family

On Concordes and Helicopters

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One of the nicer moments I had with my mum before her recent lapse into severe anxious depression happened in the summer of 2025.

We were at Manchester Airport’s Runway Park, one of my son’s favourite places. There is a real retired British Airways Concorde in a hangar there, and he got to see up close the mighty point and the smooth, seamless majesticity (is that a word?) of it.

My mum was only just starting the slippery descent into depression and I was missing all the signs. I felt the foreboding feeling radiating from her and cloaking me in its clammy presence, but I ignored it, I shook it off, I tried to point things out to her that would please her.

There was a moment where my two children were running wild in a field after we had finished our picnic lunch, and my mum and I sat watching them. We watched my boy reach the far end of the field, and I said to my mum, “watch, watch him now. He is going to stick his arm out in front of him like a point and run as fast as he can, just like a Concorde.”

He did do that. Zooming towards us, pointing, with his little sister rolling her arm like a windmill as she ran because she was still in the ‘helicopter’ mode that her brother had previously been in before the Concorde took its place in the ‘current obsession’ part of his mind.

My mum laughed.

Oh she laughed aloud. I hadn’t heard her laugh loudly like that for weeks. I didn’t realise this until now, nearly a year later, watching her suffer in some deep dark place in her mind.

When he reached us she put her arms around the little Concorde and said how she loved him.

That, I think, was the last nice moment we had together.

Before her descent into deep deep depression.

Take care of your mums, folks. Life is a dreary and drab place when they are not there.

On Worry

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Folks my mother is unwell. My mother, the strong powerhouse super-heroine of a woman who takes no nonsense from anybody, who lights up the home, who makes space for everyone she comes across… has suddenly developed severe anxiety.

It’s extremely unlike her.

I am by default an anxious person, always have been. She was one to tell me not to be silly, not to worry about things that haven’t happened yet, and to cross those bridges when they came.

And now, she is 56 years old, and over the past 5 months or so, has slowly become an extremely anxious person.

This is extremely worrying for everybody. She is the pillar of the family, the strength of us all. She is the laughter, the joy. People flock around her, people want to be with her.

Something is seriously wrong.

I am anxious, not her! I am the worrywart, and I count on her solid stoic nature to put my worries to rights. When I hear her say ‘Oh just stop it you’re being ridiculous!’ a small part of me says, yeah! it’s ridiculous! Peace and order restored.

So what do we do now that she is the one being anxious? How do we fix her? Is this part of growing older? Or is there something more sinister at play, perhaps?!

Pretend that

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“Pretend that this is where we’re meant to go but you think it’s not where we’re meant to go“

“Oh, this isn’t where we were meant to be. We went the wrong way!”

“No, it is the right place. We are meant to be right here!“

“Yes. Yes yes yes you’re right we are meant to be here.”

– An older brother, appeasing the imaginative wishes of his younger sister.

Bluebell Woods

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It’s bluebell season, or rather, the start of it. My son wanted to hunt for a carpet of bluebells under a canopy of sparse spring foliage so off we went. Meandered through several villages, stopped by a couple of cafes and village shops in the sloping hills of the cheshire countryside to ask if anybody knew where we could find bluebells.

One kind lady drew us a map and we parked our car next to a quaint little church and made our way over a stile and into a pine wood. My kids moaned and complained about the steep climbs and the many holes in the ground – badger setts? Fox dens?

Oh they WHINGED and it got on my NERVES and I told them so! My son was afraid of a little fluffy white dog and I told him not to be such a baby which was really mean in hindsight, given that he was attacked by some dogs when he was two and still harbours a (sensibly healthy!!!) fear of canines. I feel awful about it to be honest. The frustration with the moaning, the lack of patience with the fear….

But we found bluebells. Carpets and carpets of them, flowing and rippling in the wind over little slopes in the wood. My son picked a bunch and said they were for me because I was the most beautiful and best Mama ever. See? So much guilt. Why can’t I just be what he says I am. Why do I have to be such a witch sometimes!

Then when we had our fill of bluebells we drove to the ruins of a castle, climbed up a steep hill to the top (more moaning, more whingeing), and then the children’s screams of laughter and joy on the windy summit, the glorious view of sunny Cheshire all around us, oat crackers and grapes in hand – and suddenly it was all worth it.

Is it all worth it? I asked my five year old.

He asked to sit on my lap and I said no, but you can lean on me.

So he leant on me and I stoked his hair and he said it was so amazing up here.

There’s guilt and joy and sadness and regret and guilt and then so much joy and love in their presence and being and existence… and then there is me promising myself, after they are in bed, to be more patient, more kind, more lenient, more validating, more wholesome….

Tomorrow we walk to the library (I expect more whingeing but they must learn to walk long distances!) and then to the hospital for an appointment, and then perhaps stop at the shops on the way home for some seeds and laundry detergent.

Hopefully my phone will be out of sight and mind, I will be more patient (despite knowing i will need to nag a million times to get their toys put away and their shoes put on), and I will be more accepting of my children as they are in their own precious little spaces.

Because dear God I love them.

NOT my photo! This photo was taken from here.

That bloody phone.

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Daily writing prompt
How do you use social media?
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Too bloody much, if I am honest.

And too bloody much around my kids, to be honest. I am on my bloody phone in the car, while they’re falling asleep chatting to me… it’s in my damn pocket while I read them bedtime stories.

And what do I bloody even do on it?

Scroll social media, that’s what.

Even though I am supposed to be doing a million other productive things.

Either way, whether it’s scrolling social online dopamine prison or replying to emails or organising one’s life or scheduling the next homeschooling day or arranging an educational trip to the local quarry or searching for local bluebell woods on google maps…. it’s still my damn face stuck in front of a damn phone and it’s what my son is looking at as slumber sweetly rocks him into dreamland.

Kids watch everything you do and their neurones use what they’re exposed to, to make pathways. What sorts of pathways am I enabling in my sweet, sweet innocent children when they see me on my STUPID phone!?

Oh I grate on my own bloody nerves is what I do.

Cannot stand my bloody self!

Have made a decision to NOT use my phone around my kids at all. Leave it upstairs, on loud, so if anybody important rings I’ll be able to hear it. And that’s that.

Stupid bloody phone.

Little Moments

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This week, as is every week, was full of little moments.

I never usually stop and really take them in, I think it’s an addiction to dopamine. Fast paced life. Although life seems a lot more slower, less stressful, now that my kids are out of nursery and my job has… vamoosed. Less money… more time. Ahh, life.

Here are some little moments.

My mother sending me a selflie. A mirror selfie. Not for any other reason than to show me a beautiful dress she got for my sister’s upcoming nuptials. Her hair – always something my curly-haired self deeply admired – black and thick and framing her face. The way she held her phone in her left hand, her right index pointing at the camera button, mid-click, her pinky out. The pose of a generation allowed to grow up in the freedom of a lack of surveillance. Not used to taking pictures of oneself. It moved me in a way I can’t describe. My sweet mother. I thought. I don’t think that often. I think, my hardworking mother. I think, mother who I love.

Nettles. Long nettles as tall as my shoulder growing just beyond my back garden. Behind the trellis fences we put up because ivy had taken over the previous ones and rendered them a ruin. To keep the ivy away, we put trellises, so we can catch them the moment they start snaking up the fence posts. So now nettles have taken over, growing over and through the carpet of ivy at the back of the back neighbour’s garden, behind the huge trees they have covering their house. Well. it’s an old man’s house. He was taken ill and carted off to a nursing home last December. His garden a beautiful memory of 40 years of life and love and family. Ivy and conifers taller than the houses now, but which must have been small when he planted them with his wife – in a bygone era.

My moment was that I went into the back, pulled up all the nettles using a pair of rubber kitchen gloves under my usual gardening gloves. I picked each leaf off, while my kids watched from a safe distance. My boy ran inside to collect his scissors, and started snipping at other foliage, emulating me. My daughter pushed her babies around in a little pram, stopping by me every so often and putting a small chubby hand on my shoulder.

I picked all the nettles, we had nettle tea. A nettle rinse for our thin curls. Some nettle soup with toast.

Slowing down.

Screens off.

Rain on our faces and down our necks.

Appreciation of love.

Image Credit

Favourite song

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What is your favourite song?

And why?

My thing to do when I am cleaning is to sing. I sing very loudly and probably very warbly, but I love to sing. I like to pretend I am an opera singer, or just a regular singer. I like to sing low down to the floor and high high high as a kite. Deep as a ravine, roaring in an echoey bathroom.

When I was a teenager my cousins recorded me singing loudly while I cleaned the bathroom, when I caught them they fell over themselves giggling as they tried to run away from my furiously brandished sponge. Was I embarrassed, then? Oh, terribly so. They mocked me for weeks afterwards, but then I realised I enjoy singing for the fun and the good mood more than I am embarrassed!

My mum sings when she is happy. When I was a child, hearing her sing made me feel relieved, it meant she was in a good mood.

Singing while she washed dishes, singing while she changed nappies, singing as she blew raspberries into my baby brother’s chubby little tummy. She used to sing ‘Video killed the radio kill’ which I later learned was ‘Video killed the radio star‘, and ‘Kookobara lived in the old plain tree‘ which was actually ‘Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree‘.

So that is something my sister and I inherited from our mother.

I think my kids may have inherited it too. They both sing with great gusto, in public and at home, feeding off each other, instigating each other, louder and louder, opera style, until people turn to look at them and I try to shush them because they might ‘disturb other shoppers’ even though I myself do not mind their singing.

It’s a zeal, I think, for life, when you can sing. Loudly and freely.

6am thoughts

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I look at a mountain and I ask, ‘Am I a people pleaser?’

Only the mountain is not in real life but in my memory. I would never look at a mountain in real life and have such a thought. Can you even control your thoughts? I saw some real life mountains this week and my heart was sucked out of my chest. I could breathe fine, but something strange clouded my mind.

Reading Jane Eyre reminds me of warm sweet tea and hot buttery toast. It reminds me of a square pattern pink carpet, faded by the blistering heat of the desert. It reminds me of hot days, curtains billowing in dusty wind, burning air on my cheeks as a rattly van full of sweaty children speeds along shiny wide roads. Breaking necks, lives hanging on edge.

I saw some mountains this week, and waterfalls cascading down them. Not as impressive as Niagara Falls – small trickles falling over rocks and mossy branches into lakes. Fresh air, cold noses, babies with red cheeks.

I took my babies to the Lake District – well actually my husband took us. He booked everything when I was away with the kids staying with my mother, and when I saw him again he said he’d missed us and he wanted to take us somewhere. My son loved his first ever holiday. He kept telling me he was having so much fun. He slept so well, as did his baby sister. Better than they do at home.

Am I a people pleaser? I ask the mountain in my memory.

What a beautiful mountain it was. Snow-capped, green and brown, sitting in the biting storms for centuries. People coming and going. Fashions changing – what does it care for fashion? – ages and wars and the slow, sweeping turn of the millennial tide.

And it sits there, holding the earth together.

I asked my aunt if I could come visit her and her ‘text tone’ scared me so I called her sister – my mother – and said I was nervous about her answer and my mother rolled her eyes at me.

Well, I didn’t see her do it but I know she did.

‘Why are you nervous?’

‘She sounds so cross, I don’t know what will please her, I asked her if she could do Friday as Saturday would be too hard for me and she strongly hinted that although she was free both days, she’d rather I come on Saturday.’

‘Ok then stay with her Friday night!’

‘I can’t ask her that!!!’

‘Why not!? She is your aunt!’

‘I know but…’

‘If L (my daughter) called you about staying with E (my sister), what would you say?’

‘I’d say you’re crazy, E loves you to pieces, of course she would want you to stay with her!’

‘Your aunt has such a soft spot for you’

‘But she sounded so angry!’

‘Yes CALL her then, nobody sounds how they mean to via text’

‘Ok ok ok’

‘Silly girl’

Sometimes you just need to call people.

Well. I Suppose It’s Christmas

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Sometimes I read back on old posts to laugh a bit about how young I was. How NAIVE. This post about Nicholas Sparks’ ‘The Notebook’ had me cackling. Did I genuinely believe an old man would not remember his sexual encounters with the love of his life, during their young love? I didn’t know what love was, back then.

Anyway. I don’t celebrate Christmas. For many many many reasons, of which they are numerous.

This post explains why.

I don’t get hats either. I just get gloomy family gatherings and depression. But that may be because I am suffering from late-onset PPD. It’s either that or SAD… where we all get a little mad and sad and bad this time of year.

I am too afraid to go to the shopping centres to see all the decorations because of the dreaded Omicron. I also don’t relish lugging two kids around all day, and dealing with their layers of clothes and irritation and all the other things that come along with two babies.

I allowed my sister in law to take my son to the museum today. You hear that? ALLOWED? Because previously I was so scared of letting him go anywhere without me, in case something should happen while I wasn’t around. He was fine. He loved it. He had a hot chocolate from his aunty and he didn’t want to know me.

‘Go away mama, I am Aunty’s boy, not Mama’s boy’. See some may feel insecure when they hear that but I know he is Mama’s boy. He knows it too. He is just having the time of his life and being with his Mama is not as fun as getting FULL SUGAR hot chocolate with his Aunty!

I am happy he was happy. It brought me joy to hear his laughter. And to see how well he enjoys the company of his extended family. I missed him but I need to learn to relax and let go.

Merry holidays!

In fact… Merry Carrying On 😀

Fams

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A strange thing happens to me when I come to visit family.

I seem to lose all the will to live.

I start to just exist between moments.

It gets so dark and gloomy that I eventually break down, and I don’t know why that is happening.

It mostly happens when I visit my family through marriage.

They are very nice people. But I think I suffered some trauma at their hands. So whenever I come back here, a deep desolation befalls me.

Combine that with ill children and a nasty sore throat… my goodness the floodgates open.

Well. I will be seeing my own family tomorrow, so we will see what delights that will hold.