My Mum is Awesome. I just didn’t always know how much.

♥ My Momma ♥

My mum was a stay at home mum. From the day she had me, 39 years ago until the present day she hasn’t had much paid work. How LAZY. What a LUXURY. What did she DO all day? Did she spend her time going out for lunch, shopping and going to the gym like a footballer’s wife? I know she at LEAST went for coffee every morning after school drop off! All my other friend’s mums had jobs or even careers. My Grandmother and my Nana also worked. Why didn’t my mum work?

As a teenager I struggled with this. Those were my judgemental, critical, ill-informed thoughts.

Hark, the ignorance of youth!

In my younger school years, my future career choices had varied wildly… from vet (too thick), to speech therapist (why?!) to farmer (too veggie/precious city-ite). But I had no idea what I wanted to do career-wise because what I really wanted to do was be a mum. A mum like my mum. I thought her life was BRILLIANT! She got to stay at home and play with her kids and have loads of fun whilst all those other fools went off to work on the sweaty Tube every morning! Ha! She had it SUSSED! And I loved kids. LOVED them! I spent all my weekends babysitting from age 13 and my first summer job was childminding a 9yr old when I was 16. It was the PERFECT plan for me! I was going to be a stay at home mum too because I was BRILLIANT with kids too! Yes! I was going to have 20 of them (OK about 6) and we would have amazing “Swallows and Amazons” style adventures every day! Yes I just wanted to be a mum for my “job” please!

But then I started to grow up. And I began to see that this wasn’t actually a realistic or viable option. Or even something I should admit to amongst my ambitious, burgeoning Feminist, career-focused peers. I had to come up with a career choice to appease my teachers because I needed to choose GCSEs and A-Levels (but I didn’t really have a clue what I wanted to do). And I needed a career to live because I wasn’t ACTUALLY going to try and find a MAN to support me, duh!

And hang on, why DID my mum just do NOTHING all day….God didn’t she have any self-respect?! She’s just a lady of leisure! She should get a flipping paid job!

I had some harsh, harsh thoughts about my mother’s career or what I perceived as “lack thereof” back in the day. I had me some learning to do.

As I got older, the thick mist of selfishness which descends in teenagedom began to lift. And with age comes experience and wisdom. The older I got the more I saw and understood what my mum had REALLY been doing all those years when we were in school. And yes there had been a few lovely lunches and coffee every morning. But life had been pretty tough for her years before that. She’d moved from crazy, busy London to the sleepy valleys in Wales at the age of 19. Her and my Dad had no money (the story of the £1 a week family allowance and one rasher of bacon for the weekly macaroni cheese is now legend in our house!). Not only did she have to make new friends whilst my dad went to work every day, walk everywhere because she couldn’t drive (the doctors was a 2 mile walk) she also had to adjust to living on the breadline. On top of this she had to cope with 2 miscarriages and my pregnancy in which the hormone injections to prevent further miscarriages made her sick as a dog every day.

I’ve talked before about how I struggled with motherhood when I finally achieved my life’s goal. I wasn’t the natural I’d arrogantly assumed I’d be and it was a massive shock to me. The respect I had for my mother increased exponentially.

She was only 20 when she had me. She had none of the support or information that I’d had from my friends. There were no NCT class mates, extended family, internet forums, soft play centres, One Born Every Minute, breast feeding support nurses and all the rest of the barrage of PARENTING STUFF you’re given these days. In 1976, you had your family and your neighbours and you “just got on with it”. But living in the valleys, my mum didn’t even have family within walking distance. So she did just “get on with it”. AND she didn’t get postnatal depression or become a raging alcoholic! How the hell did she do that?! I had all that support and I still went mad as a box of frogs!

Her brilliance didn’t end with her “just getting on with it”.

Staying at home with 2 under 2 for four years is flipping HARD WORK. Something I actively chose to avoid. But once my brother and I were older and going to school, she didn’t get a job. And now, as a mother, I understand that decision. She chose to carry on the support she’d given us every day of our pre-school days. She wanted to be there for us when we got home after school every day of the week.

She started to help out in the school as an unpaid teaching assistant. She'd help teach kids to read (she read to us every night until we were about 10) and do things like pottery with them. She became actively involved with the PTA so she was always helping to organise fundraisers. But her real talent was the creative side of home-making. She would cook delicious meals every night from scratch. No ready meal crap allowed! Every birthday heralded a very good attempt from Jane Asher’s iconic cake decorating book and inevitably some sort of fancy dress celebration. She spent hours at the sewing machine creating things like fabulous dressing up outfits or dens, or painting things like “space ship” control panels with bottle top buttons and Kraft cheese steering wheels. She decorated the entire house herself, from wallpapering, glossing, and painting to making Laura Ashley curtains, bedspreads and Christmas table cloths. She was there for us every day after school, carting us off (on foot) to our various clubs/sports/music lessons etc. She was fantastic.

And only really recently, since my son has been in school, have I realised that actually, I would LOVE to be able to be there for them after school every day. It hadn’t occurred to me, when thinking about having kids in the future that I wouldn’t be. But then it hadn’t occurred to me that I’d find it all so hard either. I’m clearly not great at having things “occur” to me.

I do feel really sad that for the majority of my kids’ school lives I won’t be there to pick them up. I already feel the strain of trying to organise play dates for Gus on the one day I currently pick him up, juggling between my selfish desire to spend time with him to his need to socialise with school mates. In a way I feel like I made the decision to opt of the hard years by working part time so I should suck up the consequences now. With my mum, she did hard time with 2 tiny kids in the middle of nowhere with no money or PLAY CENTRES and she reaped the rewards of after school fun and holidays later.

But as I said. The main thing my experience as a mother has taught me is just how bloody awesome my OWN mother is. So mum, just in time for Mother’s day this year, a mahoosssive THANK YOU.

A selection of things she made, And a pic of her and me at my first birthday. ps I LOVED that tutu!

A Year On from "Drugs Saved My Marriage"

A Year On from “Drugs Saved My Marriage”.

It’s been a year since I wrote and published one of my most definitive blog posts to date. It was an emotional rollercoaster to write and after reading and re-reading and editing and making Emlyn read and re-read it, I pressed publish. I had some amazing feedback. It really seemed to resonate with people, especially mothers and I had some amazing comments from all corners: friends, family, strangers, even people I hadn’t heard from in years.

I can’t believe how much difference a year makes. I could never have predicted that 2015 would have been so full of so many brilliant times with my little Helicopter family and so many great opportunites. In fact, 2015 was a fantastic year for me both emotionally and physically. And I put a large part of it down to that post. I think it marked the start of a really exciting chapter in my life.  

I’ll pick up where I left the post in Feb 2015 to explain why I think it had such positive repercussions for me.

As I detailed at the end of the post, the drugs worked. I am still on the 30mg dosage and I am happy to be there. I am lucky because I have never felt like a “zombie” or that my emotions are dampened when I take anti depressants. I know there are lots of people who do feel this way when taking them and I guess that must be a result of different DNA?! I still have huge bursts of happiness, as well as some pretty angry times and even the occasional anxiety riddled day. But this feels normal to me and on the whole I feel fine.

Once I’d published that post, and received such amazing feedback from people (I even had it RTd by Bryony Gordon who told me I was BRILLIANT!) I started to feel more confident about my writing. I plucked up the courage to join Selfish Mother, an online blogazine which features the work some journalists who I admire. I published the post on there and felt even braver when it was received positively. My post is now going be published in PRINT in a book *scream* that Molly Gunn (creator of SM) is producing to help charity Mothers2Mothers.

My new found confidence helped me decide to attend a local blogging event, Blog-On Cymru.  I learnt loads and formed some great new friendships. I got even braver and booked a place at the biggest blogging event of the year, Britmums, before finding out that I was not only nominated but was a finalist in the Family blogger category. To say I was shocked is an understatement. I didn’t win, I didn’t deserve to. At that point I feel like I’d only written a handful of decent posts and my blog was really still in its infancy. But it was yet another boost. I’ve finally found a creative outlet that I makes me feel good about myself. That’s gotta help a girls emotional state, right?!

Since then I’ve decided to concentrate all my spare time on honing my writing. I am giving my writing a Feminist edge because gender identity was something that interested me since Uni. I’ve appeared on local radio giving my (Feminist) opinion about a recent news story and I’ve been accepted to write for an upcoming Feminist blogazine. My goal this year is to write for a printed publication, watch this space!

I’ve realised that I can use the social media skills to help other people who don’t have time/knowledge/inclination to spend all day flogging their business online. This is an area I am exploring further but I am super excited about!

Finally, At Britmums I bumped into a girl I’d met at the local blog event in March. She’d lost weight and looked awesome. I was inspired. She told me about the Slimpod which is a cognitive hypnotherapy download you listen to every night. You have to set goals and interact on the closed Facebook group and start to learn about eating in a different way.

A year on from having a gastric band, I’d not even lost half the weight I wanted to and was in a massive funk about it. Within weeks of listening to the pod every night, I was well on my way to changing how I ate forever. I decided that to help me boost my weight loss I would go back to my counsellor and talk through the reasons behind my food and drink decisions. It was pretty hardcore to begin with. I had to work through a lot of stuff I haven’t thought about for years, there were a tonne of tears and some big truths to face but ultimately it was so worth it. I finally managed to put to bed some ways of thinking that had been completely unhelpful and holding me back. By the end of the summer I had got to a total 4 stone loss. I blog about my weight loss here because I know it’s not that interesting for everyone!

At the same time that all of these things were happening, my home life has been fantastic. Gus and I are no longer at loggerheads over EVERY.LITTLE.THING. He’s still massively defiant and we had a few battles with night tantrums (night terrors manifesting as screaming fits of anger) but we got through it. We just communicate in such a better way now. My anger obviously was having a profound effect on how he responded to me so being able to stay calm(er) in the face of tantrums is infinitely better.

Joni’s turned 2 in October and we all know what a barrel of laughs it is teaching toddlers about “sharing” and “doing what they are told”! But instead of being a mad-faced tyrant at the end of my tether, I mostly just meet her “demands” with firmness and secret laughter at her out and out cheekiness.

My relationship with my husband is also great. He doesn’t have to live with a banshee! The atmosphere in the Helicopter household is so much more harmonious. We have had some great days out together this year, and even a week in a little holiday cottage didn’t drive us all bananas despite the 7 days of constant rain.

The run up to Christmas this year too was so different to 2014. This year I DID feel SO lucky that I was going to be spending my Christmas day with LITTLE kiddies! I loved all the activities we planned and we spent the majority of our Christmas holidays hanging out just the 4 of us and having fun. What a difference. What a massive difference.

I am excited about what the future holds. I am not the same woman who took her angry ass off the doctors last January. I am so glad. And of course, I am still VERY grateful to those drugs. ;)