Life got crazy and the unessential parts of me got neglected. Not that I stopped writing blog posts in my head at 2am, I just stopped getting out of bed to type them out. Which I’m certain is sensible, but it’s also pretty slack.

I managed to get married, without any hiccups, except the rain and an impatient celebrant.

And then I miscarried.

There is a certain miserablness to watching a pregnancy slide down your legs. Even more so when you wonder, if you’d rested more, would this be happening? (probably) The week leading up to the wedding was crazy, with hospitalisations (Isaac) and bleeding (me) and vomiting (me) and arguments (also, me) and shouting (Amy) and stress (Nathan). But we did it.

And then I took a mental holiday, as December tried to suck out my soul and my brain simutaneously. It wasn’t pleasant, as I finished miscarrying at a school pageant in which religion was mentioned more times than I felt comfortable wish.

But we all survived (except the fetus, which didn’t have a chance) and my body decided to magically work and get pregnant again. Not that the actual conception was magical (fun is a better word). There will be no religions based around an immaculate conception here. The fact I ovulated at all is magical, let alone twice in 8 weeks.

My body is kind of a fuckwit, given to practical jokes and refusals to do anything normally.

Now I sit here, nine weeks pregnant, hot, pukey and still pretty sure I’m missing both my soul and my brain.

Never mind. They can go and join my sanity in the cupboard, if December decides to release them.

Or, you could call it the day of quietly stressing out and then forgetting that you need to write a blog post.

Crap.

Isaac is improving and the wedding is in four days.

This is where I can be found this afternoon, watching the dress rehersal for This Uncharted Hour at the Theatre Royal.

Tickets are limited, so if you’ve got a spare hour this weekend and you’re in Tasmania, head along. You can hear what I’ve got to say about it on twitter this afternoon.

The point of getting up forty minutes before everyone else was to write a blog post, I grumble to myself.

It appears that the plans I make for myself don’t always work as well as I would like and my son wakes up three minutes before my alarm, demanding a warm drink and the middle of the bed as he rubs his eyes.

My daughter follows shortly thereafter, shouting at me that she doesn’t want to get dressed and WHERE IS MY PILLOW?

I’m not entirely sure how her pillow has disappeared in the five minutes between getting out of bed and shouting at me, but it turns out that she means the other pillow (no, not that one, the other OTHER pillow) that her brother is lying on.

Hilarity ensues, if by hilarity you mean heartbroken screaming and a little bit of shoving. Which I do.

‘It will be fine, STOP SHOUTING. There, do I have your attention? Share the pillows, make some breakfast, Mummy needs five minutes to THINK.’

Five minutes is a very long time when you are only five and three and I manage to get thirty seconds alone, hiding in the bathroom, before I am needed (loudly) elsewhere.

Such is my life and I suspect, such are the quality of blog posts you can expect from me this month.

There is silence in the house and I am still bleary eyed, but I have made the effort to get out of bed 40 minutes early so that I can start writing here. It’s got nothing to do with the fact that I am so busy today that I won’t have time later. Hello November. You’ve sort of snuck up there, haven’t you?

***

There is a psych appointment scheduled today. It’s been cathartic to go along each fortnight and just talk. Like every other mother however, last week I found myself dicussing my children. My fears and my stresses and the frustration I feel when I walk into the bedroom to find my daughter perched on top of my closet, eating my chocolate. She’s the perfect candidate for “owling” except for the screaming when she realises that she can’t get down.

Real owls have wings daughter, if you’re going to climb up, you have to learn how to get down. Just don’t break anything.

I spent an hour talking about my children last time, before the therapist gently mentioned that maybe we ought to talk more about me?

Silly girl. She’s not worked with many (any?) mothers, I would put money on it. The children are me and I am them. The fears for their future are not things I can separate from my personal anxiety and the frustration I feel at untriggered meltdowns is just as real as frustration with other adults. Tempered with a lot more love, of course.

I shouldn’t call her silly, in fact she is lovely – even if it is a bit disconcerting to be discussing the tangled web inside my brain with someone my own age.

But that is okay.

The main question is: Do you think she will help me work out how to get a cat into the roof, to eat the baby starlings that have hatched right above my desk? Because it’s hard enough to write a blog post half asleep, without adding shouting babies to the mix.

Have you read this post by Sara Douglass?

She died today.

I hope her family were there to hold her hand and watch her last breath. I hope she wasn’t alone.

The Silence of the Dying

It’s a slow slide down into the dark places in my mind. Moments stretch into infinity as I imagine the worst case scenarios and how I would deal with them. I’m not sure how I got here, all I know is that I’m sitting at the bottom, looking at the light a very long way up.

It’s always unpleasant down here and the road back up is long and cold, usually.

The screaming outside of my head is never as bad as the screaming inside of it. The way the sound reverberates around, shaking all coherant thought with it, until I just want to curl up in the corner and drown it out with someone elses words.

It will be okay. It will be fine, I will be FINE, this is all fine. One foot and then another. It will be okay.

I’m regretful and despite regret being useless here, it insists on hanging around and I’m raw enough without adding regret to the mix.

Some nights, I dream ghosts and then I have days like today. Dreaming the past, I’d like to stay there. Nothing was broken there (only… everything was. We just didn’t know it yet.)

That’s the problem with dreaming the past, rather than the future. You can’t get there anyway, so there is no use trying.

Better to dream the future.

At least then you’re left with possibility.

As one year ends and another begins, I start to wonder if I’ll ever forget the exact shade of ivory that hands turn after death. Or how a newly dead person looks like wax, not like the grey sunken shapes we see in movies and fiction.

Memories flow and threaten to drown me, the gurgle of a death rattle and the urge to vomit, laugh and cry all at once. How I didn’t cry, for weeks. How I can’t think about death now, without crying.

It feels like not coping, like anger, like heartbreak.

It feels like grief.

***

Two years pass and here we are, almost at the year of thirds.

You expect it to get easier. Not harder and yet, it is.

Nothing we can do, but put one foot in front of the other, and try and see the beauty in things, rather than taste the bitterness.

Hello?

Tap. Tap.

Is anyone in there still? Hello?

Oh look. There you are. You haven’t disappeared after all.

The cursor has been mocking me here for days now, little shouts of ‘you can’t write anything, ner ner’ and ‘look at you, looking at me. Go and do something useful already’.

I should have learned to not listen to a blinking cursor by now. Especially a blinking cursor that spends it’s days swimming in the shark tank that is the Interwebs.

***

There was an explosion.

BANG!

And suddenly everything was different. A mini earthquake triggered and the world beneath my feet rocked and things I took as given disappeared.

I am learning to be okay with this.

Change is not a bad thing. Change is merely change. I’m wearing my designer shoes and ignoring the breast flaunting happening in front of my eyes, as I move through a new world, shaped and moved by things beyond my comprehension.

You could say that life is different now.

Or maybe life was never going to be what I thought it was.

This is okay.

We are all going to be okay.

It’s a balancing act, knowing what to write about on the internet. An intricate dance of stories and perspectives, making sure you don’t put words in someone’s mouth and side-stepping the issue of privacy invasion. Knowing when to speak and when to hold your tongue, when to write and when to walk away.

It’s about more than not wanting to damage your own brand with drama.

It’s about knowing that truth can be fluid sometimes and not wanting it to be; wanting truth to be truth and lies to remain unspoken.

It’s a fine line.

***

My son is sad and his warm mass draped on my lap and snuggled to my chest brings to the fore all my maternal feelings. It doesn’t matter than he is dribbling in my cleavage or that I am not able to move, he is warm and sad and I am his mother and I can fix this, this time. When he is older and I cannot surround him with my arms, then he will be sad and my heart will break at how useless magic kisses have become.

I put him to bed with a warm bottle, knowing that he is tired and listen to him cry anyway. This is hard. This breaks my heart. This is probably best for all of us, that he sleeps now.

***

I send my daughter outside, to play fortheloveofgod go and play. She lies on the trampoline for an hour, not moving and I watch her as I wander around the house. She is tired and miserable and sad and bendy. She comes back inside and we lay together on the couch and I feel the heat of her. A temperature rising, her joints aching. I thank everything that I have panadol handy and I dose her up and lay her in bed. She is limp and miserable and I lay with her for a time.

Motherhood is hard.

Motherhood is beautiful.

***

The truth is hard.

The truth is beautiful.

With all this talk of authenticity, I can only be myself and this is how I am in real life too. I might not talk about all of it, but I’m honest at the core.

There are things happening and things brewing and at this point, I’m not sure I’m content to sit back and say nothing, but the drama and the angst, I don’t want it.

So I’m saying: Watch and listen and see what happens. Sit here alongside me and we’ll eat popcorn and wait for the fallout. Because it’s coming and it’s not going to be pretty.