Jack of All Trades, Mother of Two

  I have been a single parent for 5966 days and roughly 2 hours while I’m writing this. I’ve probably been scared for about 5800 of those days. Some of that fear never goes, we all worry about something happening to our kids and money is a constant worry and fear always lurking in the background.   I’ve realised lately that I’m scared about far more than that. I’ll give you an example. I have a radiator which was coming away from the wall. I isolated it immediately. I asked my ex husband for advice and when he made it clear that he wasn’t going to trot over and fix it. I knew I would have to take it off the wall myself. I spent three days being scared and then managed to do it. The next stage was to fill holes in the wall so I could replace the brackets. I finished this today having spent a week too scared because I’d never used Polyfilla before.    This has made me think about how much of my life I spend in fear. Making a phone call can induce a feeling of panic. I ...

  Do you like yourself? Honestly? Completely? If you looked in the mirror, would you think oh I’m ok but I wish I was slimmer, my boobs were bigger or I had a different nose? Or I wish I was more outgoing or more like my friend.     I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. As women we are fed an ideal of what we should look like, how we should think and how we should act. Anyone who is a little bit different will frequently find themselves on the outside. I know because this has happened to me most of my life. A childhood dominated by an emotionally abusive mother, unpopular at school with only a couple of friends. I would basically reinvent myself in their likeness to try and keep their friendship. Finding out that my natural father had run off before I was born didn’t help. I felt that. I must have been unloveable before I was even born. This feeling didn’t diminish as I got older. I was in a relationship with my ex husband for 3  years before we got engage...