In the calm moments, I step back and worry,
Am I doing enough to keep you safe, do you feel loved, supported, cared for confident?
I, so concious of how my words and actions, can shape and break you, stutter here. Stumble over these words but like in every moment, the always of now, feels urgent, there are shoulds peering over my shoulder, watching me now, as I steal a moment. How nice would it be to take a morning, to make a workshop for words, sit with my clever, beautiful friend, sip hot coffee and spill our feelings into thoughts into words on a page.
It is she who invited me to come here now. To take ten mins to myself. To push the words through my fingers, ignore the end of the washing cycle, the beep of emails and be.
The purpose is so clear we don’t need say it.
And so I think about how a moment can cloud the whole days weather. How the pressure of the should and the masters ticking clock, is a bomb of shame, ready to blow up as we turn up late, push unwilling legs into tights, unlace little fingers from anothers curls and then shout.
Repeating myself. Repeating myself. REPEATING MYSELF. Until I shout like my house is on fire, like there is a child playing in the road, shout like my Mama shouted at us. Scary. And they stopped. Scared stiff.
The rage can be close to the surface these days. Can be summoned within seconds, can burst without permission, always without permission. But once you go there, it is easy to return.
Is it nature or is it nurture? What values do I have? What am I teaching them? My Mama was so angry it was hard to hear her lessons. I spent many years undoing. Doing different. Growing values she didnt have. But how you are raised doesnt leave you and my Mum told the teachers to bollocks and scolded other people’s children. She gave no fucks.
I wish I could be more like that, to anyone but the children.
I felt sad after shouting. I apologised and I will keep trying to explain how the pressure builds and the traffic was bad and how masters clock ticks louder and Mummy doesn’t want to be late and I have work to do.
And I will tell them how I went to walk in the woods afterwards and the sunlight threw a ladder on the ground through the shadows and how Reggie and I stepped on them. Grateful for the return of the golden light, dancing on the edge of the budding leaves. How pretty it made the spindly twigs look and how I considered all the life ready to burst out of them over the next few weeks and how my beautiful, clever friend, the one that reads all the books and doenst let her kids wear or think pink, invited me to write a few words and I did.
And how these moments are what make a day and a life. How as a woman and especially a mother, we have to grab onto these moments to find ourselves and remind ourselves of who we truly are and what is important.
It wasnt as urgent as I thought it was. We were nearly late but we turned a corner and got stuck behind a bin lorry.
When we finally got home from dropping O we were nearly late again and A stepped in a puddle I told her to avoid and got wet up to her ankle.
Thank god for other mothers carrying spare tights. A skipped in after that.
And I turned into the woods and turned into the page and turned the day around.
Woke on No sleep 