Borrowed Time

When I was twenty five, my brother died.

This isn’t said starkly to garner sympathy or to make a huge impact, it just is what it is. It’s something that I don’t think about that often to be honest, sometimes I am truly taken aback that it happened at all, it’ll hit me like a ton of bricks in the middle of the night or if I hear a particular song, grief is weird like that. You patch the hole in your heart but sometimes the stitches twitch and the hole is not quite exposed again, but jiggled, like the rain would make a long mended broken bone ache

When I was thirty one, my boyfriend dumped me.

I’ve mentioned this before and now, a number of years later, it is one of those things that I view as very minor in my life, a necessary thing and the thing that led me to J and to my life now but at the time. It was like losing a family member all over again. We had been friends since we were nineteen, best friends that turned into something more, and I know, as sure as the sun will set each night, that friends is absolutely what we should have stayed. But we didn’t and the break up was traumatic and drawn out, hurtful when it didn’t need to be, things said in anger and what felt like heart break but wasn’t.

There are a million and one things in between those things and now that take a swab at your heart. Your children being unwell, a missed opportunity, a job offer that never comes, your jeans not fitting, things that are tiny and huge but always a little heart breaking in their own way.

My thirties have been infinitely better than my twenties. Would I go back to my twenties if offered? Not in a million years. If I could take J and my girls with me, have longer with them, have all the time in the world, then yes, but it doesn’t work like that.

Time is always borrowed, have this time but then your children will start school. Enjoy this time, it’s the last time you’ll have a January Tuesday in the rain with nothing to do but watch Paw Patrol and make a space rocket out of tissue paper. Enjoy the feeling of a baby squirming inside you because this might be your last baby.

Don’t take time for granted.