Your children can’t be your whole world. And you can’t be theirs. 

God, it took me such a long time to learn that. 

And it’s one of the hard lessons of my divorce that I’ve sort of un-learned over the last year. 

At the time, my world had shrunk to them. Because nothing else in my life was any good. It was all falling apart around my ears, bricks smashing to dust at my feet, and I clung to them like a lifeline. I didn’t matter any more, only them. 

I can’t remember what came first, now, chicken or egg; if the awfulness of everything else made me narrow my focus to them, or if my focus on them was part of what shrivelled the world and triggered some of the awfulness… I think now it was probably a bit of both. (And I think it’s something that happens to lots of women who have babies after infertility). 

But anyway, it turns out you cannot build your self-worth, your life’s hearth, your soul, inside other people. 

It won’t fit. 

And it will break you all, in the end. 

The thing is that your children aren’t yours - they belong to themselves and all their other connections too, old and new, and they will eventually follow those those threads away from you - and you will be only what they leave behind. 

If you don’t fill yourself with something else, if you are not you for your own sake, you will be nothing. 
And this example and this experience will hurt them. 

When my kids first started going to spend time with their dad and I was without them I honestly felt like I was going to die from it. I remember writing something of the sort on this blog and somebody telling me to stop acting like they were dead. It hurt at the time, but she was right... Thank you if you’re still here. 
Very gradually I learned to see the space as a good thing not just for them, but for me. 

I looked at the rubble, the bricks and blocks that had shed from me over much longer than I had realised, and I picked some of them up. I fixed them. I found new ones. And I started building. (All of which is pretty much code for remembering old hobbies, reading and writing a  lot, leaning on friends, and shagging strange men). 

Anyhoo, I started building ME. Not their mum. Me. And without the rotten stones I thought my foundations were stronger than ever. 

And then, all this...

And I realised my tower was far from finished, and far from stable. 

Like so many others, my world shrunk again to my children. They have been the only in-person people I’ve seen regularly (apart from one walking friend and Boynotquiteonthenetheredge, both of whom I only see twice a month) for more than a year.

And I’ve lost the balance it took me so long to find. I’ve lost the space to be me, the space to think clearly.
The Smalls have become too much my everything because there hasn’t been anything else. 

And I can feel that the boundaries with them have blurred and the emotions have heightened and I’m not parenting with deliberation and thought and measure - I’m parenting with loneliness and too much of my own unfiltered emotion. And that’s wrong. It warps things. 

I was still building me, you see. I was still recovering from all the awful. And now I’ve gone backwards... Because it turns out you can’t keep building your way out of the rubble when all your building blocks have been taken away - nights out, and friends, and cups of tea, and banter, and cocktails, and road trips, and visits, and classes, and hobbies, and places, and sights, and trying new things, and seeing and feeling and learning and growing and filling yourself up so you can float. So you can fly. 

And yes, some of those blocks are coming back now, but they feel heavier, unfamiliar in my hands. They’re pulling me down, not raising me up. I’m not sure how to use them, where to start, how to mix the cement of connections and small talk and action and planning. There are so many fragments I am afraid to pick them up in case I drop them and I have to start all over again, again. 

What I do know (now, finally) is that I cannot be the best mother to my children when I am not being the best me for myself. 

And that means donning the hard hat, rolling up my sleeves, and picking up each block, one at a time, and layering them up until they are a wall, a shield, a whole, a home. A place where my children can feel safe and loved, but that will also exist when they leave. A place the awful can’t reach me - where it will look far away once more. 

And I will grow ivy up the walls, plant blossom trees, scatter cushions and hang fairy lights. I will tend it and maintain it, keep building it higher and brighter, and it will be a thing of enduring beauty and peace.

(Until it gets ants and masonry bees, but that’s another [recent] story).

xxx