Letting Go

One of the defining memories of my life is sitting on a mattress on the floor surrounded by boxes in a flat that we were about to move out of. By we I mean, my boyfriend of fiveish years and me. We had given notice to move and the plan was to move in with his mother in a house that he owned. I had been reluctant but had come round to the idea, my then brother-in-law had painted a room to my specifications, my ex had wanted to appease me, help me with the difficult decision we had come to.

On a Saturday morning, he texted me to say that he had sent me an email and within that email, amongst many failures of my character, was the plain and brutal fact that he did not want me to move in to that house with him.

It turns out he had met someone who moved in really quite awkwardly quickly but that’s a story for another day.

When I think of him, I am so grateful for that email, that decision. It led to almost a year of heartache, decisions and ultimately it led me to Jody. I have tried hard to keep my heart just a little hard, a little closed off, leave a tiny piece that he hasn’t got yet so that if it all ended, I wouldn’t be quite as broken. Wouldn’t be left on a mattress on the floor in a near empty flat that had once been a home.

I got into bed last night, full of cold and feeling sorry for myself and Jody, who had been in bed a little while, pulled me towards him and cuddled me close to him. I laid there, the length of my body against the length of his and realised that I could just lay there and cry. Not because I was sad, but because I was home.

The realisation was also that I had given myself completely to him. Despite myself. And if it did all end, then of course I would break. Of course I would. But I would anyway, so I may as well just give in, lean in and let myself be held. If I wasn’t as completely broken as I was before, it wouldn’t be because the love wasn’t greater, it would be because I knew how to survive, I’d become stronger and more complete, grown up and become whole.

I won’t paint us as perfect. We are not. Just today, we have nitpicked at each other, we have disagreed on things and I have stood in our room and screamed silently at the wall. But we have also hugged in the kitchen as I cooked lunch for the girls, we have sat on the floor and played with our children, I have said I love you as he busied himself with drawing at the table with Isla. We have rough patches, long ones sometimes and we fight and we go silent and there have been times, fortunately not many, when I have genuinely feared that we were done.

But we are stronger now. Stitched together with good and bad and everything in between. And we work at it. We carve out time for us, we don’t rely on the way we were before children, we’ve changed as they’ve grown and we acknowledge that. I love him more today than I have ever done.

I am so glad that I got that email. I’m so glad that I am here.

Fine-Apple

I keep thinking today, on Love Day as they call it at my kids’ school, about me seven years ago. I was single but miserably so, there was no empowered femininity about me at all and I make no apologies about that, I had been single and dating for about ten months and frankly, I was done. I enjoyed some of it, I liked the initial flirty bit, when you were both just pictures on an app and I enjoyed getting ready for the first date but that’s about it. The dates themselves were awkward and stilted, there was a feeling pretty much immediately as to whether or not you liked him or he liked you and then there was the after date wait. The bit where you hoped that he would text or you hoped that he wouldn’t and you wouldn’t be the one saying that you liked him but there was just no point in a second date.

There are photos of me from that day. I’d started a facebook group for the store that I’d recently started managing and the staff and I decided that we would advertise a few bits on there. I look very thin and sad. I can remember that day vividly, the way I looked very much reflected the way I felt. It felt hopeless.

I didn’t know, of course, that less than two weeks later I would go on a blind date with Jody. And I very much didn’t know that he would be the person, my Valentine if you will, seven years later.

I think one of the reasons that Jody and I work is because we both understand what it is to be lonely. To stand in a room full of people, people who know you and like you, and feel as if you could scream at the top of your voice and nobody would hear you. We both understand how it is to be hurt. But most importantly we both understand that relationships aren’t easy. And that you can’t be the perfect couple. Nobody can. And that you have to work, work hard sometimes to keep things good.

Anyway, all this to say to hang in there. If you’re lonely and you don’t want to be, hang in there. There really is someone out there.

(Fine-Apple is a reference to the card Jody got me – if you could be any fruit, you’d be a fine-apple. Goodness me, I do love him)

The Fall Guy

Once, back in 2011, after the epic dumping by e-mail, I sent out the message I’d sent out maybe a dozen times before. Asking if he was around and if I could see him. I did, we talked, we always did, and then we slept together, we always did.

We would then not see each other again.

Until the next time.

That was the last time. I panic sometimes, when things feel scary and I’m tired and we have a tiny newborn, that I don’t have his number anymore. I have absolutely no desire to see him, none at all, I never did really until I was waiting anxiously for him to reply, but I always had the option. And I worry, when I’m dumped and alone and I have nowhere to go, that he won’t be there.

I picture him exactly as he was. Over seven years ago. And, of course, he will have changed, he might be married, have kids, he will look the same I guess, but subtly different like we all do, the fine lines around our eyes a little deeper, the eye bags a little harder to eradicate.

I have never loved anyone the way that I love Jody and I have never been loved the way that he loves me and we are good and strong and happy. There is nothing to worry about. But yet. But yet. We aren’t married, though we talk more and more about taking that step, we don’t own a home, it is our daughters that bind us physically. I don’t have a back up plan, I don’t want one, this is plan A and I want it everyday, even when things are hard.

I saw a quote on Instagram today and it went like this (ish, sorry if it’s wrong):

“Remember when what you have was all you ever wanted”

I have thought about this all day. And it is. It definitely is. I am so unbelievably blessed, so unimaginably lucky. And so very scared. Most of the time. Of how much I would lose if this disappeared. When we were first dating, Jody and I, I had a plan B, I knew what I would pack, just one small bag, I would leave my job, immediately as it wouldn’t matter at all, and I would disappear. I had a mental list, two bras, I’d wear jeans and pack leggings as they could roll up and wouldn’t take up space. I once offered him £1000 to follow his dreams and he turned me down flat. One day I’ll write about our dating life, before kids, before grown up life.

We never would have worked, the fall guy and me. We talked about it once, long long ago, and we admitted that we might have once wanted it, but probably at different times.

I think that that’s enough, I think we can leave it at that.

Things

1. I am totally overwhelmed at the prospect of this weekend. I am so very tired and there’s so much to do, and the girls are exhausting (and wonderful) and the very idea of it is making me anxious.

2. I am ridiculously stupidly broody. Now I fully recognise that this is the most nonsensical thing possibly ever written down but it is what it is. My sister-in-law’s sister had a baby yesterday and I am jealous. She also called her Grace which is making me feel odd too.

3. I have very strange thoughts on twins. Now, honestly, newborn and baby twins are the hardest work you will ever do, the light at the end of the tunnel was so far away as be not there at all and I don’t want to do it again. When we went for the scan for Poppy, I hoped against hope that there would be just one. And there was. And I’m relieved everyday that she is just here by herself. But it’s a club, the twin club, and I miss being a member.

4. Healing from a c-section is really tough. Things still hurt, there’s still blood (sorry!) and I have still got a squishy tummy. Not the usual type of squish, but like plasticine, whatever waistband I’ve worn that day will be indented into my skin until I wear the next pair of trousers with a different waistband. I want to exercise but I can’t yet and I’m frustrated.

5. I have 13 days to submit a (completely new) excerpt of 10000 words to a writing competition. I can’t use the book I’ve written so I’m aiming to do 1000 words a night like the olds days. Can you imagine how I’m so tired?!

Canterbury

He wasn’t married. And nothing happened. Not physically at least. But I think that my heart was broken.

When I was questioned in the lift as to the status of my relationship with Kenny; I was actually on my way to my room to talk to another man. Another manager. One who had totally captured my heart. I thought he was spectacular, older than me, good looking and oh, we could talk for hours. And we did, we’d get to work early and speak on the phone, a cup of tea in hand, the jobs of the day sometimes talked about, sometimes it was our lives.

He told me once that he wished he’d have met me first. Not his girlfriend. He had a girlfriend, a very long term settled girlfriend. They lived together in a Kent town. I don’t remember her name. He told me he loved her but wasn’t necessarily in love with her. The distinction doesn’t matter. There was never any possibility of him leaving her.

We had a team meal in London once and we walked through the park in the dark, a group of us but everyone knew that it was us two. We were obviously a pair. I think we might have held hands for a bit, a tipsy slip up from the professional status quo.

My area manager confronted me about him in my office. I played dumb and told her that we were friends. I have no doubt that she didn’t believe me. I wouldn’t have believed me. I think, now looking back, she was looking out for me, not him. I did not think that at the time.

I was looking at a flat with my mum. I can remember it as if it were yesterday. My phone rang as we left and I stood on the sunny street as a mutual friend told me that he’d married her on a beach in Mauritius whilst on holiday. A holiday he’d told me he was dreading. Just a few days before.

It was all a lie or none of it was. He maybe was dreading it. He maybe wasn’t. It may well have been the happiest day of his life. It certainly should have been. My wedding day will be mine. He maybe was in love with me too. There’s a part of me that thinks he might have been.

He was an education. A learning curve. I hope he’s happy wherever he is now

X Marks The Spot

It occurred to me the other day after writing the post on Mother’s Day, that in it I talked about my ex and that I have mentioned him more than once when I’ve talked about relationships. I don’t think about him at all in my day to day life, when I’m just living my life with my girls, but when I sit down to write here, especially when I want to write about relationships and all that comes along with that, it is inevitable that my thoughts will sometimes go to him and to the life that we shared for a time ten years ago.

I always find it odd when people whitewash a previous relationship and make it all bad, a terrible time that they regret wholeheartedly. I don’t do that, the relationship I had was good until it was bad and bad sometimes amongst the good. I can, hand on heart, say that it was the wrong relationship for me, and indeed he was the wrong man for me, but I want to look back, when I occasionally do, fondly. Because that’s surely better, isn’t it? J is is the same, I don’t mind at all if he mentions his ex, she was a vegetarian funnily enough, and as we begin to go meat free, he has mentioned her a lot, telling me what she found was good to eat, how she cooked certain things and it’s fine, she was a huge part of his life for a long time and she shaped him, in part, to who he is now. It would feel wholly wrong if he never mentioned her at all.

We met very young, just out of our teens, and we were friends for a long time. I used to go back to his flat after we went clubbing and I’d sleep there, platonically and we’d have dinner a couple of nights a week. Mates. I dated a friend of his for a while, that was , retrospectively, awkward but hey, we were young. We nearly became more than friends a couple of times and then he embarked on a long relationship with someone else and we drifted apart, naturally and with little animosity. Nothing was said even, it just happened.

Then one night, I met him out unexpectedly. He was single, as was I and that was largely that. The next day, a Sunday, he picked me up and we went to his auntie’s house for lunch, which was bizarre but strangely nice, I still remember their kitchen and their funny yappy dogs. We moved in together after a little while, and then four or so years later we split up.

He contacted me once, a few years ago, to tell me that I should have worked harder at the end of our relationship and that if I had, we might still be together. He was wrong. But it struck me then, that perhaps, I did mean more to him than I thought I did at the time. And maybe he regrets things. We don’t speak now, a friend of his watches my instastories sometimes and that amuses me, my little life maybe being relayed back but other than that, it’s done.

He was, though, the story of my twenties. And I don’t think that I should erase him from my brain and from my memories because nothing that he did hurts me anymore or even invokes any sort of reaction. It’s just history. Factual history.

J and I had a row last night, about things that I can’t go into here, but all was quickly well and I am so thankful for him. For this frustrating, kind, funny man who I spend my life with. Our relationship isn’t perfect, but I don’t find myself whispering to his sleeping back in the dark because I’m too scared to say it out loud, I don’t find myself second best to almost everyone, taken for granted at every turn.

So by talking about my ex, it doesn’t mean that I’m harbouring any feelings for him, hoping that he reads here and well, I don’t know really. I don’t. I hope that he’s happy, of course, and I hope that the person he’s with now fulfils him in a way that I didn’t and that they are both happy.

Cos I am.

Away

We were away this weekend. We went to Windsor on Sunday for two nights to celebrate our sixth anniversary and it was a sort of baby moon, not that that is really a thing in this country. It was wonderful, absolutely freezing, there is a big freeze here at the moment but that sort of enhanced it all, it made it utterly memorable. Walking around Windsor Castle in the snow was almost magical. And cold. Magically cold.

It’s less magical at home with a wind chill of -12.

Anyway. Six years. This is nothing, I do get that, not when people have been married for years and years, or with someone since their teens. But for me, this is something quite significant. I never imagined, when I went on a blind date six years ago, that we would be where we are now. About to have our third child, two beautiful girls and we’re really good. Things are hard sometimes, boring grown up things but then we go away and we are just good. Happy to be together, having fun, he makes me laugh so much and we talk a lot about our future, it’s one of those truly lovely things to talk about the future with someone you love.

I thought about writing a lot while we were away. I read a whole book during the two nights (there were some issues with the pillows…) and it made me think about my own book and my own writing future. The book was good and the writing too, it was confident writing, the type of writing that shows someone totally at home with their own style. I don’t assume that I have a style, but it made me think about passages of my own writing. There are bits that I reread and I love, and I can see a writer that is confident and happy with what she is writing and there are bits that I read where the writing is tentative and nervous and I can just tell that I wrote it in a completely different head space.

Driving home, I wanted desperately to write. Wanted to sit in the chair where I wrote my book and edit the beginning to send it off again. To continue on with the second book that I’ve started. And then I actually got home, to the madness, to my girls and the urge just disappeared. No, the urge is there. It’s always there. But the confidence to do it. I am almost set now on finding a job in October, when the baby is six months old. The thought of this is truly awful to me. The girls have had me all of the time for almost four years and this baby will get six months. That doesn’t seem fair. To me. To her. I envy and respect all working mums, I’d love to be one, but it didn’t work for me, for us and for our family.

Anyway, this is a stream of consciousness. I didn’t sit down knowing what I’d write about and I’m sorry if that shows. I wanted to write about J and to talk about our six years, I wanted to talk about writing but further than that, I didn’t know.

Right, enough rambling.

See you all tomorrow.

Hearts and Flowers

Unless you have recently landed on the planet, you will know that today is Valentine’s Day. A day that is fairly horrendous if you’re not in a relationship as it is everywhere. Kids make cards at school, it’s in every supermarket, a whole aisle usually dedicated to cards and chocolates and teddy bears, you can’t really avoid it. I am largely ambivalent about it, I am in a relationship obviously but it is not one that needs validation on a certain day. I did get a card, I’ll be honest, and that’s lovely but I would have been absolutely fine if I hadn’t.

Once, a very long time ago, my ex took me to get a takeaway from Chicken Cottage. I can distinctly remember sitting in his car, always his car, in one of those rows of shops found in the middle of housing estates waiting for him to get the food for us to take home. It’s funny, that’s the only Valentine’s that I remember with him and we pissibly had four, maybe five together.

It goes without saying that he wasn’t romantic.

It was Valentine’s Day two weeks before I met J. I was the manager of a well known lingerie shop (UK readers can guess which one!) and it was awful. Single and going on fairly awful blind dates, organised on a dating app, never going anywhere, sometimes from my point of view, sometimes theirs. Customer after customer came in, spending an absolute fortune on gifts and underwear, talking about their relationships, about love, even my staff were telling me about their plans. I wish that I’d known that J was just a few days away, I’d like to tell that sad girl that better things were coming.

The Valentine’s before the girls were born in 2014, we were saving money and J cut out hundreds of pink paper hearts. He distributed them up the stairs to our flat then, down the hall and into the living room, leading to a huge homemade card. It is hands down the most romantic thing that anyone has ever done for me, before or since.

 

Now, in a busy life, I get J something from his girls. And a car. We’ll have a pizza tonight and maybe watch a film. In a week and a half, we are going to London for our anniversary and for a last break before the baby is born. Romance is definitely not dead, but it is just comes in different forms these days. It comes in buying a bag of sweets that you’ll know he’ll like when you go to the shops, it comes in snuggling with your babies watching Paw Patrol while you beam above their heads, it comes in absolutely prioritising your relationship over all others. It comes in your total belief in one another. It comes in planning your lives together.

I love him so very much. Happy Valentine’s Day.

Imagine

“imagine falling in love with somebody only to find out that your capacity to love grows with every new thing you notice about them”

I read this on twitter this week and it has stayed with me ever since, it’s popped into my head as I’ve fallen asleep, occurred to me again as I’ve walked to nursery or been by myself for whatever reason and I wanted to share really.

Jody and I had an up and down first six months, we probably met three months too early really, both of emerging out of things that had left us emotionally scarred. But I loved him so early and we exchanged ‘I love you’s’ within a couple of weeks. There were dark moments, he would quite openly say that he wasn’t sure if he could stay in the country (he’d previously lived all over the world), he would be brutally honest about his feelings and there was a brief break-up that was something and nothing and which I dealt with surprisingly calmly for me, even now I think back on it and wonder where that strength came from. There is a part of me that thinks that it was because I must have known that we were meant to be together but it wasn’t that at the time, I don’t know what it was really.

We got over all of that and we moved in together seven months after getting together and it’s been largely plain sailing since then. There have been some moments where he has said things that have made me doubt him and his love for me, moments that have induced real panic but mostly, we are good. And the above quote is absolutely true. We had been together just over two years when we had twins. TWINS. Most people are still on the holidays and ikea trips by that point and we were doubling our family. Crazy but we did it. Next month, we will have been together for six years and that is amazing to me.

I love him more than I did then because he is my girls dad. And he is wonderful. Yes, he is impatient sometimes and he likes to ‘listen to the radio’ on a Sunday. AKA have a little nap. But he adores them and they him. I cannot wait to see him with our new little girl in April. Truly cannot wait.

Love is really hard. Relationships are really hard. But whatever happens, this relationship will be one that I will never, ever regret.

 

The Dating Game

J and I have been together for almost six years. We have almost three children. We have history and stories and anecdotes. It’s good. Things are really good.

I don’t miss dating at all. I never read about a single person with envy, or listen to a dating story with anything even approaching jealousy, dating is hard and gruelling and, if not predominantly devastating, then at least a little bit so. You get your hopes up and are let down, you think that things are progressing when the other person doesn’t agree, it’s basically a roller-coaster. But then it suddenly isn’t, and your second date becomes your sixth and then your tenth and then you’re not counting anymore and it’s just ‘us’.

I have never been more grateful that I am part of an ‘us’.

I was dumped fairly spectacularly in the spring of 2011, just before Prince William got married. That seems like a very random way to remember when but I can still remember almost every moment of that wedding as if I’m watching it again and again on a loop. Funny how your brain works. That was the relationship that I thought was it. Spoiler alert: it was not. Laughably not. But I was newly thirty one and it felt like the world was ending. I dated, some good, some bad, some curtailed by me walking out, one ended with an obscenely inappropriate text message. I used to date in bursts, perhaps two or three in a fortnight, then a lull when it all seemed hopeless, then feeling better and attempting it again.

J and I met on the 29th February 2012. A leap year. He had spent the day at a farm with a friend he went walking with and I had worked. I was late, forgetting that I have a hopeless sense of direction and had no idea that Bexhill had a ringroad, and he was waiting for me, sitting on a wall as I hurriedly changed into heels in the front seat of my car. I can remember bits of what we talked about, but I can remember what he looked like, what he was wearing, I can remember walking back to my car to drop him home, our hands swinging, almost nearly touching. He kissed me outside his house and that was that.

We have been through some things since then, some that people know about and some that will remain between us, some glorious things, the birth of our beautiful girls being chief amongst them and some lows, constant nagging money worries and I think one of the worries that most couples have, particularly those with small children, that of remaining a couple that love each other away from their kids.

I don’t know that we’ll be together forever, who can possibly know that, but we plan as if we will be. I have stopped worrying about it as much as I used to. When we first bought a car together, a long time ago now, I wondered vaguely as to who would get it if we broke up, knowing what it was like to split a house in the event of a break-up. We’re not married, I’d like to, but not as much as his mother would like us to, he’s not fussed. We might one day, I’d really like the same surname as my children, and I’d love to call him my husband. He is my husband though in every way that it matters and that is enough, a piece of paper won’t cement us any more than our children have.

He is the love of my life whether we are together for the next year or the next fifty. He deserves that title, for the person he is and the person he has allowed me to be. Myself. He accepts me entirely for who I am, he makes me laugh until I cry and he is the most wonderful father. I crave time with him, time without our girls, and yet I’m happiest when it’s the four of us, curled together watching Paw Patrol before bed.

The dating game. It’s not for me.