transition
There’s a late-summer feeling creeping about. A heaviness. I keep getting low, rumbling headaches from the change in the air pressure and so I’m constantly wandering about, forgetting what I’m supposed to be doing, massaging my temples and grumbling like a grumpy bear.
Also, there are some monstrous spiders dangling all over my washing line. So that’s a nice seasonal treat.
Feeling in flux at the moment because it’s all changing in our house. My daughter is going into Year 3, and my son into Reception. This means my period of being a (mostly) stay-at-home Mum to two very small children is now over, and we’ve entered the Primary School Era. Keep getting overcome with emotion about it. Half pride and excitement, half longing and sadness. Because frankly, all those people who kept telling me ‘it flies by! Make the most of it!’ weren’t joking, and it actually does fly by.
Did I make the most of it? I don’t know. I hope so. Most of the last three years has been a constant juggling act of working from home, degree, kids, and later, lockdown. So I’ve probably not treasured every single second. But then I think that saying is a bit unrealistic anyway. You can’t treasure every single moment. Some moments involve dealing with vomit and snot and sudden bursts of overwhelming fear that something terrible is going to happen to them. It would take some hardcore Pollyanna-ing to find the treasure there.
It does feel like yesterday that we had long, cozy autumn days at home. Crunching through leaves. Buying pumpkins just to play with, stacking them, covering them in glittery pens and stickers. Finding conkers. Snuggling up with books. Breastfeeding one kid whilst playing My Little Pony with the other.
I don’t know, I’m probably romanticizing it a little bit, but it was pretty incredible.
This all sounds very dramatic. I’m not sending them to boarding school in Siberia. They’re going to the local primary a five-minute walk from my house. If I wanted to I could walk past at lunchtime every day to try and spot them. (I won’t obviously because that is insane, I’m just saying it’s an option.) But it feels different, and lockdown has made us all a tight little unit, and our world has become very small. And expanding that world has made us all feel a bit weird. Emotions are running high, we’re all tired. My son in particular is feeling the strain of going into something completely unknown to him, and his moods are all over the place, and so I’m being gentle, trying to help him come to terms with the large feelings bursting out of his body in the form of tantrums and tears.
It’s hard. And I feel the transition too. What is my role now? It was so easy back then. Mum. That’s it. What’s my role now between the hours of 9–5, Monday to Friday? Freelancer. But what will that look like? How will I stay sane? How will I stop myself from getting lonely? What if I don’t like it? I’ve got used to having a little one around at least part of the time. Should we get a dog? All these questions.
I’ll have freedom, for some of the time. My own agency combined with a small amount of spare income, which I have never had in my adult life, as well as one day a week that I am determined to keep for housework and/or doing my own thing. Maybe I’ll open up my world, too. Maybe I’ll go out a bit more. Go to places I’ve never been to.
Maybe I’ll change.
This is very self-centered, sorry. I mean, you’re on a blog so it’s your own fault if you expected anything else. You’ll have to just bear with me.
I think I’ve changed a lot in the last year or so. Covid upended things, as it did for most people. My boundaries were so clear before. House stuff/family/church. All very easy to live within. And if I butted up against the walls of it sometimes, so what? I could just retreat back to the middle where it felt safe.
And now I feel like I’m out in the wilderness. I threw everything up in the air during lockdown and now I’m still waiting for a lot of it to fall back into place.
I quite like the feeling that anything could happen. Life sometimes feels strict and ordered and you forget that actually, quite a lot of things are possible.
I think it’s okay. Not having answers. Wondering about how the world really works but not really having to find a concrete solution. It’s quite nice. In fact, I like it so much that Chris suggested that I become a mystic, but then I’d literally be Mystic Meg and I don’t think I can do that to myself.
The other day it all got on top of me so I sat down and wrote a list. Things I am 100 percent sure of. It’s a small list, but a worthwhile one. Things I need to remember: I am loved. I am alive in 2021 but life does not go on forever, so I need to make the most of it. I have been given many things that I am grateful for. And so on.
And it helps. A small grounding in reality when life feels confusing and scary.
So I keep telling my kids. I love you, it’s okay to have feelings, you’re safe here, I love you, you are so brave, I love you. I keep saying it and saying it in the hope that it will imprint into their memory and then when they go off into the world without me, they’ll have that base knowledge somewhere inside them to draw upon, a strong platform, a jumping-off point.
Why am I writing this? I don’t know. To remember how I felt. To get my head around it. Change is a good thing, isn’t it? That’s what I’m dwelling on, for all of us, for the future. ❤
