Mother's Day

Mothering Sunday, to give it its proper title, marks the halfway point of Lent. The halfway point of the slog through the days of denial, of sacrifice, of fasting. The day where the end draws into sight, the joys of Easter just over the hill. The day when you should visit your home parish, your mother church, and historically, for many young men and women away in domestic or farming service, your mother.
Of course, fewer people observe Lent each year and the original point of Mothering Sunday is lost in a sea of greetings cards, floral bumf, and internet offers. Just this week, the internet has suggested I should buy my mum flowers, clothes, wine, gig tickets, and cookies.
I would buy her a book. A book of social history, or food, or better still, a mix of both. A book she wouldn't have seen in her semi-regular trips to the shop, or advertised in Sainsbury's magazine. I would buy her a book I know she would love, the sort that she would take to bed, packet of crisps in one hand, book in the other. I would buy her something like the history of the playground I saw in Jarrolds on her birthday, that made my heart hurt with longing that I would never get to give it to her.
I would buy her a card and I would write how grateful I am, and how much I love her, and hope somehow that words would be enough. I would take it round, and all her cards from all her seven children would be lined up in a row on the windowsill, and she'd be nagging my dad to go and see his mother before it got any later, and tea would be prepared, and she would be content.
That is what I would do if I still had a mother.

But I don't. And I don't like today. Today hurts.

When your mother dies, you don't merely grieve for the person. The wonderful, hilarious, intelligent woman I grew up with, who was my guardian, my educator, sculptor of my life and my personality, my friend. How I grieve for her. Her phone number in my 'last called' contacts falls further and further down the list and will never come back up. Her things are still where she left them at home, but they don't move a few inches to the left or right, the way things do when they are in use. I still expect to see her when I go in my dad's garden. I call it my dad's now - it was always "mum's house". Although we have inherited the look of her, her voice and her image are now only in recordings. The smell of her lingers in her clothes, but it will never be replenished.

In a million tiny pinpricks and sledgehammers of pain, I grieve for Jo, a woman who happened to be my mum, who was hundreds of things to hundreds of people.

But I grieve for the loss of my mother, for the loss of a mother's love, for the loss of a mother's guidance. For the loss of the person who was there first, who recognised my presence before I had a brain, who felt my first fledgling movements, and who knew me best. For the loss of the stability and foundation you only have through good parenting, through good grounding. Many people are not lucky enough to experience this type of attachment, but I did. We did.

I feel at sea: lost and abandoned and young and frightened. The fear on a child's face when they lose their mother in a shop momentarily, only magnified. When I was little, I was plagued by nightmares, and I would pad up to my parents' room and try and wake my mum up to tell her. She would rarely manage to wake up - poor woman was shattered - so I would sit by her head, and snuggle in to her until I felt safe enough to go silently back to bed. And that is what I long to do, to go and snuggle up to her for a bit until I feel safe enough to go back into the world.

Five months tomorrow. I feel like it has been five years and five minutes. But what really bothers me is that this is for always. That she won't come back. I can't have her back. Maybe if I wait a really long time, and be a really good girl, maybe we will be back together. Maybe.

When Mum was dying, she said she didn't mind dying herself, but she minded terribly about how it would affect us. She knew what it would do to us. I didn't mind Mum dying too much in the end. It felt very natural for her to die. It felt very unnatural to try and prolong her life. There comes a point when it doesn't feel wrong anymore, much as when you are pregnant, there comes a point where you really want it to all be over. So many parallels between entering and leaving the world.

But this grief, this all consuming and powerful grief: that's something to mind. That's something to tear you apart. Particularly on Mother's Day.

Dying

When I was working, we had patients dying all the time. They used to die in threes, or so it seemed, of all manner of causes, at all ages. We had a list of palliative care patients and they usually were on there because they had been issued with a DS1500. A DS1500 is a form that says you will die within a year or six months. It is a death sentence, created by the government to give you fast access to disability funds, and to pension payouts. I had known some of these patients for years. One had had a cancer in the 1980s as a youth, and been left with suppurating radiotherapy burns which still needed dressing three times a week after twenty years.I had seen that patient three times a week, because the appointments coincided with my shifts, for several years when the cancer came back and they were gone in weeks. The weird thing about working in a GP surgery is that you get to know these patients really well, until they are dying and then they drop off the radar. They become restricted to home visits and fasttracked phone requests for medication and dire oncology letters. The terminal rarely visit the GP surgery. In eight years, nobody died there. We had a birth. We had bloody emergencies in the waiting room. But nobody died. One person had a heart attack and died an hour later in A+E but I never saw anyone die in front of me. Death became everyday, something we all sympathised and empathised with, but the nearest I came to the reality of it was the grief stricken relatives in the weeks afterwards. It changed my perspective on what 'old' was, partly because I was but a youth myself, but partly because teenagers were cut down alongside the very elderly. The idea of death occurring in generational order vanished as I saw grieving spouses and parents, young grieving children, grieving grandparents. Grief doesn't give too much thought about how old the dead are, only about what is lost, be that potential or memories or both.
I became obsessed with death, surrounding myself with literature on pathology, interested in the myriad ways the body could fail, and from there, an interest in more generalised anatomy. But I never saw anyone die.

My first experience of dying predates this, of course. My friend Daisy Fuller. She died in 1995. She was ten years old. She was ten days younger than me. She had leukaemia and hers was the first funeral I ever went to. I was in the choir, and the church was packed and we sang. I don't remember what we sang. I don't remember seeing her coffin. I still visit her grave whenever I'm in the area.
Then my baby brother. He would be seventeen now. He was very teeny tiny. We had his coffin the house the night before the funeral, and it was the only time he ever came home. His name was Thomas. We don't forget him. He's buried just across from Daisy.
Then my grandparents. I was sixteen and they died within eight weeks of each other, both of cancer. Grandad went first, suddenly it seemed to me. Granny a little after after what felt like many months of illness, but was barely eight weeks.
There have been so many others since then, those I loved, those I barely knew, those who were kind to me, helping me gather chickens as a panicking teenager and those who gave me lifts to work. But I never saw them die.

It took two months to realise Mum would really die. Two months. I was terrified when she first got ill. One Sunday in June, I went straight to her house from a day out hoping that she wouldn't be as ill as she sounded. Alas, my mum lacks the clinical signs of infection and the only indication she wasn't right was a slightly raised pulse. I thought she would be OK with antibiotics. She got worse. I sent her back to the doctors because she was afraid to take herself. I told the doctors I thought she had a bowel obstruction. They missed the tumours. They sent her home with another pack of augmentin.
And then she went on holiday, and her bowel burst and poisoned her and I still don't know how she survived. My dad rang me and told me her bowel had burst and she was going to surgery and I had faith, faith in medicine, that she would survive and she would be OK and this was horrible but also the best thing because she would be OK. I told my siblings the same. This was unhappy but at the same time, survivable. She was in the best place, and it was unfortunate that the best place was miles away, but she was safe.
Later that night, Dad told me what the surgeon had told him, and I travelled to be with him while they told her. I still had hope. I still thought it would be OK. They can do so much for cancer these days. They can do so much. We went to see her in ICU, and she was so pleased to see us, and me and my dad sat with her while the surgeon told her what he had found. When he said they wouldn't have operated if they had known, I thought my last spark of hope died. I was wrong. Metastatic adenocarcinoma of unknown primary. Multiple metastases. Circulatory shock. She recovered at an astonishing rate, and was able to come back to Peterborough.
The surgeons in Peterborough were optimistic that they would get her fit for chemo, despite Mum saying over and over that she didn't want it. And then they couldn't give it anymore, and I think that was a small relief to Mum because she hates and fears hospitals. When she was first discharged, I felt so absolutely responsible, the way you do when you go home with your firstborn. Responsible for keeping her alive, for keeping her comfortable, for looking after her.
I don't feel like that now. I realised after a particularly bad weekend that, no matter what I did, I would not ever be able to save her. I already knew I couldn't, but knowing objectively that you can't, and accepting it are two totally different things. Mum's like the knight in Monty Python And The Holy Grail, armless and legless but still going. But the reality that I would have to watch her die was slow to come, and hit me with terrifying force. I lost my grip and I fell down a hole for three days, and then I came back up and I felt more at peace.

She's still here. She's STILL HERE. She is still alive, and she can sometimes talk though she sometimes can't, but she can give me a kiss and I can stroke her hair and moisturise her and she is still here. She is still Mummy for a little bit longer. I have stopped expecting her death with every silence, stopped panicking at every text, stopped thinking ahead, stopped trying to save her, stopped thinking it is my responsibility to save her and stopped feeling guilty for Not Doing the thousands of things that would have made no difference.

We don't know when she will die. We have never known when she will die. She has always been certain that she does not want to know. She does not want us to know. She has known too many people given six months who have had years and too many given years who have had weeks. She does not wish to labour under sentence of death. There's a strange feeling of being adrift because Mum no longer goes to hospital. Who is in charge? Does it really matter? She is in charge. She knows what she wants. She is mighty in the face of death. We love her so, so much. We just want to keep her.

She's still here.

Not Normal

What is normal?
This isn't.

I got the kids' school stuff together. No stress, no panic, just sorted it out, tried it on them, put it away ready for next week. Back to school. Back to normal. Except it's not normal.

I went to see my in laws. The kids ran amok. We had a barbecue, I had a glass of wine. Everything normal. Nothing's normal.

I went to see my mum. Roast beef in the oven, nephews and nieces underfoot, sitting in the garden with Mum puffing on a cigarette, cookbook by her side. All as normal. Anything but.

The hospital runs, every week. Mum afraid, fed up, nauseous, worried, sick of waiting. The waiting. It goes on forever. We sit together, usually in a side room because Mum's too ill to sit up for long. Mum doesn't look when they do the blood tests, so I tell her when it's safe to look. I surreptitiously check her obs on the machine. Maybe I should have been a nurse. We wait for the consultant - she's lovely. We ask questions. No answers yet. They don't know where the primary site is. They are worried about the infection. No chemo til the infection's sorted. No oncology at all until the infection's sorted. They can't save Mum from the cancer. Can they even save her from the infection? We don't know. We wait for the blood tests. They do them while you wait, but it's still two hours. They return with the results. Usually bad news. Usually more worry. Usually no answers.

And yet that is when I feel most normal, most at peace. That is where I can cope. In the thick of it, surrounded by people who may not have the answers but know what they're talking about, who aren't afraid of what's happening and don't use euphemism. Where I'm with my mum, looking after my mum. Making myself feel better by making her feel better. I've always felt strangely at home in hospitals. Maybe I could have been a nurse.

I have nightmares where I fail to look after Mum, in some tiny insignificant way, but it ends up meaning everything, so I don't go to bed because I'm scared of dreaming. I see old people in the street and I resent them for being alive. I hear people bitch about their mums, and I want to scream because it's not fair. I see people being normal, being happy, being unaffected by strange crushing not-quite-grief and I wonder if I will ever feel like that again. All the peculiarities of human interaction, all the minor disagreements and trivialities of life, have lost resonance and meaning.

Mum was diagnosed a month ago today. It feels like it's been a thousand years and three hours all at once.

The only people I want to be with, household and parents aside, are my siblings because they know how this is. We all cope differently. We all feel the same. Thank god there's so many of us. Thank god we can be together.

I'm not writing for sympathy, or anything really other than to get this out. This feeling that nothing in the world feels normal anymore. Everything is wrong, like someone put a puzzle together higgeldy piggeldy and all the pieces fit but the picture doesn't make sense.

I love my mum. I wish I could keep her.

We are fundraising for Macmillan, because they are wonderful.

Talking About Terminal Cancer

Behold, the shitty cancer awareness memes are going round on Facebook once more. Spread awareness with a heart in your status, say people who have probably never actually had to talk to people with cancer.
Conversations are a bit strange when someone you love has terminal cancer - gawd knows what it's like for someone who HAS terminal cancer. Here's a guide on how to talk to me, but I am not representative.

1. Please don't ask how my mum is unless you want the answer.
There isn't going to be a "Yeah, she's fantastic" response. If you can't deal with being told "Same" or "worse", please don't ask. There are other things we can talk about (see point 3).

2. Please don't ask, with any degree of intensity, how I am REALLY.
I don't know how I am 99% of the time. Somewhere vaguely between euphoric she's still alive and devastated at the sheer fucking awfulness of everything. If I tell you I'm fine, it either means I don't want to talk about it, or I actually AM FINE, as BIZARRE as that might seen.

3. Cancer gets boring
You'd never have thought the idea of losing someone you adore would get dull. In the first week after Mum was diagnosed, I think I had to explain it in detail to about ten people who weren't directly affected. Not because they were being nosy; they just couldn't fathom how This Could Happen, so they wanted detail. Painstaking, surgical detail at times. Being me, I was happy to give it, but LORD IT IS HARD and then it just gets boring. This is what our new reality is, but I am still the same person and I don't just want to talk about the scary thing that's happening.

4. Please don't tell me about anyone you know (or knew) with cancer, unless it's a parent or similarly close relative.
Thanks for the info, but I guessed cancer wasn't solely restricting itself to hurting my mum. I've lost two grandparents, my best friend from when I was five, and numerous other people to cancer. I know millions of people are afflicted. I know it's shit. I know it's vicious. I know it's unpredictable. It's also not an exercise in comparison.

5. Please don't tell me about people who Miraculously Recovered.
This is so unlikely and rare that I just find it annoying rather than comforting.

6. If you don't know how to deal with it, that's fine.
Honestly. I get it. Watching sad adverts on the telly and donating to everyone on Facebook's Race For Life pages is one thing. Actually being faced with the reality is terrifying. Maybe people think I will just sob uncontrollably into their shoulder, or be cross they asked how I am, or I dunno, have a full on nervo. I don't expect answers. I don't expect to feel magically better any time soon. If you don't know how to deal with it (or me), it's probably not your job to so please don't worry about it.

7. I know you don't know what to say
Unthinkable though it seems, the shoe has been on the other foot. I've been told people are terminally ill before, and not had a clue what to say. What can you say? There's no Please Die Nicely cards in Clintons. I know it's shit. It's fine to say it's shit.

8. Please don't offer help unless you are willing to give it
I know you want to help, but there's a vast difference between saying "If there's anything I can do" and actually looking after my children for seven hours. If you can, offer specific help. Lifts. Food. Company. Babysitting. That sort of thing. Otherwise, please donate to Macmillan for us, because they offer so much practical support, and take away some of the fear.

9. Don't hate me or take it personally if I'm grumpy or quiet or reclusive or angry or anything other than shitting sunbeams
I can't predict my mood. On the day I wrote this, I cried because people were nice, cried because Christmas might be shit, cried because everything in the future might be shit, shouted at the kids, had perfectly polite conversations with strangers, jumped out of my skin because someone knocked on the door, cried some more, text people until I was too tired to, and shouted some more. I am also still capable of pissing myself laughing, being extremely dark humoured, and full of love for everyone around me. I'm still a contrary, argumentative bitch. Mum's illness is like a knife to my heart every time I remember it, but death is a massive part of the fabric of life.

I don't hate cancer. I'm not going to start sharing those "99% of people don't hate cancer but I know you're not one of them" memes on facebook. Cancer is a terrifying prospect: the word alone scares the shit out of many people, but it is also part of the joy of living. Cancer is a cellular disease that we all carry the potential to develop. Our cells divide at a rate of around 50 billion PER DAY. It is a miracle to me that it doesn't go wrong all the time. Cancer is as old as humanity. There are thousands of different types: some kill you, some barely bother you. It is shit that Mum's developed a lethal kind, but at the same time, in the lottery of life, I think (and she thinks) that she's done OK out of it. All this love for her, all these amazing memories that we continue to make, all these Actual People She Has Made. Half of me is my mum. In every one of the billions of cells in my body, half the DNA telling that cell what to do is my mum. And my mum WOULD tell every one of my cells what to do.

16th October 2010

"When you're stuck in that spiral, you reach up". 

"What if there's nothing up there?"

"Just reach up."

Five years ago, the world stopped spinning and I fell down a hole. And there I stayed for two weeks. A very long, very dark two weeks. Two weeks of starved, quiet shock. Two weeks of hiding. Two weeks of numbness all day and sobbing all night. Two weeks of waiting to die.
Then I reached up.

I can barely believe it's been five years. Both light years ago and yesterday, and yet so much has changed. My uni module asked me what I considered to be the point at which I became an adult. For many, I suppose it's a birthday, maybe becoming a parent or buying a house. For me, it was getting divorced. Turning 18, moving out, getting a job, turning 21, buying a house, getting married, having a baby, none of that made me a grown up. I was a child playing house, playing mummies and daddies. Then overnight, I became entirely responsible for myself, for my toddler, for my unborn baby, for the bills, for our income, for cleaning, for meals, for locking up every night, for closing the curtains on the world and opening them again the next day, still going, still alive.

People told me then and tell me now, they don't know how I coped. As if I had a choice. Never tell me you wouldn't cope in the same situation. You have absolutely no idea what you can cope with until you must. Then you find your ability to cope is almost limitless, but that there is an emotional tradeoff. It's the tradeoff that makes people bitter, angry and depressed. It's the tradeoff I still fight with.

For me, I am glad it happened. I am glad my heart was broken. I am glad my security was shattered. I found myself in the darkness, and I liked who I found.


 I'm posting this today because I don't want to think about it tomorrow. 

Divorce

Since my divorce was finalised a few weeks ago, I've been trying to write an entry about the whole experience. This is my ham-fisted attempt at putting the last three and a half years into words.

My marriage ended due to adultery. There is no way to make it less stark. He cheated on me, repeatedly, over several weeks, and when I found out, something inside me snapped. I knew immediately that I could not remain with someone who could do that. It explained much of his foulness towards me, which I had been willing to live with for the sake of our marriage and children, but adultery was the final straw. So, off I went to hide at my mother's.
Our son was 18 months old, and I was 15 weeks pregnant. Both our children were planned, which made the rejection much harder to bear. For the first twelve hours, I went silent. I tried to cry, but nothing came out. I tried to scream, but nothing came out. I smashed some pictures up. I stayed awake all night. I didn't eat or drink. I am eternally grateful to my parents, who put me on suicide watch, and my siblings who simply rallied round without question. The first twelve hours passed, and then came a difficult and painful phone call which I cried throughout. I asked all the horrible questions that I didn't want the answers to, to try and get the extent of the pain out in one go. When did it start? How long? How often? How did you meet her? Why her? How could you?
Why? Why? Why?
Funnily enough, I never really got an answer to the last one.
I was left with no real income (£500 a month from my job), and more than double that in outgoings a month. I had to go and see a solicitor, to make him pay the mortgage and give me money to live on. I couldn't increase my working hours because I had no recourse for childcare outside what I already had. Phoning the tax credit office to explain that I was now a single parent was horrible. Phoning the council tax office to say the same, equally awful. Not being able to tell them where he was living because I simply had no idea...awful. Somehow, I found the energy to do all the practical bits, to tidy up and make order out of chaos and at least guarantee me and my son had somewhere to live and something to eat.
Emotionally, I was a mess. For three days, I was simply convinced I would die. How could I survive pain like that? I couldn't. I would have to die. That was the easy bit.
Then I realised that I wouldn't actually just die. I would have to live or I would have to kill myself. This became a constant circular chorus in my head. "If I live, I'm not good enough to raise two children by myself, I should die. If I die, I fuck them up for life - I should live." Equally, I had the constant chorus of "I cannot take care of two children, I should have an abortion. If I have an abortion, I will not be able to live with the decision."
I chose to live. I chose to keep my baby. These were the most difficult decisions I have ever had to make, indeed it never really felt like I was the one making the decision.
I spent a week crying. I spent another week crying, with occasional smiles. In those weeks, I met up with my ex, which ripped me open. A pattern was established. Very light healing, and then dramatic ripping open of scabs. Eventually, I scarred up over the pain. It became part of me, something in my history that I cannot erase, but must live with.

After two weeks, I went back to work, couldn't hack it and took another week off. Certain members of staff were wonderful, and have my lifelong love and respect. Others could not understand my decision to continue to talk to my ex, or why I was keeping my child, or why I chose to move away from the area. Work became something I did to get me out of the house, and to bury myself in. At home, I was surrounded by 'our' things. It stopped feeling like home without him. I did small things like put up new pictures, and buy new bed linen, but it was a ghost of a home.
Pregnancy was awful. I didn't want the baby. I just didn't. I didn't want to be pregnant, I didn't want to have to give birth, I didn't want to find out what happened next. His 20 week scan was an utter blur, brightened by the sonographer assuming me and my best friend were lovers. After I hit 24 weeks, the cut off for legal termination, I became increasingly depressed and suicidal. My ex's family lived far closer to me than my family. They struggled, understandably, with the elephant in the room that was the unwanted foetus - the literal elephant as I got bigger and bigger. My ex disengaged completely from the pregnancy. He felt the baby kick once, and that was the sum total of his post-separation involvement. My pregnancy did not stop him causing me huge amounts of stress. We saw each other regularly, and it was horrible.
In March 2011, I went for a regular antenatal check. My midwifery team knew how I was feeling, and were supportive and kind to me. The baby, however, was a bit too small and apparently breech, so I went for a checkup. I saw him for the first time since the unhappy scan in November, and he was beautiful and looked like his brother and I wanted him. It took me five months to want him. Six weeks later, he was born (two weeks late) in the middle of the night, at home and completely naturally. When he was born, his cord had two knots. One knot is frequently fatal. My little boy had somehow survived all the stress, plus this murderous cord. I don't know how he did it.
However, life continued to be difficult. My ex was awol during the birth, and finally caught up with us some ten hours later. His contact was erratic and brief. I moved house when the baby was six weeks old, and had copious support from my family and friends, and felt free. Birth itself was tremendously cathartic. I felt like I was pushing out the pain, and the agony, and the grief.
I filed for divorce when my baby turned a year old. I felt it was time.

There was two shining lights throughout the whole experience. The first was my eldest son. My clingy, silly, giggly little mummy's boy, who stayed glued to my side throughout the whole thing, and who accepted his baby brother without flinching. He was very brave himself. It must be terrifying to see your mother go through such hell at such a young age. I had to be strong for him in turn. He gave me purpose where there was none.
The second was my Tom. I went to school with Tom, and he lost his job as I lost my husband. We connected over this shared life-ruinery. Our first date was four weeks after my ex left. FILTHY HASTE according to some, but I was on the rebound, and twanging around the dating possibilities like a pinball. He lived two hundred miles away for the first two and a half years: a safe distance. But he was a constant source of comfort, laughter and distraction. He made me laugh, continuously, when nobody else could. We are getting married in August, by which time we will have been together almost four years. These have been simultaneously the best and worst years of my life. I hope the years we have together from now on are solely the best.

Losing your husband (or indeed, wife) abruptly breaks you. My husband didn't die, but it felt like he had. I didn't recognise him anymore. We had been together for nine years, and literally grown up together. All our shared memories and experiences were gone. All our in-jokes, gone. Our friends didn't exactly take sides, but it was difficult for them to remain neutral.
As time has gone on, we've forged a relationship that works for the children, but it is nothing like our marriage. We are like distant cousins. It's not always a smooth relationship, but arguments are rare. We have to be in each other's lives for as long as our children need their parents, and that is more important than bellowing at each other over old bitterness.
When he left, my entire life up to that point dissolved. I had to find a new one, and that is impossibly hard. He went directly into a co-habiting relationship, straight into a life not dissimilar to the one he left behind. I could not. I had to learn independence, something I'd never required until that point.

It still hurts. I still get upset, because it is hard work parenting in this manner. It is hard work ensuring they get enough time with their dad and his family to build a lasting attachment. It is hard work assuming most of the responsibility for two other lives, and making sure they understand the concept of step-parenting. I expect many more issues will arise as they get older.

Am I a better person for having gone through this? Unquestionably. One thing you learn very quickly when something like this happens is who your friends are. I am a lot pickier about who I keep close to me now, and more ruthless about cutting people out if necessary. I discovered that I can live by myself, that I do not need a boyfriend or husband to make me whole. I also discovered that not all relationships are poisoned by inequality. I can say, without doubt, that I would not being two thirds through a degree if I hadn't been divorced. My ex would not have supported me studying. It is due to all these things that I do not regret the end of my marriage. Neither do I regret it happening in the first place.
However, I lost everything. I lost my home, my community, my job, my sense of personal security, my financial security, many friends, memories, and feeling like I belonged. I have gradually built all that back up again, but in a way that cannot be taken away from me on a capricious whim.

I have not lost my faith in marriage.

Should anyone read this, going through something similar, wondering if they will ever feel whole again, I can assure you that you will. It takes time, but you will.

All Change

My little boy starts primary school tomorrow. He went to preschool a few days a week for the whole of the last year, but this feels different. The teachers are known as Miss or Mrs Surname instead of their first names. He and his classmates will be the smallest in the school, instead of all being approximately the same age. It feels more serious, more permanent, more terrifying for me.
He is, of course, not bothered. He's slightly baffled by the amount of stuff he has to have, and the idea of wearing full uniform, but he's mostly excited. He wants to learn to read, and to write.

For me, I feel like I'm losing a little part of my baby. When you have a child, that child is part of you even after they're born. You hurt when they hurt. You laugh when they laugh. Your urge to protect them, to keep them safe, to insulate them from harm is stronger than anything you've felt before. Those feelings don't fade with age, they just become normal.Until something big happens - the first time they walk down the road instead of going in the pushchair, the first time they climb the slide by themselves, the first sleepover with family, the first time you leave them at preschool. Primary school is a Big Thing for a mother. It's a little loss.

The actual schooling in reception (or Foundation, as they call it now) is exactly the same as preschool - open play, stories, group time, outside access at all times - but with more focus on reading, writing and maths skills. I will never get used to calling it literacy and numeracy.
I should consider it a new beginning. But it's hard to let go of his babyhood. His little brother is going to MISS HIM so much.They may have had many fights in the last six weeks, but generally they get on well and play well together.

The other big change is that my partner is moving in. This is seriously weird for me - and probably for him as well. Since my (almost) ex husband left me, almost three years ago, I have lived on my own with the kids. Initially, my partner lived 200 miles away from me, then he moved closer, and now we figure it's about time he moved in properly. I have to get used to sharing space again, to stop thinking of everything as mine and my responsibility. I lived with my ex for nearly seven years, and it took a while to shift out of that shared-life-headspace. Now I have to get back into it.
And of course, this means I am no longer going to be a single mother. I'll need to change my banner and everything!

Breaking up is hard to do

Why do some couples stay together, and others fall apart?

I DON'T KNOW, OPEN UNIVERSITY. WHY ARE YOU TAUNTING ME IN THIS FASHION?

Ahem. The fact is, I know why me and my ex failed. A lack of communication. I wanted to settle down, be a family, raise my kids and do the whole 'grown up' thing. My ex was not. Not even close. He wasn't ready to stop being the focus of my attention, couldn't understand why I needed to give my time to my child/ren instead. We never properly discussed it, just tried to batter each others square peg into our own round hole. No innuendo intended.
Then, I finally got pregnant again and I think he saw that we'd be getting worse and ran the fuck away to someone who was more willing to be devoted to him. It's very narcissistic, although you could argue that so is reproduction. You like yourself so much, you play god and produce someone in your own image, then fight them until they're adults to try and make them just like you.

The truth is, with me and my ex, that we could've loved each other to the death, but neither of us would have been happy. We suffocated each other. We could've stayed together for the kids, but they would have had to witness our combustion on a weekly basis. It'll have been a year next week, a year in which I have moved away, become financially independant and had our second child. It's been a very rough, painful year.
It was like an amputation to start with; I felt like there was part of me missing, an empty hole where he'd been. And, as with an amputation, I felt the itch there all the time. It was like he was dead, because the man I married had gone completely. I didn't know him anymore, it was so disorientating. I couldn't rid myself of all the 'what ifs' and they do you no good at all.

Now? We still see each other regularly, because of the children, and we don't fight. We don't even argue. I'm not bitter - what's the point? I have my beautiful little boys, and they are reward enough. I know what not to do next time, I know what behaviour to watch out for in a partner.
And I know who I am now. I'm not just someone's other half, not just someone's mother, not just a cook and dishwasher. I'm me, and I quite like me.

Rules of attraction

Adult relationships. That's the latest part of my pyschology intro course. Ugh.
My history either points to me knowing FAR TOO MUCH about the natural lifecycle of an adult relationship or NOTHING, because I have failed. I am Getting Divorced. I have known the happiest day of my life and watched it fall apart, all for a lack of communication. I saw this unit coming up slowly and didn't know whether to dread or anticipate.
According to this, a relationship requires attraction, and attraction stems from similarity, proximity and physical appearance.

Now, proximity. I have had two significant relationships in my life, including my marriage. Both have started long distance. Now, my marriage started in a bar in Boston. We had mutual friends, who owed us a blind date favour. We were thrown together. There was attraction, and a vast amount of adolescent lust. My more recent relationship stemmed from going to the same school, but the courtship occured primarily online. Ah the internet. Is there nothing it cannot do? So I have flouted the conventions of finding the familiar more attractive.
Similarity. Well, that's obvious enough. If you share no interests, no common thread, what do you talk about? Music tied me to my husband, and a similarly puerile sense of humour. Other than that, we had some fiery disagreement and since we were young, pretended interest in each other's hobbies to get along better. My boyfriend and I have practically everything in common, except religion and politics (which must never be discussed between friends). Similarity should equal a self-esteem boost, reducing the process of attraction to something of an ego-trip.

The most obvious basis of attraction is physical attraction. It's not ESSENTIAL, but it damn well helps. Apparently, men think women want financial security and women think men want sex. Me, I like security of a different kind. I like to know my partner won't bugger off with another woman. Maybe men interpret that as "I will be faithful to you, but if I'm not, I will buy you off handsomely".
Oh, I'm sorry, I'm doing that bitter thing again. Ahem.

Sexual attraction is all interlinked to fertility. A woman is most attractive (and possibly most viciously hormonal) when ovulating. She is also at her randy best. The human body is amazing at optimising fertility. Men, being fertile at all times, don't experience such fluctuations. LUCKY MEN. Apparently, men are attracted to women with a waist measurement that is approximately 80% of their hip measurement. Also, skinniness is only prized in cultures where food is not difficult to obtain. Suntanned skin is allegedly becoming unattractive due to the connotations of skin cancer. I knew my day would come again. Pale win!
We seek mates of similar attractiveness to ourselves. Idealism has little place in a long term relationship.

To summarise, your ideal mate is probably the guy you've been working with for two years, who always makes you laugh, who has pretty eyes and who shares your cultural references. Go on, ask him for a drink.