The middle of the bed

Tag: family

  • Traffic Lights

    One of the things I was most scared of when I first faced the reality of becoming a single mum was the logistics of solo-parenting. Truthfully I was terrified. This thought amuses me now because in reality, as most women in my position will tell you… the less people you’re taking care of, the easier life is.

    I love my new little family. We’re lighter and quieter and gentler. We cuddle up in one bed and share bags of popcorn on weeknights, I get to be the naughty one sometimes and when I break my own rules I like that I’m teaching them to be flexible and open to enjoying life intensely when the opportunity is there. We are a team. A team that is admittedly made up of a really overwhelmed manager and two very junior and mostly incompetent staff members. But if I could just get them to learn how to go from one room to the next without forgetting what they were going in there to do, I really think we might thrive.

    Like all new teams, we have our strengths (K-pop demon hunter singalongs, speed tidying for treats, morning cuddles in ‘the big bed’ the destruction of a Hawaiian pizza on a Friday night) and we have some pretty significant weaknesses. And our biggest area for improvement is mornings. Much like mornings hit hard for colds and heartbreaks, mornings really show the cracks in my team. We have systems, we are prepped, we are ready. Except we’re not, because no matter how much we think we’ve got it under control when we go to bed, the window in which we leave the house to get to school ranges from inconveniently early to undeniably more than a few minutes past the chance to make it on time, and there is really no way to tell on any given day which one it’s going to be.

    The ‘thing with the traffic lights’ started on one of the latter. Alarm was snoozed, only one tiny floral shoe could be found, breakfast was eaten at a snails pace, jumpers were forgotten and gone back for and before we knew it we had 7 minutes to drive the 10 minute drive to school. 

    “Please, Please just turn green” I yelled at the lights, desperate to avoid the late shame text which arrives at 9.05 reminding me I am a very very bad no good mother.  My son, always my biggest supporter, joined me “please, please – go green – we’re late!” and from the back my giggling daughter enjoying the added chaos of our commute yelled “green green green”, and with that (or likely with the pre-determined integrated timer) the lights went green and we zoomed off with cheers of triumph and delight and in a morning miracle – arrived at 8.59 on the dot.


    And thus began our new morning ritual. We were no longer passive road users. We were an energetic and vocal team with a toxic one sided relationship with 7 sets of traffic lights.

    A few days later after some particularly bad light luck the begging started to take on a rather aggressive tone, “turn green now” screamed a tiny floral shoed princess and I realised that I had maybe started something slightly unhinged. “Hey, this doesn’t seem to be working so well anymore” I said, “what else could we try? How about just explaining our situation and asking for some help? So, we did. And over the last couple of months we’ve used our morning commute practicing persuasion techniques with increasing complexity.

    Team studies have concluded that;

    • Traffic lights do not like being yelled at (“TURN GREEN OR I WILL NOT BE YOUR BESTFRIEND! 
    • Traffic lights respond quite well to loaded compliments (“gosh you look great in green, not sure red is your colour”)
    • Traffic lights are sympathetic (“we did everything right and it’s not our fault there was a roadworks diversion”) 
    • Traffic lights respond well to a reasonable bargain (“we understand that you have to let those cars go and we accept this, but could you tell the next lights to hook us up ?”)
    • Generally, children under 8 will believe almost anything.

    This practice has been a fun team building exercise and there is usually much disappointment on the rare occasion we happen to be running on time and the need for negotiation isn’t present. But for me it has also been something I’ve tried to actively consider as I negotiate my way from the life I had to the life I need to create. I have tried being kinder even when I’m stressed, being honest when I’m struggling, offering flexibility in a hopeful exchange for goodwill and finding nice things to say in an attempt to build warmth back into a relationship where there is currently only ice. But the truth my patient adult ‘colleague’ has been trying to get me to understand for months now, is finally hitting home. The only things I can control are my own actions and my own reactions. I have about as much control of my past as I do of traffic lights… none.

    And this morning after a longer than usual morning giggle session in the big bed, when the kids asked how we would be convincing the lights today and the clock read 8.57 I took a deep breath, smiled and shrugged. ‘None’ I said honestly, ‘sometimes we just have to accept the way things are and deal with the consequences.’ And instead of racing and begging and negotiating and blaming, we just drove peacefully to school singing k-pop demon hunters. And we were late. And I got the text. And it’s ok.

    Because it was never about the traffic lights.

  • Grace

    I truly believe in forgiveness, I believe in the power of it. Not just ‘turn the other cheek’, not just that holding onto things is bad for your soul. I genuinely believe that the intellectual exercise of finding empathy and understanding for the situations and people that have hurt us can be transformative, and can help us turn the ugliness of anger and pain into something beautiful.

    The ugly truth is though, that I’m not there yet. I’m not even close. For me, for him, for mistakes made, words said and unsaid, for choices made over a lifetime that led us to this point and for choices made now that compound this ugliness.

    Breakups are undignified at the best of times. Something as personal as the entire structure of your life shattering into pieces would hopefully be private, but it’s not, it is unceremoniously public. It is interesting, it is gossip, it is a rollercoaster of emotions and endless choices you thought you’d never have to make. It is disappointing your grandmother, it is explaining to your children why you can’t be everything they’ve always known a family to be. It is friends choosing sides when you haven’t asked and friends not choosing you when the most vulnerable parts of you wish they would. It is a million tiny paper cuts of loss. It is crying in the car and on the floor and at the bar and over brunch. It is undignified anger and pain, it is regret for the past and regret for the present and lingering regret for the future. It is….messy, chaotic and ugly.

    I could write a narrative of one-sided victimhood (god knows it’s how I feel sometimes), I could write a narrative of personal triumph, of dignity, of ‘thriving’. Fuck it’s my blog, I could write utter fiction and I could write myself a character that is above and beyond it all. I could write beauty where there is ugliness and maybe, maybe you’d even believe me for a minute.

    But for some reason I find that even uglier. I find that even more undignified. I may be on the floor but what I am learning each painstaking day is to have a little grace for myself while I’m down here.

    I talk a lot about grace at the moment, hoping the people around me will hold some for me, being surprised by those who do and those who don’t. Working to learn grace for myself, feeling its power when I succeed, feeling lost when I do not. 

    It is my friends that first showed me the power of grace in this moment. Some still do. It is my psychologist who encouraged me to learn to hold it for myself. How to have empathy for the ugliness in me and around me, how to truly believe that it’s ok not to be ok. It is in small moments of grace that I can write this without shame, laugh at hard truths with friends, find the strength to say no to things that no longer serve me and be brave enough to chase the things that do. 

    Grace is the empathy of friends who hold space for ugly moments, Grace is my parents driving 7 hours to distract my children so I can fall apart. Grace is the man who holds me crushingly tight and wipes away tears he didn’t cause when I can’t keep going.

    Grace holds me calmly as I sit cross legged on the floor looking at the shattered pieces of my life slowly figuring out how to reshape them into something beautiful.

  • Lasagna

    I once read something that said that the key to divorce was ‘learning to sleep in the middle of the bed’. It was a metaphor that tickled me even when the concept of divorce seemed like an impossibility from the comfort of my very long term relationship. In hindsight, maybe it captured me because subconsciously the thought of centering myself in my own life was incredibly exotic. I started sharing my pocket money and planning life for two at fifteen. I may have been raising my hands like an ‘ independent woman’ on underage nightclub dance floors but I somehow went and lived a life Destinys Child were definitely not singing about.

    Still, I’m a sucker for a shortcut, so in the 10 weeks since my marriage spectacularly and permanently imploded, I have been fixated on learning to sleep in the middle of the bed. I’ve tried just placing one pillow in the middle, I’ve tried trapping myself in with pillows on either side, I’ve meditated with determination on my place and moved myself back into the middle over and over through one sleepless night after another. But still, I wake up, every morning, as I always have, hair as askew as me, on the right hand side of the bed. 

    I’m learning at the moment that there are actually an alarming number of things I assumed I was capable of that it turns out I’m not. It’s quite de-stabilising to learn at 38 that you are in reality only ½ competent, but here I am, learning where the bins go and how to cook rice and where to put water in a car, even though I know how to do our taxes and bake the perfect birthday cake and run a board meeting. 

    The night I realised my relationship was beyond saving I sat alone in an airbnb and ordered lasagna, a desperately needed comfort on the last night of the holiday from hell. In the days after the end a beautiful friend bought a huge lasagna over and it sustained me for days and then weeks as I re-heated tiny frozen portions and felt her care. I haven’t been able to make it though because it turns out, that much like my life, it’s always been a group project. He did the chopping, I made the ragu, he made the bechamel and then I assembled the lasagna we’ve been making side by side for 23 years. It turns out ‘I’ didn’t actually make lasagna ‘We’ did. 

    But it’s rainy today, a dreary flat Saturday at the end of a hard week. My heart is fragile and I’m home on ‘my weekend with the kids’ and my daughter wants lasagna and quite frankly so do I. 

    So, I diced and sauteed and stirred and googled and much like the water and the bins – I figured it out. And now the smell of lasagna is wafting through my home and there’s truffle in the bechamel instead of nutmeg because I love truffle and soon my daughter will decide that actually she doesn’t love lasagna and wants toast, but I don’t care. I’m going to marvel at the lasagna I made by myself and I’m going to share it with my friend who is coming over to check on my heart….

    … and tonight I’m just going to go to sleep on the right hand side of the bed and see where I end up because I mightn’t have the hang of centering myself in my life just yet, but not being able to make a lasagna is not very ‘independent woman’ of me and I’m sure as hell not going to let Beyonce down again.