I think all the time now about how dependent we are on each other. I’m not sure how clear that was to me before the emergence of Covid 19. There’s the obvious thing we must rely upon each other for: keeping each other safe. We have to hope that others are taking the same precautions […]
Amigos
I’d thought that the ever-present stress that is the pandemic hadn’t affected my children at all. Yes, they had to wash their hands a lot more often; they saw me glued to the news for stretches of time, whereas before I’d diligently hidden my furtive information gathering, worried that the mere sight of a phone […]
Big problems
Lately I’ve been attempting to do loving-kindness meditation, where you let your mind rest on phrases such as may you be happy, may you be peaceful, may you live with ease. There’s a lot to do in the world, isn’t there? You can’t look away from what’s happening and say: well it’s nothing to do […]
Hooked
I’ve had lots of #parentingfails this week, more than I’ve had in the last few months at least. I’ve outdone myself, in fact. I didn’t realise I was quite so stressed until these last few tense days of not being able to cope with anything small child related. Oh, they’re just doing their usual ‘I […]
When the wind blows wild
Yesterday I got so angry with my sweet four-year-old I broke the dustpan from the dustpan and brush set in half, right there in front of him. His crime was to point-blank refuse to do a simple thing that I’d asked him to do. I can’t even remember what that was now, but at a […]
Sunny side
It’s ok to feel grateful for certain things in your life right now. It doesn’t negate the horror and the fear. Gratitude and horror can co-exist. I know I’m not the only parent who feels they were run ragged before the pandemic, sort of blindly running around like the proverbial hamster on the wheel. I […]
Stoned
A few days ago, I sat in the garden, washing and drying stones with one of my sons. We rinsed and rinsed again with the hose, watching as the cloudy pool of water eventually turned clear. Methodically, we lay the stones out one by one, examining and then carefully drying them. The previous hour had […]
Mum, mummy, mother, time
A lot of confusion recently from my two oldest sons on this whole mummy business and how it’s going to pan out. My six-year-old wants to know if I will still be young when he is a grown-up, and my four-year-old has got the wrong end of the stick completely. He is sure that in […]
Here, now, nothing else
Well here we are. Hello. All of our human hearts, beating. Except when they stop. Sometime back in mid-January, I started reading about the coronavirus. Soon, I couldn’t stop reading about what was happening in Wuhan. How terrifying it was. I started to obsessively wash my hands. By the beginning of February, my eldest boy […]
Big, shiny success
What is success in life? What is your definition of success? I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the weekend. Is success outside of you? Happiness 101 dictates that it is nowhere to be found outside of you, only bloody inside of you. What a drag! Is it true? Now I’m not going to […]