Here Comes the Sun

February and March have been sunshine and snow, adventures, flu, small quiet everyday beauty, and an endless barking cough. When we haven't been snowed in, we've had a series of illnesses that have cancelled most of our plans and disrupted my newfound sense of the world opening up to us again. 

Yet in a lot of ways it has been like a second babymoon. We're glorying in this new tiny sibling, and enjoying quiet crafts in our cosy, comfortable, ridiculously messy, nest. 

Our sapling is a week shy of four months old. Exactly a year ago I was starting to get sick, and thinking it would probably be a short-lived blip. I'm gradually mourning those lost months less. I'm also incredibly, ludicrously grateful for every cuddle with Alder. Every expression, every quirk, every little chat.

Four months has gone in the blink of an eye.

(Titled for Alder's favourite song.)

Yarn Along: finishing the blanket, and starting new books

I cast off, today. If I gave it a twenty stitch border I think it would be roughly single bed size, but I'm still thinking ten stitch will be fine. I just have to decide what colour. I'm deciding between a greeny-turquoise, or a grass green, I think. I want to bring those colours a bit more into balance against the slightly dominant oranges.

This blanket has been my colour play and my meditation for two weeks now, so I'm at a bit of a loss! I plan to get at least one smaller project cast on by the end of today though and I'm pretty sure I've picked which ones.

I've not been reading much. I'm a third of the way in to The Mime Order now but I think it was a mistake not to reread the first book before attempting it, because I have struggled so much to make sense of such a busy landscape of characters and setting.

I started two other books last week and quickly put them both down again, so I don't know. Maybe it's just the same busyness sapping my attention. I might go back to comic books again for a bit!

Adulting

Self care right now looks like remembering to take my vitamins and writing lots and lots of rainbow coloured lists in the hopes of not forgetting a bill or an order or a household task. My phone pings to remind me to carve out time with each child. There isn't a lot more I can let go of, so these are my priority spinning plates right now. So far, apart from the council tax bouncing and subsequent week of being extra careful and working out how to make meals from the cupboards for seven days, I'm doing okay and my general anxiety is back under control.

That makes it sound like a wayward pet.

I'm not sure I'm with the depersonalisation trend in mental health. This is my mind. It frames everything that happens to me, consolidates it, sorts and categorises it. I don't like being depressed and anxious, I'm not clinging to this identity, I would rather be well. But it is an identity in a sense. It's me; I'm working with (and sometimes against) myself.

It's not a very popular view, that one. I've been told that I'm not depressed and just need to pull myself together, or that I should talk about my conditions in a certain way if I'm serious about getting well. Fuck that noise.

I want to be well. More than that, I am planning to be well. I know how to get myself there. I don't know how to keep it gone for good, but let's get back there first. Safe, stable. I'm not stupid, I know I need to be healthy again and my family need me. (End or mental health rant/Public Service Announcement, I really did intend not to do that again but oh well!)

I have jumped on the Habitica bandwagon, which has miraculously kept me actually remembering to eat and drink water regularly. I really love a good checklist!

That's where my head is at right now. Not the most coherent words ever, but authentic and written on a day where I feel both full of cold and yet oddly peaceful with the ups and downs. I hope it reassures those of you who've asked what my plan is and whether I'm coping with the random upsurge in down days.

I'm still here, still doing, still being.

At five o'clock in the morning

She woke me at 4am by lying face down draped across me until I put my arms around her and she could relax and squirm into the bed, under the covers, between two parents. This has happened more than once lately, usually an hour or two after bedtime when she is woken by some sound in the house and comes to tell us about invisible people in her room, or that her knees hurt so much she can't sleep. Cuddles, return to bed, hold her hand until she sleeps, repeat the following night.

"The bed" last night was the inflatable kind, in the living room. Creak, creak, crunch as she crawls up the bed to me. Elbows. Those pointy four year old elbows as she grows into all limbs and angles and strength.

Guests are sleeping in our room, and I didn't wonder until now whether she tried to climb into bed with them first. I think she didn't, because last time she stumbled blearily onto my friend looking for me at night she reported to me confusedly when she came downstairs to me. "Mumma, Emerald in YOURS BED?!" Like I might not have realised and just be sleeping in the living room for fun, because it wouldn't be the weirdest thing in her life probably.

She still falls asleep so effortlessly. A busy hour of helping me to put the bed down, cuddling on the sofa, talking about cats and trees and asking me how moths fly, and she goes quiet and stares up at me from her end of the sofa. That minute of stillness is all it takes for her eyes to drift closed. But I'm awake now, not quite rested but mind too busy to nap with her.

I sneak out. Snap a sleeping-baby picture of her (how many more of these before she's grown?) and take myself into the kitchen to brew a cup of tea and paint something.

I'm not ever going to be the kind of person that leaps out of bed at five and Gets Things Done before the children wake. I've tried it a time or two, never for more than a week at a time, but I've come to accept that I'm a nicer person with an extra hour or two of sleep if I can possibly get it and I really can live without being so very organised about things. Today it's nice though. Warm, and sleepy, and my first cup of tea of the day is so very good.

Tangled Mind

When do I say I've been just feeling a little bit odd and down, and when do I call it Depression and say it's back? I don't think I can ever even be sure when there's no touch of this darkness, these days.

Last year I was feeling so utterly great and struggling the least I ever had in my entire adult life when, WHAM, out of nowhere I spent a month so completely out of it and crying constantly and it was awful and I couldn't imagine feeling okay again ever. Clawing back from there took months. As we turned towards late Autumn again and Winter festivals hove into view I started feeling creative and alive again, started making plans and looking forwards to things.

This year has been much less extreme, but still, Summer has been Hard. I have been crying for no reason, and apologising for crying, and feeling sort of disconnected.

I don't have a problem with using the proper names for things. It's not stigma or a fear of giving my mental health conditions more power by naming them. It's just that I'm confused. Sometimes I can't say until much later, "yes I was depressed then" or "I felt a bit down about something proportional but that I couldn't put a finger in at the time and it totally passed after a while".

When I'm not certain, though, when I can only tentatively say, "I feel a bit sad but it's nothing much really," I don't ask for support and I forget to do the most basic ordinary things that help. Maybe the fact that I clearly feel I only deserve care when I legitimately can't cope with life at all is a sign that the depression never goes away.

Writing this feels ridiculously self-indulgent and I don't think anyone will want to hear it. What IS that??

Shut up, brain, I'm writing it anyway.

I've taken to writing myself check lists for the morning; drink water, take vitamins, make tea, clear kitchen surface, write something, EAT, check calendar. One foot in front of the other. Sitting with the feelings waiting until I'm certain before I go back to the doctors.

(But, okay, please don't advise me about treating my mental health conditions unless I ask you directly; after fifteen years I'm totally over been told I could definitely cure myself if only I did exactly what you/your friend/someone you read about online did. If it's simple I've tried it. If it isn't I've either tried it or do not have energy to spare on it, especially if there is zero evidence for effectiveness. I'm not rambling to the internets hoping someone will fix me, just processing my own wonky mind in my own way and happy to be heard if there's anyone there to hear.)

Which leads me on to: Being extroverted and depressed is crap. No energy to get out and do Peopleing. The less human contact, the less energy I have to spare. It's the worst kind of vicious circle knowing exactly what I can do to help my mental state, knowing what I need to feed myself, and just being utterly unable. I want to diverge into an analogy about being an artist and needing to create and at the same time having very young children and the feedback cycle of putting off creating until the itch mainly goes away and how sad that is.

Oh, look, I worked it out. I'm pretty sure I AM depressed again.

But I'm also on it and starting to turn a corner, and super well supported by my family and dear ones, and actually at a point where I can figure out words. Yay. That's progress for a short piece of navel gazing wittering, typing on a tiny phone screen, letting words pour out of me and rearrange themselves in my mind.

This still already ended up considerably more words than I set out to write. And I still didn't photograph my ICAD Summer art. Or any of the other things I wanted to write about. Hey, talking to myself sort of works for me though, so...

Yarn Along during troubling feelings about how fast time is passing

I'm still setting aside projects and picking up something else, over and over again. Jenna's shawl is waiting for cables. Talia's coat is waiting for its button. I'm knitting back and forth on an experimental ribbon toy thingy that I planned to be finished with weeks ago. But at least I have lots to read. Okay that's an exaggeration, because these all arrived two days ago and I read them all within twelve hours. I have new fanfiction to read. That's good enough for me. :)

     *     *     *

You guys, this was ten years ago.Ten.Years. I was horrendously sick (again), pregnant with Morgan, and I felt like my life was simultaneously coming together and falling apart. I still feel like my life is simultaneously coming together and falling apart, and I look about that much pregnant even though I'm not, and I honestly feel like nothing has changed in any essential way and I sort of thought I would have my life a bit more together by 31.

I mean, the sort of together where you don't phone HMRC the day after the tax credit deadline to sort out the renewal. The sort of together that does laundry before we run out of pants. That sort of together.

Alas...

In ten years I have learned to knit, and stopped wishing I was an artist and started claiming the fact that I already am because I can't not create and it doesn't even matter if almost all of it sucks and I have no idea what I'm doing.

In another ten years maybe I won't feel so much like an overgrown kid trying to fake being competent at things. Or maybe I will. Hopefully I'll still be able to take it all on one moment at a time, one stitch at a time.

We can pretend June didn't happen, right?

Today has been the first day in a couple of weeks that I haven't feel generally overwhelmed. In fact, it has been one of those golden home educating days when everyone is happily engaged in doing interesting and impressive looking stuff all day, the siblings are all eager to help each other out, I get the satisfaction of hearing them chatter interestingly and knowledgeably, and generally feel like Not a Shit Parent.

In fact, they even made tea with minimal supervision; beetroot and mushroom pizza, broadbean risotto, and steamed artichokes with butter and balsamic vinegar. For saying there were actual tears about me having served the wrong kind of sausages a couple of days ago (they were in a parcel of food my brother kindly gave us), I was tempted to wonder aloud if these were really my children. Alas, the audience for my sarcasm is usually unimpressed at best.

I've spent years trying to compel wonderful days to keep happening, at first by working out ways to control their behaviour, and later by working on controlling mine, and now I've reached a place of relative peace (or perhaps capitulation). All of my best choices, and all of my best moments right now, are the ones in which I go with the flow and welcome the moment I'm in.

I'm not sure I'm a natural at this. Any of it. Ending days feeling bruised by life and not sure any more whether I'm a good parent if I'm feeling particularly honest. Yeah, it's been a tough couple of weeks.

Today I saw a glimpse of balance and joyful ordinary and it was good. I also barely remembered to take any pictures, but the evidence is largely in my newfound sense of peace anyway.

Warrior face

I want to whine: about being tired and juggling Martin's early shifts with evening plans for theatre trips, about being broody and yet not wanting another baby at the same time, about trying to juggle all the business administration, about being so very needed.

But I'm so very needed. And today is so very precious, and feels far too heavy to waste on complaining about having to be an adult. (Maybe I'll whine later, when I've kicked today's behind.)

I need to warrior up, first.

(Art and work progress shots just because everything is better with rainbows. Even tired-mumma-big-girl-pants rallying cries.)

Sometimes, I just want to create art

I want to do all the things, no matter how tired I am, no matter what work I have on or how the kids are or what size of laundry mountain is piled up waiting for my attention. During last week I woke up with a jolt at five in the morning with an entire artwork planned out in my head. I could picture it so vividly I ended up getting up to sketch ideas quickly before I lost the sense of urgency.

I can still see it in my mind's eye, so clear and simple.

A week later I've started, every couple of days adding a layer, and am at the stage of hating it and questioning why I think I'm an artist anyway (and considering throwing it away and starting over). Only the knowledge of having been through this process before is keeping me from taking a tub of gesso to the canvas and using it for something else.

I'm in the tired, introverted days of my monthly cycle. I found myself wishing, a couple of days ago, that I could send the children off somewhere for a couple of days so that I could just make something. Instead, I took them on the train to Nottingham to tour the art galleries, and then spent an entire day building train tracks and winding the crank handle on the giant tape measure for a small child to pull it out again. And giving myself over to being overwhelmed and present and not flinching from it was enough. It was enough.

Both the laundry and the art will wait. They will. Some days they have to.

Today I'm taking my brush to the canvas again. It's okay if it sucks. Tomorrow it might be just what I thought it would be. This is where I am, today. Beautiful mess. Vibrant chaos. Colourful disarray. Mothering as art. Art as mothering. Documenting the whirl of it, the essential hurry-up-and-wait of it, the beauty and the soul of being here now.

**Exhibits pictured: La Source (demi-teinte) by Simon Starling (part of his exhibition at the Nottingham Contemporary); Mother and son by Sam Rose, and below that, Nesting by Jessica Paige Greig (both part of Artist as Mother as Artist at the ncn Lace Market Gallery).**

Seven Days of flowing nicely

I'm in a happy place of doing and being and feeling right now. The kids are just as bickery as last week, and the house is just as much of a mess, but it feels different. Intentional. Comfortable. Light.

It's hard to say why. I'm more on top of work, less on top of finances, creating more, reading more, doing more fun stuff with the kids. I'm probably sleeping more, that would explain a lot. Overthinking aside, it's a really good place to be in.

1. Rainy walk
2. Arcade machine prizes at home-ed bowling session
3. Jenna loving on baby Torin
4. Home made fried mozzarella
5. Dorkiest Morgan picture ever <3
6. Evidence of tidying, a kitchen window sill
7. Eurovision night sleepover s'mores dip especially for the pair of joyfully sarcastic eleven year olds

It's been a while, folks

Sometimes there isn't a right time. Sometimes there's no right place to start. I've thought about starting to write again so so many times, in the midst of the chaos (or the beauty) or in a quiet moment of peace (or exhaustion). There's nothing extraordinary about today. Here I am, surrounded by journals and projects and children, the vivid colours and astonishing disorder that is my home, and I'm sitting down to say something.

Not a big, articulate, important something. Just a hello. Perhaps only to myself.

Maybe I'm honestly evading starting to pick up toys and clutter and papers to make space for hosting Doctor Who Club tomorrow. Maybe I'm connecting this ordinary moment to so many other ordinary moments occuring right now, and that common familiar sensation of the present and its very mundane precious existence.

Here I am.