A Hogmanay Letter.

Dear ones,

 it's that time after Christmas that stretches into the first week or so of the new year when I think back over the last twelve months and feel inescapably tragic. No matter if it has been a good twelve months or a bad twelve months or (more commonly) an untanglable mixture of the two, the weight of the year past descends upon me and I feel heavy, as heavy as if I were being asked to live it all over again in the space of a week.

 This year has been longer than most. We started it in London in a pretty bad way – stretched, sad, exhausted, scared, fairly legitimately tragic. We scrambled and we fought to get ourselves packed and organised and ready to leave the life that was filling our pockets with more and more rocks every day and we did it; after three months of painting and building and planting and crying we stuffed our bags and closed the door, said goodbye to the garden and the home that we had tried to build (some pieces more successfully than others) and handed the keys to our year's work and life's savings over to a bunch of only moderately suspect tenants.


 We boarded planes and ferries and planes again - sometimes together and sometimes apart - and fell face first into Nye's parents' arms and home where we lay whimpering and shaking and drinking wine like France had run out of water. It was supposed to be three months but it turned into six, three months being not nearly long enough to recover from the preceding hundreds. I'm still trying to make sense of them but I probably never will, they were six months out of a life otherwise lived elsewhere. They were six months that were purely, intensely, unfathomably their own (très français) thing. Seductive and restorative and alienating and exhausting, they both tempted us with the desire to turn them into our next six years and sent us running for a place we knew better, a place for want of a better word, less foreign.


 And so again we were packing our bags and our boxes and our car. Wrapping the speakers and the hard drives in tea towels, stacking the books and squashing the cuddly toys into the spaces in between. Washing and folding the clothes outgrown, the summer things that would in all reality not be needed again while they still fitted and packing them into bags for the charity shop. Dismantling bikes, taking photos from the fridge door, secretly filing a thousand drawings of the dog and the swimming pool into the recycling. Boarding planes alone again with two small, bewildered children and watching my husband drive off, the work of his past few months bouncing along on a trailer behind him. Saying goodbye to somewhere that like the home before it had been so many things to me, both wonderful and terrible. A place that had taught me that nowhere is perfect, that however hard we look a home is never going to be heaven all of the time, that even a landscape gifted to you by the gods can and will turn into a prison of occasion and that maybe it was time to accept and learn to live with that.


 Stepping off the first plane into Bristol we stumbled again into the arms of family, again we drank wine and again sighs of relief were prickled with tears of separation while bone deep exhaustion settled over us as we drifted to sleep on the floor. Another plane, another journey alone with little children and we were almost there, desperate to be reunited again with my husband, their daddy who had driven across two countries. Together, in a state of weary confusion and displacement and with the help of my mum whose quiet home we invaded with our chaos, we got ready for the final stretch of our journey and a convoy of two cars trailed slowly through the Highlands, mountains and lochs and deer and sheep leading the way to the ferry terminal, a long concrete strip buzzing with fishermen bringing in catches and seagulls busy spreading their detritus. In the back of one of those cars shivered a small, smelly puppy with ridiculous ears who had been found along the way and collected that morning in an act of hope and serendipity colliding. Ten years of talking about a dog and finally, finally, we had one.

 We arrived in the dark, having sailed into the sunset and out of the other side. Driving across the moors in the pitch of a night unlit by street lamps, the ghostly antlers and luminous eyes of red deer, the low swooping of owls and the darting of rabbits from the road welcomed us to their island. The next morning that same road disappeared into the grey of an October sunrise and in our pyjamas we threw a ball in the garden, marvelling at the thick blanket, the rolling tide of mist from whence our new home was peering.



This year has been a long year. We have moved and we have moved. We have rested in a way that we have never rested before, we have quit and we have stalled and we have tried to start over again. We have made the best of what we have and we have worked hard on accepting - accepting decisions mis-made, situations mis-handled, directions mis-taken. We are looking into a new year (like every other damn person) not knowing what will come and being, finally, okay with that, hopeful that this will be one of new starts but that not a single one of those starts will require a boarding card.

 I have dreams big and dreams small for 2016, the list is endless but these are some that come to mind; to see more of the people I love, to find a home and put up a picture, to sell my photography but not my soul, to train the dog to walk at heel, to find a mascara that works for me, a pair of jeans that fit and a job that pays me actual money. To hold the newborn baby of my oldest friends and cry quiet tears of joy into his or her soft little head. To learn to drive, make sourdough bread and joint a chicken (not all at the same time). To climb more sand dunes, chase more waves, eat more foods that scare me. To go slow and enjoy it, to go fast and enjoy that too. To fill a sketchbook. To find my place in this endless landscape, to enjoy the space that has opened up around me and allow myself to fill as much of it as I need. To shout less, or at least with a little more direction, to join the library and knit something in the round. The list goes on and always will.

 Happy New Year friends. Thank you for being with me this year, for leaving your words of encouragement and commiseration and support. For offering me your tales of failure and your dreams of success. For being there when I quit and being there when I tried to start again. Every word you have left here has been a gift to me, a gift to each other and I hope you know that they are always, always appreciated. As this year ends I wish you all a few moments of peace to think about all that has past, to ready yourselves for all that lies ahead. I wish for at least 30% of your dreams to come true, if not this year then the next or the next or the next again and for those dreams that aren't for you to be let go with all of the grace or anger or dismay that they deserve, for as my Granny says, what's for you won't go by you. 

 See you on the other side my friends, see you on the other side. x

Going Home.

The spring buds fattened slowly forth into summer fruits, the summer fruits gorged on the sun and the rain and ripened into swollen bunches of sugar and promise and then the village came forth to stoop and pick and gather. All that was grown and fostered, nurtured and tended came to fruition and it was time to bring the harvest to bear, to say this is what we have made and this is what it will become. 

As with the grapes so with our plans. Our ideas for what was to be, our thoughts on what had passed. Our desires and dreams and hopes and wishes. Those that had not come to fruition were let go sadly and with many tears.

We had been flirting with a dream but as the rains fell and the sun beat down it was becoming clearer every day that our dreams, the ones we had been focusing on – they weren't ripening. Perhaps they were planted in the wrong place, perhaps the conditions weren't right or the timing wasn't ideal, maybe the weather hadn't been quite optimal but as the season drew on it became clearer, storm by storm, day by day that although we had wished and hoped and dreamed of a long term life in France, the reality was that it wasn't quite working for us. 

Although the plan had always been that we would just come here for a few months while we figured out the next step, we had harbored secret dreams of staying forever, I mean why wouldn't you? It's beautiful, it's perfect. Except. Except that it's not home and it turns out that we long for home - somewhere where the ground is receptive to roots being placed. Here, although we have tried, our roots have pushed up against rock and boulder, have been baked and burned in the heat, half drowned in the rains, struggled to get by in the climate that is very hospitable to only one thing, one crop that has evolved over thousands of years to thrive here. A crop that isn't ours. 

The realisation that however hard we wished for it this wouldn't be our home and that what we really longed for home was painful, it hurt. We have loved it here. Over the last two months the tiny roots that had managed to push through the ancient rock and slate, that had begun to cling slowly but dearly to the landscape were eased away, pulled from habit and familiarity, from hope and recognition and although they were wrapped in the damp cotton of loving and careful relocation they cried, aching for the place that they had so desperately tried to make home. My heart, it aches. 

I didn't want to leave. I wanted to stay, until I didn't. I wanted France to be my home, French to be my language, these to be my people. This place where people care about the things that I care about, about family and food and celebration and the small but sacred routines of every day life. This place. it speaks to my soul in so many ways but not in the ways in which my soul can speak back. How different it would be if we were French.

 

Sometime over the endless two months that was W&P's school holidays there came a point that felt like The Time, the point where we had to decide to either commit to investing a serious amount of time in France and finding our own home, or to leave. And so we decided to leave, to try that thing that we have talked of and batted back and forth for the last ten years. That thing that has always been our maybe and our some day and our what if and our but I don't think I could. The life that has sung a siren song to us and yet always scared the sweet crap right out of us. 

In a few weeks we are moving to the Western Isles of Scotland. To the island that my grandmother comes from, that we spent every childhood holiday on, that I moved to with my mum when I was twelve – a move that the only upside of which I could think being that if we lived there we would have to go somewhere else on holiday. And yet, within a few weeks I was as happy there as I've been anywhere. My feelings about the place are mixed. It's home, home of my heart, home of my dreams. It's the colour of my soul and the picture that creeps across my canvas. It's my answer to the inevitable 'where are you from?'.  It's also the place of my most anxious recurring  nightmares, the claustrophobia of a life I've already lived, a life that I remember as both the best of times and the worst of times. Home, in other words. 
 

There are a million things that draw me back and a good half dozen that repel me. In the interests of my family and our future and the possibility that it might just be the thing that soothes my soul, I've agreed to move back, to try it one more time, thirteen years after I last lived there.
 

Nye and the girls are delighted. There is talk of dogs and chickens and beaches and lambs. Cows and horses and goats and open fires. Newly built houses and machines that convert methane into heated swimming pools. Of friendships and conversation and being able to share a common language with people again. Of proximity to family and to the dearest of friends. Of remoteness, of the wilds, of living a life on the edge of all the things that most people hold dear. Of home. And for that I hold the greatest hope. Home. God, how I've missed it. 

Country of Solid Worth

A Map of the Open Country of a Womans' Heart, c. 1833–1842 Source: http://visualoop.com

(Alternatively Titled: Things I Might Want To Do Or Be When I Grow Up.)

When I in school I wanted to be either a lawyer or an artist. A lawyer because I was clever and I liked using that to prove that other people were not, or an artist because art made me happy. I chose art. I only regret that decision maybe two days a week. It's not that I wish I was a lawyer exactly, but it would be nice to have a salary, and for the part of my brain that was once clever to still work. And to have a salary.

So, Be An Artist; that was my dream. I didn't get very far with that, there's nothing like art school to kill your dreams, and your tolerance for artists. I left art school a year early; sad and angry and betrayed by the neglectful - borderline abusive - tutors I had been trusted to and completely, utterly unemployable. Someone asked us to photograph their wedding so we did that and it turned out that a) we were good at it, b) it was quite fun and c) people would PAY us! We were sold.

Eight years in and we've had enough though, the moments of fun are outweighed by the pressure, the responsibility, the logistics, the desk work, the back ache and the speeches. We've known since the beginning that it wasn't going to be our forever careers and we've been having the exact same conversation for as long as I can remember;

'I don't want to be a wedding photographer forever.'

'Me neither. What else could we do?'

'Dunno.'

Nothing has changed except that we can't, just can't, keep doing it. I've spent a lot of the last 6 months wailing at Nye 'But I don't know what I want to do, I don't have a dream.' Every time I say it I hear Ross from Friends; 'Ahhh, the lesser-known 'I don't have a dream' speech' (I keep this to myself, chuckling inwardly as the husband does not appreciate Friends references. I know, the things I suffer in my marriage.)

There still isn't a next plan. There are lots of things that I sometimes think I would like to do/be and I've been keeping a list. Let's imagine for a minute that any of these is even slightly possible, that education in England doesn't cost £9000 a year (NINE THOUSAND FUCKING POUNDS. Yes, yes, yes, I know that in America it costs like, Fifty thousand, but your country is absurd.) and that I have the time / energy / mental capacity to retrain as anything; these are The Things I Would Maybe Like To Be or Do (in no particular order);

Forensic Science. I have watched nine seasons of Bones and it looks fun. When I watch Bones I can think of nothing but splatter patterns and decomposition rates and bone markers and how much I really want to learn about that. Also, having watched nine seasons of Bones, I'm surely at least half qualified now.

Teaching. I have flirted with the idea of teacher training for years, initially because teaching is a qualification that I could use anywhere we decided to live and then gradually because I actually liked the idea of teaching. The thing is I hate noise, crowds and parents so I would need to teach only quiet kids and have nothing to do with the people who spawned them. Which I'm sure is an option they offer you when you're looking for placements.

Writing. I love to write, which you might have noticed and after doing a really excellent writing class at City University last year I even feel a little bit like I could do it in a more focused way, if only I knew what I would like to write about. That only takes me so far though, as far as a way to spend all my time but not a way to make an actual pay-for-food-and-raise-my-family living. No one makes money from writing. Even real, published, experienced writers with actual books have to get other jobs, like serving coffee or turning tricks.

Publishing. in lieu of being able to write my own work I would enjoy correcting other people's mistakes and I believe that books will save the world. Unfortunately I hear print is dying. Also it's a fairly London-centric industry and I think you need to start out with a) a degree in English and b) a willingness to work 50 hours a week without pay. I have neither of those things.

B&B Proprietor in the South of France. Basically I want to own this place, to drink wine and eat cheese and grow food and probably learn to speak French at some point and send my kids to school in a country that still values state education and healthcare for all. (I know France is no utopia, you don't need to tell me that, but it's not England. And it's warmer that Scotland. Which is currently being fucked by England. So there you go.)

Counselling. Friends of mine work in counselling and psychotherapy and they are full of interesting thoughts and conversations and opinions. Their training sounds like training I would like to have, the studying like study I would thoroughly enjoy. I've been to therapy, I've seen a couple of counsellors and it's no exaggeration to say that they changed my life. I'd like to do that for people. Sadly, I can only talk/listen to people talk for an hour a day before I start biting the inside of my face to stop me from closing my eyes and rocking back and forward with my fingers in my ears. That could be a problem.

Zoologist. I was standing in a bus queue a few weeks ago when the man waiting next to me admired my purse (leopard print) and my scarf (leopard print) and my tights (leopard print). He told me that he was a zoologist based in Paris who works with South African wildlife reserves finding ways for the wildlife and the local people to live harmoniously together. His wife was a wildlife photographer (also fond of leopard print although I'm sure she approached it in a more restrained fashion, most grown up people do.) Anyway, we were just standing chatting about life, leopards and the ridiculously small print on the Oxford bus timetable when I felt a lump rising in my throat and my eyes burning, envy and a sense of pointlessness washed over me, that is what I want to do, I thought, I want to work with animals and the environment and cuddle baby leopards.

Rare Breeds Farmer. I like animals (see above), both looking after them and more recently, eating them. Raising them myself seems like the best way to make me feel less bad about eating them. Also they don't talk. I do hear that farming is quite hard work though. And that land is expensive. And I find mud to be a bit of a drag.

Micro-distiller. This is one that Nye and I have talked about quite seriously, to the point where he has researched stills and the laws preventing us from having one. We have talked a lot about moving to an island where the only things that grow are sheep (see above), potatoes and insanity. There's no money to be made in sheep or potatoes (possibly in insanity, if I pursued that counselling qualification first) but there is money to be made in single estate British potato vodka... Sadly the rules in the UK to make it very tough to set up a micro distillery, not impossible but rather a ball-ache. I also worry about the state of our livers and general ability to function if we had liquor quite literally on tap. 

Artisanal Toy Maker. Plan; move to island, (see above) buy sheep, name sheep, shear sheep, spin fleece into wool, knit toys, label them with their sheep's name and photo, price at £100 each, sell them to Londoners as Single Estate Island Teddies, live in perpetual state of shame at calling myself an 'artisanal' anything, repeat. 

Photographer. I wanted to be a photographer from the second week of art school, when I used the dark room for the first time and from that rancid smelling liquid a fleeting moment I had thought interesting the week before appeared in a mixture of magic and alchemy and the teaching assistant told me I had 'an eye'. The problem is I don't know how to make a living from it, I don't have any experience and I'm not very good. Joke! I do! I have! I am! The real problem is that I'm burned out. That I've been making a living from it for 8 years and I'm exhausted. I don't want to keep photographing weddings (which I'll write about one day) but I don't have the energy to try and break into other areas. I am a tired photographer.

So there you have it; my career plans. Thank god our plan for the immediate future is to eat, sleep and milk Nye's parents for both childcare and accommodation because our longer term ideas are, um, questionable to say the least. I am living in a state of faith at the moment, faith that our immediate plan won't drive us crazy and that our longer term plan will become clear, and that that longer term plan is not deeply unrealistic, unaffordable and unsustainable. Living in a state of faith isn't a bad place to be.  

Living Adventurously (aka, Quitting)

Remember way back, oh two years ago, when we moved to London? How it was the most exciting thing in the whole world? Well, it hasn't really worked out for us. I feel like such a flake saying this, but we're leaving.

I had loved it, I really had. Then at the beginning of last year I hit a wall. I spiralled into a bad place and suddenly I hated everything, I mean everything. It was pretty terrible. I spent my days either crying or thinking about how I could leave my family. I swore that the city was the problem and that I'd just feel better if we lived somewhere where every noise, every shout, every mattress discarded in the street didn't cut into my soul. It was really, really no good. I did not leave my family and I did stop crying, but I never felt at home again in London. The city that I had briefly loved felt hard, abrasive, expensive, exhausting. I had neither the money to enjoy the amazing bits that called to me or the energy to find the amazing bits that I could afford. The tiny bit of community that we'd had here had left and I was lonely, tired and worn down. *sad violin* 

We daydreamed of moving, of leaving the city and our jobs and finding a way to live cheaply and happily outdoors. We talked in maybes; 'maybe we could move to France? Maybe we could move to Dorset? Maybe we could move to Alaska?' (that last one was all Nye.) But however deeply we felt the longing to move there didn't seem any way to make it happen while we were running as fast as we could to keep up with the daily get up, get everyone ready, work, get everyone back, feed everyone, work, sleep, repeat, travel at the weekends. There was no energy to talk about making a change let alone the energy to actually do it and while we had been talking about quitting wedding photography for years neither of us could come up with a viable alternative that we could step into.

Sometimes when you're desperately looking for a way out the universe throws you a bone, it's just that it's not the bone you hoped for. Instead of a nice juicy rib that you can chew at your leisure it's a great fucking ox skull hurled through your sitting room window and now you have a way out but there's glass and shit everywhere and a frankly terrifying head staring at you with its gaping, empty eye sockets and you're too shocked and traumatised to move. That's what happened. (Literally. No, not really, but it was close.) 

It was messy and horrible and I shook for days but it was finally clear that we could not keep going the way that we were, we were starting to fall apart at the seams. So we quit, kind of. It was mostly emotional and symbolic at that point; we planned to leave London and we stopped taking wedding bookings and instantly we felt better, lighter.

That was five months ago. At the moment we're starting to pack up the things we want to keep, trying really hard to get rid of as much of our crap as possible, finishing making our house nice so that we can rent it out (one day, one day we'll make a house nice so that we can live in it) and freaking out. Nye, mostly fixing the house; me, mostly freaking out.

'Where are you going?' you ask. Well, that's a good question. How very clever of you to notice that I have not in fact mentioned an actual plan, somewhere we are going to go and something we are going to do. Well, immediately we are going to France, to stay in N's parents' self-catering place. When you're having an existential crisis it helps if someone you know has a spare house in the south of France and is willing to let you ride out your meltdown in it.

We're planning to stay for about three months and for the girls to go to pre-school there while we a) recover from the last few years and b) figure out what the hell we're going to do longer term c) eat cheese, drink wine and get fat/fit (yet to be determined).

After that we are thinking about spending a couple of months in the Western Isles. We also talk about Dorset, Glasgow, Wales and moving to sea. So if anyone would like to start a sweepstake on where we'll end up. . .

I fluctuate between thinking that we're doing something great, we're living adventurously, we're identifying what doesn't make us happy and doing what we can to find what will, teaching our children that life is short and precious and that you need to live it well, that fear shouldn't stop you from trying new paths. And then feeling like a complete and utter failure who has invested eight years in a career that they don't love, who has no idea what they actually want to be (or where they want to live) and who is dragging their children around in their wake while they try to figure it out causing them irreparable therapy-inducing damage. Not to mention feeling like an entitled brat who has the luxury of throwing it all in and moving to France. I have good days and bad days.

At the moment we have no idea when we're actually going to get out of here. We were aiming for February but that's not going to happen. Life and Christmas and the flu saw to that. We run out of money at the end of March that would be a good point by which to have our arses in gear. Wish us luck. 

our brightest lights

'What platitudes then can we fling along with the listless, insufficient wreaths at the stillness that was once so animated and wired, the silence where the laughter was? That fame and accolades are no defence against mental illness and addiction? That we live in a world that has become so negligent of human values that our brightest lights are extinguishing themselves? That we must be more vigilant, more aware, more grateful, more mindful? That we can’t tarnish this tiny slice of awareness that we share on this sphere amidst the infinite blackness with conflict and hate?'
Russell Brand, on the late, great Robin Williams.*

It was with such sadness that I took in the news this morning that Robin Williams had committed suicide. I can't think of a single actor that brought me more joy as a child, who starred in films that moved me as much as Good Will Hunting or Dead Poet's Society in my adolescence. (Or creeped me out as much as that one about the guy working in the photo lab, but I prefer not to think too hard about that one.) 

In lieu of words of my own I ask you to read the above Guardian piece by Russel Brand. It's everything I wish I was capable of writing. I also ask that if you are suffering... please hold on. Please tell someone. Please.

* It still confuses me that Russell Brand is one of the most eloquent, moving voices of our generation. RUSSELL BRAND? The first time I read one of his pieces I thought it was a practical joke. I mean RUSSELL BRAND. Come on.

On really needing to pull oneself together.

Brooks Salzwedel

You know when someone asks you to do something that you don't normally do and you say 'okay' because Why Not? (and you need the money) and then it gets to the day before and you are on the verge of vomiting and you cry actual tears and wonder if there is any way you can get out of this because YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING AND WHY DID YOU AGREE TO THIS AND OHMYGOD IT'S TERRIBLE AND YOU'RE PROBABLY GOING TO DIE and then on the day you leave super early and you walk very very slowly like a dog on the way to the vet or a seven year old due at the head teacher's office and you feel physically sick all of the way and the rain is dripping on you and your phone dies so you can't actually be sure where you are going and you get hungry and the only thing that you can find to eat is a £12 sandwich which turns out to be half a sandwich and so now you're still scared and still hungry but you also want to punch whoever came up with stupid fucking Le Pain Quotidien and their stupid fucking half sandwiches and then you finally get there and you have to start doing what you're so scared of doing and you're still a little bit shaking and kicking yourself for ever agreeing to it in the first place and wait, what is this? You're enjoying yourself? And you're having a good time? And you're actually quite good at what you do?

Yeah. That.

on motherhood

"I didn't expect to come face to face with my selfishness, my laziness and my lack of patience so brutally or abruptly. I didn't expect that my self confidence would wither or that I would battle so much just getting through the day. I didn't realise that such a small creature could expose me the way Pip has.

I thought I could just go on being me. Me with a baby. Turned out, I had to be stripped back and rebuilt from the bottom up. "

I'm probably not the only one who feels like culturally we are mis-selling motherhood; yes it's amazing and wonderful and fulfilling and life-giving and nurturing etc etc, but FUCK, it's hard too. I'm probably not the only one who is reading blogs like Glow and looking at supermodel (sometimes literally) mothers with beatifically happy children in impeccably artistic houses spouting crap about how their most humbling moment as a mother was when their kid spilled juice on their interior designer friend's white sofa and thinking COME ON.

My friend Rachel wrote the most beautifully raw and succinct piece on motherhood for Oh You Pretty Things, summing up in remarkably few words what it feels like to become a mother, to go from being responsible for the life of one person to being responsible for the life of another (or others) and the complete and utter disassembling that takes place to readjust to this new and huge way of being.

You should read it.

Giving birth. Part 2.

part 1. {here}

The drugs that are meant to start the proper contractions kick in, fast. It's really sore, which I don't like, but I'm also detached enough to observe that it's probably not as sore as my worst periods, the ones where I black out.  Birth Plan Reading Midwife suggest that I get in the birthing pool. It's deep and dark and lovely and the water pressure is excellent. I ask Nye why our bath doesn't fill this fast. He sits beside me and looks anxious. It amuses me that he's being such an expectant father about the whole thing. Then it irritates me, he's read the birth partner book so why the fuck isn't he making it all better instead of just sitting there?

The lights are low, I'm in the pool completely naked. I'm still sore but boringly so, not enough to mention. The water seems to quite literally dilute the pain. I'm surprised, I kind of thought people gave birth in water to distract themselves from the pain, not because it actually helped to lessen it. Weird bits of stuff are floating in the water, I chase them absent mindedly with my hand, trying to catch them. Nye looks concerned. It's almost 8pm, shifts have changed and the door opens. New No Birth Plan Midwife has arrived and tells me that I need to get out of the pool right away as the water will wash out the drugs that are meant to induce labour. Man, I am pissed off.

As soon as I get out of the water I'm in pain again. It takes the midwife 15 minutes to come back. I could have been in the water the whole time instead of pacing the room, clutching furniture and moaning about being sore. We're shown to a labour room and told to make ourselves at home, as if we've just arrived at a nice hotel for the weekend. We're told that if we have an ipod we can plug it into the stereo and listen to some relaxing music. We do have an ipod, which we brought for exactly this purpose, but I can't possibly fathom why I would want to listen to music right now.

Nye is rummaging in the bag for something, food probably. I spot the camera, I ask him for it and take his picture. He takes mine. They're the last pictures of us before we become parents.

I'm sore. I'm lying on the bed and I'm sore. It's not excruciating (for example, I can still take photos) but I don't like it much either. The midwife offers me pethidine. I waver for a second while I remember something about believing in 'natural birth' and that drugs are bad for the baby, then said 'yes please'. One injection and 20 seconds later I remember how much I adore opiates. Something delicious washes through my body and it gets a lot easier to make myself comfortable. I fall asleep.

Doctors come, one at a time, to check how dilated I am. Some of them are nice, respectful of the fact that I am making life, some of them call me 'good girl'. They all apologise for the discomfort. It might be discomfortable, I couldn't tell you, I don't remember.

I fall asleep.

I wake up. I feel a little sore again, not much but a little. Things don't feel quite as delicious, the edges not quite as blurred.

The anaesthesiologist comes in. She's not much older than me, she's friendly. I immediately like her. The midwife tells me I'm lucky she's on duty, there's a male one and he just took 20 minutes and three attempts to get the needle thingy into a patient's spine. This makes me feel quite sick. No one has asked my if I'm ready for an epidural, it's just happening and that's fine. I hope they'll give me more pethidine,

Everyone's chatty. I lean over the edge of the bed and am told to stay very still. No one says it but I've read the books, one sneeze and I could be paralysed forever. Never have I felt more like sneezing.

She rubs numbing stuff on my skin, it doesn't work. I feel the needle go it. I twitch. Fuck, am I paralysed? No. Good. I hope that it might feel like the pethidine, beautiful as it trickles through my veins, but it doesn't. I just go disappointingly dumb. Someone whacks my feet to see if I can feel it, I can't, which is good. The midwife turns the lights down and leave. Nye and I chat quietly a little and then I nod off again, it must be around midnight.

I wake up and push myself up slightly to see what's going on, something must be going on. Nye is asleep in a reclining chair next to me, the room is empty, the lights still low. It is a warm yellow cocoon, I lie down and fall asleep again. I haven't slept so much in weeks.

The next (and last) time I wake it's very early in the morning, something past 4am. I need to pee. The midwife is there. I don't know if we called her, if she just happened to be there or if knowing we needed her she appeared like magic. In my memory she appeared like magic which now that I think about it, seems unlikely.

I tell her I need to go to the loo, thinking that she might help me to the bathroom. I've forgotten that my legs don't work any more and feel slightly surprised when she reminds me. Apparently I'm going to need to have a catheter. I know from past experience that I like catheters, they negate the need to get out of bed to pee, something that I've been looking forward to for approximately 9 months. The midwife bends my legs at the knee and props them up. I note that although I can't feel anything, they're not useless, they prop quite easily. Interesting. Her head disappears.

'Oh.' her voice says from between my legs. 

'You're fully dilated. I can see the head.'

Huh, I think, that's pretty cool.

'Okay, I'd like you to push a little bit' .... 

'now a little bit more'..... 

'good'..... 

'now a little bit harder, the baby's nearly out.'

EXCUSE ME WHAT?

I thought I was practise pushing, so that she could look at it's head.  No one said anything about having a baby right this minute .Why did no one tell me I am having the baby right this minute? Okay, I think, I suppose I can have a baby right now and I push with more conviction, the conviction of someone who knows she's having a baby and isn't just practising.

'Harder! Okay! We're nearly there!'

Scissors disappear between my legs, Nye looks at me, panic stricken, not sure what to do. He has been told that I do not want an episiotomy. I smile at him, nod my head and tell him without words that it's all okay. Despite my surprise that she wants me to have this baby right now, everything is okay, exactly as it should be. I am having a baby. Never have I felt such pure faith that everything is okay, happening exactly as it's meant to.

There are three people in the room; me, Nye and the midwife. It's sometime before 5am, the world is dark and it's quiet, the lights are still low. I push again, harder than before, and then there are four. Me, Nye, the midwife and my baby girl.

I laugh, relief and joy relax my muscles. Nye looks at me with wonder. 'You did it' he whispers. Clutching his hand, glistening with sweat, as happy as is possible to be, I turn to my right and away from my husband. I see the midwife; wiping, wrapping, weighing, and then a tiny tiny person is delivered to me. The tiniest person I've ever seen. She's wearing a knitted hat, she's wrapped tightly in a blanket. Her mouth is tiny and open and her eyes are closed. Her lips part, searching, and I want desperately to put her to my breast.

The door opens, fluorescent corridor light spilling into our room bringing with it people. I don't look up, I'm still staring at my daughter, wondering how to get to my boobs through the top that I'm wearing.

"why didn't you call......"  

"...there wasn't time...... sudden..... straightforward..... blood loss though, about three litres.'' 

" ...need to call consultant before next one arrives"

Arms gently pull my baby away, hand her to her father. 'But....' I want to say, 'she needs milk' but before the thought has reached the world I drift back to my body, to the other baby that's still in there and the doctores that have started to arrive. Doctors who want to make sure that they see this one come out. For the first time I'm torn between two people, my child who is here and my child who isn't. No one is interested though.

Lights turned up, monitors strapped on. Talk of heart rates. The anaesthesiologist reappears. She 'tops me up' while someone rolls an ancient looking scanner into the room. Yet more people arrive.Gel on my stomach. More people. The scanner. Checking that the baby's still breech. Monitoring her heart rate. Waiting. Waiting for her to turn. Stubborn. Stubborn baby. Bright lights. We wait.

An hour later, a consultant. Stern face, disapproving.

"What is she still doing here? Theatre. Now." 

"Straightforward" says the midwife. Cut off mid sentence.  

"Theatre."

People leave. There is me, Nye and the midwife again. And our baby.

The midwife is doing something to the bottom of the bed, adjusting something so that it will fit through corridors. 'SHIT' she exclaims, metal clattering to the floor. A container dropping, liquid splashing, lots of liquid splashing. My legs are still suspended, I don't know what's happening but I know the midwife is stressed. Something is broken, there is blood on her scrubs.

Then it's fixed and I'm moving through the corridor. Nye is left alone in a darkened room with my blood on the walls. Except he's not alone, he's holding a baby, his baby, the first of precious few moments that he and his eldest daughter will share, just the two of them, alone.

I'm moving through double doors after double doors. There are voices, so many people. One two three four five six seven I lose count. Lights, so bright, dazzling, white walls, lamps. So this is theatre. I've been in theatre before, three times, but those theatres have been relative broom cupboards, a tight squeeze for a surgeon,  anaesthesiologist, nurse and patient. This theatre is bright, spacious, there's room for the ten people I have so far registered. Nye comes through the door, following slowly behind the crowd. He sits to my left. My daughter is wheeled in in a large plastic box. My daughter. She is placed beside us. Her little mouth is still moving, still searching for a breast that isn't there. Nye places a hand in her box beside her before turning back to me.

I try to count again, one two three four five six seven... twelve. Twelve people in the room; for me, for my daughter who is yet to be born.  I take stock. There is Mairi, the midwife. There is me, there is Nye. I don't know if I count us. There is a consultant between my legs, I've never seen her before. There are two midwives looking after the baby. There is the anaesthesiologist. There's a backup anaesthesiologist (probably the one who took 20 minutes to anaesthetise his patient. I am wary of that one.) There are two paediatricians standing in the corner by the incubator, they're talking about the holidays they have coming up, skiing. They are clearly straight out of medical school and are flirting wildly. They could not be less interested that 6 feet away from them life is coming into the world. In the far corner, with a disapproving look, is the consultant who insisted I was moved to theatre NOW. She's itching to take charge.


The midwife, my midwife, is holding my hand. The other two are fussing around my baby with that peculiar mixture of possessiveness and disinterest that they all have. Nye is holding my other hand. The paediatricians are flirting. My anaesthesiologist is standing beside me. Among all of those people she, Nye and my midwife are mine, they're the only ones that I notice. The others are strangers, along for the ride and I'm barely aware of them. My midwife is asking me to push, the consultant between my legs is telling me to push, my anaesthesiologist is asking me if I can feel anything.

'Yes' I tell her.

'Do you want me to top you up?' she asks, reaching automatically for whatever it is that pumps more drugs into my spinal cord.

'No,' I tell her,  'please don't. I can feel it but it doesn't hurt. It's.... amazing.'

She looks utterly bewildered, but also slightly impressed. She finds her place by the consultant and leans over, watching in mute fascination. Surely she's seen this before?

The midwife tells me to push, to push harder. That damn stubborn baby does not want to come out. I remember what I read about amorous activity encouraging babies to leave the womb and I ask Nye to kiss me. I am absolutely sure that Nye kissing me and only Nye kissing me will lead to this baby being born. Now, thinking back, the thought of me telling Nye over and over again to 'kiss me!' like some awful hippy makes me want to die with embarrassment but at the time it made perfect sense; the baby doesn't want to come out, if Nye and I kiss my cervix will open like lotus blossom and she will enter the world perfect and whole and ready to greet a brand new dawn. I blame the opiates. And Ina May. 


But then, with the help of forceps to shoe-horn her out, Baby Two is born. She is in this world. And she really, really isn't happy about it. First there is a yell, and then in silent protest she turns blue. She is taken to the resus table and the paediatricians stop flirting and disappear over my daughter, my other daughter, I have two.  She perks up and they bring her to me, but she doesn't look too perky, in fact she looks rather blue again. They whisk her away to NICU, assuring me that she's fine. It's only days later that I think to question them, my faith that everything is just fine is still going strong.

My midwife's shift is long over yet she's still here. The other midwives tell her to go home, get some sleep. She leans over and kisses my cheek. She hugs me tight and whispers in my ear 'please tell me what they're going to be called, I won't see you again.' We've been refusing to tell anyone their names for the last 12 hours, it seeming rude to tell other people before we've told them, but I whisper back 'Ella and Amelia. And thank you.' As she leaves the theatre I notice that she's covered from waist to toe in blood, I wonder whose it is.

The lights are still bright as people start to drift away. There is an obstetrician in a headscarf between my legs, she is stitching me back up. It's not sore but it's bloody uncomfortable, it feels as if someone is sewing a brick into my vagina. Very, very tightly. I look around the room, hoping to see the placentas but I can't tell what is my flesh and what is blood-stained paper towels. No one even mentions them to me, let alone ask me if I want to keep them. 'What if I want to make a print? Or a wee charm?' I wonder. Maybe placenta prints aren't big in Glasgow.

Eventually it's done. I'm free of theatre, no long a vessel to empty then mend, but a mother with a baby, to be sent to recovery.

The recovery rooms are quiet, I lie with Ella and Nye and finally, I get to feed her. I hold her to my breast and the midwife helps her to latch on. In one arm I hold a tiny brand-new person, in the other hand a cheese sandwich. It's the best cheese sandwich I've ever eaten. Nye takes a picture of me on his phone, in it I am the happiest I can ever imagine being. He leaves to check on Amelia, and so begins the story of our stay in hospital. 

mama.

They call me 'mama'. 

Sometimes I feel lost and then they point at my heart and they call me mama and I know who I am again. 

It's like floating off and just as you're losing sight of the ground, feeling the gentle tug of a string and knowing that you're tethered somewhere, even if you can't quite remember where. 

*photos by Nye. 

tipping point.

I was editing a photo session, an hour I spent this week with a gorgeous little girl in her home, looking at the photos of her playing with her mummy and smiling and giggling and showing me her toys. Every so often I was checking twitter, as I do on most work days, to see what was happening in my small corner of the internet and to share amusing links to articles about boobs or let the world know that I spent my morning photoshopping dog genitals out of a wedding album, when I saw this tweet from Gaby Hinsliff. At first I skimmed by it, tried really hard to ignore it. God, I wanted to ignore it. Who wants to read things that they know are going to break their hearts? So I went back to my photo session, back to images of a happy, safe toddler wrapped in the arms of her mother. But then I was back on twitter, my finger hovered over the #tippingpoint hashtag and after a few seconds I clicked. At first I read one blog post; not too graphic, not too distressing, just facts, a call to Do Something.  'okay,' I thought, 'I've done my bit, I can go back to work now', but a few minutes later and I was back and I was reading through the posts as fast as I could, one after another until finally this one broke me, forced me to feel what I had been avoiding since I first caught a glimpse of a headline three days ago. 

Describing the evils of massacre in detail is beyond me. I'm still resisting engaging with this as a mother, imagining that it could have been my babies. I don't have the words to pull at your heartstrings, to make you feel the revulsion and the pain and the despair of the situation. All I ask is that if like me, you were avoiding engaging with the horror of the Houla massacre, you consider letting yourself feel, consider reading about what happened and doing something, however small, to voice your anger that things like this happen in our world. 

Todayt, June 1st, bloggers have united in protest. People are tweeting with the hashtag #tippingpoint and the Times have made their article on the massacre free to view today. There are things you can do too...

• You can sign petitions from Save The Children, Avaaz and Amnesty.
• You can blog about it, tweet about it or share the things you read on Facebook.
• You can RT tweets you see that use the hashtags #tippingpoint #syria #stopthekilling
• You can read more about the politics and facts known about the massacre in Houla, Syria here.
• On June 10th You can join the protest of mothers, parents, grandparents and children in London 

in Wigan.

As 'moving to London' becomes less something that we talk about doing in the future and more something that looks like it might actually happen, the urgency with which I feel like I'm going to vomit right into my lap increases drastically.

Don't get me wrong, we still haven't sold our flat and we haven't started looking for houses in London, and since that one day when we announced that we were planning on moving we have done absolutely nothing to try and secure work. But it's looking more like it's something that is going to happen, and within the next year, and ohmygod I'm going to throw up. The thing is, I feel sort of paralysed. Somewhere between the life I've spent 5 years building and the life we talk and dream about for our future and somewhere there, half way between Glasgow and London (Wigan?) there's me, curled in to the foetal position pretending it's all not happening while spectres of mortgage lenders and the frankly terrifying business competition in London delightedly jab me with their fingers and whisper gleeful promises of failure in my ear.

Call it fear or pessimism or denial but I feel exactly like I did when I was 37 weeks pregnant, that nothing is ever ever going to change, I'm going have two people inside me and need to pee six times a minute FOREVER. I can picture the future with our dog and our garden and our beautiful London clients and I'm more or less present in the life we live just now (which make no mistake, is pretty amazing) but when I try to picture actually making the change? Wigan.

I'm working on leaving, no one wants to spend too long in Wigan (joking, I've never been, it might be lovely.) but I'm also trying to accept that this huge chasm of uncertainty between making a decision and actually being able to make it happen is just a fact of life and one that I need to embrace, not fight. Maybe it's not the end of the world if I'm not certain all of the time?

* IMAGE BY JENNIFER TRAN www.jennifer-tran.com

Four years minus nine months, concluded.

introduction

part one

part two

And so I sunk. Again. Further. I started a blog, which helped. But not enough. Days were spent staring into the middle distance and the slightest knock would find me locked in the bathroom crying uncontrollably. I wouldn't talk to Nye about it, I wouldn't talk to anyone about it. Reluctantly I made an appointment with the hospital's fertility counsellor and once I made it to the top of the waiting list we met the women who would push us and protect us and make us cry and ultimately, nurse us through more than we thought we could bear. Now, two years later, we owe that woman more than we could begin to put into words; our health, our marriage, our daughters.

But I get ahead of myself. Things were still not good and in May of 2008 (aged 23) I found myself referred to a psychiatric unit. Which was fun.

In a windowless room and with the smell of disinfectant seeping into my very being, I poured out my tears to two women who I would never see again. They decided I was fine. Or rather, that with the right medication I would be. An hour later I was sent home with a prescription and a few months after that I wasn't exactly fine, but I was no longer locking myself in the bathroom.


At the same time I start having monthly injections into my stomach, well, not so much injections as implants. Implants pushed through a bore needle (have you seen an apple corer? Similar.) Designed to push my body into a false and in theory reversible menopause, intended to stop what is left of my ovaries being washed away in the monthly toing and froing of my hormones and preserve them for the future. For it is accepted by everyone that at the moment they are no use to me at all. With a laconic shrug and wave of the hand my consultant brushes away the universally accepted belief that the implants are only safe for six months at a time (something insignificant to do with decreased bone density, osteoporosis, the chance that the aforementioned menopause might become less than false, less than reversible...) and writes me a prescription for 20 months worth, a prescription that makes my GP and the nurses who inject me and the pharmacist who hands over the shopping bags full of industrial sized, pre-loaded needles baulk.

And so the next two years passed. The nurses come to know me by name and every four weeks they ask the same question “how many more?" Eighteen months I reply, fourteen months... ten months. Their eyebrows furrow as they silently turned to double check my notes. Riddled with small round scars my stomach now resembles a map of one of the lesser known constellations

Nye and I get married. We throw ourselves into starting a business that will support us if we ever have a child and will distract us if we don't. There are months that are good, where we carry on not quite as we once were, but close. And then there are months that are bad, months where we cry and we despair and we question whether this wait is worth it, whether the appointments are worth it, whether the boxing match with the unknowable outcome that is IVF is worth it, whether biological children are worth it. We see specialists who sympathise, nurses who are brusque and doctors who resent stepping away from their daytime TV viewing to explain to yet another scared and hurting couple how IVF works. We go to appointments that we have waited a year for, more often than not leaving with tears stinging our eyes and unanswered crowding us like predators as yet again we are told that we will learn more when we reach the top of the list.

There were days, months really, when we planned another life. A childless life. And just like the imaginery one with our baby that we had immersed ourselves in so many years previously, we pictured this one so vividly that it was hard not to be swallowed up by it. We stopped picturing the life we once imagined, the one with three of us, because we just couldn't and so there were times when our new dreams seemed to displace the old ones, seemed to shine more brightly, confusing us with their promises of freedom and adventure. A decision loomed over us; will we do this? Will we sacrifice ourselves to the process? Do we want a child?

And all along, in a tiny airless room perched above the motorway, we continued to pour out our hurts and our worries and our doubts to a women who listened to us and cared for us and took our hurts and our doubts and held them in her own arms so that we could rest for a little while.

And then, after a journey that was much longer than it was supposed to be, after another surgery (no surprises when I came around this time, just a gentle "you're ready, good luck") it was January 2010. I was 25. We had reached the top of the list. All of the maybes and the whens and the in-the-futures were over, it was time to do or die. And there was no decision to be made.

Standing with our toes curled over the edge of the cliff, knuckles white on our desperately clenched hands, we looked at each other and we each asked 'are we going to do this? Are we going to jump?'

And we did.

So that was going to be it, where the story ends, (or rather where it merges into another, new story) you know how IVF goes, the appointments, the drugs, the uncertainty. And I don't know if I mentioned it or not (SPOILER ALERT) but it worked, we had twins. But the fact that writing our story has been helpful to people means so much to me. So, if you think that hearing about the IVF process would be helpful to you, tell me. It might take me a while to write about it (uh, does anyone remember when I started writing this? I did not have babies back then) because although it has been all sorts of cathartic to write this down FUCK has it been draining and emotional and a little like pulling teeth to get the words out.

*photo by Autumn Fingers