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...

“All the world is made of faith, trust and pixie dust”  – Peter Pan We grow up putting our trust in people. As a child you trust your parents to look after you. You trust your friends to support you. As an adult you trust society to treat you well if you do the right thing. In today’s world though, is it naïve to be trusting? Who can we really rely on? Can we trust the police to be impartial enforcers of the law? The awful truth is probably not if you’re black especially if you live in America. We live in a democracy so we trust our government to maintain a society where we can all thrive. I don’t want to get too political but the UK government’s handling of the corona virus pandemic has made it extremely difficult to trust them with anything. Even before that, years of austerity with families in poverty and scores of homeless people makes it almost impossible to trust that the government are doing the best for all. The world is changing around us and we may never retur...

It’s that tone of voice, the dismissive attitude, the comment that shows they don’t think anything of your accomplishments. I’m sure it’s happened to all of us more than once. So what do you do about it? The first reaction is probably to do what I’ve done many times and that’s just to disappear off on your own and cry for a bit. I take things personally and am my harshest critic. I don’t think this is a bad option though as it lets your feelings out and then you can think what to do. You could confront the person and explain how they have made you feel. They may be horrified and apologise profusely. You would have to be prepared though for the fact that they may feel that you are attacking them and they’ll try to twist the argument back against you. You may come to the realisation that it’s just not worth confronting these type of people as you are the one who will end up feeling worse. Probably the best option is to deal with belittling behaviour or comments by having the self e...

I’ve always regarded myself as quite a self sufficient person anyway. I don’t like to rely on others and I’m happy with my own company. I’ve been a single parent for over fifteen years now so I’ve had to learn new skills, wallpapering was an education, and do many things that fell outside my comfort zone. Self sufficiency with regards to food though, is something that never really appealed to me until last year. Brexit scared me. I read as much as I could about it to try and educate myself. It seemed reasonable to expect a level of disruption with food supplies and, if we left with no deal, to have widespread longer term shortages particularly of fresh food.  I had some spare cash at the time so I decided to see what I could manage to grow. I was desperate to do anything I could that might protect us against the worse case scenario.  I invested in some fruit trees and bushes. These gave me a small harvest last year but I saw them as a longer term investment. ...

When Lin Manuel Miranda wrote the song Yorktown (The world turned upside down), he was writing of a time of war and revolution with political orders being overthrown. He certainly wasn’t considering a global pandemic. For the last few days though, the song has been going round and round in my head and I think it is fair to say that for many of us across the globe, the world really has turned upside down.  I live in the U.K. and I can remember starting to hear in early January the news reports from China. It was terrible but seemed so far away at the time. As Covid-19 started its insidious creep across Europe, I started to feel more concerned. We cut out a few planned trips to London in February and I made sure my youngest daughter had  hand sanitiser for school. Then it started to get worse through March and picked up speed like a steamroller out of control on a hill. My oldest daughter’s firm introduced home working. Company after company announced closures and pani...

Most people would look at my relationship with my ex and consider that we were on really good terms and would actually consider us friends. Is that because most ex husbands and wives hate each other and we appear to have bucked the trend or can you really be friends with an ex? We had a truly hideous break up, it was like an Eastenders plot. At eight months pregnant, I hacked my then husbands phone and found conclusive evidence of his affair. I, after the initial shock, wanted to try and work things out whereas he sat me down and told me how many different affairs he'd had. Anyway, we stumbled on through the birth of our daughter and he eventually left when she was 3 months and I gave him an ultimatum about seeing the other woman. We didn't divorce for some years. He moved in with his mum initially and would visit the girls once a week. People said to me how could I let him in the house but my reply was that the girls needed to see him so what else could I do. One was six y...