Drop Out

Last month, I dropped out of my postgraduate course. 

I posted in February about how the children were struggling emotionally... for one of them in particular, mental health has been an ever increasing concern, and it got to the point where I was unable to go into my placement. My course depends heavily on practical work, and while the providers were willing to give me all the leeway they could, I eventually had to acknowledge that there was no way I could complete it.

It's not something parents can talk about, just out of respect for their child's privacy, but mental health issues that impact the rest of the family happen more often than I knew. It's terrifying, because you don't really know what it means, how long it will last or where it will lead. Parental guilt gets ramped right up, because obviously, this is Your Fault. Still, all you can do is deal with it as best you can. In our case, that means I have to be a stay-at-home Mum again, and make the family my priority.

There's often a societal assumption that women who do this are satisfied with their "choice". They do it because they don't really want to work, they'd rather stay at home and are, in part, using their children as an excuse. After all, if they really cared about their career, they'd find a way to pursue it regardless. There are so many examples of mothers who battled the odds to succeed in their chosen field.

Or there's the assumption that although the mother is making a sacrifice, seeing her children thrive is fulfillment enough. In years to come, the grateful child will talk about the mother who gave everything to see that they had a good life, we can all raise a glass to her as a hero, and feel complacent that she has been given due respect.

For the vast majority of women who find themselves in this sort of situation, either assumption is harmful: they're reasons not to help.

Therefore, I would like to make it very clear that I wanted to complete my course. I'm passionate about Early Years, I'm terrified about what this might mean for my future employment prospects and I've always been happier and more self-confident when I'm working, even if only for a few hours a week.

But I'm the one who made the call that the family would come and live here. If the children need extra support just to cope with their new lives, I have to take full responsibility for that. In our case, that means putting my career back on hold.

 And what of those omnipresent anecdotal examples of women who worked/studied full-time and raised children on their own? Well, every situation has different issues and different resources... or perhaps it's a situation where the mother literally has no option but to put her employment first, because the family needs her income. Unfortunately, a lot of the time, that means she (knowingly) has to put the child in a detrimental situation so that she can work—possibly in a field that is not what she's really interested in.

My relevant resource: Spousal maintenance, which lets me get by without my own salary in the short term. I hate depending on that, but it would be irresponsible of me to ignore it.

Relevant issue #1: Covid, which has overloaded the mental health system. I naively assumed that once we were in the system, I could let the professionals take care of things. Instead, I have to constantly chase people up and coordinate the various support elements to make sure we are moving forwards in a sensible direction...

Relevant issue #2: my ADD. Keeping up with the support system is exhausting on its own. Coursework then demanded I switch the brain over to devising a learning sequence on composition of number for four year olds, etc. That switch was a struggle; focusing on actual day-to-day parenting proved impossible. My anxiety and the children's started feeding off each other, the house became increasingly chaotic, and the to-do list piled ever upwards. So I dropped the course, and shifted my mental power and time to our home-life. 

When the family's mental health has improved enough I'll resume the employment hunt. The long term intention is to attempt my course again and hopefully complete it on the second try. A friend of mine who did something similar told me she took three attempts to pass her own course. Twice, she had to drop out due to issues with her children. She wasn't even a single mother!

A note to all couples where one partner is taking time off from their career to focus on having / raising children. If at all possible, plan to have a couple of years where that partner can have their career take priority, and the other partner becomes the primary caregiver, the one who stays home as needed or otherwise manages the parenting miscellany (i.e. keeping the kids in the correct size clothes, arranging their social lives and taking them to appointments.) Even if the stay-at-home partner is only going back to work part-time and/or on minimal income, give them practical support until they've got well started. They've earned it.

As for me, at least my professional skills are transferable when it comes to working on self-care for the family. I don't necessarily know what I'm doing, but I do have a plan. The children have had enough of "Things will get better," so this is a summer of "Things are better." We're doing those things we keep saying we'll do but never get around to. From re-starting the children's tennis lessons to renting a row boat for a half day and having a picnic on the canal.

Self-care, boat-style

As per usual, that's our life: some things are worse and some things are better; some things will get worse and some things will get better. But our life goes on, and I want us to live it.

Mothering

It was Mother's Day this weekend. Which, per tradition, meant that the first thing my daughter did was stumble to her schoolbag and scrabble around until she found the card she'd made for me. My son, however, is now in secondary school, where Mother's Day Card-making is no longer on the curriculum. Getting up slightly later than his sister, it took him a couple of hours to even realise what day it was, so his gift to me was guilt-tripping-fodder...

Obviously, the kids have gone back to school, though we're still figuring out my son's new bus route. We had the letter explaining his stop and times at Christmas, and I carefully put it away for future referral, so three months later, we have no bloody chance of finding it. I got the info emailed to me from the council, but it's an unmarked stop, school route only, and no other kids get on and off there. My son nearly got run over the first morning when flagging the bus down, and he's yet to get the driver to stop on the way back. Luckily, the next village is less than a mile down the road...

With such stress factors, it's not surprising Mother's Day almost went forgotten. I should note that their Dad would help them get a card, but as US and UK Mother's Days are on different days, he doesn't necessarily know it's coming. I had barely remembered it myself, and when I had, it was worrying about what to do for my own mother.

These days, I don't harbour expectations for Mother's Day. I'm glad I am a Mum, and while it's really touching to get gifts or other sentiment-driven actions, appreciation is meaningless when forced and the kids are really too young to truly understand what I do for them. Nor should they... I'm supposed to be setting them up to lead their own lives, not to be indebted to me. I get plenty of little moments that touch me and make me feel loved throughout the year. They don't make the stress of parenting any easier, but they do make them worth it.

Anyway, being older than my kids, I'm very aware of my obligations towards my own mother. We're not actually used to being on the same landmass for Mother's Day. We therefore had to celebrate, but taking her out for tea wasn't exactly an option. She suggested we bake her a cake, and I hit the internet with the goal of finding a boozy but easy cake recipe. So on Saturday, we had an excursion to Homeleigh Food Hall in the morning and spent the afternoon in the kitchen, first soaking cherries in brandy, then mixing them into a cake. It failed to rise because I didn't pay close enough attention to the recipe, but that didn't matter, because we finished by pouring the brandy over the cake.

Last year, with Mother's Day in lockdown, I ordered a puzzle box by post, thinking to give her some at home entertainment. I had severely underestimated the difficulty of the box, and she gave up, putting it away until we could all be together again. Lockdown isn't quite over, but I'm still a single adult household, so we bubbled up a couple of weeks ago. (I've been worried about bubbling with Mum and Dad due to their vulnerability, but they've both had their first vaccinations now, and there have been no new cases local to us in weeks.)

Long story short, Mum and I spent Mother's Day afternoon eating alcoholic cake and figuring out codes from overly cryptic clues. We only got halfway through the box... we'll have another go at it this weekend, when they come over to help me with the rambling rose that's annexed the back end of the garden and most likely has its sights set on world domination.

It's odd how productive our weekend was, after a hectic, stressful and exhausting return to school. But that's the worst of having nothing to do all day every day... there's no reason to do anything today instead of tomorrow. When we just have a weekend, we have to make the most of it. I'm still a little worried about keeping up with everything when I make my own return to school (probably next week), but so far, we've only benefited from having more structure—or perhaps more variety—in our lives.

Lockdown Fatigue

The first lockdown was a break, bringing the onslaught of Life to a temporary standstill just as we hit the first gloriously warm spell of the year. The children were in the same class at school and did most of their homeschooling together. The rest of the day was ours to spend as we wanted.

The second lockdown almost seemed to pass us by. The schools (and many other businesses) stayed open and I had just started my placement for my postgrad. All three of us left the house every day, interacted with other people and learned new things--save for the two week blip when my son had to self-isolate, but we managed to adapt.

This third lockdown has been harder.

The children are at two different schools with very different homeschooling systems. My son has to log into the relevant classroom for every period, while my daughter requires a fair amount of attention if she's to do her work properly. While the schools are more prepared for homeschooling now, teachers are still struggling to teach via a medium they've not been trained for and one that renders almost all their training invalid. They can't engage their students with hands on activities or group projects. School is, inevitably, boring.

The weather's terrible too and with the government finally getting firmer about travel restrictions, we're reluctant to venture too far afield. But it's hard to muster interest for the umpteenth visit to the beach in the wind and rain, or for a walk through rain and mud. Even when I dredge up the motivation to drag the kids out, at least one of them will be groaning the whole time, and then I start snapping. Fresh air and exercise are no relief.

It's taken a toll on our mental health. At first, I assumed I was doing all right, because I was staying productive with house stuff—until I noticed I was losing weight. I'd all but given up on self-care. House-productivity was just escapism—a constructive form of escapism, doing stuff that needed to be done anyway, but it was a way of procrastinating on everything else because I didn't want to face up to it.

The mental health issues are even worse for the kids. They've had a rough go of it the last few years: Dad left, Mum was an emotionally volatile mess for two years straight, and they got uprooted from everything they knew and plopped down in a new country to start over. Now, just when things are supposed to be getting better, we have this interminable pandemic.

Supporting them is what's taking its toll on me. Sometimes it's fine, because I can see the breakdowns coming and I can head it off. Sometimes, I don't see them coming, and I realise too late that I picked the wrong time to get insistent about doing a chore. Then all my plans are wiped out for a few hours as I try to defuse everything. Usually badly, as my brain isn't good at switching tracks from whatever project I was on to focus on human interaction.

A few weeks back, I posted to Facebook about how I wanted to be something other than Mum for a little while. Some friends offered to video chat with the kids so I could have a break, but that wasn't what I meant. It's not difficult to get time away from the kids; what I miss is being Sarah. 

Our family doesn't have our support bubble this time around, and we sorely miss that... I miss being a girlfriend as well as a Mum, I miss having somebody who wants to go out for a walk, we all miss having a fresh face to talk to and a different meal to eat. Something that isn't the same as every other day!

Socialising in general is something we're badly in need of. They chat with their Dad most days, but that's not getting them out of the parent-child dynamic. My daughter's got a few online friends on various games (she's allowed to be on game-chats on the understanding that I may glance at her screen at any time to check everything's OK), but my son isn't into net-chat, and I'm not active in any online community lately... probably the first time in my adult life that that's been the case. We don't do many video calls either. 

We should do. There's no excuse. I have family and friends who'd be willing, and there's no end of virtual events to try, if we want something other than a basic chat. It would do all of us the world of good to talk regularly to other people. But it only happens every now and then, even with me thinking about how good it would be for us.

(One friend, a mother herself, understood my afore-mentioned Facebook post exactly, and the two of us have occasional video-chats, mostly framed around watching an episode or two of Bridgerton and then discussing it, letting me live another side of myself for a while. But, because we're both parents and Life is a Thing, these happen infrequently and often get postponed. They don't benefit the children either.)

My vague theory is that as the lone adult of the household, I get tired of being the one to set everything up, to always be the one encouraging others to participate in my choice of activity—often with very poor returns of enthusiasm.

At any rate, I'm doing a bad job of keeping up my end of the social network, and the whole household is suffering as a result.

As gloomy as this is, our life-rollercoaster isn't a white knuckle ride. We're not getting the high highs, but nor are the lows too low. Thankfully, this is just a part of our lives it will pass. In another few weeks, the kids at least will be back in school (I haven't figured out yet whether it makes the most sense to return to my course before or after Easter). The weather will have improved. We can meet up with my parents again. By the end of the year, we should be able to hug, to travel, to make more friends...

Of course, it's easy for me, with 43 years of living through difficult periods, to have confidence in this being temporary. It's less easy for children, and in the case of my two, I've been saying: "We've just got to get through this difficult bit and then things will get better!" since we came to England in summer 2019.

Small wonder they're getting a bit suspicious of the whole Hope concept. All I can do is keep trying to find the patience for all three of us.

My house

Making this house ours has been a leisurely process so far as we find ourselves more focused on schoolwork, but it's already our home. As with all new homes, we're discovering an escalating list of problems now we've moved in, but I'm still so thrilled we found this place. It's perfect for us.

I knew we needed a guestroom, even if it was a dining room that we used as a guestroom. I like having people to stay. I'm an introvert, but I enjoy being around other people, and as a single mother, I really appreciate having adult company in the house. 

The house has an extra room downstairs that the sellers were using as a study. I decided I wanted a library more than a study, so I flogged my desk on Facebook Marketplace and put the bookshelves up instead. It's going to require some creative organisation to make it a comfortable bedroom as well, but a sofa bed is on its way. I've always wanted a library and if the idea of bedding down in a roomful of books doesn't appeal to you, you are no friend of mine.

The other thing we needed was room for our sofa. Our sectional is a good size by American standards, and bloody massive by British ones. Our mover was dumbfounded. I knew from the room measurements there was the physical space for it, but I wasn't sure how it would fit around the door, radiator, kitchen...

Thankfully, it looks like it was made for this room, dividing the space beautifully, though I may want to replace the round kitchen table with a rectangular one in due course. I credit the sofa for the cats settling in so quickly. The fact that this was their third move in eighteen months almost certainly helped, but the sofa means home in a way nothing else does, and the cats were purring and confident as soon as they found it.

For the first time, the children have a home with a fireplace! Two in fact, since the one in my bedroom has been left in place, although it's purely ornamental now. The massive fireplace downstairs has been redone and fitted with a woodburning stove, which we're all getting the hang of using. In this grey, mizzly weather and the repetitive grind of lockdown, it's very nice to curl up on the sofa (cats included) for cosy evenings in front of the fire.

Upstairs, I have a couple of candles in my grate, and my grandmother's silver pheasants on the 'hearth'. When I was a little girl, those pheasants were permanently falling over on her hearth, and now they can fall over on mine. 

I have her old secretary next to it as well. As I said, I didn't want a study. Nan's old-fashioned little fold-out desk is fine for paperwork. I should perhaps buy a new filing cabinet, but for now, I've put everything into a concertina folder. In this era of 'going paperless', we have fewer documents to store after all.
 

My daughter wanted a conservatory. Luckily for her, the owners of twenty years ago followed the home-improvement fad of adding one. However, they were more ambitious than most homeowners who squeezed in a small glassy nook along the patio. The conservatory matches the length of the kitchen and living room, with a deep bay area and two different exits to the outside.

I have plans for this to be the 'teenage hangout room' when the kids brings friends over in the future, possibly doubling up as extra sleeping space in the summer months. Ideally, I'd like to put a proper roof on it to make it more usable in cold or hot weather, but owing to its size, I'm not sure I can afford that.

For now, the conservatory is acting as a box room, stacked up with the things that we haven't figured out what to do with yet. However, I've kept enough space clear for a sort of nest with the old papasan chair and two recently-gifted giant beanbags. When the sun comes out, it warms up quickly into a luxurious respite for us: cuddling down into the beanbags even as we bask in vitamin D and listen to birds sing...  The cats are loving it.

The cats are also loving the garden. The flat had a rectangle of grass with no undergrowth for them. Here, we have shrubs galore. Two owners back was a lady who was passionate about exotic gardens, and her legacy is a small fortune in landscaping and lots of different plants.

As far as the mogs are concerned, they like eating the ornamental grasses (and then being sick), and the retaining wall that runs up the side of the garden makes a perfect secret tunnel for them behind the plants.

I like that they can't get out. Cars don't have to slow down for our hamlet, and they whizz by at 60mph. In our cats' younger days, we could never have lived here. Now that they're old and arthritic, they've no interest in trying to climb the fencing. Though Trog does keep eyeing up the pergola....

There's a child's swing on the pergola, which I wasn't expecting the previous owners to leave. My two love it, even if it's a lot tamer than the swing we had in the States. We still have that swing, but there's nothing in the garden with the proper height for it. That's one wish we didn't get, but we're more than willing to make this concession. 

If I were a fictional character, seeking refuge in Cornwall after a heartbreak, there would be a country lane running from our house to the sea. In reality, nothing that close to the coastline is in our budget, but we're only a few miles from the coast, tucked away from the worst of the summer traffic. Our house is semi-detached rather than a self-contained cottage, but the building is a century old—thankfully much modernised in the last four years—and when we moved in we found a box-file containing the information on all the previous owners.

For most of my house's existence, it's been owned by women: a widow and a spinster who held it for almost fifty years until both had died; another who retired here at the beginning of the century and only sold the house when she had to move into a care home. I like knowing that. Knowing that it's been a home to women, to older women who've loved and lost. Their feet wore the grooves in the hallway's stone steps, and now mine will deepen them.

 

Lockdown Hiatus

 First lockdown of the year! It's somewhere between lockdown one and two. Unlike lockdown two, the schools are closed. Unlike lockdown one, the nurseries are open. Which meant I was supposed to go to school while the children stayed home.

Actually, I'm classed as a key worker, even if I'm only a student teacher, so I could have got provision for the children, but as they've been getting some stress issues lately, I opted to defer my course for six weeks so that I could stay home with them (and catch up a bit on research, etc.) 

And unpack! We've settled pretty comfortably into the new house, but we've got a lot of boxes of the archive-or-delete variety as well as a steadily increasing to-do list. We also had our first houseguest, as the kids' Dad came over to spend new year with them. Because of pandemic rules, this meant he spent five days self-isolating with us, before taking a mail-order test... except the test didn't arrive until the sixth day because the center would neither post them in advance nor over the new year, and then he had to wait until the seventh day for a result.

But it meant he got to spend time with the kids for the first time in almost six months. It also marked a huge breakthrough for the two of us, just to co-exist. Granted, we didn't talk about anything too heavy, and we avoided physical contact for almost his entire stay (we did hug goodbye at the end) but we were able to have a conversation, make eye contact and accept help from each other, which is more than we've been able to do for the past couple of years.

I think having the house helped me a lot with that. I kept joking over Christmas that it was the "First of fifty!" It's plausible that I'll live another fifty years and that I could live in this house for the rest of my life. I don't have to, but I could. All my life, I've lived with the expectation that I'd be moving in another few years. There's something very intoxicating about digging in.

This gives me a vision of my life beyond the kids again. I used to think that when they left home, I'd still have my husband, but when he left me, I struggled to picture my life without the children. Now I can see myself growing old in this house. I don't quite understand why, but that's comforting. I feel more secure with that vision.

At any rate, it's let me face him again, and in this pandemic world we live in, it was really useful to actually have another pair of hands around. It would have been a lot harder to clear everything out of the flat without him, and he got our wifi set up so we can do Zoom etc in just about every room now. Definitely handy while we're all locked down!

He went back at the beginning of this week, so it's just us and the cats now. Home.

Goodbye to a Year

2020 has ended. A year that's been weird and hard for the entire globe. A year in which I've been very very happy. A year in which my life aligned with a man's and we grew closer than we ever intended. But now it's 2021 and on Sunday, he moves to Leeds and I stay here.

It's the end of our relationship, if not so much a break up as the point where our lives diverge. We knew from the start it wouldn't make sense for us to do a long distance relationship. It's not as if he will be back in a year or I will follow him later... I am taking root and he is taking wing. 

Yet for 2020 our lives ran in parallel.

Love in the Time of Corona

The pandemic is a terrible thing, but all bad things work out well for somebody, and that's how it panned out for us. Yes, it was a pain at times (particularly with the whole driving fiasco), but really, I only moan about Covid-19 restrictions because that's the socially acceptable thing to do. They haven't stopped my life from flourishing. Had my dream been to run a pub in Sheffield, that would have been a different matter. But my dream was to work with pre-schoolers in Cornwall. My life has progressed in a year when so many had to put theirs on hold—or saw them shattered completely. I'm grateful for that and humbled by it.

It also meant my boyfriend stayed down south almost a year longer than intended. It was supposed to be a fairly casual relationship, where we would go out on a ramble somewhere every one to two weeks. Instead, we bubbled up and he became his own part of our family for the past six months. He met my parents, I met his Mum, he was there for me during the driving issues and for the move. We've had long conversations about difficult parts of our lives, supporting each other emotionally as well as practically. 

He's also cooked dozens of meals. As the person who has been responsible for dinner for the past 20 years, I cannot begin to tell you how exciting it is to watch somebody cook for me.

For New Year's, we arranged to have one day of 2021 together. It was freezing up on Dartmoor, but we layered up to explore the geography around Haytor. Ice caused us to fall on our backsides several times, and mist kept blowing in and out, but we climbed rocks and scrambled down crevices without breaking our necks. It was perfect. A very 'us' sort of day and adventure. A day to carry with us as we face a busy year. 

At the end of our walk, I drove him back to our starting point. I took the bag I had left in his car, we hugged and kissed in the dusk, then I got back into my car and drove away across the moor and home to my family.

I may miss him terribly, yet I am where I belong.

Our lives will cross again in the future. His parents live down here and he loves the countryside here—we've agreed that if nothing else, we'll meet up for more moor and coastal adventures. However, there's no point in waiting for each other. 2021 will bring its own adventures to each of us. I can wait to hear his, but I won't to live mine.

A Promise

 When my marriage ended,
Legal professionals took thirteen years,
Of memories, love and hopes,
And they turned it into a figure,
In pounds sterling.

So I took that money,
And I bought a house.
Now I will fill that house,
With memories, love and hopes.