Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.

Tuesday 22 March 2011

SWF...

Do you ever get the feeling that someone else stole your life and they are walking around wearing it? Like you have been single white femaled by an invisible counterpart, that exists in another universe and she is living the life that should be yours.

I have that feeling most days...

Things weren't always this way though, were they?

I sat in the park today, watching my daughter trying, with the help of her grandmother, to negotiate the slide the wrong way. And a group of high school girls caught my eye, so young and free that I had to ask my mother if I was ever like that because honestly some days I struggle to remember a time when my life was ever that simple. She assures me that I was and so I allow my mind to wonder and I begin to remember...

A time before all the madness began, when everything came down to the simply divine pleasures. Listening to Shola Ama, You Might Need Somebody, on repeat and singing along at the top of my voice. The exhilaration in watching as the hairdresser cut off my long tresses for a funky, short bob, rolling up my school skirt by at least an inch or two so I could show off a little leg but not too much, going fives on my last cigarette because my four best friends also smoked but I was the only one with enough dinner (lunch) money to be able to afford 10 Berkley Red. The night the boy that made my stomach somersault gave me his scarf and walked me home.

I allowed myself to drift away on a sea of nostalgia, momentarily lost in the 90's. Back then I couldn't wait to grow up and be independent, live my own life and make my own decisions. I wasn't going to let anyone tell me how things should be done, I was going to forge my own path and make the world stop and notice me! I was so full of passion then, so alive!

And now?

Most days, I just feel...old. My mother always laughs at me when I say this,

“How can you feel old at your age” she asks me.

I don't know mother but I do. I feel like someone sucked all the zest for life out of me. It's that woman I tell you, the one from the other universe, the one walking around with my life. It's her fault, right? Except I figured out that woman is just another version of me. And is it so inconceivable to imagine that I might be able to change my circumstances, change my outlook with a little bit of effort and some hard work? A positive attitudes goes a long way so I recall.

I know I will never get back to 1995 but that's okay, being a teenager once was enough for me and beside cigarettes are so expensive these day and, of course, extremely bad for your health. Another downside to getting older, eventually everything becomes bad for your health! There is, however,nothing to say that I can't bring a little of that free spirit into 2011. So stayed tuned blogger fans because as Bob Dylan would say, the times they are a changing.

Saturday 19 March 2011

When I get older...

Today my daughter placed her head on my lap and went to sleep, something she hasn't done in a while and I realised that no matter what else life throws at me, I know love...real love for this little person. This little person that grew inside me and filled my life with love, joy, pain and sadness all at once, the kind of which I had never felt before.

I realised again, the same thing that I have known ever since those two blue lines appeared in that little window, that I was changed forever. That my daughter would be forever mine and yet never belong to me but only to herself. That I would literally die to save her life and that I would be forever done for, beholden to her beautiful smile and lost in her deep blue eyes. The same eyes that looked up at me the first time I held her.

Becoming a mother, a parent, is the most exhilaratingly terrifying experience I have ever known and trust me when I say I have known real fear, pain and joy in the 28 years previous to becoming Emily's mother. But the older I get, with every year that passes the more I realise what is important, what matters and what just doesn't. Because in the end everything falls away, till all we are left with are the things that matter the most to us. Whether that be people, possessions, money, status or whatever it is we value. Given enough time we can forgive most any sins committed against us, whether that be the heartbreak we feel when a lover doesn't love us back anymore, our parents failure to go the distance together or that 'bitch' that made our lives hell for 3 years because we fancied the guy she fancied and because...well she 'just could' (I'm still working on that one).

Anyway my point is that life changes us, getting older changes us and you can't fight it, you can try but it happens to us all and it doesn't have to be a bad thing. You can stop caring so much about what other people think, realise that it should only matter what you think and what those closest to you, the important ones, think. So take comfort in your life lived, in your family and friends because that's what I am learning to do. When I am at my lowest, darkest, when the sadness takes a complete hold of me, I look into those beautiful blue eyes and I know, that when everything else has fallen away, I did a good thing...no a GREAT thing!