Free

It’s been a weird few weeks (hence the increased blog posts).  In some ways it’s been tough, because a lot of quite traumatic memories have been dragged up, but ultimately, it’s been a time that’s confirmed how far I’ve come and how much better things are for me.  I’ve realised how just happy I am and […]

Bigger

I was talking to my Aunt on Tuesday.  As I’ve mentioned on here before, we lost my lovely Uncle last year, and she is at the beginning of the long hard path of learning to live a life without him.  She was saying that she’d seen an illustration about grief, which showed grief as a […]

Dishes

All of a sudden, in the weeks running up to Christmas, Oldest Son seemed to reach Peak Teen. My mild mannered, quietly sardonic son became slightly moody, his amusingly sarcastic comments became increasingly biting and his usual amused patience with me and his siblings was replaced with an increasingly bemused irritation. It was bound to […]

Honourable

E believes he is an honourable man. Don’t laugh. He really does. In the meantime, the rest of us are still struggling to reconcile the person we thought E was, with the person that the evidence is beginning to prove he actually is. There was the E I thought I was with for 25 years. […]

WhatsUp?

Communication with E seems to have reached a new low recently.  It seems that he has now stopped replying to my emails.  He’s never answered a text and he refuses to speak to me, so email was pretty much the only way I could communicate with him about the kids and money.  Now he’s not responding […]

Old Normal

Watching Youngest Son watch the football the other night, made me realise two things; firstly how much has changed, secondly how little has changed, since E left us. Whilst the kids and I have experienced a seismic shift emotionally, and in terms of our family dynamic, the fact is that in terms of our environment […]

Fathers’ Day

It was Fathers’ Day on Sunday, and whilst the kids didn’t particularly lament the lack of their Dad (in fact none of them noticed  – Youngest Son only remembered because I asked him if he’d wished his Dad a Happy Father’s Day), it did make me reflect upon E’s role as a ‘father figure’. In […]

Weekend

Yesterday I went to my best friend of nearly 35 years parents’ house for a ‘goodbye’ do (she’s moving to the depths of beautiful Cornwall in a few weeks).  We met in our first year of upper school in 1983, and we have been friends ever since.  I felt quite tearful when I went to the […]

Shaman

Yesterday evening I was lucky enough to interview a Shaman for the magazine that I work for.  It was one of the most extraordinary experiences I’ve ever had.  I won’t go into detail here (I’ll save those for the article I’m writing), but one of the things that stood out about our conversation was his […]

The Secret Diary of E, aged 37 3/4* *(according to J). The Early Years: Part One

Over the last year or so loads of people have asked me what on earth was going on in E’s head.  I usually shrug, shake my head and say something along the lines of ‘unfathomable’.  But maybe, just maybe, I can guess.  Below is the first in a series of light-hearted attempts to look at […]