This is a free reader post, but on Saturday I will be sending out my Full Moon Book Club to paid subscribers. Packed full of writing prompts, insight into the creative practice, inspiration, video recordings and reflections on Twelve Moons, it’s a lovely way to connect with other readers and writers. I hope you will join us.
The main road at the end of the street where I live is called Wagonway Road. It leads down to the old station at the bottom of a hill that is now a huge second-hand bookshop. The houses on either side of Wagonway Road are kissed with coal dust from years ago, the stone bricks tinged black. A large house set back from a square of neatly trimmed lawn used to be a workhouse, but you wouldn’t know that from the gleaming windows and potted begonias outside the doorway.
When I walk into town with my daughters, the two youngest girls like to walk along the wall that fringes the front yards of the terraced houses on Wagonway Road. The wall is really just slabs of stone that used to act as bases for railings that were taken away and melted in the 1940s to be moulded into ammunition. You can still see nobbles of smoothed metal on the surface of the stone, lined up like buttons on a shirt.
Each time my daughters skip along the stones, I think about the last time I will hold their child hands, the drawn-out act of letting go. And as I type this I remember holding my granny’s hand just before she died, cool and papery thin, smoothing my fingers over the gentle rivers of her veins. I read a prayer to her because my mum had told me that hearing is the last sense to fade before we die and I wanted that to be true. I didn't believe the words in the prayer, but I wanted to, and I wanted to believe that Grannie would hear my voice even if she couldn't feel my hand stroking hers. Last week I sent my mum a photo of my newly manicured nails, and she sent me a message back saying it was like looking at her own hands. So now whenever I look down at the shiny red Shellac I think of my mum, and I wonder what else she has passed on to me.
As my children teeter on the wall, they sometimes hold onto me and other times let go and run ahead, leaving my hands unsure of their purpose. After years of caring, and many more of mothering, it is hard to know what to do with them. My identity is currently confused. I step out of the wardrobe into a magical land, then return to its confines and struggle to adjust my eyes to the darkness. Yesterday I posted a story on Instagram about crying in a car park, because I was overwhelmed by everything and everyone my hands are required to hold. I received a message from someone who told me she found it harder to be a carer following a period of extra support or respite, and as I sobbed outside Homebase, I realised that this was exactly how I felt.
I’ve written before about dancing between the woman and the mother, and whether that is even possible, but I think the immersion back into full time single parent-caring is harder still. The hands are there, and then they are taken away, and the reality of staying on the wall without anything to hold onto is brutal. Sometimes you have to step away from your life to understand it, and then you realise that the reason you have not tried to understand it earlier is that it is impossible: you are holding too much for one person and there is no good reason why you have not yet dropped every single thing.
Over the weekend there was an extra pair of hands in my house. When the hands went away on Tuesday I just felt grateful to have held them for a few days. But yesterday, the reality of those hands no longer being near me, helping me and holding me, hit me hard. Usually I wake up early and attack the day, juggling domestic tasks, education, life admin, carer admin, mothering, medicating, writing, working, all of the things that make up my life. Usually I don’t stop to think about the balls spinning above my head, and somehow they stay there, swirling around me as I flit through life. But yesterday I woke up an hour later than usual, didn't feel buoyed by the sunlight streaking through my blind, couldn’t drag words from my head onto the screen, struggled to make a list of the many administrative tasks I had to complete, wasn’t inspired to teach my children. I spoke to a couple of people before breakfast who needed me to listen, so at least I felt like a decent friend, but I was always on the brink of tears and the day was heavy and hard.
It wasn’t that my day was much different to any other day, although it came on the back of some fairly hefty professional rejections that have made me feel temporarily small. On consideration I think I was flailing around in the space where those hands had been. I find it very hard to accept help from others, because for so long it has just been me and my children, a fierce little tribe against the rest of the world. But I am trying to learn that allowing people to take some of the load is, in itself, an act of love. A meal cooked, a coffee made, a child soothed, these tiny actions that make up my day can easily go unnoticed, but they matter. And these incremental gestures of support are more than missed when they disappear, they also act as reminders of how tired my own hands have become.
But I am grateful for the extra pair of hands, even though they cannot always be here. And whilst the come down is always painful, I will fight for the precious time I spend away from my caring responsibilities because it has been very hard won. The nature of caring, of mothering, is that it is frequently undervalued and invisible. But when I wobble precariously along the wall, holding too much, I will always be grateful when your hand takes mine, and I will miss it when it has gone.
Sending sparkles. The solstice is too huge this year. ✨🙏💫