DAY 20 - Coming back (21 DAYS OF RAGE)

This is the 20th instalment of a 21 day writing series about maternal rage and anger.

If I take the slightly long way home after dropping my daughter off at school, I pass by a house that’s fallen into such a bad state of disrepair that I used to assume it wasn’t inhabited. Then a few times I saw signs of life there and realised that, despite the overgrown garden and the cracked window and the rubbish in the driveway, someone really does live there.

We like to think we can own things but most things are just temporarily in our care. Every time I pass that 1930s semi-detached house, I imagine that one day we’ll be able to buy it, care for it for a while: do it up, love it, tidy the garden and make a home there. 

I live a life of such utter privilege compared to the vast majority of the human race that I worry it’s in bad taste to share about not feeling like I’m home. But the will to locate this sensation is strong, a lot of longing exists in me to find it. 

Me and my husband own a lovely ground floor flat in a great area. The ceilings are ridiculously high, you can see green space and trees from the windows, and we added a beautiful light-filled room at the back, where we have a small garden and an access to a bigger communal garden.

We can’t move out the flat for at least a few years, until a structural issue has been monitored and fixed. Last summer we were set to move to a house up the hill next to the woods, but it all fell through at the last moment, in a great moment of stress and drama and disappointment. We are bursting at the seams in our space here, the layout is not ideal for a family to attempt to live and work and play and sleep. It is damp and badly-ventilated because the windows don’t open.

We are kind of stuck, in a place that's good, and not at home. We are waiting, and waiting in my body feels as if I’m holding in, bracing against something. It’s the opposite of being able to root down, to relax into the ground.

There’s an element of choice here, as with every feeling. My movement practice too felt as if it had become stuck and constrained. I have been playing with holding my arms out to the world around me and moving in a bigger space, widening my vision, of actually seeing where I am and feeling that it’s safe to move and pause here. Everything moves in the end, inside us and around us. Sometimes we can give a lot of ourselves to something and sometimes only a little. Often, it’s possible to find refuge in a moment.

In the moments which feel like my biggest parenting fails, it is tempting to abandon myself in shame. The biggest moments of overwhelm are so big in my body that they feel almost unbearable to stay with. But I am all of me, whether I like it or not. The place where I can choose to feel I am really here, where I can find some peace and calm is the same place that sometimes feels like a stranger, that feels wild and uninhabitable. 

But if it’s all the same place, then we have to learn to live with each other. I can brace against it and only see one version of things, or I can root down a little and live my life here, warts and all. That way when my children come home to me, to the arms and the tummy and the legs that curl around theirs at night, this is a whole place, integrated at least to an extent, loving and raging and smiling and fighting and holding and being here, in this moment together.