Saturday 20 June 2015

Changing my life

I found myself 31 with 3 children and somehow lost. Let me rewind; I got married, moved 3 times, changed jobs 3 times and had three children in 6 years. Its not surprising that I felt I was lost, because my life had changed. Who I was in my twenties was the kind of person who emigrated on a whim- I literally booked plane tickets during a twenty minute phone conversation about how cool it would be to move to Norway (spoiler alert it was utterly awesome, and to be fair I had lived there before). Then somehow I had impossibly fallen in love, with a man, reproduced with him and ended up in the countryside. The view from my back window stretches out across fields and features cows, nesting waterfowl and various bird life. It is idyllic. But a very far cry from the coffee shops and bakeries and markets and vibrant loveliness of my youth. I felt like my life was not exactly my own. Not just because everything felt so nice, so normal and lovely that it was slightly surreal. But because this was not what I had dreamed. I had been expecting that my life was going to be hipster cool before there reallt were hipster, and a whole lot less straight. So I ticked along in my life, because I was happy and it was more than comfortable, even if it didn’t feel completely like my mine all the time. Then I had 3 week hospital stay. I was pretty sick, not imminent death sick, just pain and frustration and unpleasantness sick. But it helped me a lot. Not just because my health, which had been annoying at a niggle level for years suddenly began to improve exponentially when the cause was finally being treated. And not just because being away from my wonderful husband and our adorable funny perfect children had made me love them even more fiercely, and, to be trite, appreciate them so so much more. No, the most significant way it helped was it made me feel like my life really was my life after all. Which meant that the things that weren’t perfect, the things that bothered me, or made me sad, or frustrated me, they weren’t things I had to live with, they were things that I could change. More than that I had to change them. That was 3 months ago and some of those things have already altered beyond recognition. Some of them are still changing. But I’ve begun and that’s the most important step.