and known what I share of our happy, silly, domestic, affectionate, ridiculous lives.

It's his birthday today and all I have to say is this:
Thanks, Martin. You're a good man and a kind one. You make me smile every day, and I'm outrageously grateful for everything. Happy Birthday, love.