Time the Healer

Been a long time...

And reading my last post, I just cant believe how much my feelings have swung.

I'm not talking hormonal fluctuations, just the normal passing of time and what it does with the things that happen to us.

Last post - just a few months ago - I couldn't think about daughter 1 and her impending departure to uni without flashbacks to her childhood and tears welling in my eyes. Maternal guilt was running rampant.

This post - well she's gone. And am I crying? No. Do I think about her all the time? No? Am I waiting with baited breath for her calls and her Blackberry messages? No.

We talk and Blackberry message quite a lot which is great. I don't feel cut off from her. I still know what is going on. I still feel like her mother.

But I'm quite happy without her. The other three children provide enough entertainment and work to more than fill the time that I'm not working.

Next week, she is coming to stay for a few days with her boyfriend. And I am looking forward to it. But I'm also mindful that it will mean extra work for me (lazy lazy person that I am).

How far have I come from the distraught mother of 5 months ago?

So what do I draw from this?

Not much really.

Yes time heals. But everybody knows that. And it never helps at the time.

And I don't believe that the fact that I am thinking and feeling so differently now invalidates what I was thinking and feeling then.

That my children will leave me is a tragedy - a completely right and reasonable tragedy - that I will sometimes experience again. That the bossy five year old with a squeaky voice has gone is another tragedy that I know about but am not experiencing now.

So maybe what I have learnt is that time doesn't exactly heal. But it does change things. Until, of course, it changes them again.

Terrific?

Ok so tomorrow is now today and it's time for something terrific.

Only there isn't anything.

Instead, there is only sadness.

I just read a fantastic post by a mother of four looking back at the hope and love she felt 32 years ago when her first child was born and at how things turned out differently but also the same.

That post really struck a chord with me.

Daughter 1 is due to leave for university in a few months and she will be living in Scotland, a four and a half hour train ride or 30 minutes by plane away.

The family is breaking up. It hasn't always been the happiest family. In fact, sometimes things have been downright terrible. Even so, it was a family, my family, and I have lived inside it for nearly 19 years.

And soon, it is to change, shrink a little, lose a member. It feels like an amputation is beginning and I can already feel some of the raw pain. Images of daughter 1 as a 5 year old flash into my head all the time, a bossy little girl with a squeaky voice telling everyone what to do and all I can do is cry.

And daughter 1 is only the first. The others will follow. In 7 years, they will all be gone.

Pretty obvious stuff? Well yes, only... I hadn't really realised it before.

What makes all this really bite is something similar to what Ms. Moon, the authour of the post above, is experiencing:

I wish, oh babies, I wish - I could have done better by you sometimes. I do.

I wish that too. I wish it so hard I could gouge my eyes out with the strength of that wish.

Mothers feel guilt all the time. It comes with the job. But this is something more. I know I could have done better by them. I know I should have done.

Cracking content

I read the other day that if you don't write on your blog for a while, you should'nt apologise, you shouldn't even mention it. You should just set to writing some really cracking content so that your readers (who?) will just be grateful that you're back.

Hmmm cracking content. OK I'm lighting a cigarette (horrified intake of breath) and thinking.

More news from the kids' exam front? Not cracking. Walks with the dog? Not cracking. Lack of progress of builder at recreating our shower room? Definitely not cracking.

Think I'll go away and hide my head in the sand and come back tomorrow with something really terrific.

Worried about daughter one

Today, I suddenly got worried that daughter 1 was taking drugs.

I know she has taken drugs, both weed (which is what you have to call it now) and cocaine. But not much, I have always believed. It's the boys in her group who mainly take the drugs and most of her girlfriends don't. They drink instead, but that's another story.

Today though, I wondered if drugs were behind her recent inability to do any work.

Her A levels are in a week. And yet every opportunity she has to do some revision, she uses to watch one of the endless stream of US soap operas she follows. And if she isn't watching TV, she is on the phone. The sound of her walking up and down the stairs with a portable plugged to her ear is one of the top irritations of my life at the moment.

She says she knows what she is doing. She's done well up to now without working overly hard (which is true) and I should trust her to do it again.

She may be right. Then again, she may be pushing the limits too far this time.

And of course, she may be taking drugs.

Time will tell.

Wasted day

Today:

• Took daughter 1 to school (late) because she has an A level. She rung me as I was half way home to tell me she had left her glasses in the car and I had to take them all the way back to school and deliver them in the office because it was too much of a trek for her to walk to meet me.
• Talked to plumber about new shower and shower door.
• Did tiny bit of work
• Picked up son 1 from his A/S level and sat in hot waiting room at orthodontic hospital for long time and then had brief appointment with nice orthodontist and 7 silent students.

Now home but its 5.00pm and gotta walk the dog in half an hour.

Older children don't monopolise your time like younger ones do. But they do eat it up.

I want to be alone

They think its them who want to get away from us. Kids that is. Actually, it's the other way around.

I long for peace, that light airy feel of NOBODY AT ALL being in the house with me. Instead, I got both sons. Son 1 on study leave; son 2 ill. That's ill as in the strange mysterious illnesses that overwhelm at 8.00am and magically clear up by 10.00am ready for a long hard day on the Playstation.

They aren't making any noise but somehow their presence bears down on me.

Just being selfish I suppose.

But maybe (little interesting appercu coming now) it's natures way of preparing for the separations ahead.

Study leave begins

Older son now on study leave. He got up at 11.00am despite numerous wake up calls. Now downstairs probably engaged in his project of reading Wikipedia from beginning to end. Or playing Championship Manager.

Yesterday, he took an old computer apart. What for? No reason. Just painstakingly took it to bits. Each time he extricated a bit, he brought it up to me proudly:

"This is a motherboard".

"Here's the hard drive".

Oh he was so proud of himself. He piled all the bits up into a tower and looked at them with awe.

But he says maybe I can use the hard drive for backing up my stuff. He has ordered an adaptor for the connection with my credit card details which are saved on their computer for vital itunes and pizza purchases.

If it works, his study leave will have produced something good.

Also, this tinkering around makes me feel more comfortable about his recent choice of engineering as a degree subject.

Study leave isn't meant to be a holiday

1045am. Older daughter not in school but in bed. She isn't on study leave yet but will be from next week as her A levels begin in a few weeks. But the holiday spirit in which my children take study leave seeems to have set in early.

Yesterday, older son came in from school cheering and hitting high fives and saying "yessssssssssss". Why? Because he is now on study leave (his A/Ss start today) so reckons the fun begins now.

Do other children take study leave in the same spirit? My two eldest are both pretty clever, so they know they don't have to work too hard. But this endless BBC sports-wikipedia-Championship Manager-US-soap-operas fest just seems crazy.

Is it my fault they are so lazy? Probably.

Productivity

Started late but did A LOT.

You know how it is - sometimes you're all prepared, got hours stretching ahead of you. Yet somehow the hours pass and nothing gets accomplished.

Other times, not many hours but oh so productive.

Today was one of the latter days. Did the whole blog design and quite like it. What's more, my super-critical oldest daughter liked it too.

Yaay!

Bad start

Bad start to the day today. Got up at 11.20. Wont be able to get much work in before children get home. Conversely, will be able to stay up later and do work after they have gone to bed.

Currently working on a design for a soon-to-be-blog for my husband's company. Hate doing designs because I'm not very good at them. But husband wont pay any more to the designer. He feels the £600 he has already paid for the design of a new website and logo is already too much - even though its outrageously cheap.

Husband is a bit of a cheapskate.

My first post

My first post. The very first one.

So let me introduce myself. My name is Sarah, I live in London in a typically tall London house with my husband and dog and four teenage children.

My life is hectic - what with the washing and cooking and the work too. There are never enough hours in the day.

I have friends but I rarely see them. That suits me fine on a day to day basis. Most evenings I'm tired, and I need to catch up with work. When the phone rings, I curse, even when its someone I like. The phone never stops ringing you see.

But when I think about it, I'm not so happy to see friends so little.

So in a way, this blog could be a substitute. I can talk to it instead of them.

Well, we'll have to see how it develops.