Lovely readers, I'm now posting over here. Hope to see you there. 

Feel the Fear and Say it Anyway

While other kids had quite sensible fears; spiders, snakes, getting lost in a crowd, sitting next to James Bissenden, I was riddled with a fear of throwing up that, by the age of seven saw me talking to bananas. Cut off the end and I either got a black dot, "No", or a Y-shape, "Yes".  It was conclusive. A simple fruit salad could ruin my day.

“Do you feel sick?” My dad sensibly asked when I told him what the banana foretold. When I confessed “No”, he said, “Well then,” with a tone of exasperation he usually reserved for the dog. But sitting cross legged in assembly in elementary school I'd always have a latent fear that someone, possibly me, would vomit unexpectedly. It was a fear I just couldn't shake. A fear of the messy uncertainty of life.

Notes from school tell us about nits and conjunctivitis but they never give you a heads up on the stomach bug.  Half the class are down with it before you realize this freight train is heading at you, spewing its filthy detritus into your home in the middle of the night. With some foresight you might have been more militant about hand washing, you might have Cloroxed the door handles, OK, maybe not, but at least you’d have been prepared.

When I was not yet two my only word was "Fascia board", a British roofing term I picked up while my dad was up a ladder. We lived on farm in a damp part of rural England with cows for neighbors. 

“Say Fascia board!” my mother would plead, presumably for lack of conversation with other adults. We lived half an hour from the nearest town down a narrow winding lane that was more often a river of slurry from the muck spreaders flicking shit in the fields than an actual driveway.

 “Fascia board” I’d say and my mother fell upon me with kisses.  

Back then my brother, Jos, and I were often mistaken for twins. Although he was a year older, we had the same blue eyes and mousy hair and wore the same boys’ hand-me-downs, corduroy dungarees with patches on the knee. Those were days of monotonous isolated minutiae for my mother, when we were not yet at school and days blurred into years.  

One bright day in March that year, we’d just finished the messy business of lunch. Jos and I had refused my mothers home-grown beetroot in her home-made white sauce. We’d pushed around the cold meat on our plates, meat that had come to us from our grandmother, a no-nonsense, buck-up, bandy-legged woman who bred bulls and sent us a whole butchered pig as a Christmas gift. She included a note to my mother, her daughter-in-law, about marinating the head and glazing it for the table. Mum carefully dug the head out from the box of body parts in the chest freezer and told my father to bury it at the end of the garden. Two weeks later the dog dragged it into the kitchen.

More lenient than my father, my mother had given in to us that lunchtime, though we didn’t deserve it, and handed us plates of stewed apple, apples she’d cooked up herself from September’s windfalls softening in the garage.  The homesteading life was one she had embraced, stewing tomatoes, making marmalade, freezing carrots and finally understanding what Aunt June had meant when she said over a cup of tea, "Thank God the plums have failed." 

It was familiar to see my mothers cracked hands discolored by the juice of blackberries and red currents or smiling as she shelled broad beans, saying how cozy they looked nestled among their fibrous white blankets. It’s possible she imagined a more literary life, surrounded by books and theatre but by marrying my father she’d agreed to a level of rural isolation that was amplified by motherhood. Sometimes a mobile bakery would rattle down the narrow lane, hedges high on either side and a man sold us a loaf of sandwich white, before rolling away with a tide-mark of slurry on his once-white van.

 “Outside” she directed us that day when our bowls are empty. “You don’t need boots.”

It had been a wet winter but the sun was out, gutters creaking, a wood pigeon’s coo promising springtime. For the first time, perhaps, my mother felt we could play outside without her constant supervision, so while we went outside, she put away the cold meat and the sliced beetroot. She wrapped the Cheddar and put it in the fridge and took the plates to the sink. We did not have a dishwasher then. With her hands deep in the soapy water she gazed out of the window, inhaling this moment of domesticity, no different from all the others, but somehow sweeter.  Just the sound of the fridge humming.

As she cleared the draining board and returned to the sink, she would have caught sight of Jos and I from the window – we had reached the edge of the garden, just before the field, creating a scene of water-colored simplicity as if pulled from the postcard-sized pages of Peter and Jane. But the next time she looked up we were in the field, beyond the fence and poking at something. She tore out of the house, her hands still dripping soap suds as she reached us. The toadstools reached our chests, they grew in tall clumps, dripping black ink from their delicate gills. The flesh on their caps was flaking like old skin and they oozed a damp fungal smell that leaked out when we prodded them.

“You didn’t eat any of that did you?” My mother asked, her words coming at us like gunfire.

“Did you?”

“No” said Jos, wide eyed, using a three year old’s first language, denial, “but Emily did.”

I, the picky eater who had turned down beetroot and pork on a clean plate had eaten toadstool growing out of cow shit. Only a frantic mother would miss this. Most likely I burst into tears.  No "Fascia board" could save me now.

When my mother first shared this story she insisted I was at least four years old.

"But why didn't I speak up?" I said. "How come you only listened to Jos?" I pressed her on this. 

"Perhaps you were younger" she conceded, "Yes, possibly all you had was "Fascia board"". In telling this story, she doesn’t mention the vice-like grip she had on my wrist as she flung me back to the house or how she stretched my arms up to the sink, not noticing they were bending the wrong way at the elbow or how the water scalded my hands, as she locked her eyes on mine for some hint of dilation or delirium. She called the doctor who remarkably, because it was the Seventies, drove over, and like the baker, probably cursed the filthy roads.

Dr. Reddington had a square beard like a thick piece of toast which bounced when he talked. Did I appear to nod when he talked to me or was I just watching the jumping toast? He gave me the medicine anyway and told my mother to send me out into the garden again, this time under supervision, where I promptly threw up my stewed apple.

“Undigested” my mother adds when she tells the story. “Of course you hadn’t eaten any toadstool.” As if it was a trick we played on her. A practical joke. My brother walked away unscathed, I held him no grudge, only loved him more fiercely.  But I was left with a single question I asked every day, “Will I be sick?” until my parents could take no more and dispatched me, at eleven, to boarding school.  I was not the sport-loving rumbunctious tween that features in books about girls boarding schools, flitting around in a gym skirt, swinging my ponytail. I preferred the library over the Lacrosse  pitch and began carrying around a pocket book of Psalms, the text more baffling than the bananas and the fear of someone finding out so paralyzing, I’d sit, of all places, in the toilet stalls to figure out my prognosis.

While I'm certain the toadstool episode gave me my fear of vomiting, I wonder now if it also gave me something else, my fascination with finding the right words, of having them ready, of having my say.

“When,” my husband asks me these days, “did you ever not have your say?”

Time

By the time the third tyre blew we were somewhere near Preston and we spun twice across two lanes of traffic. Three of us were in Andy's Fiat Panda, a two door hatchback. Andy was driving, J was in the front and I was packed in the back among several duvets, an electric lamp and a box of lever arch files; the luggage of students heading back to college.

The first tyre had blown about an hour into the journey, just outside Reading.  We were on a smaller road then and we shuddered a little before realising we had a puncture.  We limped off the road into a local garage, grateful for the help we'd get. We emptied the suitcases from the trunk and with the help of the mechanic, got out the spare. We levered up the vehicle and swapped the tyres, packing the punctured one back into the well where the new one had been.

'You don't want to drive too far on that' said the garage attendant in his overalls.

The vehicle was clearly loaded up for a big journey.

'That wheel's got almost no thread.'

He showed us how we should be able to put a coin in the tyre's rubber indentations. We were teenagers. Irresponsible. Immortal. My friend didn't want to fork out a hundred quid for a new tyre.  She didn't say as much, but she didn't spend any money there that day and we drove out of the garage on the spare.  Should I have spoken up? Bought the tyre myself? We journeyed on.

The second blow out wasn't long after that. Was it the spare that went? Possibly. This time we needed towing.  This time we paid up.  I found out then that the vehicle was thirteen years old and had never had its tyres replaced. 

When Andy and I were eleven one of the girls at school lost both her parents in a car accident.  Ann Acre was in the year above us.  She had a freckled face and the thick dark hair of a movie starlet.  In my childish imagination her parents were romantic travelers; he in a trench coat, she with a headscarf.  One day she was just another girl, the next she had no parents.  Our first year dormitory was near the surgery that year.  Sister Lux was on duty to take care of us as we settled into boarding school.  I saw Ann Acre waiting to see the nurse.  I took in her presence, sitting silently on a plastic chair without tears, without parents.  On the lacrosse pitch, in the lunch line, in the corridors between lessons, it was unbelievable she could be so alone.

Andy had just asked me if I could see a problem with the right rear wheel so I was trying to get a glimpse of it when we started spinning.  I imagine I looked like a child evacuee being dispatched by train. Fear and disbelief on my face. The world slowed. It was silent.  I saw my hands on the window. I always liked my hands.  I held this thought even as I tried to dismiss it.  My last thought? On my left hand is a scar in the shape of an L. I got it when I snipped grapes from a vine with a pair of scissors and drew blood. As a child it helped me tell left from right.  I saw the grey blur of the road, dotted white lines joining up as we spiraled once, then twice.

'I knew what to do', Andy said later, 'I knew to pump the brakes'. She was retelling the story. The responsible driver.

I had no idea about pumping the brakes. We teetered for a moment after the second spin, another car swerved away from us, there was screeching, car horns, swearing, roaring in my head and we came to rest on the verge. The engine fizzed and ticked. It had stopped on the brown grass just ahead of a deep trench. A hundred yards further up the road was a concrete wall, the base of a bridge. The distance between our vehicle and that impact was a matter of seconds.

We pulled ourselves out, stunned. A tow service appeared and it was dark by the time we pulled into a garage on the outskirts of Preston. Someone kind gave us coffee.   It warmed us.  We had three hours further to drive. We were lucky, irresponsible, stupid and alive. 

Years later when I worked on the radio, I'd be asked to do a thirty second voicer or be given a programme piece that had to be packed into one minute thirty. I'd spend all morning getting the right voices, the right facts, the right sound effects for one minute that would be broadcast to the nation.  The adrenaline was high, the editor was hard to please, seconds mattered. Seconds always matter. 

Time expands and collapses with children; the long arc of the day in which things happen so fast.  For eight years I have stayed home, a choice I made to give the seconds more meaning than the next headline.  I indulged myself, staying home.  Now, on the other side of forty I am clawing back the seconds.  The boys hurl their hugs at me. I try to write it down, in the moments before breakfast, before a fight breaks out about who sits where around the kitchen table or who gets the Mickey Mouse spoon. Precious seconds with all their joys and terrors.

Imperfect

'Can you tie my shoes? I might fall.'
My three year old is wearing a pair of hand-me-downs with laces. I bend down at his feet, realizing as I do that I haven't yet bought him his own shoes.  These latest ones came from his old babysitter.  I hold the fraying laces between my fingers.  As I begin the bow, I feel small hands in my hair, playing, seeking reassurance.  This is a child who strokes my eyebrows when I lean in to kiss him goodnight. 
'Cozy eyebrows' he says. 
And now I have memories of work experience at Vogue when one of the editors cried out across the office full of clothes racks and beautiful people and bizarre paper mache props, 'Let's do a feature on eyebrows!' And it was with breathless excitement that she hauled me out from behind my corner desk as a perfect example of 'uncultured brows'.  Was that really what she said?  Haunted forever by 'uncultured brows'.  She was stick thin in leather pants. I stood there in my floral A-line (my favourite) with an excruciatingly red flush. I did pluck my eyebrows once but it wasn't for me. I prefer 'cozy.'
The supper is cooking. I can hear water bubbling in the saucepan, the hum of the oven, the smell of boiled potatoes. I tie the bow and stay there, on bended knee even when I have finished, lingering with my son's hands in my hair. He sees the shoe is done and moves behind me, flopping on my back.
'Mummy, looky! I'm on your backy!' He giggles. I begin to stand up.
'I'm going to drop!' he says, but he doesn't, he holds on tight, gripping me as I move about the kitchen.
'Hello Mummy!' He tries to peer his head in front of me. I have gone quiet, taking in the weight of his body, the sound of his voice, the smell of his closeness to me. He is laughing and uttering a jibberish dream-talk, a collection of words I can't catch. When he can no longer hold on he slips to the floor and finds his Lego bike. He drives it noisily around the kitchen surfaces.
'I'm using your bread for jumps' he announces, 'and I'm getting the stool'.  I smile, too tired to tell him the bread's not for motorbike jumps, the stool will get in the way of the cooking and that dinner's nearly ready. Tonight I'll settle for less, I'll settle for cozy.

Cream Pies and Green Apples

My three year old asks for a green apple.
'A green apple.' he clarifies.
'I want one too', says the five year old.
'A green apple,' he adds.
They are both skipping around, excited about their green apples.  I cut them slices of green apple. The three year old takes them. The five year old wails.
'I wanted a red apple. Why can't I have a red apple? '
It's true there's a red apple sitting in the fruit bowl with the green apples.
'You asked for a green apple.'
'I wanted red.'
'Well, I've cut green.'
'I want red.'
The boy is going to break me.  Do I give in?
'Well, what do you say?'
'Please can I have red.'
I reluctantly cut a red apple and eat the other half of the green one. Later when he comes out of school, he's thirsty.
'Mum I need water.'
'I don't have any water.'
'But I need water.'
'OK. Well, we'll get some at the music class.'  We are taking the seven year old to his guitar class.
'But I'm thirsty.'
'Did you have water at snack time?'
'No'
'Why not?'
'I'm thirsty now, not then.'
'Well, wouldn't it be nice if there was a tap in the car and we could get water whenever we like.'
We briefly digress into the imaginary tap idea, having it dispense apple juice and frozen tubes of popsicles. This is too much or the five year old. 
'I'm thirsty.' he wails
'We will get some water at the water fountain when we stop.'
It's after we have delivered the seven year old to his music teacher and as we are finding the water fountain for the five year old that the three year old tells me he needs to do a pee.  The bathroom is one of those sealed rooms with a heavy door. The three year old doesn't want to be in there on his own with the terrifying flush and the noisy air dryer.  I go in with him.  The five year old waits in the empty corridor outside. We wash our hands and when I try and open the door it is even heavier than I'm expecting. I push against it and realize the five year old is pushing just as hard the other side.  I give it a good shove. He's pushing against it as if he's holding back flood waters.  My shove is stronger though, and he is pushed aside.
'You hurt me' he wails, indignant.
'You were trying to shut us in the bathroom!'
I'm reduced to this peevishness.
'Would you like it if someone was trying to trap you in a bathroom?' I say.
'But you hurt me.'
I feel bullied and angry and tired. Later I tell my husband about it. I know it's petty. I ended up fighting with the seven year old too. I let him play on the computer while I was preparing supper and afterwards when I asked him to get his backpack from the car he started crying about how terrified he was of the garage and how he couldn't do it because he was so scared.
'You don't get computer privileges if you can't do simple things like get your backpack from the car.'

'Do you think he was trying to make you laugh?' My husband asks when I tell him about the bathroom story.
Trying to make me laugh? I hadn't looked at it this way. Then I imagine him telling his brothers. 'I trapped mum in the loo.' Yes, perhaps he might have been trying to make them laugh. 'So-and-so says he trapped his mum in the bathroom.'  That might have some punch in the playground.

I was on a long haul flight with my husband many years ago. When we had our meal trays delivered he stuffed my face in the cream pie. He could not understand my rage.  His implication was that any fun loving gal would have had a good old laugh about that.  I felt like I was the kid sister and I was fed up of being the kid sister.
'Were we married when you stuffed my face in the custard pie?' I ask him.
'It wasn't like that' he says, smiling.  And damn it if I'm not smiling too.
I demonstrate for him with my own hand the pressure on my neck as he forced my face into the sweet marshmallow fluff. He says that's not true. I apparently lifted the pie up to smell it and he gave my head a little push so I got a tiny bit of cream on my nose. Was it flirtatious then? Or did he think I'd laugh?
'Were we married?' I ask him.
'I think we were on our way to Australia.' So I married him in spite of the custard pie. 'Three hours out of Heathrow' he adds.
'Three hours out of Heathrow on a 24 hour flight, you thought it was a good idea to stuff my face in a cream pie.'

Being trapped in the bathroom by your five year old, having your face stuffed in a pie by your husband. I should lighten up.  I should lighten up and try and see the world through the inscrutable lens of a small boy.  Because I live with four of them. The little shits.

Hello again...

Good God...it's been months.  I've been busy writing elsewhere (on my computer) but my blog is beginning to feel alarmingly neglected. 
The current status in our house is that we have a nearly-eight year old raging with hormones who needs to be exercised like a whippet if we are to get any peace. The said exercise makes the five year old extremely morose and he starts whining about milkshakes and smoothies as soon as his heart rate quickens. I think he equates the beat in his chest with fear-pumping adrenaline when he meets an unknown dog which, in this town, is about 3 times a minute. The three year old, amazingly, just keeps going. He takes tactics from both his brothers and uses them when needed; raging and moaning in turn. By the time they fall into bed they are all kisses and tickles and I wonder how the day can have been quite so exhausting. 
The other night the five year old woke me from my sleep wailing.
I don't want there to be a war! he cried.
Had he heard about Putin in the Crimea? About Assad and Syria? I wanted to agree with him.
Do we have to sign up? I hugged him.
Was he thinking of soccer? We have signed up for that.
No I said. You don't sign up for war. You don't have to fight. There is no war.
Will Dad be back for the war? (My husband was away.)
There is no war. 
But you said! he accuses me. You said on the phone there was fighting.
My love, I think I was talking about you and your brothers. (That might have been the day the sibling rivalry got so much that I wanted to text 'help' to someone but couldn't think who to send it to. I ended up calling my mother to commiserate about my parenting skills.)
There is no fighting.
I don't want to die! he wails as I lie him back down in his bed and stroke his hair.
I don't want to die!
In the morning we oversleep because it took us so long to get back to sleep after the war stuff. We eat breakfast in the car and I have to stop the school run twice because the five year old says he's going to be sick.  Haste is not his forte.
Yesterday I had an entire afternoon to myself. Well, an afternoon that started at 3.30pm but it ended well past 8pm. The quiet! It intensified at teatime when there should have been bickering and shoving as hands were washed, the menu was assessed for vegetable content and favoritism was determined by the distribution of particular plates and cutlery. Instead there was the imperceptible sound of the kettle boiling as I made myself a cup of tea. The boys were at the beach and stayed there eating hotdogs well beyond their bedtime. I was at my computer as the dark crept in without me noticing until I was cloaked in luxurious inky silence. With not a wail to be heard.

Turkey Holiday highlights

So we've had the turkey holiday as my seven year old calls it. We brined it, we cooked it, we basted it and ate it.  For two days we had turkey sandwiches and warm turkey salad. Yesterday I pulled the rest of the flesh off the carcass and boiled it for 3 hours. Today we ate broccoli soup made with turkey stock.
Is there any more turkey left? Oli asked, wincing a little.
I've frozen it. I told him.
What have you done with its head? he asked, as if I might be saving it for some particular pastry-wrapped delicacy, just for him.
It didn't come with a head. I told him. Do we have to talk about this now? I asked. We were eating the broccoli soup. I can see vividly its wobbly neck and how I tucked the bumpy flap of skin under its body in the roasting pan, not sure if there was something else I should have done with it - trussed it perhaps?  It dripped small stalactites of fat as it cooked.
The three year old had gaged at the sweet potato gratin on his Thanksgiving plate.  Oli valiantly ate what he could in order to get access to the apple pie he knew would follow.
The sun shone, though it was just cold enough in the shade to feel like it could be November.  The boys go back to school tomorrow and tonight I sat on Oli's bed and asked him what had been the best day of the week.  I would like to write a book through the mind of a five year old boy. There is magic there.  Was it, I asked, the first day when you played animal races all over the house with your stuffed toys and when we finally got out at 3 o'clock to go to the park, we saw the police motorbike on the street corner and when we went to investigate found that Barack Obama was going to go past any minute and we waited and saw all the police cars and men in flak jackets and Obama looking out of his SUV with the window down? Or was it the day when Wendy, who was staying with us, walked you up to the bookshop to buy you a book each and then we came home and read and played? Or was it the next day when we went to Golden Gate Park and you climbed a tree and then we ran some errands and went to the post office? Or the Turkey day when we walked in the Presidio and the Robinsons came and ate the food in the afternoon? Or the next day when Keanu and Luca came over and we went out to play? Or today when we met Henrik on the beach and had lunch at the Pelican Inn? Which day was it?
I am thinking, yes! we had fun! We actually did it this time!
It was all good says Oli, except the day we saw Brack Obrama, because we wasted time when we could have been at the park.
That same day, my seven year old had said at supper, The bad thing about being the President is - you can't be a police motorbike rider.
That's true  I conceded.
Or a dump truck driver  Oli added.
We ate on in silence. There's no disputing that.

Time wasting

What with a house renovation (which I admit, has made me mildly obsessed with pinterest) and three boys to cook for and clean up after, you might think I could be forgiven for passing up on the chance to rough and tumble with them on the mattress in the living room (the mattress that is passing for our bed). But my eldest put it succinctly: 'Mum, why are you wasting your time not playing with us?' Point taken.

With thanks to the Grand National

Tonight, bedtime was given the commentary of the Grand National:
And it's Max who is making a strong lead picking up the lego. A strong lead for Max followed by Mummy, both putting plenty of bricks in the bag. And now Oli's joined the race. A slow start for Jack though - yet to place a brick in the bag. But Oli's coming in strong with handfuls of lego men and the duplo aeroplane. Beard guys, buildings, it's a fast and furious race tonight. With Max in the lead, followed by Mummy, Oli coming in a close third and Jack working hard to catch up. The bag is nearly full with a few straggling pieces still to be put away and Max is holding onto a handful of lego so he can be take a strong position into the next phase of the race but Oli won't beaten, he races across the room to find the final pieces by the door and the FLOOR IS CLEAR. So it's onto the next jump, taking off the clothes for a shower. With Max in the lead and Jack taking a surprising second place as they race for the bathroom. Max has his clothes off, Jack is struggling with his socks, he gets help from Mummy and Oli is slipping behind, but 'No' he shrieks, he will not be outdone. He gets some help from Mummy who is clearly no longer in the race. The shower is switched on and it's Max who races in. Jack is in second. 'Too hot!' is the cry as both come back out of the shower. Cooler now, they head back in but is Jack out again to do a pee. The race is heating up with Oli refusing to take his top off until he is given a glass of water.  An interesting approach from the four year old but it looks like Mummy will comply. Jack's off the loo and back in the shower. The glass of water is there but Max's lead is taking shape. 'Face the wall!' is the cry from Mummy as Jack takes in gulps of water and starts spluttering. 'No can't see!' he yells. Mummy opens the door to give him a scrub and Max is OUT OF THE SHOWER. Out of the shower and Oli still not in. Jack stays in there to get the soap off. And Oli is finally in the shower as the commentary slows down, but that is not tolerated. 'Keep talking!' is the demand from the horses in this race. So it's Max in the lead with Oli being scrubbed and Jack now refusing to get out of the shower. It's a first refusal for Jack, can he take the jump again? Oli is scrubbed and has washed his face so he's ready to get out of the shower. He takes a strong second place as Max gets into his pyjamas. Oli sees his way back into the race and charges into the bedroom. Max is struggling with an inverted pyjama sleeve. How is he going to tackle this one? It's a real challenge. Frustration showing on his face. Will he get his arm through or will he have to pick another tactic? Oh, the grimace! He can see his lead diminishing. Oli seizes his opportunity, getting help from Mummy with his top. He doesn't have buttons and Max does. But there it is, just as Max gets his top on, Oli faces the same inverted sleeve problem with his pyjama bottoms. Frustration bubbling over for Oli now and Jack is still refusing to get out of the shower. The water is switched off but he's busy putting the flannel gloves on his feet. A bold strategy of defiance from the youngest competitor. So it's between Max and Oli. And suddenly Max is faced with toothpaste indecision. Several tubes are strewn around without much inside which is a major challenge at this late stage in the game. Is it going to be Crest or Oral B? It's hard to get enough on the bristles. Oli goes for the Scooby Doo toothpaste which is really hard to get out of the tube. Could this be a decider in the race? And it looks like the brushing has begun. It's underway as they head to the final stretch; the race to bed. They have to navigate into sleeping bags...who will take the pole position. There's nothing in it but Max is struggling to get into his bag because all his teddies are stuffed into the bottom, there's no room for him! And Oli is IN BED. He wins the race tonight. But tears of frustration for Max who must surely be given the generosity prize for sharing his sleeping bag with at least 2 dozen stuffed animals. But tonight is Oli's night with Jack still sitting on the shower floor with flannels on his feet.

I used to put in this blog all the happy things I didn't want to forget in the slow blur of parenting. I wrote about my children's irresistible emergent language; the way they saw things, so fresh and observant. I wrote about the moments I thought were funny; the things we made, or I made for them. I wrote about the ebb and flow of my feelings about raising a family in a place so many miles from 'home'.  I really tried to capture the weight of their bodies in my arms, their small frames, their turn of phrase, the nature of who they might be and the childhood that might be shaping them.

Preschool art projects became kindergarten homework. Empty afternoons filled up with the school run.  Tiredness took a bite out of sibling friendships. Squabbles fell upon us like high speed tetris blocks. I couldn't shift them fast enough to fit the matrix.  Emotion trebled; 'he made a nasty face', 'he took my train', 'he called me dude' (despite the meaning, the slight is deep when delivered with a first grade snarl). I stopped wanting to record our days together. I stopped wanting to take my camera out. I no longer had the time or inclination to share on a blog the content of our lives.  I see an earlier version of myself reading this, the one who took so much pleasure capturing our particular journey.  She is wondering what changed.  I am wondering too.

I know it is all about attitude. I will endeavour to carve out more time to write, seek out the meaning of things and hand it to you like a delicate chocolate wrapped in tissue paper.

Trash to treasure

These are the before and after shots of the chair I rescued from the sidewalk the other day.  With the help of the blog, little green notebook, I managed to reupholster the piece in the space of a week. I have to admit, it was pretty satisfying.  I spent about $70 on fabric and cord (to make the piping/welting) and I used paint I had already purchased. The main challenge was keeping the staple gun away from the kids. It now looks like one of the smartest pieces of furniture we own!

Done with summer

The summer holidays come to a close.   The time has been divided into a happy half spent in Cornwall, catching glimpses of sunshine, seeing people who are important to us, clambering down to inaccessible beaches and sloshing through puddles.  But these past few weeks have been dominated by a friend's accident.  One of those important people. Though I am thousands of miles away, in my mind I have walked the hospital ward. I know the parking lot, full of hot cars, ticking in the sunshine. I see the blue signs directing patients and visitors. I see the nurses. One is especially tall with a brown bob, her eyes the colour of her overalls.  I know the waiting room, the curved plastic chairs, the frosted glass along one wall, the magazines that have come loose from their staples. I know the ICU. I see my friend there, sitting by her husband's side, as he sleeps, among the tubes and the IV bags and the machinery that is helping him survive.  I see the line of staples across the right side of his shaven head. I have seen his children brought into his room, the nurse explaining the tubes and letting them play with the stethoscope and even sit in the swing chair. She lets them trace the shape of their father's hand to take away with them.  I see the doctors looking serious and urgent but benign. This used to be his ward. What are the chances? The intensive care consultant, now consulted upon. There is a picture of him in the bathroom, smiling with his palms out, reminding you to wash your hands.  A bike accident. A split second that has twisted time and lives and futures.  It has been hard to think of anything else.
We went for a walk the other day with the promise of pancakes and sausages at a mountain lodge 2 miles up the hill.  It was so hot, even at ten in the morning, and by the time we were walking back there wasn't even a thin sliver of shade from the trees on the trail.  Last week we picked blackberries and made our first ever pot of sweet pippy jam.  I have kept myself busy making a 'keyhole garden' and reupholstering a chair that we found flung out on the street.  Planning playdates for the kids, getting ready for school. But they are all distractions. My heart is in the Intensive Care Unit at Dereford Hospital, willing a friend to heal.

Summer wishlist

Here are a few things on our summer wishlist....

1. Make cool sandcastles
2. Learn how to surf
3. Visit an island
4. Write a story

What's on your list?

Graphic expression

Oli has always been into drawing. Which is good. Much of the year at his preschool they have focused on 'graphic expression' in the early years (which really translates as 'interpreting the scribbles'). But in the past few months his enthusiasm has really taken off. He's recently been channeling it into colouring photocopied pages of busytown from Max's Best Ever Rainy Day Book. Then he discovered tracing paper and returned to his well-loved copy of the Lego catalogue (so, so well-loved since Christmas and taped and stapled to keep it whole) and he began tracing Lego men and castles and horses.  Then last night I went into his bedroom to find this...

Your eyes might need to adjust to the light but I tell you, the pencil lines are all but faint when you see them on the wall. My jaw dropped. I was so shocked. Drawing on the walls? Isn't that the tipping point when supernanny is called in? Down the other end of the corridor Dom gave a yell.  Jack (increasingly verbal and rarely quiet) had climbed back into the bath, fully clothed in his zip-up pyjamas. His crying was not from falling in, no, he was having a fine time splashing with his brother, the tears came from being hauled out, dripping wet and several pounds heavier, in soggy clothes and a swollen double layer of cotton nappies.
Honestly if, a few years ago, you had told me my three year old would graffiti his bedroom while my one year old climbed into the bath with his clothes on I would have said you had the wrong house - no, no, no. There will be worse to come I'm sure (parents of teenagers - teenage boys - will be chuckling) but this is where I am - the summer holidays, just days away, stretch in front of me like the Marathon Des Sables.
At first Oli insisted that the artwork was 'an accident' (spot the signature tag on the right? ) then he fell into a despairing mantra of 'I did it on purpose, I'm bad.' The truth is, he's actually quite good. He's certainly good with a pencil. I love how he starts at the bottom, perhaps thinking, I'll just add some legs to this old circle here (the metal thing in the wall) and then maybe give this person some friends (the group of little circles with legs). Then he sees his own hand, leaning on the wall to steady himself and thinks, I'll trace round that. Then he has this great idea of drawing a person and adding his own hands to it. I love to think the top two images, the climax of it all, represent a genie coming out of a bottle to grant him any, any wish...even maybe hinting to him that he might really want to wish the pencil markings would fade before mummy comes into his bedroom...He actually says it's a house with two lights on the side and he's inside the house (well, I had to ask). I'll have to wash it off, I know, but looking at it does make me smile...

One for Mum

I promised my mum I would post something today. Actually I have been waiting for my head to clear in order to say something coherent. In truth, I'm not sure I'm there yet.  The past few months have seen me pitching and rolling like a boat in high seas.  It is nothing very serious that has had me lurching around like this.  Nothing that threatens the immediate survival of loved ones.  So really, why all the anxiety?  I think it's because everything has felt so tangled, as worries do.  One concern is so mixed up with the next. From the future of the planet to finding our own future on the planet.
To counter my apocalyptic thoughts back in March, I started reading. Books. 'Your book has 294 pages!' Max was astonished. It's true, my normal reading material is either the internet or my 60 page subscription to a Finnish sewing magazine (that's just how I roll).  In my desire to make sense of it all, I found The Great Disruption by Paul Gilding, to be just what I needed. While it doesn't shy away from the fact that our finite planet is under pressure that is unsustainable, it does at least try and look beyond the forthcoming 'disruption' to a possibly better place (if you can get over the pain ensued by actually getting there).

Then I went to hear Richard Louv speak. He's the author of The Last Child in the Woods, the book that introduced the term 'nature deficit disorder' to the public consciousness. I admit I never finished the book, I found it too depressing. But, like Gilding, his latest offering, The Nature Principle attempts to imagine a better world rather than send us headlong into the blade-runner futures we are familiar with. The ever present cynic in me sees the similarity - both books are pushing optimism, undeniably a more attractive sell than the pessimism of prior publications. But optimism is working better for my mental health.
Something else that has been taking up space in my cluttered mind has been the task of finding the right school for Max and the worry that, when we switch, we may realize we had it in the other one all along. Decisions about the future seem to have been so very grueling as we plan to head 'home' to the UK to see grandparents and friends. Where is home, then, if we travel 5000 miles once a year to get there? I know this is partly slippery language playing tricks on me because, of course, home is here in the US where our toothbrushes live, but that question never seems to go away. And it's not that I haven't loved our time here, it's just that the path doesn't seem to open up in front of me. We are forever hacking at the tangled ivy, cutting at the thick vines.  Don't the song lyrics say you only get the view when you look back at the path you've cut, not by looking forward where there is no path? I don't care, I'm still hungry for what's in front, but I desperately want to know what it looks like.
Today I cut my hair to a 'boy's cut' and can no longer be exclusively blamed for blocking the shower drain.  Max really did not want me to cut my hair and it crossed my mind that I should keep it long just for the sake of consistency (and the fact that it's taken me this long to grow my hair back from that hormone horror hair-loss after my last pregnancy). But I wanted to cut it off - the time had come. In lots of ways I also want the boys to embrace change in a way that I have never found easy, and that fact, in some strange way, urged me on.  This afternoon there was a grin on Max's face when he saw me. It's true, I do look a bit funny.  And it reminded me that nothing is set in stone. Change is often good. Hair grows back. Decisions can be changed.  Things only look a certain way for a while. 

Interpretations

Inspired by a recent trip to LACMA in Los Angeles, and more specifically a room-sized racecar exhibit called Metropolis II, we have been filling idle moments this Easter break by trying to create our own high rise car track.  Was it just a little over ambitious to reassure the boys that it was possible? Avoiding the rain earlier this week, we scoured the local home improvement store for just the right material. There were grand plans about twists and turns and impressive loops plus an escalator to raise the cars to their starting position (as in the genuine article). Our interpretation doesn't quite have the complexity of Chris Burden's installation, nor the evocation of 'the stress of living in an dynamic, active and bustling 21st century city' but still, it's fun to see what can be done with a length of garage door weatherizing strip (draught excluder if we are being bilingual about it!)

Another Day

It's been weeks since I last posted.  We went skiing for a few days last month, which gave me a healthy break from the chores at home and actually some time away from myself and my own cluttered mind and my need to write.  At some point on holiday I looked down from a chairlift and traced the path of animal prints in the diamond-flecked snow and just soaked up the beauty of it.  That is what has stayed with me.
Home again, and we got back into the rhythm of school and after-school and everything else that entails. There were those evenings when the children wanted the easle, then they wanted paint, not crayons, oh and paper, not that kind.  Someone was missing a paintbrush, someone was hungry.  Jack, has an amazing ability to find pencils and he was no doubt trotting around with them tight in his fist.  I often tell his brothers to ask if they want something from Jack, not to grab, but to use their words - 'Look!' I say as I hold out my hand, 'he can be very obliging'.  That night I'm sure I pulled the pencils from his grasp, one after another.  Tonight, boys are circling me with demands and requests without, I'm afraid, a hint of manners.  I am trying to finish a chicken pie and the task is rolling out the pastry.  I have visions of this happening in my farmhouse-style kitchen, fresh flowers on the table, shafts of sunshine picking out the mist of flour as I endeavor to cook wholesome food for my family. In fact, it is raining, the defrosted pastry is too hard and the kitchen floor is a hazard of toys. I bang the pastry hard with my rolling pin. Exercising my frustration can at least have some practical purpose here.  Everyone stops in their tracks.
'Enough demands, I am trying to cook supper' I say.
Max disappears next door and I hear him picking out notes on the keyboard. I know I will not respond well if the volume is turned up and dark, loud chords are thrashed out of the instrument.  Luckily it remains quiet, even soothing, one key at a time. The pastry gets rolled. Max returns.
'Did you like the piano?'
I nod.
'I was trying to give you something relaxing.'
My parents came to visit the other week which was wonderful.  As their taxi pulled away at the end of the week, both Max and Oli burst into tears. 'It's sometimes sad to say goodbye' I told them and Oli now reminds me of that regularly, even when no-one is going anywhere.
What happened after that was that Dom left for a trip to Japan and Taiwan and with evenings to myself, I began watching documentaries that I knew I wouldn't have persuaded Dom to watch if he'd been there. First it was one on the US food industry. That got me a little wary and mildly depressed. Then I found a website where you can watch documentaries for free and I feasted on all versions of the apocalypse, exclusively related to climate change. Now I am properly terrified....but I want to keep you, my dear, only, reader, so I will try to veer away from these dark tendencies and put my energy into practical solutions.  Yesterday we planted a vegetable patch of peas surrounded by concentric circles of carrots, broccoli and basil.  It sits proudly where the fountain used to be. I say 'fountain' but it was really just a large circular tray where mosquitos bred in the muddy water left over from the rains.  Thanks to my Dad for getting that concrete beast out! And so here I am, back in the blogging saddle, a little rested, a little weary, a little terrified, a little cheery and hoping to see green shoots in the garden very shortly.

Happy Valentine's Day!

A package of sticky dots and some index cards to wish you a happy Valentine's Day!

Parallels

February is rattling past and I have been focusing my writing elsewhere (getting the nicest possible rejection!) and reading lots.  I've been trying to keep up my new year's resolution of exercising three times a week; running twice and making a trip to the hot yoga studio.  The evidence of three children is still written over my body but I'm beginning to feel better.
I had a minor epiphany during yoga this week. The temperature was above 100 and I was somewhere between Dandayamana-Dhanurasana and Tuladandasana.  The teacher was reeling off the benefits of what we were doing and reassuring us, 'It's meant to hurt like hell'. It struck me that my yoga session is a lot like life and mothering and writing. I turn up for class, I am there of my own volition (mostly), arms out to the side like airplane wings, the small of my back aching as I bring eyes up, chin up, whole body up.  Certainly, there are some easy bits, some bits where I cruise for a while, but that's usually when my mind wanders and I realize I'm not really concentrating, not in the sacred 'moment'.  Then there are bits when it really does hurt and I think I might throw up and I want to shout obscenities.  I know that's when my body will actually change but I'm sure the postures are going to break me.  I stay in the room and count to ten and try to breathe. Then there are bits where I switch off and cheat and my ankles don't really lift off the floor, my knee isn't locked and I keep my eyes down.  It doesn't make me feel good about myself, the cheating, but sometimes I need the break. I see the newcomers, the ones who have had to raise their hands and say it's their first class, and I remember when that was me.  They need help identifying their left hand from their right and are told to watch others before they join in.  But before I get cocky, there's always the people in the front row, immaculate in lycra, to remind me that I'm not a veteran either, and even though I've been doing this on and off for years, my postures still suck.  Sometimes the teacher opens the window and the cool evening air brushes me with it's magic and I can't think of anything better, and I remember how much I love this class and how great I feel when I'm flexible and strong and how it's going to keep me healthy as I get older, and I'm dripping with hope, remembering there's always the possibility that I might actually be able to get my legs off the floor in Salabhasana. Then I hear the window closing and I realize that, no, it's just hot, stifling and painful. By the end of the class, I've almost drained my water bottle, the last sip is luke warm and carries a hint of metal.  Then we end up in Savasana and the teacher switches off the lights.  I lie there for a few seconds in the clammy putrid dark, letting relief wash over me. And I keep coming back.

First Words

Mrs Clutterbuck's class: sometime in the early 'eighties.  The door opens onto rows of single desks, side on, and there's a window seat across the room. The school used to be a grand home but the furniture's changed and there are dry-erase white boards in place of artwork. There's an impressive entry with a marble slab stairwell clinging to the walls, taking it's time to meander past large stone windows, down to the iron studded double oak doors. Beyond Mrs Clutterbuck's class is the stairwell. We never use it, of course. We come in through the cloakroom at the back. Past the dining rooms, eyes on the black and red floor tiles, and up the back stairs. Homework is to find out what our first words were.
'Cow', I discover, and write it proudly on my piece of paper.  Cow. I learn that my brother said 'Clower' and I imagine my mum pushing him in the purple Silver Cross pram and pointing out the primroses and snowdrops as they emerged from the hedgerows. Or maybe it was later, May perhaps, and the lane was full of cow parsley and campions. By the time I arrived, my brother would have just been toddling at my mum's side. You didn't have to walk very far before reaching the crooked iron gates and seeing the cows. Damp pink noses pushing through the bars, whiskers as tough as fishing line.  The farmer left giant bricks of salt by the water troughs which they'd lick like eroded sandstone, before pushing their vast sandpaper tongues up a nostril.  My brother's gaze, by now, had shifted from flowers to cows and I was the beneficiary.  'Cow' would be my entry into language, my stepping stone.  How often did we walk up the lane? Twice daily, with the dog? A single track, muddied tarmac, with gravel smoothed in two neat grooves from the wear of car tyres.  I can only imagine those walks but they are sealed forever in a part of me with the knowledge of my first word.  I remember the later walks, using my doll's bonnet to stash wild strawberries only to find out that I had stained the soft blond flannel with a gash of red that looked forever like a head injury.  I was not a 'girly girl'; I had called the doll 'floppy legs', but it still shocked me. And later again, home from boarding school, walking with my camera, taking pictures of those noses, or of black and white hide pulled tight over angular haunches.  Then the walking became running the loop; up the lane in one direction, zig-zaging to the end, a left and right, up the hill, past Treswallen and Creed Lane, hugging the hedge on the way down the other side, over the bridge and back home.

What is a first word?  Must it be accompanied by a pointed finger? 'Look, a cow!' Or is it a mother's memory; 'You loved the cows, we walked the lane so often to look at them.' Our youngest has, in the past few weeks, put his first word on the slate of his emerging history.  Though he mimiced 'apple' beautifully several times he hasn't quite aligned the softly spoken syllables to the fruit in the bowl. What he does say frequently and what is all too clearly understood is 'Nee new', copied from his brothers' 'I need you!'  He must have worked out that 'Nee new', in this house, is the equivalent of dialing a first responder.  What picture will this third child draw for himself when he is asked by his teacher to find out his first word?  Mine, after all, could have come from a picture book.