Geraniums in my garden

On this date, twelve years ago, I was in the psychiatric ward of North Park Private Hospital.  I'd had my first child, and although I'd wanted to be a mother for as long as I could remember (even though I found babies kind of annoying and squishy, but I was sure that would change when I had one of my own).  It didn't. Motherhood is the place where you need to know who you are and what kind of mother you want to be.  You need to back yourself and your decisions. You need to scream for an epidural if you want one. You need to tell the brestapo to fuck off if you want to use bottles because you can't stand the feeling of breastfeeding and it's making you insane.  You need to look in the mirror and be able to tell yourself that this is hard and messy but you can do this because you are strong and that YOU ARE THERE FOR YOU.  It doesn't matter what happens, you back yourself and you know you can do this. I had none of that.  I had a chameleonic sense of sel...

This past few months, I've been working hard in the gym, I've been working my arse off, literally.  I have a really addictive personality and so it has been an amazing shift to move away from defining myself as a fatty who loves chocolate and who isn't active, to a person who loves to eat healthily and do the exercise at every opportunity. With any shift in self-definition, there is grief.  I have experienced grief at all the major turning points in my life.  I felt grief when I swapped my single girl life for that of a married woman. I felt grief when I became a separated woman. I felt grief when I became a mother, and again when I became a mother of two. Every time I am assigned a new role, I feel a sense of fear.  Even if it's me who assigns it.  When I decided that I was sick and tired of feeling fat and old and ugly and invisible, and I wanted more energy and I wanted to change my life, and gosh darn it, I wanted to attract a hotter type of emotionally ...

So, a while ago, I wrote a post about "shouldn't this be getting easier?".  What I was talking about was the navigation of a post separation life, but what I really mean was....when does life get easier?  And do you know what? Sometimes life isn't easy. And it continues on being not easy, and then instead of getting a break, things get even more not easy.  In fact, they become downright difficult and hard and anxiety ridden and awful. And do you know what it means when life is hard and shit and awful like that? It's the universe prompting you to change. To let go of what "easy" might be.  If you're a single mum, and you have two young kids, and you're on a fixed income, and you're still trying to be a twentysomething with a fabulous life when they go....you're going to have lots of troubles. You're going to be going back and forward between enjoying your money, to being broke, you're going to be angry and sad and resentful. It...

So, welcome back to another episode of introspection and analysis, brought to you by a slightly neurotic but definitely positive woman who is kinda ok with being forty one and single. There has been so much going on in my life lately, that my blog is where I come to sort out the little threads that look messy and untidy, until I turn them over and see that my higher power is actually making a kind cool abstract needlepoint tapestry thingy. Like, look at this piece of art.  I like to think that my life is in the midst of creating one of the corners of this.  Sure, all the pieces that I'm working on sometimes don't make sense.  It looks messy, it doesn't always make sense to me.  There are things that I think are "the answer", only to find that I can't continue with them. I have to knot that thread off.  Most recently, I had to give up my job, working two days a week in admin, doing a job I loved, with people who I adored. It was a bright, shiny, splash...

It's my 41st birthday and I am like a mythical phoenix rising from the ashes of my 40th year. Jealous of my poetic sentence and my fabulous balloon animal?  Well, in searching for "41 Balloons", I also came across a news story from 2010 of a woman who had swallowed 41 Balloons of heroin.  Hey, I know how to have a good time, but that's taking things a bit far.  I'd rather swallow 41 slices of cake.  Ha! So, today I write to you from a little house in North Shepparton.  I've been separated from my husband for eight months exactly today, I moved out on the 5th of November 2016.  Not gonna lie, this has been the most difficult and challenging year of my entire life.  I have felt so sad that I thought I was never going to keep on living. I've lost my temper spectacularly, I've made mistakes, I've lost a beautiful kitty who I thought would be with me forever. I've had intense fails in the area of internet dating, I've met wonderful people...

It's been five months since I last blogged, on what was going to be my daily mindfulness and gratitude blog. Ha!! The only thing that I seem capable of completing at the moment is a family size cheesecake. Just kidding.  Although the cheesecake was delicious, I have managed to stay sober for a long time, to parent my kids for 10 years, and to keep living even when things seemed truly crap. At the moment, I am recovering from having a tooth pulled. I hate dental stuff. I am slightly phobic.  I had a filling about two weeks ago on a tooth that was already heavily decayed and filled.  The dentist seemed sure that he could save the tooth, I thought it would need to be pulled.  He numbed me up and started on his journey to save that tooth.  As he started pulling out the decay, drilling and scraping, he started seeing that the tooth was almost more decay than tooth.  He started saying "oh dear, this is a lot of decay".  He started saying that they would ...