Time to put life into focus

Getting used to a life where I’m no longer spinning ten plates just to stand still is taking some adjustment. I feel myself giving into it – short bursts of motivation – cleaning cupboards, packing up old clothes for the charity shop, running the dog back from the school – subsumed by mild nihilism. Dry January never started – after a day at home, busy doing nothing in particular, a glass of wine helps while away another evening spent on the sofa, and who cares if I wake up in the night when the alarm goes at 7.30 and I don’t have to get dressed for work in the morning?

In the morning, I throw on my trackie bs, with a vague aim to do exercise. I no longer have to do anything with my face, since my skin now glows like an 11-year-old’s, save for the trace wrinkles and scars of the past twenty-four years of worry. My hair, newly sprouting gray, just does itself. It’s scary how easy it’s been to let myself go. I’m not used to doing nothing. Doing something was drummed into me as a child, and I fear I’m drumming it into my kids also – the need to be busy for the sake of it; to be seen to be moving onwards and upwards instead of plateauing and simply being. I’m beginning to question it all.

If anything, rather than unfurling from years spent striving without ever quite knowing what for, I feel sad I didn’t use my time more wisely: to have more fun and misspend my youth, which is so much more appropriate than misspending one’s prime, if that, indeed is what this is – feeling, instead that I’m rapidly losing it, whatever it was I had. In any case, I object to my kids making the same mistake – no doubt they will make plenty of their own – but aiming high without a plan won’t be one of them, I hope,  although I’m not quite comfortable with them aiming low.

With more time to play with, there is more time to play with them, but that doesn’t’ address the reasons why I avoided it in the first place. I’m scared of computer games – my kids’ preferred conduit for relaxation, through early failures and my own chronic lack of exposure. They make me feel clumsy and fumble fingered, even more so than I habitually feel in real life. I make excuses every time; and for Lego, at which I’m equally inept, and which feels as fun as constructing a piece of flat-packed furniture but rather more fiddly. I am more reliable for a story, literature being my speciality, and crafts, which, quickly began to bore me, luckily held no interest. I have made a pact with the kids to make more effort with their games if they make more with things I like them to do (and not just chores), but like any pact, it only works when it’s mutually convenient. It’s a sad state of affairs, but I’m trying harder to live with them in the present rather than hiding out, exhausted,  behind my own screen.

Getting to know the kids better is accompanied by a sense of dis-ease around the reasons  I don’t. Neither relationship has been organic, and the fastidious care I provided in the early years was superseded with worry at what I might have created, and fear I was losing myself. The fact is, I was already lost when I had them; they were just a distraction from the business of doing something about my own life. Without them, and something else to occupy myself with, I am a little lost. But then I have been all my life.

My friend who said, this week she didn’t realise I was a Bowie fan, when I asked her to go to a remembrance event with me – because, for once in a long time, I can – was right. I didn’t realise I was either. Becoming a mum so young, having spent a decade feeling unsure of myself means I don’t know what I like, or who I am anymore.

Today’s news, in this last half hour, of another youthful hero, Alan Rickman, departing too soon, but who squeezed far more out of what life has to offer, than, perhaps, I have been able to so far, got me thinking. Enjoy this time off, as much as you can. It is more precious than anything else you might have. Use it to make a plan, because who knows how much time any of us has to play with. By spending it navel gazing and doing things you don’t enjoy will be to miss out on so much that I might. The kids, after all, are only passing through. Spend it enjoying them more, for sure, but use it to find yourself.