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Writing Workshop: One Year – On me, Cybermummy and Blogging

Posted by Josie on Jun 27, 2011 in Blogging, Charity Organisations and Awareness Raising, Me, Save the Children, Writing, Writing Workshop | 47 comments

This is the bracelet I wore to Cybermummy this weekend. In case you don’t recognise the symbol, it’s a Save the Children one, and on the back is engraved “Every Child Born To Shine”.

I lay in my hotel room the following morning, ribs aching from laughing, heart aching from unexpected feeling, and head a little numb from thinking, and rubbed the red token with my thumb in the sunshine coming through the blind. And I thought back on the last year.

Thinking about last year’s Cybermummy I suddenly realised how much I’d changed, and how much those changes have affected the way I approach and experience things. Not just things like Cybermummy, everything really, but comparing myself at the two events really hit home.

Last year’s saw me full of self-doubt, feeling like I had something to prove, feeling like I needed to convince everyone that I had something to say that was worth listening – brands as well as people. In a room full of mostly strangers I felt small. Standing up to deliver my talk about blogging and authenticity and voice as part of the main panel session, something I had anxiously worried over long before-hand, I felt like a fraud, like I didn’t deserve to be there and I worried that everyone else thought it, too. This meant I tried a bit too hard, I think. It certainly meant I worried more, a bundle of self-concious nerves with a slightly forced face of confidence and a ‘I belong here’ attitude to try and convince myself.

But by the end of the weekend I wasn’t in a room full of strangers any more, and my voice had reached people that I never would have expected, prompting an email a couple of weeks later from Save the Children and the beginning of that amazing journey and all the changes that followed.

Writing Workshop: Coming Up For Air

Posted by Josie on Nov 11, 2010 in Kai, Me, Writing, Writing Workshop | 42 comments

It has been two weeks since I started a new life.

Oh, it’s hard writing about this.

I am still vetoing the whys and wherefores. Those are not for your eyes. But my feelings now? Those are my own and free to wander this screen now because if I don’t let them out I might as well give up this blog, for what use is it if I can’t write something of this THIS. This whatever it is, in some way.

When talking about how it’s felt to those closest to me, I’ve found myself talking a lot about death, and loss, and grief for that is what it has felt like. There was shock, too. Great rolling waves of it that have left me numb, or crying till I was sick, or manically cleaning for hours, driven by a restless energy that would not let me stop. Sleep has been a bit scarce. Long hours spent trying to switch off long enough to fall asleep, or waking, shivering, trying to get used to the absent body heat I am used to. I have been up early with Kai, or, when he’s not here, waking in the silence thinking I have heard him cry out.

I have been very tired. The sheer physical endurance has been the hardest, aside from the emotional fall-out. Kai is just one child, but he quite a child. Early starts have run into long days dealing with his emotion, his frustration, which was so intense at the best of times but now seems to be reaching new levels as speech problems worsen and the poor thing deals with his own inner confusion at this strange change to his routine. Hours pass, torpedoing me from managing his aggression and sensitivity, to some of the sweetest, most intimate moments with him I have known, as we sit, often both worn out from the force of our collective emotion, a mutual time-out, as he strokes my hair and we talk our language of his made-up words and signs and jokes. He remains, despite the hard work, still the most delightful, bright, interesting little person I could ever hope to share a life with, and though my patience and my strength at dealing with him are being pushed to new levels, my love for him is growing deeper and fiercer too.

And then the change, as the weekend comes, and suddenly I find myself in a whole new world. One of empty space and silence and time I don’t know what to do with and LIE INS! Time in which I am mostly sleeping, and walking, and cleaning some more, and trying hard not think too much or miss my boy. The deep relief at the end of such a long week, and the hardest bit of all in some respects. Such a strange shift of focus to get used to, and a bit of a lonely one.

It has been the hardest few weeks of my life, by a very long shot, and there have been some pretty hard times in my life, I can tell you.

But.

There is coming at times, once the emotional dust has settled, fuelled by caught-up sleep and lots and lots of giggling and silliness with my beautiful boy, there is coming a kind of peace. Kai and I may be crying more, raging more, but we are laughing more too. Great belly-laughing sessions where we dance and go on adventures and find a new way that is OUR way. And there is a strange kind of fierce pride, in this home that is now mine and the daily life that is now under my control.

Ant is helping. In his kindness and his support. I am very lucky there. I don’t want that to go unmentioned.

And within the sadness and the grief there is relief. That feels a hard thing to say, but there is. Relief at the end to what has been such an awful few months and a new lightness about my shoulders from such an interminable weight lifted. I am beginning to realise how depressed I have been, how smothered with stress.

I got up early on Saturday morning, happy in the knowledge that Kai was safe and with someone that loved him more than anyone else in the world, and walked and walked around the place that is my home. My paths and fields and trees. And I stood and breathed in deep and there was stillness and there was peace and for a little while I felt better in myself than I had in a long, long time.

I am going to be okay. We all are. Not yet, maybe not for a while. But we’ll get there.

___________________________________________________

This post was written for this week’s Writing Workshop. I chose prompt two: Coming Up For Air.

What prompt did you chose?

1. Catch 22 (by Joseph Heller)
- Are you feeling stuck with no discernible way out of something?

2. Coming Up For Air (by George Orwell)
- Write about a time you found peace after a difficult time. Or, alternatively, write about breathing spaces. What helps you re-charge?

3. On Beauty (by Zadie Smith)
- Tell us about finding beauty somewhere unexpected. Or about what beauty means to you.

4. Past Secret (by Cathy Kelly)
- Do you have a secret from your past you are brave enough to share?

5. The Book of Lost Things (by Joseph Connolly)
- Write about something you have lost: emotionally, physically, or metaphorically.

Leave your name and the URL to your post in the MckLinky below (the URL should be to your post not just to your blog) If you have the time it would be great if you could try and read and comment on at least two other entries. And be kind! It’s supposed to be a bit of fun – we’re not looking for the next Booker Prize winner here.

If you haven’t had chance to respond yet, then you’ve still got till Sunday to enter your link! Or just wait till next week, when there’ll be five brand new prompts to get you thinking.

All Change

Posted by Josie on Sep 12, 2010 in Kai, Me, Save the Children | 22 comments

Change seems to be a theme here lately. Maybe it’s something in the wind. Or maybe by pushing for it, I ended up drawing it to me too. Who knows.

It’s been a strange week since I got home. Full of excitement and busyness. ITN news appearances and press interviews and radio broadcasts and an impending trip on Thursday to meet the Deputy Prime Minister, deeply satisfying and exhilarating, feeling like the world is waking up to our message. I am so glad of it. The only way I can bear to think about some of the people we left behind in Bangladesh, wondering if some of the sick children we met are still alive, wondering how much the smiling faces I still remember so, so vividly have had to eat today, the only way I can think about them is by carrying alongside them the thought that we are here trying to change their reality, if only a little bit. We are. It’s not guilt, coming home, that drives me. It’s a kind of dull anger. A restless one. It’s quite comforting actually. I’m glad it’s there.

But as much as I have wanted to absorb myself in memories, in processing experiences and riding this media wave, confusingly and exhaustingly my ‘other’ life has been busy clamouring at my heels. Money and choices and a toddler going through another intense, angry, demanding, frustrated phase, with communication difficulties becoming more and more challenging. The biggest change in Kai while I was away was that he learnt, finally, at the grand old age of 26 months to say ‘No’. And ironically that is all I’ve heard since I’ve got home… “NO mama. NO”. Those two words the only comprehensible words in a long, endless tirade of shouting, screaming gibberish. I don’t know if it’s cause he’s missed me more than we thought, or if it’s just a phase, or if he’s picking up on what is quite a considerably stressful situation at home, but boy, that boy is ANGRY.

Anyway. It’s been tough. Tough to find the head-space needed to deal with the force of change that hit this week.

To start with it looks like Ant is going to be made redundant next week, and so we’re bracing ourselves for the sudden tightening of already-tight belts and a frantic job hunt. It’s a wait and see on that one, but not looking good to be honest.

And that, coupled with an already fraught financial and home situation, made me make the decision to pull out of my Art degree that was due to start next week and deferring it for another year.

I am devastated, despite the fact I know it was the right thing to do. Too many memories flooding back of the year I had to turn down my last university place many years ago when I fell ill. Too many false starts. It’s hard to let go of the one plan that was giving my life some stability.

But it WAS the right thing to do. And financial considerations aside, there were other reasons for pulling out.

Something is happening to me. I am being pulled somewhere. It is away from the indulgence of art school for now and into the world of writing, writing for a PURPOSE, of words that have the power to change, perhaps. It’s steeped in some of the heat of the Bangladesh countryside and fed by some of its green, thick waters. It’s something to do with writing and potential and people finally starting to sit up and take notice of me and what I could do, maybe, if I was given half a chance, after a life time of being invisible. And it’s something to do with wanting to make something meaningful happen, that makes the most of the experiences I am being given, and who I am.

So it’s a sad change. A scary change. One of letting go of hard things and of much uncertainty.

But, when the fatigue of the past few weeks lifts enough for me to get a bit of a sense of where I’m standing, I realise it’s a good change too. A hopeful one. A portentous one.

So here I am. A new beginning. I’m about to launch myself into the pretty daunting task of finding some paid writing work and building some sort of career from the disparate strands of achievement and interest and contacts I have gathered over the last few months.

I guess we’ll see what happens.

For now, though, I sleep. Lots.

Night night.

Pulling Up Stakes

Posted by Josie on Jan 31, 2010 in Uncategorized | 33 comments

I have lived in the same town now for 23 years.

We moved here in the winter, just before my fifth birthday. A winter of snow, I remember, thick and deep, much like this one. It’s funny really that I should start and end my time here with snow.

For we are moving.

The little terrace house that Ant and I have made our first home is rapidly getting a little tight around the waist, our collective bulge as a family of three leaving us all feeling uncomfortable and irritable and in need of stretchier accommodation. Something with room for an extra person perhaps, of the small and loud variety, and a washing machine that isn’t in a falling-down out-house in the garden, and a hall way and a drive way and kitchen that can fit more than one of you in at a time.

We could stay here, of course, in this town. Find something nearby, in a nicer neighbourhood (of which there are some), close to friends and family and everything we know. Ant would be happy with that, he likes it here.

But I just can’t do it. It seems I have reached absolute saturation point in my ability to appreciate or enjoy anything Stafford-y. Everything about here bores me: the same streets, the same views, the same endless lines of congested traffic. The small, isolated patches of green that seem fewer and farther between than I remember. There are more featureless housing estates and unfamiliar people than ever before. The high street is drowning in a sea of boarded up shops and windows, carbon-copy brand name stores. . We are stuck in a routine of going to the same places week in week out and Kai and I have read all the books in the library.

I need a change.

I REALLY need a change.

So yes, a move it is. To greener pastures. Or rather, not-quite-the-greener-pastures-we-would-like-as-turns-out-all-the-REALLY-nice places-cost-a-bomb-but-still-pretty-nice-which-will-have-to-do.

The schools are excellent. The estates we’re looking at back on to open fields with the beautiful expanse of forest, that breathes home to me and I’m not sure I could ever leave, only five minutes up the road. There is a beautiful new leisure centre and library a short bus drive away, and towns with good shops and rail links only a ten minute drive.

It’s not perfect. Not our DREAM town. But it’s close enough. And for potential first-time-buyers slowly realising the reality of house prices vs. what we can afford to borrow and maintain, we are realising that close enough may have to do.

We went yesterday. To look around the area, get a sense of where we would want to live. We will rent first, while we get a feel for the place and while my mums sell this house that they rent out to us. And we plan to move soon, by summer at the latest.

It’s not far away. 15 miles which means Ant won’t have to move jobs and we’re close enough to family to make popping over still easy. And yet it may as well be the other side of the world in terms of my experience of settling and living anywhere new.

I’m terrified.

Completely, genuinely, metaphorically sh*t-in-my-pants, scared.

What if I hate it? What if I don’t make any friends there and am horribly lonely? What if we buy a house that falls down around our ears and that leaves us even broker than we are already? What if I’m being horribly naive and swapping an ok-but-I’m-bored-of-it town for something much worse?

F*ck it.

I will never know if I never try.

Sometimes a change IS as good as a rest, and maybe new streets to pound and new places to go to are just what I need.

I am imagining taking a big, slow, breath in of that new air and that new life, and do you know what?

I think it feels good.