Roller coaster life
Well, I seem to start with this a lot, but it really has been an up and down time, literally. You see last week we went to Flamingo Land. I discovered a few things. 1)Three mums with 7 kids between them can co-exist pretty well in two caravans, as long as you talk about things that are bugging you in a timely and constructive way. 2)My son is happy to be himself and decide whether or not he wants to go on scary rides and not feel the pressure to conform to other people's ideas of what an eleven year old should or shouldn't enjoy. 3)My 7 nearly 8 year old daughter is an adrenaline junkie, and 4) I can 'feel the fear and do it anyway' when it comes to sharing the scary upside down corkscrew rollercoaster and the spinning, whooshing dinner plate that swings up and down like a pirate ship with her.5) My 5 year old daughter has an infectious, squealy laugh when she's on the Frog hopper. 6) All the kids like spending money on those silly waste of money hook a duck/throw the ball on the barrel/knock the tins down games that spew out silly fluffy toys for £2 or £3 a go ('But there's all this other stuff to go on for free and you want to spend money on that?!!). And 7) I can forget about Badman and Balls even if it is only for a few days. There's a long way to go with the whole thing, and I'm still waking up discomfited and gloomy some days, but I think I'm beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel. It's very small, and a long way off, but it's there. I'll do my best to keep it glowing.
I've been thinking about what it takes to be happy and feel secure in a place. Because we moved over 300 miles from where we lived before it can seem like we'll never quite fit in. Everything we've done since we moved here has been starting from scratch, or very nearly. That's one of the reasons, I suppose, why the setbacks seem to hit harder than they might have in a place we were already familiar, if bored and miserable, with. At least there I might have had people to fall back on. Our social circle here seems limited because we don't have a history here, or not one we can grasp anyway. We have to make our roots ourselves, which can be difficult when we have a fully-grown tree of a family to support them on. If we expend our energy on bedding in and finding new networks to hook into we run the risk of neglecting the nurturing we should be doing to keep the tree alive, yet if we concentrate on the day to day growth, we risk being too inward-looking which will perpetuate the feeling of isolation. As in all things it's a question of balance, easy to say, hard to do.
It was whilst thinking along these lines, as well as feeling pretty lethargic today after the hullabaloo of the holiday and halloween last night, that I remembered something as I was listlessly surfing the web. About a year ago I came across a blog written by a woman who seemed to be in a similar position to me. She'd moved to Northumberland, to a location I recognised from our house-hunting days. It seemed interesting so I tried it out, but was put off by the whinging tone and the London-centric nature of the posts. I couldn't understand why she would agree to a move that was so important to her husband (who seemed to always be in London himself - go figure) and then spend most of her life moaning about it. She even said that she knew before she moved that she'd hate it. Maybe that's not quite fair. She loved London so much that anything else just wasn't right. I realised she wasn't writing it for people like me who'd done a similar thing - she'd done it for people who lived in London and wanted their decision not to do it justified for them. Fair enough. That's what sells I guess, there's more of them than me. Judging by the reviews on Amazon I'm obviously not alone in my assessment, although I felt like I was, given that Woman's Hour chose to serialise it a while ago. I even toyed with the idea of writing a different perspective kind of blog about my life since I'd got here. It really has been the best move we ever made, all things considered. It just needs a bit of working on, our life here. A bit more outward looking, a bit more embracing of the unknown rather than sticking with what has become familiar. A bit more daring myself to go on the scary roller coaster is what's needed.
