I’m sorry if I’m a terrible friend.

It’s not that I don’t love and value you. It’s just that I’m running on empty.

By the time everyone who needs me every day has taken a slice of me, there is just… none left over.

I can’t give any more, or do any more, or be any more, for anyone else.

If it helps, please know you’re not the bottom of my to do list.

I am.

I think friendship in middle age does just have to look a bit different, sometimes.

Sometimes it’s not about the nights out you have, the deep and meaningful conversations – putting the world to rights, the laughs, the drinks, or the coffees. Sometimes it’s not about the hours put in. Sometimes it’s just a periodic text to check the other person is still alive. A fleeting catch-up on the fly to report the latest updates on crazy kids, ailing parents, and stalling careers.

Sometimes, friendship in middle age is an act of faith – object permanence for adults. You have to believe the other person is there even when you don’t see them.

I think I am here when people need me. When you’re not looking, I still exist – a tree in a wood when there’s no one to hear it slowly collapse in exhaustion. And I’m far better at holding your structural integrity than my own. I don’t think I’m mean, or using you, or taking more than I’m willing to give? I know in theory friendships aren’t transactional – but at the same time I feel so guilty, so much of the time. Like I’m not enough for you, or me – or anyone.

I wish I was better at object permanence, myself. I wish I could rest in friendships without feeling the need to make people like me all over again whenever I next see them. I wish I was better at remembering birthdays. I wish I was better at reaching out after a gap instead of being weird and awkward about it. I wish I was more organised. I wish I had more energy – more get up and go. I wish I didn’t find correspondence and diary management so terrifying and overwhelming. I wish I had more free time. I wish the smalls were easier, and easier to blend. I wish I was capable of peopling better and more often. I wish I believed, deep down, I was worth the wait, your time and patience.

So if you’re still my friend despite the scattiness, gaucheness, random silences interspersed with over-familiarity, the rampant poor time management and even more rampant self-doubt and self-pity – thank you.

I’m sorry if I’m a terrible friend.

If you bear with me I’ll bear with you.

And I’ll make it my new Summer’s resolution to do a bit better.

xxx

I love my house.

I moved in the summer before the pandemic hit. It was a big downsize after my divorce. I was so, so tired. I just wanted to rest and be SAFE. And it’s given me that, these four walls. If my life goes to shit all over again, I can afford it. I can still pootle along gently. I can breathe.

I’ve also questioned myself, again and again, if I did the right thing.

I’ve worried I’m lazy. That not going bigger and better and working harder and earning more and aiming higher and having more ambition is a cop out. That I chose retreat. That licking my wounds and living smaller (and out of catchment) and cutting out big rooms (and cars and holidays) might ruin my life, and the Smalls’ lives in turn.

Well the cost of living crisis has sort of put paid to that… As interests rates hike again I’m increasingly grateful for my cowardice/caution. (And the Big Small, after months of worry, is going up to big school with all her mates – also a massive relief).

I still love my house. I love that I can walk to the shop, and the vet, and the pharmacy, and the take-away, and the park. I love my neighbours, and my community. I love the security.

But some days, these same four beloved walls press in HARD.

Some days, I think I hate it, too.

For a start I hate that there is always something to do, and fix, and clean, and sort out, and spruce up – in an oppressive cycle we were never told about as kids, drawing the dream, the red roof, the four windows and front door in the middle, stripes of blue and green top and bottom. A starburst sun in the corner.

I hate the fact nothing is ever finished, nothing is ever DONE. You can’t stick it on the fridge with a magnet and just forget about it and move on to the next thing.

I hate that after four years it has inexplicably filled back up with all the junk I worked so hard to eliminate so we could fit into it in the first place.

I hate that post pandemic my life is STILL shrunk mostly to these rooms. To a short circuit around them, of school runs, and supermarket shops, drs appointments and very little that is much further afield, off the paper.

I hate that like millions of home workers, I feel the weight of the privilege of being able to pick up and drop off kids, put a wash on, wear pyjama bottoms and drink tea in the garden – and the pressure of being seen to be present and productive and switched on at all times.

I hate that I am on my own in it. Because funnily enough as a child I never drew stick me outside it, all alone. I drew company.

I hate that I am so often so lonely, here. So claustrophobic. Chafing at my boundaries. When I feel I am spring-loaded in my own body, ready to leap out of the picture, hurl myself off the set tracks I laid so deliberately.

I hate that as soon as I leave it all I want to do is get back to it.

I feel all of this particularly hard after the death of my dad.

I suppose it is partly the classic carpe diem of grief, wanting to feel and experience and expand to fill what life and time there is left. Like him, I am also on an ever-shifting continuum between the Myers Brigg I and E – sometimes drawing energy from others but needing time to recharge on my own.

And the balance right now is… off.

Some days I’m conscious the only real-life adult interactions I have are the small talk conversations at the school gate, at which I am only partially successful. This is not the social life I imagined for my adult self.

When the kids return, they have used up their own quota of other-people energy at school, or at their dad’s, and they want to veg, to hibernate, to retreat into their own little home world and not come out – not go out.

When the most anxious Small is particularly anxious, I cannot pry her from the house at a weekend with either force or bribery, and she rebels at the thought of my inviting others into her safe space. Babysitters and having mates round for an evening cuppa is not always possible, here. Bedtime isn’t always easy. This is not something people always understand.

There are days when I feel trapped in my own home, a prisoner of a nest I created. A haven which has also limited my horizons, a safety net that has become a sticky web – pulling my limbs down harder the harder I fight it.

And always always, just behind my shoulder, out of sight, is the knowledge of the spider that is waiting to eat me – the doom that stalks all of the anxious. (I wonder where she gets it from).

I’m not quite sure that there are answers.

I think that this – this trapped feeling – is maybe just… middle age. A combination of the squeeze of responsibility, the boredom of monotony, the gaping hole of loss, the reality of physical/hormonal exhaustion, the tick of the clock, the double-edged sword of home-working, the challenge of raising kids wired differently – in a world too fucked up to make safe for them.

This, of course, is the junction at which men start wearing sports blazers, buying two seater cars, developing a coke habit and dating women 15-20 years their junior.

As a woman my options are more limited. An extra glass of wine, maybe. A spring clean. Fluff up and feather the nest with a trip to Dunhelm and a few different cushions and lamps… Possibly a kitten.

I think as women we are often better at understanding how love and hate live together, under one roof, two sides of one of sheet of paper, scrunched up into a ball. We are so used to feeling more than one thing at once, often in direct opposition, and feeling the feeling rather than seeking a solution to the dissonance.

And we are good at smoothing out the wrinkles, placing it carefully in a memory box, starting over with a fresh sheet, every day if that’s what’s necessary.

This summer, I definitely need to draw some new lines.

Wish me luck.

xxx

This Mother’s Day, following hot on the heels of this International Women’s Day, I’ve decided I don’t particularly want to be a Strong Independent Woman anymore. International or otherwise.

Like many Mothers, I’m sick of being strong – of coping. Of carrying on. Of being congratulated for keeping lots of balls in the air or things on my plate, when what I’d really like isn’t flowers, or chocolates, or random toiletries (that’d probably give me a rash/thrush if I actually used them), but for someone to catch a few of the balls, or wipe a few things off my plate, instead.

I think, just for a bit, I’d quite like to be a Feeble, Heavily Supported, Local Puddle.

Or perhaps a Blancmange.

I feel like I could really put the Bleugh into Blancmange (said properly, not like it’s spelled).

First of all, it’s just a great, GREAT word. And I feel like it’s weirdly onomatopoeic for this point in my life. People who don’t enjoy the shape and feel in their mouths of saying the word Blancmange are frankly, Bleugh-wrong.

Plus, the Blancmange enjoyed its heyday in the 80s, a situation I very much identify with…

It’s also almost entirely made of sugar, and EXPECTED to be pink and jiggly, without judgement, which sounds like something I can really get behind, too.

Finally, it does not have to hold itself up and maintain its own structural integrity: it can flollop at will, and takes the form of whatever harder, firmer vessel is holding it – possibly a rabbit mould. (Surrounded by lime jelly grass, obvs).

Being passive and gelatinous and allowing someone else to shape my destiny and make my decisions sounds pretty damn good at the moment.

So today, Mothers, I hope you get to be a Blancmange. I hope you get to put down everything you hold up, just for a bit, and rest in a mould of some kind, resplendently wibbly.

Because all of us need to be able to wobble, sometimes, under the impossible pressure of being everything to everyone, keeping everything in mind, everything ticking over, everyone on an even keel. All of us melt down, sometimes, before we pull ourselves back together, try again, woman up. Re-form. Un-mange.

This Mother’s Day, rest, if you can, like an 80s dessert. Feel free to let it all slide. Gloop. Smell of strawberries. (An inevitable consequence of the crap smellies you will inevitably be gifted).

And if you CAN maintain your own structural integrity, go forth and be the rabbit mould for a Mum you know.

It’s what she really wants.

And deserves.

Xxx