My youngest daughter has started school full-time today. This is it. This is where I find the part of me which has been lying dormant for six years. I can now get 'me' back. Whatever that is. I'm not sure I know me anymore. I have become a lot more focussed since having children. I have learned how valuable free time is and you grab it where you can, before other responsibilities take over your time and the space in your head. I can now put a lot more hours into studying. This will make a change from snatched hours here and there; between breaking up fights over Barbies, Lego and Play-Doh; sorting out hair and clothes crises (they start young these days); washing and cooking for my family and for the constant stream of foreign students who stay with us while they learn English. I still have to walk the dog, but at least I'm not bribing a four-year-old with the promise of sweets if we do one more lap of the park.
Thinking back to the class last Thursday, I found myself wondering why I was so guarded when we did an exercise to write down the different slices of ourselves. My list consisted mainly of jobs I've had. These weren't even fabulous careers I couldn't wait to show off. They were just jobs. 'Mother' was listed way down and I didn't even touch on the various roles that make up being a mum. When I heard other people's lists, I realised I didn't write anything emotional about myself at all. I hid behind a few job titles and left out the rest. At first I thought I was being a bit thick. But I've had enough psychotherapy (here we go, I'm opening up) to know that my natural instinct is to avoid revealing myself too early. Perhaps I'll go much deeper when I write about a recent memory. I'm still deciding which one. How recent is recent? To me, 15 years ago is fairly recent. But to some of the younger students in our group, that would be as far as their memories go back.
I've been very distracted this week by the five-year-old girl in the news who went missing from outside her home in Wales. April Jones was the same age as my eldest daughter and their smiles are similar. What is so wrong with society that you can't let a young child play with her friends outside her own house? Machynlleth is a small town in Powys, with a population of just over 2,000 (as measured in the 2001 Census). That's not a lot of people. Everyone must know everyone. It is the last place you'd expect something like this to happen. You shouldn't have to watch them every second of the day. Once they start school you have to start trusting other people.
The times I've let mine wander off a bit further out of reach, possibly a little out of sight in our local park. It's fairly wide open with an enclosed playground in one corner. My thinking has been that they're fairly sensible, they won't talk to strangers. Then they always come back, feeling proud that they have been trusted to be grown up. It's okay there's some other parents nearby. I don't know them, but I've seen them at the school. They have children; they won't let anything happen to them, will they? On the BBC's website, it reported: About 500 children under 16 are abducted each year - but the majority of these are parental abductions, according to the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop). It's extremely rare for children to be abducted by strangers, so who do we trust? How paranoid does a parent have to be to keep their child safe?
Back to the recent memory. I'm still thinking about this. I lived in a garage for a while; perhaps I could elaborate on that? This memory came up as I'm writing in our sun lounge (fancy lean-to and there's no sun) at the moment. The Writing Room is still out of commission. And it suddenly struck me that the garage I lived in with my boyfriend really wasn't much bigger than the sun lounge, maybe just a little wider.
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