Jack of All Trades, Mother of Two

  The tragic case of Sarah Everard has brought the sexual harassment and abuse that women must deal with in their day to day lives to the forefront of public attention. I have been both deeply moved and horrified by stories shared on Twitter. I found myself thinking more and more about Sarah’s family and the unimaginable grief that they are enduring.     My daughter is a survivor of rape. I will not call her a victim; she is a survivor who has risen above what happened to her. I will not go into the details, that is her story to share not mine, but I felt compelled to talk about how what happened has impacted on me and the rest of her family. You see, rape does not just hurt one person.   She told me over the phone the next morning. She was at university and it was not feasible for me to get to her immediately I remember that phone call as an almost out of body experience to me. I stayed calm, talked about practicalities with her and made sure she was not alone. When...

  2020. Where do I start? A lot of people would just say that it was a really shit year. For many people it was the most awful year of their life with loss and tragedy across the entire globe. Words that had never been part of our vocabulary such as lockdown, the R number and quarantine quickly became daily phrases. We all lived through a year that we could not have anticipated or imagined.   Now we have reached the very last day of 2020 and I ‘ve been thinking about whether, amongst all the bad stuff, was there anything positive? Has 2020 left me with anything good that I can take forward into the new year? I started thinking about things that I had achieved during the year and even made a list. ·         Learnt to make sourdough bread ·         Started riding a bike for the first time in 40 years ·         Grew lots of fruit and vegetables myself ·    ...

I t may seem strange, but this post was actually inspired by a Taylor Swift track. I was so excited when she released the Evermore album and could not wait to listen to it. It was when I got to track 5, Tolerate It, that it hit me. I instantly could relate to the song and when I read the comments on YouTube, I was struck by how different people had related to the song in different ways. Some talked of past relationships, some of their parents and some even thought it related to Princess Diana. I started thinking of how we often do accept one sided relationships where we put in all the effort without it being reciprocated.     I was genuinely shocked to realise that this may have been an ongoing theme throughout my life. This saddened me but also gave me clarity as situations and relationships that had made me sad at times or sometimes even constantly, suddenly made sense and I could see exactly what was wrong.    My relationship with my mother was often troubled but ...

  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...