Indefinite leave

Published ghost writer

abandons dreams to become

unmade, unreal. oh!

Starlings On Sunday

 The darkest cloud swells and subsides again and again. It has become a welcome speckled sight against these usually still skies. The flock is as punctual as only nature in her timelessness knows how to be, arriving in our patch of grey at around 5.20 every evening. I spend the next few minutes watching a grand and ancient waltz that I imagine must continue to swirl forever over other roofs in other towns long after my curtains have closed and the streetlights flicker on. 

 If my son is with me at this time, I point the flock out to him and he stands by the window in as much awe as me, asking the same two questions over and over again: "Mummy, what are they doing? Mummy, where are they going?" For those few minutes and beyond I do not know whether or how to answer him, because the lightness of some mysteries are so sacred that I'd rather not weigh them down with a simple search and a simpler answer. Some days I decide to tell him they are dancing, I tell him they are going wherever the wind takes them, and he tells me that sounds fun. I silently agree.

Today we watch the birds swell, subside and swirl. As I watch, I'm listening to an old playlist of sentimental songs I never intend on letting go, singing along heartily and missing all the top notes, swaying with my baby girl, watching my not-so-baby boy run from my side to reimmerse himself into his play, smelling the food my husband is preparing for our dinner, feeling my way ever so slowly through this home, this family, this expanded heart with all of its stretch marks. This rugged life of mine. And this? It is the writing and recording of moments of it all, it is the cherry atop my healing Sunday filled with starlings on grey skies. It is a necessary ritual for my body and blood to feel good in themselves again. Just for today, I feel good inside myself again. I hope that this is more than enough to see me through.

Testing testing

 Don’t be deceived by the deafening digital silence. I’ve been writing copiously, usually on the most sleepless of nights. Pixelated reams of nonsense or otherwise obfuscatory metaphors have come bursting out of me like the shit out of my precious daughter’s nappies. And it’s all been just that: the yellowest of shit. I know you’ll understand how I’ve been too scared to publish most of it, for fear of being completely seen through. Or, worse yet, seen and believed that is all there is to it. To me. Shallow shallow language for a shallow little girl, not even deep enough to tickle a babe’s chubby ankles. This is some of what I’ve felt and, having put the sum of it out here, I feel a bit too exposed and cold (but you know what we say about the cold).

 I’ve been thinking maybe anger becomes overrated past a certain point. Sometimes it hits like foul flatulence released noisily into a crowded gathering, making everyone a little annoyed and uncomfortable until it disperses and only awkwardness lingers. I feel like I’m getting everything so wrong this time around. For once I don’t know what else to say - life has become something besides my own, which makes it all the more difficult for this long-time naval-gazer to examine it properly and report back on. If I had a mentor to turn to right now I’m sure she’d ask one question over and over and over again: what exactly are you trying to say? 

Then say it.

The Grace of God has come down from on high to sit right next to me, just like I’ve been pleading for so long. I, in turn, sit here behaving as though she is a stranger I have never seen before. What am I to say to her this time? What am I not to say? Something better left off these bare white pages either way. I don’t know what I’m becoming and I’d rather not explain whatever it is as I am unfurling & discovering. 

MAMA HOLDS ANGER

 The torrents of Anger that wept down when I rose to greet my first pregnancy took us all by surprise, shock and horror. When it drenched us again during my second pregnancy, we were doubly astounded. Anger is not an emotion typically associated with motherhood, let alone ‘good’ motherhood. I think I shocked myself the most, because I had always believed & often declared myself to be a fairly peaceful, conflict-avoiding citizen. I’m known to my colleagues as Zen Seun, to my family and close friends as The Mediator, always sticking my oar in to diffuse and placate wherever high emotions and injustices arise.

But the first nine-month period of Undoing and Growing and Becoming Anew apparently let loose long-bound fastenings. Things that I had not been allowed or given myself space to feel for a very very long time, if ever, had their great escape and it was equal parts ugly, painful and exhilerating. There was anger, yes, but fiercer things still we were met with: desire, passion, terror, disappointment, sheer joy, unbridled faith and hope and fear and so many others whose names I did not even know.

The biggest grace I have received in my experience of becoming a mother is the opening up of a special new space (or perhaps it was always there, unnoticed on my periphery) to be exactly who I am and always have been and was always meant to be. Wholly me - good, bad, delightful and devious all present and accounted for. Not just Good Daughter, Defender of Sisterhood, Doting Wife, Loyal Friend, Mediating Presence or even simply (complexly) Mother of Any Kind. I am all and so much more - my newfound expansiveness is most fulfilling even though I have no clue into what where or whom I might continue to expand. I do now know that at the end of each blessed little battle of a day, the only person I and my children need me to be is ALL of me. Acknowledging, knowing and accepting this under all circumstances has been my most glorious feminine triumph yet and I can only rightly give that glory back to my Maker. 

The only shame I've happened to feel here is that it took this long for me to arrive at who I've always known myself to be (and I say ‘this long’ as if I’ve not only just turned 29 - some never get this close to themselves at all if we’re being real). I just feel like I’ve been holding my breath and holding myself in up until the point I knew I was to be a mother. Motherhood in all its cherished forms (biological, adoptive, spiritual, or otherwise) is by no means ‘for’ everyone for myriad complicated, mystical and human reasons, nor is it at all a necessary prerequisite of joyful self-discovery and -expression. But I know in my own body and bones as I’ve always known for as long as I can remember: that it is a very essential part of who I, Oluseun (neé Alabi) Stancombe, am. This assuredness isn’t everyone’s experience - in fact it is perhaps the opposite for many in our anxiety-riddled self-conscious world - so I also acknowledge the incredible privilege of giving myself total permission to be what I am, external expectations and consequences be damned. Again, I can only thank my Maker here.

Of course turning up to the same old party freshly hatched as oneself can cause a great deal of confusion and damage to the people around you, especially if there is a great deal of perceived negative change. To clutch at the familiarity of albeit limited/limiting titles again, going from Agreeable Yes Woman to Combative Shouty Lady for example, all in such a compressed space of time, can be jarring from the outside. What might have seemed a gradual and natural awakening to me was perhaps more like the sudden flip of a switch in the wrong direction to some others. What brought light and freedom to me, how I view myself, how I operate as purely as I can within this world, may have brought sheaths of shadow and darkness to the person others thought they knew well enough in me. While I sympathise, I hold no shame and proffer no apologies here. My only hope through all this is that my little family will be all the richer for mama showing them just how powerful and Good it can be to walk in the spaces that have been divinely held for you, and how wonderful it is to truly follow the lifelong process of knowing thyself and turning up to all those spaces as exactly who you are. There is no point in denial or repression here; more so, the feelings of guilt and shame that often dog these openings have their place and use but certainly not here. Only truth and integrity, with a healthy dose of compassion of course, are worthy pursuits for me and mine. Call it naive to make such bold, stake-driving statements at so tender an age on something as inconsequential as an online personal blog, but this is indeed how I’ve always intended to grow my life and make it as bounteous as is within my God-given power. 

Thirties approaching - a brief reflection

Nope, don't panic. I'm not 30 yet. I've only just entered the final year of my twenties (hbd2m, yay!). I simply felt obliged to offer a somwhat brief reflection on this precipice of an age because why not. Perhaps you will make sense of, and even relate to, some of it.

First I must confess: I've been looking forward to the start of my thirties ever since the first time I caught myself trying to figure out a precise formula for whatever it meant to be a happy and successful mature adult woman in the prime of her life. Second confession incoming: I started seriously pondering and then trying to work towards such grand theories from a weirdly young age. I remember ten year old Seunny watching all those 00s rom coms with their frazzled leading ladies at the ripe 'old' age of 30 and clutching at varying levels of shit-togetherness, thinking 'I wonder what I'll get right/wrong when I get there... I can't wait to get there'. 

It wasn't the glamorous depictions of frazzledness or getting-of-shit-together that necessarily appealed to me, but the privilege of making one's own life choices and the freedom to be gloriously, imperfectly oneself along the way. It's funny because, looking at how my life in the run-up to this slightly arbitrary age milestone has actually panned out so far, my reality and my ideals might seem more than a bit incongruous from the outside. It would seem that I've made all the 'sensible' (or 'conventional', 'prescribed') life choices, chased a narrow and socially acceptable view of 'perfection' and, maybe to some, it may also seem like I've attained a level of it especially when compared to those rom com leading ladies (really I'm just looking at the problematic icon that is Bridget Jones here - also don't ask why I was allowed to watch these movies at ten years old, let's just accept the 00s were a problematic decade for everyone involved and move swiftly on). 

Last month I wrote an embarrassingly shallow and patronising blog post. It waxed on about how the most apt metaphor for Life wasn't a sprint or even a marathon, but actually a banquet at which we should all simply enjoy whatever random dish was placed in front of us, however extravagant or plain, and do so with gratitude and humility instead of an envious or anxious eye on whatever our fellow guests were served. Even for my own standards it was pretty awful stuff. But I do think that blog post was my attempt to put to words a few of the bigger insecurities I've held close while approaching thirty like the most determined steamroller you've ever seen. It all just unfortunately spilled out under the form of some pretentious thought-piece thinly masking the fact that, while I've always wanted (and still very much want) this outwardly postcard-picture ‘conventional’ life of mine, I wasn't actually expecting to have any of this by this age and sometimes have doubts about it or just completely take it for granted. Like any normal human I suppose. And while I'm generally the most fulfilled and content I've ever felt in this little life thus far, the farther along I go, the more I realise my youthful self-assuredness and all the confidence I've stored up to get me through adulthood will inevitably unravel in the face of what true maturity and wisdom probably is: a total, headlong, eyes-open dive into all that which we can never fully know or understand, both within and outside of ourselves. Such lofty things, I’ve quickly come to learn, are not governed by arbitrary age milestones…

Don't get it twisted, I fear the mess and upheaval this utterly chaotic process of unravelling must surely bring, and I certainly don't think I'll get to that level of maturely embracing the deep dive any time soon. I sure hope I will, but I'm presently clinging onto way too much and have far more to work through as I peel through the layers of my formative years while pressing on with my future ones (I'm doing the work, as they say). And yes, there are now two (soon to be three) other beautiful, magnificent, complicated, frustrating humans at the centre of my life whose personal growth I need and want to prioritise while I try to work on myself as well. There really isn't as much time for my favourite pastime of angsty naval-gazing as I'd like these days, she says with a sigh... 

I do also find that the privilege and freedom and self-embracing imperfection I once enshrined as successful markers of healthy early-middle-agedom look a whole lot more complex up close now, and will probably look even more so in another decade. All the privilege I've earned thus far now centres on being able to literally and emotionally afford to continue living comfortably with my life choices regardless of whether they turn out to be 'good' or 'bad' or 'meh' ones. My freedom to choose the life I want is there for the taking on paper as it has always been but, as I have already said, this now rarely extends beyond those who are just as if not more important to me than myself. There is little room on deck for self-centred choices if I truly want the ultimate good of everyone aboard my little boat. These days my imperfections are very much allowed full exposure, sometimes on centre stage even, but they're not so ridiculously self-conscious as to think they exist alone under a spotlight - they interact within a messy performance of many other egos and imperfections that have every right as mine to be there, and they must navigate this play with great care as they proceed.

I'm afraid I've come to the end of all the pondering I can muster on the subject of my ageing. I genuinely don't know if any of what I've written has made an ounce of sense, even to me, but I've enjoyed sitting down to write it all the same. I'm looking forward to thirty next year, but let me now recline further back and enjoy twenty-nine while I still have it in sight, stretching before me with all its heady promise of love and mess and hope and wondrous growth.

Bourdain & Mother

 Do you remember, ma? We used to devour episodes of No Reservations together in front of that bulky silver Hitachi thing that stood in the corner of our mouldy ground floor flat like a three-legged robotic rhinoceros. You’d sometimes let me stay up late watching it with you and we would gobble up together every morsel of the familiar ease, the nobullshit take on cultures and their cuisines, the simplistic escape to places we could never even imagine taking breath in, the heartfelt meals and the many many people across this earth with whom he would converse and eat. 

Food was the language we all shared as we crossed over and passed through those borders, partakers all in his culinary pilgrimage. We ate and drank and burped with the gumbo shack regulars in the Deep South and the noodle stall hawkers in Thailand or wherever it was he’d bring us to. Those minutes spent sat before his world, nestled in next to you, were absolutely everything to me. Do you remember, mama? It’s why feeding and being fed are sacred and deep acts of care to me. It’s why travel is not mere escape, but a wholehearted embrace of the familiar within the other. It’s why I have so often sought out that experience of being unmoored and unfamiliar as we all felt we were then. But it’s how I've often ended up finding home and comfort buried in the pockets of a hand turned pastry or long broiled stew…

Bourdain & Mother blessed me with a gift of loving home in places, faces and foods I never thought I’d find it. 

Notary Votary

 So I’ve decided, realised, come to the conclusion that I cannot be a full time artist however much I would like to. My whole adolescence was filled with the tussle between two denominations: art & literature. I know more about the former and have a deep passion for it that’s actually a part of my lineage on both sides of the family, but the latter seems to be what is in my marrow when I’m cut open.

Besides, I’ve not got a disciplined enough bone in my body to practise something so ruthlessly talent-based as painting or drawing or sculpting. That requires quite a lot of skill, grit, focus, selfmastery, clarity of vision. I’m too hazy and vague and ‘meh’ to consecrate myself to it...

That’s why I will stick my votives under the shrine of writing, where 90 percent is bullshit that passes for masterful work and the rest is pure truth, so I’ve decided. You, I will let decide what side of the percentage my words fall. But before you do, I will confess: there’s always been one great shadow dodging my light. In truth, if that’s what we’re really going for here, I’ve always made the worst student of literature. Despite having read English at Oxford (did you know?) where I was  forced to build up out of nowhere an appetite to devour 20+ texts a week - I never was very well-read.

My problem is that, prior to Oxford, reading and writing were just for fun and I tended to go more where my intuition or curiosity led than where tradition or canon (‘f ck the canon’) dictated. To be honest I didn’t even have more than a vague and hazy idea of what this revered canon even was until I found myself beneath the very cloisters under which it was fashioned.

There was this one history student who so desperately wanted to be a writer of poetry and probably thought he’d make a better English student than most of us. He’d always ask about what texts we were reading and had usually already ingested most of them himself, and then some (the public ritual of regurgitation he’d routinely perform for us was as pretty as you’d imagine). He couldn’t fathom an English undergrad who hadn’t touched or even heard of Woolf or Wilde until she was doing her A Levels. Who couldn’t distinguish between Orwell and Huxley, well, because weren’t they both dystopian blokes from around the same time? 

The funny thing is - and I say this without a bit of resentment or condescension towards the guy, for I was already ashamed at my comparative dearth of rounded knowledge on a subject I’d proudly professed my faith in without him outing my arid foundations - but the guy’s writing was shit anyway. All that enthusiastic rimming of the bloody canon simply gets you a lacerated tongue if you do not already have a voice and point of view of your own to hold against it. I say again without parenthesis: f ck the canon. 

The true irony is that’s something Oxford eventually taught me, whether or not it intended to - not to worship & adore the great throng of literary saints that were martyred on the pyres of fame and infamy before me, but to take up my own space outside of the great procession, however small and dim. Take it up and keep burrowing into it until I hit truth.

That’s what I’m trying to do, would like to do full time and for the rest of my life somehow. There are so many wonderful writers out there, canonical or otherwise, who I’m convinced that’s what they were/are all about. Digging digging away with their beautifully pointed words. Refining, sharpening against the rocks they meet along the descent. Finding gems and bones that hinted at that greater, brighter truth that lies somewhere deeper down there. If we could just all get to it some way. Friends, comrades, I believe I have joined your great descent.

 So I’ve come to the conclusion, realised, decided that I must be a writer. It doesn’t matter what form or metaphor my writing takes on, or where it ends up, or who does or doesn’t read it. Or even whether I’m a consistently ‘good’ one. I’ve just got to keep doing it. Keep chucking earth back behind me and hope I’m not burying the world as I go… or maybe I wouldn’t mind doing that, it’s a bit of a steaming mound anyway. 

Short Satire: A Complaint of Karens

 The crown of a gently braised egg was cracked and ripped open with merciless routine and a heavy silver table knife, the latter no doubt a gift either from one of her three ill-fated weddings, or from the legion of dead and distant relatives that always gave up useless heirlooms at their expiration. Never just a boxful of cash with those ones. 

Once silver and crown were lain aside with neither care nor haste, in fell those warm, golden soldiers. Fell one, then the other - yielding soft and delicious crunches in place of screams - until the prompt 06:45 ritual sacrifice was complete, betraying no more of itself than briskly swept crumbs and a half empty shell, dipped of all its golden goodness. 

Karen was a good woman, a devout one even, so she often said. Nobody ever dared meet her quietly hateful and routinely condescending gaze to ask why she felt so often the need to assert that statement aloud when it was so very clearly far from the truth of her. They all knew and saw, but were never quite sure if she ever suspected herself deep down, and all were reluctant to be the doomed lamb who would turn her head into the mirror to finally observe the small town tyrant they had watched her grow into over nearly five decades. None of that was really their problem.  No, so long as they were spared her petulant and entitled attacks for one day more. 

Karen was not always their monster, their watchtower dragon swooping to gobble any idiot who did not take care to toe her line. She really came into her own hideous form on the awful day the Black Lady stumbled into their dozing village with her shining white sneakers, her brazenly loud openness, her naïve expectations of any sort of glad reception and her ever-damned always-on smartphone. That devilish device was really the sword that unmade and disembowelled Karen. When it fell and the millions beyond their sleepy suburbia witnessed it, that was her final undoing, so the story went. The brave sacrificial lamb had been an outsider, the old dragon had been slain, and - to be perfectly honest - the villagers weren’t too upset about it once the press had cleared out and everything had settled down again. No, they really found they could get on a bit better without the constant near-demonic presence of a loathsome and seething busybody. 

But this is not the story of Karen’s great fall. We all know that fairytale by now. This is the biopsy of a cancer that was left to fester and grow, to become far too comfortable, complacent and, in the end, abusive of its privilege. Our primary concern is what madeth the Karen and why she was left to her own hubristic devices for far too long. Here, we enter into a rich and complex memedom where we can only make vastly sweeping generalisations about gender, race, class and more. Nestled far from the scrutiny of reason, logic and thorough scientific objectivity, journeying deep into the very real social hysteria of circa 2020, we turn to ‘The Year of Karen’ to seek our answers.

TO BE CONTINUED...

One day like this

Every hour is our whole life, or something like that. How do these hours anoint my soul?

Sam is in the kitchen already preparing fresh coffee in his cafetière. An act performed in the softness of dawn and total habitual abandon. He’s probably listening to the cricket, or more likely a YouTube video about last night’s AEW tag team tournament. 

I am woken with the same soft light upstairs, by my baby boy shouting ‘mummy’ across the corridor as he too wakes. I say my simple line of morning prayer and go to greet him with a big cuddle and, let’s be real, a heaving and stinking nappy.  

I change him, we go downstairs to greet daddy in the kitchen and the breakfast ritual begins for the two of them - they must have their own things, as must I. 

Returning upstairs, I shower, dress and look forward to a long but never long enough day of spending time with family, with friends, with strangers, in nature, in art, in love. In other words, we step into our mighty little universe which we have so carefully placed around us, yet have only been able to call ours by what the lightest of sceptics would name Complete Accident of Birth. Or if, like me, you are less of a question mark and more of an ellipses: God's perfect will.

We leave the car dozing in a bay on our long street, where parking is always a fought-over and highly prized treasure, and opt for one bus and two underground trains instead. These are our child's favourite modes of transportation (generally, his favourite subject du jour is transportation - I chuckle at this boyish stereotype which was never taught but has emerged from nowhere at all and may or may not subside one day as he grows). 

Don't ask me where specifically we're headed, I only know the way: in deep and serious conversation about our groceries and whose parents' debt we would pay off first if we won the lottery; whether we should let our baby boy out of the buggy to run around on the slender, unbroken line of the eastbound Metropolitan before it becomes overcrowded at Harrow; if we could stop off at a few charity shops before heading over to meet our people at whichever museum or gallery we've agreed; and so on until we must detrain.

A day like this in the privilege of light and inconsequential conversation amongst the most treasured company. For little things such as these are privileges - ones that, with the grounding of our parents' unconditional sacrifices, people like us have carefully worked and scrimped and saved to be able to afford. And which are only ours by some great, miraculous and puzzling accident, otherwise known as the perfectly unsolvable will of God.

Expression of Interest in Frenzied Tones

I will kiss myself in the name of the Lord, I will
ask open-handed and allow the voice at the door
in the unknown hour of night into my throne so that I
may receive.

My son, my love and I will hold hands in the gale,
we will form a ring and shout and laugh
and run round each other, with each other, to each other. 

This is our year of plenty, of wilderness and home,
of light thought.

We come from one another, we will not fold
unless to Truth. We show our glinting mystery
to the vastness and, still, are more
than it can take. 

This is so much that I have held, so much I have held away,
it would be sin, now, to place it anywhere but here on the pedestal. 

I’m here too, screaming, crying, smiling, kneeling,
confessing the red ruthlessness of my whole being and oh my God, 

I love this and don’t understand it.
I love me so much, I love you, Sam and baby boy, yes!
I love this world (but I am confused),
the whole world, the one in his hands, so much. 

I am not done.

My village came

 Mama has power, but has she enough strength? I have found an old definition of motherhood and it is simply, complicatedly, ‘Everything’. 

 My village arrived in drips during the weeks after the birth of our son. To tell you the truth, I do not really remember anything other than the relief & gratitude I felt whenever my door would swing wide to the smiles and coos of some warm person I loved so much, often bearing food or open arms. 

 There were photos, of course there were, with our new bundle where he should be: at the centre of all of them. And I was there too - not the headless, bodiless arms that were only there to hold him up so others could see. But me, my whole self, my whole bloated and sagging and lifegiving body. We were there and my people held me as I held my baby and I swear it was God on Earth all over again. 

 There is power here, oh yes, power in abundance. And deep within my village there is more strength than could be told. 

The Devoutness of Father John Misty

 The first chords of Only Son of a Lady’s Man struck me with stars and spangles right in my spiritually war-torn teenage heart. O did that music grip me like a mystical fever, burning up every question and potential answer in me, sticking to my skin like the sweat from weeks of heated worship or illness.

I swayed ceremoniously to each chant like a lay person caught up in mass hysteria. He had me toying with the idea of tarot and charting planets at a time when faith was more of an ellipsis than the hard full stop it had always been.  And then it was all gone one day. Simply swept away like the leaves on a main road, and I moved on with myself. Back to piety I slouched, but with a new & delectably warm sense of that sharp irreverence still nestled deep within me. It was a somehow holy irreverence - one that emboldened the embers of faith which remained, made them know that one day, any day, they could fan themselves back into the firestorm in less than a moment, should the command fall from his lips.

Some things, like faith - or at least religion, the casings of faith - never leave you. They follow you like a lost and wailing kitten who has been rejected by its mother and needs your warmth to survive. Music which has been inspired by that viscous, tar-like relationship between faith and religion has always moved mountains in me. People trying to find faith, lose faith, change faith, or make peace with their mottled patchwork of it... that's what makes me dig a little deeper every time I turn to their songs. 

The Nursery

 F ck, I’m almost livid at myself for being this  silly heap of a mess. . I am staring at our doorway, cracked open & showing a sliver of dim hallway,  and i wait for my baby to need me. The  sentinel - a monitor which very tenuously links the two of us by no sense other than sound - silently betrays the fact that, right now, he does not. .      Need me.  

 I am waiting, still. For a cackle of static to erupt suddenly from the tiny retro-looking device and carry his little voice to me , his mama.  Instead it is my ears  alone that  are filled with a needlessly terrified buzz, and oh  the base of my stomach swells and heaves with that  same noise now and oh oh i just want my baby back in the crib beside me here. Not forever, just for now.  Where I can see him. Where I can hear him breathe and move  and where I can reach him within one stretch, should the long long night prove too much for one so small to bear alone. 

 He’s just a baby, yeah. My baby he is.  But he knows what ‘alone’ is already.  (Did you know how soon they learnt it?)  And though i try to act so strong and one so cheery  like we don’t both know the word, for us, means ‘away from one another’,  it shatters  my uneven heart to be away from him and yet still know that he really is just fine

  without me always  near  . 

 I miss my baby who is in the other room for the first time, even though  it feels as if I am the one who has been unexpectedly exiled  from my own warmth . . .

 Oh, 

i hear 

my baby boy I’m here, 

my baby boy. 

I’m here,

right here. 

Always here

‘Don’t ask me what any of this means’ - 2022

 I scrolled through hazy pictures, grainy with the heat of adventure and youth, and felt that same dull prod of jealousy that often appears when observing the lives of my peers through the small lens of that app. 

My idea of the word Adventure has been under most strenuous interrogation this past year. I thought as a late-twenty-something year old that the definition lay in the very obvious physical sense of exploration – the one constantly tugging at me, pulling my mind from country to country, allowing me to roam freely, to taste new cultures, to converse with strangers, to know the earth and its fullness and all that wonderful, thrilling, romantic stuff. ‘Adventure’ had at some point been sold to me as a specific type of youth, entwined with an even more specific kind of freedom, and I happily bought it all up. 

This has been a hard & dear purchase to return - I’m not even sure I kept the receipts. My life, as you may know, is not very typical of the average late-twenty-something year old. I have a son, a beautiful and curious and determined little boy who wants to see all of the world just like his mama. I have a husband, a house, a new job (finally!), and a something I can barely call a small business— essentially, I’ve a boatful of responsibility that keeps me bobbing precariously along from day to day. And yet this tugging to drop it all, run away to see the world, persists. The two halves of who I am at this time in my life - young but also older - are at odds and cannot realistically meet. However much my outside life looks like I have it all and all my proverbial shit is together, the truth is I’m still like every other youthful person who craves a sense of transient chaos and wondrous novelty which my current existence could not seem further from. I have had to uproot much in order to find my small sense of adventure in the cracks and crevices of this everyday life. And I really wasn’t expecting how equally painful & thrilling it would be. 

 I hate cliches but I do have to say it: this year has been the greatest adventure of my life in absolutely none of the ways I expected. That chaos and novelty I craved? Oh you bet i got that in spades with a newborn who's somehow turning one in a few months… But while I scroll through friends & acquaintances living it up abroad or out for fancy meals (and frequently try to recreate that life within my small means), I’ve sat here far too often for my liking wondering if I should've just waited that little bit longer to fulfil this longing to be a mother and wife. This might all seem incredibly superficial and ungrateful of me, considering the immense blessings I am able to call mine, but it’s a truth I feel eludes careful inspection and conversation far too frequently… I want to pick away at this very specific idea of ‘living your best life’ while of a certain age. I want to throw it under my lamplight and reveal it to be actually a bit of a con, because in reality it’s just a new generation of keeping up with the Joneses wrapped up in the spirit of ‘youthful freedom’. I’m fully aware I’m not saying anything we don’t already know. But if you’re anything like me, no matter what side of the fence you may currently fall - young & carefree or mature & settled - there will probably always be some gnawing sensation reminding you of the other places you could be, of the other lives you could have. That feeling, my friend, is the biggest con of all. The grass is always greener. . right?

 Another thing I’ve always hated hearing but have lived & muddled through this year in order to really grasp: you won’t appreciate anything you already have unless you sit down to look at all of it, the difficult and the exciting and the gruelling and the rewarding alike. That’s why I thought about listing all the ways I’ve come to appreciate my small adventures as a new mother, as someone opening herself up to the community & boundless opportunity right on her doorstep, all while letting go of (and indeed mourning) the Other Lives That Could Have Been. But even I’d eventually find that boring and trite. I’ve done my grumbling but I don’t think I’m here to preach or offer solutions. . I guess I just wanted to publicly acknowledge certain truths in the hopes that it might strike a familiar chord at this time in our lives.  

 I’m okay with wanting the more exciting and seemingly superficial things in life, and with wanting the humbling and deeply fulfilling family life I have too. I’m perfectly okay with sometimes not being bothered by the fact that I’m not living the life I’ve been prescribed by this youth- & ego-centric western society, and I’m also okay with sometimes finding the self-sacrificial and thankless life I am currently living too hard to muddle through. In short, it’s okay to want it all and want none of it at the same time. Ours is a complex age constantly caught at the apex of something new & shining ahead and also something very very old behind. We’re told to embrace it all as we step foot atop the summit, but we’re not taught how to find and keep our balance as we do so. It’s always one extreme pitted against another, and so we often find ourselves flailing while trying to grasp at everything but holding armfuls of nothing we really feel satisfied enough with in the end. 

 I’m hoping one day, we won’t have to teeter, we won’t even feel like we have to grasp or climb and climb at all. . but if one thing history has to teach it’s the fact that as humans we are by our very nature ambitious things. We are babylonians building our confused towers up to God-knows-where. Arms always reaching up to swipe at everything we know we could not possibly hold. And that tower is a beautiful sight in its own way, but it’s a tragic one too. And that’s okay. Building, teetering, balancing, flailing, falling – it’s all adventure in its own way. Adventure of the most raw & human kind. None of it nearly as neatly typed or heavily punctuated as this little blog post might wish to suggest. But it’s there whenever we care to sit down and take a look. 

I’m Looking Forward

To being able to carelessly fold and tuck my body into itself with no bumps or barriers to worry about.

To having whole lungfuls of air at my disposal whenever I command a breath.

To wearing jeans again.

To not constantly having my heart and stomach and intestines burning in my throat at once.

To sunshine and warm breezes, and walking too quickly round the parks for people with short legs or slow gaits to keep up with.

To being Wanted and Needed.

To wearing jeans again.

To watching and hearing from the outside, rather than feeling on my insides, every precious and uncomfortable little twist, kick and hiccough.

To holding you in trembling arms that have waited far longer than nine months for the weight of your precious self to fill them.

To the hope of maybe one day being okay with the equal batterings of fear and peace, utter elation and sinking overwhelm, that will invade my already full heart all at once, every single time I look at you. 

To finally putting on my jeans and being your mother.

written: 32-33 weeks

Slow walker

 I have become one by necessity. Our child gently reminds me with each rise and fall of my legs that I can only go so fast and certainly no faster. I waddle now, sometimes shuffle when the painful stretching sensation on the right side of my groin gets too much to bear lifting a foot for.

 Motherhood is already transforming me in ways I’d not thought of - small and profound ways, often creeping into my being as I try to get on with things as best as I can; without more than a whisper, appearing out of nowhere over days and weeks and now months as I look back. In reality, I sort of expected this bafflingly new phase of my life to hit me like a boom between the ears, and then keep hitting and hitting as we hit each new milestone… but the blows have been soft yet somehow more powerful whenever they have come, and they have always come unexpectedly.

 So with this particular blow, I am now a slow walker, and I should be content with that. I can no longer keep up. I should no longer try to keep up. And really this is the thing that I have waited and prayed for as I grew into whatever the next phase of my life would bring, but it’s also the thing I kept fighting because I just did not want to let go of how far and how fast I have come. My path is far more different & honestly more difficult now than I could ever have prepared myself for, and I cannot continue to pretend I’m able to straddle both it and the one the infamous ‘Everyone Else’s of the world walk. I am not on ‘their’ path. They are not even on ‘their path’ as far as my limited perception & shallow glimpses of other peoples’ lives will ever allow me to imagine… Motherhood tells me it’s time I leave behind such shallow ways of looking at myself, at others and at the world. 

 I will have much bigger things to care for soon enough and none of this will even matter in the end. That makes me so happy to think about. Anxious, but so unbelievably happy. . .

written: 32 weeks

Some learnings, 2021

This year of learning really did teach me a few gaping truths about myself and about those that I love. It was uncomfortable in that wonderful ‘becoming-anew’ kind of way - you know the one where every molecule of your being is painfully transforming under varying levels of heat and pressure, and there’s nothing you can do about it but it’s what you’ve always wanted for yourself, and besides, you’re actually quite excited to see what of your currently recognisable self survives the crucible. If anything. 

A lot survived. A lot was refined. A lot died too, and I find myself rejoicing and mourning at once on the eve of this new year. 

I’m trying to see if there was a golden thread, or a few threads, that linked the chains of each month in 2021 together, because retrospective intentionality is my paradoxical thing apparently. There are a few that I can spot, and they all revolve around my loved ones. My own little family - as in Sam, myself and now another little one coming soon to a Victorian mid terrace nowhere near you - our extended family, and my closest most beloved friends. 

I think 2020 really forced me to open my sleepy eyes and not take these relationships for granted, to actually put the work into them which I’d been meaning to for the longest time. So that’s what I tried to start doing in 2021. And I’ll be honest, it’s been really bloody hard to be intentional about relationships that have just ‘always been there’ and you assume will be forevermore. But looking back I really do feel a lot closer to the people in my life despite the physical distance that separates us and has actually often made me feel isolated from them on the bad days. 

I also feel like I’m shaking off old habits that made me see the people closest to me in a one dimensional, often transactional, way. I find I’m seeing them in a more dynamic way now. In other words, I’m moving into a constant state of getting to know them rather than settling for who I think they are and always will be. It surprised me to find that the latter was how I saw my loved ones. Given that I’ve always seen myself as constantly evolving and never one stable thing, you’d think I’d extend that same grace to others. But this is one lesson learned that I’m continuing to practise and will always be working at by its very nature. It has started with building an understanding of people as they are, wherever it is you meet them, and accepting them as they might be or not be in the near or far future, and then deciding each day to love them all the same. Whether that love manifests itself in each passing ‘I hope they’re doing okay’ thought or in a message or phone call on a random Thursday evening, or in a yearly meetup that’s always cobbled together at the last hour, or in a last minute trip to Barcelona… that’s perfectly okay. My only expectations are that I continue cultivating these close bonds with all of the love and time and patience I can give, for as long as they’ll allow me to give it. Because I’ve started to enjoy actively appreciating just how precious each one is. 

What else. Well, Sam and I ‘achieved’ a lot this year and stopping to look back and smile at those achievements is something neither of us have ever been good at. At this point you might expect me to list them off and conclude that celebrating myself is the learning, but actually the thing I finally unearthed here is that these ‘achievements’ really aren’t anything in themselves. At the time, of course, we stopped to celebrate each one with the loved ones I rambled on about in the previous paragraph, but then it was full speed ahead onto the next thing. Because that’s all we knew about life. There was no room for stopping, resting, appreciating for too long. There was always another milestone to reach, and so we kept running towards it. Anyone who knows me well will know that this restless and blind ambition is a little beastie I’ve been wrestling with forever: in my career, my relationship with Sam, my worldly goals and even in my creativity. Too often have I denied its existence, only to arrive at that infamous point of burnout which comes after running for too long and pushing too hard into what ends up being total exhaustion and existential angst. No exaggeration. 

Accumulating achievements - and generally amassing pointless ‘stuff’ that one never really needs - simply for the sake of it is not really how I want to live my life over the long term. But that’s easy to say when you don’t know anything else and no one is showing you another way that works for you. Lesson? We’re figuring out for ourselves how to go slower on our own terms, and funnily enough, this will take time. No more running from pillar to post. There’s also a certain little human arriving in the new year who might just force that habit out of us anyway…

Now that is an adventure I am both wildly excited and inexplicably terrified for us to step into, hopefully with our eyes as open as they can be and with our family & friends close by the whole time. 

I am too far down

 The line. 

We are all floating in a line, 

arms stretched wide and only hands, 

fingers, 

skin, 

sweat, 

holding us 

together.

We are all trying to belong 

to each other: a group. 

But we can’t 

because it’s only one person to two – one either side of you – 

some grasping tightly, interlocked,

some barely holding on,

all one after the other. 

We can’t turn to see each other down the line.  

And what or who tethers us to the earth below 

as we all drift outwards, unfurling

like one long ribbon into space? 

Who is holding your hand?

Where does it end?

I couldn’t tell you, for

I am too far down the line

to know. 

Going, Staying

I want calm,

I want excitement.

I want up and she wants down.

You want round and I want round,

And we want round and round and round. 

My Speech Will Be The Silence

I think you have come to sit here before me 

for a little while, to look at me and expect something. 

(Don’t worry, I expected it too - something).

I don’t know who you are, or perhaps I do. 

But maybe I’ll be sitting here for years to come, 

when you have come and gone a thousand times,

and my words have chipped away at each other

until they and I are piles of nothing beneath nothing

And my speech will be the silence.