THE GIFT OF ENCOURAGEMENT

Writing can be a lonely occupation. Especially in those times when we wonder why we keep going, when another email rejection arrives, or a competition deadline passes so your failure registers by default, when it seems like no one likes your work enough to put it out there.

But then there comes a moment when you feel seen, validated. An acceptance. And even more, a comment on the quality of your work. Someone gets you, appreciates what you have done, and wants to include it alongside work you admire.

This is what it felt like when I recently submitted two works successfully to the Harpy Hybrid Review. Not only did the editors come back to me quickly (which is amazing in itself) but they said my two pieces about my dad’s dementia were “beautiful and heartbreaking”, which is just as I had intended them to be.

A few months later and I’m excited to see the Spring edition 2024 published. And there’s THIEF and JIGSAW, in among other pieces so good they make me wish I’d written them, and with other writers and artists – visual poets in particular – who speak the same language as me. I feel at home. And it makes me want to shout out to as many people as possible, “Come and see what we’ve done! It might not be what you’re expecting but it might speak to you too.”

It’s great to feel part of this creative community.

And creatives do seem so good at community. You’d think that we would be competing with each other – for publication, for agents, for grants, for sales, for views – but actually we’re only ever competing with ourselves. Our fellow artists are (in my experience) cheering each other on, vicariously enjoying each other’s successes, and seeing other’s achievements as encouragement that we might be able to do likewise.

They are some of the most generous and encouraging people I’ve come across.

I think of the poet, Liz Berry, not only giving permission for us to use her poem on our local radio series but also offering to record it for us. Or author, Deborah Jenkins’s consistent words of encouragement on social media. Or how artist, Paul Hobbs, took the time to send detailed and supportive replies when I emailed asking for advice. Or check out Amy McNee whose Instagram account art (@inspiredtowrite) constantly reminds artists how great they are and to keep going. Or Valley Verse, my local poetry group, where new and established writers are welcomed with equal enthusiasm. Or any one of my fellow students at Plymouth University, relishing each other’s work across the genres.

We all need people who will encourage and challenge us, help us feel seen and known. The Bible talks about encouragement as a gift from God. Creatives seem to have it spades.

ORDINARY EXTRAORDINARY

We took advantage of the good weather yesterday and went to Saltram again just outside Plymouth. The grounds are beautiful, the Chapel Tearoom food delicious, and their volunteer guides are some of the most enthusiastic and knowledgeable we’ve ever met.

They are full of stories.

How an enthusiastic conservator in the family wrongly labelled – in gold leaf – some key paintings. How one Countess went off around Europe to practise her painting skills because she didn’t want to meet the Pope with her husband. How another died on her honeymoon. Even how a modern teenage visitor ignored the guide ropes and did a Fosbury Flop onto a delicate four poster bed.

The world is full of stories if we take the time to listen or look for them.

We found a new one – well, new to us – in our own family history recently. My father in law has given us two big boxes of family photos to sort and scan so that they can be saved and shared. This one is of my husband’s grandparents, Nick and Edie, his brother, Fred, and his wife, Sylvie.

“Oh yes,” said my husband, “Fred’s the one who was a Japanese prisoner of war.”

It was too fascinating not to do some research to see if I could find more details. There’s so much you can learn from forms and we hit gold dust with Fred: a questionnaire given to British and American POWs on liberation, full of detail. It proved he had been a POW, although not under the Japanese, and no Hollywood worthy story but still a moving one of an ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances.

Aged 20, he left his job as a printer in 1940 to enlist in the Royal Army Service Corps, where he served as a driver. Eighteen months later he was captured at Tobruk (in modern day Libya) in Rommel’s retaking of the city and the largest capture of British Commonwealth troops since the fall of Singapore.

Fred spent the rest of World War Two as a prisoner, initially in Bhengazi in North Africa, then Altamura and Carpi in Italy, finally in Muhlberg and Oschatz in Germany. For the final two years, he was in work camps, doing back breaking jobs in granite quarries.  At one point he caught malaria but reports that he had adequate medical care thanks to a French medical officer and a British orderly.

En route to Egypt on the troopship Nea Hellas, Fred had watched a film about what to do in case of capture but that was his only training. He was taught nothing about escape or evasion but that didn’t stop him trying. He and another soldier, John Sumner of the Kings Own Rifles, escaped once from a prison column marching between Grimma and the River Elbe. They were both fit but had no maps and were picked up by German guards only eight hours later and returned to the column. 

He did what he could in terms of sabotage though. He broke tools on a daily basis and twice poured a drum of diesel oil into a stream by the quarry.

I can’t help but admire Fred for this. He’s no Steve McQueen hero, no document forger or tunnel digger. He’s an ordinary man doing what he can to disrupt the enemy despite the risk of punishment.

Day after day. For three years.

What a story of faithfulness, of not forgetting who you are and what your purpose is, no matter the limitations of the circumstances he finds himself in.

Only months after the war ended, Fred married Sylvie.

There’s another story of everyday heroism mentioned on the form too. Under ‘any other matter of any kind you wish to bring to notice’, Fred wrote:

“I should like to state that a Polish girl helped us at Kleinsteinberg on many occasions when we were very very hungry. She stole potatoes for us from the farm she worked on in Kleinsteinberg at great personal risk. Her name is Johanna Motika. I believe she is still in Kleinsteinberg.”

I wonder who Johanna was? And what prompted her to be so kind and generous and brave? In another document, the Registration of Foreigners and German Persecutees 1939-1947, there’s a Janina Johanna Matyka living in Hof, a hundred miles south of Kleinsteinberg.  She’s listed as being born in 1923 in Tarnow, South East Poland. I wonder if that’s her and what happened to her.

But that’s another story.

GRATEFUL IN THE GREY

I’ve felt a bit out of sorts this week, nothing terrible, just not quite myself. I guess it’s down to a near miss of a migraine, menopausal insomnia, and the weather. I know this is the UK but oh the rain, the hail, the grey of it all. Work has felt dull too, effortful and with little to see for it. And my Lent discipline, still full of valuable insights, has moved past the excitement of that hopeful first week.

I still find it too easy to count my negatives than my blessings. My imperfections stand out to me like misused apostrophes to an editor. But as I struggled to get to sleep last night, I remembered something I haven’t updated you about on this blog:

For those of you who don’t know, I developed De Quervain’s, a form of RSI that causes the tendons in the wrist/thumb joint to inflame and become painful. In the past, it resolved with anti-inflammatories and a resting splint, but this time it didn’t. So I had 6 months of increasing pain and debility followed by an extremely painful steroid injection into the joint.  If that didn’t work, I would be referred for hand surgery.

There was a lot riding on this injection. I was a tangled mess of hoped for recovery and feared permanent loss. I wrote about my first week post injection here:  https://thestufflifeismadeofblog.wordpress.com/2024/01/20/single-handed/. Return to function has been slow but it has happened, is continuing to happen.

Here’s some of things I never knew before to be grateful for:

I no longer wear a splint every night.

I can do up the zip on my coat.

I can chop vegetables again.

I can put the handbrake on in our car.

I can pop pills out of their strip.

I can carry two mugs of coffee at the same time.

I can type two handed.

I’ve started knitting again, which I have missed this so much.

I even did a bit of light pruning in the garden yesterday.

And to Mr M’s delight, I can wash up without pain or dropping things.

I’ve learned a few things along the way. The importance of good positioning and support when I’m on my keyboard. To keep doing my hand exercises regularly (and I can do all of them without pain now!). To take frequent breaks and limit time on repetitive activities, however enjoyable they are. How caring and protective Mr M is – I mean, I already knew that one but it’s so lovely to be reminded. That he and I are better these days at communicating when and how we need help and when we need to do things for ourselves.

There, the last week doesn’t seem so grey now. All these sunshine moments that I just needed to stop and notice and be thankful for.

“And not a tear is wasted” *

“if you weren’t haunted by those stories, you wouldn’t waste your time trying to write it.” (The Art of Memoir by M Karr)

It’s a fine line to walk, writing about deeply personal experiences, especially painful ones, and then putting them out there for the world to see. Deciding how much to reveal and how much to keep private. Working out what’s beneficial and what’s self-indulgence. Perhaps being British, with a history of not expressing our feelings – except at football matches! – doesn’t help.

I’ve written a lot about personal and painful stuff. I try to be very careful when it involves others, my family usually, asking for permission first, abandoning anything they aren’t comfortable with. I haven’t always got it right. I always try to ask myself if something is my story to tell or someone else’s.

Sometimes that’s unclear – because trauma, illness, doesn’t just happen to one person. Take my mother’s death, my father’s dementia, or my son’s bipolar. However, what I can write about is my experience of those things.

And there are benefits. Much of what I wrote during my Creative Writing MA turned out to be  therapy for me, processing traumatic events and putting them into context with the benefit of distance, rehab if you like. But more than that, the whole theme of my dissertation -a visual poetry collection – became the means of redeeming those events. I called it Prayer Stations: Acts of Reclamation. Like I was creating my own reclamation yard of experiences, using words and arts to upcycle them into something new.

The other benefit of going public with my experiences is when it chimes with a reader. I can’t measure (at this point) my worth as a writer in income or competitions success or any other commercial way. However, there are times when I get a comment, when someone says: “Yes, that’s me too.” And they feel seen, acknowledged, less alone in the experience. There’s something about putting it into words that makes a difficulty manageable, contained somehow’ sharing it dilutes its power somehow. Those comments are precious and it’s those moments that make me feel validated as a writer.

My faith helps. Not that it always makes things easy! But it gives me a filter to look at these experiences through – or maybe more like putting on the right pair of prescription glasses. I remember the first pair I had to wear all the time: suddenly I could see details, like individual leaves on trees, again and everything seemed to jump six feet nearer.  

The Casting Crowns song I quoted goes on to say:

And not a tear is wasted
In time, you’ll understand
I’m painting beauty with the ashes
Your life is in My hands

It sounds pretentious perhaps but that’s what I feel I am doing. Or what God is doing through my creativity. Painting beauty with ashes. Just as I buy preloved clothes and combine them with old things from my wardrobe into new looks, or repurpose old book pages into an Advent Calendar box, or put my garden waste out for the council to turn into compost, – it’s all redemption and reclamation.

Much of our past traumas are behind me now. My parents, although I will always miss them, are home with God. My son no longer even needs medication for his bipolar. And I am so much happier as a writer than I was in my later years as an occupational therapist.

I am no longer haunted by those experiences. And I don’t need to look back on them with regret because nothing is wasted.

(*Just Be Held by Casting Crowns)

NATIVITY!

It’s a strange experience to have two houses to decorate at Christmas.  

In Fleet, the boxes have come down from the loft full of memories – the nutcracker from a business trip to Germany; the crocheted Santa hangings from a work fundraising fayre; bells fashioned from egg cartons, foil, and string and doily covered toilet roll angels all made by the boys when they were little; Advent calendar refilled and Jesse Tree rehung season after season; decorations from our sons’ old flats added to the mix.  In Looe, we’ve kept it simpler, concentrated on lots of lights.

But in each place, the essential decoration is the nativity set. It’s usually the last thing to go up, the finale so to speak. In previous Advents we’ve had the characters travel around the room or across the mantlepiece to echo their journeys to Bethlehem. Mary and Joseph in a mini version of the posada tradition we used to keep at the hospice. Baby kept out of site until after Midnight Mass. Kings not arriving until Epiphany.

Our Hampshire set is thirty five years old, carved from olive wood, bartered for from a street trader in Kigali. Traditional tall slim Rwandan figures – shepherds with pointed hooded cloaks, a cow with long curved horns.

Last year, I found our Cornish one, very different, in a local small charity shop. The volunteer behind the counter was so happy it was going to continue to be used as it had been her family’s one. I wondered to myself how she could bear to give it up. Today it is sitting in front of our log burner, where my eyes are regularly drawn to it:

I’ve placed it slightly differently to last year. The wise men are on the right, (sort of) from the East, with our Christmas-sailed boats aptly suggesting travel behind them. One tilts his head, apparently distracted by the cow. Perhaps he’s nervous of it or wondering what it’s doing in the nursery of a new king. The two animals face outwards as if guarding the baby. Joseph stands over mother and child protectively with that new parent’s question on his face:

“How will life turn out for you?”

An angel, standing slightly back, prays for the new little family, for the baby, for all he will meet and love. Her head is tilted as if contemplating, questioning even, God’s strange plan for His Son, as she worships.

I can’t make out the shepherd’s thoughts. He too stands guard but seems a little on the outside of it all. Perhaps he’s considering if it’s time to return to the other sheep out on the hills.

Mary’s posture seems the most unnatural: a pious kneeling woman rather than an exhausted new mother. Why isn’t she resting in bed or sat in a chair? But when I pick her up, I see her eyes are closed and with her half extended hand, I think she’s praying, catching a quiet moment with God in the midst of the crowd.

And the baby? This one’s rosy cheeked and wide shouldered, no newborn. He’s almost outgrown his manger-cot so more the likely age when the Magi visited than the shepherds. Which means this family will soon have to pack up and flee for their lives. This moment of peace and community will soon be gone.

May you find moments of peace and community this Christmas and into the New Year. And thank you for your company this year in the blog. God bless.

YES, I’M GONG THERE – I’M MENTIONING THE C WORD!

Brace yourselves: it’s October but I am going to mention the C word – Christmas. Well Advent, that is. I know it feels too soon – we haven’t got past Guy Fawkes yet – but bear with me. It’s for a good reason.

Let me tell you about The Jesse Tree Anthology.

Long term readers of this blog will know my love of a Jesse Tree. In fact, back in December 2019, I wrote a month long series prompted by the different ornaments we use on our family one.

For some years we have been hanging little olive wood symbols on a set of white glittery branches wedged into a vase each December. Two things led to starting this tradition: feeling jaded with how increasingly commercialised Advent calendars had become, and reading a beautiful book called The Jesse Tree by Geraldine McCaughrean and Bee Willey to my Boys’ Brigade group. It tells the story of a boy on holiday who interrupts a grumpy carpenter carving a traditional Jesse Tree in an old church, who grudgingly ends up telling him the stories behind the images.

I love the Jesse Tree tradition. It puts the Christmas story into a much wider perspective and reminds me of how my faith has its spiritual ancestry in Jewish tradition. It makes me think about my own family history and how that too has underpinned my faith. And there is the wonderful quiet moment when I find a place to hang the symbol and stop to think about the Bible story that goes with it, pondering what it might mean for me.

So what if you’d like to try the Jesse Tree tradition this Advent? Where would you start? Well, I can help you with that!

I’ve had the pleasure and honour of contributing to a new book: The Jesse Tree Anthology. On each day, it gives you a short Bible story to read, a reflection (each by a different writer), a couple of questions to consider, some simple prayers, and a stained glass window decoration to colour and cut out (or download from the editor, Rachel Yarworth’s website here: Jesse tree – Rachel Yarworth, Writer (rachelyarworthwriter.uk).

It’s not the only Jesse Tree book available for Advent but this one has two particular features. It’s written by 25 different writers so you get a real variety and range of reflections and each one shows how the Bible stories point to Jesus. So you really get that perspective and lead up to the Big Day.

It’s suitable for individuals and groups, and for adults to share with children. It’s great if you’re not so familiar with the Bible but its simplicity is refreshing for anyone further along in their faith journey.

If you want a taste of my writing, I’m in there writing about the escape from Egypt. But I’m so chuffed to be in the illustrious company of all the other writers, I’ll be using this myself this Advent.

You can purchase The Jesse Tree Anthology (ISBN 978-1739257712) via Amazon), direct from Rachel’s website, or from all good bookshops.

IN SIGHT OF THE TIDE: Of Endings and Beginnings

August is turning out to be a month of endings. The apparent end of the British summer. (We’ve had so much sea mist it’s felt more like October). The approaching end of my Masters. The imminent end of younger son’s Masters. And this week, the Lovely Mr M’s last working day for Microsoft as he takes early retirement.

A momentous event that passed rather quietly to be honest. Although we did go out for a very nice dinner that evening to celebrate his new freedom.

I can hear echoes of my past in this. My dad took early retirement due to ill health caused by work stress. A big part of our decision (and it is a joint one) for Mr M to retire is based on his work’s impact on his health. But this is a more proactive than reactive choice. It’s also almost exactly a year since my own last day at work. And another key influence for Mr M was seeing how much happier I am since doing that.

So we are giving ourselves another year to try to try life in Looe. Working an often tiring job from home has restricted options for building friendships and finding a place in the community. Similarly, university has given me a routine and a social life but not specifically within Looe. As our sons learned after their undergraduate years, there is a real difference between studying somewhere and living there.

So this will be our chance to try that. What that looks like though is as foggy as this week’s sea mist.

My trouble is that I can think of too many options. It’s the price of being an overthinker, a term that was sometimes used as a criticism. But I believe it to be both a strength and a weakness. Being able to see so many possibilities makes me more creative and, if taken with an adventurous spirit, can lead to all sorts of new avenues of work. But sometimes too many choices lead to me feeling overwhelmed and paralysis to make any decision at all.

One of the most helpful pieces of advice I’ve had from my dissertation tutor has been to remember to simplify. Take all those ideas and play with them but then whittle them down to the ones that are relevant. Don’t go down interesting diversions – those can always be kept for another project.

I think that may be good advice as Mr M and I approach the next year.  There are some key writing things I know I want to get on with: relaunching my website with my visual poetry and as a writer rather just a blogger; a podcast of the Poetry Prescription. After a holiday, these are my first priorities.

I’m considering other things too writing wise – volunteering with the radio station to learn more about radio production, an exhibition of my work (if I can figure out how and where), putting together a small poetry collection in a chapbook, maybe going back to the novel I started, those competitions and journal submissions I promised myself. But they can wait a little longer.

I’m thinking about some other volunteering opportunities – Looe Lions, the local foodbank, a small mental health charity. Plus the social side of things – quiz night in the nearest pub, joining a choir, a regular yoga class. Maybe even renewing my OT registration, just to keep my options open. But again, not yet.

Our lovely neighbour gave some good advice – that it will be easier to join things and make friends after the summer, after most of the visitors have gone home.

So, for now, Mr M and I are taking things one day or so at a time, getting through the next few weeks, and waiting to see what happens, what God puts in our path. There’s no need to rush and we can keep things simple.

IN SIGHT OF THE TIDE: In Sight of the Tide

The view from our house is over the harbour and I love to sit by our French windows watching the same yet always changing scene of our tidal river. This morning I’ve counted ten two-man kayaks make their windmilling way upriver. Yesterday evening the fishing fleet hauled in their day catch.

The water levels rise and lower twice a day. High enough to tease the harbour walls. Low enough to strand boats on seaweedy sand, leaving just the east bed covered by the river alone streaming out to sea.

I love to watch its changes in colour too: all the subtle shades of blue, green, and grey. Sparkling teal clear as a kingfisher’s back. Gunmetal as the naval ships toing and froing out of Plymouth Sound. Tangleweed and bladderwrack brown. Sea lettuce and samphire green. Dark as purple laver. The river’s mood reflecting the state of the sky.

There’s a writing device called pathetic fallacy. It’s where nature (or objects) personifies or reflects human emotions. I’ve seen it in action this past week, where we’ve been subject to unrelenting grey and mizzle, interspersed with uncomfortable humidity, just like my mood.

It’s made everything feel so much more effortful, draining. No wild and exhilarating storm to blow away cobwebs and brain fog. Just cloud after cloud after cloud. Any small breaks of blue quickly vanishing. No chance of drying clothes in the bleaching freshness of sunshine. All prospect of a break on the beach washed away.

I’ve felt much the same about my work. Re-recording our second radio programme because of timing problems with the original, researching poems and poets for the third, negotiating running orders, and finally recording the last one. Editing dissertation poems. Wrestling with feedback. It’s all seemed grey and stifling and heavy going.

I still get low moods. The waves of that sea of depression still splash at my ankles and sink my feet into the sand again from time to time.  Sometimes it’s obviously a reflection of the circumstances around me. Sometimes there’s no apparent reason.

But, like the weather, it passes. This tropical maritime air mass gives way to tropical continental. With the final radio programme in the bag, I feel lighter. Space in my head to focus on my dissertation. A clear patch overhead.

The river continues to rise and fall, colours changing with the sky. Weather systems will blow in and pass on. I’m learning the patterns. For here and me.

IN SIGHT OF THE TIDE: In Search Of The Light

I have a confession to make. An ironic one for a writer:

Sometimes, words aren’t enough.

One great gift my MA course has given me is the courage to experiment. As a result, I have discovered that I am visual poet, and sometimes a hybrid poet.

Visual poetry is poetry that needs to be seen. It uses layout, fonts, all sorts, to say or suggest more than the words alone do. We had the owner of Guillemot Press speak to us this week and they have some beautiful examples of this. Check out their website. https://www.guillemotpress.co.uk/ Start with Astra Papachristodoulou’s Constellations. https://www.astranaut.co.uk/ Or have a look at the wonderful https://www.poematlas.com/.

Hybrid poetry goes one further and mixes text with any art media. It’s a little like conceptual art, I suppose, and certainly blurs the lines between writer and artist, or in my case, craftist. Roger Wagner https://www.rogerwagner.co.uk/and Paul Hobbs https://www.arthobbs.com/conceptualare worth checking out. I love Wagner’s book The Nearer You Stand and Hobbs’s Sabbath Rest in particular.

My background, especially as an occupational therapist, is more in the craft side of art. So that’s what I use with my poetry. So far, I’ve combined words with paper weaving, quilting, sewing. But occupational therapy also emphasises purposeful activity so I branch out further from defined crafts, including jigsaws, genealogy, astronomy, recipes, even gardening. Whatever seems most appropriate to what I am trying to say.

I can see that sounds a little weird. It’s hard to explain in words. (Back to that theme!) You’ll have to come to the exhibition I’m hoping to hold.

I don’t pretend to be an artist. Art was a subject I struggled with at school. Looking back, I wonder if that was because it seemed aimed at those with natural talent. I was an adult before I realised there are actual techniques that can be learned.

So my newfound courage to experiment has also led to a decision to learn to draw. Just the basics. I bought a book called You Can Draw In 30 Days. And here, to my delight, are actual logical techniques and principles I can learn and apply. But the biggest lesson is how enjoyable it is as I see my skill improve, or find myself in that mindful place of ‘flow’ when I’m doing it, or producing recognisable objects on paper. I’ve even drawn the odd extra piece for myself after the set exercise.

Yesterday morning, having done an exercise on complex cylinders, I drew some of the many plants pots in our garden. Perched on a hillside in a steep sided river valley, I spent a long time trying to work out the direction the light was coming from. It’s easier when the sun is lower in the sky and reflections in wet paving don’t confuse the issue. The trick is to look which way the shadows are pointing.

Isn’t that a topsy-turvy idea? Shadows – the darkness cast by obstacles – point to the light. When I think about the pieces I’ve written (poems, a script, the beginning of a novel), much of my inspiration comes in hope found in or through dark times. Shadows pointing to the light.

It reminds me of the Leonard Cohen lyric: “There is a crack in everything/It’s where the light gets in.” Or another quote I read recently: “Jesus promised us a full life, not an easy one.”

When I draw, I notice how shading, and different depths of shading, makes an object look more 3D; how it reveals its shape, its fullness.

Maybe darkness isn’t something to be afraid of. If we use it to seek fullness and the light.

IN SIGHT OF THE TIDE: Mothering Sunday then and now

It’s Mothers’ Day tomorrow and with the recent news of our nephew and his partner expecting the first of the next generation in our family, it’s taken my memory back to Mothering Sundays of the past.

I remember, six months into a difficult first pregnancy, making it with relief to the service at the Anglican church we attended then. It was the tradition to give posies to mothers on the way out after the church and I smiled expectantly (pun intended) at our rector at the door. He smiled and made a light hearted (no doubt to his ears) remark about how next year it would be my first time to receive the flowers. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing but he was insistent – I didn’t qualify for the gift yet.

It was, at best, a thoughtless comment but a hurtful one. And, thinking about it now, a ridiculously rigid definition of motherhood – that only someone who has given birth counts as a mother. I am reminded of the poem I wrote a couple of years ago querying similarly rigid definitions of womanhood (SHE | thestufflifeismadeofblog (wordpress.com)).

With two grown sons I now more than qualify for my old rector’s flowers but I know that I am not the only woman to have mothered them over the years. Their grandmothers, their aunts, their godmothers, my best friend, church and Boys’ Brigade leaders, teachers – all have played a part in that. As their biological mother, I have no problem with sharing that joy and responsibility. We all have women, not tied or obligated by blood or marriage, who love us. My faithful Roget’s Thesaurus reminds me that ‘motherly’ can be a synonym for ‘loving’. And my Bible reminds me that the origin of these qualities is God.

At our old Hampshire church, the tradition this weekend is to give flowers to all the women in the congregation. That seems to me to be a much more loving, motherly thing to do. Especially as Mothers’ Day can be painful for so many people.

I know. These days it’s more of an ache than a gut punch, the loss of my own mum. For my husband and his siblings, being more recent, the wound is fresher.

So tomorrow, Mr M and I will Facetime with our boys (they visited last weekend for their dad’s birthday and two of us have imminent university deadlines looming). And then we’ll go down to the beach to lay roses in the waves, overlooking where my mum’s ashes are scattered, but remembering both with gratitude.