Category Archives: Life

Going through the motions. 

07 Friday Oct 2016

Posted by in Emotions, Life, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,



Chris has gone away. It’s not permanent, we’ve not split up and it was a decision that we made together. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not been hard. Really hard. In fact, I couldn’t ever have imagined how hard it would be. Perhaps it was the uncertainty about whether it was going to happen, perhaps it was the speed in which it did happen; or perhaps I’ve changed somehow. I don’t really know. The only thing I do know is that at times in the past few weeks, I have been at the edge; of my sanity, of reason, of my ability to cope. 
In honesty I can only admit that I have been a mess. I have cried. I have raged, to myself and to others and then it culminated in an anxiety attack. I was sitting at my desk at work, with a ton of urgent things to do and I could just feel this feeling; it was like a fluttering that kept getting stronger. A feeling that I had to get away. It just got more and more urgent until I couldn’t ignore it any more. And so I got up and I walked out. I went to wash my face, hoping that the cold water would soothe me in a way that I was unable to soothe myself. 

It helped. A little. Enough to get me back to my desk to attempt to carry on. But I couldn’t. The feeling built again and like a child who is overwhelmed I couldn’t hold back the tide of emotion and I fell apart. It started slowly. I could feel silent tears start to drop from my face; then my body started to silently shudder until I couldn’t control it any more and I began to sob. Uncontrollable, violent sobs that baffled me and scared me. 

You see I don’t do falling apart. Well I do, but not in a public way. At home. Alone maybe. Not at work. Not spectacularly.  

But maybe now I do. Because it keeps happening. Nothing is really wrong but nothing is really right either. I have every reason to be happy and for the most part I am. I have my dream job, house, husband and 3 gorgeous children as well as friends and family who have rallied around me; holding me up. But then randomly, I’ll wake up with this pit of anxiety in the bottom of my chest. And the feeling will build and nothing that I do can calm it down. The pique of adrenaline that you get when someone startles you, only it just doesn’t go. 

And the thing is, it’s like it’s catching. The anxiety I’m feeling; I’m passing it on; to Chris who thinks I’m having a breakdown; to my children who can’t understand what is going on. 

And it’s so difficult to understand, how could they possibly do so; I don’t understand myself. On a cognitive level I’m fine. I’m happy with life, I have a job I love, family and friends who have surrounded me with love and support. A husband who loves me and is trying his best to show it from 1000 miles and a different time zone away and yet emotionally I feel different. My emotions don’t match my cognition. In a split second I go from absolutely fine to full blown out of control; for no particular reason. 

And so I’m scared.  And I don’t really know how to stop it. some days I don’t want to leave the house, or speak to anyone; but I do, because sometimes going through the motions is all I can do to remain sane. I’m looking for coping strategies, trying to work my way through it. 

So I’m sharing it, because I know others feel like this too and maybe they aren’t as lucky as me. Maybe they don’t have the support network and maybe they just need to know, like I do, that sometimes it’s ok to be a bit broken. So far I have a 100% record of getting through this, and I’ll get through it again. 

Advertisement

Categorically selfish. 

20 Tuesday Sep 2016

Posted by in Emotions, Life, love, Relationships, Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

Anyone who has been in my company for more than 5 minutes this past week (even more so the past 2 days) knows that I’ve been a complete mess. On the verge of tears constantly and bad tempered to boot! 

From nearly the first time that I met my husband I’ve known that he wanted to be a doctor. He is one of those people; it’s not about a career for him. He is driven by a sense of wanting to be able to do his best to help people and despite volunteering and then training as an ambulance technician, he has always wanted to do more. 

Anyway, when we got together and decided to move in together it was important to me that he didn’t lose sight of that dream. He took on me, and my boys, and my ex husband, and all my family and it couldn’t, I wouldn’t let it,  be at the expense of his dream. And so last year we agreed that he would work part time to study and apply to study medicine. 

He (along with approximately 64,000 of the 71,000 other applicants) didn’t get a place in a UK medical school when he applied last year and so it looked like he would apply again for next year. And then we saw an opportunity to study medicine abroad and three weeks ago he applied and was accepted. So on Sunday he flew to Bulgaria and yesterday he registered. He is a medical student!!! Yay! I was kind of on a high all day. Yes I miss him, but he was enrolled. He was doing it. He was beginning to live his dream; I was excited by it, enthused by it. Happy. 

Then he called me to tell me he had rented a flat and got a new phone number and was generally doing all the things that we’d discussed in the previous week that he would do, and all of a sudden I just wanted to cry. Not because he was doing these things, but that he was doing them without me. In a moment I felt every single mile between us; and they felt eternal. 

I got off the phone and I had a little cry and messaged a friend who immediately rang me and I talked it out and with my brother, and with my colleague, until I realised that I was ok again. 

And it’s only been a few days, and I’ve spent longer than this away from him loads of times, but because it’s not a short trip, or a holiday away, the void feels huge. 

However, I can’t agree with people who say I’m brave to do this, to commit to making this work. I adore my husband. He truly makes me happy in a way I didn’t feel possible. 

And so I am doing this for me. I am doing it because I want him to feel as happy and fulfilled with our relationship as I do; and I know that if I stopped him from fulfilling his dreams, he might  never feel that. He might always resent me a little that he gave up his own dreams for me. So I’m not brave or good for supporting him in doing this. I am categorically selfish. I can’t bear to give him up forever, so I will give him up temporarily. And I will do everything to make this work. 


If you’ve enjoyed this blog please follow it or follow me on Twitter @101madness or find me on Facebook @themadnessthatismylife

Sometimes accidents happen.

01 Wednesday Jun 2016

Posted by in kids, Life, Motherhood, Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

, , , , , ,


I know from the arguments and reprimands that I’ve had on social media today that this isn’t going to be a popular view, but whoa, I’m an honest person and so I’m going to just say it anyway; that kid who fell into the gorilla pit? It could just as easily have been mine. 

So go on start throwing your insults, but first let me explain: 

I am human. I am a mum of 3 and I am human.  This means that I only have two eyes, and I only have two hands. I’m already handicapped when it comes to having 3 children; there’s just not enough of me to go around. I can only physically be holding 2 of them at the same time. I can only see them all if (and this never happens) they are standing nicely together. Normally, I’ve deliberately got the youngest two as far away from where they can annoy each other as possible. This means I get to see those two one at a time. i.e. I have to take my eyes off one to look at the other. And let’s face it, even if I didn’t, I’m a self confessed haphazard parent. I get through my parenting life by the skin of my teeth and occasionally by the seat of my pants; I actually once nearly ended up in my Nana’s grave on top of her coffin due to a particularly difficult moment when my 18 month old decided to do that throwing himself backwards with the force of a baby elephant  thing just as I threw in my handful of mud and rose as we were burying her. It was only the quick thinking of my ex that stopped us both falling 8 ft into the ground and giving my Nana one last shock. These things happen, right? Accidents I think we call them…

All day I have seen on Facebook and Twitter that the mother should have been looking after him properly. That it was her fault. Was it though? Really? 

I wasn’t there, but I find it difficult to believe that this woman stood by and idly watched her 4 year old son climb a small fence with a 15 ft drop the other side. Surely it is more likely that one of her other children demanded her attention in some way, perhaps she was trying to stop that child from climbing the fence, or running away? Perhaps another one of her children needed a drink, or a tissue, or lifting so they could see the animals, and in those moments, when her back was turned, the 4 year old got away from her? 

And by the time she turned back it was too late; he was gone, or maybe he was about to go, and she couldn’t quite get her fingers to him in time to stop him. After all, I’m led to believe there were plenty of other zoo visitors also in the area at the time. Now call me nosey, but if I’d been at the zoo and seen a child, any child mine or a strangers, about to climb into a gorilla pit, I’d like to think I’d stop them. The fact that no one seemed to notice kind of makes me think that perhaps this was something that only took a split second. That, like my son nearly flipping us both into my Nana’s grave, wasn’t really foreseeable and unluckily for her, she had no quick thinking sidekick to stop the nightmare. 

Which leads me neatly on to an imbecilic statement that I saw posted to Facebook earlier; she should have taken additional help with her to supervise all 4 children all the time! Oh yeah, because all those of us who have more than one child shouldn’t go anywhere unless the child to adult ratio is 1:1. Hands up who else would never be able to leave the house?

There’s something fundamentally wrong with that, because even if the ratio is 1:1, guess what, at some point that adult will need to look away from the child!! It’s impossible (not to mention probably mentally unhealthy) to watch a child every second of every minute of the day. I mean what if you need to look at your watch, or scope out where the next animal enclosure is? Have you never needed to sneeze? There’s forced eyes off time right there! And do you know how long it takes a child to slip out of your grasp? Out of your sight? I’ll tell you: 0.00004 of a second, well that’s how it feels anyway!! I don’t know how they do it but mine can literally vanish near enough in front of my eyes!! 

Find me any parent who hasn’t had that moment of absolute panic, when they’ve glanced at their watch, or spoken to another child and turned back to find that the errant child is not where they had last seen them and reasonably expected them to be. I know I’ve done it a few times, per child!! It is terrifying and it is horrible, but I have been lucky enough that the said child was just hidden under a clothes rail (or decided to ditch me and walk back to the car (aged 3 and in a shopping centre!!)). 

What are we going to do? Chain our children to us? Take out two adults for every child so they never have a moment without adult supervision (Bill, I need to scratch my nose, eyes on Charlie for me) , or do we put in adequate safeguards and precautions and allow our kids to be kids? 

I would not expect that a 4 year old could easily climb into a gorilla enclosure, if I had been that parent I would likely have taken my eyes off the 4 year old for a moment. That seems a reasonable thing to do; perhaps the younger one cried, perhaps mum needed a tissue out of her bag, whatever, I’m pretty sure it never occurred to her or the other visitors that day that it would/could happen.

 Parents should look after their children, but there is only so much supervision it is reasonable to give. As sad as it is Harambe was killed it doesn’t make it anyone’s fault. Sometimes accidents just happen.


Follow me on Twitter @101madness or Facebook.com/themadnessthatismylife

Divorce; doing it right 

02 Monday May 2016

Posted by in Life, Motherhood, Relationships, Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , ,

I’ve not got many things right in my life; fewer as a parent, however one thing I have got right, weirdly, is divorce. 

Readers of my blog will know that last year Paul and I decided to go our separate ways, after 10 years and get divorced. We didn’t hate each other, we’d just moved on, grown out of each other and realised that we could probably be a lot happier living separate lives. 

It was difficult at first, we had to find a new kind of normal. Develop a new relationship, set new rules, agree new boundaries. Especially when (pretty damn quickly) we both started dating again. We had to argue, but not as a couple, as two people who’s children were depending on them to do the right thing. 

We had to agree on childcare, money, and a whole lot of logistics such as who was getting what from the house. I’m not going to lie, it was tough. On occasions I wanted to kill him! Did he not realise how difficult this was? But in reality we were both struggling to come to terms with our new lives. 

I think a pivotal time for me was when we first disagreed over money and my Chris said to me “no amount of money is worth your children’s mental health.” And that really hit home. It was true. We could do a lot of damage arguing over stupid things, but at the end of the day what we would achieve apart from upset kids? We had to work out things and we had to do it in a way that was amicable. More important than anything else was that we had to remain friends, which when you think about it isn’t that difficult; I liked him enough to marry him, have two children, he’s actually a good guy. We used to be best friends. 

And so we have spent the last year doing just that; being friends. We have spent Christmas together with our respective new partners, clubbed together to buy the boys presents or school uniform. He has keys to our house, I have keys to his. If I needed someone in the middle of the night and I couldn’t get hold of Chris, I know I could call Paul and (after much bitching and moaning) he would be there for me. 

Last week was our middle sons birthday, and so my Mum and Stepdad along with Chris’s parents, Paul, Chris and I all went out for dinner with the boys to celebrate. It means so much to me that our boys don’t have to choose between us, or feel guilty about being with one or the other of us. 

Paul has come round for dinner because he can’t be arsed to cook and I am cooking, so he’s come to get the boys and had dinner with us before taking them back to his. 

Today I’m at work and Chris has the boys. He will be dropping them off with Paul this afternoon. They have spoken to each other to arrange it. You know, like adults do. Not arguing and hating each other, just getting on. 

Because we get on it makes all those family occasions that bit easier; he still gets an invite, he still bitches about having to go, he sometimes shows up (probably more often than he did when we were together) and all my family still talk to him. His sister, who I love has come to visit me, I’ve visited her. 

And the weird thing is that people seem to find us doing this odd!! I don’t really understand why, after all, we are still a family, linked together through our children, we can’t change that; in truth, I wouldn’t want to. 

If you’ve enjoyed this please read my other posts or find me on Facebook: Facebook.com/themadnessthatismylife or on Twitter @101madness

Sticking plasters

29 Monday Feb 2016

Posted by in cold, Emotions, Life, Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,

  
I love the NHS. I pretty much live and breathe it. I work full time for the NHS and at weekends I work as a contractor for NHS Trusts on front line ambulances.  When I have a day off I am often to be found at the doctors or the dentists with one of the kids.  The NHS is awesome, always there when you need it.  Anyone who has been ill abroad will tell you that the NHS is something to be proud of.  If I am ill , I don’t have to think about whether I can afford to go to the hospital or the GP,  I can just go.  I might have to wait, the hospital or GP surgery may be a bit tired looking, but I know that I will be looked after. 
However good the NHS is though, it is not a lot of things; it isn’t social care, it isn’t a hotel and it most certainly isn’t a miracle worker.  Much as those who work in it would like to work miracles and cure each and every person who walks through the door. 

The NHS is stretched to breaking point everyday. There are a lot of reasons for this but some of them are easy to see. I’ve lost count of the number of times that I have been called to patients who aren’t really patients at all. They are desperately in need of help,  but not medical help. They need social care. Or social housing. They need their basic needs to be met,  but they do not really need an ambulance,  it’s just that there is no one else that they can call on a Sunday afternoon when they are at the end of their tether. When the loneliness hits hard and the prospect of not seeing a friendly face for another week is more than they can bear.  Or when caring for their loved one just becomes too heavy a burden to carry for another day, another night.  When they are desperate for a little bit of respite from the ceaseless pressure of responsibility for an old or dying loved one.

In the past this would have been dealt with, perhaps, by ringing another family member, or by a carer or a respite centre to give the family a break.  These days though, families are spread far apart and so with cuts to Local Authority budgets meaning that social care has been decimated,  there is no one to call. There is no relief, no respite in sight for a lot of these people; and so, in desperation, they call an ambulance.  And, in turn, because the ambulance crew can see that the family cannot cope, that it’s just too much,  we have no choice. We take them to hospital in the hope that given a few hours of space the family feel better, more able to continue in the thankless task of caring. We put a sticking plaster over society’s failure. 

And so there goes a hospital bed. A nurse,  a doctor, all of who’s time is taken up, instead of looking after the sick. And there goes that ‘protected’ NHS budget. The one that the government has pledged to increase. Only it’s not really an increase or protected at all, because now, instead of the money being spent on social care, and coming out of local authority budgets, it is coming out of the NHS one. The one that we hold so dear. And all the while the NHS covers up this deficit elsewhere, the worse it will get.

Then there are the lost souls. Those who drift, who sofa surf or sleep on park benches. Many of them mentally unwell but not acutely so; they don’t need a hospital, they just need somewhere to be warm; to be safe. Again there is no reason for them to be taken to hospital, but where else is there for them to go?  It takes a cold hearted person to leave a person on a park bench when you know they have nowhere else to go and it is minus 3 centigrade outside. And so yet again we, the ambulance crew, paid for by the NHS spend our time and your money phoning around charities, forgotten contacts in our patients phone, in the hope that we can find them a warm bed for the night. And if not, due to cuts in social housing, there being by no easy access hostels, we take them to the warm waiting room of the hospital.  And as we sit there sticking plasters on the plight of the homeless, another cardiac arrest call goes unanswered. Another person dies. 

Other patients are just too old; their bodies far too weak.  Sometimes it happens slowly, other times it is quick.  I recently went to a patient who was nearly 100 years old and barely lucid.  Struggling to even open his eyes; despite that, there was nothing significantly wrong with him; if I had to hazard a guess (and as I am helping to treat we have to do an educated one), I’d probably say it was just his time to go.  His body was just worn out.  He was nearly 100! But his daughter insisted he had been fine until he got pneumonia previously and was taken in hospital for a month.  Obviously the hospital had made him ill; before that he had been fine. Before that he had lived alone; was fine. There was no point telling her that maybe it was just his time to go.  That he had lived longer than most people, that the hospital that she was blaming by for the state of her father, probably was to blame, only not in the way that she thought; because years ago, her dad wouldn’t have been taken to hospital to be treated for the pneumonia, that nearly killed him. He would likely have just died. At home. Peacefully in his bed. Instead we dragged him off to A & E,  for more interventions. To prolong his life further such that it is.  And when he isn’t restored back to full health, no doubt his daughter will claim that the hospital killed him.  Because blame, it would seem is easier than the truth; that sometimes we just need to allow people to die.  Not play God and attempt miracles. We all have to die sometime. We all, as individuals and the NHS just need to learn to let them. 

The NHS cannot put a sticking plaster on the whole of society. As an ambulance crew friend once told me: if you just need a plaster, you don’t need us. 

If you’ve enjoyed this blog come find me on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/themadnessthatismylife/ or follow me on Twitter @101madness

33 Reasons. 

23 Tuesday Feb 2016

Posted by in Emotions, Life

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

, , , , , ,

  
We have fundamentally been doing it all wrong. Our approach has been flawed. We need a change in our justice system and it needs to happen soon. We are putting often the most vulnerable people in our society into places where they can never be expected to change, to thrive. We need to rehabilitate these children, these adults, not induct them into a life of unending criminality. We need to ensure that they are given opportunities for education, for employment, for change. To rehabilitate. 

Obviously for a few this may not be possible but for most it is. 

Our justice system should be less about just banging people up, and more about rehabilitation, re-education. It makes sense, and it’s about time that we stop keep saying it, and actually started to do something that will begin to achieve it. A shake up of prisons and children’s custody, away from just punishment, moving toward change. Hope, education; rehabilitation.  

I know this absolutely. I know this because I have experienced it. From both sides of the fence; as a criminal, a habitual offender who found herself locked up in one of these establishments; and also, perhaps uniquely as one of those who has the keys, literally, to assisting in that rehabilitation. 

If we were to meet today, I would introduce myself as Kate, a successful career woman. A mother of 3 with ambitions and goals and a plan as to how to achieve them. You would see a smartly dressed, probably crazy haired, confident woman, literally holding the keys to a prison in my hands. 

Had I met you 11 years ago it would have been a very different story. I would have likely been introduced to you as a prisoner within that very same prison. A heroin addict, with 33 criminal convictions; shoplifting, theft, possession of class A drugs. 26 years old, weighing 5.5 stone, I would have looked a very different person to the one I am today. 
In my early teens I began to take drugs and swiftly found myself  with a heroin addiction. Crime was my way of life and I was a repeat offender, with no hope of anything really, certainly not of ever living. 
At the age of 25, after 33 convictions I finally wound up in prison, just for a few weeks, but I was lucky. In those few weeks I was nurtured and helped and I found an idiom of peace. A snippet of chance that things could be different. I was offered respite from the continual drudgery of crime, and drug taking and I glimpsed a different life. 

I volunteered to help people. I optimised Big Society. I helped set up a charity and I found work. I got a degree and my life continued in an upward trajectory. Today I find myself responsible for the substance misuse needs of large groups of vulnerable people; adults and children. I run a budget of many millions a year. I hold keys to the prison I was once locked up in. I am rehabilitation personified. 

So it absolutely pains me to tell you that whilst rehabilitation is the key to changing lives for the better, there is a fundamental flaw. People in the UK today cannot be rehabilitated and move forward, away from their pasts. They can absolutely be rehabilitated, but there is no point in rehabilitating them because, as it stands they can never be seen to have changed. Their past haunts them like a shadow in the night; threatening at any point to pull it all away. I know this because I have experienced it myself. 

Part of my recovery and rehabilitation has been to help others. I went to university, I got a degree and a post graduate certificate, I gained a teaching qualification, sharing what I have learnt with others. I spend my days demanding the best services for the patients within prisons that I am responsible for. I trained as a first aider and gave up my weekends setting up and then volunteering on an SOS bus,  helping those who were drunk or ill, making sure they were safe. I followed on from this by training as an Emergency Care Assistant and working one day a week on frontline ambulances. I love it, I’m good at it. So you can imagine my devastation when I suddenly found out that I wasn’t able to do a job that I love, might not be able to again.  The reason? A renewed DBS check which this time (not sure how they missed it last time) they had seen my 11-20 year old criminal convictions. Never mind that I have a demonstrable track record, much more recent, of being a stand up citizen. Never mind that in my full time job I hold a position of significant responsibility. Never mind that I regularly walk in and out of the prisons that I am responsible for using the keys I am trusted to hold. No; convictions, from what feels to me like another life, indeed are from over a decade ago appeared to supersede it all. I can no longer work in a job that I am good at, that I love, because I made bad decisions at 13 years of age. 

And so whilst I wholeheartedly agree that rehabilitation needs to happen, that can work, the sad truth is that society is not currently set up to see it that way. We rehabilitate people and then cut them off at the knees when they try to apply for any decent job, because employers don’t see the rehabilitation. They don’t see that someone has desisted from reoffending because they have changed; what they see is a six page long DBS check giving them 33 reasons not to employ that rehabilitated ex offender. 

And so whilst I believe wholeheartedly in rehabilitation, I think that we are in danger of setting people up to fail if we don’t address the issue of how we recognise that rehabilitation as a society. People can change, but only if we let them. 

So many choices. 

13 Saturday Feb 2016

Posted by in Life

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

One extra hot, one shot, small, skinny, latte please; there are five decisions to make just to order my favourite coffee. That’s how I like it, add a sachet of sugar and it’s just about perfect. I do have to wonder however if it is a good thing to be able to have so many choices to make over something as simple as a coffee. Especially when I’m in the queue at Costa behind a queue of equally demanding coffee drinkers, whilst the barista is run ragged making up ever more complicated orders. I notice in Starbucks you can now pick which continent you would like your coffee beans to come from. Even I’m not that fussy!! 

Growing up there was a choice of black or white coffee. Occasionally, if you were lucky you might be offered a filter or instant but normally it was the latter. I remember it being the height of sophistication to go to Wimpy with my Mum to have a “frothy coffee”. 

It seems standard nowadays to be able to personalise pretty much anything…put an address in your sat nav and you might have to choose between the shortest route, the longest, the fastest; do you want to avoid tolls, or maybe you would prefer to totally avoid main roads? 

Even posting a letter is complicated; working out the sizes and the difference between signed for, tracked and special delivery requires a diploma at least, maybe even a degree; with honours! 

Picking a school for your children had become a trauma beyond most people’s comprehension. It begins with picking childcare, do you get a childminder, send the kids to a playgroup, a Montessori nursery, or a standard nursery. Then you have to pick a school. Do you want a church school, an academy, a voluntary controlled school, a state school, a primary school or an infants school? Perhaps a church school would fit your child (and you) better? It moves on to secondary; sports academy, or science? Grammar or high school?The lists go on and on. Gone are the days when you went to the local school. Nowadays there are so many elements to consider that it makes my head hurt. My poor befuddled brain struggles to make sense of it all and the differences between them. 

The same happens when you try to buy a phone, do you want an iPhone, a Samsung, Nokia or a Motorola? Android, IOS 9 or Windows? Which provider? There are so many to choose from.

There used to be 4 TV channels, now we can pick from hundreds. Sometimes the stress of it all means I just switch it off. 

Some of the reasons we have so many choices are good; I currently have choice of 5 different bins for my waste: food waste bin, paper recycling, plastics and glass recycle bin, general waste, and garden waste. Whilst being complicated it makes sense that we can’t keep chucking everything into landfill, we need to recycle wherever we can, however it doesn’t help to keep things simple! 

Even mundane things have so many choices. I’m pretty sure my washing machine has at least 50 different cycles I can choose from. The result? I use one; the same one each time. I know where I am with that wash! 

Do we really need all these choices? Was the world that bad when we went to the local school along with 95% of the kids we grew up with?  Or when there was only a choice between watching The Waltons on a Sunday morning or going outside to play?

Is it any wonder then that so many of us are stressed and anxious all of the time? Under pressure to constantly make a choice, the right choice, often without fully understanding all of the options we are choosing between (especially in the case of phones, or is that just me)? 

Is the world that much better because I can choose between 120 different ways to make my coffee? We live in a world full of people living constantly in the angst of maybe making a bad choice, the wrong decision, getting it wrong. Whilst it might seem a small thing to pick out a coffee, when you add up all those small decisions that we make everyday it starts to get mind blowing. It’s hard enough to make big decisions let along to constantly have to make choices about what, in the grand scheme of things are relatively trivial. 

Just because we can have so many options available to us doesn’t mean we should always consider offering them. 

Still it’s nice to know that those other 49 wash cycles are there if I need them…

In 5 years. 

06 Saturday Feb 2016

Posted by in Life

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

It’s one of those questions that parents ask their children whether they are 3 years old or 25 years old; “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Actually it may start off as as that but gradually, over the years, it might change to be said in a more accusing tone, with the implication that person being asked is somehow whittling away their life. That they should know by now, should be working towards it. 

It’s asked in a different form at job interviews “Where do you see yourself in 5 years?” And the expectation is that you will have a plan, a route forward, marked out with incremental markers along the way; earn more; work less hours; get a promotion; run the company. 

I’ve always thought that it was an extremely difficult question to answer. It’s also one full of pit falls. What if I say I want to be running my own business, earning lots of money and yet in reality in 5 years I’m still in the same job that I’ve been in since I left school, because I actually quite like it and it suits my lifestyle. Have I somehow failed at life? 

What if I say I want to get a degree in maths, and I enrol and then halfway through I realise that it’s just not adding up for me? That I’m bored, that I’ve changed my mind, actually I rather fancy doing anything, as long as it doesn’t involve me having to do sums? Am I a drop out? A failure? Or have I just decided that for me failing would be sticking at doing something that I hate, in order to fulfil everyone’s expectations of my answer to a question I answered 2 years ago, in a different time, a different place? 

 The past few months I’ve had more than one reason to look at what I want to do in relation to work, I love my job but sometimes I despair of it. I wonder if I could do something else, but one thing is for sure; if anyone had asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, the answer wouldn’t have been the job I do now. Not because I couldn’t imagine doing the job I do now, but because I didn’t even know it existed. Or the job I had before that. Or the one before that. 

Why can we not just see where life takes us? What’s wrong with trying a few career pathways/lifestyles before we find the one that suits us? And why does it have to be one thing? I currently have two jobs, both very different from each other but both I love. They fulfill me in different ways. Neither would I ever have put myself in as a child, nor 5 years ago. We are under pressure from such a young age to plan and know what we are going to be/do when we grow up, but surely that’s just limiting ourselves? Sometimes there’s nothing like waiting to see where life takes us, because inevitably life takes us on the path it chooses, not the route we planned aged 3. 

Crushed. 

21 Monday Dec 2015

Posted by in Emotions, Friends, Life, love, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , ,

Crushed. I am crushed. 

The grief comes in waves, great big tsunamis that don’t just knock me over, they throw me off my feet with a staggering ferociousness, ripping chunks out of me. 

To the outsider perhaps, I have too much grief. Too many tears. But they just cannot understand the connection that we had. The shit that we went through.they don’t know the times that I just had a feeling that he needed me, and I tracked him down, sometimes just to check that he was actually alive. 

Then today, out of the blue, the ending I half knew was coming but fought at every opportunity materialised . And the finality is almost too much to bear. It’s not fair. How come so many get to live, hateful and cruel and yet you, you who loved so much despite all the reasons not to, weren’t given that chance. 

And I’m raging at the insanity of a world where evil lives and kindness dies. Where you don’t reap what you sow. The randomness of it all is baffling.

And it terrifies me, because there was never anything I could do.  And I tried. I honestly did. Me; who’s job it is to help save addicts, albeit not personally, but through my work; I couldn’t even save you. And if I can’t do that knowing how much I cared, I don’t know how I can help others. 

But I know I need to try. I know that you would want to give anyone the chance to be free of addiction. And if I can’t save you maybe I can help someone else. Maybe it will be their turn even though it was never yours. 

You told me so many times how proud you were of me, but I want you to know that I am proud of you too; for being you despite of all the pain. For living in the face of despair and continuing to love. 

Most of all I want you to know that no matter what happened I love you, in our own fucked up way we loved each other despite not being a couple. Despite everything I hope you know I still cared.  

A new dawn. 

09 Thursday Jul 2015

Posted by in kids, Life, love, Mornings, Motherhood, waking

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged. A lot has been going on and I just couldn’t seem to decide on which thing to focus on; however this morning it became blatantly obvious. 

I am one of those people who wakes up and is ready to go. I don’t need to slowly waken and set lots of different alarms. Most mornings I’m awake before my alarm even goes off. And I savour those moment when the kids come in for a cuddle and tell me they love me. This morning the youngest told me that he is most comfortable “when I hold him”, which just about melted my heart. Those kids are awesome. 

So why is it that nearly every day, or so it feels. I end up just about ready to nail said child/children to the wall!!
Take this morning for example; lovely cuddles completed, I tell the boys to go get dressed. This shouldn’t be a problem, after all last night I laid their clothes out for them. It should just be a case of putting them on, a feat that, on a good day they can manage in under a minute. So why, today, did it take nearly an hour? An hour interspersed with me alternately sending youngest to the naughty step to get dressed, to me screaming at him to just get dressed, only to have him wander in 5 minutes later, wearing a pair of pants and s single sock, moaning that he can’t open the can of soap he just found in his room?!  WTH were you doing in your room, I ask? Why aren’t you dressed? “Because I want to wash my dirty hands” came the reply. Perfectly reasonable you might think, however, there was nothing dirty on his hands 5 minutes ago and now, when he was supposed to be getting dressed, somehow his whole hands are covered in red pen?! So, swallowing my rage, I squirt some soap into his hands and tell him to be quick about washing them and then, GET DRESSED. 

10 minutes later, he is back, this time he has two socks and a filthy school T-shirt on, that is most certainly not the nicely cleaned and ironed one is laid out for him the previous evening, and instead looks like he has used it to clean off a homeless guys bare feet. “Why aren’t you wearing the t-shirt I left out for you? Why aren’t you dressed? Where did you find that thing?” I ask astounded. To which the reply is that this was all he could find?!?! I damn near rip the filthy t-shirt off his head and walk into his room and pick up the neat pile of trousers and t-shirt I left sitting, prominently RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF HIS ROOM!!

I send him back to the naughty step to get dressed. 

5 minutes later progress appears to have been made; well he now has a clean t-shirt on, however now he has a new gripe! Last night in a clearly weak moment which I have regretted from the moment the words were out of my mouth, I agreed that he could have a packed lunch today. This is a rare treat that he is rarely allowed (I mean at his age they get free school meals, why would I do a packed lunch), so you’d think the child would be grateful, but no, not a chance, even the sandwich filling turned into a battle, him wanting PB&J and me insisting he couldn’t. Anyway, this morning he has decided that he wants to swap the contents of the lunch box I’ve made for him as there’s not enough in it!! Arrgghhh, GET DRESSED!!! And give me that lunch box so I can launch it out of the window! 

The flip side of this is that as he can see me getting increasingly frustrated with his younger brother, the middle one takes the opportunity to shine; he is dressed with no prompting from me, brushes his teeth at the first request, prepares his packed lunch and sits in the front room all ready to go calling out to his younger brother to stop being naughty. Yay. At least one of my children can behave thinks I, prematurely as it turns out. 

The next time I come downstairs, miraculously the youngest is now dressed and comes out of the kitchen carrying a bag of chocolate, which I happen to know was in the back of one of the top cupboards, asking if he can have it for breakfast. No. You cannot, and GET YOUR BLOODY SHOES ON!!! I scream as I grab the chocolate and slam it into the bin, “no one is having any chocolate in this house ever again!” A perfectly reasonable response I feel! 

It is then that the middle one, decides to tell me that when he had climbed the cupboards to reach said chocolate, he “may” have broken the door on the cupboard below! Closer inspection reveals that the cupboard below no longer actually has a door, it is more that a door is leant against the cupboard at a jaunty angle, and that the hinges have ripped out so spectacularly that there is no hope of ever securing it again. 

At this point there is no stopping the rage which I have been swallowing back nearly all morning. Both boys are dispatched to sit in the front room and behave until I’ve made my coffee and we can go.  Do they think this is good behaviour? Do they think I want to give them nice things and a new house if they can’t look after this one? I spend two further minutes berating them before I go off to make the much needed coffee! 

We leave the house without further incident (if you don’t count the daily squabble over who gets to sit in the front) and once we are all safely strapped in the car, I look across at them both and my heart melts. They are both grinning at me, and the youngest cheekily pokes his tongue out and tells me he loves me. The middle one leans forward to plant a kiss on my lips and a hug round my neck. They apologise.  Peace is restored. 

I drop them off and we have a hug and a cuddle, and as I drive away I am determined that tomorrow it will be different. Tomorrow I will be calm. I will not shout, I will be the perfect mum. It won’t happen though, I’ll try, they will try, but they are two mischievous boys and I am an overtired, harassed mum of three. Whilst it may not be ideal, and I’d  prefer we didn’t have the rows in the first place, the fact that we all forgive and forget so freely, that despite everything we all leave with a kiss and a cuddle, feeling loved surely says a lot more about our live than the fact we were at loggerheads 5 minutes before…doesn’t it?! 

Anyway tomorrow is a new dawn!