Hot Buttered Toast – Seams + Dreams
When fixing is overrated, chaos is a constant and life's dos and don'ts fall short...
Much has been messy in these here woods. This past year, navigating an eldest kid who woke up one day, utterly done with school, has taught us so much about her and quite a bit about ourselves… about how quickly our hearts leap to break our kids’ falls.
If struggling, I want to make it all better. I want to carry you. You’re almost as big as me now, but if I could, I’d flip you up onto my shoulders and walk wherever it was you needed me to take you.
If it hurts, I want to take it away. I want to make every day a little easier… I want to get rid of the people who don’t get you – just smudge them out of your picture, so you’ll never have to face their confusion or misunderstandings again.
I want you to be able to walk through your world with your head held high. That beautiful head, filled with so many ideas and dreams, so many untold stories. I want your life to feel filled with potential and possibility. I want you to wake with energy and levity. I want you to make the sort of friends who’ll fill in the gaps in your unspoken sentences.
I want you to ask for what it is you need, whatever you need, whenever you need it, without fearing judgment.
When I started writing these weekly letters, I’d reached a place in my parenting journey where I felt I could reflect a little, on all I’d learned in the 13+ years since I became a mother to my eldest child. The ups and downs, the torn seams and frayed edges; the raucous, savage, wild ride of this one unrepeatable life.
I was at a place where my youngest had faced anxiety and PTSD, head-on, and with weekly therapy, support, endless hours of holding and talking and sharing and loving, she came through the other side… tiniest step by tiniest step… little heart hiccups… until her lungs began to fill again with the stuff that lit her up… long walks with the pup, bike rides, drumming sessions, funny comics + deep, dark, love-lined books, netball club and cross-country runs… until she began to let life back in, and more than that – to grab it with two outstretched, open hands.
I was also at a place where my eldest was a couple of months into her home-schooling journey, and Mr R and I were trying to find some way to reach her within it all. To tap into her passions (ever-changing) and create some framework upon which she might hang the tapestry of her blossoming being.
Turns out, the framework never worked. Not the long days out of doors, climbing trees and sketching deer, nor the quiet days inside, working through textbooks, reading poetry, setting questions as her mind wandered and thumbs twitched.
What did work, I can see now, is that by simply being out of the school system for six months, she has come back to herself. Every day is different, but this week, she has done several things she did not want to do for many months, willingly, joyfully even.
She has gone from that closed up clam of a kid trying to hold it all, mask it all, manage it all, to a wide open book… talking for hours about every thought in her mind, however unfiltered and odd, however raw or surprising… she doesn’t use a filter at home with us… she is herself, in full, blazing colour. And it is pure joy to witness, even as I wince when she swears or says something so close to the bone that I am left half-marvelling, half-reeling… the girl who says what she really thinks. A rare, rare being, indeed. My beloved.
As we approach the end of this shifting, sliding year… our eldest having arrived at a completely new place, through late night sketches and art experiments, that re-lit the creative spark in her, which had been wholly snubbed during her first year at secondary school, when she’d received her lowest mark of the year in Art. Not enough form. Not enough theory. Not enough… Her ideas marked down for lack of method… instinct, it seems, deeply undervalued; misunderstood; distrusted.
Then, from some magical periphery of our shared lives, a hand reached out to us. The possibility of an art scholarship for the kid who, at the tenderest age of 11, was made to believe she didn’t have what it took to create what her mind led her to share. A very different type of school – tiny classes, creative syllabus, engaged and excited teachers… a whole new world for a brave new girl… ready to step out of her shell, again, though fearful, nervous, unsure…
So… a new year with a new job for me, that takes me down to Devon once a month, for a week at a time; a new school and fresh start for our eldest, and the final months of primary school for our youngest… a lot of hope, a lot of unknowing, a lot of ‘let’s just see how it goes’-ing. Mr R, the constant compass centre, here, home, holding. We will find our way, anew.
And that part of me that always hopes to fix… that believes that by planning it all out, by tracing every possibility and preparing for it – fresh starts and new years – it will be what we all need it to be… a life that feels a little more spacious, a little lighter; a better rhythm, a better outlook, a better year… in hope, in hope, in hope.
And even as I hold that hope, I know I cannot fix a damn thing. I cannot fix the paths my children choose. Cannot be there, navigating, holding… cannot carry them the last leg, when they’re aching and crying out for their beds.
What I am understanding, more and more as I get older, is that all I can do is the stuff that makes me feel more hopeful. When I’m hopeful and trusting and peaceful – when I feel that it will turn out just fine, and we will find our way, and we’re here for a reason, and it can all just flow in the way it’s meant to flow – even when it doesn’t (and of course it doesn’t, much of the time), it doesn’t matter anywhere near as much.
We wrote, Mr R and I, a lot about the porosity of our beings, in our book SATTVA. How, when we are depleted and stressed and pulled in a million directions, every little raindrop penetrates. We have no capacity, no boundaries, no protection, no resilience. We are porous to every ill-wind. It gets in and up and through… rattles and shakes us… and makes it so hard for us to carry on, heads held high, the heart-compass strong and true.
Every slight, every snark, every bicker, every sob… and doubt grows, fear rises, the heart flutters and we lose the centre without our selves. We lose what we know to be true and forget where we were meant to be going.
So, to be less porous. To trust. To invite life to flow. To let go, and go with it.
These are the lessons I carry with me into 2024.
And they are damned impossible if I am not doing at least some of the following things… if I am not giving myself the grace and space to hear what it is I need, more than anything in the world, so that I can be the clearest mirror I can be, to the occasionally lost kids looking to and through me, for a reminder of their own truest, strongest, bravest reflections.
Below are the five things I am leaving at the threshold of this year. And the five I am carrying over it. May they go where they are needed and land where they land.
Until next Sunday… wishing you more glee, more joy, more trust, more ease…
Emine
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Next year, I DO NOT NEED…
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