All change!

Well, I've been wanting to share this with you for a while, but I couldn't tell anyone until I'd told the kids.....No I'm not pregnant, we're not moving house, but we are about to start something I have thought about and read about and wanted to do since I started having children nearly fourteen years ago........

We're planning to home school our two youngest, Tansy and Leo, for a trial period of a year, with the get out clause of jumping back into school if any of us emerges from the year with lasting scars...

Why the change? We've already moved from a state primary school four years ago when Freddie and Lily were nine and six, to a Rudolf Steiner School which everyone melted into as if they had never been anywhere else.  This is not the post where I will be discussing the merits of Steiner schools. Suffice to say that we have learnt alot about child development and how they learn in a heart centred, non pressured, nature orientated environment, and we have no criticism. Bar the fact that apart from the lovely Hereford and Stroud schools (and shortly Exeter) they are not free. As in they are fee paying.  Hmm. (Anyone work out one of the reasons we have been living in yurts and caravans and wooden cabins for the last, uh four years?).  And they take up lots of time .Kids only become full time at steiner schools when they are ten....which for parents  with more than one child means a bewildering array of different pick up times and lots of driving.

But really, the point is that, as we are living in the woods and starting to have plans to buy goats, chickens, and start all sorts of exciting new projects, isn't it better for them just to be at home and learn here? Because really, that's where kids have always been....until the Industrial Revolution pushed everyone down mines and into mills, and there was a sudden urgent need for mass child care and a compliant work force. Enter compulsory education. That's why schools as we know them were invented folks. And they still do the same thing, create a compliant worker (consumer) and provide mass child care so we can earn (buy) more.

We were very very lucky that the Steiner School did only one of those things, ie provide child care, but still....How many times have I torn my kids away from some wonderful imaginative game to hurry and dress for school? How many times have I curtailed a  story, or a meal or a walk in the woods or a trip to the beach or a visit with friends...because the kids have to get to bed to get up early for school? When Freddie was small, and at state school, I even remember dragging him in from the garden where he was drawing and labelling the vegetables in his notebook yes, you guessed it, to go to school. Where he screamed to stay with me and fell asleep on the carpet after lunch. Insanity.

There's the worry of course that I won't be up to it. That I can't teach my kids to read and write. Don't I need to be qualified? And when I sit myself down and examine that, I realise that my kids have learned to walk, talk, dress themselves, eat cleanly, prepare food, knit, sew, saw firewood, weave, ride bikes, swim, sing, dance, play, care for animals, garden....with ME. Or their dads.

Tansy could probably teach herself to write, she's already got her own notebook where she copies the label off the tahini jar!

I have things I want to do, too many creative projects fizzing away, and I am concerned about my available time being eroded, but, who knows, I may even end up with more time than before .I have bouts of patience and gentleness and great storms of impatience and annoyance..How will it go? I 'll let you know.

How about you? What's your experience of schools, for your kids..or even for you?

But someone might die!

Last weekend, something wasn't right. I woke up on Saturday with my day planned out. Admittedly it wasn't particularly thrilling....getting a mammoth laundry into buckets, catching up on craft projects, mending, a walk, some firewood... But I was happy to have a quiet day at home and felt content.


At breakfast, Hugh bounced in,
'let's take the canoe out to sea and catch some mackerel' he cried
Tansy and Leo dropped their porridge spoons with a clatter and started cheering and something in me contracted. I reasoned that it was my day's plans being disrupted, however dull!
Sandwiches were busily prepared and our canoe strapped to the roof of the car. I plodded on with my laundry, conscious of dragging everyone's mood down. Adult bickering commenced.

The car wouldn't start. After a lengthy effort with jump leads and a neighbour's car we were off, my mood becoming blacker and more morose the nearer we got to the sea.

'Can't we just canoe down the river as normal?' I may have said, a few times.

We parked up to unload the canoe with the intention of moving the car to a pleasant spot that doesn't cost £8 to be there.
We unloaded the canoe. The car wouldn't start. No money for parking. My back was having one its low days and I wasn't relishing carrying a big canadian canoe several hundred  metres to the sea. In a rather untimely way, I started to fret about suncream, which we had forgotten, on one of the two days this summer when it's actually been sunny enough to need it. I started to fret about carrying the canoe with a bad back, and about having to call the car rescue service at the end of a long day in order to get home.  I mentioned canoeing in the river again, until it was pointed out that as the car wouldn't start and we were at the sea, this wasn't an option.
Adult bickering continued, with renewed intensity.

I ran off to the cash point to get parking money and calm down. I was feeling really really anxious. I considered going off on some adventure of my own after visiting the cash point.  I felt unhappy and obstructive and I knew everyone was getting frustrated with me.

While I was waiting in the shop to buy a newspaper to get change for the parking, I idly glanced down at the headline on the local paper which sat on the counter.

'Record number of rescues by lifeguards this year off the coast of Devon......parents are being warned....the sea is a dangerous place....etc'
Boom! Of course. That was why I was feeling so anxious it was like I had a ball of wire in my stomach. I was afraid another of my children was going to die.

There's something about the sea, perhaps because I was raised by land loving, sea fearing folks, that scares the hell out of me. Its majestic, beautiful, inspiring, breathtaking, but my childhood was punctuated by drowning dreams and I've never been someone who would pull on a wetsuit and go tearing head first into an enormous wave. Unlike my seriously water obsessed-grew-up-a-minute-from-the-beach partner.

I will happily swim about in a very calm sea on a warm day, and I love collecting shells and I don't mind going on a ferry, but a little canoe, out to sea, with my children?

Visions of them being thrown from the boat and tossed about in dark stormy waves filled my eyes with tears and my heart with terror.
You see I have seen Death. Head to head with the terrible awesome finality with which it strikes. The speed, the shock, the suddeness, just another sunny day with the kids. Pottering about, eating pancakes, thinking vaguely about what to do next, washing up, then I'm in an air ambulance with my daughter in a coma, then I'm in a hospital ward with a dead daughter.

And I can't be the relaxed chilled mum any more who thinks everything will be fine and things like that don't happen to us only to other people and usually only in the newspaper or at least in another town.
Because they happen to anyone, any time without a moments warning.

But we're still here. We survived. But we are changed.
If some one is later than they said they'd be and hasn't let me know they're ok, I'm not very relaxed.
Walking on a street or a pier or a river bank with small, impulsive, quick children is hard for me and my shoulders drop when we are away from traffic, deep water, danger.

Back at the carpark, I tried, not very eloquently to say that I was anxious, but I was shown the flat, calm expanse of water ahead of me and promised a calm, quiet, windless weather outlook for the afternoon.

It was, in the end a lovely day, of which I took many photographs which unfortunately are on a memory card somewhere around Brixham harbour, being nibbled by fish. My muscles gradually smoothed themselves out, we picnicked on a beach with egrets and oyster catchers nearby, Tansy and Leo caught seven silver mackerel, and I swam in a beautifully cool refreshing and calm sea. It  wasn't dangerous, it was really really lovely and I've got to just keep doing stuff even though I'm terrified.
 Because I'm alive and I've got to live. And so have my kids

The alchemy of food

Some days I'm just plain bored of cooking! Do you feel like that sometimes? I love cooking and place (rather too much) importance on the regular production of delicious nutritious meals....but...sometimes I just can't be bothered.

 I'll be just getting my teeth into chopping a huge mound of ash logs up for the winter and ... it's that time of the day again. Or I walk into the house at the end of a long day out with cranky hungry children and not a clue what to rustle up, or we've all just snuggled up on the sofa with some knitting and stories (it's that kind of summer in Devon) and ....well exactly. Sometimes I wish we could all just not eat for a day or two, just so I don't have to think what to cook.

But then sometimes I build up to an enormous crescendo of baking, churning out bread pies, biscuits, quiches....just to make it worth turning the oven on. When I was a kid one of the greatest sins was putting only one thing at a time in the oven...I don't think I have  really ever grown out of it, and of course it does make perfect financial and environmental sense!! And about three quarters of the way through the enormous crescendo, where everyone has decided to get fully involved, dinner is still a long way off and my tiny kitchen counter is a jumble of dirty dishes, chopped vegetables coated in flour, and four unfinished baking projects, I realise I'm not having fun anymore. I'm flustered agitated, snappy and  flushed and I just want to throw everything in the compost bin and run into the woods. The words, 'I just need to get this finished now and would you please go and play?' have been uttered, sometimes not so nicely, and with little effect.

It doesn't feel very nourishing.

And neither was yesterday's dinner, a pale unimaginative pasta that felt like wading ankle deep through mud, with some over steamed cauliflower and tofu. That was sort of how I was feeling when I was cooking it and it showed!

So I was surprised today to be making pasties, having torn myself away from the ash logs and the sofa, and quite enjoying it. It was late, Tansy and Leo were fighting over cleaning the rat cage out, and coming in periodically to drop rat cleaning rags into the sink near where I was working. I was tired and a bit grumpy. Conditions were not favourable. And I was uninspired by the thought of little cubes of carrot and potato going into my pasties yet again. Things were teetering on the edge of spiralling downhill rapidly when I found an enormous bunch of chard in my veg box and started chopping it and singing all twelve verses of Green grow the rushes oh! You don't know that song? Tansy and Leo were involved immediately and all rat issues were forgiven and forgotten. But tell me just who were the Rivals and the Lily white boys? Or the Proud Walkers for that matter?

So the chard went in with some sauteed onions and some chopped celery....Hmm chard and goat cheese would be a better bet, a hint of nutmeg? A zest of orange? Some raisins and toasted hazelnut? Buttery short crust pastry. Suddenly I felt like I was creating a bit of magic. I was enjoying myself, I twirled Tansy round the kitchen...(mainly to distract her from her current wobbly tooth which was quite literally dangling by a thread and spitting blood everywhere) the spices and fruits married in the pan in a fragrant mellow nuttiness, the dough baked to buttery perfection, melting goats cheese..mmmm!

That's how to prepare food!
You know it's strange, everyone ate much more calmly tonight, everyone went to sleep quietly.

Have you ever seen the film Like Water for Chocolate? It was always one of my favourites, although I haven't seen it for years. I have always longed to cook quail in rose petal sauce with as much love as Tita did.

Healing Flowers

Its summer! It's sunny! At last at last!.

For those of you who live, like me in the UK, it's time to celebrate the return of the sun. I had genuinely forgotten what it was like to not take a raincoat, I had forgotten that it is in fact possible to hang clothes outside to dry, I had forgotten how it is to wriggle my toes in warm wriggles in dry hot earth. I had forgotten that feeling that prolonged hot sun gives you, which makes you think that sitting outside doing nothing is actually quite productive.
We're harvesting flowers. Not my  home grown produce which has gone the way of the slug this year with too many absences and busy times on my part to keep on top of them.The slugs I mean. My harvesting is all wild this year.

A few days ago we returned from a family retreat locally where I held sugar free baking workshops and Hugh led bushcraft  activities. We felt nourished and energised by living in community and sharing our skills even for such a short time. (the sauna helped too!) Unfortunately we also brought an eye infection in the form of raging conjunctivitis back with us.
Tansy woke unable to open her eyes and when she did they were red and swollen. It took ten minutes of gentle bathing with warm herbal tea to unstick them.

I have some favourite herbs for eye infections and luckily, the only thing that is growing with any enthusiasm in my garden at the moment is one of them.....chickweed. Stellaria media, the little star. It's one of my favourite weeds and I always have a hard time digging it out of my beds. I make chickweed pesto in spring and by this time of year its lush soft greeness is beginning to straggle and I'm starting to think about pulling it up. I'm so glad I didn't.

Step number one in treating conjunctivitis.

Chickweed poultice.
Cut the soft tips of the chickweed and discard any stringy stems.

Place in a bowl and cover with boiling water. I added some calendula petals too.
Leave until cool enough to lay the vegetable matter over the eyes without any risk of burns, although it should be as warm as possible

Lay on eyes and cover with a cloth if needed to prevent drips running into the ear!
Leave until cool or until patient leaps up shouting  'that's enough Mummy', and races off to play.

Step 2
Eyebright lotion.

Usually I have some shop bought eyebright on hand at all times but due to house moves etc, my herb  jar was empty. I asked Hugh to pick me up some in town but it was on errand too many. Disgruntled, I stomped off for a walk onto our neighbour's land, a steep hill which rises up on the opposite side of the valley from our land, grazed by several shire horses. Well I'd never noticed that the entire hill is practically covered in eyebright! It's a tiny plant, so close to the ground and delicate it's very easy to miss. It's semi parasitic, so very hard to cultivate in the garden and seems to favour grass closely cropped by horses or sheep.

I made up an infusion with eyebright, elderflower, chamomile and plantain, and bathed her eyes in the warm solution as many times as I could in between chickweed poultices. I also used it to unglue her eyes each morning laying warm cotton wool soaked in the solution on her eyes for five minutes.

Step 3
Internal immune boost.
Basically, I added a few drops of shop bought echinacea tincture (my plants are nowhere near being ready to use!) to the eyebright and elder mix and gave it to Tansy to drink throughout the day.
I also chopped lots of raw garlic to add to her food to fight the infection.

Finally, we are obviously paying good attention to hygiene and sleep.No touching eyes or sharing wash cloths, and early bedtimes

It feels nourishing to be helping her this way, searching out the herbs, taking the time to lie down in the day for the treatments...Tansy said this morning, 'it's quite nice to rest with my eyes closed and not be able to see anything.'
I really believe that sometimes illness has such teaching to offer us. Yesterday I had plans to dash off in the car in an effort to do 'holiday stuff' making the most of the hot weather. It would have involved hideously complicated juggling of the car with Hugh's work needs, and after glancing at Tansy's eyes I decided to stay at home.

We had a picnic by the stream, collected hay left by the farmer, found baby frogs at the pond and waded through the mud, collected some firewood, did some beeswax modelling, sewing, gardening and an early bed....

It was a challenge for me to let go of beach plans and relax into being at home, the kids showed me how, they don't think further than the minute they're in.

But we are off to the beach today!!

Struggle

Its been hard to keep this space alive recently. I have ideas tumbling over each other to be written, but somehow, something always gets in the way.
The computer battery runs out.
The fuse in the plug which connects the computer to the solar power is broken, and keeps breaking every time I replace it.
A child I thought would be at Kindergarten is ill and my writing time disappears.
It is late at night and although everyone is finally asleep, I am so exhausted with the day, I have no energy to write.
I wake early to write before everyone else is up and, suddenly everyone else is up!
I could write in the toilet....but there's always someone who needs to go.....

There is no separate space in our house where I can write. Our bedroom is even in the sitting room!
There is too much else to do.
And so on.

I could go on.
But it's fast turning into a boring list of complaints and that doesn't achieve anything.

It is intensely frustrating. Sometimes I feel like giving up on the whole thing. Maybe my life style...heating huge vats of water over the fire every time I do laundry or want a bath, living in one space with kids and a partner,  just isn't compatable with writing. You see it's not just the blog..it's the articles all lining up in draft, its the half written books languishing in notebooks around my bed.

I love writing.
It's one of the most satisfying things I can do.
But it always comes last.
The bottom of the pile.
I always feel guilty when I ask for some child care so that I can write. Like its an indulgence, something that's worthless, to be apologised for, quickly squeezed into guilty time at the end of the day, or round making a gourmet lunch.
I always put my partner's work first. I put my children's needs first.

No wonder I'm not getting round to it.

It's time to make some decisions.

We've just come back from a festival and two days before we went, I devoted one entire day to washing. No kidding. The kids were at school, it was my writing morning, and I was lighting fires outside, heating vats of water, scrubbing, rinsing, dodging rain, bringing laundry in and out from the washing line, lighting another fire inside so I could actually dry the damn laundry....a whole day.

Is this how I want to spend my time?
Well, actually yes and  no,

When my kids are at home, and I have a small laundry load, I like to light the fire with them and sit around it scrubbing, chatting, getting them to help fold and mangle the clothes. That feels good and empowering that we can do it ourselves.
But hours and hours devoted to a task which is eroding time when I can write? No!
Time struggling in the rain lighting a fire to heat water because if I light it inside we'll all melt? No!

When I lived in a yurt for six months with four children and Leo still in (washable) nappies I came to a sudden realisation about the lack of women poets, artists, writers in history. I was finding it hard  to find time to send a text message. And it wasn't just time...it was almost impossible to sit down at the end of a day hauling water, firewood, outside baths, cooking on camp stoves, keeping rats at bay and the school run.....and compose articles and short stories calmly by candle light.

So do I have to choose between a low impact lifestyle and writing? Well, driving to a friends house to write isn't exactly doing my carbon emissions any good is it?

Maybe I'm using it as an excuse to not write and avoid the fear of rejection. Possible.  If I can justify my time by producing swathes of clean, hand-laundered clothes and lovingly prepared food and neatly chopped firewood then I don't need to write. I can let myself off the hook.

BUT I DO WANT TO WRITE.

So I need to start taking it seriously and find a balance.

• Do some hand laundry, IF I WANT TO, and explore options for setting up a shared washing machine nearby. Ask for help. Visit the laundrette.
• Don't feel the need to fill in spare time by making endless healthy snacks, raw sweeties, dips and breads for the family.
• Get the solar system functioning, so I have enough power to do internet stuff for more than half an hour!

• Get myself some indoor writing space that I don't have to drive to, and that isn't our kitchen/sitting room/bedroom. It could be a hand built cob house with stained glass windows, it could just be a little caravan.
• be firm about getting some time and space to write...and when I get the time...just write.

Sounds easy eh?

Sharing all this makes it far more likely I'll get on with it....I do  love writing in this space and I don't want to give it up. I do want to publish books..and I just need to get on with it. (more about this another time)

I think we can achieve pretty much anything if we really want to, and decide that we can.  The practical obstacles, although they often seem insurmountable, are often the easier ones to overcome.


What are the obstacles in your lives lovely people?
How do you overcome them?

Lilies and Roses

The scent of lilies is particularly intense this year. It might have something to do with the fact that there are three bunches of them dotted around our small cabin.
This time of year.
It's the month of lilies and roses
The month of my Lily Rose.


The fragrance is strong and sweet and lingering. As if it doesn't want to let us go, or let us forget. Maybe we don't want to let go. I bury my nose in the open lily blossom and inhale and inhale. It's the scent of the first few days without Lily when swathes of lilies descended on our home, when baskets of rose petals were collected by her friends to surround her coffin.
It's the scent of loss and love and strange sweet mourning. It reminds me of the days when Lily was still recent. When I could still say, 'Last Tuesday I took Lily to the dentist' or, 'Lily and I made beads last weekend' even though I knew she never would again.
Pots of lilies, bunches of lilies, cards decorated with lilies, we were submerged in their scent, their cool sweet petals which withered and dropped one by one as the days went by.

And this morning was the sickening smell of rotting flesh in Tansy and Leo's room. A dead mouse festering under the bed. I am generally the corpse remover, with a torch, a trowel and a long stick to manoeuvre the bloated body, fat and pulsating with maggots. The mouse tumbled into a makeshift and careless grave in the wood while I tried not to breathe.
It's hard for a bereaved mother to have to dwell on these realities of ravaged and rotting flesh. I try not to, I try not to connect the two, but my mind is pulled back to it, the little black demon at the corner of my brain clawing at me with his piercing talons,
'where's your daughter now? what happened to her?
It's easy to forget that everything will be like that, every lily petal, every mouse, every beech tree, every chicken, everyone you've met today. You. We are protected, shielded and disconnected from the physical reality of death and  its hard when you come face to face with the physicality of our corporal mortality. It's just flesh I guess, there's more to us than that..our bodies are the transitory container for our souls, it's just hard to remember, when all we think about is material stuff. 

After the mouse, I emptied all the flower vases. One was a cottage garden bouquet from my mother, long past its best except for a beautiful full blown pink rose with a delicate scent. Discarding the decaying flowers, I gently lifted the rose out, intending to put it in a little pot next to Lily's photo on the table. But as I rescued it, its petals tumbled off softly, like falling snow. I was left with a dried stalk in my hand. It was such a stark image that I gasped, but even as the tears sprung to my eyes I spotted what I had missed before, a perfect unopened rose bud still hidden in the old bunch...a promise of new beauty just waiting to begin its fleeting life.

No loss is ever without its gift .

Not what I'd planned

This post is not what I'd planned. The last two weeks were not what I'd planned.
 I started writing a post a week and a half ago...a poignant prelude to the date in June which creeps up insidiously every year. The 11th. My daughter Lily's anniversary.
 The post is still half written in draft and I just tried to finish it but can't. Maybe I will finish it.
But not yet.
In June I try to give myself some space. To think, to write, to remember, to feel, to connect, to plan a quiet meaningful day for the family.
 But then Tansy started being sick.
And then sick some more, and more, and more for day after day every time she sat up or moved.
My three boys left on an annual men's camp on Dartmoor...in the rain, thinking she had a bad bug.
I was feeding her teaspoons of home made raw goat milk yoghurt, slippery elm gruel with banana, chamomile tea, an electrolyte mix of salt and honey.....
It was just me and Tansy in our cabin, in the rain.
I don't usually go to the doctors, I will, if needed, but I love to treat my kids with herbs, healing foods, rest, massage, hot teas and sofas by the fire...it usually does the trick.
She was sleeping more and more and so thin.

I carried her to the doctors in my arms in torrential rain. She was sick.
We were referred immediately to hospital for tests.
I carried her in my arms across the hospital car park in the pouring rain. She was sick.
We were there a week.
Level 12, the children's ward in a side room. High above the city in a little white room far from our woods, far from herbs and healing foods.
Five terrifying hours waiting to go for a brain scan.And get the results.
She lay flat in the bed barely moving or speaking and I carried her to the toilet twice a day and she was sick.
In those five hours I wondered what was going on with my daughters. I cried, I crocheted furiously, I looked across the grey rooftops of the vast hospital complex and wondered why, on Lily's anniversary I was in the same hospital I came to in an air ambulance three years ago. Would I lose another daughter? Why was I not being allowed to have my girls? My mind created all the horror it possibly could and stirred it into an evil brew of fear, terror and sorrow.
The consultant caught me in the corridor.
The scan was clear.
She has a non permanent neurological condition which makes her lose her balance and coordination and vomit when she is upright. It gets better.. quite slowly.
And she did start slowly, to get better. She started to smile. And talk...quite slowly and deliberately as if she was tasting the words for the first time in her mouth . She smiled more, to compensate for lack of words..lovely melting smiles when she wanted another oatcake..or some purple bedsocks from the hospital shop. And she was so hungry...even for hospital food. Really.
We learned that she could eat sucessfully if she lay down and didn't move for an hour afterwards. Then she started to sit up without keeling over.....
And then she stood up, shakily...

And so it goes..we are now home and things are the same and things are different. She is walking like a gigantic toddler, falling without warning, dashing towards me in a little rush to reach my arms before she topples. I have to watch her. All the time.
Everyone is adjusting to mum being around again..I'm not often away... but in some ways it's been a gift.
Apart from the terror of those days when she was really ill and I imagined the worst, I found that I could do nothing for a change. I couldn't go far....a run up and down the hospital stairs two or three times a day to buy a newspaper or some fruit, and then more sitting in the little white room. I looked out of the window, I crocheted, I read, and as Tansy started to improve we just hung out together. We don't ever get to do this. Just us two. I noticed things about her I hadn't noticed before. We laughed at how you can tell who was approaching by their shoes....doctors clip clop and nurses trudge in soft soled shoes. We commiserated at the hourly checks on her drip all through the night. It wasn't all bad.

And as always it was love that kept us going....messages from friends..little cards, offers of food, kindly nurses, other parents on the ward. It is very easy, even after what happened to our family three years ago, to become wrapped up in the material rush and grab of our lives, to forget, to think that all our little daily worries are important.
Again we've been set back on our heels and shown another way forward. Time to reflect, time to face fear and loss in the face and see their sharp teeth, time to slide between the teeth and find the connection to others. Time to feel the love of neighbours, friends and family. The time to support a mother weeping because her daughter was moaning in pain after surgery, time to share stories with another bereaved parent over coffee in the ward kitchen.
That's what I learned. There is time for that. Time for each other.
And that's what's important.