I wish.

I tell my friend that Chris is going on a work trip, to Budapest, my favourite city.

“Can’t you go with him?” she asks.

“I wish”, I reply.

*

I see the post on Facebook, the red brick, the blue sky, “Are you ready to walk through these gates yet? #Chq2017”.

I tag my friend Lynn.  I type 2 words: “I wish”.

*

My Auntie Po is in Australia.  I see her lovely photos – places I visited, places I lived, the faces of our family.

I like the photos, but also, I wish.

*

It’s fine to be a little wistful, of course.  A little dreamy and nostalgic.

But then there’s envy.  There’s discontent.  There’s sighing over your kitchen sink, sighing over your right-now-life.

*

Marian Vischer writes about learning to receive her own summer life.  I am learning this too.

‘Real life is not lived in highlight reel moments’, she says.  ‘When we receive those moments, they are worthy of celebrating. But the mundane moments matter too. And to begrudge them because everyone else seems to be living their best summer life now, well, it makes a mockery of our beautiful, ordinary lives.’

*

I have had some life-changing, memory-making summers, and I’m grateful.  I’ve been to some beautiful places, packed backpacks, talked under the moonlight.

But we’re memory-making now, I think, with welly boots and library cards and another trip to the same old park.

Here’s this beautiful, ordinary life and if I’m honest – when I sat by lakes, legs dangling off piers, talking all night long – wasn’t I a little wistful for this?  For a future that was still a bit blurry, a bit hard to imagine.

If you had shown me a snapshot, then, of pink rain suits and stick collections and Lego cities, of a house that smells of Apple Crisp and 2 girls that won’t come for dinner because they’re reading… I think I might have said… “I wish”.

 

Pockets Full of Paper

Sunday morning: my husband raises his eyebrow at the scraps of paper on the kitchen worktop. Short sentences scrawled in inky black pen, crumpled into balls, soon to be stuffed into the pockets of my jeans.

My Permission Slips.

My new favourite practice.

‘Permission’ is my word for 2017.

I need to give myself permission, most days, just to be myself, to rest in my God-breathed worth.

I need to give myself permission to have these particular limits and gifts and needs, to have this particular way of being in the world.

I need to give myself permission to have the thoughts and feelings that I do, to let them exist.

This is work for me, it’s kind of a fight.

I don’t want to function from a place of shame, or envy, or pretense.  I know the cost of that.  It’s not worth it.

Yet these are my defaults – to withdraw with embarrassment, to look over my shoulder, to declare it all ‘fine’, everything’s fine.

Brené Brown says we need to reckon with emotion rather than off-load it, and I have learnt (from her) to use permission slips to do this.  She says, “writing down permission becomes a powerful intention to stay aware.”

So I pause now, sometimes, before going out the door, and I scribble these notes.

Permission to be excited!

Permission to be nervous. 

Permission to tell the truth. 

Permission to not know what to say.

It is a simple practice, stuffing my pockets full of paper, but it gives me peace, and it gives me courage.

I use it a lot for the things that make me nervous, and I use it a lot for church, but you could use it for anything.

‘Be Kind to Yourself’ by Andrew Peterson plays every day in our house at the end of our morning playlist.

“How does it end when the war that you’re in is just you against you against you?” 

I uncap my pen, rip a piece of paper.

Maybe that war can end here – with pockets full of paper and permission, black uni-ball scribbles and authenticity, walking out the door with courage and peace.

 

---

Thanks to Gemma for doing the lovely graphic for this post.

# One Word 365

‘It’s odd that we start on 1st January and try to come up with our teachable moments. I can’t predict what life will teach me this year.’

[Erin Loechner]

“I thought your mornings are all nice and gentle?!” my husband texts me at 7.58am, in response to a text from me, declaring my intention to commit murder.

Gentle mornings.

He’s funny.

*

‘Morning’ was my one word for 2016.

I have been choosing a word for the past few years now.  Instead of making a list of resolutions that you forget, or fail at, you choose just one word.  The tagline for #OneWord365 is “Go where it takes you.  Be who it makes you.”

The words I have picked to guide me over the past few years have been Morning, Rhythm, Body and Home.

I have always picked words to help me focus on an area that I’m struggling with a bit, words to help me live more intentionally, words that encourage some improvement in my attitude or my time-keeping, in my habits, in how I spend my days.  Which is good.

I have a page in my bullet journal where I had been doodling contenders for 2017, all of them related, all worthy, none of them quite right.

*

Our mornings are not All Nice And Gentle.  But they are better than they used to be.

Mornings had been defeating me, on several levels, and #OneWord365 helped me invest a bit more in the start of my days.  I get up in time to have an hour to myself, more often than I used to.  A morning playlist has changed the atmosphere of our school mornings, apart form the odd morning, when I want to commit murder.  I also Read Aloud at breakfast.  It’s nerdy, but it works.

The school door has sometimes been a difficult threshold for my eldest daughter (and I) so I have picked up Lisa-Jo Baker’s reminder to part in love, not relief as my school-run mantra.  I needed it this morning.

*

As with previous words for the year, I will probably always pay a little more attention to my mornings now, picking up any tips and wisdom that I come across.  The other day I heard someone say that the problem with the ‘morning voice’ (the one that pipes up at 3am when we get up to pee) is that it gets us when we’re not ready for it.  So true. So helpful, somehow, to have someone draw attention to it.

This year, though, I have been doodling through January, circling around words that weren’t quite right.  Having too many ideas, to be honest.

Then I listened to an episode of the Simple Show about goals and non-goals.  Erin Loechner likes to celebrate, and centre herself, around her non-goals in January.  She describes these as the things she has fought to love and accept about herself (like her introversion).  When other people are setting goals and trying new things, she reminds herself about the things in her life that are now a given.  When she finds herself looking over her shoulder and thinking she needs to try something that worked for someone else – if it doesn’t match the things she has fought hard to keep about herself – then she knows she doesn’t need to.

I said ‘YES’ to all of this in my kitchen and as I listened I found a word emerging for 2017:

Permission.

This word is more of a grounding, than a guide.

It’s about holding on to important things that I am so quick to drop.  It’s about being myself.  (Isn’t it always?).  It’s about listening to the still small voice instead of the fire and the wind.  It’s about non-goals.

I’ll write more about it soon.

 

---

 

* I follow Tsh on Spotify and use her Schoolhouse playlist in the mornings.  She writes about how she uses music in her house here.

 

 

This is the morning

This is the morning after the night the clocks went back and it stretches long before us. We are up at the same time as usual, the girls and I, but it feels like we’re early risers, the clock says so.

This is the morning my husband rejoices that Sunday is his lie-in day.

This is the morning I find Liv banging around in the dark in her room, Cat in the Hat outfit half on. It’s GB Sunday, but that’s not on her radar. If she could wear her tail and top hat to church she would.

This is the morning Imogen propositions me the same way she does every morning: “Dance with me Mumma?”. This is the morning that there’s time. This is the morning they shake their butts to the radio in the kitchen, the morning I make a mental note (again) that we should stop saying ‘butts’.

This is the morning I strain to hear Sunday Sequence as they discuss the evangelical support (or not) for Donald Trump. This is the penultimate Sunday before the election. Morning after morning I have expected to wake up to the news that he is no longer a candidate, how could he be? By this morning I have stopped expecting to hear that.

This is a morning that tastes like my childhood: Shredded Wheat with hot milk.  It’s a morning I make myself a small coffee ten minutes before church, just like my dad always did.  (Like he still does).

This is a warm morning for the end of October – the sky blue, the trees on fire.

This is the morning after the night I read ‘Out of Sorts’ for longer than I meant to (read it like a novel) and it’s still swirling round in my head.  This is the morning I sit on a wooden pew with Sarah Bessey’s words : “I don’t want to choose between the people who first showed me Jesus and the people who made sure I got to hold on to Jesus and the ones that keep me even now.”  I wonder why those words, what have they got to do with anything?  They seem to have something to do with all the mornings, all the Sundays… something to do with legacy and heritage and faith and doubt and wilderness and home.

This is the morning I feel like maybe it all holds together, that I can be thankful for it all.

 

Morning (small beginnings)

The mornings are dark now and there is nowhere like a quiet kitchen lit up at this hour, when everyone else is sleeping.

There is nowhere like it yet, more often than not, I would trade my very soul to stay in bed. I whittle away this hour, ten minutes at a time, with every hit of the snooze button.  Always convinced it’s worth the trade off.

When I chose morning as my word for the year, maybe I imagined myself productive.  I thought I might have jobs done, essays written.

What I have, is a morning basket.  It has colouring pencils and colouring books.  It has my Common Book of Prayer.  It has my bullet journal.  Right now it has a Georgia O’Keeffe postcard that my friend Cherith gave me.  It has my heart bowl, which I set on the kitchen table beside the postcard.  Sometimes it has other books, or pictures, or quotes from my bedroom.

I have two problems with the morning.  One: I don’t want to get out of bed.  Two: when I do get out of bed, I want to do Everything.  It is easy (for me) to be lazy.  And it is easy (for me) to try to do too much, and to try to run on empty.  It is harder by far to just be awake and present to my life.

It is hard to just colour in.  It is hard to read liturgies before I read Facebook. It is hard to feed myself properly instead of quickly.  It is hard to Be Still, with my fists unclenched, like I believe in the holy spirit, like it’s the way to start my day, like it will make any difference.

It is hard to begin without feeling like we’re already behind, without panicking that already “it’s not enough”, without listening to ridiculous voices in our heads.

“Do not despise these small beginnings”, Zechariah 4:10 says, “for the Lord rejoices to see the work begin.”.

Those words are too long for a tattoo, but I need to etch them somewhere.

The mornings are dark now, and just being here in my quiet kitchen is a small beginning.  A cause to rejoice.

 

Are you free on Thursday night? Thoughts on Introversion.

There’s a few things the internet doesn’t need any more of.  Open letters, for example. Elsa pictures.

There’s something about saturation that can make us weary, or even angry.  Something that once was cute, or original, or important starts to make us twitch the more we see it.  I have read some brilliant open letters in the past, but these days I fear it’s only a matter of time before I turn on my computer and see “Dear woman with the curly hair driving the scratched Fiesta…”.

And there’s something about enthusiasm, evangelical fervour, popularity even, that can be curiously off-putting.  We feel like giving up faith, say, or breastfeeding, in reaction to the intensity of those who share our practice.

One of my favourite topics of conversation is personality types and tests like Myers-Briggs and the Enneagram, and particularly Introversion.  Understanding myself as an introvert has, and is, one of the most important factors in how I live my life.

But when a friend texted me recently saying: “I think I’ll become an introvert, they’re taking over the world”, I started to wonder, is one more post about introversion the last thing the internet needs?  Have we got Introvert-fatigue?

*

Back in the day, I read about introversion like it was some big secret.  Back when Philip Yancey books were steadying my soul in the garden, one of the reasons I felt this weird commonality with him was in the way he wrote about his personality, his slowness, his thought-process.  He was the only person I ever read who was writing about being an introvert and I thought me too, me too.

My ears picked up any time I heard it being discussed.

Even 4 years ago Susan Cain’s TED talk, and subsequently her book, healed and inspired me so much because it wasn’t being talked about.

*

When my mind is healthy I know that my gifting, my truest parts, my best offerings all come from being an introvert – from slow, well-brewed thoughts and feelings, from paying attention.

But on a daily basis that mind gets frazzled and rushed and the thing it notices is people around me doing life faster and smoother and smarter, and I feel less-than.

When my soul is healthy I know that it needs stillness, time, good books, prayer and rest to stay that way.  Yet when I hear those words “Are you free on Thursday night?” something in me still believes that the only acceptable no is the ‘Busy No’… No because I’m at an Event, No because I’m meeting someone else, No because I’m doing some kind of work.

I need those introvert articles and memes and comic strips to simply remind me that I am a person who recharges by being alone, and that I am not the only one, and that I do not have to go anywhere on Thursday night.

(Source: Quiet Revolution)

I’ll be honest, because I’m an introvert, the text my friend sent “recently” was actually about a year ago.  This post has sat, unfinished, for a long time.  I would read it, now and again, and wonder what my point was.  Since then I have been doing the work with Brené Brown, I have started seeing a Spiritual Director and I have become a bit of an Enneagram-geek (that is a whole other post!).  These things are adding depth and dimension (and even discomfort) to my understanding of shame, true self and the things that get in the way.

I have also come to understand that it is not just introverts who feel the pressure of the “acceptable no”, or whose lives are damaged by too much hustle.  Gemma’s  lovely Ode to Margin resonates with most of us, I imagine.

So I do not celebrate my introversion over your extroversion.  Thursday nights are for solitude and conversation, pottering and dancing, saying yes and saying no.  I do not click on all the introvert articles anymore (I probably get sent a few too many ‘saw this and thought of you’ ones, these days).  But, regularly, I just need a reminder, you know?

 

 

---

Some of my Introvert Favourites

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking
by Susan Cain

Susan Cain TED talk

Introverts in the Church: Finding Our Place in an Extroverted Culture
by Adam S. McHugh

Can Introverts Be Part of the Revolution? by Addie Zierman

Why Slowing Down Your Kid’s Schedule Can Be A Good Thing by Brian Gresko

2016: That Morning Cuppa

‘The hour before the world gets to you is precious and sacred time.’

[Anne Lamott]

It’s February and the waves are crashing right outside my window, right outside my three windows.  The house is quiet and the sea is loud.  Now and again a train passes over the narrow track.  The rugged beach is dotted with dog walkers in anoraks, an occasional horse.

I had my breakfast in the huge bay window downstairs – porridge with berries, chocolate brioche, Brené Brown, tea.  I had my breakfast while the rest of the house slept.  The sea was loud but it let me be.

*

On my first night at the writers’ retreat I had my supper, filled my hot water bottle and went to bed.  I thought about sitting up, by the cosy fire, with this interesting group of people, all here by the sea to write.  Where else would I meet them?

Fear of missing out thrummed its familiar beat.  A glass of wine and fireside conversation with interesting strangers sounds like a life I used to have.  Sounds like something motherhood should be making me crave.  Don’t I?

I do want those things.  But I want my morning more. 

*

I am here for 3 nights as a Christmas present.  My husband knows that in this season of life the greatest gift he can give me is Time (especially time with wild sea and a desk to write at).

I feel like Time & I have been locked in battle ever since I became a mum.  I write lists and confab with my husband, trying to figure out how to fit it all in.  I scratch things off the list or designate them a particular slot, I swap things around.  We try to prioritise.  Which things are obligatory?  Which things are necessary?  Which things are not?  We try to name the things we love, the things we want to make time for.  I write more lists and scratch more things off.  We try to work out how to give each other ‘time’.

Last year I chose Rhythm as my word for the year and  I noticed that I am addicted to the elusive ideal of ‘getting everything done first’, and it is filling my days with stress.  I keep chasing this daily rhythm where the rest comes at the end.  In some seasons, and contexts, this can be a healthy pattern, but not in motherhood.  I seem to have developed an “inner bookie” where I am constantly calculating the odds of a restful evening as I go through the day.  I  do more to try to boost the odds.  I count desperately on something rather uncertain – my girls having a smooth, on-time bedtime.  I put too much pressure on things I can’t control.   It’s exhausting and it doesn’t work, the payoff never comes.  The tattoo on my foot says “Be Still” but I seem to have scheduled even stillness – only when the house is still, only when the dishes are done.  So what I get, if I get it, is the left overs.  Whatever time is left, whatever energy is left.

There is a phrase that has been rattling round my head since I read it recently in ‘Simplicity Parenting’, it is about establishing islands of “being” in the torrent of constant doing.  The book says that to have moments of calm – creative or restful – is a form of deep sustenance for human beings of all ages.  I am trying to establish this for my girls, but I am trying to establish it for myself, too.  “Islands of being”, I mutter to myself like a crazy person, “islands of being!”.

Virginia Woolf said every woman needs a room of her own. I don’t have that… but I do have an hour of my own and it’s glorious.

[Glennon Doyle Melton]

As I continue to seek rhythm in 2016, my word for this year is ‘Morning.’  I want to choose this island of being, this hour of my own, at the start of the day, instead of frantically chasing it all day.  I know I’m a morning person, I don’t know why I stubbornly put so much stock in the evening.  I am also a person that needs a little solitude and I have realised that if I don’t choose it first thing, then I spend all day resenting how impossible it is to get.

So here’s to moments of calm.

Here’s to choosing the sustenance we need.

Here’s to precious, sacred time…

…and here’s to that morning cuppa.

 

What about you? Any words for the year? Are mornings or evenings your sacred time?

This is the girl, all cold and cross

‘And though she be but little, she is fierce.’

[Shakespeare]

My friend Patrick recently sent me a link to the met office’s list of future storm names. For I: Storm Imogen.  Yes, I thought, what a perfect name for a storm. But, also, hasn’t Storm Imogen already hit, many times?

You turned 3 this month and you have been celebrating yourself like it’s your job. Your capacity for celebration matches your capacity for angst. You are ALL the Emotions. You are both/and.

It’s true, you can tantrum. You can huff. You can bear a grudge. You can give the most withering looks. When Storm Imogen hits it is loud, and a little violent. You stamp that right foot with indignation and your voices ratchets up like a crazy housewife (like your mama, I fear, when I’m not my best self). You are, we often say, a very eloquent cross person, very specific in your grievances. When you do not want to wear your coat on the Gruffalo trail and I tell you you can take it off in the car you stamp that foot and yell into the Colin Glenn: “I do not want to wear it in the Deep DARK WOOD!” You add syllables when you’re cross, as well as volume, your piercing, rising tone vibrating off the trees. When you do not want to wear a hair bobble at breakfast (you never want to wear a hair bobble) you yell in mounting disgust :”That. Hair. Bobble. Is TOO SPARKLY for me!”  (This morning, you simply insisted train drivers don’t wear hair bobbles, and that was that.)

You like to be charmed.  You like a little effort to be made.  You are open to bribes, deals and offers.  You’re anyone’s for a chocolate button.

You like to mimic the faces of the characters in any books we read.  Your favourite, of course, ‘This is the bear all cold and cross’, a posture you adopt away from the books, whenever it matches your mood.

Your mood: both/and.

Both the stormiest, and the sunniest girl around.

It’s true, you can tantrum.  You’re that kind of girl.  But you’re also a yes please and thank you and sorry kind of girl.  A kiss, hug kind of girl.  A dancing in the supermarket kind of girl.  A laugh-until-you-choke kind of girl.  A merrymaker. A reveller.  A celebrator of life, and of yourself.

You have a fondness for men, particularly  butchers.  You bond with people, often, by roaring like a dinosaur.

It was BLUE day yesterday at your sister’s school.  As we got into the car Olivia said “We are supposed to Be Loving and Understanding to Everyone, but Imogen’s not doing it.” Ha.  “Well,” I replied, “Imogen is often loving and understanding, but she’s still learning, just like all of us.”

Said sister (victim to the violence) is mostly your partner in crime, your crazy playmate.  Although you have a very particular, practical kind of Arnold nature, it is curiously complemented with this wild imagination.  I wonder if your whimsical big sister has nurtured that in you?  You are often lost in other worlds, bestowing names and powers on each other, solving problems and mysteries and saving the world, all before breakfast.

That Arnold nature, though, has you doing 50 piece jigsaws, has you tidying up, has you noticing details I never would and figuring out how things work… it makes you physically capable in ways that are surprising for a 3-year-old.  I may recognise myself in your Mullan-face and your wild hair but your daddy sees you straightening everything up and thinks “That’s my girl!”.

That hair, of course, is commented on by everyone you meet.  You hate to have it touched or tamed.  That may change but for now it’s nice to have your company, wee frizz.

So happy birthday to our little boss lady, may you always find yourself worth celebrating.

 

Today you are you

‘Today you are you, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is youer than you.’

[Dr Seuss]

“Are there elephants in Australia mummy?”, “What about rhinos?”, “Giraffes?”. You turn your porridge bowl around and ask me in turn if each animal on its rim can be found in Australia.

Then you make up your mind: “Yes, I would like to go to Australia on an aeroplane. Please.”

You’re answering a question Uncle Kerr asked you. Yesterday.

*

You arrived into the world with a large bump on your head where you repeatedly banged it for a day and a half trying to get out, a little left of centre.

Left of centre, your preferred position, still.

*

You hate baked beans and the dark and tidying up.  You love ‘psgetti’ and cocoa and strawberries and ramen noodles.  You love baking with your daddy and you love finger-painting more than any mummy-driven-craft-project I come up with.  You love the ‘No-livia and Papa Rexus’ made-up stories that you beg your Papa for (as long as he gets all previous details correct).  You love just one more book from Nana, just one more minute in her house.  “I DO like you mummy”, you told me to my amusement last night, “I just like Nana Beethie MORE”.

You love curling up in Papa Ernest’s chair and you love eating all Nana Berta’s treats.  You love running round and around the outside of their house and you love playing with you daddy’s old Fisherprice toys on their floor.

You love Jane from across the road and don’t leave her side when we go on outings together.  Jane knows what all the trees and plants are and the pair of you stop to look at all the insects and talk to all the dogs and to go a bit closer to the river than mummy lets you.  (In fairness, you and Auntie Jane are usually IN the river).

Your feet seek out every ledge or edge or wall or line on the road.  Your fingers touch every button, wall and surface.  You are always climbing and exploring, hanging off things that aren’t supposed to be hung off.

You make your raisins talk to each other while your porridge bowl cools, forgotten, beside them.

You notice the things in the distance and are often oblivious to what’s in front of you.

You take the scenic route, endless detours, even if it’s just across the living room floor.

You have an inability to hold your head still so we embrace the ‘messy’ style of plaiting, incorporating every twist and turn of your wandering attention.  You have the kind of hair I’ve always wanted, though, thick and smooth and taken for granted.

You have your daddy’s face, all your Arnold genes gathered in one place, while the thoughts and temperament behind it serve to thwart the Arnold modus operandi at every turn.

You love your little sister, your partner in crime.  You shared a room for 2 months in the summer until we acknowledged you have too ‘spirited’ a relationship to be roomies.  You fight, of course, but it is the shrieks of laughter that usually need investigated.  When you’re not causing destruction together you’re usually cackling and howling as monsters and witches, or calling out to each other dramatically: “Mama?”, “DAR-ling!”.

You offer theories about everything you come across (why that car crashed, where that litter came from, why that thing isn’t working, who that person might be).

You unravel with too much choice, or expectation. “I’m not sure“ and “That sounds a bit tricky” are your go-to-answers when under pressure.

You thrive with a basic routine and wide margins in your day for wandering and wondering.  You love open space, and you love to be curled up at home.  It is the end of the world if you’re tired, and it always has been.

You are cautious, sometimes. You listen to your inner voice.  You are not a child that can be persuaded, or coaxed, or bribed.  You do things when you want to and when you’re ready and I guess I hope you always will.

*

Today you are 5 and last week I found myself googling in search of an old Huffington Post article – The Day I Stopped Saying Hurry Up.  I don’t think I’m ever going to stop saying it, daughter.  We’d never get to school.  But I’m trying to say it less and it reminds me, completely, to cherish you my stop-and-smell-the-roses kind of child.

It reminds me that I LOVE the way you are.

I love that you take your time. I love that you colour outside the lines. I love that you deviate from The Plan and twist the instructions and sneak your own rules in. I love your abstract questions and your zany sense of humour and your wicked little laugh when you’re really amused.  I love that, more often than not, I find you standing on your head.  I love the endless thoughts that fuel your chatter, and I love your Quiet.

I love that you are FIVE in so many common, shared, universal ways. And I love that you are YOU in as many quirky, not-in-the-text-book, still-trying-to-figure-you-out ones.

So Happy Birthday Livi-kins and in the words of our wise old chum:

we’ll go to the top of the toppest blue space,

The Official Katroo Birthday Sounding-Off Place!

Come on! Open your mouth and sound off at the sky!

Shout loud at the top of your voice, “I AM I!

ME!

I am I!

And I may not know why

But I know that I like it.

Three cheers!  I AM I!”

Belonging to Each Other

There is a dent in my pride to match the rather large one on the side of my car, above the wheel, where the scrapes are.  You can’t miss the scrapes.  There is a dent in my car and it bothers me.  Superficial damage in a car worth more to me than anyone else.  I don’t care about cars, how they look, what everyone else is driving. I don’t care about cars, until tonight.  Tonight I care.  I lie in bed irritated and regretful, unable to find the perspective that is glaringly obvious, unable to care about anything else.

*

Sometimes, when I haven’t just bashed my car, I get into bed and kind of wallow in the comfort of it.  I have done my fair share of travelling in the past and although I loved it I also love lying in my own comfortable space, thinking how nice it is not to be in a tent or a dorm room, on a greyhound or an overnight train.  I guess it’s part of a little end-of-the-day gratitude, for what I have, for my small corner in the world.

But as I snuggle into the sheets, I feel a niggling discomfort, wondering about all the people who right at that moment are experiencing very different conditions and feelings – homeless, trafficked, refugees.  I can’t say I leap out of bed to do anything about it, but I acknowledge it, and maybe that’s a place to start.

*

I’m annoyed about the car but I’m also annoyed because I was supposed to get my nails painted, and there was a mix-up.  If there is one thing I care about less than the aesthetics of cars, it’s painted nails.  I never have painted nails.  But I was going to tonight, and it’s annoying me disproportionate amounts.

I lie in bed wallowing, not in its comfort, but in my disappointment and self-reproach.

*

I hoist Imogen higher up on my hip as we navigate our way towards the school gate with her sister.  She’s too big to be carried but some mornings it’s just easier.  She is fierce in her independence, fast on her feet, and committed to a new method she has developed of holding her OWN hand.  I feel like I’m running a gauntlet from car to classroom – chasing my feisty toddler and coaxing my 4 year-old who just does not want to go to school – not on Mondays or Fridays, not last week, not this week, not today.  I try to navigate them through the car-park and up the steps, round corners and through their Big Feelings.  I feel fully deserving of a medal by the end of it all.

*

I text my husband to tell him we are having fish finger sandwiches. He replies, predictably, now desperate for a fish finger sandwich – that trivial sharing of common loves with the people we know best.

*

My computer is a throng  of opened tabs – op eds and blog posts and petitions and videos. Syria, Syria, Syria. Some get my full attention, some get scanned, many sit there, blinking at me, being added to, and added to, as if clicking on them will help someone.

*

I watch desperate refugees on the news – see toddlers asleep in arms at border points – and I feel ridiculous and ashamed at how desperate I thought I was, half an hour before, for my children to go to sleep. I have talked on and on and on about it for 2 months now. This room sharing isn’t working.  Maybe we should change them back?  Maybe we should try this?  These antics are unbelievable.  Worse than newborn days.  Will we ever sleep again?

I see a picture of a toddler in an anorak, hoisted high on someone’s hip, her big sister clinging to someone’s leg as they navigate a journey in stark contrast to my school run.  I feel ridiculous and ashamed.

*

Recently, on the 52nd anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr’s “I have a dream” speech, Gemma Brown asked people to think about and share their dream – for themselves, or their community or the world.  People looked up, took a picture of what they saw and posted it on social media with their dream.  I loved seeing and reading these.  I’m a slow, slooooooow thinker so I am still mulling this one over.  How would I finish the sentence “My dream is…”?

*

Mother Teresa said “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”

I believe, and write often, that the small things matter.  I believe that the daily caring for a few small souls matters.  The school run, their sleeping arrangements, their Big Feelings, fish finger sandwiches.  All of it.

And I believe in telling the truth when I find some of that hard.

I have dreams for my own little anoraked girls, and I have dreams for myself.  (That’s a whole other blog post, but a lot if it is what Mel explores here, and what Elizabeth Gilbert talks about in her brilliant podcasts here.)

I feel peace when I feel the solidarity and care of belonging to others.  We share common loves, we share tips about sleeping arrangements, people text to ask how did Olivia get on today?  Some of it’s trivial, much of it is ordinary, but it’s good.

It’s good, and yet I know, they’re first world problems, or pleasures.  What does it mean that someone else’s anoraked girls belong to me too?

*

In the afternoon we walk home from school.  We go to the ‘wee park’.  Every day.  We have water and Nairn’s oatcakes and there is never anyone there.  It’s not fancy, but it’s good.  I look up to the sky.  Isn’t this very ordinary life the one we dream of, believe in, for refugees?  A little bit of space, a place to return to, somewhere to play for their children, where they can go down the slide head first?  Isn’t it right that my peace is disturbed lying in bed at night when I think of them?

*

The truth is I struggle to maintain my attention, and my compassion.  My good intentions embarrass me: unread, open tabs everywhere I look.

We belong to each to other. I think about that a lot. Connected with fish finger sandwiches and hand holding and those blinking tabs – trying to educate me, explain the war, tell stories and show me their faces.

I hit ‘x’, again and again.  I’m not going to read them all.  I start to choose more slowly, one thing at a time.  I start to look more seriously at the small things I can do.

I’m paying attention to the niggling discomfort at night, the lack of peace when I forget we belong to each other.