Last time I posted, I posted about the final straw.

I swore I’d try and use it – and the resilience from not buckling under it – to build myself a new nest. From the inside out.

Well I’m now, after all the run-of-the-mill horrendous house-moving, sat-in-a-van-waiting-to-exchange-and-for-money-to-come-through-shizzle, IN my new nest. The actual physical one. And this picture was taken in my new and perfect little patch of garden.

It is the opposite of the final straw – it is in fact a first green shoot.

And it shows (through entirely accidental timing) the dawning light as I step out from the long jagged shadows of my old life.

Into the new one.

I know lots of people who stay. In their old marital home. For lots of reasons – mostly school catchment and kid stability… Or lack of any damn choice, obviously. They invest in fairy lights and cushions to banish the shadows and change their shape. Their colour. I’ve seen it work.

But I didn’t realise how much the old echoes still rang in my ears, how much the grey and dull and dim of my relationship, it’s physical brick and mortar borders, still clouded my view of everything, including myself.

Moving has been a whirlwind, but it’s blown away the echoes and the clouds in a way so physical it’s literally left me swaying on my feet.

I feel free.

The old stuff can’t touch me here. HE can’t touch me here. I can’t be hurt in the same way. It is a step change, a step forwards.

But…

Freedom is a bit scary, too. Because it has its own pressures.

And I do feel pressure.

Partly that’s because I’ve been under so much stress for so long I’m finding it hard to come down and slow down and stop living at a hundred miles an hour fuelled by pure adrenaline and copious nutella, and a pathological fear of my own bank account. I can’t sit and stop and relax into it.

And I want to.

Because I LOVE this house.

I love that I’ve literally filled it with colour and that the old crap brown sofa has been replaced by a bright blue one, and with yellow and red and green bits all at once (not all on the sofa). Yes, there are fairy lights. And cushions. And upstairs a duvet cover so girly my boyfriend feels his testosterone levels drop at the bedroom threshold (he gets over this).

I love that it’s small. That all the downsizing and tip trips mean me and the Smalls fit it perfectly, and it us, and everything has its place, or will do when I finally get some wardrobes, and that the first thing the distressingly middle-class Big Small tells people who ask about her new home is that “it’s VERY small”. I love that we can see and hear our neighbours (which is also shocking to her), and walk to a park and a shop and a cafe, and that it feels MANAGEABLE. It feels like I’m on holiday. It feels perfect.

I love that it’s not the old place, with it’s gas leaks, and asbestos, and woodlice, and space – detached physically and metaphorically – and too much quiet, it’s tweeting twatting boiler, and memories, and huge ridiculous mortgage that no one should pay out on a house every month ARE YOU MAD???

I even love that I haven’t yet got blinds in the velux above my bed, so I can’t sleep, but who the FORK needs sleep anyway when you’ve got all this to take in, and I can watch the clouds roll past and feel small and blessed – yes even with the row of threatening pigeon bums lined up directly over it (and my flowery duvet) at 5am.

I love that it has given me the things I always wanted, and couldn’t have when we were chasing bigger and better and more and STATUS, and that every choice I have made from the choice to ask him to leave has been about redefining MY values, and that what I get now is what I begged him to prioritise – less stress, more time, more quality, less rat race, less strive, less STRIFE, more LIFE.

My life.

But that’s where most of the pressure I’m feeling comes from. Because this is my new start. And I have to get it RIGHT.

I have to start LIVING my values, not just planning for them, imagining them. I have to now actually create the family and the environment I want, and be the MUM I want, and the ME I want when I’m not in a mould and on a path and living a life that didn’t suit me and eroded me and I couldn’t breathe in, and when I’m not fighting my way out of that and coping and managing and juggling and organising and packing and working and FORGETTING to breathe.

This isn’t just about new green shoots. It’s about new leaves. Turning them over. Keeping them turned.

And while right now I feel like the physical change of moving has boosted the emotional change I’ve been working on for the last 20 months and longer – there is still part of me that is afraid.

I’m afraid I’ll still be the person that doesn’t turn ON the fairy lights because it might waste the batteries. Or the one who will never be able to sit, or stop, or settle, because she’s mostly momentum, and without that she’ll collapse, and maybe there isn’t anything else underneath worth a damn anyway. Or the one that is always so on the edge of her tether the anxiety turns to anger on a tuppence, who shouts, who is broken by straws, big and small. Who doesn’t let the kids make mess or go outside again or stay up late because the hassle is too much and she just wants to sit, and lie, and work up the energy to face the next day. The one who focuses on surviving not living. The one who leaps at every shriek convinced it’s a disaster. The one who can’t sleep because her mind is running on wheels. The one who overplans, forgets to enjoy any of it, and who lives a life of thwarted expectations. The one who can’t bring herself to get up off the sofa – even now that it’s blue – and go to bed – now a whole extra floor up – because it means the next day and doing it all, all over again. The one who squanders or sabotages opportunities because she is afraid. The one who is always, always afraid. The one that doesn’t look out of the window. The one who lets pigeon bums stop her opening it. The one that doesn’t live up to her potential.

This new house, this new life, this new freedom – is a gift. It is also a responsibility.

The fact is I don’t do well under pressure. Which is why every choice I’ve made to get here is about having LESS of it. And why now I’m here I feel MORE pressure to make the most of that. A Catch-22…

So.

This is it.

And I’m going to do the only thing I can do to start getting in right – I’m going to start small. As I mean to go on.

Because all of this, ALL OF IT, has been about going smaller, and slower, and simpler.

So today, I’m going to remember to breathe. It doesn’t get simpler than that.

I’m going to stop.
I’m going to see what happens when I stop. Who I am when I’m not stressed, and rushing, and worrying.
I’m going to turn on the damn fairy lights.
I’m going to open the velux.
I’m going to leave the unpacking and the nesting and the DIY.
Hell, I’m going to LEAVE THE WASHING UP.
BUGGER the routine. We’re not even going to brush teeth if we don’t feel like it, and we’re certainly not wearing shoes.
I’m going to enjoy my children.
I’m going to enjoy ME.
I’m NOT going to have a plan.
I’m not going to achieve ANYTHING.
I am going to let happy come to me.
I am going to go outside.
I’m going to watch the clouds.
I’m going to paint a picture.
I’m going to GROW, upwards, towards the sun, if it ever decides to shine again, like a new, green shoot.
I’m going to turn my face up to it, and bask, and APPRECIATE.

Although, as you can see from this picture, I AM probably going to have to mow the bloody lawn first…

I hate my sofa.

I hate it because it’s brown.

I wanted neutral, but neutral is kind of impractical with small children and animals, a propensity towards spillage and questionable housekeeping skills, and brown seemed just like neutral PLUS. Only now I just have a massive muddy Thing in my living room, precisely the colour that all other colours go when they give up both hope and integrity.

I hate it because it’s the same ubiquitous brown Dfs sofa that everyone has. And I don’t like to think I’m like everyone else, nobody does, but I’m afraid that I am, and so is everyone else.

I hate it because it’s seen FAR better days, and one of the old decrepit cats weed on it, A LOT, and it cost a fortune to clean it, 3 times, and the velvety channels are all flattened down and thinned out and don’t feel nice anymore, and if I’m honest when one of the children has been sitting on one of the cushions and made it warm, you can still smell cat wee out of the corner of your nose.

I hate it because it’s uncomfortable and I’m small and it’s big and I can’t put my feet on the ground, and I’m old and curling in the corner angled towards the telly puts my back out, and also pushes the seat cushion out, and it constantly needs pushing back in which involves climbing off the sofa and HEAVING, which I hate, and if I don’t do this the kids jump off the edge – but it’s not really an edge it’s just cushion with nothing underneath it – so they fall and cry.

I hate it because it’s a symbol of my old life. We bought it in preparation for the Small Small, so we could all sit in one place and be a Family, and we never were, and he knew, and it turns out sofas can’t make families or fix relationships.

I hate it because when he moved out he set himself up with shiny new things nicer than the stuff we had when we were together, and without the cat wee and connotations, and then told me what a noble hero he was to let me have everything while he walked away with nothing, but nothing feels to me rather like a fresh start, and that’s something pretty big, though maybe not as big as the ubiquitous smelly brown sofa.

I hate it because the kids love jumping round the corner bit, and it’s so huge and brown it’s become a giant rock in their lives, anchoring them, and with all the changes and the moving houses when I float the idea that it might not fit in our new, smaller living room, there are tears, and there is no point crying over brown sofas, and it’s the least I can do for them in terms of basic continuity, so I will have to keep it if I can, and have nothing in my living room but the ubiquitous smelly brown sofa because there will be no space for anything else, possibly even people.

But most of all I hate it because I get stuck in it.

The children are in bed and I’ve done the jobs, and sorted the Stuff, and all I want is to sit down for five minutes to not think and not do, but it’s never as relaxing or comfortable as I want or expect, despite daily experience, and suddenly it’s 10 o’clock, and I know I need to turn off the lights and lock the doors and go upstairs, but the thought of having to do those things and then having to brush my teeth and wash my face and check on the children and take my pills and put my pyjamas on is suddenly so BIG – bigger even than the sofa – that I am stuck in it and I cannot move and it won’t let me go.

Sometimes I try and cheat it, and do my teeth and face and pjs before I come back downstairs, so it’s not all waiting at the end and the sofa will have less pull and power over me, but this doesn’t always help, and I still get stuck.

And as I sit in it’s faded, lumpy, cloying embrace, I think that I could just stay here, and there is really nothing to move for, and who would care if I just sat here all night, and really, what’s the damn point anyway?

And then the cat walks in.

A new, continent cat.

A cat exactly the same shade as the sofa – and with the same capricious temperament. She is grumpy, and vicious, frequently attacks me and the children, and is only made palatable to them because I do her voice as a Russian spy, and excuse her assaults as ‘training’ them and ‘hardening them up’ to be future spies, and the only reason I put up with her is that she helps me beat the sofa.

She comes and sits on my lap, purrs like a tractor, and then bites me, and repeats until I get up, when – plurping insistently – she physically leads me from the sofa to the kitchen with all the air of a vengeful and self-absorbed Lassie, where she prances invitingly around the bowls of cat food.

She is what gets me off the sofa, and I do not know what I’d do without her.

Often I find that I am jealous of her sense of purpose. She always knows where she’s going, what she’s doing, has ultimate confidence in her plans, and abandons herself to them – even her attack and napping plans – with uncompromising zest. The Sofa Trap is not a thing for a cat. They don’t get stuck. And if they do they pretend it was all part of their grand scheme, they were doing the fireman a freaking FAVOUR, don’t you know, and they basically just OWN it.

I don’t own anything. (Apart from a ubiquitous smelly brown sofa, obviously).

Now the good news is, the cat will be coming along to the new house with the sofa.

The bad news is, that it might not be the sofa that’s the problem…

You see, it occurs to me that maybe the sofa ISN’T an albatross around my neck, holding me down. Maybe I am.

I’ve pinned a lot on MY fresh start, my move. And I suppose what I’m really saying is that I’m afraid bringing along the old, smelly, sticky (literally and figuratively) sofa will contaminate it.

But I am even more afraid of bringing the same old me along.

The one that gets stuck.
The one who can’t even decide to get up and go to bed.
The one that has to borrow purpose from a punitive pussycat.
The one who mucked up the old life in the first place.
The one I don’t know if I can trust to get it right this time around.

Maybe, just maybe, it’s not the sofa I hate at all.

But then I remember it’s uncomfortable and ugly and smelly, so maybe it is.

Being a mother is the very closest that I think you can come to time travel. Bear with me.

I’ve read and watched a LOT of sci-fi. And there are a lot of time travel tropes, but what pretty much everyone agrees on – from HG Wells to Dr Who, Michael J Fox to Audrey Niffenegger – is that time travel causes a certain degree disorientation, and distortion.

But maybe the reason we’ve never achieved it outside of fiction is that, maybe, that bit isn’t just a side effect of time travel – maybe it’s the gateway.

And there is nothing more disorienting – and distorting – than motherhood.

Being plunged into something so simultaneously amazing and awful and natural and alien and affirming and hollowing and real and surreal all at once leaves you gasping for air, grasping for purchase, flailing against the grey fog of sleep deprivation, hormonal fluctuations, and life alterations – and in the brief moments any clarity you get above the tumult is too bright and crisp, newly hewn, re-seen, ill-fitting – as you tread a stranger’s footprints across your own life.

Even as they grow, the small people, you’re never the same again. The footprints don’t wash away with time. And some of the tracks go backwards in it…

Because having a kid makes you remember being one. Only when you remember suddenly you’re looking at it not just through your childhood eyes, but through your mother’s eyes, too.

I remember a trip to the supermarket, aged about 9, where my mum couldn’t get out of the car parking space. She scraped the car along both sides trying to reverse round a caged lamppost. I remember her losing it. I remember her noise. I remember the pattern of the white scrapes on the red paint. I remember wanting it to stop and to go home and for her to just go back to normal and blocking it out and waiting for it to be over. I remember my own inconvenience and discomfort.

As a child I had little understanding, or sympathy.

As an adult I didn’t think about it much, other than feeling vaguely confused that someone so calm and reassuring in mine and others’ big crises could be so frenetic in her own, small ones.

As a mother, I am transported there and suddenly I AM her.

I can FEEL her frustration, the overflow of someone operating at the very end of their tether, managing two kids, a household, a dog, a cat, an absent husband working away, and a full time job, who just wanted to get the food in and go home and why can’t anything ever just be easy, and I can’t take any more, and that’s IT.

I don’t remember how we got home. But now I know she would have had to piece herself together. Put away the shopping. Put the kids to bed. Work out how to get the car fixed while still ferrying everyone around. Hold it all up and in and tight on a knife’s edge of functioning panic reliant on momentum and perpetual motion because sometimes that’s all there is and there are really no other choices and you can’t cry when there’s fishfingers to grill and dogs to feed and children to wash and bags to pack for the next day.

I remember sitting at the top of the stairs aged 6 or 7. And I wouldn’t go to bed, because my OCD meant I had to do my checks and my Mum had caught me and was angry, but maybe I could get her to come upstairs and help with my checks anyway. I remember my nightdress – it had a jungle scene on it. I remember the feel of the banister under my fingers. I remember how she stood. I remember the look on her face.

And now, in a rush of understanding, I know what that look meant.

She needs to get the house sorted and dishes done and lunches made for the morning, and she needs to go to bed herself but her smallest is still up and wandering round the house, and why can’t she just stay in bed, and how many times does she have to say it, and she’s exasperated, but also worried, because she doesn’t know what to do with her and is this normal? and are other kids like this? and how can I help and I’m SO tired and everything is harder than I thought it would be.

It was never really anger, it was fear.

It was never impatience, it was exhuastion.

It wasn’t a lack of sympathy, it was a lack of choice.

Memories are always time travel, in a way, but it’s in this DUALITY of memory, in the transference of experience, that time travel really comes true for women.

You need your mum, more than you have done in years, when you become one. You LITERALLY slip back in time in your craving for her. And you realise this explosion of love is how your mum must have felt about you – only you never really knew you just expected it and accepted it without a blink. And that disparity in love and sacrifice and gratitude is almost sad for her – but even sadder for you because you’re repeating the pattern all over again.

But that’s where you get to travel to the future, too.

Because one day, my daughters will look up with new, raw eyes, and it will be their turn to time travel. They will see their own past through two perspectives superimposed on top of each other, and they will stumble to make sense of their own memories and mine mixed up together.

They’ll KNOW.

They’ll know what it must have been like to be on you own with a 2 year old and 5 year old, trying to get everyone up and ready and out by 7.30am. They’ll know how it felt when they pretended to forget my name and called me by their Dad’s girlfriends name instead, like it’s the funniest joke EVER. They’ll know why I cried over silly burnt chicken dippas. They’ll know how much effort and love went in to the 8th hokey cokey of the evening when all you want to do is sit, and how tiring it must have been to do all the Harry Potter voices after a 15 hour day of rushing round and ticking off lists and keeping balls in the air.

They’ll know the good, and the bad, and the ugly of love for what it was.

There’s always a price to pay for time travel, though. That’s one of the accepted rules – alongside the disorientation thing. The protagonists are always caught up in the end in a causal loop or the ‘Grandfather paradox’ – the impossibility of going back in time to kill your grandfather and therefore erase your own timeline.

The price here is that you can never pass forwards what you’ve learned. It won’t be until your daughters hit the same point in their own timeline that you’ll understand each other on a new level. We’ve been having kids forever, but we’ve never, ever been really been able to pass the experience on through anything other than the experience itself.

In so much sci-fi, the time travellers are men. But the truth is, women cracked time travel generations ago. We just can’t meaningfully communicate it. And that, I suppose, is the Grandmother paradox…

Caught in it as we are, the best you can do today – if you’re lucky enough to still have her around – is to look your own mum in the eye, slip your hand into hers like you did when hers was smoother and yours was smaller, and say “Thank you”.

And possibly, “I’m sorry.”

At the very least, “I know now.”

Happy Mother’s Day.

The thing with grief, of any sort, is that it’s not a straight line. Or a puddle, receding gradually in the sun. It’s wilder than that. It’s unpredictable. It’s alive.

A break-up is a grief, you see. Or it is if you were the doing it right in the first place…

Sure, no one’s died. So it’s not exactly comparable… But a future has ended. A family has ended. Abruptly. Awfully. At least death has the merit of being universal. Divorce is so PERSONAL. The ultimate rejection. It’s not just one of those things, the luck of the draw, the circle of life – it’s YOU.

And if you’ve got kids you get to keep running into the ghosts of what you lost again, and again. Or maybe you’re the ghost and the person you split up from is the real one. I don’t know.

Grief is a Tiger. It stalks you. And just when you think you’ve outrun it, outwitted it, reached safety – it pounces. And it’s teeth and claws can still tear strips off you.

That’s happened to me this week. And I suppose if I was a ghost I wouldn’t feel it as much, would I? So I am real, after all.

It’s been a hard week, for a number of reasons. Including a sick and incredibly angry and anxious child. Who now has the power to text.

When they’re babies you feel like the separation anxiety when they cry for you as you leave them somewhere is the most awful thing ever. And then they talk. And then they write… And the ability to express it in words somehow makes it so much worse.

So I started sending silly pictures. And she sent pictures back. Family pictures. Of her and her sister with their Dad and his girlfriend. And the Tiger leapt up from nowhere and sunk it’s claws into my back.

The images of the family I wanted, of the man he never was for me, of the woman playing Mummy in my place – sent me straight back into a spiral I thought I was done with. An orange and black cyclone that leaves me bruised and broken every time I’m caught in it’s vortex.

Why couldn’t he do that for me? Why couldn’t he be that man, that father, with me? Why couldn’t I have that family? What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I have someone to share it all with? To tag team? To play happy families? What did I ever do that was so bloody wrong?

I’m better than this, mostly. So I’m sorry if I’m boring – a record stuck on repeat… But that’s kind of how grief works. The Tiger doesn’t get bored. It just visits less often.

For the most part time is a great healer. I’ve learnt to protect myself – for instance by deleting my personal social media. Not looking. Not asking. I’ve learnt to repeat the mantra that I’m happy they’re happy. I’m happy he’s a better Dad. I’ve learnt to see the gift I’ve been given of starting over.

But GODDAMIT, when it does hit me the impact still hurts SO MUCH. It’s still in those moments so alien that this is my life now. This is my reality. Like I’m looking at it from afar. And it’s sad and awful and lonely and it’s NOT FUCKING FAIR. And then the pain is horribly familiar and sickeningly, weirdly WELCOME. I’m GLAD it hurts. I’m GLAD there’s something to help me remember I am real, after all.

It doesn’t stop following you, that bloody Tiger. Whatever your particular grief. But it does change. It has already. It doesn’t catch me as often. The wounds heal faster. I’m better at predicting when and how and where it will pounce. The scar tissue from past attacks becomes a sort of armour… And the Tiger becomes a sort of friend.

One day the Tiger will shrink. It’ll be a tabby pussy cat with an attitude problem – like Catonthenetheredge. And one day, one day maybe every now and again I’ll welcome it onto my lap and remember what I lost deliberately.

Right now I just have to clean up the blood, get up, and steel myself for next time.