Right now the purple-pink thistle flowers by the river are setting seed. Each flower transforming into a shell of white fluff and preparing to scatter. In the death of one phase the possibility of the next.

 

Like the seeds in a dandelion clock. These images have shadowed me this year. The sense of a thousand possibilities. The feeling of chance encounters and their ripples. The unseen consequences of our words and actions.

 

I’ve spent the past fourteen years sand-bagging my life. In the event of sudden and unwelcome change shore up your defences. Baton hatches. Pull up drawbridge. Prepare. Plan. Train. Review, begin again.

Its been a journey, I suppose. But I am coming to wonder at this version of myself. She’s good at what she does. Determined. Focused. She perseveres. But in her attempts to safeguard herself she is missing life.

Driving out to see a client today I reminded myself that this is my real life. I am not play-acting. It’s not an imagined scenario; a training day role play, a childhood imaginary game. The buzzard thermaling there above the wheat, almost brown it’s so dry, is real. The newly resurfaced road, minus its dividing  lines, is real, the woman with her carrier bag and flip flops walking in the heat haze is real, the trickle of sweat through my hairline is real.

In unusual weather everything becomes surreal. The heat and lack of rain is revealing hidden secrets in the landscape, lost monuments, archaeological remains. It’s the same in my life. The bones of life are coming to the surface, harder to bury in the flinty soil…Here are the bleached remains. Here the signs of something deeper, more primitive, a primal, present, instinctive life.

I am learning, slowly, that the mind doesn’t have the answers, I have to feel into them. The me I used to live in is unimpressed. It isn’t very tidy or coherent. I often do things on a whim. I am like a child exploring her environment, because it is here and it wants me to. My plans and programs, my lists and goals are abandoned, a boot fair of clutter and unneeded processes.

I want my life to be like thistledown. I want to grow, flower, and release. I want to let it all go. Not radio track the outcomes, simply set them to dance, fairy free without the need to know or monitor. They have their own life, they will live beyond what I can see or imagine. This is the magic. That each day I am sending thistledown out into the world, in my words and deeds, and that I only have to do this, as light as air, as easy as breathing, the rest is up to grace.

It is time.

For you too.

Take off the mask.

Reach into your heart and lead your soul-self out into the sunlight.

We’ve been hiding for too long.

Playing the roles given to us by parents and teachers.

Staying small so that we don’t upset, don’t challenge, don’t upstage.

Listening to the whispers of doubt, the naysayers; feeling the disapproving glances cast to put us in our place.  This far and no further, the smallest piece of the cake, chosen to be polite.

What does it look like if you take the biggest piece? And first?

What does it feel like if you shout and stamp your feet and sing and drum and scream and dance? Shameful? Ecstatic? What if you are the one on their feet first when they ask for volunteers at the panto? What if you’re the kid up on the stage getting all the limelight, bathed in glory?

What if you take the gift of yourself, the things you’re best at, and do those first, before the ironing or the grocery shopping or the pile of marking? What if you use the whole bottle of ointment, poured out and running over, over your whole head?

What if that is the work? To un-hide, un-mask, un-wrap in unimaginable, crazy, delighted wonder.  What if we break open and show the things we learned to hide. Let our hair blow wild and free, our hands muddy, our feet black from dancing on the bare earth? What if we shine?

 

It’s 9.55 am. Two and a half hours ago I had a phone call. J was in the hospital after a night out. The paramedics think he had his drink spiked.

Of course I blame myself. I have powerful thoughts. Last night I sat in bed at a reasonable hour with a fresh cup of peppermint tea and a good book and I felt like life was calming down. I shouldn’t have thought that because it tempted fate…This is magical thinking. I know it’s nonsense. That by thinking I precipitated the next drama. Of course I know that’s nonsense… Mostly.

So I’m sat in J’s flat in Margate having retrieved him from A and E and got him cleaned up. He’s shaken and feels like crap but will live.

I am constantly reminded that life is what you get. Each day just now I feel the disjoint between IG feeds and Facebook posts and what actually happens. I post a snapshot in a rare 5 minutes of leisure. Because it’s rare. Not because this is my life. If I posted about real life it would mostly be; a computer keyboard, cat litter trays, Morrisons (our local supermarket), a bowl full of washing up, laundry.

I’m beginning to think that I may have to shed the social. I don’t want to throw it away altogether, I have made some amazing friends and soul connections this way. But more and more it bruises my soul to be so constantly visible.

In magical terms it reminds me of a glamour. A glamour is spell which represents something which isn’t real, which shows you an illusion or something as other than it is. Glamours are deceptions, misrepresentations. It is a powerful magic which requires willpower and a strong sense of self to overcome. Tiffany Aching faces it when she deals with the faery queen in Terry Pratchett’s The Wee Free Men. It needs a bone deep connection to your own truth and confidence in your own wisdom to escape…

I’m not as strong as Tiffany. I want to be seen. This magic makes me feel real. If I am visible I exist. If you can’t see me I vanish, like a baby hiding it’s eyes, I’ve  disappeared…

I am working with breath and body. I am working to explore what is actually present, rather than what I think is here.

For years now I’ve been working hard to create a work life which encompasses my passions but while I know this is valued by those who work with me and I enjoy it, in real terms it’s not supporting us.

Life is I find a constant process of revaluation. Shifting clouds of circumstance. It is not helpful to persist with particular ways of thinking or believing when these are no longer working . If I were tending a garden it would be time to see what is actually growing. From many seeds planted what has sprouted? What is thriving? What needs watering, or pulling up and composting? What tiny fruits can I feed with the energy of intention and purpose as they swell and flourish, ripening for harvest?

I am giving myself permission to do this work. To make mistakes. To try and fail. To change my mind. This is the essence of life lived rather than observed. Reaching down to the roots of the soul to find the elemental self and bringing her into daylight, blinking in the light of an awakening life.

Today is the last, last day.  After nearly two months of sorting, sifting, clearing, moving I will return the keys for the old house. A new chapter then.

As the dust begins to settle something is clawing at the corner of my mind (like the cat at the door as I write, desperate to walk over the keyboard and watch birds on the telegraph wires).  This sensation has been with me almost constantly for the past decade or so, but in the past I have been better at evading it.  It is a disquiet, an unease, a restlessness.  Something uncomfortable, like a stone in the shoe, or a splinter, just below the skin but avoiding extraction.

In the past I have identified this with divine promptings, a feeling that I need to be looking elsewhere, moving on.  Over time though I am coming to wonder if it isn’t within me. I feel now that this feeling, which has had me seeking new life paths and employments repeatedly over many years, is a desire for escape. I don’t know what yet.  What it is I am running from. Or wish to avoid.  But now I feel the answer is with sitting.  Just being.  Already the intensity is threatening to overwhelm. A rising sense of panic from my stomach to my head.

I have a lot of “air” in my character.  In elemental workings air is to do with the head, with thoughts and ideas.  For me my inner world is often more real than the concrete one, and frequently feels much safer.  My ideas and imaginings are often so real that they hang around, created ghosts, long after a particular project or plan has passed or been discarded.  It gets pretty hectic in my head at times, noisy with the buzz of ideas, old and new, an overcrowded waiting room.  They lounge around, arguing, these thoughts, contradicting and disputing, waving their agendas at each other.  It’s no wonder I get dizzy some days.

It takes conscious effort to bring myself back into the real, and to really “be” here. With so much changing my levels of restlessness are almost off the scale.  If I can have a new plan then my mind will be busy with that, I will feel a greater sense of control, at least over this thing I am creating and putting in place, and the discomfort will be dissipated, for the time being.  This helps me to understand, at least in part, my love of studying.  Keeping the restless child of the mind occupied so I can have some peace.

But as we know these are only temporary measures.  There will always be the unoccupied moment, the enforced wait of a delayed train, cancelled plans which free up time, and the mind begins its persistent itch once more.

I am good at thinking.  I’m good at planning and executing those plans.  I am good at reasoning.  I am sensible and seek to live by my principles.  That’s all good.

But right now I feel that’s not the answer. In spite of all that something else is needed.  The situation can’t be fixed that way, it is an old paradigm.  In the new I have to learn to sit.  To feel the discomfort, and then feel it some more.  I have to learn to be in the day, not tomorrow, or next week, or “one day”.  I have to deal with boredom.  Mundane.

Perhaps once I have done this, squirming like a three year old left to sit too long, I will notice something. A woodlouse. A mote of dust in sunlight.  And remember that life is centred elsewhere. That wherever the centre of the universe lies, it is not in me. That I can let go and be here with the same freedom and flow as a sparrow bathing in dust. Perhaps then I will remember what it is to live in grace.

Last year New Age Hipster (a.k.a Vix) wrote this post about being a Christian Witch.  This was powerful for me. Newly out of the church and exploring a nature-based spiritual path I didn’t want to throw my whole faith heritage and spiritual journey to date out of the window.  Yet my own experiences in evangelical/ charismatic churches in my teens had taught me that some people in the church aren’t at all keen on those who follow the old ways.  This kept me hiding my new path and firmly in the broom closet.

More recently I’ve “come out” about reading tarot and have posted occasionally on social media about the Celtic Wheel of the Year and festivals. But I’ve still been reluctant to claim my path.  Because I am afraid.  I’m afraid people won’t understand and I like to be understood…  I’m not a different person.  I haven’t rejected the values which have steered me through life.  I still believe fundamentally we are here to live abundant lives, to have “life to the full“,  to love God/dess and our neighbour.  But there are some aspects of “belief”, being tied to a creed, that I struggled with for decades and can no longer pretend to adhere to. This is, to me, a more honest way to live, than struggling to bend my mind to claim dogmas which I can’t accept.

But it’s challenging. Stepping outside of the certainty of church life is daunting, letting go of a way of life; it was comfortable and, in many ways, safe.  Easier to stay with the known sometimes, even though it’s become unhealthy, than to break free into uncharted territory.  Seeking to hold true to a spiritual path outside of orthodoxy means walking into the  “cloud of unknowing“, continuing to seek God/dess, to reach out all my love, but into a void space beyond.

I still pray sometimes.  Sometimes I talk to Mary.  Sometimes to Jesus.  And today I remembered a retreat I took in 2001-2002.

In Ignatian Spirituality one practice is to imagine yourself in the Bible story.  You visualise the scene.  You see the characters.  You notice what they are wearing. What you can see and smell around you.  Then you see where you are in the story.  Are you a bystander?  One of the leading characters?  If Jesus is there what does he say? Does he speak to you? How do you respond?  You then reflect on what this can teach you about the story, and about your own faith journey.

And I wondered how it would be if I had a conversation with Jesus today about my witchy path.  And what he would say to me now. It began kind of awkwardly, more on my part, the prodigal daughter seeking an audience…

But I realised pretty quickly that it wasn’t an issue.  Jesus isn’t interested in any label I or others ascribe to me.  He is interested in how I live.  I had a strong sense that he calls some people to serve him in the church, and some to serve him in every other place on earth.  He calls people to live radically loving lives, to bring healing, to challenge the dark places in human hearts and seek to bring wholeness.  I do not believe that this is dependent on any creed or specific religious path, because God/dess is way too big to be contained in one faith…

I saw him kneeling on the ground with the woman caught in adultery, drawing shapes in the dust, I saw him challenging the status quo, asking the difficult questions, living differently to the way people expected.  And I knew that while other people might judge me, he didn’t.  That he would ask me to live as honestly as possible. To trust in grace.  To stay open.  To return accusation with patience.  And to be ready to turn over the tables when there is injustice.

I still don’t understand how my faith shifted in the way it did.  I still don’t know what spiritual twister took me from that place and dropped me in this.  But I will keep  walking the path, seeking grace, seeking to serve and seeking to bring love and healing.

Amen, sister. So mote it be.

 

 

The body speaks.

Today it is asking me to slow the heck down, for goodness sake.

It has been telling me this for a while now.

I’m not good at listening.

Since I was eighteen I’ve had patches of poor health.  These tend to grow out of patches of overwork, though it’s taken a long time to see the pattern.

One of the contributing factors is that I don’t like to let people down. So when something new begins, I tend to try and carry on with what was there before as well.  This leads to being overloaded. Which leads to a need to shed things. Which leads, ironically, to letting people down…

For instance.

When I started teaching I continued with my church ministry.  I looked around and saw other people doing lots at church.  I figured I should be able to as well.  I didn’t factor in parenting a young person with an autistic spectrum condition, managing a fragile marriage, or, what’s that? Self care…A week after the end of term we flew to visit my friend in Canada, in all the photos I am red-eyed with a heavy cold, I came back exhausted…

At the end of that year I experienced strange symptoms, right sided weakness, dizzyness, excessive tiredness.  The diagnosis was a small stroke.

Forward a few years. The fragile marriage is over. I’m a lone parent looking to support my children and improve my career prospects.  I need a way to work which will earn enough without requiring too many hours work (because I need to stay healthy dammit). So I’m teaching and studying. I’m back in church ministry too. Oh yes and on the side I’m running a healing business, because that’s what I wanted to do when the marriage ended and I don’t want to let it go. I end up shaky every day, with constant palpitations and not sleeping.  I resign my teaching post and try self-employment.

A while later I’m back working in a school.  It’s what in the UK is called a specialist provision, this one for young people with ASC. I’m the Senco and the government systems for monitoring SEN have just changed. There’s plenty to do… When I stopped working for myself I held on to a couple of pieces of private work.  Maybe it was an insurance policy. Maybe, again, it was so as not to let folk down.  After a full working week working in school I spend Saturday morning teaching and then go into a local school in the afternoon to do assessments.  These result in  8000 word reports, which get written in the weekday evenings….looking back it was a truly insane way to live.

At the same time my faith is unravelling.  The certainty and hope that has kept me going is finally disintegrating, there have been signs over the past seven years or so, but now it’s in full out free fall.  I am looking for anchors but drifting uncontrollably.  I begin to get symptoms.  Mostly dizzyness.  Weakness. I find I can’t drive.  I can’t get to work.  There is no sick pay policy so in the end I have to resign.  I cannot walk properly, occasionally I need to use a stick.

Things fall apart.

But I am cussid if nothing else.  Or wilful. Or maybe, occasionally, resilient.  I begin tutoring again, manage to find some assessment work.  I pick up threads and start to try and weave them into something coherent.  It’s a hotch potch macrame mix but I figure it will have to do.

Throughout my adult life I have worked with a spiritual director.  A mentor or guide.  Ever since my early twenties I have believed I have choices, that we always have a choice.  I have sought to act, not to sit back and bemoan circumstances, to take what is at hand and get on with it.  I wonder sometimes about the idea of the “life of dreams” because it feels more like a “life of consequences”.

And now.

Transition.  Change. Unplanned. Unexpected. Necessary.  And I see this pattern. The pattern of trying to hold on when things shift.  The band playing on while the Titanic lists and plunges.  Whistling while Rome burns.

I do not see it as wisdom anymore.

Because it doesn’t acknowledge the ending, or leave space for new beginnings.  If I carry on regardless the season won’t match.  I will be planting seedlings in the cooling temperatures of autumn, or trying to create an English country garden in a sub-tropical climate.  It won’t work. Old wine, new wineskins, as the Bible has it.

So I don’t allow the rest space where there can be recovery, I have begun with the new before the old is ended…

What happens if I just stop this time? This change above all feels so huge, it is like one path simply ended, in a cliff-fall plunge, a clear track and then the void.  What happens if I really do listen, if I take each day as it comes, if I stop trying to rebuild the path out into nothing? What happens if I accept the ending and stop to take in my surroundings?

I am surrounded both literally and metaphorically by the evidence of a life.  The desire to serve others, to serve God/dess, to bring healing, to make things better.  Evidence of mothering and teaching. Evidence of hobbies and interests. I am not sure what to make of any of it. If any of it fits or can come with me…the externals look like seeds, tufted, and floating  into the blue.  I can’t catch them, or put them back in place, reconnect the seedhead’s tidy globe with glue and tape…

Maybe, though, I can wish on them, set them free, to see where they land, what they grow…and meanwhile stand barefoot on the earth, learn how to breathe, drink tea, find the rhythm of my soul’s life in the body’s wisdom…

 

The secrets are here. I hadn’t realised how many. The abandoned dreams. Too many memories. Before this house I had moved four times in five years. I’d shed boxes full of University reading, notes, unworn clothes, outgrown toys. We could get the whole of our house and possessions in one small lorry, which seemed an achievement with two small children. When we moved to this house, the one we are leaving now, the attic was empty save for one lone suitcase abandoned by the previous tenant and an old water tank.

Now though. We put down boards , a ladder, for ease of access. When my husband left I was thankful that I could still get up there without step-ladder acrobatics and rafter balancing, not forgetting dire warnings from childhood about the risk of going through the ceiling. I could still find the Christmas decorations and the boys could set out race tracks or Playmobil cities with abandon.

The clutter crept. Things kept just in case. Old cases full of spare blankets and pillows.  When the toys became obsolete I kept my favourites, like my mum before me, in case we needed them in the future for grandchildren, and because it is hard to let go.

There are boxes of photos, folders full of old lesson plans, books and books and books. Theology books from my years in ministry, teaching books, children’s books, from my own children and my own childhood. There are demi -jons and brewing buckets from summers when there was time to make wine, there are boxes full of cables, old game cassettes and DVDs. There are crates of Lego and a life size cut-out of Boba Fett.

Within the boxes I find a place card from my first wedding, a newspaper announcing the engagement of Prince Charles to Lady Diana, a map of the Falkland Islands my dad brought back from his tour there. I find the Bible my nanna gifted my grandfather when he was away during World War 2 and the trolley full of blocks which I pushed as I learned to walk.

This odd collection makes up my life. Much of it can be set aside. The essays and course notes have stayed undisturbed for ten years, the education books will be obsolete by now, there is no space to store excess bedding or the confusion of cables.

But the unpeeling, the dismantling, the decisions are uncomfortable. I feel raw and exposed. Many things remind me of a life I no longer live, a person who no longer lives in me, remnants of a different marriage, another family, a woman who did the right thing, stuck to the rules, a good girl. These objects are signs, clues, I am like an archaeologist of my own existence, this means she was dedicated to her teaching career, this shows us that in those days the family might be found camping, we see here signs of persistent and determined Christian practice.

The space is almost empty now. I have swept it clean. One box, one bundle at a time we have lowered the treasures and trash into the daylight, exposed them to scrutiny. They seem absurd, they drag up old stories, open old wounds. We have a room of boxes piled and ready for storage. I don’t know how I feel about leaving these things in a distant warehouse. I imagine the whispering in the darkness when the padlock has been fastened, the shutters drawn, the ghosts of memory rustling like leaf-litter, scattering to dust.

 

 

We are in the process of moving. It’s been thirteen years since I attempted this. In the meantime I have accumulated a loft full of folders from teaching, a store of toys now outgrown, assorted bed linen that may come in handy and furniture and fittings to comfortably fill a three-bedroom, nineteen-forties council house. I’ve grown a garden, found plants that will thrive in the dry summers of Kent, filled beds to overflowing with herbs and wildflowers. I have found decorations to fill my bookshelves and windowsills. It is a comfortable home, it speaks of who I have become and who I am becoming.

As well as this it’s doubled as my work space. Since giving up employment two years ago to get well again I’ve made spaces here for the various strands of work I offer. I have them just so. It’s possible to teach and seamlessly move onto a reflexology treatment without blinking. Things were coming together nicely thank you.

I have found, over the years I’ve been walking a path with grace, that when I get to this point I will often be challenged. It is as though God sees and knows that it’s time to stir the cauldron. She reaches out and whispers in my ear. And the shift begins.

So we are moving. We are going to live with my parents. There are many good reasons for this and the biggest is that my mother is living with dementia and my father needs back up. I love my parents. They are in my opinion uniquely supportive and understanding. They have always encouraged my brother and I to follow our dreams. They do not bat an eyelid when we share our latest project or plan, when we give up steady jobs to train as an actor (him) or tell them we want to work as a tarot reader and village witch (me). For a long time I didn’t want to make this choice (although I could see it might be needed). I wanted to be independent, to keep “my life”, to grow “my dreams”. And then I couldn’t. This is needed. I want to be there. I want to do whatever I can for as long as it’s needed.

Which all sounds very noble and lovely. When in reality it’s just a bit hard. I’m sad to leave the beautiful place where we live, the place where I remembered my soul-self and the land which allowed that. Mum and Dad are having to turn their house upside down. My eldest son, who lives on the autistic spectrum, is anxious and stressed. And heaven only knows how the cats are going to cope…I want it to be ok. I want the right choices to be easy. Because it’s the right Choice, the good and loving choice, I want it to be a skip through the daisies process with wall to wall sunshine and soft-focus lenses.

Reality check. This is real life. These are real emotions. They are complicated. I am still surprised that I can feel both happy and sad at the same time.

So on we go. It is a great adventure in many ways. I am learning to unpick the life I’d made, to dig down to the bones, to uncover what is needed, it turns out not half as much as I had thought. Most of the “stuff”is just window dressing. Nothing wrong with that but not essential.

Over the next few weeks we will birth a new life. It feels like a new phase is opening. The next stage of the journey. A great social experiment. I know we will laugh a lot. I know we will rub each other up the wrong way. I know I will have to remember not to take myself too seriously. Home is where you find it.  I hold it in my belly, in my blood, in the soles of my feet. Home is the green earth who anchors me. And the moon who ever watches my days and weeks.

I am coming to the end of a year long priestess program.  This is my summary reflection:

You chose this path.  You heard the call and it pulled you.  A cord below your heart, tugged, kite-string of hope.  You answered.  You stepped onto the road, skipped, stumbled, danced your way, dizzy with possibility into a new journey.

At the start, as in all good stories, your way is clear.  Sunlight falls dappled on the track, the earth is clear and dry, soft and mossy beneath your toes, there is a warmth in the air, and freedom and possibility call your name like a robin’s song.  You feel the clarity in your heart and mind and make each step willingly and without effort.  You name your intentions with bravery and courage, I will be connected, I will be strong and bold, I will be bathed in magic, I will stand in my own power, I will be creative and fierce.  These words are true, they are stones set in a cairn by the wayside, they are marks scratched into tree-bark, chalk etched on paving, to show the way.

The change, when it begins, is subtle.  Maybe it is a chill in the air, a shift in the light? You are aware, just out of sight, of a shadow, edging her way into the extremity of sense, felt in the scalp, in the nape of the neck.  Who is this?  Who ghosts your steps and breeds dis-ease?  The way is more difficult now.  Roots tangle your footsteps, you begin to fear, mists creep up to cover your ankles and you cannot see your footsteps, mud holds you at each step, sucking you down, hindering your dance, slowing your progress. You feel there must be some mistake, maybe you missed a turn?  The shadow takes shape.  She is familiar; from dreams perhaps, or nightmares? The sunlight dims, dusk begins to creep in from the trees around.

In the dimming light the questions come.  Who do you think you are?  Why did you think you could? How dare you? What a presumption! To give yourself this name, to stand in that company! Delusions of grandeur.  Laughter echoes, unfriendly, taunting.  The shadow is close now, you feel her presence, her eyes of fire, the smell of her, the deep, earthy fragrance.  You stumble forwards, limbs shaking with fatigue. The early optimism is gone. Now there is only the journey. Only the next step.  You dare not look too closely at the forest around you; who knows what it will show?

This is the path for the longest time.  Continuing.  Breathing in and out. Lungs burning, limbs aching, feet bruised and battered.  Next step. Next step.  Your hope that this would be a path to freedom seems mistaken and you laugh at your childishness, the fairy-tale romance you had envisioned.  Bitter thoughts crowd in, regrets, fears, disillusionment.  In the dark places you are alone, consumed by your foolishness.

Time after time and then time. A half-light returns, another dawn? A new day? So many days, none as you imagined, you are thirsty. Finding a pool, you stop to wash your feet, your face.  Heart in your mouth as you look up you find the shadow before you and know her for the first time. Wild. Fierce. Unfettered. Spirit-fire pulsing through her eyes as she holds your gaze. Earth-born goddess. Your soul self. This moment, when she stands so close, at the end of need, and you allow her embrace, allow this connection, blood and bone, earth and fire. When the old self disintegrates and the new is born and you can only think, this isn’t what I expected.

People will ask you what you learned on this journey, on your priestess-path.  They will want to know answers, truths which can be digested over coffee or lunch.  And you will not be able to show them…the raw beauty, the alchemy, the transformation, the descent and return, the dark path and the shadow.  How could you explain this?  The way expectation is lost at the edge places, how you lose yourself there, and come back changed?

You are peeled.  Stripped bare.  Scoured clean. Old patterns and habits, old thoughts, shed.  You are no longer certain. No longer clear. You have shifted; from the known to the unknown. Tame to wild. Good girl to wild woman. Princess to hag. Unboxed, unbound you step forward. New-skinned.  No velvet robe here, soul bare, eyes full of fire, a heart burning with the blue flame of divine love.

You will be exhausted.  Every day for about ten years.  You will be up at 5 a.m. building wooden railway layouts in the sitting room in your dressing gown.  You will know things about children’s TV, like characters names and storylines and the ear-worm theme tunes.  You will learn to find sanctuary in the bathroom, for five minutes each 24 hours, this will become your sacred space.  You will create boundaries and yell them through the door when you’re in there “no-one talk to me while I’m here…” like a sit-com character.

You will carry enough luggage for a weekend away most days you’re out with your child.  To start with necessities, food, nappies, spare clothes (for your child, also for you).  Then on day trips, books, crayons, favourite toys, CDs for the car.  You will become an expert in day-planning.  Building an activity timetable from the moment you’re awake.  Breakfast. Play. Park. TV. Garden. Mini-beast hunt. Bubble blowing. Baking. Dinner. Bed.  A different programme each day.

Once they are in school the days, weeks and years will vanish.  The nativity plays. Parent evenings.  Carrier bag of books and drawings at the end of each year.  The long lazy days of summer, when you’re trying to work while also remembering to buy sand for the sand pit and provide additional entertainment so they don’t watch six hours of Thomas the Tank Engine a day…

There will be times when you go to check on them and they are sleeping and you wonder where their dreams take them.  There will be moments when they laugh so hard they shake with mirth, and you will feel a song in your soul of pure joy.

You will feel everything.  Every cut and scrape.  Every fever.  Every stomach ache.  When they’re older and heart-broken you will be torn in two and find a rage you had forgotten you possessed, ready to practice shadow magic, and burn anyone with the dragon-fire of your maternal fury.  When they are at the very end of despair, and you know their thoughts are leading them away from life you will pray, light candles, cast a circle of black stones and protection, and wait.

And one day they will be ready to leave.  They will be able to drive.  Have their own car (you will learn to trust them behind the wheel).  They will go to work each morning, and come home each night telling you about traffic and customer complaints.  You will know it is coming.  This is the moment you’ve been working towards. Two decades, phase one almost complete.  You will go with them to check apartments.  You will look suspicioulsy at people in the street, like strangers in the playground fifteen years before. And all the while you will be calm and enthusiastic.  Positive about their good decisions, their grounded, practical, grown-up choices.

At nights come 2 a.m. you will sit awake with tea and worry.  That they will be lonely. That they won’t know what to do. Until you remember that was you once.  And you survived.  So when the sun is up again, and you’re bleary from lack of sleep, you begin to pack.  Finding the pots and pans they can take.  Tea towels.  A spare chopping board.  You can feel the roller coaster creeping to the top of the slope, you can see the drop approaching and you know that once it’s here there’ll be nothing to do but let gravity take you.

But.

There is also anticipation.  Waiting to see them fly.  Imagination takes you to visits, meet-ups for coffee.

Not the end then.

The beginning of the next cycle.