Grin and Tonic

For 5 months, since my marriage ended, I have been Woe Me (hand swept across brow in 18th century damsel in distress sort of way).   I’m ok with this.  While I’m a glass half-full kind of person, occasionally you are allowed to admit the glass is tilting.… usually my wine glass but that’s a different blog post!

When you have devoted ten years to supporting and loving someone who then ends it to go and live a different life (one they had already had been living for some time without telling you), you stare at the on-coming lights of their car, wide eyed, open mouthed, unable to move, hoping someone pushes you off the road just in time. 

I have been like a rabbit in headlights since it happened, and while my amazing friends have often had to save me from being squashed, I still sat, stunned in the onslaught.  But I realise now, that while my friends will always be there to save my life, I will end up as roadkill unless I stand up, close my mouth, blink and walk off the road.   Walk from where the grass was full of thorns to the side where the grass is greener and lusher and full of beautiful flowers. 

The sandwich years have had lots of ups and downs.  The tension of the pull between the needs of my young children and the needs of my mum and dad have wrung me dry at times. Choices, challenges and a lot of miles up the motorway.

But the tension has been eased by great times too…. everything my children do, good times with my mum and dad, and always, always the love and wine my friends bring into my life. 

But these few months have pulled me stick thin… (all that wine makes this a literary description rather a literal one).  My kids need me more than they ever have and my mum is deteriorating and needs me too. As I struggle to keep everyone afloat though, I have realised I was beginning to drown.  Events of the last week had me gasping for my last breath.

So I have two choices.  Sit, stunned, wondering what happened to Option A…. or stand, defiant and go kick the shit out of Option B.   

My kids need me. My mum and dad need me. But most of all, I need me.   Out of the worst time of my life, I am going to strive towards the best time of my life. The people who depend on me most, are also the ones who motivate me most. There is no bread without filling. No filling without bread.   But I can decide if the Sandwich years will continue with me as a lacklustre limp petrol station pre-wrap filling, or a gorgeous gourmet 5 star restaurant filling. With relish.

For the last 5 months I have been Woe Me (hand swept across brow in distress).

For the next 50 years I am going to be Wow Me!! (hand up in the air in defiance).

Be warned you in the car – I may have been a rabbit in headlights…… but I just turned into a lion.

I am alone but I have been so touched, and that is making all the difference.

This is what I talked about it my last blog.  Six days of being wrapped around my girls, having fun in the sun.  After the first day I put away my laptop and just focussed on them.   I am so used to working in and around them, every moment a push and a pull towards them from my work, from them towards my work, that it took me a moment to remember that this was a holiday. That perhaps I can work when they are with their dad, that perhaps this time was all about them and me, and making touching times.

This was our first ‘separated’ holiday.  They cried. I cried. And it’s really important to cry. Really important to acknowledge that the family we had is gone. Ruby keeps saying’ but I want to be a family again’.  We can’t.    But we can create a new family. So as Sheryl Landberg has said about the death of her husband, we can’t have Option  A anymore.  But we’re going to kick the shit out of Option B. 

So I shut down the laptop and opened up my arms. I slept with them every night, I held hands with them during the day. We got into a routine of having ‘massagy’ in the evenings, rubbing after-sun cream on our after sunned bodies.  We sat around in the shade and said everything. We lay around in the sun and said nothing.

And I have left them now. It is time for their dad to have them.  I am staying on for a couple of days to work. Might as well work on my tan as well as my book.  I am not sure I will ever get used to the separation of our family. Of walking away from them.  I’m not sure they ever will.  So I am a little bereft today, shadowing the ice cream stores and the restaurants I have just been with them, except now I am alone.

But I’m not going to focus on that.  I cannot focus on that.  Option A is hanging out with my girls. But I can’t have that.  So I’m going to kick the shit out of Option B.

I am sitting in the Spanish sun with a glass of Rose in a cafe they were not, and I am going to embrace my alone time.   This is my time and I will learn to love it (so everyone tells me!). But I can love it more because of what went before.   I’ve been super loved. And super touched. 

So much of what I write about in this blog is the push and pull of living the sandwich years and the struggle of caring for my mum while being a mum, and having no mum to guide me.

But something strange has been happening lately. 

Sometimes as I scream outwardly for them to pick up their clothes, I scream inwardly for them to grow up.  The sheer physical and mental effort of caring for three small people can be overwhelming.   I don’t really mean it of course. I want them to stay exactly the way they are now.

But Daisy is starting to fill her shoes as the eldest daughter. Sometimes this makes me sad, and sometimes it makes me proud.  At home I have started saying something with worrying regularity:

“Daisy, there is only room for one mother in this house,” as she gives out orders left, right and centre.   She admonishes Ruby for her (complete lack of) table manners, and tells Poppy to hurry up in the mornings.   She tells me what time to go to bed!

She makes me laugh, taking charge of the world, in order to make sense of her own.   She likes to know when I am going to bed at night, what I am doing, where I am going. Not only is she taking on the sub-mother role in the house but on holiday she moved up a gear.  It was like going on holiday with my actual mother.

Around the pool, I like to ensure a more rounded tan.  On the way to the beach Daisy suddenly stopped in her tracks. “Now you’re going to be keeping your top on on the beach aren’t you?”

I laughed. “Daisy, we’re in Europe. Most women go topless on the beach” To which a stoic white face responded with “Well let’s be really clear about this… you are not.”

What followed then was a negotiation of epic proportions where we finally agreed that if more women were topless around us then I could (but not stand up), but if more women around us were covered up then I wasn’t.

We found our spot and I unpacked the unbelievable amount of things that is seemingly required for three small people to survive two hours on a beach. Daisy was already counting. She counted three times but I could see by her shoulders she was admitting defeat.   I decided though that I would sit on the fence and be as discreet as I could while not getting strap lines.

Over the course of the next hour she fussed about me saying things like “cover yourself up” and “Mummy, please, someone’s coming”  and “have you got enough cream on?”  It made me smile as my mother’s words flitted around my ears.

Yes, I am touched in so many ways….. and that is making all the difference.

And we do still have a family of sorts. Tonight I am meeting them all for dinner. Option A occasionally can be done.  In the meantime, I’m off to work on those tan lines.

My mum had a hands on approach to love. There were hugs and cuddles and bedtime snuggles.  Touches and tickles and bedtime kisses.

Even when I was 40, she would take my hand to walk down the road, and throw her legs over mine on the sofa.  But it is her hands that fill my childhood memories – our hands embedded in a bowl of cake mix, our hands entwined on the sofa, her hands knitting me jumpers that were always too long, her hand stroking my face goodnight. They stroked my hair when we watched TV, they stroked my back when I couldn’t sleep.

The week of her stroke when the doctors told us to prepare for the worst, and as she clung on to life, I clung on to her hands. I held them tight and the desperation of thinking I would never see them or feel them again nearly broke me.   She was dying and her hands would never touch me again.  So I pulled the curtain around us and I pressed her hand in some clay I had got to take an imprint of my new daughter’s footprint.  Like so much with the sandwich years, my child’s footprint and my mum’s handprint were moulded from the same clay.

I sent it off and it was made into a silver charm which I wear every day…. her hand always by mine.  She didn’t die – not in exact terms – and even now, she reaches out the one part of her she can move and I take her hand, and we sit.  Touching love.   And I always wear her handprint on my wrist to remind me of her handprint on my heart.

It felt strange when I married someone who wasn’t really a touchy person. Love is a hands on thing. For me anyway.  I think you are either a hand holder or you are not.  Maybe it’s something you learn from your mother.  I certainly learnt it from mine.

And I am the same mother to my girls. I’m a hand holder. I love the feel of our fingers entwined, or their little hands cupped perfectly inside mine.

I touch them every chance I get… a hug here, a squeeze there. And when we all watch TV we are entwined like slithering snakes, a wonderful weaving of arms and legs.

Daisy is growing up. I’ve been brutally informed I am no longer allowed to hug her in the school yard. I am, however,  permitted a perfunctory pat on the shoulder (and have had to practise with her to ensure I get it right!). Yet as soon as we are home she jumps up and wraps her legs and arms around me, and no goodnight is complete without a back rub and a hug….. just as long as nobody sees!

Poppy is a tree hugger, an animal hugger and a people hugger – she loves to hold hands and snuggle.   Poppy touches instinctually, her sleep routine at night a touch fest of stroking her ‘Pinkie’ a strange soft cloth doll she’s had since she was a baby.

And Ruby is a born toucher. She hugs me like there is no tomorrow, she puts me in head locks and won’t let go. Every night is a wrestle to wiggle my arm free from her clutches.  She grasps life and I know she will touch every corner of it.

And so our growing menagerie of animals is like touch therapy right now.  As I face single-dom and single parenting I miss my mum’s touch more than ever. Even now.  And while I touch the girls with reassuring hugs and stokes (and restrained school yard pats) and they touch me with clinging intensity as their world changes shape, the animals seem to know we all need a little extra touch of love.

The dog never leaves my side. He sat yesterday with his head on my leg as I wrote at the kitchen table.

The cat purrs his sultry sleek body around my legs and body, literally rubbing me with affection.

The kitten, well, he’s just a small ball of love. His intensity to need and give affection is only matched by Ruby.

And you know, even the hamster has his value. I love the fact he comes with instructions to Handle Daily.  I think we should all come with those instructions. Poppy is touched by the responsibility to care for her little bite-sized ball of need (bite-sized indeed if my cat anything to do with it!).

And so as the rawness of our changing lives exposes us to the harsh elements of life, the touches of our loving lives protects us in a warm cocoon of care.

And tomorrow we pack our bags and head into the sun for a week. We need it. I need to hang out with my girls without the pressure and pain we have lived under for the last few months.  We need to lie entangled in bed, swim and slip around each other in the pool, sit on the shore, feet piled together under sand, walk hand in hand with the warmth of the sun touching our faces.

A touch-fest of love.

I’m single. But I am touched. And that is making all the difference.

What a difference a year makes.  This week in May has always been a bit full on.  This one week holds host to three of the most most important birthday’s in my family – my mum, one of my daughters and my husband.

 Last year it was my mum’s 80th and we celebrated with a garden party.

 Last year my daughter turned 7 and we celebrated with a Frozen party.

 Last year my husband was still my husband, and we celebrated as a family.

 What a difference a year makes.

Last year, I hung bunting and made macaroons in three different colours.  I dressed my mum in her fabulous turquoise outfit (the one she bought for a party one time; the one she wore for the professional family photos we had taken before her stroke that now hang on my wall to remind me of how gorgeous she had once looked; the one that I now think she will be dressed in after she dies. .. is that weird?  I just want her to look nice. Look fabulous. I know the last act I will do for my mum is apply her lipstick before the lid is secured.)

So, I dressed her in her fabulous turquoise outfit and I applied her lipstick and she looked amazing.  All her friends came and we sat around in the sunshine and celebrated 80 years of being loved my her. We put photos of her up around the kitchen, from all the times of her life, and we took family photos with her still in this time of her life.

But that life is diminishing. Over the last year she has deteriorated. For her birthday this year I got the train up to Belfast but there was no bunting, or macaroons. I don’t even think I took a photo.  I took her out for lunch with her friends but she slept in the wheelchair while we talked. I took her out to lunch the next day with dad and we got her a hot fudge Sundae but her face stared into the distance until it melted into an Olaf puddle.

She used to stare into space reminiscing about her life. Now I think she stares into space, searching for the place where she can close her eyes for good.   She no longer wants to live.  She is tired of living, and we are tired of watching her suffer. She is in pain. She is is despair. She is in limbo.

Last year we celebrated my mum’s life.  But this year we know that we have to let that life go.

Last year, my little 7 year old celebrated her birthday with all thing’s Frozen. I hung bunting and made an Olaf cake. She dressed as Ana, and a multitude of Ana’a and Elsa’s friends arrived and squealed with childish delight. Poppy was a blaze of beauty and I will never forget her face when she tapped the balloon with the Magician’s wand and it turned into a real fluffy rabbit in front of our eyes, her face alight with childish wonder.

She danced and squealed surrounded by friends and spun in a spin of happiness, her life perfect in every way.  She got childish toys for her presents, including an Ana doll.

This year she didn’t want a theme.  Certainly not Frozen. That’s all too babyish. This year she dressed in a pretty dress but she applied lipgloss (her nanna’s granddaughter!) and they danced to Taylor Swift that was less spinning and more hip shaking…. little women.    She got no dolls this year, but an ipod touch.

Last year I celebrated my daughter’s childhood.  But this year I know that I am slowly letting that go.

Last year my husband turned 45.I made him a cake and bought him presents. I hung bunting and balloons and we had a family day.

This year, there is no longer a family. He has taken them off for a birthday lunch and movie while I take down the bunting from Poppy’s birthday. It is not needed for him any more in this house. He has his own home now for bunting to hang. One that is for him and my girls, but not for me.

Last year I celebrated my husband’s birthday. But this year I have to learn to let him go.

As the memories of “Let it Go” still echo around this house (so many times was it played) the movie is long gone but the sentiments sing along in my head still.

What a difference a year makes.  I look back on what I had last year, but I know I must let it all go..

It’s not that my Wonder Pants are slipping… it’s just maybe right now they’re giving me a wedgey.  I still have no doubt I will get through this………. it’s just that the getting through this is so so hard.

I have really struggled the last few days.  Separation is like going down a ladder in the dark, not knowing where the bottom is.  Every time I think I’ve hit a new low… a lower low emerges.  There’s always another step to take.

For years I have had to make terrible choices.  Sandwiched between the practical needs of my mum and dad, and the emotional needs of my three girls, I have often had to choose which to respond to over the other.

In the days and weeks after mum’s stroke, I had to choose between saying goodbye to her over getting to know my new baby.

In the weeks and months that followed, I had to choose between helping my dad get used to caring for mum in her paralysed, brain damaged state, and helping my daughters get used to school and montessori.

In the years that have passed I have had to constantly choose who to care for, and who to abandon (for that was how it felt).

Then, my mum’s need was so great and my grief so profound, the weight on me fell in her favour.

Now, my children’s need is so great and their grief so profound, the weight on me falls in their favour.

But the pull is wringing me out.

I go to Belfast and hear the pain in my children’s voice as they beg me to come home.

I stay here, and hear the strain in my dad’s voice as he deals with mum’s deteriorating state.

I spent years crippled with the guilt of leaving my girls so I could look after my mum, and now I feel I am abandoning my mum so I can be there for my girls.   I am thinned out from the endless choices and pulling and wrenching apart of my love and my loyalties.

And in the midst of this, there is another pull. Me.  Future Me, Wonder Pants Me, Opportunity Knocks Me.

As my dreams of marriage and family are shattered, another dream is being fulfilled. My lifelong dream to be a writer. To have a significant piece of work recognised and published is dangling in front of me like a sparkling gin after a long hot day.  At one of the worst times of my life, I have been offered a gift.   The disaster in my life of my marriage ending is tarnishing the joy of that gift, yet the opportunity of that gift is making that disaster almost bearable.

I have to grasp it. I have to take this chance.  But where do I add strain to give me some slack?

On Friday night I had to drop the girls to their dad’s apartment for the first time.   They were so excited to show me around (for them this is a wonderful thing, for me this is like being slowly strangled) and then I had to leave them, barely able to see the road through my sobs to drive 500 meters back to my house to spend the weekend alone.   There is nothing I can do except get used to it.

But there has been a loneliness to my life for years. I’ve a mother who can’t speak to me, and a husband who couldn’t hear me.  I have children who need me to be their mum, not their confidante.

So I have always have to be strong…. my mum’s love nurturing me from the past, my girl’s love nurturing me in the present. And my friend’s love nurturing me into the future.

But then when I think about the silence of the house and sounds of solitude….. I quickly look around me.  This is what ‘working from home’ looks like!

Because even when I’m alone I have company.   Olly would surgically attach himself to me if he could.  Tinker Tom is just so cool I want to marry him.  Just a rub across my ankles and purr in my ear and I’m love-punched for the day.  And so as if I didn’t have enough on my plate, I had to add to my magnificent menagerie of madness.

Animals calm me in a way little else can (gin and chocolate not withstanding).

But this weekend we doubled our trouble.

Poppy is finding it hard to adjust to a world where being with one parent means she can’t be with the other. I call her the Animal Whisperer and so given her sadness we’ve agreed for her to have a hamster.   It is portable enough to go with her to her dad’s and dependent enough to need care and love. She’s even very sweet.   I’ve never seen a child so happy, and if I could put a smile back on my little girl’s face then I will get her 100 hamsters.

But that’s not enough. I wanted a kitten for my birthday back in February but because we have a male cat we needed a young kitten. He arrived today. I can hardly contain myself.   As I write this now I have the kitten prancing around the kitchen, the dog asleep at my feet (after howling in horror that he was being usurped), and the cat mewling indignation on the windowsill.

 I am pulled every which way. My Wonder Pants are straining as I try to figure out how to care for all the parts of my life that need my care. So it’s nice every now and then, for me to be cared for….Every Wonder Pants Woman needs a furry sidekick.

Peace of mind…..It’s a much undervalued state.

But if one thing the last few years has taught me, peace of mind is the most important.

I’m not talking about mindfulness. I’m not talking about meditation. I’m not even talking about having a quiet life (it feels like I haven’t had a quiet life since at least 1978!)

I’m talking about the state of mind whereby you are in charge of yourself.   Where no matter what is happening – good or bad – you have the power to accept it or change it, the power to live it or leave it, the power to feel it or forget it.

You can be lonely in the midst of a marriage.

You can be sad in the face of joy.

or

You can be happy in a moment of mundane.

You can be calm in the depths of disaster.

And the thing that makes the difference is peace of mind.

To me, not having peace of mind is when you allow someone else or something else to make you so mad in the head you feel powerless and unable to function properly.   Where you feel tormented by torrents of thoughts that won’t go away. Where you doubt yourself, and become a fraught and furious caricature of yourself.

It happened to an extent in the first awful weeks and months after my mum’s stroke. It was the first real feeling of powerlessness in my life. Even losing the babies, while traumatic and painful, didn’t make me feel I couldn’t do something, or at least eventually, come to terms with it.  But losing my mum was so primal and core it took a long time before I could find the peace of mind to accept her situation.  I wasn’t in charge of my own happiness, and it nearly drove me mad (you might say it did, nicely packaged up as post-natal depression).

And now I realise that despite all the grief and turmoil of separation, I am actually calmer than I have been in – literally – years.  I’m in the midst of a maelstrom of madness and disaster, but I have an inner voice keeping me steady. It’s saying, “you will be ok.”  It’s a voice I’ve missed.

The torment of trying to fix something that was ultimately unfixable ate away at my brain, at my peace, at my personality until I was a fractured piece of myself.   But that torment is over, and my inner voice is stronger and louder than I have allowed her to be for a long, long time.

I may be going through one of the worst times of my life.  And I’m feeling the pain and strain. I have hurt beyond belief and grief beyond relief.  Bu I know I’m back in charge of my happiness.

I have peace of mind…. and that is making all the difference.

This weekend I was the damsel in distress. But it was no prince who rescued me. It was a clan of wondrous women.

I’m out the other side broken but better and bolder. Sometimes you just have to jump into the fire to be reborn.

This weekend was tough (how many times have I written that in the last three months!).   But in a series of pretty spectacularly bad weekends this one was spectacularly bad.

Sometimes we make the stupidest mistakes for the smartest reasons.   Despite quiet ‘really?’s’ from a couple of friends, I decided to go on a pre-planned weekend away with the man who left me three months ago, and our children.  With two other families who are his best friends.  In a caravan. Yes, read that again.  I really did.

I’d love to blame the gin for my ludicrous stupidity, but I think it was just hope.  Hope that despite the end of our marriage, it didn’t mean the end of our family.

I did obviously consider not going, but I didn’t have the girls last weekend, they were horrified when I suggested I wouldn’t go, and frankly I thought I could suck up the pain because it would be considerably less than sitting at home on my own missing my girls for three days.

 I don’t know if I was wrong because I don’t now know how painful it would have been to sit at home while he took the girls on a fun weekend I organised and booked.  For several years, I have nurtured and supported Poppy’s interest in fossils and so a weekend on the Jurassic coast of England was something she’s been looking forward to all year.  Her heroine is Mary Anning, who collected fossils as a child in the early 19^th Century and discovered the Ichthyosaur dinosaur in Lyme Regis. Last year I took Poppy to the Natural History Museum in London to see the actual huge dinosaur fossil Mary found, and this year Poppy dressed up as her for Book Day (I was rather proud of her that she didn’t care that no-one in the school knew who Mary Anning was, or had ever read The Fossil Girl!)  I didn’t want to miss it.

 So I don’t know if I was wrong. But I know now I wasn’t right.   In normal circumstances trying to pretend your family is intact three months after it disintegrated is probably not a good idea.

Travelling Ryanair at 6am, arriving to the worst weather since, well, the dinosaurs, and being holed up in a tin can is one of the worst ideas since, well, the dinosaurs.

But then my women came to my rescue. Some rescued me figuratively, and one rescued me literally. She drove 5 hours to Lyme Regis so I could still go away with my girls but have an outlet. We stayed in a B&B and ate dinner one of the nights so I only had one in the caravan. I joined the girls again the next day. Others kept me going with calls of courage and care.   Another sent me a letter of love by email from Canada. I’ve never even met her but she knows my circumstances and wrote to me anyway.

I won’t dish my dirty pants here but it was truly awful. Two people cannot parent as a couple, when they are hostile individuals.   Walking away from my girls to stay in a b&b because it was too awful to stay was a new low.

But the real low was having to accept our family is gone.  The girls have a family with me, and they have a family with him. But the weekend proved there is no longer a family with us all.

Meanwhile my other family was very much intact, as we rally round my mum.  Added to the stress was the fact there was very little mobile coverage in Lyme Regis – I know they discovered the dinosaurs but do they still have to live in the dark ages?  My mum was in hospital and I was trying to keep up to date with events – hanging off a cliff edge on one foot with my arm in the air trying to get a half bar of coverage.  She’s doing ok again, but I should have been there. But I needed to be here.  Really, there are just some days you feel like a gin before it’s really acceptable.

But you know what, I tried. Maybe the weekend wasn’t a disaster.  It allowed me to see what I needed to see. That I must let go.  I will always hang on to the family that has nurtured and supported me.  But I must let go of the one that has damaged me.

I am starting a new family with my girls, and what makes me so proud is that it won’t just be them and me. It will be them, me and all my women warriors.

So I’m putting on my Wonder Woman pants (and because I’m me and can’t function without colour coding, I’ll sneak on a matching bra and socks as well) and rise from the wreckage.

The day Mary Anning found the fossil that would change the world’s knowledge of how the earth began there had been a terrific storm that had demolished her house. She went out to find ‘curiosities’ to try and sell to help her mum rebuild it. Instead she found a collapsed cliff and the face of a monster.

Out of catastrophe she found opportunity.

And like so many bad experiences in life, I have come out the other side a little better, a little stronger, and a lot more knowledgeable about who I am.

It was a bad weekend, but my friends got me through it, and I know it’s going to be a good week. The Wonder Pants are on.

Yesterday I agreed away my marriage.

We finalised the mediated separation agreement which will now represent my husband in absence.  It’s full of rules and drop-off times, and weekend shifts and divided school holidays. It’s full of numbers and figures and how much I can spend a month on tampons. Literally.   It’s full of facts and empty of emotion.

I used to have a marriage. Now I have a spreadsheet.

I used to have hugs. Now I have maintenance.

I used to have love. Now I have rules.

There are the days when you have the strength to deflect the little blows life throws at you. Like a martial arts expert, a hand shield here, a step back there. Deflect, desist, defend. But then there are times when all you can do is stand there and let life slap you around the face.   You just have to live through the pain. Absorb it into yourself and cry.

My last post ended with me making the train to Belfast to see my mum.  It was a blog about my mad life.  This is a blog about my sad life.

Four and a half years after her catastrophic stroke, my mum is still hanging on. We all are. My dad, my brother, me. All getting a little tireder, a little older, a little less able.

But she doesn’t want to live. Because she knows she’s not living.

She is so low, her distress is unbearable to watch. She hasn’t been up in her chair in a week. The only thing that has made any of this manageable is the fact we can hoist her into a wheelchair and get her up most days for a couple of hours. Dad bought the ‘Patmobile’, a van that we can wheel mum into so that we can take her out and about. Some days she likes it, some days she doesn’t. But it beats staring at the same wall 24 hours a day.

But no more.  Not moving for four years has taken its toll. She has pain in her legs. But I know really she has pain in her heart. We all do. To watch the woman you love more than any other endure a life like this is crushing. To be living it must be like being buried alive.  Buried under the rubble of the life you had.

So this weekend was tough. She cried, she clasped my hand and begged me to make it all stop. She wants it all to stop. She needed me to just hold her and be there, and I’m so glad I was there.

But by being there I wasn’t with the other people who need me…. my girls.  My daughter Daisy called me unable to speak with the hysteria of hurt. She’s 9 and enduring the worst thing a child can endure – the breakup of her family, her foundation, her life as she knows it.   She wept down the phone, begging me to come home. Hysterical with upset, it took me 40 minutes to calm her down, my heart splintering into shards that I couldn’t be there for her.  It’s not that she doesn’t want to be with her dad. She just doesn’t want that to mean she can’t be with me.

So all weekend I was pulled by the extremes of my life’s responsibilities – my mum and my daughter, both pleading and needing, both in despair. One at the end of her life, one just at the beginning. And me sandwiched between their anguish trying to fix the unfixable.

I feel bruised by life’s slapping this weekend, and now as I sit in the quiet of the house, my marriage reduced to a 6 page document, I wonder how I pick myself up.  So I do what I often do and think of my mum.  She had a hard life at times, but she endured it with love and kindness.  No matter how crap it became at times, she put her face on. That’s what she would say. “I must go and put my face on.” I know she meant her make up or her lipstick but it meant something else too. It meant her other make up – her make up. Her strength to carry on, her love and kindness.

This morning Daisy stood in front of my bedroom mirror and preened herself with my make-up brushes.  “I’m just going to put my face on!” she said in her best mummy voice.

I obviously say it too, just like my mum.   And it made me smile. My girls will learn from me, as I learned from my mum.  It’s not about being false or being something you’re not. It’s about facing up to the bad time, facing down the challenging times and facing into the sun in the good times.

Life is hard right now. But I will face up to it, I will face it down and I will wait for a time when I am facing into the sun.  So time to put my face on and greet the day.    Here it is – my game face. Bring today on!

Sometimes I move so fast I see myself rushing past in a blur of colour.  “Oh is is that me?” I think as I whip past at warp speed.  But before I can grab myself, I’m gone, like a gust of wind, the only sign of me a rustle of the trees and the dog spinning in my jet stream.  Sometimes I watch him in the garden chasing his tail and I think, “yep, that’s me, without the drool.”  (Although as my 40’s take hold, no doubt the drool will come.)

My mum always told me I suited hats…. I just never imagined how many I’d have to wear.   Life was so simple in my 20’s. I was me (Ok, I wasn’t fully sure who ‘me’ was, but that was all I had to figure out. That, and which boy to kiss.)  But life got more complex with every year and now, between parenting, daughtering, working, writing, separating, and socialising I have so many hats my scalp is itching and my eyes are twitching and I feel half mad.

On a good day I get to take one hat off before I put on another, and hopefully have a nice cup of tea in between. But that is rare. Most days I have to jump and juggle in a peculiar pantomime – keeping all my hats in the air and swapping them around at high speed.  One on, whip it off, put another on, whop it off, put a different one on, zip it off, put the other one back on, quick quick until somedays I tell the dog to set the table and call one of my clients ‘sweetheart’ on the phone.

Sometimes if I wake early and I don’t have a little body in the bed I might write in the morning darkness (writing hat).  Then I make muffins and have breakfast with the girls and walk them to school (mummy hat). Then I come home, put the kettle on and morph into Super-focused Business woman (work hat). Then I run to the school switching hats on the way for pick up, and the afternoon is spent in a hassled hat dance (homework, emails, play do, phonecalls). Once I threw the phone for the dog and kept talking to the plastic bone.  The phone bone squeaked and he chewed the bone phone.  Evenings are a mix of hats as I get bits done in between three bedtime routines. Sometimes I feel like one of those silly clowns – a pile of hats stacked on my head as I play all hats together.

For my day job I write for charities, I do a lot of work for Medicine Sans Frontiers and last year I was immersed in ebola for several months. I had to interview doctors and nurses who were working in the most distressing of human conditions. I try and make sure I work when my girls are at school or bed, but sometimes I have to do what suits others.  Squeezing a chat to me between treating ebola patients trumps my school run timeframe.  So I set Ruby up with her colouring and told her she had to be super quiet.  The line to Sierra Leone isn’t great at the best of times. From a make-shift medical tent it’s pretty crap so I had to listen very carefully.  This doctor has just spent a day treating children and families dying in their droves of a disease that inflicts maximum indignity and pain. It takes an hour just to get out of the protective gear and drink enough water to rehydrate before they collapse.   So when Ruby comes in to my room to tell me her pen isn’t working I hold up that finger –  ‘the I am working, do NOT disturb’  finger and keep listening and writing. She persists. My finger stands strong and then points out of the room. She starts to wail. I start to run. She follows me. This doctor is telling me about terrible tragedy and I cannot interrupt with my domestic issues.  So I run into the downstairs loo and barricade myself in.  Ruby starts bashing on the door. I am literally sitting on the floor, phone in one hand, pen in the other, notebook on my knees, with my feet pushing against the door as she tries to kick it in.   Now that I am occupying the toilet, she switches tact, the pen no longer an issue.  “I want to do a poo!” she screams. I try to talk over her noise. I keep asking questions, and taking notes, the sweat pouring off me, and Ruby shouting ‘I want to do a poo!!” every 30 seconds. “I want to do a poo!”  Listen, scribble, sweat.  “I want to do a poo!”  I’m nearly in tears and not just because of the doctor’s story.

At last my call nears it’s end and I realise Ruby is no longer screaming.  She has stopped kicking the door. I relax my feet.  I say goodbye. I open the door.   I wish I hadn’t. I see my little girl smiling at me. She points to the steaming pile beside her.

“I did a poo.”

She sure did. And I won’t tell you what the dog was doing with it.

My working day.   So when I had to take a REALY important phonecall yesterday and the timing wasn’t great, I knew I had to haggle my hat wearing skills.  This was a REALLY important phonecall.   The kind of phonecall you REALLY want to dedicate your life to!  (I hope to be able to write about that phonecall and why it was REALLY important soon!).

But I was in possession of one child (same said 4 year old), due to pick up two others and in a rush to the train station to get up to see my mum who isn’t well.  So I looked at my hat collection and figured out a plan. I would buy Ruby a new colouring in book. We would do our jobs which included driving through the car wash, then get to the school half an hour early. She would colour and I’d take the call in the car, begging her with my eyes to be quiet and hoping my girls would understand if I was still on the call when I picked them up and gave them the finger (the work finger, the work finger!).   I would get home, throw them into the house, where their dad is taking over for the weekend, and rush to the train to get up to my mum for a weekend of wearing a daughtering hat (with a bit of writing wearing too).

But it all went horribly wrong. The garage didn’t have the colouring book I’d promised her so I had to go to another shop. This made me later than I wanted to the car wash but a bird had had diarrhoea above my car and I’d promised Ruby an exciting car wash experience (poor child, the height of her cultural experiences with me are Hello Kitty colouring and car washes.)  But there was a queue. And before I realised, another car had come in behind me and I was trapped. Trapped in a car wash queue with a 4 year old, the wrong colouring book and a VERY IMPORTANT phonecall due.   This is not the kind of call you take while sitting in the car wash!

I now faced the prospect of starting the REALLY important phonecall trapped in a car in a car wash  with a VERY unpredictable 4 year old, and then continuing while driving like a lunatic to the school, talking while I park anywhere I can find and run to the yard, dragging 4 year old, collecting my 2 children, telling them not to speak to me – all while pretending I am actually sitting in my office!

There is a hat for that – it’s got bells on the top.  Sometimes I do feel like the joker, the court jester, the puppet on a string, and I look around to see who is laughing?  But no-one is. It’s just life, sandwiched between caring for young children, older parents, and myself.

So did it all work out?  It did. The call was late, my Not Quite texted to say he would pick up the girls and I swerved and screeched the car into my driveway just as my phone began to ring.   It was a good phonecall.  It took longer than I thought, but I made the train by the skin of my teeth.  And for the first 10 minutes of the journey, I just took all my hats off, and closed my eyes and breathed.  And smiled. Then I opened my eyes, and put on my writing hat and worked until I got to Belfast and when I got to my mum, and she smiled, and her eyes said all the words of love she used to say to me, I put on one of my best hats of all…. my daughter hat.

Going with the flow….. such a pretty concept. It conjures up a lazy loveliness of meandering musings.  Drifting down the river aimlessly on a warm summer day, the haze of sun misting the haze of thoughts in your head. But here’s the thing about The Flow.   It takes you places you might not want to go.

And as a list-led, goal-geared, destination-driven kind of gal, that makes me very nervous.

Right now, life has kicked up a storm and the waters are choppy and challenging. But as always, even though she can no longer guide me to safety herself, I realise through the lessons she taught me, my mum is still holding up a light in the dark.

With life in freefall right now, I keep thinking I should be more of a  ‘go with the flow’ sort of person.  But even thinking about it makes me want to grab an oar and start paddling back to shore.   Drifting aimlessly down a river is only a nice idea if you know exactly where you are drifting to. I’d be so stressed that I’d be missing out on the really important cafe on the far shore (I always need to know where my next decent tea or wine is coming from). Or that I’d get bogged down in the weeds – there are always a wrangle of weeds that all the rubbish has flowed into… rubbish that has literally gone with the flow into a cluster of clogged up leaves, sticks and discarded debris.

You see, going with the flow does not flow in my family.  My mum was an agitated list maker and day planner. Four years after her stroke I’m still finding little notebooks filled entirely with lists: Christmas presents, groceries, clothes to pack (and one that I now keep beside my bed – “Things I love about Alana”…. a pre-blogger if ever I saw one, she actually wrote down all the things she loved about me……is it any wonder I’m a blogging, listing, planning documenting, organising queen?)

But I actually got the Double Determined No-Flow Gene.

My dad is also a list maker. His room is full of notebooks documenting every walk he has wandered, and every mountain he has climbed. Now that he cares for mum and runs the house, his kitchen looks like a paint splatter, scattered with scraps of yellow and pink Post It Notes. They represent all the bits of his brain stuck up on the wall so he knows what to do every day. And when I go to visit, I add my own so that sometimes there is no room on the kitchen counter to prepare food – only read what we are meant to be preparing.

As a child, nobody in my house was short of an opinion. Opinions flowed instead of going with the flow.   Everyone had a plan, a view, an absolute belief that their way was the right way.  It wasn’t a quiet house.  But it was full of energy and ideas and plans.

So I never grew up learning to go with the flow – I was brought up to steer with a clear intent. Make a list, form a plan, don’t miss a trick.

And so I grab what I learnt as a child and implement it as an adult. As my life falls down around me into chaos, I am rising like a list-lunatic Phoenix, arms stretched high, pen in one hand, post it note in the other – screeching a warrior wail: I will survive and I will figure out where I’m going!

I wrestle with the uncertainty and crave routine and so going with the flow is not an option.  I am going to wrestle uncertainty with Post It’s. I am going to stab uncertainty with a pen. And I am going to build routine with a plan.   But I am also learning from my girls.

Like this flowed from my parents to me (a family flow rather than a go-with-the-flow), it now flows from me to my girls.

Daisy has notebooks filled with lists – she’d be giving my mum a run for her money. (although I doubt shes listing why she loves me….. instead she is obsessively listing (in order) who she likes best in Harry Potter, who is the best baddie in Harry Potter, what is her favourite teacher in Harry Potter (there’s a theme…).  She likes to know exactly what we will be doing, at what time and woe is woe if we deviate from the plan!   She needs a plan just to plan her plans (she obviously got my Double Gene and tripled it!!)

Ruby too likes to know how her day will look and that’s ok. Being 4, you still need a little direction.

So far, so on the same boat.  We all have opinions and like to voice them. Loudly.

And then there is Poppy. Lovely softly Poppy who make the phrase ‘go with the flow’ sound positively military.  She is so laid back she’s not even in the boat. She’s drifting down the river on her back, singing to herself, not a care (or a plan) in her head.  She does like the odd list but they usually end up getting lost in the land-fill site that is her room.  She brings a certain calm to the chaos of our new family.

My life has flowed in a  direction I never imagined, and I need to navigate it back to a route that will bring me happiness, contentment and creative energy.  For that I need lists, and plans and order. But as I’m realising more and more from these sandwich years, I take what I’ve learnt from my mum and I look at what I’m learning from my children.  I may be mothering them all, but that doesn’t mean they don’t still teach me.

My mum made lists and planned plans, but she wasn’t bossy.   She also knew how to see how things panned out.  She knew when to flow and when to go. As I reflect on her style, I realise that while she spoke her mind, she actually steered our boat from behind. Like a train diver in the back carriage, full steam ahead, on the right track, but at our backs, having our backs.

And that is my job now. To steer her life in a way that she is safe and cared for, and to guide my girls through this storm until the waters are calm again.  And to find my direction and flow there in confidence.