Sometimes, the Authenticity Gods, or even the more minor Small Talk Deities, are behind me. Other times they are most definitely not.

Sometimes I am this awkward marionette bent at grotesque angles to my own life, not quite fitting into it, into any given situation it presents – from work meetings to the school gate, supermarket checkouts to nights out, playing with the kids to coffee with friends.

Sometimes I am just too conscious of my body and my tongue and my thoughts. Of what other people are thinking. Of the world pushing in on me. And it throws me off my axis.

I’m slightly off kilter – a beat behind everything and everyone. Too loud. Too quiet. Too filtered and too unfiltered – saying or doing slightly the wrong thing at slightly the wrong time. Looking out of my own eyes from a long way away.

Sometimes I am just… Other. Othered. I’m not sure how else to describe it.

The really annoying thing is that I can’t really tell how or when it’s going to happen, but it is when I am stuck between selves that it is at its worst.

This is a particular problem (one of many) I think, for the co-parent. Because as a co-parent you end up living life in two halves; the one with your children, and the one without them.

In many ways it is a privilege – to get time in your own skin, to get the chance to play at being young and carefree, to shed the mantle of responsibility, to lower the mum mask.

But the flip side is that you’re split. You’re never a whole person in the same place and space.

Or at least I’m not…

I think I just didn’t know how else to do it on my own but to mum HARD, and then ‘me’ hard in relief/despair when I was without them. And I ended up with these two different lives that for various logistical reasons have never much crossed over.

Certainly the Big Small now always complains that I don’t feel like the mum she knows when she glimpses my other self – for instance when I’ve had a glass of wine and I’m with my friends, or The Boy.

It’s always hard when your parents suddenly feel like they don’t belong to you – I remember it from my own childhood, watching dinner partiers through the banisters. When your mum, your person, is suddenly not your mum but a stranger – and you feel them slipping away from you. So I get it. But sometimes, as I said to her, she doesn’t feel like she belongs to me either.

I feel the distance most keenly when she’s away on holiday with her dad – in the awkward, stilted phone calls that don’t flow like conversations do when we’re together. She’s not mine, in those moments. And I’m not me.

She KNOWS this about herself, as well as knowing it about me. She can articulate it. She said to me recently that she feels like she’s two people – the person she is with me, and the person she is at her dad’s, and that keeping up both is exhausting.

I feel that SO HARD.

Because I am tired, too.

Reconciling the different sides of myself, the different hats I wear, roles I play and moods I weather has always been a struggle. And it is both the cause and the effect of this Otherness.

I had this epiphany recently when I went away with a group, where I had to be two sides of me in both halves of my life AT THE SAME TIME. And I ended up doing neither very well… I wasn’t the mum I wanted to be, or the me I wanted to be. I was locked in weird self-conflict – as if the two halves coming together didn’t actually make a proper functioning whole.

I CAN be hugely present and in a moment and FLOWING.

But, sometimes – I can’t.

What I want for the Big Small as she grows up into whoever she’s going to be, is to be able to be her WHOLE self, the whole time. To embrace being different in different moments and emotions, without bowing to expectations – her own or others’. To live without the conflicts so many women face trying to please everyone and navigate their way through the binaries of personal/professional, mother/lover, leader/nurturer. To accept Otherness when it comes as a part of herself, as a part of being a human.

I want that for me, too.

Perhaps the best I can do at the start of mental health awareness week, is to try to be kinder to myself when I am stuck in Other. And shout out to all the other ‘Othered’, out there. The anxious. The autistic. The overthinkers. The hurt. The wary. The weary.

You are not alone, and you’re not actually out of sync with the rest of the world.

You are in sync with me, at least.

xxx