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...