4 Children and it

It's all relative, unfortunately

2011-11-11T00:11:00.000Z

It always fascinates me that the expectation is that relatives are the ones that support you no matter what, whilst friends come and go.

It is a strange expectation since the reality is that friends generally support you no matter what and relatives generally, annoy the hell out of you.

The last couple of weeks has seen an upward rise in my level of sheer exhaustion. For some reason life has been a tad relentless and not even the weekend provided for a later start. From teenage pick ups to Sunday morning Rugby - as much as I hankered for a little loafing under goose down, it wasn't going to happen.

It's when really tired that I find it hardest to switch off and so, with no common sense whatsoever - I embark on insane de-cluttering. Within 4 days I had removed 4 packing boxes full of 'stuff' and deposited them across Wiltshire's charity shops. My huge jar for make up, one for nails, one for hair - an entire Georgian cupboard full of body lotion and boob tape, a medicine cabinet reminiscent of a pharmacy and a store cupboard worthy of a nuclear shelter. Everything was halved.

Including my energy levels. Monday morning felt like a Friday, starting a little chaotically when I realised I had neglected to buy food. The week deteriotes. Everyday at work alongside trying to sling in 2 parents consultations, one 3 hour meeting with the visual impairment team, the EA IT specialist, Head of year and Head of SEN to try and trash out a solution to the multitude of problems for one of the offspring. Tuesday sees a home visit from VI lady and the mobility specialist. By the time they left, I had 8 minutes to get to a business pitch. By the time that finished, I had 26 minutes to finish some work that was sure to take longer. And so the week has gone on.

Then there are the minor things, like keeping up with the washing and mess created by four other people sharing your space, the 45 emotional melt down, the big argument with one child, the homework, the general chaos and having to find time for a bath every morning.

Last week was little better and at one weak moment, commented to a member of the family that I was in fact, utterly exhausted. Following a typically relative reply about how they had done their time working, I pointed out that they had never had the added bonus of being a single parent to four children.

'Well" they said "It was your choice"

"I beg your pardon" I reply in my most incredulous voice (IIIII BEG your parduuun?)

When (not unreasonably, I thought) point out that no one in their right mind would have 4 children by themselves through choice and in fact, not only had the ex husband been really very controlling, he had been doing things he ought not with a woman with a preference for married men and Polyester. Clearly if anyone was making a choice, it was him (And thank god he did) Given the circumstances, I think choice was a most irritating view.

"Well" they say "You could have forgiven him"

Thank god for friends.

Two sides of the same coin

2011-11-08T00:42:00.000Z

To a man I was in a relationship with, "Everytime we hurt someone, we make it a little harder for that person to love the next"

Since he nodded his head vehemently, I took that to mean he understood the concept. He may well have done but on reflection, failedd to grasp the responsibility in the statemnet. It seems that for some, for whatever reason - there own issues overtake the need to make sure that those who have been close are not unnecessarily damaged in the process of knowing them.

So this is where I ponder the responsibility. I have realised of late that following the couple of relationsships that I have had, I am developing a deep sense of mistrust in others. If it was an overall scepticism, I could probably live with that but this is a full scale analytical panic if any man is nice to me. In my head runs the same script "Why are they being nice, what do they want, are they flirting, are they making a play, are they trying to screw with my head"?

It is a deeply disturbing experience. I want to believe in the good, I want to believe in authenticity, of kindness. Ireally, genuinly, wholeheartedly want to believe that people are genuine but if they have a penis, I have a million red flags flying.

I hate thinking like this. It seems I have gone from one end of the spectrum of trust to the other and it is not a pleasent experience. If a man is being nice, is being genuine - then he probably wants to have sex and he will undoubtedly try to screw with my mind at the same time.

In midst of full on panic that someone was about to mess with my mind, I phone a friend. A male friend. I snivel down the phone that I cannot bear not trusting people. He tells me never to trust any man. Great.

So now I have to question the responsibility issue. Is it someone else's responsibility to make sure that your trust in humans is not anhilated by their behaviour or actions, or is it mine for allowing the actions of others to have a negative impact on the way I view the world.

I am really not sure but I profoundly hope that any impact I have had on men I have ever been in arelationship - is not one that makes it harder for them to care about the next person.

Friends with benefits

2011-11-02T18:21:00.000Z

"When I first met you, you were one of the most intelligent women I had ever met"

Pause.....

"And over time, you have just got progressively thicker"

It would be easy to take offense at such comment, butit is quite the most amusing thing anyone has ever said to me. More than that, there is clear truth in its content. Sometimes I say things that surprise me with unexpected astuteness and other times, I say things so spectacularly stupid they border on impressive.

Last week I had a text from a man who kindly told me that I light up the lives of others. In the same text he told me that I was erudite. I had to google the word.I now suspect that I light up the lives of others, primarily due to my moments of utter and complete denseness.

It was in this text I had to consider other areas of stupidity. Such as having an extensive collection of utterly gorgeous male friends. I love male friends. Male friends are straight in what they say, they have (on the whole) a sharper humour, less sides and are less interested in fluff. They also speak less than I do, which is pretty convenient, since I rarely pause for breath.

Married, in relationships or single, male friends are my bench mark for emotional security. They make me laugh, they roll their eyes in affection, they hug me if on rare occasion I cry and they are always, always kind. More than this, my male friends are safe because they are all emotionally stable and secure.

Which makes me wonder why none of the beautiful male friends I have in my life are men that I would ever date. This alone must indicate some spectacular level of dimness. I find them all attractive in their own way but not one of them has ever sparked chemistry. And that is because they are lovely. If I put them into a dating category they would only say nie things until they got what they wanted. Keep them in the friendship category and they always say nice things. I have long said that the idea of something is always better than the reality. One of my oldest sexiest male friends is a man I went out with in my 20's. I never slept with him and swear blind that this is why we are still friends. I recognise that I may have some control issues going on here!

One of my dearest friends is a man I met on a date. I adore him, he more than tolerates me. I love his children, he loves mine. We go out regularly together, we go on holiday together. Yet despite the fact that we get on so well, I feel no chemistry and as such,not even a kiss has passed between us. In between dating and in moments of boredom I will get random texts asking me for some sort of sexual favour, but we both know that once my mind is made up, nothing will change it.

And like all of my male friends; if he wasn't so nice, wasn't so stable, wasn't so dependable I would probably find him stimulating in a multitude of ways. Now that is stupidity.

Or is it? Any relationship that starts with chemistry will surely develop into a calmer state in which friendship, respect, tolerance and most of all - acceptance will become primary features. And yet it is this state of acceptance, perhaps contentment that causes the likes of people like me to break out in a cold sweat.

Which makes me wonder - what in gods name is contentment? Is it a compromise, a word with negative association - of old couples that want nothing and totter about in anticipation of Coronation Street being aired. When I was married I accepted my lot but I never felt contented, I spent most of it wondering what life would be like if you met your soulmate.

So in fact, if contended is not wanting for more but being contended with what you have then perhaps contended is better than acceptance. Then again, perhaps you only reach contented when you have reached acceptance of yourself and others. Acceptance is clearly about accepting the things youcannot change and sotrting out the crap in the things you can.

Perhaps it is all simply too confusing.

Utterly Rantastic

2011-08-17T01:03:00.000+01:00

If a blog affords a real benefit, it is in enabling the facility to rant and rave, rather than react - which for those that occasionally need a good rant, was the old fashioned response. Reacting in midst of rant is always a foolish approach and so on this blog, I am going to rant.

Divorce is really quite simple. You marry someone, it doesn't work and so you divorce. Simple. Except it rarely is, since divorce teaches you the side to that person that you failed to spot when you walked up the aisle. Logical really, since if you knew then, what you learn through the marriage - then the aisle is not the path you would have trodden.

What I learned in the divorce was that the trust I had placed in the integrity of the person I married, was misplaced. Yet despite learning that, I still thought that divorce makes people act in a most peculiar way and that eventually we all reach a place where honesty and integrity may reside once more, just in a different way. Apparently I am wrong in this assumption.

For some time, ex husband and I have appeared to have reached a place where we can get on. There have even been quite a few long telephone calls in which we have discussed a few things from the past, a few things about work, love, life and stuff. At one point, I even sought and received dating advice. In this call, he even conceded that I had demanded nothing from him when marred and had in fact, allowed him to behave selfishly. Apparently, he had never hated me, his anger a result of me thinking badly of him.

One such call which went on for hours, was cut short due to an overwhelming need on my part to faint. Ex husband called a nurse friend to seek advice and called me later to dispense it. Given that the Divorce was something we both wanted, it appeared that we were both now being quite civilised. I am no fool. Clearly there will remain a lot of unsaid things, most of which remain best left unsaid. However, he is regularly invited in for a cup of tea and last month, I even invited him to stay for supper, which he did. That one was probably a step to far and on the scale of weirdness - it notched a high score.

Still, all good so far. Accept I discovered tonight that what he tells others is something entirely different. So, I learnt many things this evening, such as my apparnet refusal to tell him anything about the children

One child is losing his sight. I called him straight after the opticions appointment. A consultants sppointment date was duly advised and ex-husband forgot about it. I know that, since 3 days after his son had mentioned he had attended said hospital appointment, he phoned and asked about it.

"Did you forget?" said I

"I thought you just meant around that date" said he.

Yet, it would seem that what he tells others is that I only told him at he very last minute, too late for him to do or know anything about it.

It gets better, I prevent him knowing anything about what goes on at school, prevent him being able to attend anything at school. Which is ironic since when we were married he never had anything to do with anything that happened at school. In 14 years of educating 4 children, I think he only attended 2 parents evening and not through choice. When he was informed that I would taking the school to task over disability discrimination, the Head called him in error. It was in he that called the Head to advise that I was the parent that he need speak to. At no point did he ever ask what had happened about it.

It is now 2 years since I fought the Education Authority at a special needs tribunal and I still have never been asked what happened. This in itself is no surprise - when a 17 page report on one child was compiled by Great Ormond Street and his parents asked about it - he couldn't comment since he hadn't actually read it and that was when we lived under the same roof.

So, he phones the other night to ask what help this child was getting at school. Clearly someone had asked him and decided he ought to know the answer. It is three years since this child starting walking into furniture and 2 months since a fairly tragic diagnosis and yet the first time his father has ever asked what support he gets at school. And yet this long, long history in not being involved or responsible for what happens in the lives of is children, is by all accounts, my fault.

As is the fact that he cannot stand the sight of me and cannot bear to be in the same room as me - or so he is leading his family to believe. So it certainly cannot have been him that sat down in my house last month and tucked into lamb, couscous and stuffed mushrooms. It cannot be him that is quite willing to accept an offer of a cup of tea when picking up or dropping off children.

It cannot be him, since he cannot bear to look at he woman that apparently also bleeds him dry. And boy do I, this is the woman that had to spend £17,000 to get the judge to make him pay £400 per month for 4 children to live in luxury. This is the woman that needed to buy a computer to enable her partially sighted son to use speech to text software and for the first time in 2.5 years had the audacity to ask for a financial contribution of an apparently eye watering £200.

This is the woman that accepted the line of "I can't, since I only have £13 to my name" and did not utter a word when he turned up 3 days later with a brand new lease vehicle. This is the woman knows that there will never be a time where he ever provides anything more than the legal minimum based on the minimum amount you can get away with saying that a limited company earns.

This is a women that at this particular moment is apoplectic with rage and has decide that it far better to rant via a keyboard than to open my mouth. It is remaining very tightly clamped, to the point of jaw pain.

Apparently ex-husband is really not happy with the fact that I am being invited to his sisters wedding. Since he has made it clear to all that he cannot bear to be in the same room with me, since he will be bringing the woman that he was unfaithful with and it will be the first occasion I get to meet the woman that refused contact with me when I was actually married, I can imagine that he may feel quite awkward.

Still, it seems that my invite will be a plus one. I was thinking of inviting the man that looks like him that sometimes drinks tea with me.

I profoundly hope that at some point in my life I meet a male that is genuinely capable of being a man.

Rant over. Reaction buried

An interesting supper party

2011-07-10T00:44:00.000+01:00

I have made two decisions this week, the first was to restart the Gym membership. Following last years collapse I am trying to avoid looking at any more Russian army exercise videos on you tube. I am also trying to hypnotise myself so that when the instructor say's "Women are not designed to do these kind of exercises" that I simply smile and nod in agreement instead of trying to prove him wrong.

I was immensely chuffed to prove him wrong but the smugness of doing so lasted 3 weeks until the big collapse. As a result, a year later and I can't do any. So I am rejoining the gym for the use of the steam room. I may venture into the gym. The words 'well toned' are just a little compelling.

The other decision I made was to have an interesting supper party. I thought about doing this six months ago but think many things that I never actually do. So I decided to just get on with it.

My interesting supper party is inviting people for supper that I have found interesting. I don't really know them, but for the brief period I met them, they interested me. Based on the theory that everyone comes into your life for a reason, I figured that it would simply be interesting to have interesting people around.

So far, I have invited my work colleague, just because she is utterly gorgeous. Her husband is insane and very interesting, so he got an invite. Then there is a man that has started many companies, almost all with an eco edge. Met through a meeting he requested about marketing, the conversation soon left work and moved into Shamanism - definitely interesting.

Guest no 4 is the Marketeer with his own branding agency. I met him for no more than 20 minutes at a gallery opening. The conversation was entirely on the definition of masculinity. Since I have a growing and enthusiastic appreciation for masculinity, it fascinated me to meet a man that was so well read on the subject.

Supper party guest number 5 is a woman I met for no more than 10 minutes about 9 years ago. An ex 80's minor pop star that then went onto start a successful business, we struck up a conversation in a doctors surgery abut a book called 'The Indigo children' She was very interesting. Thankfully she remembered meeting me and is delighted to be coming.

Guests no 6 is a little tricky. She doesn't want to come without her husband, despite the fact that she is interesting on her own. I had to say no, since this is my evening of people that are interesting and I have never met her husband. Perhaps a little harsh, but bringing unmet spouses would blow the reason for having this supper. Besides, since I do not have a husband and even when I did, would merrily go out without him - I have too little empathy to bend the rules. I shall work on her, she needs to be there.

Guest number 7 is a thoroughly interesting female who has one of the most interesting families you could ever meet. Every one in it is about as creative as it is possible to be. Since I cannot invite all 6 of them, she will have to be the spokesperson.

I am toying with inviting another man, met on a business course - that was so at peace with himself and the world around, such utter acceptance that he could have been Buddha himself. I am debating his invite. I am not convinced he will find us interesting enough.

I, of course will be there. This on the basis that my claim to being interesting is that I had the idea of the interesting supper party. If this workout, I shall rename it the interesting supper-club. Each month, I shall invite 4 interesting people and they will be required to each invite an interesting person they have met.

So that is it. An interesting idea

Sex on my mind

2011-07-09T02:49:00.000+01:00

I have been thinking about sex lately. A lot. In fact, there have been times when it has all I have been able to think about.

Today I had a meeting. Quite an important one in which I had to prep thoroughly to ensure that nothing but confident knowledge was exuded. In a momentary pause, I googled the man I was due to meet. 'Not bad' I thought - so I googled a little more. Then I stumbled across a picture that included his forearms.

I have for some time recognised that I can lose all rational thought process when confronted with well toned muscle and alas, this man had a dangerous combination of extremely muscular forearms and the slightly mischievous trade mark look of a player. Sadly, it is a combination that I find compelling. Dangerous but compelling. I knew I was heading into dangerous territory.

So the meeting went ahead. We talked of strategy, policy and messaging. By the end of the meeting, the raised eyebrow appeared. The one that say's "You are not what I was expecting" then the look that you know that should you wish that the work remit extended, it would take no more than a little cerebral dance and it's a done deal.

So another meeting has been arranged, in a pub. Strictly business at this point but strictly speaking, possibly not. Since I have had nothing but fairly inappropriate thoughts for some time - I made up my mind that I was going to drop my stance on meaningless sex and just start having meaningless sex. It lasted until about 9pm until I went to the garage and was blatantly checked out by two men.

I realised that meaningless sex was no more than momentary gratification. I could repackage as being in control, taking the pleasure without the grief of intimacy and without the risk of hurt. By ruling out a relationship, I would be in control. If I was in control, I just got sex when I felt like it and could just take physical pleasure.

And here is the reality. Devaluing my own view of sex and intimacy and convincing myself that I would be in control - was a guaranteed passport to misery. Devaluing sex would simply anaesthetise myself to true intimacy. I am not talking about life long commitment, but the level of intimacy you can reach when someone trusts you with their body and mind and them yours. Sex for sex's sake is never going to be as good as sex with someone with which there is a connection that is more than gratification or validation. A connection deeper than carnal need.

Don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with carnal need, but if I switched off the emotional side simply to have sex with men I barely knew, than I would be living on a permanent power high. And it is a high that you would risk being addicted to. No single person would ever match that hit on a long term level and so I would create a cycle difficult to break.

And lets face it, it wouldn't be hard to achieve. If you put your mind to it, there is no more difficulty in finding willing participants than there is finding a petrol station. And this is the bit I don't get - there is no challenge. It doesn't take long before you can instantly spot the signs of someone willing to go the distance. It's simply too easy, like candy from a child. There is no true respect involved and aside from the instantaneous gratification, the long term emotional risks are too high.

Mind blowing sex is not technique, it is a level reached when two people have attained a level of emotional intimacy that is equal and shared. You can only reach that plateau when you completely accept another person. Respecting and embracing the opposite sex is also a step up the ladder towards the kind of sex that creates a healthy addiction.

Tempting as it was brief, I shall not be venturing into the chalk it up approach to sex. If I don't respect myself or anyone else, than it would seem unreasonable to expect anyone to respect me. Though I loved the idea for a moment, I know that it would be a slippery emotional slope that it would be difficult to climb back up from.

So I shall carry on being old fashioned in my view. I like being able to remember the men I have been intimate with. I like that I can remember individual and unique things about them, I like the fact that my feeling was sufficient for them then, that even after, I would choose only for them to be happy. To be so anaesthetised to intimacy that I would struggle to remember names is not a route I aspire to travel.

And so I shall remain old fashioned and very frustrated.

Delivery of my new baby

2011-04-17T23:58:00.001+01:00

I am having a lull in shoe fixes. Another torn meniscus and the longest and most hated ban on heels in the history of shoe addiction has had to see a change in purchasing high.

Meet my new baby. He took me days of reading to choose (don't start me on the the benefits of the aluminium clips) and a further 5 days to make the final decision. I could have saved a sum but could not wait. He will be here tomorrow ( I know since I am tracking his DHL status.

I have always hankered after a pressure washer.

So utterly excited and a little worried about that level of excitement

When boys become men, in search of happiness

2011-04-17T23:49:00.000+01:00

It has been a really hard week. Certainly a crash and burn one. The physical toll has been immense, I ache to a level that I can find insufficient drugs for and I have lost 7 pounds. I have achieved nothing of any note and yet when I look back over the course of the last few days, I am stunned that not only have I survived it but at how much there has been to deal with.

This is the week in which I discover there is something potentially up with one of my beautiful boys. Not life threatening, but most certainly life changing and the implications of which do not bear thinking about. So I have tried not to. I have promised him that no matter what life throws at him, there is always a way of dealing with it, just perhaps in a different way than he assumes it will be.

Then I face the recognition that I am a little emotionally screwed. This has been a little tricky but since a lifelong pattern has not worked, the only thing to do is to change it. This in itself is no easy task but hey, I like a challenge.

It has been a watershed week in so many ways,. Inbetween all the revelation, discovery and heartache I have had to work, sort the house out and continue with both work and the business plan (and boy did that slide this week).

Having realised just how my own patterns of behaviour are based in not truly believing in love, I thought I had better check with one of the many sons that he felt loved.

"Do you feel loved"? Say I

"Of course" say's he

"I want you to know that you should never change your self to be loved by others, that you are beautiful person just the way you are" say I

"You are not really like other Mothers, are you?" say's he

(No shit, Sherlock) thinks I

"Are you happy"? I continue

"Not really" he say's "It's school"

My heart pounds, I feel alarm that if he admits to being unhappy then it must be bad, and gratitude that he feels able to raise an issue with me.

"What's up"

He looks at the floor, then looks up at me with his beautiful blue eyes

"It starts too early, finishes too late and I really hate going on a Monday"

The male ability to leave me utterly speechless starts a lot younger than I thought.

Multi million pound ego

2011-04-15T23:25:00.000+01:00

Gosh a night of illumination and much thought.

I finally get it all. 'Tis all self hate and egocentric behaviour. My value on myself is based on ego, which is entirely false. My inability to voice my needs is about my hatred towards myself, defined by my ego

But since my ego is false, I have defined my life by believing something that was never there in the first place. Apparently such ego is set in place by the age of seven. This is alarming since all of my children are older than this.

Blinding. So, having based 42 years of my life on something that was never there it is time to move on.

Tonight I tried to build a social network site. I didn't do it. I haven't failed, I just didn't do it. A seed of an idea that I just need to plant

In truth, I find this whole technology thing a bit tricky. Still tomorrow is another day.

I am also in the throws of starting a business. Last week I chatted with the 'co-founder' of our not yet started business.

"What is your view for an exit strategy" I ask. We both had the same view

"Take a stab at what you aim to sell at in 7 years" say I

She said £20 million at the same time I said 22.

Life is full of signs, possibility and strangeness.

I think we only see what we need to see when we are ready to ee it. This in itself is odd, since one of my favourite expressions as a child was "I see said the blind man as he walked into the post"

Life is what it is

I am Medusa

2011-04-15T19:50:00.000+01:00

I have many abilities. I can rebuild an engine, milk a goat and spray a car. Most of these have had limited use over the years but the one skill I have that continues in its development is my ability to have grown men too scared to look me in the eye.

I have considered the obvious. Spot on the chin, mono brow, halitosis - but none seem to quite fit the bill. This week the thunderbolt hit.

I keep quiet. I think that being non demanding, being cool with behaviour that frankly, is not cool means that I am cool. I think that if I prove I have no needs, no expectations and no demands then I must be a really nice person. So nice in fact, there have been times that I thought I have emotional bulemia.

Yet I do not think their behaviour is okay, I think it sucks. Yet so convinced that if I say anything the inevitable will happen, the relationship will end that I keep silent. All the little games, the 24 hours to respond to a text yet they call you within 2 if you don't respond to theirs. The shit behaviour they pre-empt by saying "Do you think I am a lazy lover?" The answer to that one is that if you have to ask, you already know the answer. And so it goes on.

So I accept the behaviour and they feel great. I offer a very large pass that say's take the piss.

Yet I clock it all. And when the time comes I shoot from the hip in the kind of character assassination that will hurt. It hurts because it is all too often deadly accurate and I gave no warning. Then they feel shit.

The ex husband would never argue with me. He controlled any disharmony with sulking. If I tried to say that I wasn't happy about something he simply refused to speak for days on end. Then I would know that it simply wasn't worth it. I suspect this is where I learned to keep my mouth shut and clock it all. I once said "But I didn't say anything that wasn't true'

"Exactly" he said "That's why it hurt"

So I create my own death. The men I care about (I am not including ex marital relationships) are the ones that I destroy relationships with through my own behaviour. I offer no honesty, I allow myself to be fucked around and then become indignant at the injustice of it all. When I then demand some honesty from them, I fire a bullet. Then they cannot look me in the face.

Tis ironic that I demand honesty and yet the only honesty I ever give is my views on them.

Perhaps I do men an injustice. Perhaps if I had boundaries, then I would only meet the kind of men that respect them.

Seems that I am not that bright after all.

The head nodders guide to sex

2011-03-21T22:25:00.004Z

Sometimes I hear people say that sex is overarated, sometimes I nod my head in agreement. Head nodding is normally kindness, since to disagree would be to make them face the fact that they are probably the victim of poor sex syndrome. That would be cruel, so I nod.

They know the truth and that is why they kid themselves that sex is overrated. The more I nod, the more I make sympathetic noises the more they feel that sex that lasts less than three minutes or is so dull that you actually consider sleeping is entirely normal.

I used to say that sex was overrated. Mainly because it was. I also said it because the periods between threatened survival of the human race.

Good sex is never overrated.

Not that I have been thinking of sex.

Yours,

in the desert.

Everyday is a yesterday

2011-03-20T20:57:00.002Z

The one great thing about life is that each and every day has the potential to be better than the last. It may not be, it may be. It's a chance, something may happen that makes it a worse day, or an event could occur that makes it the best day of your life. Those things are out of our control. Then there is state of mind - if you tell yourself that each day presents a new opportunity, then you are opening yourself to good things happen.

Today was a better day then yesterday. Tomorrow has the potential of being better.

Perhaps this is the purpose of sleep. Like a short coma that you wake up from and start your life again.

Sleep well X

And whilst I fight sleep

2011-03-20T00:07:00.003Z

I thought I would post an out of focus picture of me in curlers. that's just the sort of classy madame that I am. My dear friend R and I have been having converstion on the cost of photographers. Since the seed of a business plan will involve them and there is the issue over money - none of it, I was thinking out of focus stling could be the way to go.

A creative trend is afoot.

Trapping your heart in the door

2011-03-19T23:28:00.003Z

It has been a really positive week. I decided to start a business. I organised an office, I purchase a domain name, I finally oil my kitchen worktop, I clean my car and I actually eat food. Tonight, I even allow myslef the time to lie in bed and watch a film.

And then the tears start, from nowhere. Three hours later and they are still rolling down my face - as if from a constant and unstoppable source. I have no idea why they started and no idea of how to stop them. I am not sobbing, simply awash with tears. My face stings, my jaw aches and I feel like my chest has lead weight upon it.

Perhaps this is the irony on being strong. I have always been strong - nothing, absolutely nothing will break me and no matter what is thrown my way, I shall continue to get up every day and continue my belief that it will all be okay. I became this strong not by choice but over a serious of events. Perhaps this isn't strength at all, perhaps it is nothing more than barriers.

Perhaps staying in a marriage awash with pretence and unhappiness was never strength, it was cowardice.

I have uttered to many a teenager that should I tell them anything in life worthy of them paying heed to, it would be that love does not mean that you are with the right person. Love does not mean you should make a life with them.

What if your real strength is when you finally realise that something is not right and you shut the door on. What if shutting the door on something despite how deeply you feel, is the right thing to do. What if the staying positive was a combination of denial and protection, set to distract you from the fact that your heart had become deeply and utterly exposed. What if you have finally reached a stage where you are in touch with your emotions enough that you can cry without obvious cause, that despite knowing that shutting that door was the right thing to do, that you miss them. What if strength is shutting the door on something that you deep down you know you don't want to shut the door on.

It hurts, it really, really hurts.

And yet I know that the sadness I feel is a sign that I have become stronger. All will be well in the morning.

I am just not sure which one

Knee Deep in it

2011-03-14T22:43:00.002Z

Uncharacteristically fed up.

It would appear that my assumption of stuffed knee is entirely correct. I have stuffed the other knee and it appears there is only one way out of this tricky situation.

Another operation.

The GP tried to put it gently, as if they would merely brush my leg with the smallest of invasion.

"They will have a little look, a little tidy up and maybe a repair"

"I had an arthroscopy 18 months ago" say I

"Oh no" says she "You know exactly what you will be facing then"

No kidding.

I can barely remember the last one. Trying to recover from an op at the same time as discovering your husband had a hankering for polyester (though looking back, he always did) was hardly conducive to recovery and resulted in being on crutches for 5 weeks.

I have googled how to drive your children to school when you can't and nothing of any use came up. I googled how much the operation was privately but decided that 2k on a credit card was a bad idea since I could not pay it back. How much easier, no hideous hospital, no cancellations. I could book it next week and rid myself of continued pain with the inevitable months waiting. Over and done with whilst I am still fed up.

Perfect.

All donations of £2k made payable to me. Thank you in anticipation.

Sometimes life is a little unfair. I am trying not to dwell on it and remain positive. This is challenging, since I am now allergic to the pain relief.

Bugger

A different perspective

2011-03-13T21:56:00.002Z

Whilst I know that there are more important things in life than high heels, I know that my passion for them is entirely superficial and that in the great scheme of life, they are irrelevant - no matter how irrelevent - I love them.

High heels to me are like Prozac to others. No matter how taxing life is, it seems utterly bearable in 5 inch heels. Life on the flat is frankly, dull.

Weekend four of flats and I find myself cleaning the car. It was like being married. So utterly mind blowingly, arse achingly dull - that if I even considered whether I should embrace impending doom and go to the garden centre. I choose Life and jet washed the wheel arches instead.

Then it struck me how easy it is to give up life in a marriage. Before you know it, you are living a life of humdrum, jut because slipping into parody mode is all to simple one in the years following the trip up the aisle.

If I have to cosign myself to anymore of my life slipping into a role that I feel that I am supposed to slip into, then take me forest way and dart me.

I miss my heels. I simply like the new perspective they have given me.

I felt a little guilty today. Perhaps I had proven the thoughts of others by shutting a door firmly shut. I have been fighting the feeling of mild guilt all day.

I think healthy is when you don't have to to leave the door ajar but someone chooses to break it down. Who knows but I suspect that I am a perplexing individual.

Short, but perplexing

Waynes World

2011-03-12T09:27:00.003Z

Somebody wrote an amazing comment today. I won't publish it because it was personal to them and so long in it's wisdom that it was almost a blog in itself.

In essence, I guess it was saying that there are some things that you can change, some things you can't and some things you can worry about and shouldn't.

I am no longer dating anyone. I have learnt that you can only ever really date in the present, you cannot predict the future and you living entirely in the past is a particularly bad idea. What you cannot do is persuade anyone else to be in the present with you. People's pasts can dictate their present, sucking them into a whirlpool of self fulfilling behaviour.

I feel saddened but I am not broken. I finally see that these are not my issues, they are not a reflection of me, Perhaps in some peculiar way I should be flattered. A relationship that reached the stage where the barriers were sufficiently lowered to let in pain before fear took over. Perhaps I shall ponder.

The universal truth is acceptance. To accept yourself dispenses with so much angst. You meet someone, you like them, do they like you? You text someone, they text you, do you text back, will you appear to keen - so it goes on. 'Tis all about being accepted and yet the one thing we rarely do is have emotional honesty. We rarely admit our deepest needs.

This is far more so for men. Hidden behind a mask of masculine armour, it is far harder for men to admit they crave emotional intimacy. Far easier to man it up, to face the world as strong. Yet I think men consider as much as women, they worry as much about rejection, if not more than women. They worry about getting their needs met at he same time as meeting the needs of a woman in a way that completely fits in with their 'man code' Men do all the same things as women, just in a different way.Men do not sit there and analyse with their friends the way in which women do, it stays in their head. Emotionally damaged, immature, whatever word you use, men do not unpick their behaviour, they go on gut instinct. If causes anxiety, get rid the problem.

I did a good job this time of recognising what I do and do not need. Whether I shall ever come across it I have no idea. The future is the one thing I will never be able to predict. Yet I see a pattern. I meet people, I get to know them, I love them - this can be friends, lovers, marriage it makes little difference. Then, they cannot face me, simply cannot look me in the eye.

It causes me an immense sadness and confusion. I no longer tie it in with my ego and damage myself, since I know that is not from any action I have chosen. It is simply something in me, that makes some people see something in themselves that they are not strong enough to accept.

It is not until you accept that you can ever be truly loved. Intimacy is about revealing the true you, bit by bit, piece by piece.

Someone in town told me the other day that you never really understand yourself until you understand how you are perceived by others. I am well aware of how people assume my confidence. And to a degree I am. I am now okay with myself and accept the fears that I have, I accept that I choose men that cannot allow to much emotional connection because I am simply terrified of the concept of safe, intimate emotionally connected love because I do not really believe it exists.

Only this time I saw a glimmer of it, I felt female and I liked it.

But sometimes, I feel saddened that someone elses deep emotional fear prevents them attaining honest, deep meaningful and non dependent love, because their fear means another door shuts in my heart.

I will never regret the men I fall in love with. I have learnt something about people and about myself from every single person in my life. Those people become part of you.

Life is very short, it can change in an instant.

The only moment you can live in, is the one you are living in now.

Synchronised breathing

2011-03-07T13:31:00.003Z

I am disovering things.

Sorting your own crap only works if others sort theirs out too. This takes the kind of synchronicity rarely seen in modern life and one which I keep missing.

Breathing very, very deeply.

Sometimes things turn out the way that you expected but not the way you hoped. It hurts, but one needs to take the view that in when you take a stand against expectation and go with opportunity - that no matter how painful, you will learn so much on the way.

Still, the ability to wear high heels would help a lot right now.

I am not a man, I am a coffee table

2011-02-26T22:10:00.003Z

I am procrastinating. I have decided to write something else and am midst outline. I am also a procrastinator and so I am writing on here.

I am in severe pain.

One of the most enlightening and pleasing things I have learnt in the last few months is that I am female. I spent some time with someone who is clearly masculine and it finally dawned on me that I am not equal to a man, I am different. Allowing for that difference and embracing it is is really quite a charming place to be. Masculinity it turns out is really very....attractive. I have loved it. It makes no less of me and in fact makes me more complete.

Except there is still the issue of my androgynous quality. Sometimes, just sometimes - in the midst of my new found female side, my inner male appears - as if from nowhere. In a moment of sheer stupidity and in a bout of tom foolery, I thought I would challenge a male with brute force. I lost. Not only did I resort to begging for mercy, I tore my meniscus.

Now I am facing potentially another knee operation and on top of that, have been banned from wearing high heels. This is a profoundly troubling ban. I have never purchased flat shoes in my life. I will have to spend the next few weeks being mistaken for a coffee table.

Repeat after myself: I am not a man, I am not a man, I am not a man.

Respect is a matter of ego

2011-02-26T21:21:00.002Z

Its been an interesting period. I have indeed find myself a magnate to men with emotional baggage. Or perhaps they are a magnet to me. Still, for everything that cause a thought process there is a lesson to be learnt.

I have learnt this. Peope have very specific ideas on what is the 'proper' way to behave and on the whole I struggle to agree that people should adhere to them. In dating - if a man does not respond immediately to texts or does not call for three days, he is no good and not treating me with respect.

Bollocks. I am 42, I have no idea what I want from my life and certainly have no idea about what I want from a relationship. I love the benefits of that unknown, the cooked breakfast, the witty conversations, my utter confusion over the concept of knowing the future, fantastic sex and beautiful bodies - but I am not the same persoon I was two years ago and if I need to be validated by someone calling me to do so - then I have a problem.

I figure this - I am just fine as I am. I no doubt have much to learn and am certain of a perpetual evolution until the day I sit in a carehome and shriek "I get it" through my toothless mouth. Until then, commitment phobic men, emotionally confused - whatever it is - it is their issue and not one I will ever need to take responsibility for, nor ones that I shall ever again see as a reflection of my worth. Compassion is so much more beautiful than responsibility. If there is one thing I can be certain of, it is that I will never again be in a co-dependant relationship.

Last week, I found myself in a situation in which I was gaining much pleasure. I gained it because it was simply pleasureable and NOT because I needed to give someone pleasure. I just gained it. As a result of that, the other person gained a lot of pleasure and that in turn, increased mine.

I think it may have been the only moment in which I have ever experienced true pleasure with no need, worry, validation required on either side. No ego involved.

The ego has a lot to answer for. When you need people to validate your existance, your ego has taken over.

The recovery from toxicity

2010-12-14T23:54:00.003Z

I am a divorced woman.

And so it was that I was inundated by texts wishing congratulations. Very nice they were too. The man that I am dating but not in a 'relationship' with sent a particularly nice one advising to hold onto that feeling of freedom, since it was somthing I had worked towards. He was right, except that feeling of freedom was about not being controlled. When I got the Decree absolute I realised that control doesn't actually exist. It is not inanimate, no more than a feeling, no more than what you allow someone else, or some fear in you to do.

Tonight I was summoned to the pub by a handful of friends to celebrate the legal end to being married. A worthy cause. Earlier in the day I had advised the man that I am no longer married to that we are no longer married. I invited him out for a drink to celebrate. Everyone things once again that I am nuts but frankly - I walked up the aisle with the man and since we did not want to stay married, I feel it befitting that we should end it in a slightly more discreet form of celebration. I could, I suppose wear my wedding dress.Now that would be nuts. Still, I think a final 'Yeahhhhhh' drink together the way to end things.

It was ironic that in celebrating my new start that the pub should also contain the serial dater. There I was charting the beginning of the fun in life when I have to sit in the same room with a man that was my first introduction to single life. Should I have allowed myself to have seen normal behaviour as this, I would never have dated again.

Still, I must remain honest. I still feel some chemistry. Not a sexual, I want to sleep with you chemistry, more of 'still a little in my head' chemistry. Which is doubly ironic since I am still not sure which was the real man. There is still the one that thinks himself to be a real catch, arrogant in body language, cocky in behaviour but perhaps more than that, the reality that deep down, he questions all of that.

Facade. There is no selection process to the daily contact with women - simply an addiction to women to provide the adulation that he needs to feel okay. There is still something unresolved. And I am fine with that. It is no more than an unhealthy fix. I am not the type to feed that kind of addiction.

It caused a host of mixed emotion tonight. The man I am seeing but not in a 'relationship' with, I utterly adore. No matter how much I have tried to feel nothing (and I have) he becomes a little more gorgeous every time I see him. It is a very slow non relationship and frankly, just what I need. So it upset me that I could feel so much for such a gentle soul, such a gorgeous man. No matter his or my issues he deals with them. I want to bolt, he has me sussed. He panics, he tells me. I get on with my life, he gets on with his. If I see him in the street, I see his face and I know that this is an interesting time. If I stay, he makes me laugh like no one else ever has. He has met my children, some of my friends, I have met some of his. All without pressure, all without expectation and labelling. All just the way this needs to be.

So this evening perplexed me. It was not resolved in my head, perhaps it will never be. Serial dater is never going to be the man that I thought he was. Serial dater is never going to be the man he thinks he is. All because he cannot face himself.

So I spoke to him tonight. I asked him if in the wake of a new year we could at least attempt to be civil to each other. He really had no choice but to say yes in public. I spoke to him tonight since I have recognise that facing things makes them less than they are.

The man I am not in a relationship wanted to know about the serial dater recently. He knew who he was since a friend had shared the local grapevine with him. "Do you always fall in love with men straight away?" he asked

"No" I replied "I thought you were an arrogant prig when I first met you"

And here in lies the difference. Last year I fell in love with potential. Ths year, I have the potential to fall in love.

Choice is in the bag

Before the horse has bolted

2010-11-21T22:55:00.002Z

I have spent all week preparing to bolt. I sat opposite someone last week having a serious adult conversation about expectation and such stuff. I presented as being very in control, very measured, pragmatic and a litte 'take it or leave it' All the while my head was thinking " Oh God, you are gorgeous and I feel like melting'.

I realised I could never say those words. Realising that I was thinking like that was a little shocking and extremely risky. If I told him that I was thinking that, he would no doubt bolt and more importantly, thinking those things meant that I could get hurt and so therefore there was only one answer.

Bolt.

I have had exit lines in my head and on the end of my texting finger for some time. I know the response to any "we need to talk' line because I have them all prepared in advance for the inevitable. Last night I acknowledged that texting my exit line was easier but unfair and if I am now an adult - I needed to call and exit. 4 hours of pacing and I summoned the courage. He was out.

So I spoke to a friend instead. Trained as a counsellor she says all the right things such as "And why do you think you feel this way"?

To which I reply "I have no idea, that's why I am asking you"

And she pointed out what I already know. I am a bolter. I date men that are bolters because it hides the fact that I am a bolter. I marry or date emotionally unavailable men because I think I am only worthy of emotionally unavailable men and since I am an emotionally unavailable woman, this proves my own fears.

I can be achingly honest about all sorts of things. Until I care. This is the point I reveal nothing since this is the point I can get hurt. What I never figured was that in emotionally withdrawing I sort of guarantee that the person I am seeing may be in the same place and me not being honest may make them withdraw. Choosing men with emotional baggage is perfect since this is the point I can turn it back onto them and concentrate on their issue and in so doing, avoid mine. Which in fundamentally, if I show them that I have feelings for them they are guaranteed to reject me. Not showing them I have feelings also guarantees that rejection will occur. Perfect, I don't have to take the risk and it becomes their fault.

So I missed the boat to bolt yesterday and when I received the 'phone me for a chat' message today, I panicked and hid the phone so I could avoid dealing with it. In a bid to try and undue some of this - I had already decided to be honest about how I felt, not in a bid to change the inevitable but in an attempt to leave a relationship having been emotionally honest for the first time ever.

So I called back. It was not the inevitable but merely a chat. My brain shifted as I considered that my fight or flight reaction was always on red alert and that perhaps my assumptions were always based on worse case scenario's. So I bit the bullet and revealed my thoughts. I did not however present it in a healthy way.

"I have something to tell you and you may not like it"

Oh Christ I feel really sick even saying this"

"Oh my God, I don't think I can"

Granted it was an unusual approach to telling someone that you think they are rather gorgeous and that they made me feel uncharacteristically melted. But even more unexpected is that no one shot me, the sky didn't fall in and the world didn't end in an instant.

What was even more interesting is that the fear of saying those words, had griped me for a week and the desire to bolt had almost entirely taken over me. So thank you to the man that made me realise that bolting is about fear and a sensation you can only feel when someone has made you feel something - I hope that one day you deal with this and find happiness.

And thank you to the man that made me feel that he was worth the risk of being honest with and that will not allow such issues to be unresolved. Who knows what the future holds but I do know this: Everyone comes into your life for a reason, everyone teaches you something but it is personal choice as to whether you learn from it. You learn from being hurt but you also learn alot about yourself and sometimes what hurts you most from other peoples behaviour, is what you start to see in your own.

There are no guarantees but at this moment and for this day I learnt that my fear of being hurt nearly made me bolt from something that could make me happy. May be it will, maybe it won't but the only chance I have in finding happiness is accepting that fear holds you in the same place time and time again. Refusing to give into fear and taking the chance that my assumptions could be wrong.

This time they were.

Duh

Life is very short

2010-10-16T08:35:00.002+01:00

The anonymous poster is back. Its mid October and the anonymous poster decides upon a derisory comment with reference to a post in September about 'Tank Girl' Apparently, I have been 'had over' good and proper since such expression is used by the poster to mean silly cow.

This has caused me to ponder many issues. The first is why has anyone so little to do but trawl through someone's old post and make such comments. One can only assume, as I have, that they simply have no life. More than that people that feel the need to behave in such a way are generally very unhappy people.

Lets put it in perspective. This week I went to the funeral of a colleague who was killed in very horrid car accident. He was 25 years old. In the time I knew him he never nasty, bitter or unkind. The church was full and rightly so.

There is no sense in this. Perhaps the kind sweet people die for no good reason to teach those that have so much to learn. Perhaps the world would be a better place if all the miserable, horrid people were wiped out but then there would be nothing to learn and if that happened, the human race would have no purpose and I am not sure how long it would last.

So now we have to deal with a life in which people with their whole life in front of them, who make all those around them laugh get wiped out in an instant. A life in which people without the balls to lead their own life want to write ridiculous comments on others.

So I did a straw pole with men. I asked them their assumption on a man calling someone tank girl. Interestingly it was all positive. Strong, feisty, scary and sexy. Not sure I have a problem with that at all. Which makes you wonder if the anonymous poster, using the expression tank girl as a means of establishing the connection of silly cow. I think that given the tone, the anonymity and cowardice - that anonymous poster is in fact a little scared and intimidated by women in general.

It speaks volumes that a man would use any term in a derisory way to talk to women, instead of having the ability to communicate in an adult fashion. The other thing I thought poignant was the concept that someone 'had you'. Independent women only give what they want. I for one am happy giving what I want to a man that does not have issues with feeling inadequate.

As for those with clear issue regarding masculinity, adequacy and strength of character. Remember that life is very short. Bitterness and unkindness make for a lonely gathering at the end. If we all aspire to anything it should be that when we die, people miss us.

Sadly, I think anonymous poster need not face this accolade.

Too much text

2010-09-18T23:22:00.003+01:00

The man that I am not particularly dating told me that I am not like a real girl. Apparently I am more like a boy. I have also been described as 'a small boy with breasts', Tank Girl and 'The Girl wit the Dragon Tattoo' - though I hasten to add, not all by the same man. I have not been overly flattered but ex-blind date assures me that the Tank Girl one is not an insult.

It would be a fair assessment that there are times where I respond to things like a 'Geezer' and when I respond to thinks like a girl, they tend to be overly girlie, emotional panic rants via text (god forbid that I share emotional panic on a face to face level) Should the unwitting recipient push an emotional button and MAKE me look them in the face, then tears are normally involved. Tears and talking are not one of the multi skills I ever mastered. In fact tears are not necessarily about genuine sadness but more to do with genuine awkwardness at being made to share a feeling. Tears feel so shockingly girlie that they normally render me incapable of speech in the hope that tears are sufficient and the unlucky other party is psychic.

So on the whole, I associate being overly emotional with being girlie and am more comfortable by far sending texts that say intelligent and feminine things such as "Nice Arse"

So having been told that I am a bit of a boy by a man that makes me want to be a bit of a girl, I decide that illness was the perfect time to watch a Chick Flick and get in touch with my inner Barbie.

I was nearly sick. I find it hard to believe that any film can incorporate such bad acting, such airhead mentality, such lip gloss, boobs and banality. I swear if being a girl means chocolate and chick flicks on a Saturday Evening, then I am going for surgery.

Should you ever find your self in the unfortunate position of being sufficiently ill to warrant a chick flick, don't bother. Having endured 90 minutes of torture I think it fair to say that the 'The boat that rocked' (I think that was it's title, was a much better choice'

Continuing on the theme of having my self imaged challenged, I was out texted this week. Never in the history of texting has this happened. I send a pretty sharp, pretty cryptic, pretty clever (and quite long) text and I get one back that frankly, blew mine out of the water. It took me 14 hours to come up with a response and the best I could do was to admit defeat. I am totally flummoxed. I have been out texted by a man.

Perhaps I am more of an airhead than I thought

When the shoe fits.

2010-09-16T07:46:00.002+01:00

On a more positive note. I had a shoe fix. At times of emotional dilemma and revelation - always have a shoe fix. It works wonders

Drama Queens and lessons in Life

2010-09-15T23:07:00.002+01:00

I am a woman of action. Following last night self revelations, I slept badly. By mid morning I had figured that the feelings of panic that were making me want to bolt, were due to placing myself in a situation that I had done in my marriage. I wasn't being true to myself.

At no point have I ever blamed 'he who cannot be mentioned' for the fact our relationship was co dependant and toxic. We both entered into it for our own reasons and it was doomed to fail because of it (This is not to say that I don't hold him responsible for his utter bitterness and unkindness since, because I do).

I wasn't true to myself. I shut off my emotions because his issues gave me a chance to avoid mine. I shut off emotions because I chose a man that would never be able to emotionally supportive or in tune because nothing existed outside his own issues. Thus co-dependency.

This morning I got it. I couldn't be vulnerable with my choice of husband because I had made my vulnerability something he was responsible for. In wringing it out to dry I made a connection that vulnerability is a stick someone can beat you with and therefore a bad thing. The truth is that vulnerability is part of being me and something I need to take responsibility for myself. In not allowing myself to be vulnerable, I cannot allow myself to love or be loved.

This is going to get confusing - I figured that in denying my vulnerability in the hope of not scaring someone else, I was living my life at the mercy of another person yet again. My panic response was because I was presenting with the same behaviour that I knew could only create the same pattern. Duh!

Then someone made me read the Karpman Dram Triangle - Victim, rescuer and persecutor, how we live according to a script- on the whole negative and how we basically can move from role to role.

"The covert purpose for each 'player' is to get their unspoken (and frequently unconscious) psychological wishes/needs met in a manner they feel justified, without having to acknowledge the broader dysfunction or harm done in the situation as a whole. As such, each player is acting upon their own selfish 'needs', rather than acting in a genuinely responsible or altruistic manner.

Bingo. Owning your feelings is about taking responsibility for them and not expecting others to. My issue with vulnerability is a big one. Then I realised the obvious, if I owned my own issue then I was accepting myself as I am and it is only when you do that, and accept others for who they are and not what they can give you - that you can reach acceptance and stop allowing the past to dictate the future.

Since the past was on the whole destructive and emotionally abusive, it is not a drama that I want to keep playing. So today I was honest about the feelings of panic that I had been experiencing and honest about my knee jerk reaction to risk. I was honest about the fact that if I was feeling like I could get hurt, then that meant that there was something that I was recognising as potential to feel good. Running away will not protect me. Seeing if I can get past the feelings of panic and see what happens will. Perhaps those around me will be capable of doing the same, perhaps not - but the one thing I know is that the only person responsible for my emotional well being is myself. That is not about protection, it is about honesty and respect.

When I stayed in a relationship for over 20 years, I stuck with a man that was indeed passively aggressive, he did indeed sap me of self esteem and confidence but more than that, I entered into a contract were I willingly abused myself because the only person that accepted not being myself was part of the deal, was me.

You can get to a crossroad in life and you have a choice: the route you don't know and the one that is well trodden. I the well trodden one has not been a happy one, self preservation will dictate the unknown. When I showed my softer side today (and believe me the fear nearly made me vomit) I discovered the fear of change is greater than the actual change.

I didn't vomit

Entering into the circles of others

2010-09-15T00:17:00.003+01:00

I felt an overwhelming sense of sadness this evening. Having re-framed my thought process into acknowledging that I want no long term anything, want no normal because normal is the death of everything, I spoke with a friend that has just hooked up with someone that has made her so blissfully happy that she has been almost transformed by contentment.

As I explained my newly re-framed thought process of no expectation and happiness in just living for the moment , she said

"That is utter bollocks, of course you want a long term possibility, we all do"

Then I went to the pub. I joined in, I had a great time, I emphasised that I am not 'in' a relationship, just having a good time. At which point the people I was with said:

"Will you stop the negative crap about this going nowhere, you are only doing it because you are too scared to think it might"

They have a point and I feel a tad saddened. Someone I knew last year said to me that they try very hard to think with their head and struggled with the fact they were being led by their heart. In the end the head won and this in essence, is where it all goes very wrong.

I am thinking with my head because my head knows that if I feel with my heart, it is going to get broken. The true irony is that in shutting off the part of my heart that can truly expose myself to emotions, feelings and ultimately, vulnerability - I am guaranteeing that I shut off he feelings that allow you to get past this stage and feel things on a different level.

It is this deeper level that makes a relationship. Thinking with your head may well protect you from harm but it also means that you can talk yourself out of a relationship quicker than you ever talked yourself in. In simplistic terms, you will never get out of a relationship what you are too afraid to put in, which ultimately means that the relationship with potential can never grow and is doomed to fail.

I have completely empathised with the serial dater recently. You meet someone, it's great, you get swept away with all the possibility in it and then you make that fatal mistake. You use your brain. Your brain takes over emotions and gives you 150 reasons why this will never work. Survival mechanism kicks in, turns off your ability to feel emotions and you walk away because you can now justify that you no longer feel anything emotional for that person and so it becomes a no brainer. Except that it is your brain that has convinced your heart that the risk of pain is simply too high.

And this is the position I find myself. The head is taking over and in extricating myself from emotional risk means that I have entered into something that my head recognises is emotionally risky. Emotions are switching off. Yet deep down, I know that this is an action on my part to avoid pain, because I know that I am capable of feeling it.

For someone that can see self fulfilling prophecy a mile off in others, I appear to be creating my own. I knew when I met the serial dater that he had entered into my life for a reason. I had hoped that it was that I learnt something from it but instead, I appear to be replicating it.

Life sucks.

Pregnant Pause

2010-09-10T22:51:00.003+01:00

More strange insight. Having harped on in my head that I find myself in another no win situation, I found myself somewhat dreading any call that might lead to heavy conversation.

Last nights conversation was not heavy. Hum drum normal, which was great until he asked about what was going on with the house, the divorce and that 'ex husband' person. There is clearly concern. There was advice on making sure that I had everything read through before every signature was penned. The other evening there was bewilderment that I should have chosen to spend most of my life with a man that had different morals, ethics and views on life, different expectations, philosophies and heart. I had not really considered any of that but once pondered - had to confess that his bewilderment was nothing compared to mine.

It was a surreal conversation. It was normal, it was what people talk about in a 'relationship'. But we are not in one, we are simply seeing each other. I realised that 'normal' is not somewhere I particularly want to go. The normal in life is frankly so dull or depressing that I would be entirely happy to keep it out of any 'non relationship'. I do not want to talk about ex husband since the days when he does not enter my head are so much better than the days he does. I do not want to talk about mortgages, MOT's or gas bills - I want to lie in bed with someone and talk about philosophy, art and other people.

The poor confused fellow who does not want a relationship is unwittingly stepping into relationship territory and I am panicking because I feel really uncomfortable with making anything normal. It seems that the man I find myself in a no win situation with, is in fact in a no win situation himself.

On a more amusing not, I nipped out to a friends house this evening. She was already in her third gin and tonic when she declared that I was 'glowing'.

"Physical attention' say I, followed by "And why are you glowing'?

It turns out that she had been benefiting form some unexpected and rather enjoyed attention herself. "How lovely" say I - until I spot the pregnancy testing kit.

Which would have been normal had she not been 51 and 6 months into a menopause. Post periods or not - she has a metallic taste, off wine (unheard of) and feels 'odd'. So I refuse to leave until she completes the pregnancy test.

It was quite hysterically funny, she couldn't read the instructions properly since her eye sight is no longer what it should be. Add this to the very strong gin and you end up with a negative test result, aided in part by weeing on the plastic and completely non absorbent end of the test.

She has assured me of her intention to retest in the morning with the assistance of sobriety and daylight.

Serial Dating Disaster

2010-09-09T21:46:00.003+01:00

A rather shocking development has occurred. This morning, without any time for rational - it crossed my mind that I had developed a tad of empathy for the Serial Dater.

I feel quite rocked. In fact, there have been a couple of times recently when I have behaved in a similar way. One was last month when the man I have been seeing admitted his utter terror of the fact that I have 4 children and that I was the absolute opposite of the woman he was going to marry. It was a meaningful conversation and we both went to bed happy, until I woke up.

This is when I sent the text that said 'Can't do this. It was nice, you are lovely but not for me. The hidden message was 'Oh God, you are going to hurt me and I need to get out of this fast, before you do' What was really disturbing is that it was uncannily similar to the text I received from the serial dater in response to my 'We need to talk' text.

So this week things took another turn and I find myself in another 'relationship' that is not as easy as it should be, and it was then that I realised that shutting your emotions down and backing out before things get complicated is very much easier. People can cause huge heartache and when they do, the pain can be unbearable. Shutting the door to protect yourself is self protection but in doing so, you shut the door on so many things and only open yourself to a self full filling phropechy of non attachment. Frankly, it all sounded quite appealing this morning.

So I mull over the many ironies in life. The first is that I realise that I do not want to be in a relationship that involves any form of commitment other than monogomy for the period that it lasts. I want no promise or thought of the future, I want no expectations for responsibility of another and at this particular time I want dinner and sleep overs with someone I like.

That is great, except the man I am dating has never been married and seems to fear that every single woman has an expectation of commitment. I really don't, which as the the word commitment appears to make his heart race for all of the wrong reasons, is quite a good thing. Or would be if it were not for the fact that his past experience has taught him otherwise and he is a bolter. The more we have to talk about it, the more my eye is on the door and the more I am thinking 'How fast can I run'

Do not get me wrong, he is so very lovely and I enjoy the time I spend with him. But I also dread the prospect that we could be immersed in deep conversations at any moment. He doesn't want meaningless anything but the minute it has meaning he sweats. If it becomes meaningless then it is not what he wants. Yet again I find myself in a no win situation.

It's really simple. I want to meet up, have fun, conversation, laughing and intimacy. I want to be excited that your text and not fearful of where your head is at. I want you to cook me dinner and then I want to go home feeling good. I want to be happy that you are too busy to call for a couple of days, not worried that you are freaking out about the meaning of it all. I want to feel like a goddess when I see you and go home to my domestic hell in peace. Do I want marriage or commitment? No because the minute you see someone every day, all of those things will evaporate.

I think I may be a man and all the men I meet are in fact, big girls. I also realised this week that men say the total opposite of what they mean. Serial Dater used to say 'I am really worried that you are going to hurt me. Roughly translated this meant "I shall screw with your head and once I am there I shall rip your soul to shreds'

This man keeps saying "I am worried I am going to hurt you" What that really means is "I am really worried that you are going to hurt me" Which I might. I wouldn't do it on purpose, nor with malice but since I have no idea what the future holds, I have no ability to make promises.

So I am now pondering the reality that I am attracted to emotionally unavailable men. So I googled and discovered that one of the reasons you can be attracted to such men is that in fact, you are an emotionally unavailable women. Woman that do not believe that love is all that it is cracked up to be, that expect disappointment and rubbish cannot be committed to a worthwhile deep and loving relationship since they do not believe they exist. In dating unemotionally available men, they prove it. I can be committed, and frankly after sticking with an emotionally disconnected man for all of my adult life, I think I should have been.

So I almost bolted again today. Perhaps I am attracted to emotionally damaged men because I am in fact as emotionally damaged myself. Perhaps the reason I understand them is because I relate to the feeling of things that seem good will never work because they 'never do'.

I don't want completely meaningless, I do want emotion and tenderness but commitment, marriage and children? When I say that I have no expectations or demands I really don't but mainly because I do not want any placed on me.

I was on the verge of a full scale bolt today but the sheer horror that I could replicate the behaviour of someone that chose to cause pain made me stop. So I may get hurt and so may he - but we may have fun and we may still like each other tomorrow.

Today, my inner man grew some balls.

Drawing the Line

2010-09-03T23:20:00.002+01:00

I wonder if it is scientifically provable that bikini lines grow quicker when you are dating. There must be a hormone thing going on. Hormones go crazy and follicles that have lain dormant suddenly over react. Perhaps it is natures way of ensuring that you maintain everything to perfection to ensure furthercreation of the human race. Lets hope that bit doesn't work.

I once noted that transatlantic travel makes your eyebrows grow quicker.

I am never having sex on an aeroplane. I get off in New York looking like prehistoric man

Doughnut Dating

2010-08-21T13:11:00.002+01:00

I appear to have met my worse case scenario. Ticking all the boxes of men that I will not date, I find it somewhat alarming how much I am beginning to like him. When you are a forty something divorcee (or about to be) with 4 children, one of the worst case scenarios has to be a man in his 40's with no children. If you are single man in his 40's that has no children and yet wants them - the absolute worse case scenario is a nearly divorced woman in her 40's with 4 children.

And this is exactly the situation I find myself in. Still dating a man with lots of children didn't guarantee a rational being and marrying a man and having four children did not guarantee great fatherhood, so what do I know. Life hasn't gone according to plan so far so I am taking the open minded approach. He is taking the lets thinks about this carefully but I really don't know what to think approach.

All I can say on the matter is that staying with an attractive man and not crossing a line is rather like eating a doughnut but not being allowed to lick your lips.

Frozen in time

2010-07-21T23:27:00.003+01:00

I have a task to convert tiffs to jpegs. Dull but necessary. Still, 4 months ago I didn't know what a tiff was. There were lots of things I didn't know months ago and now I do. Life is simply like that, one small lesson after another, one huge jigsaw.

So instead of Jpegs and tiffs, I lie in bed, mulling.

I woke this morning so tired, that I walked sideways into the wall and bashed my face. Last day of term and so I looked for the cards I had written to the teachers. I looked in the fridge. It didn't bode well for the day ahead.

In fact, in the short period that I could stay awake, I managed to rewrite one press release to appear as if it had been specifically written for tall people, for male people and for people that had a blank canvas. I am still waiting for the clients response on my copy line for the gay market. Pretty nifty work I thought, until the whole thing was scuppered by intermittent internet. Technology was never my forte, that was always the art of the tenuous link.

I had a call from my work guru today. A formidable business woman with the softest heart, she called to say that she had won another pitch. She hadn't really expected to since the woman she was pitching to, was intimidating. Apparently, she stares directly at you, completely expressionless. It turns out that this is not intimidation but the result of too much Botox. She has no expression because her face is frozen.

Having recovered from the hysterics I found myself with, it got me thinking. The way we present to others is easily misconstrued and all too frequently we are unaware of the impact on others. A bit like the business meeting I attended in which I realised that my silence was taken for quiet authority and made me the focus of the answers. The other person could have no idea that I was silent simply because I had absolutely nothing to say.

So in my skill of the tenuous link, it got me mulling on parts of the conversation that took place

last night. We all go through life making an impact, good or bad on others and likewise, people make an impact on you. Acknowledging that for what ever reason, someone else see's something in you that was good, should never be a hard thing, it should never be something that you recoil from. If you do, there is something that has gone very wrong.

One of the things that I have enjoyed most about being single, is the freedom of thought and of choice, unhindered by misplaced guilt. Next month I am taking the children camping. A trip with friends and with my ex-blind date and his children. This man is an important part of my life. I met him, liked him but do not want a relationship with him. We are adults, we like each other, care about each other and I feel priveledged to have him in my life.

What I could never do is dismiss him as a person simply because his feelings for me did not match mine for him. On a completely superficial level, I feel honoured that he cares and feel equally priveledged that anyone shoud care, even if the feelings were not reciprocated.

So this is the perplexity. If I tell someone that I care, or cared about them - it would be reasonable to assume that they should not have some form of panic attack. It doesn't make sense. If I told He who cannot be mentioned' that I cared about him, it would be reasonable to expect him to panic - since he would not be sure of my motives and deep down he would know that the world must be about to end. However, if I told him that I had cared about him, even he would get that it means nothing more than the statement it is. And he gets very little.

I knew someone once that had been abused as a child. In fact, 'he should not be mentioned' had an extremely emotionally abusive childhood and the effect of that is palpable in the behaviour he has as an adult. The thing about the person I knew, is that they thought they are so good at hiding it. They weren't. I always thought that the saddest thing about this person was that the one thing they craved most was love. It was also the one thing that terrified.

It didn't matter who tried, they were always pushed away. Abusive childhoods come in all shapes and sizes and the scars, if you allow - it can define your entire life. This friend was sexually abused. She could do the relationship, until the sex. This is the point she was numb, the point she recoiled and this is the point that the relationship was on it's way out. Only it was never her, always another reason and always about the other person. It was never the reality, never that she had an issue with intimacy. One that was not her fault, but in not facing it - she was allowing to control her life.

The hardest thing about caring, the trickiest task as a friend, is in allowing them the freedom to think that they are just fine. When you really do care, you have to go along with the pretence, because sometimes people simply cannot face the past.

And until they do, there is no future.

For the rest of us mere mortals, when someone saw something in you that they considered good, don't acknowledge that by being unkind. That, is an issue

Mr Big shrinks

2010-07-20T23:44:00.003+01:00

I did something today that I needed to do along time ago.

I sought clarity. I didn't gain it in any form of true honesty, but I gained it in the way I expected.

Defensiveness means people are too fearful of putting themselves on the line. True honesty is when you can let the barriers down and true honesty is something rarely seen in anyone.

Frankly, partial honesty would be a start. In seeking clarity this evening, I am not entirely sure what I expected to achieve from it and yet I gained a lot. What I really gained was the knowledge that sometimes people, too afraid of their own honesty, will turn things around in a bid to avoid answering things they are not comfortable with. Before you realise it, their issue becomes your issue and sadly, they can believe this to be the truth.

If there is one thing that I am renown, is that I will be entirely honest about my view on you. If I think you are an arrogant arse - I will tell you. If I think you are an arrogant arse that is an arrogant arse because your mother refused to give you ice-cream as a child, I will tell you that too.

What I will never do is tell everyone else that you are an arrogant arse and smile sweetly to your face. It would simply never happen.

Another thing I learnt tonight is that people invairably have hidden agendas. I met someone recently who was so addicted to another person that it bordered on a clinical obsession. A long discussion had ensued where I had voiced the opinion that I simply did not believe that another was as simple, or as hard as appeared on the surface. My experience had not been a parallel and I couldn't agree that it. It clearly didn't go down well as the next evening I was blanked in the street. It would appear that the translation of this conversation was very different.

This, I find fascinating. Someone so addicted that they have befriended as a way of staying close. Someone so alarmed by another having shared some level of closeness that they would feel the need to manipulate a conversation to reflect badly. And someone else, seemingly naive to friendship and of female manipulation, would need to believe something in order to justify their own behaviour. It seems that all have a hidden agenda.

What I realised tonight is that sometimes people are stuck at a certain point. They may well never get past it but their need to deny it, to make behaviour appear acceptable, means they have to twist and turn and dump the blame on someone else's door.

The only clarity that I gained tonight was the one that I already knew. Clarity is not the same as honesty and in a sense, nor does it need to be. Emotional intelligence is of higher value than cognitive intelligence. Fear protects you from absolutely nothing. An ability to be honest is not a weakness, an inability to be honest is.

I also learnt that rumour is something you hear and you believe the bits that you fear most in yourself. If there was a rumour about you with no credence to it, it would be water off a ducks back. If you know it to be true and reflects badly. . . . Ouch.

Reputation is something that you earn from behaviour. Reputation never comes from one rumour. It comes from the experience of others or a multitude of the same rumour.

Question rumour and learn from reputation.

I cannot choose what people believe but I can choose reputation. Sometimes people are so stuck in their behaviour that they can be oblivious to reputation. Sometimes when people try so hard to appear big, it makes them appear really small.

Deflection, defensiveness and inability to be open. What I saw this evening wasn't a kind person, nor was it a person lacking arrogance and no matter how much I believe that deep down is another person, this is the side that reputation is built on. And yet it was their ability to misjudge me that I was more fascinated by.

I was hoping that tonight that I would gain enough clarity to be able to be angry. I failed.

I felt pity.

Such a shame

all this itching....

2010-07-19T22:58:00.003+01:00

When I was a little girl, I picked at scabs. I couldn't help it, the minute they started to heal, I would start to lift the edge to see how far I could get before the pain or ickiness was too much. Then it would heal and I would do the same thing all over. I suspect that nothing has really changed.

Sometimes things cause me pain and I leave them alone. Then, after a while when I realise that there is still the potential for pain, I go back for a bit more. It appears that unless something has completely healed and dropped off, I have a compulsion to route around to make it all last a little longer.

I have also started to recognise some other things. I am acutely over sensitive. When I feel over sensitive, I feel vulnerable and when that happens, large heavy doors of defence come slamming down and this is the point people assume that I am an emotional hard arse.

And I can be. Shutting out vulnerability is at times, a whole heap simpler than experiencing it. If I think someone is about to hurt me, my inner male appears as if by magic and I have the emotional responses of someone with a large degree of testosterone pumping around their body.

And this has happened several times this week. I am the emotional hard arse that is not fazed by anything or bothered by anyone. Except it is not entirely true. I am the emotional hard arse because if I had to put my sense of intuition on the line - someone would no doubt stamp hard on it - so I don't.

There is no question that I am strong. I can deal with most things, but I struggle with honesty and pretence. I struggle with people that pretend everything is okay when it clearly isn't. I struggle with people that cannot look you in the face, I struggle with people that suck you in and spit you out, I struggle with people that appear genuine and are not really and those that say one thing but who present body language that say's another.

I do not struggle with clarity and yet it seems one of the hardest things to obtain. What I struggle with most - is those that are as defensive as me. If you can get past the defensiveness, you get to the loyalty, if you don't - you get the emotional hard arse.

I thought last year, that I had met my match and I think I did. I had truly believed that they had been too good for me. They never were. But by the time I realised it, they had already started messing with my head. This is the point that the inner man started kicking in. I may well have met my match and he certainly had, but at this juncture of his life - he wasn't ready to get off the pedestal he needs to be on and I wasn't someone that would keep him on it.

Yet there was something there that left me vulnerable. There is no sense, no logic and it defied all reason. For someone with a long history of being an emotional hard arse, it truly irkes that I cannot make sense of my emotions being out of line with my logic.

Perhaps I met someone as defensive as me, perhaps a genuine emotional hard arse. Perhaps I met someone who is so wrapped in spin that he no longer has a real sense of self. Perhaps I my long standing guidance by intuition overrides logic. Perhaps I never heard honesty.

What has messed with my mind is the intuition being diametrically opposed to fact and this is what I need to understand. So rocked by the spiral of mixed messages and emotions, that my barriers are up and I am risking scaring everyone away with my extremely hard arse.Either way, there is something that reminds me of my rather unhealthy habit of picking at wounds as a child.

And yet I would rather die than voice that. My reputation and my defences depend on it.

Perhaps PR & Marketing is the only career for those that talk utter bull. In which case, I shall be very successful.

Maintaining standards

2010-07-15T23:35:00.002+01:00

I spoke with the solicitor today.

Following a discussion with he who cannot be mentioned, in which I had told him that despite legal advice to the opposite - I would concede a clean break in exchange for securing the house. He would retain his house, his company, his pensions, assets etc and protect his future earnings. Since he apparently has none at he moment and no children to hinder his hours - it is a good deal.

So I was quite surprised by contact from his solicitors stating that I would consider a total clean break, one in which he retains all of the above and saves him from a necessity of providing any child maintenance at all, ever.

I think, perhaps, that the entire universe has gone quite insane. Thank god there are judges. There is not a judge in the country that will agree to a man who has his own company, owns a house, has an income, has capacity to earn - to being able to walk away from any need to provide money to someone else, in enabling them to raise said mans children

I suspect a full moon must be imminent.

Hardcore View

2010-07-15T22:43:00.003+01:00

'Everyone looks at Pornography'

"Perhaps they do, but not everyone downloads hardcore porn,' Say I

'Well' says the other person

'Someone said to me recently that if you removed all the porn from the Internet, you would be left with one page that says - Where has all the porn gone'?

I was stumped by the statement. More so that anyone could consider this to be a reasonable claim to make, particularly as none of the pages on my computer hard drive have any pornography on them. So I google 'Where has all the pornography gone'? and there are 5,410,000 pages answering that query. I cannot validate the content, since I had no desire to open them. It does blow the 'normal' theory a little out of the water.

I do not take a puritanical stance on pornography. What ever floats your boat, it is not my place to judge but there are levels in which I see it as an issue. Pornography used in a relationship is an entirely personal thing. Pornography used in a relationship where only one person is being made aware of it, represents a potential issue. Hardcore porn would be a major issue.

A long time ago, I turned up at the office of he who cannot be mentioned proffering spontaneous administration duties. Whilst it appeared not to be an issue at the time, there was an extended period of sulking after. Apparently I am a selfish person since I was only offering what I wanted myself. I couldn't disagree, since I couldn't understand why I would offer anything I didn't want.

Even more importantly, why would you want something someone was not willing to give? Which is where I have the issue with pornography used as a means of avoiding dealing with real life. Real life means that people feel crap, they feel snubbed or they feel inadequate or rejected. The answer to any of these issues is opening your mouth and not the dodgy emails in your inbox.

When someone uses pornography as a way of avoiding intimacy they achieve one of my favourite terms 'the self fulfilling prophecy.' You use porn to avoid intimacy and then you have difficulty creating intimacy since you are using the unreal world of pornography.

I am, I think - fairly broad minded. The confines of a relationship make it fairly safe to experience whatever you want, as long as you feel safe to do so. Yet this only works within a good relationship, Fulfilling someone else fantasy is perfectly fine if it is simply a fantasy. When one partner has started seeing pornography as an escape route to real life and objectifies it to a level where women are willing and able to do whatever you want without question, with a lot of grunting and the kind of facial expressions normally associated with severe oxygen deficiency, It becomes not fine. When one partner becomes aware that the real world only exists in the fantasy one and feels obliged to behave in a way that excludes intimacy, it creates humiliation. It's a high price to pay for someone else's issue.

The risk for those with a thing about hardcore porn, is the inability to separate real from some fairly strong viewing. Watch enough of the stuff and it is fairly likely that you will become deadened to reality. Good sex is about intimacy, it's about safety, closeness, being comfortable and being free to experience whatever you feel comfortable with. Good sex is about a creating a relationship where you can be one thing one day and another a next. Good relationships mean that you can have intimate loving sex or a quickie in the larder. Good sex is not about needing to pretend you are something you are not to enable someone else to enjoy what is on offer.

I profoundly hope that I never get to the stage where I do not feel I can turn up at someone else's office mid way through the day but they had be pretty damn comfortable with the fact that I am doing it because I want to.

Drinking partners and dementia

2010-07-14T18:21:00.003+01:00

A friend called this afternoon to find out what I had thought of Monday night.

'What happened on Monday night' Said I

'You met that man for a drink' She said

She pointed out that since it was already Weds and I had forgotten Monday, that this was unlikely to go any further. Since I had forgotten I had gone, I had given no thought to going again.

As a guide for dating, it's a good one

A Defensive Move

2010-07-13T23:30:00.002+01:00

One of the things that I have always found moderately disconcerting about myself, is my ability to run 100 things through my head at the same time as having a conversation.

I went out tonight with close friend and we discussed everything. At the same time as discussing everything I ran several things through my head simultaneously. The first was the Mother-in-law/husband thing. The conclusion I reached was that normality is relative. Their level of normality is so far removed from mine, and that of most people - that there is no chance of them ever seeing their behaviour is a different way, since the way they behave is entirely normal. To them.

The other thought I had was that the Divorce and upcoming court case is the death knell for eldest child and fatherly relationship. I think there is a sad certainty that since his father appears blinded by the true cost of all of this, the only thing he will gain is the absolute certainty that he will lose his son for good. Fortunately I am not in the position myself but should I ever have to choose between money and my children's respect well frankly, it would be a non brainer. I feel much the same about my own self respect.

On another note. Ex blind date has told me (and he is not the first) that I have the emotional responses of a man. Having read some of his texts from women, I was genuinely shocked at how girly some of them where. Apparently, my shock is misplaced since I am, as he says 'not like most women'.

I received a text the other day from a man who suggested we meet for a drink. I was unable reply for hours since I could not find the right words. If I wrote that would be great, or 'that would be lovely' he may think I was keen. I was perplexed, not for want of game playing but purely because I didn't know if I wanted to go or not. Nice legs, very good thighs but a man that didn't appear to get me and in my mind: if you don't get me, you won't get me.

So I deliberated all day and in the end wrote 'On the drink front -that's fine' Granted not girly but I am past any stage where I feel any need to try and impress anyone with something I am not. So I met him, I had a good evening but at the end of it, he made a couple of assumptions that got my back up and that was it, door shut.

I though about it and realised something else. Shutting the door on something is about me being defensive. People can make me cry with ease and yet they think that I am the last person to have this response. Those that get to see me do it more than once are few and far between. Last night hook up thought he should tell me that I was clearly very strong and he had heard I was pretty feisty.

I can be strong, I can be feisty but as I learnt this year, I am also very susceptible to being very hurt and it is not somewhere I want to revisit. Getting to know someone is no doubt about them getting to know that you are not quite as the world assumes that you are. This is the point that they can trample all over you. The minute people feel they can make personal assumptions about me, I want to cry and this is the moment that I turn into an emotional hard arse.

So for the man that thought I was strong and feisty, the door is shut.

The joy of work

2010-07-13T15:15:00.003+01:00

I can hardly bare the excitement.

I have calculated the benefit of working full time. Factor in the increase in income and the decrease in tax credits and it is a staggering........£56.00 a month.

I am so excited and simply cannot decide how to spend it. Or I was until I added the extra childcare I need and worked out that in fact., I am worse off.

On a positive note, it can only improve

The true cost of parenting

2010-07-12T23:56:00.004+01:00

A horrid few days.

After a 18 months of abuse, he that should not be mentioned emails to ask if I need any help with childcare in the holidays. With only 3 weeks until the next court date, suspicion is aroused. Apparently he is no longer angry. Since any increase in contact has previously led to a decrease in income, I remain sceptical.

Having agreed that he would not want his children to be raised in Trowbridge, he then went on to tell me all of he reasons why his children should be raised in Trowbridge. Non of those reasons were for the benefit of the children.

Then I receive an email from his parents. An email in which they were utterly horrid about their eldest Grandparent. Apparently, adding to the acrimony, telling a child you will take sides and that you loathe his Mother is all perfectly acceptable as long as you send gifts. When said child has no wish to accept the gifts on the basis that the behaviour was such that should not warrant being condoned - then you are free to send an email stating that this child is selfish, spiteful, ignorant and self centred.

So I send an email back stating that I am glad that they feel comfortable behaving in such an unkind manner, but their need to be so mean about their Grandson said more about them than it ever could about him. The response back..... I need some form of therapy.

And perhaps they are right. But the difference is that if I thought I needed counselling, I would get it. In fact, since having had to come to terms with what really went on with this marriage - I did have therapy. Far more dangerous are those that think they are beyond any need.

So I range he who should not be mentioned, who considered there was nothing really wrong with his parents latest correspondence and since he didn't write it - it had nothing to do with him. It appears that he believes that since my own family and one of his, have wisely and maturely taken the course of not putting the children in the middle of this, they must be ****** saints.

They will be delighted. My father spent most of my childhood claiming he was in fact, God.

And perhaps I thought so too. I certainly placed him on his very own pedestal. One that he fell off for a long period until I accepted that he was in fact human. That is the thing about parenthood, we all stuff up and we all make mistakes but surely the mark of a good parent is one that can accept those imperfect moves and acknowledge them. When it comes to my own offspring, I refuse to sort every little thing for them, but when it comes to protecting them emotionally then you had better be prepared for a long fight.

For a 15 year old to witness a broken home is not a great thing. I fear far worse than of a younger age. A pinnacle and confusing period of your life and one that can probably leave a bigger impact than at any other time. Suddenly your life is turned upside down. Your standard of living drops, you have no stability since you don't know if you are staying in your home. Too stubborn to articulate, too proud to acknowledge fear and hurt, then it is down to the adults around to be in tune with what is really going on. For those adults that cannot acknowledge this, they may as well stamp on his head.

For any child that remains this angry or this stubborn has an issue and one that is completely understandable. What is not, are the actions of anyone that adds to it. For Grandparents to feel they have the right or desire to write words that can only cause hurt and for a Father that fails to acknowledge any responsibility in contributing to a situation where one child has felt he had to make such a stand that he refuses contact with both.

Sometimes Divorce is necessary. The acrimony, the extended damage to children and using property and money to try and exert power over another is not. It is clear that there are some that will fight for everything they can get at the cost of everyone else.

Maybe they will get what they want, but in doing so will risk losing the things that make life what it is. Friendship comes from giving, Love comes from giving, respect comes from giving, integrity from within.

All cost nothing and all are priceless. When you can look someone in the eye, you know you are being genuine.

So the children's future is dependent on me to provide it and a third party to decide what is best for them. It should be the parents but given the current situation, this has to be a better option

I remain sceptical.

A steady stream....

2010-07-05T23:23:00.002+01:00

Many years ago, after a night of copious alcohol, a very good friend of mine mistook me for a lamppost and wee'd on me. Fortunately, I had consumed a comparable amount and thought it no more than a mental aberration. Until I woke up in the morning.

I had thought it was the only time in my life that I would be mistaken for council furnishing but it appears I was incorrect.

One of the small offspring has been unsettled for a period. Irregular night terrors, regular night time wanderings that invariably end in my bed, overly vocal in declaring undying love and a propensity to declare adoration at the drop of a hat. There are conversations that have been had, tucked up in bed with a stuffed kangaroo that have made the reasons understandable, but none I thought that would lead to a second incantation as a lamp post.

I was asked recently if people get married after they are divorced. Having assured him that I was in no rush to consider such venture, small child had proceeded to state that when Daddy gets better, perhaps we may remarry. Somewhat confused at the better part of the statement, it became clear when he stated that Daddy may get 'Better at being nice to you'

And therein lies one of the route causes. Children are not stupid, the observe and then they come up with their own conclusion. Months of watching Daddy not be able to be civil in response to any verbal contact, Daddy refusing all eye contact and Daddy walking behind Mummy without speaking on the few unfortunate occasions that we have shared tarmac. Since their friends have questioned the normality of the situation - you can magnify that thought process by about one thousand.

So the unsettled nights have been no surprise and the fact that they have continues even less surprising. Finding small distraught child crying on the top of the stairs 4 hours after he went to bed was not necessarily a surprise. What I didn't anticipate was the lamppost. As I walked up the stairs, I did take note of a strange sensation on my stomach, I noted it even more as it continued down my body. By the time we were at mid thigh level, I realised that I was in fact being urinated on.

Great. I am a lamppost.

WHEN THE BALANCE IS IN MY FAVOUR

2010-07-04T01:37:00.003+01:00

I have a love hate relationship with Birthdays. I say that they don't bother me and then they leave me feeling flat. It is not an age thing in the slightest, I have never associated a single day as a point that defines my mortality. Besides, the older I get, the happier I feel and the more sorted my mind becomes. Despite this, I still associate it with a time of expectation that invariably fails to deliver. The best protection has always been to expect nothing.

Perhaps it is not this at all. The minute that I am told that something is the way it is, or should be the way it will be, I want to challenge it. Like booking a a taxi for a night out will guarantee a worthless evening. Preparing for a worthless evening and driving the car, is normally sufficient to guarantee a fantastic night.

So tonight I was proved wrong. Stage one birthday was spent consuming too much Vodka and ended with in depth conversation into the early hour with ex blind dates chum and another founding member of the 'Single people at Sunday Lunch Club. It also ended with the sobering realisation that my car was in a part of Wiltshire which I was not.

Apparently 'proper' birthday celebration was delayed until the weekend for the benefit of the boys, who are quite partial to birthday celebration and particularly ones in which cake is involved.

I have said it numerous times, but I feel immeasurably privileged with friends. With all the rubbish being thrown my way in terms of Divorce and trying to financially manage 4 children - I fear that I would be in a very different place without my army of buddies. No matter that sometimes I feel that I am not dealing with things as well as I might - there is always someone that gives me a hug, or simply demands an explanation if there is anything less than a spring in my step. Tonight, when I had a moment of somewhat subdued demeana, rarely witnessed by others - one of the mafia congratulated me. Apparently, so used to me being positive and full of determination, they all breath a sigh of relief when I am quiet, since it means that I am relaxed enough to be myself. Fair point. A word of warning though, if I am quiet, have a set jaw and am staring at you directly - it could be time for you to be alarmed.

So birthday stage 2 and its perfect execution. Child 2 makes an enormous chocolate cake. Admittedly it takes two hours to clear up the kitchen but it was a fabulous offering. The evening has been carefully orchestrated and I am not allowed a part, except attendance. At 7pm, someone turns up to put my children in the bath. I am then ordered the same. A scented candle lit in preparation and as lie amidst the bubbles, a knock on the door and a glass of chilled wine appears by the side of the bath.

By the time I appear, there are others and an accompanying abundance of food. Child 2 has found lights for the chair, the table is laid and flowers and tea lights have arrived. I have not lifted a finger. Sometimes, with the divorce, the pittance of maintenance and It's determination to force a sale, I wonder what I could possibly have done to deserve the way he has behaved towards us. Yet In balance, I wonder what I have done to deserve tremendous friends. Who knows, perhaps some form of balance.

It is the perfect birthday celebration: out of my control, perfect children, perfect friends and a perfect evening.

Perfect xx

A Sporting Chance

2010-07-01T00:18:00.008+01:00

Sometimes I look at the boys and feel overwhelming pride. Sports Day is one such time. Not because they can kick arse on the track, nor can they throw further and harder than any one else but simply because they are unbearably cute.

Every year I get to Sports Day a few minutes late. Every year I watch them scanning the sea of faces to make sure that I am there. Every year they stand there grinning and waving so much that they almost miss their place. Every year I look at these scrawny creatures with their innocent happy faces and want to eat them. By the time they get home they are tired, bad tempered and I want to jump on their head.

Not this year though. Yesterday was my birthday and they spent it with he that is best not mentioned. Today they came home from Sports Day tired, hot and secretive. They disappear for long periods, reappearing once in a while asking for another piece of fruit. Since hunger is a common sensation after school and particularly so on a day of great physical exertion, it was of little surprise.

And then they both crept in, bearing a birthday gift of fruitt salad with homegrown strawberries and the last of a much favourite melon, all garnished with flowers.

Now I really want to eat them. If they retain any part of their ability to love and to be loved, then stand a sporting chance of happiness as an adult. And the makings of what makes a real man.
X

The cold front

2010-06-27T00:10:00.002+01:00

Tonight was a different kind of night. One of those ones where everything should be right, but it just isn't.

I compartmentalise things. Lots of people do but most people are capable of doing so long before things are 'sorted'. There are things that need sorting things in my head is just one of the very complicated things that makes me very complicated.

So in an exceptionally brave, uncharacteristically 'lets deal with this' I tried to deal with something that was never dealt with.

In dealing with things that are not dealt with, you have to take a risk. I am on the whole a spontaneous risk taker. I have a focus of how I am going to handle things and I stick to it. This invariably involves not appearing vulnerable and never exposing that someone has the ability to hurt you. Occasionally spontaneity takes over and I feel the need to expose the one thing that terrifies me most — me.

So tonight, after the night that should be right but wasn't, a moment of spontaneity took over and I decided that things I hadn't fully sorted, needed sorting.

The one thing I never allow for is that my moments rarely coincide with anyone else. I met a brick wall, a block of ice, and it upset me to a level that I thought I was incapable of.

Not only had I risked showing that my air of nothing getting to me, was possibly a front. I had to face the other thing that I fear most - That some people are just cruel. They may not be underneath but really, does underneath matter that much when other people have to fight so hard to get to the underneath? Whether there are issue that cause it or not, there is no necessity in life to be cruel to other people. None.

So it was an odd evening and one that ended badly. I am staggeringly upset.Upset because no matter those around me that say I should be more open to being vulnerable, more willing to be honest, they are making their assumptions on their own experience of dealing with peoople capable of being honest.

Mine is not so great. Being honest, trying to deal with stuff in my head is not all that it is cracked up to be.

When being me isn't me

2010-06-26T10:57:00.003+01:00

An interesting night and one sure to cause much reflection.

I was set up. Spontanious BBQ, requested early attendance to assist friend, who turns out to be single. I am touched, initially not overly delighted but in fact, it was a lovely thoughtful gesture and it wasn't a man that was weird, short, ugly or old.

In fact, as a hard core runner and cyclist - he was a man in good shape and as the evening progressed, it was clear that there was potential for something, not sure what but definately something.

However, he is a good looking, man partly transformed from his military history but burdened by family duty which frankly, makes him very............traditional.

Traditional is not necessarily good, traditional can step into old fashioned, which can step into narrow minded. Narrow minded is never good. Family duty is admirable but to the level this man is bound, probably a curse. Bound by tradition and responsibility is an unlikely combination to appeal long term. I fear Responsibility is drawn of duty and not the same as being driven - which is far sexier. I suspect that the reality is that I am simply too challenging for a man like this and in fact I have met another cute man that stands zero chance of ever understanding me.

Now I have an issue. Nice man, nice body - both something I could benefit from for a short period and not something likely for a long term.

In some senses, this is all great - I am not sure I want a long term. On another level it raises issues for me, such as getting involved with someone you have no intention of anything serious occuring, is so far removed from the me that is currently me that I am quite perplexed.

Me being me is not a moral judgement, it never has been. It is just very me.

Last night made me question whether I should drop the old me completely and just start having fun. He did have nice legs and so I feel it sensible to review my thought process.

It also taught me that I was right about other things. Gut instinct and sexual attraction are not mutially exclusive. Having one without the other is just different.

Sometimes I think I think too much

Eyeball table tennis. Game Suspended

2010-06-14T17:57:00.001+01:00

In between vodka and eyebrow wax there was an opportunity for eyeball table tennis. Having considered that the scope for attractive and possible was fairly limited in local region, I was surely delighted.

And then I decided that I simply could not be bothered.

Yours liberated

In face of revelations

2010-06-14T17:50:00.002+01:00

Sometimes, life is just one revelation after another. Sometimes you think you have faced all of the revelations that you could possibly face in a lifetime.

Sometimes, just as you believe that, you are faced with another.

Then you realise that the true test of being a woman is pulling yourself together and telling yourself that no matter what else is thrown your way - you will simply just deal with it, since there are only two choices: Deal with it or throw the towel in.

I decided on a stiff Vodka and an eyebrow wax.

Bring it on, I can face anything.

A new religion

2010-06-13T23:37:00.001+01:00

Thank you to the person that sent this. Brilliant

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atBg9zLI2bA

Penis Envy

2010-06-13T22:52:00.003+01:00

I went back to work on Saturday. Whilst working on Sunday I got a message to say that they would contact me about return to work training. After I had returned to work. Enough said.

Having to work to pay all the bills and support the children is turning into an eye opener. Not the working, that is not an issue and really, being in control of my own life is always going to be better than someone else controlling it, but in terms of managing time and the effect on the children.

I worked all week. I am having to work 4x the amount I should because I am working in an area that I know little about. Working for yourself means that a lot of the time you are working, you are not actually earning any money at all. The days are shorter because of the children and so that doubles the time. One day without children is like two days with. Without children, you can start early and finish late. With children and you are running from task to task and never really feeling as if you have achieved anything.

So this week was full on. Tuesday, with the added requirement of attending some kind of group meeting, I left the house at 8.30 and got home at midnight. Weds, I left at 8.30 and got home at 7pm. The rest of the week were just school hour days, and I then worked Saturday and Sunday. Somehow I managed to get some food shopping and finally got the washing done. I am not sure how and I think I saw the children but I cannot actually remember when.

Last week was their first holiday in childcare, the novelty of which ran thin fairly rapidly. They are used to holidays where they get to lie in, where they get to go out and generally we all sigh with collective relief to have a break from the hell that is the school week. No more - from now on they will get holidays in childcare. I suspect they will not be overjoyed and frankly, I missed them and they missed being at home.

One of the small ones is still clingy and this is not helping. Tummy ache on the phone on Saturday and 2 episodes of night terrors all ready and it's only 11pm. Pile it on. I have a guaranteed 48hours of trying behaviour before some kind of normality returns.

It is times like this week that I feel I might be inclined toward penis envy. I used to think it was strange that it was on the whole, an assumption that women were the ones to be the resident parent. I could understand that from my experience they were the ones that were closer to their children and more in tune with their needs but I had a mental block with the assumption.

If I meet a non resident father that says he works hard in the week, I may be forced to punch him. If you think working all week is hard, you should try doing it whilst looking after 4 children. Oh and add alternate weekends on to the list too. I think I have finally worked out why so many men are so keen to walk away from responsibility, because the real responsibility is just plain hard and for some, just too hard. Perhaps this is the test of a real man.

And on another aggrieved note. It is round one in court this week. Aggrieved because it all such a waste of money. I originally requested that round one was an FDR, which is a way in which you go with the intention of trying to come up with agreement that avoids all the extra court dates. The opposing side agreed, except they didn't actually answer any questions.

You cannot go into an FDR without all the information. So it was changed back to a first directions appointment. The judge resides, you burn money at a barrister and all that is going to happen is that the judge will decide which bits of paper really are required and tells you to go away and find them.

Having seen the other sides Form E, there were a few questions asked. Actually, having read the form E - there were a few things that I had to read and reread in incredulity. Some of the things on left me so stunned that I had to laugh hysterically, for some time. So staggering that I have decided to save it all for prosperity. If people can actually convince themselves the truth in untruths, then the world is indeed a scary place and I fear for my children.

So fundamentally, you only go to an FDA because one or both of you is not being open and honest and providing all the information they have been asked to. What you are doing is spending thousands on something that could have been done for nothing. This is what I call true insanity.

On the plus side, this is not my insanity and I know that as soon as this protracted, money burning episode of my life is over, I can actually get on with my life.

Children are more important than money ever could be.

Now that is perspective.

By the hair on my head

2010-06-07T22:30:00.002+01:00

I finally finished the divorce paperwork and went to bed at 5am. I lay there getting increasingly more irritated at the light shining through the stained glass panel in the wall, until I realised that it was not a light but in fact, the next day. I gave up after an hour.

I think that courts should allow extra time for resident parents. Half term, working and 4 children make mundane issues like paperwork a real challenge and so they get left to the last moment - at which point they cease to become mundane and become more of a crisis situation.

I detest the fact that enormous sums of money are being thrown at a situation that could so easily have been catered for by communication. Simply answering questions would have saved thousands. However, I concede that part of the reason for divorce is a marriage that lacked communication. Oh and infidelity, but even that kind of dishonourable behaviour and dishonesty, fundamentally has its routes in a lacking of communication skill.

I am simply exhausted.

For some foolish reason I decided to tint my hair in the midst of this. I forgot I had decided to do it and left it on for an hour. The end result is alarming. All I need to complete the look is to over pluck my eyebrows and wear gold earrings. Slap on a tad more take tan and I would pass for anyone working at the local funfair.

I am not entirely sure why I thought it would be a good idea to alter the colour in the first place, not only do I look slightly rough but it has the texture of an electrocuted skunk.

Looking hot.

Divorced from reality

2010-06-06T17:54:00.002+01:00

It is a regular occurrence in this blog that I should question why people cannot look me in the eye.

I have just read the divorce paper work.

I have the answer.

Tenuous links

2010-06-02T23:52:00.002+01:00

When you are as mouthy as me then writing 250 words on anything is a huge challenge. More of an extended twitter than an article. Yet I achieved it.

250 words on mens propensity to wee on the side of the road, all tied in nicely with water conservation measures for the South East. The art of the tenuous link - one of the few abilities that I excel at.

It's journalism - but not as you know it.

It has got me thinking. My self esteem declined steadily in the last few years unhappiness and writing took the hardest hit. I fear I may be some time off a return but I am beginning to get the familiar niggle of wanting to scribble.

I am not sure there are many markets for pieces on male scenting on roadside but life is full of strange unexpected occurance.

Driving Ambition

2010-06-02T11:25:00.003+01:00

I am supposed to be writing a sample column on motoring. My mind is blank. Apparently, Quentin Wilson is writing his sample to and for free. Thanks to his generosity, the increase in budget means that I am getting paid for mine.

He is no fool that Quentin. He can happily offer his wise words for free since he is unlikely to get turned away. I am happy to take the money on the basis that should I continue with my mental blank - it could be the last funding I see for some time.

Women and motoring........................nope, nothing.

A worm in the head

2010-06-01T00:16:00.003+01:00

I am having to draw a reluctant and decisive line under something.

For some time I have been involved in a round of mind games. A series so subtle that I have had to question whether I may in fact be going insane. I know I am not. I have had to acknowledge that in this bat and ball mind game, I have enjoyed it. It has been titillating, exciting, mentally challenging and thought consuming. So very few can challenge me in such a way that I remain hooked - never to be beaten by the latest subtlety, constantly pitting my instinct against my imagination.

I like it. I like the ability in this person to keep me rapt. Its like cerebral sex and like good sex - it is equally addictive. Except I don't want this from this person, I want more and I always did.

I finally got it the other day. This is the bit this person is good at and equally I can hold my own, but I can do the next bit too and they can't. I always did want the next bit and all I have done in becoming rapt by the mind games - is guarantee that the next step could never be attained.

Mental challenge, chase and titillation is safe sex in the extreme. Since you cannot put your finger on it and dare not say it aloud then there is no risk. No blatant emotions on the line, nothing to get called up on, nothing concrete that could have accusation or demand attached to it. What I achieved is a few weeks of mental foreplay and whilst in ways that has been what I like -it is not healthy or good for me.

If there is one thing I have always been certain of is that you are unlikely to meet anyone quite like me. Good or bad, I know I am not any ones idea of predictably female. I can live with this. For all the minus's attached to that, there are a hundred pluses.

I know that my moral gauge is higher than most and if you fail to reach it, there is nothing that you will ever do that will make me lower mine. If you lack integrity then mine will not be dipping to get in line. If you want me to react like a girl, I will react like a man. If you want me to tell you what you want to hear, you could be waiting a long time but if you want me to be honest about the way I see things, then you had better have a pretty comfy seat.

So in this sense I also know that I will never fear being just one in a long line of many women, I may well be one in a line but if there is one that will bug the hell out of you, then it will most certainly be me. If there is one person that will make you question how good you feel about something when you behave shabbily, that may well be me too. And if there was one person that told you that you were beautiful and meant it, that would probably be me too. If there was one woman that never said anything she didn't mean, it was me. If there is one person that may niggle away at you - guess who.

So it is equally in this sense that I know that despite the fact that I like the mind games, I like the hook - that I also know I am worth more. This is not good, it is not healthy and if I am going to get involved in cerebral foreplay it needs to be with someone who can perform. All I have done is feed a situation in which the chase and the tease become the existence and this, is the part that this person was always good at.

It saddens me immensely and I have been a fool. I don't think I was wrong and yet I cannot create a situation whereby someone can trust others. Life is dangerous, there is no real security in anything, I get that. However, that does not mean that you should spend your whole life running from the one thing you crave.

So I disappointingly resign myself to being a worm in the head. Such a waste, it could have been so much more, but I am no ones imaginary muse. ~I was definitely and whole heartily worth the next step.

And another clear observation. When someone cannot look someone in the face it is invariably because they do not feel comfortable doing so and almost certainly that their own behaviour makes them feel too bad to lock pupils. They cannot make eye contact because this would involve guilt and since they do not want to accept any responsibility, they cannot face you. So for anyone in my life that cannot look me in the eye - deal with your issues, life would be so much easier and happier.

And for those that can maintain the merest glimpse of eye contact, the eyes are a window to the soul. I never, ever say anything I do not mean.

The road to nowhere...

2010-05-31T07:49:00.002+01:00

I woke this morning this morning to find myself being gazed at lovingly by the most beautiful being. He is 6.

"I love you Mummy" He say's

"I love you too" Say I.

Then he say's

"I saw a cream on the television that gets rid of wrinkle, bumps and dry area"

Such a lovely start to the day.

We chatted last night about stuff. They were away this weekend and when I spoke to them it was clear that 'stuff' was bothering. It would appear that this child is living under false hope that 'It" and I could get back together or even, shortly after the frozen lakes of hell, get remarried after the divorce is finalised.

"Sweet Pea, that is never going to happen" Say I.

"Perhaps's Daddy will get better" say's he

"Better at what?" I ask, wondering if he too had been considering the markers for social communication disorders.

"Better at liking you" say's small child. "Maybe if he could start liking you again you could be remarried.

Such a tricky one. It's times like these when you so desperately want to say what you really think. Instead, I smile sweetly and point out that I do not want to get remarried to Daddy and even if Daddy 'got better' and could be nice the only pre curser to a proposal would have to be a frontal lobotomy (I didn't tell him that bit). I think this may take some time. It takes children a long, long time to adjust to things.

Middle child was telling me that the girlfriend told of her adventure trotting past the house, turning around and trotting back. Apparently, she trotted past the house, turned around and trotted back. Since we already knew that, I am not sure how much more exciting the tale could be. Apparently the need to turn around and trot back past the house was because it was a road with cars on. Indeed it is - it's the quiet one you can only get to after riding on roads with cars on. Duh...

If there is anything you learn from children that you can only learn from having children, is that they are, in many ways - more perceptive, astute and intelligent that most adults. Some of those skills are naturally fine tuned and actually diminish with age. All hidden behind innocent little smiles.

Never underestimate a child and never assume anything

I am going to a car boot sale to wade through over peoples discarded lives. It's a liberating experience.

Thoughts of the Day

2010-05-27T23:36:00.003+01:00

First thought of the day - Divorce - Bored of it all. The sooner it is all over the better.

What I am finding really frustrating is the fact that I am restricted in writing what I really want to write. What I really want to write would be in my own apparently not amusing way and as such, far more interesting. I am having to save all fodder for future publication. Frustrating but I can wait. Furthermore, all characters will have their own nickname, appointed by me.

This future publishing will include all details of the last few months, including the sweat meister who, despite my best efforts - I still think rather fondly of. I remain unable to write about this episode. I feel it only fair to offer sufficient period in allowing him to offer some indication he is in fact the person I think that he is, currently buried deep within and appears for the odd brief excursion. Since I don't give up loyalty easily, I have to be sure I am wrong before I can be right. Should he fail to do so, he will be fair game.

In fact all have been plotted. All get a fair shot of amnesty and if nothing changes in convincing me otherwise, I can safely assume that I shall be attending my own premier in five years time.

Second thought of the Day - I am wondering how long it takes for knee and shins to recover from shock of falling off 4 inch heels. Now on day 6 and there is no sign of abatement. If I am forced to wear flat shoes all summer I may get mistaken for road bollard.

Third thought of the Day - In my 'lets reframe everything that's not great' way. I have reframed periods. Since there is little I can do to avoid them, reframing is the best approach. When you have a period, you can eat what you like since you loose 2lbs in sweat each night. Your breasts get bigger. The later works better for me.

Fourth thought of the Day
Is 28 too young? 'What was that you said'? I cannot hear you. Fingers in ears. I gave it due consideration. I so wish I could do inappropriate with ease. Maybe next year.

Fifth thought of the Day Can someone send me on a good client management course or should I just invest in a digger and concrete. I am working on my charismatic side.

Sixth thought of the Day I can now say 'absolutely' a lot, with no sense of being my own parody. I am not clear yet as to whether this is a good thing.

Not my most profound day

Reeding and Ryting

2010-05-27T18:57:00.002+01:00

Last week a friend receive a letter from school to saying that her child need extra helps with literacy.

There were 3 grammatical errors in the first paragraph.

Perfect.

Breathing deeply and sweating

2010-05-27T16:22:00.005+01:00

There are many moments when you realise that filing for divorce was the right thing to do and none more so when you get a glimpses of the other sides form E. It becomes even clearer to insight of the tactics that are deployed

Least important but one of the most galling is the value of a watch. Yes, it really does come to this. Three years ago it was 'It's' 40th birthday. The one thing he had always wanted was a Tag Heure watch. For an entire year I bought and sold things until I had earned enough to buy him his hearts desire - a 2.5k Tag watch.

So in the form E he has gone to the trouble of finding someone that sold a somewhat scratched one ridiculously cheap on Ebay to present how 'little' his watch is worth.

I have often queried on this blog how people live with their conscience. Obviously the answer is quite easily. I can only assume it was a result of his request to have my wedding and engagement ring ring included in the chattels. Sadly, they were too cheap.

I am going to breathing very deeply and once that works, I am going to rise above such behaviour, knowing that I have never been more certain that I could have been so wrong about anyone.

Then I shall finish my Guidebook for Men on how to Divorce with Dignity. I fear it unlikely to be a best seller.

Note to myself - No involvement with men who:

1) cannot be verified by ex-wives.
2) men that seek to spend more in divorce than they are likely to gain
3) men that do not speak to their ex wives and cannot look them in the eye
4) men that do not have full involvement in their childrens lives
5) men that fail to acknowledge any role they play

I will only be involving myself with men that

1) Speak to their ex wifes, begrudgingly maybe but with friendliness in front of children
2) That respect their ex wifes
3) Men that have high sex drives
3) Men that the words 'sorry' and 'talk to me' and 'get your arse over here' are second nature
4) Men that sweat a lot on specific physical exertion
5) Men that make me sweat
6) Men that know what women want and know how to give it.
7) Men that are sexually comfortable, confident and just plain good

Obviously, I have added no 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 as benefits to my new choice system.

These are the added advantages.

Getting your garden in order

2010-05-26T22:16:00.002+01:00

Still ill. Frankly my stomach has been so painful for the last two days, I have had to consider that I may in fact be in labour. No baby so far, which can only be a good thing.

Two odd things happened in this time. The children and I found a DVD of a garden makeover that was completed on the house a few years ago. It was most peculiar watching it and seeing the 'family' as a whole. Mummy, Daddy, 4 children, beautiful children, beautiful garden and immaculate house.

So different from now. Single parent family, still beautiful children, annihilated garden and house that looks is anything but immaculate. It must have been even more peculiar for the children.

It struck me once more that the sadness in ugly divorce is not the divorce but the ugliness in it. In my normal world, 'Daddy' should be able to come into the house and say hello to the children that live in it. 'Daddy' should be able to have a cup of tea so that children see that people move on and life goes on in an as normal way as possible. It seems normality is far from reality.

What struck me watching 'It' on the big screen was the sadness of it all. Not that I am seeking divorce but sadness that he is very far from a place where normality can exist and even further from a place in which he can look me in the eye. For all the unhappiness that existed in this marriage there was clearly a period that we shared in which we loved each other enough to stick with it. From knowing each other since childhood, to going through adulthood together and to having children - I cannot regret what has been since they were choices I made, without which I would not be where I am now. Because of these factors, I will never hate him, I may not like the way in which he has behaved, I may not respect his inability to deal with divorce with civility and kindness but I have never hated anyone in my life and I doubt I will start with the man my children call Dad.

I do not want him back and nor does he want to be here - which should make this situation relatively easy but instead, it appears to be the opposite. So yes, I feel sad because the way this has unfolded is not the way in which has been good for anyone involved. Last week one of the children's friends asked in the playground why the boy's mother and father never speak. When I find out, I shall pass the wisdom on.

I had a conversation with a close friend today who is a little more than unhappy. I pointed out that the road to happiness is not an easy one but ultimately worthwhile. I told her that I think that 'It' did absolutely the right thing to leave and I probably would never had had the strength to do it myself, but what had caused the pain was the betrayal, the way in which he did it and the animosity that he cannot let go of. Divorce is not an issue, the way in which people handle it will have far more impact on your life and your children's emotional well being than a decree absolute could ever achieve.

So today we were sitting in the garden talking about 'stuff. Closest friend, older children and I, when who should come up past the house but 'It's' girlfriend. Since she recently moved her horse to a much closer vicinity, I had wondered how long it would take. Apparently not long.

Now I could not possibly say for certain that she was riding by with intent but it does look a trifle odd when someone rides slowly, in the middle of the road towards the house and then speeds up past the garden when they realise someone has said "Is that 'It's' girlfriend"?.

It look even more peculiar when they go further down the road, turn around and trot past at speed. If it had been me, I think I may have been inclined towards speed at that point too. Frankly, if it had been me - I would probably not have chosen to ride past my partners wife's house at all, unless I knew I could get away with only going past once and not look like I was doing it on purpose.

Sadly, said loyal friend made a facetious comment which simply proved the theory that she certainly knew which house she was going past. If someone called out when you were going past, normal response would be to say "I am sorry, did you call me?". Leaving the scene as quickly as possible does little to indicate coincidence.

Such an odd thing to do. I have absolutely no idea what was to be achieve by such a thing and it has not particularly improved the views of older son. Since I invited her to converse some time ago and since I have absolutely no desire to place any claim on her partner, I would be fascinated to discover the reason for her excursion.

Perhaps she wanted to see if I really do have horns. Perhaps she wanted to gleam some insight into why her partner cannot be happy with moving on, despite me suggesting many times that this would be the healthy choice. Perhaps she is insecure. No need my dear, I am happy for you both. If she managed to work all that out by riding up to look at the house, she is more than welcome to swing by and let me know.

I won't put the kettle on just yet.

If you don't get me, you won't get me

2010-05-25T21:50:00.004+01:00

I am ill.

I have been thinking about safe and lovely. I have decided that I do not need safe and lovely. I would be bored. Since I have no need to be with anyone, I have no need for safe and lovely. Taking advantage of the safe and lovely situation would make it not safe and lovely for the other party, and then I would feel bad. As precaution I shall restrict intake of white wine soda.

This thought process has seen a lot of eye rolling in the friend camp. They all think I am insane. Since my thought process has always been a little of kilter to the masses, I am not entirely sure what they are surprised about. I understand what they mean about safe but I never want to spend another day looking out the window and asking "is this my life" It's not a place I am ever prepared to revisit.

It is all so simple in my head. If you don't get me, you won't get me.

Frankly, at this stage, I do not understand why anyone would want me to compromise. The men that I have come across that have made me stand still in my tracks are few and far between and years later, I am still friends with them. This tells me two things: firstly, the men that stop me in my tracks are exceptionally rare and secondly, my judgement is clearly not based on chemistry alone.

Reports on the NLP are all good. Apparently I have changed. This can be no bad thing. I am now climbing up the confidence ladder, talking less and more able to whip arse.

And with that, I am going to vomit

DIY and balls

2010-05-23T09:05:00.003+01:00

I went to the DIY shop with a man yesterday. Always great company but you can tell so much about someone in the way they shop. Sadly I am on red alert to all possible warning signs. Do not purchase a hat.

You go in for two things. You get one. Is this a waste of a trip or are you pleased that you got one item. It always goes back to glass half full or empty. I publicly state that I will never again live with someone with pessimistic tendency. Whilst over exuberant optimism would be draining - positive realism is good.

I was up early yesterday in a bid to reclaim my eyebrows. By 10am we were in Barton Farm in BOA to view the local triathlon event. Perfect morning, beautiful sunshine, soft grass and watching fit and healthy men jump up and down in sport wear. All without lifting a finger.

By 12, I was back at home wondering about gardening. The garden is barren, finances are not extending to lush fauna and the sheer day to day of life has excluded adequate time for such activity. As a result, the garden is looking dire. I stood and started, and stared some more. There was only one thing to do and it came in the shape of a bikini. The garden still looks awful but I feel so much more relaxed

Swimming party in the afternoon and so DIY trip man and I went to the Bath Cricket club for a drink. It was supposed to be a relaxing affair, watching the bating but I spotted the pool table. Sad, I know. Picked up boys and rounded off day with a somewhat aggressive round of tennis on DIY trip mans lawn. I think I must avoid such sport as I clearly have a very competitive trait simmering underneath, In a bid to annihilate DIY trip man, I accidentally smashed the racket on top of the head of one child and scored an ace in the groin of another. Fortunately, they still love me.

I have been challenged to a proper game. Things could get aggressive

A higher Plateau, briefly

2010-05-21T23:40:00.002+01:00

I often have people enquire as to how I am able to walk in 4 inch platform heels. It is a task that on the whole is relatively easy.

It is not walking that causes the problem, it is falling off them. Which I did in a rather spectacular fashion today. On the whole I am a master of inappropriate footwear and dexterity. Today was not such a day. As a result my knee hurts, as does the muscle in the calf, my shin hip and thigh. It's not good. I may have single handedly undone some fine surgery.

I accompanied at a meeting today. It's all great practise. I accompany so I can work out the banter expected, hopefully enabling me to replicate such behaviour in the future if called upon to do so. I frequently sit at such event wondering what on earth I could say if needed. The answer is invariably, nothing. Today I worked out a pattern of behaviour that has been bothering me .

Every time I can think of nothing to say, the other person appears to assume that I am weighing them up. This is the point that they start making a lot of eye contact with me, presumably on the basis that I am weighing up, so they must have some final say.

It is hysterical. Sometimes what you don't say has more power than anything you do.

On a final odd note. I had a text from a man today saying that he hoped I was in the garden with a bikini on. Very odd. I can only assume that he thinks my lawn is untended.

Confused, lovely and sorted

2010-05-21T00:01:00.002+01:00

Today was a beautiful day. Beautiful days, when the sun shines and you can wear summer clothes simply lift your spirits. I love meeting people and today I met lots.

The diet was not great. Three Chelsea buns, one doughnut and a packet of Rolo's. Very poor, it's not even like I enjoy unhealthy food. There is something about picking pieces of Chelsea buns out of the bag as you walk along though.

I do not help myself by analysing everything. On the whole I do it far less but it still creeps into my mind and niggles away.

I spent the afternoon with a lovely man. I got a short guided tour of some of the places that I didn't know existed in town. We even got to poke around someones house on the basis I could give her a number of a great decorator, in exchange for poking around her house. So we drank coffee and mooched and a fine time was had.

There is an issue though and that is that I enjoyed myself. I don't want to enjoy myself. I have a clear idea of what I want and it is not ticking the boxes that I know I want. I want passion, I want to be challenged, I want verbal tenacity, I want deep feeling, complex thought and big muscles. I know myself so much better now. I do not want another relationship where I have to wonder if there is someone that could makes my heart race. I don't want a relationship where I know I will be safe and comfortable. I know now that I need to be in a relationship where I feel safe, but one in which someone has real 'oomph' should such a word actually exist.

I want a man that has some alpha male in him, someone that doesn't just say what I want to hear but actually say's what he thinks, someone not afraid to tell me to sod off and someone not afraid to say that he needs me.

Yet today was really lovely. Bugger, bugger and another bugger.

I figured today that I have changed so much as a person, that I am now regaining the person that I probably always was, instead of the person I became. Part of the issue is that the lovely man has similarities with 'It' that are putting me off. Equally they are very different.

Fundamental is that part of my need years ago to be with It, was that it was a safe relationship. I suspect that we never really should have been together but for various reasons I clearly thought that a very safe man was what I needed. The truth is that in fact, I need to be in a relationship where I am safe being able to be myself, rather than safe. Safe stopped me being me.

The one thing I learnt with serial Dater is that knowing someone who challenged me about the reasons I didn't do things, was good for me. For any harm he did, some benefits outweighed. I discovered that confident people are as screwed up as the socially awkward, that being on top at work did not mean you were more emotionally able than anyone else and I discovered that men who are physically and sexually confident were really quite appealling - granted some confidence was fronted but who cares, being able to front it is more enjoyable than any level of physical un comfortableness.

I have done safe, I need challenge, passion, emotion and tears. Maybe I am wrong, maybe I am right - who knows. I do know that I have a deep routed fear of convincing myself that lovely is enough. Perhaps lovely is, just not yet, not now.

I didn't need a lovely day to add confusion to my life.

Perfect Arse, Perfect friends, perfectly imperfect.

2010-05-19T22:17:00.003+01:00

A series of rambling events.

I have the perfect arse, courtesy of Bath Spa. Last week I was exfoliated, covered in impurity sucking mud, massaged, re hydrated and steamed. I now have thighs like silk and was utterly exhausted by the whole experience. Being a lady of leisure must be a tiresome task. Thank you so kindly to the husband of my dear friend that provided the experience.

Back to friends. In spite of the unpleasantness that continues to permeate my existence, I consider my life enriched by the sheer generosity and kindness of those around me.

Thank you to the friend that ignores my crisis's of confidence and forces me into facing my demons and opens the possibility of a career and a future.

Thank you to the friend that is always there and gave me a spa day in a bid to calm me down (which I still have due to my perverse thought process that I needed to be calm to use it, and yes, I will use it before then)

Thank you to the friend that offers to run down all of those that cause me upset, to the friends that make me laugh and take me out.

Thank you to the friends that have a savings pot so the children and I can accompany them to Paultons Park for the day in June. Thank you to the friends husband who makes me sublime lunches and insists that I eat them, to the friend that patiently listens to me vent spleen, knowing that once it is, out I am half way there.

Thank you to all that have listened to my heartbreak over the man I thought was my soul mate and haven't actually shot me. Thank you to ex blind date for simply being there. Thank you to my once life guru who, despite freaking me out - was instrumental in teaching me to hold onto sanity, let go off bitterness and regain my life.

Thank you to the friend that gave me 10 weeks of NLP when I couldn't afford it and thank you to the friend who hid a sum of money in my bed this week, knowing that if she had still been in the country when I discovered it, I would never have accepted it.

Friendship, I learn is not about what people do, it is fact that they do it. I am bless, feel loved and am certain that I have done little in your lives that deserve the kind of friendship that I have been offered.

Perfect friends and the perfect arse. Perfect.

Moving on to the not so perfect. It seems that the great divorce debacle continues. With child maintenance coming in at just £295 per month, I took the view that since financial responsibility was for the most part going to be down to me, the most important thing in this has been trying to maintain stability.

Knowing the history as I do, I have taken the view that the best thing is to work my now perfect arse off and figure a way of trying to pay the mortgage. Divorce is traumatic enough, acrimonious divorce more so - without the prospect of having to relocate area completely. Since 'It' already has another house that he purchased himself some years ago, it is not that either of us are homeless.

I still find it mind blowing that a couple can have children, know each other for their entire adult life and end up in the situation where one party wants to force a sale, the other part wants to keep the home for the sake of the children and the only people getting rich are the solicitors.

I quite like my solicitor. She is not nasty, always writes politely and stays level headed and keen to resolve without extra expense. Not so easy when the opposing solicitor is keen to stay locked in battle. Last week I sent off a letter in response to questions and with a few key questions that had still not been answered. I resent throwing money at solicitors and since the questions and statements were all accurate and pertinent, my solicitor agreed there was no benefit in her re writing them and charging me for the privilege. Since every pound is coming off our future, it seemed prudent not to burn the stuff.

The response back was interesting. The 'opposing' solicitor was seemingly outraged at my solicitor and not prepared to answer questions put forward by me, only ones rewritten by the solicitor. It beggars belief. I do have to question who's divorce this is. Tomorrow, I shall be investigating which law that say's a spouse cannot ask any questions unless she is prepared to pay £200ph for someone else to write them for them.

So despite all best efforts, it seems we are going to court. It will be long and protracted and given a recent legal overview - will be so historically financially complicated that it could go on for some time.

I am now resolved to this. For months I have reworded solicitors letters too minimise reactions and it would appear it has been in vane. On the plus side, I have learnt it is a waste of time and so therefore there is no need to waste further time. Good from bad etc.

What will be, will be. Having attempted to settle without the need for in depth investigation and more appropriate finances and having got no where - I think it prudent to let the Barristers take over. It may be burning money but since there are no better solutions available it would appear that this has to be the only route to walk. The only other one is to accept everything at face value and have to relocate completely. The children would be horrified and I like my friends too much to go back to the Norfolk plan.

I have great admiration for men that leave their wives and keep things amicable for the children. I fail to understand bitterness, I fail to understand how someone can have so much resentment that they refuse to look the woman that gave birth to their children in the eye.

I fail to understand how someone can be happy for you to take the responsibility for your children, to raise them single handily, to feed them, look after them at the same time as working to financially support and provide for them with the things they need, and refuse to even speak with them. I fail to understand why anyone would need to hold onto, or even have animosity. I will never understand why you would not want to be supportive to the person who has been left in that role in providing a secure and friendly environment for your children. I will never understand why, given the fact that it was not I that left, it was not I that embarked on an extramarital affair - why it is not I that is not consumed with anger. I have at least stopped trying to understand the unachievable.

I am unclear as to why when a marriage is over, why both parties are simply not accepting of that fact. If everyone was okay with this, there would be no place for acrimony.

So for all the couples that work things out by the simplicity of conversations, to all those fathers that though left, work alongside the mother in raising children, for all those fathers that do not want their children to be witness to acrimony, court cases, financial hardship and the kind of parenting whereby one parent takes them out, the other doesn't and never the twain shall meet. For all those Fathers that are there to listen to the tales of night terrors, tummy aches and anger. For all those fathers that stand alongside their ex-wives in civility, maturity and respect for the role they are left with. I take my hat off to you. Should I ever be foolish enough to remarry - you are the kind of men I would be seeking.

For all those that cannot do this, you can kiss my now perfect arse.

Perfect

2010-05-19T22:16:00.001+01:00

Sleeping well.

2010-05-18T19:14:00.003+01:00

I have been forced to wonder how people have a conscience that allows them to sleep well, when their behaviour is beyond any level that normality can comprehend.

I am going to have a very stiff drink tonight. Life has been one almighty revelation in the last 2 years.

If you think you know someone, think again. The only thing you can guarantee in life is that it will be one continual surprise.

For all the people that are fundamentally good, fundamentally kind and fundamentally ethical, moral and decent - well done you. For if it wasn't for these people, life would be a soul destroying experience.

For all those people that are bitter, unkind, unethical and immoral - shame on you and shame for you. You will go through life never understanding the nice feelings that can be afforded from simply being decent.

Sowing the seeds, reaping......

If I achieve anything as a Mother it will be t teach my children that you can get anything you want in life but it should never be at the expense of those around you.

Is Dishonesty denial or Denial Dishonesty.

2010-05-17T23:02:00.002+01:00

I have been pondering on the difference and the not so apparent obvious has struck me. I have been asking myself for sometime if the actions of others are dishonest or simple denial. Then I realised that both possibilities are the same thing.

A person is in denial when they refuse to acknowledge what is really happening. Making someone else believe in a denial based appraisal, is in fact dishonesty. If you try and convince someone of a situation that you know not to be true, then you are involved equally in denial of the truth and thus dishonesty. If you are simply dishonest you are in denial about morality, ethics or responsibility. Either way, you are unlikely to have a spring in your step on the journey of life.

If something can not survive with honesty then denial may seem like it will keep it going, but the reality is that the dishonesty will catch up. More than this, denial means that there is no vent for expressing concerns and the result is anxiety and pressure.

I think this is where there may be some separation. Dishonesty sucks you into a web that it is difficult to extradite yourself from. One dishonest statement leads to another and before you know it the toll of keeping up with it all, becomes unbearable.

Denial is shutting your eyes to the obvious, refusing to acknowledge cause and effect. Denial is about addiction to an idea of what should be. Deep routed denial results in the symptoms of addiction: loss of sense of values and morality, self centredness, illusion of control, isolation. Denial bids farewell to reality in such a way as to cause confusion, obsessiveness, paranoid thinking and control.

The maintaining of denial has no space for rational thought. The decision making process is wound up in confusion and thus those in denial will be forced to lurch from crisis to crisis. What is really interesting is that whether someone is in denial or simply dishonest, they will project those thought processes onto those around them - assuming that all other individuals are equally dishonest. In doing so, they negate the need for reflection and are able to deny the need to take responsibility for situations. Far worse is an addicts thought process that in fact, everyone else must be too blame.

Those that practice denial or dishonesty walk a lonely path. There is no coalition, simply us and them, me or you, no room for ambiguity. Both denial and dishonesty are self serving and those willing to practise either need no one else to assist.

Consider it like this: Your chum is an alcoholic, you both get on just great when you both are drunk. Sober up and you become less appealing since you make your drunk friend feel bad about being the only drunk. You can rationalise with him as much as you like but it will be fruitless since in the mind of the alcoholic, he doesn't have a drink problem. If he doesn't have an issue then the problem is you - since you are no fun anymore.

With an alcoholic, everyone around them suffers and yet as long as he denies the reality and continues the dishonesty, the person that really suffers is him. The more he denies, the more he drinks, the more he drinks the more paranoid he gets and the more he needs to drink.

So is there really any difference? I think not.

Beyonce, dating and mental faculty

2010-05-16T23:58:00.003+01:00

One of the strangest things about falling for someone, was that my music taste disappeared. Literally vanished alongside any rational thought process. For weeks on end I listened to Heart FM. Not only was it curiously addictive, but acutely embarrassing - just not enough to stop me.

It is with a large proportion of cringe that I can claim lyrical knowledge on every Beyonce and Adele song. I am not embarrassed by Adele, for she really is very talented.

However the Beyonce thing has irked me. I was an Xray Specs kinda girl. Pop music? Purleeze. Or at least until I discovered that a girlie emotional side of me did in fact exist.

Anyhow, I am cured. Having finally realised that serial dater may well remain in his world of self fulfilling prophecy and finally, that I am worth so much more than a man who's self protection can shut more people out than the Berlin wall ever did. Admittedly, I hoped that he would get it, deal with it and risk it. I was wrong. Damn, I hate being wrong. I shall always think fondly of his thighs and his accent. Both were equally endearing. I hope that he finds what he is looking for.

However, there is always good from everything. I am cured of Beyonce. Normal service resumes. In honour of this, let me recommend the following. It is entirely brilliant

http://vodpod.com/watch/3386636-youtube-faithless-mass-destruction

Chemistry, Instantaneous Karma or slowly evolving

2010-05-15T23:19:00.003+01:00

Have had food for thought today.

I sent the afternoon with a great friend and two single male chums and their children. We barbequed, made food and sat around drinking wine.

It caused some pondering. What happens when there is someone in your life that clearly cares very much for you, would never willingly hurt you and that they when they look at you, there is more in their eyes than just friendship. What you are looking at is real feelings.

So what happens when you have told yourself that you are simply incapable of compromising on chemistry and that stop you in your tracks moment, is your guiding force of what is right from that point on.

What happens if you are sure you could never meet anyone that gets the way you think, that can articulate at the speed you can, is cuttingly astute and capable of the level of emotions that you feel. Then you meet them. You discover that the moment feels so rare that they then have the power to cut you to pieces. It's a real bitch when they do. Does accepting you may have been wrong mean compromising?

So which is better, the man that still causes a physical reaction every time you see him despite the pain he caused, or the man that you know is not entirely sure about anything you say but you know when he looks at you, that he cares deeply.

Buggered if I know the answer. I do know that when someone looks at you like that then physical closeness would take the snap of fingers. It's compelling. I also know that when you are questioning the basis of healthy emotion, then you are likely to cause them huge pain. Having been on the end of that scenario, I have no wish to subject someone who cares about me - any such pain.

Just when you thin you have the answers to everything, it seems that you have none.

2010-05-11T22:36:00.001+01:00

I had the results back from the CT scan following the weird seizure moment.

Apparently, I have an insignificant brain.

I demand another scan.

Men with issues, cave men and lions

2010-05-01T00:56:00.003+01:00

Two glasses of wine. One too many. I am attracted to men with issues. This is a problem. Accepting those issues are theirs and they may never deal with it is one thing, getting them out of your head, another.

On another, quite unrelated issues is something that I have had to grasp in the latest NLP. Control is a tricky thing to understand. When you finally realise the enormity of a controlling relationship you try to understand two things. The first is how you could ever have been so stupid and the second is why anyone would be so unkind. Then you realise two other things, the first is that being controlled is not about stupidity: it's divisive, it creeps up on you without announcement and truly successful control is achieved when the feeling of something not being right leaves you assuming that you must be imagining it or it must be your fault.

The second thing that you will hopefully conclude is that control is not necessarily about a malicious need to control someone else, but something often borne for the right reasons. Take an old fashioned marriage. Man works, woman stays at home'

Lets imagine that the man has subconscious issues with adequacy. He needs to feel like the provider, the caveman - earning money, providing roof warm and water to his family. This makes him feel good. This makes her feel protected and safe. Yet the caveman knows that the only way to retain that situation is to ensure that she remains dependent. The easiest way is by controlling money.

Before you know it you have a situation where caveman is in charge. Caveman restricts income and any ability for cave woman to earn her own. Caveman provides roof, water and heat. By restricting money, caveman achieves total dependency. By saying that he has to go out and club animals, he restricts cave woman's ability to club animals herself.

Occasionally, caveman offers cave woman and cave children a bonus, like a takeaway curried gazelle. Cave woman, due to restricted clubbing ability feels slightly demeaned by this and guilty of thinking it is a tad unfair. Caveman regularly treats himself to new clubs, new stone wheels or a new loin cloth - all apparently a requirement to club animals. Caveman then has to go out at weekend to clubbing contests. Cave woman knows that this is just fun but cave woman, when told it is necessary to perfect the art of clubbing, then feels guilty that she should question.

Then caveman, through his subconscious desire to be the big provider, creates a situation whereby the only way that he can ensure that he earns the title is by completely controlling cave woman. Cave children grow up thinking that Daddy provides baby mongoose to play with but cannot understand why cave woman mummy only gets to let them play with sticks in the mud.

Eventually Caveman twigs that cave woman no longer believes that there is fairness and equality and the feeling of supremacy is fading. In a bid to regain that feeling of admiration, Caveman seeks cave woman number two - another option who can make him feel that the loin cloth is well worn. No questions, no doubts, no demands for roof, food and heat - just admiration. Cave woman two needs a caveman to make her feel like a cave woman and shares in his behaviour that new clubs can make everyone happy. Club woman two has her own issues and needed to 'rescue' a caveman to feel of worth. This bit works well as both caveman and cavewoman two still need co-dependancy.

Then it turns out that Caveman borrowed lots of flint heads in a bid to club the family fodder. Feeling bitter that the adoration disappeared, Caveman claims that the flints were only borrowed to kill the fodder and not to fund the control, the new clubs and the clubbing weekends.

Cave woman, having had to do with bartering the toenails of dead lions to provide a nice cave and supply cave children with chalk for drawings - is understandably stunned that caveman now wants payback for the funding of his clubbing activities, when she never had any say in what clubs were brought.

The truth is quite sad. Caveman had good intent - he wanted to provide for his family. Where he went wrong was to ensure that Cave woman was kept in the back of the cave to allow him to achieve it. After years in the dark, asking her to pay back the flints from the clubbing weekends and the new clubs was one step to far.

Such a sad story.

Cave woman finally saw the light and Caveman got eaten by lions.

Sad, unnecessary but true,

On a positive note, Cave woman discovered that there was more to life than clubbing things.

vicarious living

2010-04-25T00:48:00.002+01:00

One of my favourite expressions is 'living vicariously through someone else'. It is such a great sentence. I have, for sometime had an 'anonymous' poster who sends on the whole, malicious comments. They could be about me, the children, or telling me that the repro man is after the house.

Clearly they are ill informed, since it is not the repro man that is after the house, it is it. I have always found it a tad irksome that any adult would make comments about children, but since anyone who felt the inclination to send malicious comments at all - was probably unworthy of any real cerebral consideration and certainly not anyone of cerebral ability, am not unduly bothered.

What I find most fascinating is that this person, who clearly knows of me and of the children - is totally obsessed by my life. A complete and clear cut case of living vicariously through someone else - they border on an obsession with the amount of times they read this blog. I am not sure I can grasp the intellect of someone who hides behind anonymity to show the side of their personality that is truer than anything they could ever present in public, but the clearly have no life of their own that they should have to read this blog as much as they do.

I have never had an issue with my thought process. There is little that happens in my life that hasn't happened to thousands of others. In this sense I am hardly likely to be particularly bothered by someone with inadequate social ability and lets face it, I have experience on those with issues with adequacy. I am however, delighted that my life is clearly and undoubtedly more fascinating than their own.

The one thing that really bothers me though, is their complete and utter inability to spell. Frankly, if they have the time to be on the Internet for the best part of the day, they certainly have time to research how to use a spell check.

One point of reflection. I recall last year writing an entry on the village idiot. It was a fine description. Perhaps the link was far too tenuous for those with limited cognitive function.

Duh....

On a more interesting note. I had a great night out tonight with another mother of 4 who had spent a similar amount of her life with a man of a very similar nature to 'it'. Like me, she is also dealing with the bulk of financial responsibility and the full responsibility of raising her children without assistance.

It was universally agreed that being single and answerable to no one else - is a very exciting point in life. There is another expression in life about not going back and frankly, who would want to? She has got the added benefit of not actually having been married and for that I envy her. I have had to seriously consider whether I have an issue with marriage but in fact, the only real issue is in the choices I made.

You would not believe how damn difficult it is in just getting divorced. You would think it would be no more than 'It's over, I am leaving, you can have the children and I will behave decently' Apparently not. Apparently it is more common place to keep trying to hold on to the past and use everything you have in you to prevent any moving on happening at all. When people have got some point to make, they throw money at a solicitor and it goes on and on and on. Whatever they were after starts to dwindle compared to the bills they are racking up in legal fees and the only people that really suffer are the children.

It seems that many people seriously believe that divorce, acrimony, uncertainty and lack of understanding do not affect children. One of mine has spent the last three weeks attached to my side. If I move, he moves. If he wakes up, he cries, if I go out, he wakes up in hysterics and when I wake up, I have a tiny upturned nose attached to mine. Yep, they will deal with it, yes they will grow up and be okay but the damage becomes entrenched and it will impact on the way they are as adults, the relationships they have and the way they respond to their own children. For those that were really screwed up by their childhood and remember insecurity and fear, they run the risk of replicating the very same with their own children.

I have absolutely no comprehension of why anyone would want to inflict that on their own offspring. Yet they do, time and time again.

It sucks

Glass half empty,

2010-04-24T10:03:00.003+01:00

I have a bad headache. How can two glasses of wine cause such a condition? I fear I may be in need of medical referral to see if there is a clinical reason as to my low alcohol intolerance.

I also fear I may have revealed too much of myself to the neighbour. At least this time it was the working of my inner mind and not my body. I am not sure which of those is scarier. Besides, she wasn't as attractive as the gardener.

I had planned to attempt a sort out of the garden today. I plan to get last weeks washing in but need to clear a path to get to it first. I did reseed the lawn and forgot to water it. The garden may have to be postponed to this afternoon.

The missing link, alcohol, love and trust

2010-04-24T00:54:00.002+01:00

I fear that my blog has been missing alcohol. In a bid to sort myself out, I have been going out less. Going out more was about avoiding dealing with myself and since avoidance is never a good thing, I had decided to face it all.

But tonight I shared a bottle of wine with a neighbour. Like any occasion that fermented substance passes my lips, my thought process goes into free fall.

I have a tetchy client. She is new to handing over anything to anyone else and is understandably tetchy. Her nerves are making me nervous and as such, making me panic.

I figured tonight that relationships with clients are almost parallel to relationships with men. It is all trust. She needs to trust me for this relationship to work. Having said she wants someone on board, she is actually finding trusting someone else and trying to control issues. Her control is making me question my own ability and wondering if she has cause for concern.

In reality, I know that she is dealing with fear, if she can get past the initial fear she will be okay but that may simply be a step to far. I know I can do what she has been told that I can do. I know that I have it in me to deliver the promises, but the minute she panics - I panic, and we both end up with levels of fear that will make the relationship impossible.

So then it struck me. Is any relationship really that different? What the client needs is for me to stay focus and give her the reassurance that she seeks that all will be okay. I assure her, she feels safe and bingo, job done. Or do I take the view that there is no relationship without trust and that clearly this is not a relationship that will work and get out first?

I am taking the view that if I allow her fear to take me off course, then I will not be able to offer her what was originally promised and it will all be a difficult and damaging relationship. Therefore I need to prove to her that there is only one person panicking and isn't me.

This is where the strange similarities with client and personal relationships differ.

If this had been a man, I would simply have panicked and backed off. If a man needed reassurance that I was genuine in promise and thus started to behave oddly, I would retreat in an instant. To risk having to persuade a man that you had a relationship with potential would risk being humiliated. If the man was the effective client, he would be having to persuade me that he desperately wanted me to work for him.

Strange thinks I. I would expect him to have crawl on hands and knees, despite the fact that it may be some behaviour of mine that had caused the fear in the fist place. Doubly ironic that I would want someone to do something for me, that I would not be brave enough to do myself.

The other thing I have figured recently is that when someone tells themselves they need no one, there is invariably some kind of delusion involved. I have never needed anyone, I can cope with anything.

Bull - I finally get it. Too many barriers, too much guarding my emotions. I need someone who can see through me. There is no need for compromise. What will be will be.

This probably makes no sense and probably, I need not drink again

Bikini lines, gorgeous knickers and ex husbands

2010-04-12T23:38:00.002+01:00

Uncharacteristically, I had some odd thoughts today.

Yesterday I had to sort the lawn out. By the time I had finished, my feet looked like that of a Nepalise Goat Herder. So last night I had to embark on a home based pedicure. things like this bore me senseless. Necessary but mind blowingly boring. For some reason I was humming the tunes to 'Head, shoulders, knees and toes' and pondered something. If most men are like older hairier versions of small boys, then where do women fit in to childhood? The answer is in the nursery song. Life as a woman is a repetative cycle of 'Head, shoulders, knees and toes'.

You sort your toes out and then you realise your eyebrows need tending. Eyebrows regained and your fingernails are atrocious. Get around to that and your bikini line is need of order. Suitably buff and your toenails need adjustment again. In between all of this you have to reseed the lawn, wash the car, make dinner, unblock the toilet and fix the dodgy light switch. I am beginning to see why there are so many women that do not bother.

I went to the car boot sale in Lacock yesterday. I came back with all sorts of things I could have lived without. My most exciting item was a wire coat hanger. Thrilled, because I had a toilet to unblock and I had no intention of using anything that would not be disposed of immediately. This is now becoming a weekly and very unpleasant task. The little ones are determined to be independent but not accountable. Independence means blocking the toilet. Blocking the toilet means I gag. Great. I am hoping it will not last long.

Whilst on the random thought process, my random thoughts turned to underwear. I have a couple of pieces I particularly like. One pair are rarely worn. 'Tres stylish, but with a couple of ribboned ties on each side of the hip - they are hardly the most practical undergarment.

It got me thinking on how clothing design. Trousers are designer to cover your legs, tops are designed to cover your top. Knickers take no account of bikini lines at all. You buy beautiful underwear but they will only look beautiful if you have kept up to date with bikini line removal. I have no issue with this, but am left wondering why the same does not apply to a hat. If you someone buys a hat they do not remove the hair that is left around it. If they removed the hair protruding from the Beanie they would look very odd. If you don't remove the hair around the knicker line, you look very odd.

"Tis all odd, but possibly not as odd as me.

As another irrelevant point. The nearly ex husband and I had a rather large argument today. I realised something else. My mind has moved from the point he left to now. Now is the only relevant point. I realised that his mind is still in the lead up to him leaving. We are not in the same place.

To me, the past cannot be changed, you can only earn from it and move forward. Holding onto it means that you cannot let go of bitterness, blame and anger. I finally realised today that no matter what I say, when these three emotions are attached to every conversation - no conversation is ever going to be a productive one.

I do not think there is any logic that can be attached to the situation.

Today I realised that it is pointless even trying.

So on that note I am just going to accept that we are in very different places. I am going to concentrate on raising and supporting these 4 beautiful but slightly smelly boys. I have no real idea how I will meet the financial costs over their lifetime but I will do it. I will do it because that is what you do as a parent. You move heaven and earth to protect and provide for your children.

Further more, I shall have a perfectly tended bikini line and gorgeous knickers.

Spiked heels and happiness

2010-04-11T16:57:00.003+01:00

Yesterday I took delivery of a pair of 4in platform heels. Very tasty. The small boys were overcome with delirium at a parcel being delivered. their little faces dropped a little when they realised they were Mummy's shoe fix but quickly realising that shoes makes Mummy happy and happy mummy makes happy boys - they were happy.

Today we went to the car boot sale. There were a pair of strange contraption that you attach to your feet. Embedded with spikes, you traipse up and down the lawn with them and suitably rejuvenated grass follicles breed. Result is lush grass. Apparently.

Having spent last year aerating the lawn with a fork and the year before with a pizza cutter, I was tempted.

Briefly.

If someone had agreed to lie on top of the grass before I stepped forth wearing 3 inch spike it may have sealed the deal.

Going round in circles no more - Excuse me Sir, you are misaken.

2010-04-10T20:19:00.003+01:00

I recently had a conversation with someone on the pros's and cons of counselling versus NLP. I was never one for counselling, picking over the cherry stones has never been my bag. I am too good at analysing to have enough faith in anyone to do it for me.

It appears that someone that was once very important to me, has been a little confused over my rambling and has mistaken light bulbs for wallowing. Let me explain the difference:

Wallowing is when you accept the way you are and the situation around you as something that just is. Something that you can do nothing about. Light bulbs are when you see the obvious for the first time, despite it maybe being obvious to others. When you see the self defeating circles that you have created around yourself and the impact they have had on the choices you have made, and the paths you have walked.

Lightbulb is when you see it for what it is. Self defeating.

The joy of the NLP is that it allows you to see this, acknowledge it and slowly, kiss goodbye to it all.

Whatever the reasons I have done things, whatever the things that I have done are - seeing how they are all interlinked has been fascinating. There have been times of recent note that have challenged me. The truth was simple. The way I had been dealing with life, was no longer working. This is not wallowing, this is slowly embracing.

So now I have to be different, now I have to face the fears that prevented me having the career that I could have had, the relationships that I felt I deserved and the life that I choose. There is no longer anyone else making decisions in which I have no say and this alone, has to be one of the best things that could have happened.

Yes, facing your demons is tricky but when you realise that the only person that has truly prevented anything happening, is yourself - it is time to take a deep breath and get on with it.

Little things, like an aversion to calling people I don't know have had to be dealt with. Unless I can call people, I cannot earn money, so I have to call people. It is staggeringly simple. Hard but simple.

Being the source of financial support for 4 children is daunting, but I have no choice. No one else is offering to do it for me. In solving those issues, I am taking control and this is an exciting thought.

In accepting that I have made poor choices in relationships, I can start putting my needs first and not putting up with other peoples issues when those issues start to affect me.

This is the start of a new life, a great one. It is not about wallowing it is about light bulbs.

On another note. Yesterday I gave away a large tub of specialist paint finish on freecycle. Today I posted for perspex sheets for the garden shed windows. This evening, the person who took the paint finish, sent their son around with two perspex windows. Not content with giving them away, he insisted on fitting them as well.

Sometimes, life is just peachy.

Going around in circles

2010-04-07T22:54:00.004+01:00

It would appear that life is full of journeys, some more difficult than others. I am beginning to suspect that the most difficult journeys are the ones that offer the biggest rewards.

The Hypnotherapy and NLP are such a journey. We all reach a point in our lives that we realise that whatever it is we do in life to cope, may no longer work. Sadly, I suspect that many people learn it just before they take their last breath. I have no desire to be one of those.

NLP is proactive. You visulaise what you want to achieve and where you want to be. Then you work out what you need to do to achieve it. The hypnotherapy is trickier. Your sub conscious puts in various blocks to prevent you achieving those things and all for various reasons. Unpicking those is emotionally difficult.

Back to the can of worms. The lid is firmly open. When I was a young teenager, I was hoisted out of my life within 14 days. One day I had a horse, a dog, a cat, lived in the country and had friends at the local school. Within 14 days I was in a boarding school in another county with my parents preparing to go and live in Hong Kong. I cannot say I was overjoyed.

Saying what I think has never been a problem for me. Saying what I need has been an issue. I coped for a while and then I stopped eating. Eventually, having worked through the 'not being able to leave the dining hall until food had passed my lips', it was acknowledged it was going to be a problem. I was taken out of boarding school and got a flight to the Far East.

Then other stuff happened. With an entrenched habit of not being able to verbalise how I felt about things, combined with lots of 'things' - I had a period of minor self harm. I still remember the sensation of doing it. It sounds appalling to describe but the sense of cutting your arm was like a breath of fresh air.

I read a little about self harm this evening. Not uncommon in teenage girls and very common with young people who feel unable to express what is going on internally. Self harm is about being able to control something at a time when you can control nothing else. Physical pain releases emotional pain. People who self harm tend to be perfectionists, tend to need to control their own 'stuff'.

I had forgotten alll about it until last weeks hypnotherapy. It hit me like a train that in fact I still self harm, just in a different way. I no longer cause myself physical pain but am adept at causing myself emotional pain. The irony is that I do this to prevent anyone else hurting me. Whatever happens in my life, I never choose to consciously hurt anyone else. I firmly believe that we must all take responsibility for our own actions. What I fail to address is that my own subconscious belief that I need no one, though in a bid to protect myself from hurt - only serves to hurt me since in letting no one in, I am doomed to be hurt by the fact that no one can really get close. That is self harm.

It is beginning to make me wonder if I chose to marry someone that I knew could never give me emotional support, because in doing so I could continue to protect myself from anyone being able to hurt me. That was fairly stupid since no matter what we tell ourselves, we all want to be loved for who we truly are. The more you present as someone you are not, the more likely it is that we never feel truly loved. Duh

This week was equally tough. I dealt with stillbirth. The ultimate show of how I could cope emotionally, was when I gave birth to a lifeless baby. Today I sobbed. Not totally, I still feel uncomfortable with it, it sill feels alien and I could still feel myself fighting it. but I cried. After years of perfecting the art of describing the experience of stillbirth with no emotional connection to myself, it felt very raw. There are no adequate words. Giving birth to a dead baby is like having your soul ripped from you.

The aftermath of a still birth is awful. People handle things in very different ways. I never, ever got upset publicaly. I coped. My mind was another matter. The struggle of such huge pain and appearing to cope was challenging. At times it tipped me over the edge. One day I burnt all poured petrol over my clothes and set alight to them. I could not bear the fact that I had worn them when I was pregnant and the baby was now dead. I hated those clothes and was in control of nothing. I couldn't tell anyone, I couldn't begin to describe the pain. So I burnt the clothes.

The nearly ex husband never talked about it. I told myself and everyone else that he showed his support by never judging me when I lost it. I was deluding myself. He was not equipped to deal with emotions, particularly not anyone elses. Not his fault, just the way it is. My fault for not recognising that I had chosen a partner that was simply not capable in giving me the one thing I needed in life, emotional support and love. The one thing I have spent my life telling myself I do not need turns out to be the very thing I need and the thing that scares me most.

When you have a pathological aversion to being vulnerable, there is no better solution to marry someone that is not equipped to give it. More self harm. I am beginning to think that I am not in fact, as emotionally aware as I had thought.

On the upside, it's all starting to slot into place. All the patterns of self defeating behaviour, all of the issues with fear that keep me in my comfort zone, all being exposed. Fear is a great thing. It causes you to avoid and to face issues. Take your pick which one is the best option.

I also realised this weekend that those that try and hurt me, no longer can. The damage they cause is to themselves and to innocent parties. I have spend far too much of my life allowing myself to be damaged. By others and by myself. Those that I have allowed to damage me in the past are no longer capable. How they deal with that is now firmly their issue and not mine. I no longer need to anaylase it. I just accept it as it is. Other peoples unkindness is a reflection of them and not one that has anything to do with me.

Losing that little boy taught me other things. The intense love I feel for the little ones sometimes overwhelmes me. I have never been particularly 'Mummsy'. I would fight to the death for my children, equally I would be the first to hand them in if they did anything wrong. I do not pander to them, I like self sufficient children. I do not wear 'Mummsy' clothes, I do not spend my life entertaining them. I spend a proportion of my time lying in bed wondering what the point to it all is. Raising 4 children myself often leaves me wondering if I am failing all of them. Perhaps, but they all know that above all else, they are loved.

After the nearly ex husband left, he told me that he had never wanted the last two. He thought it would make things better. It was a comment that truly shocked me. I am not sure why anyone would think that having more children would make things better, it could only ever make things harder. Yet, I know that having given birth to a little boy that was never going to make it, to have been given to healthy, living breathing children is the kind of thing that makes you realise just how precious life is.

The other issue addressed today was what I would seek in a relationship. Having already worked through goals and desires for work, finances, health, fitness and spirituality, this was the one area that compromise was not on offer. Having spent most of my life in the wrong relationship, I am not compromising on anything I need in any future plans. I cannot think of anything more soul destroying than a serious of half right encounters and really would rather be on my own. I have met men that would tick a multitude of boxes, but they leave me feeling nothing. What is the point?

So back to an IQ of over 135, a well toned body, a dry sense of wit, kindness, posture, emotionally aware, and a lateral thinker. The thing about NLP is that it reframes your reference. Instead of telling myself that the serial dater was the only person that I had ever met that can think like me and that caused that 'oh so not common' physical reaction on sight, I have been reframed.

Now I have proved I can meet someone who causes me the 'oh not so common' physical reaction on sight, a man with an IQ over 135, a well toned body, wit, lateral thinker. Fill in the gaps.

It really was quite easy.

"If you met a man that made you feel like the serial dater did but before he started the mind games. A man that had all his plus sides but that was not as emotionally damaged as he, how would you feel?" He asked

"Alive" said I

Simple. I just need to start believing it.

Easter was cancelled

2010-04-06T23:36:00.002+01:00

I moved the dates of Easter around. This is the first year that I have not had all of the children, courtesy of the calendar. Some were worried about participating in the annual Easter Egg hunt on the village green. A compromise was reached in which we simply swapped Easter Sunday to Monday. Clearly I had to write to the Easter Bunny, which I did.

This situation does not work well when you still have one child that does not go anywhere on alternate weekends. He didn't see why his Easter should be moved and saw no good reason why he should not slice into the annual Easter cake provided by one of the neighbours. Tis a tricky situation.

The little ones came back unusually quiet on Sunday night. Apparently the only thing that happened all weekend was that they got a biscuit. Sometimes, silence tells you more about a child's thought process than words ever could. As a consequence, I spent yet another night with small feet in my back and in my face. Great

I got breakfast in bed. One small child took all of the chocolate that he had come home with, broke it into a large amount of broken piece and presented in a bowl at 7.30am. Really sweet, very generous, but I defy anyone to eat a plate full of milky chocolate at that time of day. I don't even particularly like chocolate. Fortunately there are enough kleptomaniacs in the house to ensure a continually diminishing pile.

Then I was given some hastily drawn Easter cards, all declaring some form of adoration. Apparently I am 'the only mummy they have' (for true effect you have to say each word in an extended way, very slowly). As their only Mummy I feel I have the right to tell them that another Easter tradition is that all Mummy's get to spend an hour longer in bed. For a non religious household, we embraced the Easter thing with relish.

Suitably convinced by the loud knocking on the door of the Easter Bunny, the hunt commenced. It was finished in 8 minutes. I may have to try harder next year.

"I know what happened to the eggs that were in the bag" said small child

"Oh really"? say I

"Yes" he declares "They are the same eggs that were on the village green"

This is the point I start screaming

"Oh my God, the Easter Bunny stole my eggs, now I have no eggs to give you"

Having suitably tarnished the reputation of the bunny and successfully salvaged mine, I tell the teenager that the Easter Bunny had left a note saying it recognised that teenagers were too cool to be seen hunting on the village green. As such, his eggs had been hidden in the garden. He looks me up and down, then goes back to bed.

Fully into Easter mode, we had Roast Lamb and extended family to eat it. This is the point at which middle child starts telling us about various methods of lamb slaughter. Graphically. By the time we get to dessert everyone is a little less keen on Easter.

A Brand of loyalty, one to one

2010-04-03T00:41:00.002+01:00

In recognition of the in roads NLP is making, I had my first session of training at the Apple store. In a flick of a return key, your personal trainer can tell everything there is to know about you, since it is all stored on your hard drive. Within three minutes of meeting, my personal trainer had worked out that I am fascinated by narcissists, am going through an extremely ugly divorce, been burnt by the serial dater and like Prada. We are now very intimate. Apparently I am relatively normal. Some of the pictures that come up in the iphoto sessions are not ones you would show your grandmother.

Having discussed my in depth knowledge of Apple Macs and my bizarre thought process, he quickly ascertained that we would be building up a deep and meaningful relationship. I would be there for a lot of training and he would spend a lot of time having to research things that he was not sure about. It seems the things that I need to understand are not ones that most of the nation worry about.

Nothing changes.

The Apple one-to-one is an incredibly canny move. It would appear fantastic value. Indeed it is. At £79 per year you can access as much one to one training as deemed necessary. If needed, the potential is there to go in every day which would make Apple comparatively cheap when you consider the cost of a PC and some dreadful computer course. Yet it is not about value, it is about brand loyalty and it works. I am now converted and will never go back to the dreadful PC again. Not only that, I have probably been responsible for at least 3 laptop sales on behalf of Apple. They treat me nicely, I tell other people and they all want to be treated nicely. In a society where being treated really nicely is comparatively rare, the cost of a laptop is peanuts.

Genius.

Interesting though. Apple have keyed into human need and to the one thing most of us fail to get. Treat people nicely and you create loyalty. So simple and yet seemingly so difficult for so many.

I had a conversation today with someone that dislikes me so much that they are incapable of looking me in the face. They clearly hold me reasonable for every bad feeling they have. In doing so, it makes a future of civility almost impossible. Every single thing I say is taken as a criticism which means it is not worth saying anything. This can only result in a situation where no information is shared, which will breed resentment and exclusion. Resentment and exclusion will cause more hatred and so the cycle will go on and on and on. Cycle after cycle of self fulfilling prophecy. It is a pattern of behaviour I am growing tired of witnessing.

One of the things that I had to work really hard on last year was the theory that since I cannot change other peoples behaviour, I could concentrate on changing my reaction to it. I can do that and it does indeed make facing adversity much easier. You can only be controlled if you are willing for that to happen. Anger is a reaction that you allow to happen. No one can make you angry, it is a choice you make yourself.

All great stuff and all true. However, I also realised today that if the other person is not willing to control their own reactions and assumptions to situations, than neither of you will reach a place of acceptance because one party will make that impossible. When you have been made the visual scapegoat for everything that has ever gone wrong in someone else's life, then every time they look at you, you become the reminder of everything that went wrong in their life.

This is the point that you realise that nothing you say or do will ever make the situation any different and there is no point in trying. Having reached a place of acceptance, they are blind to the fact that it no longer has any affect. The only people it hurts is them and the innocent victims caught up in it all.

Holding onto anger, bitterness and resentment is staggeringly unhealthy and sadly a form of self abuse. There are choices. Holding onto feelings attached to the past simply means that you can never really have a future.

Perhaps they will reach that point. Perhaps one day they will be happy in their choices and stop making other people responsible for their decisions. It is only at the point that you are willing to take responsibility for the choices you make, that happiness can ever been attained. For me, choosing to get rid of anger goes hand in hand of letting go of expectation. When you expect people to behave in a better why than they do, disappointment will follow. When you expect people to behave in the way that deep down you know they will, acceptance follows.

Punishing others will never provide good feeling. Guilt generally comes from bad behaviour. Bad behaviour frequently comes from not liking the feeling of guilt. Tis so simple, stop the bad behaviour, behave in the right way and the guilt goes. In punishing others, people all to frequently punish themselves.

Pointless

Embarrassing Technology

2010-03-27T20:05:00.003Z

So this was the week I embraced technology. Following a session of NLP and having visualised where I want to be in life and what I need to do to get there, I decided that tackling technology head on, was the way ahead.

I have a habit with technology. I get the first bit and then learning anything else becomes too time intensive and too complicated, so I don't bother. As a consequence, I have mastered a spreadsheet but have no idea how to manipulate the cells. This means that I have to shorten my words to fit and I have to add everything up myself.

So I set myself three challenges: to get some training, to stop telling myself I can't do it and the final challenge, to master the art of setting the central heating boiler.

So my new phone arrives. It takes me 30 minutes to work out where the sim card goes. I resort to watching a YouTube video. Three hours later I work out that it is not me that it the problem, but the new and very duff phone. By this time I have transferred the numbers on my old phone back and forward on to various Sim's and all are full.

Two hours of trying to get through to a call centre and I realise I am calling a mobile number. The new phone has suddenly become a whole heap more expensive. The holding message should simply have said:

"We are experiencing a large volume of calls right now. Since we are charging you 13p a minute we have figured that we can make a large sum of money by making you hold for excessive periods of time. We fully intend to bleed you dry"

So I finally get through. Of course it is not their fault but the manufacturers and so I need to be transferred. They want to freeze a huge sum of money on a credit card in order to send a replacement by guaranteed delivery for Friday. It is now Saturday. No phone.

Having had the same mobile number for 16 years, I have now changed it three times in as many weeks. If divorce would be a civil affair then you might get to keep your number. Any one who fears there may be trouble afoot, take my advice - transfer your mobile to your name.

On the upside, it means that you can not bother to give your new mobile out to all those people that you probably should not have given it out to in the first place.

I digress. So I spend three days swapping Sim cards around because I am no longer certain who has what number. Then I realise that all of my contacts in the last two years were transferred to last weeks Sim. The one that I can no longer find. The one that I put in a safe place.

So my attention moves to the central heating. I try and programme it and notice the pressure is very high. I let some water out of a radiator and end up with an internal fountain. I call the gas board. Unsurprisingly, they have not got the parts and now I have no hot water. They return 2 days later and replace a part. 24 hours later I discover that the new part leaks and I have three shelves full of soaking wet clothes. The gas board return and they do not have the parts. I have no hot water again. It is all feeling a little like groundhog day.

I refuse to be beaten. I have signed up for one to one tuition. I refuse to be a one cell spreadsheet kind girl. I have been bombarded with computer systems that I need to know inside out and all I can do is stare at them blankly. When people ask me a if I need high resolution I start sweating. The last time I wanted a photograph, I went to the counter at Boots.

I shall master the phone, master the programmes, master it all.

I am steering clear of the central heating. It is going to be a very hot summer

Titanium Will

2010-03-27T19:51:00.002Z

I went to visit someone at the Bath Clinic yesterday, following their hip replacement operation. Apparently, the procedure cost a total of £9k. Most of us would be cut open by the NHS and I am sure that the lack of on tap coffee and the surgeons Mercedes, must have some bearing on cost. Even so, it is a fairly pricey procedure.

So it got me thinking. As we live longer and parts degenerate, we are more likely to be filled with Titanium, Stainless Steel and Silicone than ever before. So is it worth negotiating? In a society where people are 'apparently' more conscious of environmentally aware practise it seems that we are missing a golden opportunity in reducing the cost of living longer - by offsetting it against our own ability to be a little more carbon neutral.

When you get cremated, your hip joint will not be a pile of ash. It will be a glowing red piece of tarnished Titanium. Since it will annihilate the grinder, it will be removed. Your left gait will then be no more that scrap metal.

I can see where this is going. In years to come, we will be so resource short that Britain's church yards will be full of the metal detector brigade. Almost every grave will emit a loud shrill and the middle of the night will see the return the bounty hunters. It will be a full circle to the 19th century days of grave robbing. Each and every hip and knee joint, every steel plate, will all be cash in hand for a new type of scrap metal dealer.

The new airport x-ray machines will pinpoint your titanium and your personal file will be updated. Should you keel over, someone, somewhere will know exactly what your assets are.

In the mean time, ask for a discount with a written agreement that they can have your joint back on your death. Perhaps they could even be passed on through the family.

"Dearest Daughter, I pass to you my left hip - may it give you as much pleasure and movement as it did me"

Just a thought

I have a penis and a stride.

2010-03-21T22:21:00.002Z

There is nothing like a bit of 'opening the can of worms' hypnotherapy to get your friends helping with perceptions. Apparently I have a 'walk'. I should imagine that most people are not conscious of their walk. I would be no different, yet it seems to be coming up in conversation.

On dating the serial dater, the walk was raised. Too be honest, I thought it was a charm offensive. Yet on discussion over coffee last week, a friend decided to answer my query on how people could possibly see me as intimidating. The answer, apparently, lay in the walk.

I stride. Apparently.

Unbeknown to me, I stride wherever I go. Striding and holding your head high and your back straight equates to intimidating. Add large sunglasses and a large leather handbag and the deal is sealed. People are scared.

So out for a friendly drink with my ex blind date, I asked for his opinion. I stride and maybe a slight hip sway. The barmaid confirmed it. I walk with a stride and people notice. I am not entirely sure how I should be walking now. I am becoming more aware of the walk but it is entirely normal for me. I became so conscious of it on Friday that I tripped over a pavement. At that point, it became more of a stagger than swagger.

Stagger would be a more appropriate description for Chronic Fatigue. It really is like climbing a ladder and slipping a few rungs. Thursday and Friday were good. Saturday was bad. I attempted to get up 8 times. Each time lasted for anywhere between 20mins and 2 hours. You get up, you are wiped out, you have to sleep. You sleep, you get up and you feel as exhausted as before you went to sleep. Frankly I have had enough of it all.

According to my chum in the States, I need drugs. I am not convinced. Whilst on the theme of analysing my analysation, she pointed out that I undoubtedly had a penis on my body somewhere, I just hadn't found it.

She may be right. In a bid to prevent people knowing they have hurt me, I have a quite unique ability to look like I couldn't give a stuff. This is of course, complete and utter self protection but my responses are so controlled that I could be a 'bloke'.

If you are looking for a female, emotional response, then I would be your last port of call. If you want the 'whatever, it's cool' type of line normally gained from the bearer of testosterone - then you have come to the right place. There are obviously a hand full of people that have seen me be very emotional and female but they are few and far between. They also know better than to ever bring it in conversation or remind me of such times.

So what I have is a walk, a penis and hypocrisy. In getting upset at some people for appearing to not care when I think they do, it finally dawns that this is exactly what I do. Perhaps people can't be honest about how they feel because they fear not getting the response they need. Perhaps, in my fear of not getting the response I need, I can't be honest about I feel.

I feel like a Spirograph - we are all going round in self fulfilling circles

I am not entirely sure what the answer is.

If it's not broken, ask a child

2010-03-17T00:05:00.002Z

Having children is very similar to having a ghost. Mysterious things happen, things move, disappear or break. There is no plausible explanation for these mysterious happenings and the only thing you can guarantee, is that no one knows who did it.

Today, the glass in my antique kitchen cupboard gained a 12 inch crack. Clearly it was the fault of the kettle being allowed to boil directly under it. But no one boiled the kettle, since no one was in. The Sofa bed, which in fairness was broken as a result of three large teenage boys sleeping on one single mattress - is now a pile of very nicely painted firewood. No one used that room. Ever.

It gets worse. The ghost has a bladder. Yet the ghost died before toilet seats were invented and as a consequence wees either directly on the seat or 5 inches to the left. I think it is worthy of investigation: a presence that can not be seen but leaves clear evidence. Unusual. Having a house full of male ghosts is the best bladder control method available. Far too many times I have sat on a toilet seat in the dark, only to wish that I had sat anywhere but the toilet seat. Nowadays I would rather be fitted with a catheter than venture into a dark bathroom.

The ghost is getting pretty cocky. Tonight he cut his hair all over the bath, sink and floor. It is suspiciously similar in colouring to one of my offspring. The fact that two of them are away tonight should narrow the options but apparently not. The cropped fibre in the bath is not a genetic match.

So today something equally common and rare happened. A teenager broke the shower. This was a mere 30 minutes after I discovered the cracked glass. What made it rare was that he came and told me.

It was not my teenager, but one of the regulars I find sleeping somewhere. I could have kissed him for his refreshing honesty.

Yet I still have the ghosts

2010-03-14T22:57:00.002Z

I have three children in my bed. Two of them are there due to love and insecurity. The one lying across the place where my feet should be, is blaming it on a mouse.

It seems puberty is no match for fear. This got me thinking again. Sometimes our fears are out of all proportion to reality. This predisposition to fear seems, for many of us, to get bigger as we get older.

The mouse will do no harm other than to the house. His irrational fear is that he will somehow be attacked by a two inch furry animal called Minnie. Nothing I say or do will convince this hormone ridden being, that the mouse will go nowhere near him. My sanctimonious comments regarding food in bedrooms make no difference either. He has an irrational phobia that the mouse will do something to him that no mouse has ever done to a human. As a result, I can not sleep with my legs straight.

I would like to advice him on irrational fears but I am not really in a position to. When the irrational fear takes over a part of your mind, people telling you what you should and shouldn't be scared of will make no difference. If I have a phobia of being truly open (which I may just have) people telling me I should be more open does not make me open. It makes me argue that I am open, even though I know I am not.

You can only ever see what you want to see, deal with what you want to deal with. If something is an issue the brain has a staggering ability to shut the door on it. What you refuse to see, is not there and if it's not there, you don't need to deal with it.

I was talking to my very cherished long standing male friend. I was telling him about the hypnotherapy thing. "It appears I may have an issue with allowing myself to appear vulnerable" I say.

Clearly having only acknowledged this recently, I expected trumpets and fanfares of some kind. At the very least I was hoping for some affirmation that I did not have an issue at all.

What I got was "Brilliant, finally you get it. You could have simply rung me up and I could have told you that'

It would seem that the only people that do not see what is going on, is the people that don't want to. He also told me that my issue with not telling people what I want will almost certainly not get me what I want. I am not convinced. Saying what you want is almost demanding it. IF you get your way by demanding it, then perhaps you shouldn't have it in the first place.

There was a debate in the car this afternoon. I sat waiting in the car park for a space whilst the children tapped toes impatiently.

"Can't you just drive up the road and find somewhere else to park?" asked the most impatient one

"Patience" said I "You need to learn that everything comes to those who wait"

This guaranteed that no one moved there car for a further 20 minutes. Even I was beginning to think I may be wrong. I was stuck between a rock and a hard place. I wanted to park and was bored of waiting. Moving meant that I had just taught them that nothing comes to those that wait. So we waited - with me smiling assuredly and like a lunatic. Thankfully someone moved, we got our place and I retained my short shelf life as a knowledgeable and wise Mother.

I so hope I am right. I hope that everything comes to those that wait. Sometimes my patience for the things I really want wears a little thin.

It was Mothers day today. I got a large jug of tea. This was quite exciting as I have never before been presented with tea in a jug. Middle child is apparently fed up of having to make 2nd cups of tea and thought today a good time to preempt the inevitable request. I also got three gingerbread love heart biscuits and only two requests to eat them for me. True love is getting gingerbread biscuits. True love is having to overlook the annihilation in the kitchen.

I was on strict instruction to lie in bed, sip tea, nibble biscuits and look at shoes on the Internet. It was very nice. Then I discovered what I truly wanted in life. A pair of the most stunningly beautiful 4inch Prada shoes. They were also stunningly expensive.

I have an irrational phobia that my life will never be truly complete

No sex please

2010-03-12T22:54:00.003Z

I had a conversation today, with a friend who always makes me laugh with no intent on her part.

We were talking about sex. Clearly, I have little to say on the subject at the current time. Much to think, but little to say. She was positively delighted that she was still within a window of once every three months. Delighted, since this had been an improvement from the 6 month window.

Apparently men think about sex every few seconds. That may be so but thinking and doing are not necessarily bed partners. Once, in a moment of boredom I answered to a post on 'How often do you have sex?' The options were: once a day, once a week or once a month. I emailed in stating that I was unable to complete it since the option of once a year was not available.

I digress. Friend of the funny comments then went on to say that she had asked her other half if he might be gay. Apparently he is not like most men. He is not into football, or indeed any sport. Not bothered by meeting mates or drinking beer. He is not gay. I would have laughed more if it hadn't been for the fact that I had once asked the same question. I hadn't really meant it either but there are times when exasperation outweighs appropriate wording.

So it got me thinking. What happens when you live with someone that does not have the same attitude or appetite for and to sex as you do? Certainly you get used to it, you get frustrated and you think about it a lot. BUt it does more than that. sexual incompatibility will lead to one or bot having some form of self esteem damage. Perhaps there are benefits to higher testosterone men than I had given any thought to. Perhaps, when thinking towards the future I should place more emphasis on gaging sexual compatibility.

So as a visual comparative in a very scientific test: You google professions, look at the pictures and decide which career is more likely to have a higher sex drive.... Go onto google images and type in accountant, lawyer and rugby player. End of. Absolutely no comparison.

Perhaps the accountant has a higher sex drive, I doubt it. The fact that the rugby player has a body like that has to have a bearing. Interestingly, the Lawyer page come up with fancy dress outfits. I say interestingly because if I think of lawyers, I automatically think of diapers and madams. Clearly I am not alone.

There is certainly more to life and relationships than simply sex but as an indicator for closeness of openness and of compatibility - perhaps it is a more accurate guide than that off the fact that you both like pasta.

2010-03-12T21:44:00.002Z

I had a theory when I was about 10 that we were all cabbages. It didn't matter how green, how large, small, bitter or sweet you were, you were just a cabbage. At the end of your cabbage life we would all get eaten by slugs. It was my party piece. Whenever there was a lull in conversation, my parents would get me to relay my cabbage theory (the full version was considerably longer). I fear it was in a bid to confirm to all, that their daughter was as odd as they believed.

My theories on things are invariably half baked. I have the intellect to think things but I do not have the readings to back them up or the experience to validate them. In truth they are nothing more than bizarre nonsensical ramblings.

I have spent the last few days mulling over the statement 'Spiritual but not religious' and wondering if tis is no more than extreme narcissism. As a natural magnet to the narcissist I felt that I had some authority in the rambling. I have no issue with the description, I simply wonder if when people use it to describe themselves they are further removed from enlightenment than they could ever suspect.

Personally I have always had an issue with religion. I take affront at people using it as an excuse for bad behaviour. Being judgemental towards others appears easier when you can hang your hat on the title of religion and in doing so, absolve yourself of responsibility for narrow mindedness and unkind thought. This is not to say that all religious people are unkind, just that it is not okay to go and blow up a load of people and tell everyone that your god dictates your actions. No more so than saying that homosexuality is abhorrent on the basis that your God says so.

Being aware and taking responsibility for your own actions has to be where true spirituality begins. Awareness of self and your connection to everything around you must surely be the essence of understanding we are all part of a bigger picture. It has to be a form of synergy. Yet when we label ourselves as 'Spiritual but not religious' are we not giving ourselves a title we feel that we want to be, rather than what we are?

In my head true spirituality would be an awareness of our self that would be detected by others. The minute you state that you are spiritual then perhaps you are really talking about ego.' This is what I want to be seen as and so I shall name it, just in case you had not detected it yourself' (and the fact that you had to be told, probably means you didn't detect it).

Being obsessed with how you 'appear' to others, making sure that you really are seen to do the right thing, say the right thing is not spirituality. Ego is in the thought process of actions, spirituality must be in the non thought. When you call yourself spiritual and you actions fail to meet the label, the ego will take over and deep down, you will feel like crap. This has to be when 'Spiritual but not religious' becomes no more than extreme narcissism.

If you are truly spiritual it would be in the minds of others and not yourself. Perhaps the true judge of spirituality is in the unsaid and the feeling of those around you. Perhaps it is your true enlightenment becomes apparent.

I concede that non of this makes sense. There was no thought in the construction, just mere mental rambling

Out of the mouths

2010-03-10T23:45:00.002Z

I had hypnotherapy today. At the end of it, I was warned that it would not be an easy process. I fear that may be quite accurate. It would appear that a lot of our basis of perception is rooted firmly in subconscious memories we have from way back when.

The things that make us what we are today are from messages we pick up too young to have been aware. Equally, the things that prevent us being what we could or should be are so fundamental to out subconscious that we are not even aware of their existence. What I perceive as being open is actually a front for being open. A sort of double bluff. Large concrete and seemingly invisible blocks.

I suggested to an older offspring that it may be prudent for me to pay for him to have counselling now.

"If there is one thing I can guarantee" say I,

"Is that somewhere along the line I will have inflicted monumental and inadvertent psychological damage. Perhaps getting it dealt with now will preempt 20 years of self defeating behaviour"

Clearly I wasn't being serious. Whilst I am certain that I will have screwed him up somewhere, only time will tell how much and how much blame will be attached. I anticipate it and will take it on the chin accordingly.

"I am quite aware of my issues and quite comfortable with them" he replied.

Out of the mouths of babes. I fear though, that anyone who is quite comfortable with issues may have bigger issues further down the line. The word issue should be key.

I was also informed that the fact that I was not like other mothers and did not think like most people, was in fact a good thing. I am not entirely sure how to respond to this. I figure it has to be better than the acute embarrassment I felt as a child, upon the realisation that my mother was not entirely like others. Since I never claimed to think like anyone else - I shall take it as a compliment for the short period that it will be meant as one.

I was sent a large book today. Two inches worth of being mindful. I have been instructed to meditate. Apparently it is based on an 8 week course. I feel it would have been less intimidating if it had been in 8 small books rather than one I could use as a draught excluder. The book is so big that it raises anxiety by merely looking at it.

So far I have read 43 pages. The person that sent it is so deeply into meditation that I will feel a dismal failure if I haven't followed instruction. He is currently on a retreat in Mexico and will have expected some roads into this book by his return.

So far, I have achieved three minutes of mindfulness and understood an experiment of eating raisins one by one and very slowly. There is stuff I already know. Having spent hours pouring over my health and psychology bible, I fully understand the impact of stress on health. I understand the issues with tension, fatigue and nausea.

I draw the line at any form of spots. I have a spot. As a result of the spot I am embracing mindfulness. Not only shall I read the book, understand it and practise it, I shall never have another spot again. Ever.

I was telling a family member that I was going to have some hypnotherapy. They were not overly enthused. I was given a clear warning that this can lead to unearthing things that are best left unearthed. The proverbial can of worms.

I figure this: if you feel that some places in your head are places best left alone, then they are probably things that need to be dealt with. You can throw the ironing in the cupboard but you still know it is there. Hiding mess doesn't make it go away, it keeps coming back and niggling away until it is dealt with.

I learnt this today - dealing with the thing you do not want to is not going to be easy. Things that are not easy do not go away unless they are faced.

If you have hypnotherapy, make sure you are wearing waterproof mascara. To not do so will scare everybody.

2010-03-09T21:55:00.002Z

I have a migraine. Someone told me that you get migraines because you fight them and I should go with it. I think that is what they said.

I am going with it which means it can be safely assumed that within the next hour, I shall be facing the U bend.

I have just had a thirty minute conversation with middle child on how many duff, duffs there are in the EastEnders theme tune. Apparently there are several and the end credits always start with two duff duffs. Having had a child introduce the modern delights of BBC iplayer (Middle name clearly luddite) we treated ourselves to one round of soap. Hence the conversation on duff duffs.

I fear my children are deficient in musical bones. Still, descriptive verbal tenacity is surely not lacking. I miss being a child. It all seems so simple.

2010-03-05T23:36:00.002Z

I truly met my nemesis today. Myself

I made a call and admitted I needed help. Those that know me well know that this is not something I do, since my entire persona hinges on not needing help. Ever

So now I do.

For the last few days I have been having mild panic attacks. Not the lie on the floor clutching a bag to your face panic attack, but the sudden surge of adrenalin 'I am about to be mugged' type of attack. It has not been pleasant.

Panic is not a sensation that I relate to. What I relate to is the cause. For me it seems that a semi panic attack is not caused by not coping, but the fear of not coping. A sort of no mans land between being absolutely fine and fine. It is the bit in the middle where you think you will be fine but your brain is shouting "But what if you are not going to be fine" For an emotional control freak this is dangerous and uncomfortable territory.

So I made a call and before I knew it I was spilling everything to a hypnotherapist and NLP guru. The stuff that came out was fairly toe curling uncomfortable. It seems that not only am I a woman with Prada but a woman with issues. I knew this deep down, but knowing something and addressing it are two different things. Addressing issues is notoriously uncomfortable and most of us, myself included - spend the best part of our lives avoiding them. Until we start feeling like we are about to be mugged.

It would appear that in my 'deny the reality' world, I have been denying the reality that I have a pathological aversion to being emotionally vulnerable. The fear of being vulnerable makes me numb to real feelings. This is completely logical. If I do not recognise or acknowledge my own emotional need, I cannot get hurt. If I choose people to love that have huge emotional needs, I can throw myself into meeting theirs in a bid to avoid mine. Complicated but simple. I have an issue with trusting people with my emotions. It may be irrational but believe me, it's not without good cause.

The irony - I only realised this as a result of a very short period when I thought it was safe to be vulnerable. It would seem it was not a safe place, but I didn't know that. I do not need anyone, I stopped needing anyone a very long time ago. It is not hard to learn that if you need someone and you get nothing emotionally, you get very hurt. So you switch of the need and you become in charge of your own emotions. Tis much harder to hurt yourself. Or so you think.

What I realise today is that I am right in the fact that I do not need anyone but having exposed myself to it briefly, I got a glimpse of what feeling safe felt like. It was an alien and truly fantastic feeling. It does however suck, that it was such a brief period until I realised the person I had felt safe with, was in fact emotion control freak dobble ganger. Having allowed myself to feel safe, I now feel extremely unsafe and very emotionally exposed. Stuck in the headlights, I cannot go back to feeling numb but feeling vulnerable is about as comfortable as a mohair G string

It also made me understand why chemistry is so important to me. Chemistry takes over logic and rationale. Since both of these are apparently screwed, chemistry is the only time I can truly let my guard down and feel genuine, spontaneous emotions.

So I need to do things. I need to change it. I will not spend the rest of my life with men that leave me feeling too scared to have emotional needs and I do not want to be in a place where I am too scared to recognise and express them. I do not need to be in a place where I am so scared of being judged for unkindness that I have to continue trying to understand people that are simply unkind.

Sometimes in a bid to protect ourselves from reality and responsibility, the only real person we hurt, is ourselves.

My life is over

2010-02-23T00:31:00.002Z

Bored and waiting for knock your brain out meds to work, I decide upon an online anaylsis thing about personality and dating. This was foollows a 2 hour conversationw with an ex date on if the mistakes are my choices or mere bad look;

RESULTS

The combination of these three basic character types affects the pattern of our behaviour and conditions the expectations we have for other people.

Intellect - refers to those occasions when rational, conscious decision determines our behaviour. The intellect takes over when we make decisions with a clear head, so to speak.

Feeling - Feeling is the behavioural pattern that - to use the same analogy - comes from the heart. It can be irrational and illogical

Instinct - when we react to events spontaneously and pragmatically.

Your test result

Your profile suggests that your most attractive quality is your enjoyment of life and your willingness to act spontaneously. Your profile suggests that you have great faith in your own judgment: your behavioural pattern is determined by trust in your own instinct (45%). However, this is not at a price of precipitous or ill-advised action. You are also thoroughly grounded in reality and allow your head to rule your heart when it comes to big decisions (40%). But expressing your emotions to another person is obviously not an easy thing for you to do in a romantic relationship (feeling constitutes only 15% of your profile).

Info

Key:

Feeling

Instinct

Intellect

Searching for a partner ...

When selecting a partner you should look for someone who is able to see through your efficient exterior to discover your warmheartedness and personal tenderness for what it is.

This is so depressing in its accuracy. I have spent my whole life in the wrong relationship. I then date potential but with two much emotional damage and then I discover the reality.

20 seconds on the internet and a machine knows me better than any man ever did.

Great

So finally I get poked

2010-02-21T19:55:00.002Z

Apparently, anything that looks and sound suspiciously like a seizure should be investigated by a neurologist and a CT scan.

When I hoped earlier this year for a little more in the way of prodding and poking, this is not entirely what I had in mind.

Yours disappointed,

Baths New Dating Columnist

2010-02-20T21:30:00.003Z

On another note. No one picked up on my suggestion of being a food critic last year. The thought of free meals was appealing but now I have moved on.

I want to be Baths very own dating columnist.

Large muscular men can apply. Tall is good but no stooping. Must have thighs like steel, no thick necks, pale jeans or high waisted trousers. No hairy big toes, must be funny in a dry wit way. Absolutely know knock, knock jokes and absolutely no interest in motor racing unless it is sponsorship.

Good looking men only and absolutely, crucially (or parallel with large toned arms) MUST have an IQ over 135.

That's 1 column next year then.

2010-02-20T20:34:00.002Z

I have anonymous posters. I like. It is an odd thing never being entirely sure if the words are from a stranger, or someone you know. Perhaps this is the thing about blogging, a kind of cerebral vomit. So does that make it modern day voyeurism or modern day exhibitionism?

Today's random thought process: are peoples view on money a reflection of their personality. I know two people: One (person A) pays a lot of tax and is happy too. Their view being that they earn the money, tax pays for society and there is no issue contributing. She claims the obvious, never taking advantage. She feels that she is paying her due.

Take another example.Person B. Their apparent income is the same as person A's tax bill. Yet they use every trick in the book to reduce tax and avoid paying. In fact, a large part of their lifestyle is put through as expenses. Not a bad idea, since you keep your income down and your lifestyle up. When it comes to tax, they do not see it as they are contributing to society, they see society taking from them.

Perhaps then, your view on money is a true reflection of your view on life. If you feel that people take from you, then perhaps you feel attacked and persecuted. You will want to contribute the bear minimum because anymore would involve people taking more from you. You can never be open because you can never take the risk of exposure.

Yet person A is happier. Happier because in this life you get what you give, eventually. Person A may have a big tax bill but being of a giving nature she has a lot of people who adore her. She is open and honest and she gets that back.

Perhaps people do not wear their heart on their sleeve but firmly tucked in their wallet. For those that control, money is a tool. If you want to judge someone, perhaps their attitude to money is a good start.

I posted a while back about the CSA. It still blows my mind. I have discovered more that has blown my mind further.

In this country you get child allowance for each individual child. For those unfortunate to have to resort to using the government to get Fathers to pay for their children, they only recognise 3 children. So if you have 6, tough because Daddy will not have to pay for all since in the Governments eyes, they do not cost anything. CSA dads are no doubt happy to accept this since despite knowing its not true, they are complying to a pretty handy calculi.

It gets better, in a society where children are used as pawns and one in which fathers are apparently marginalised. The Government allow those Fathers already paying the bare minimum to take off money for contact, a sum NOT dependant on the amount of children.

So take the scenario of 6 children. Daddy has them to stay occassionaly. Daddy then realises that by having them more, he gets to pay less. So he suddenly starts having them more, but not all of them. The Government in their wisdom have not only created a system where the Father is better off, but then gets to take off 1/7th per week of minimum contribution. Better still, he can do this even if he only has one child.

So Mummy, already responsible for the bulk of all costs in raising her 6 children, has one child stay at Dads and Daddy can take away the money for all 6 (or 3 according to CSA).

So you end up in a situation where it becomes very clear that women are penalised for encouraging contact. On the basis that those resorting to CSA are doing it because they have to, they end up in a situation where seeing Dad would make survival almost impossible. I would love to meet the person who made these rules up. With men all over the country totting up the nights they see their children in a bid to save a little money, there will be a disproportionate number of children that end up seeing there fathers less. Parents cannot co-parent if one is taking advantage of loopholes. Mothers cannot ask fathers to help when they are ill, let them have a holiday etc if they know that the extra night may cost them hundreds of pounds each year.

It still leads me back to the same point about CSA. It is a vehicle for bare minimum legal requirements. Even men that are not being chased by the CSA will use it as a guideline to get away with a weekly contribution per child, of less than they probably pay for a starter and main course. There is the irony, in bare minimum contribution, you get to go out. The other irony is that the minute you get over a set amount of nights, a baby sitter and a photograph of Daddy is a cheaper option.

So back in full circle to Person A and Person B.

Person A recognises the cost involved and feels the need to contribute what they know is needed. It is the right thing to do. Person A is giving.

Person B feels everyone is taking. It is not about what children need, it is about using every rule in the book not to provide it. It is about getting away with more than the minimum and still being able to say that they are following guidelines.

Still within the law, but not particularly morale and ethical. Still, neither were ever particularly good companions.

Generosity of spirit is little to do with financial means. Situations have no bearing on morality. Ethics and integrity are not something you can wear for a couple of days when it suits and discard at leisure. Rules may be there to be challenged, principles are no bad things.

Is it really no more complicated than knowing if you are person A or person B?

The future does not bode well for generational emotional stability

2010-02-20T20:20:00.002Z

This is a level of tiredness bordering on insanity. I slept, I watched, I got up. I last 30 Minos. I watch, I sleep and get up. I go to Bath, I have my eyebrows done with the only eyebrow threader in Bath, I get home, I cannot stand. So I lie down, with nice eyebrows.

I finally fell asleep at 3am. I set my alarm for 9am. The bonus of GP order is that I get a lie in. The alarm goes off (my mobile) and so I pick it up to see what time it is. Only it was not the mobile but a large glass of water. Cold Water, which I still thinking it is a mobile, I proceed to pour all over my face.

Still exhausted, I cannot summon the energy to care, so I lie there cold and wet and go back to sleep. When I wake I am wet and clammy. I have forgotten about the water and in a moment of terror, I consider that it may be sweat and perhaps I have just hit the menopause.

Sanity returned and I dash to eyebrow SOS. I figure on an upper lip wax. I hate pain. The last time one of the children had an injection courtesy of anaesthetic cream, I stole the remains. I was hoping that if I stock piled enough, I could address my fear of bikini waxes. This is a weekend of feeling delicate and as a precaution of pain overload, I applied a coating of the magic cream to my upper lip.

All I can say is that when the road is blocked and you need to check directions with a friendly pedestrian, check your rear view mirror first. I thought they were just being friendly. I may have made their day.

2010-02-19T23:43:00.002Z

Bed. Doctors orders.

My brain doesn't switch off, so my body does. I too exhausted to sleep. The concept of sleep bores me, so I compromise. Bed with a laptop and a boxed set of Sex and the City. I never got Sex and the City . Now I do.

When I was married the only programme I watched was Desperate Housewives. Now I don't.

Perhaps we are simply drawn to things we relate to and once we stop relating to them, we switch off.

Perhaps then, our TV viewing is symbiotic of what our lives are. You are married, you stop relating, you switch off. Your not married, you switch back on and suddenly you are watching Sex in the City and getting it. I watched all of the episodes on Disk 3. I realised that in fact, I have become a parody of Carrie Bradshaw.

The first was too similar for comfort. The last was scary. Carrie finally gets it that men cannot deal with complicated women. they like simplicity. Simple woman are good because they don't have to try and second guess thoughts. Complicated women make them feel inadequate. I am complicated. You would have to be more adequate than most to cope with me and the irony is, this may be the point at which I would become less complicated.

There was an episode mid way through that dealt with patterns of behaviour. It made for uncomfortable viewing. Irony in the extreme was being interrupted from a friend of school years that I have spoken with maybe twice in 28 years. It appears that that events of the last few years and the place I am at now wit both head and heart were no surprise. I have the same patterns now as I did at 12.

Somethings change, somethings don't. Can we ever really change our behaviour? When I first saw my nearly not husband, I was decided that we would be together. It then became my mission to be right. It was never the right decision for either of us and my desire to be right became more important than acknowledging that it may be wrong. When we got married, we got married because he didn't want to. I fully acknowledge that I was determined that if I was good enough to live with, I was good enough to be married to. He knew this. Walking up the aisle I realised that sometimes , I put far too much emphasis on principle.

Perhaps there are some things about ourselves we can never change. I still like to be right. The difference is that now I accept that if I am not, I am not. So what about men? Past history has taught that my desire to be right led me to create situations that allowed for this. Perhaps this is manipulation. Is it possible to manipulate someone into wanting you? I am not sure it is, are we not all responsible for our own emotional responses?

You can never truly manipulate. Manipulation creates a situation based on falsehood. If a relationship is built on trickery and presentation of facts that are more palatable - it simply will never work. If you create in your head an idea of the kind of person you want your partner to be, one day you will wake up and realise that they never were that person. If you present to someone else and image of the person you want to be rather than the person that lies within, you will feel lonely and misunderstood. A pile of pebbles that will simply collapse.

I spend a disproportionate period of time what makes others tick. I like reasons, they make life more palatable. Sometimes, we need to accept what we see. If someone is quiet, it does not mean they are deep. If someone behaves badly the truth may be no more complicated than they are an arse.

I still want to be right. Perhaps this is the part of me that can never change. The part of me that has changed, is in no longer wanting to concoct situations to prove that I am right. I simply want to be right. I may of course be wrong and this I will have to take on the chin but being right at the expense of honesty is nothing more than being wrong and in denial.

So maybe the fundamental patterns never change. If you give someone in debt money, you solve their debt. For a period. Ultimately the pattern that caused the debt will recreate it and you will be dragged into the spiral too. Robbing Peter to pay Paul. Everyone loses until the person with the debt solves the original cause. Them

Perhaps love and emotions are the same. You have a need, you find a way of fulfilling it, it lasts a while and the need come back. The problem is the need.

So I still want to be right, I see something I want and I know that if I really wanted it, I could find a way. Yet I also know that if I want to be truly right, I need to forget it all and what is right will simply be, because it always was.

Need and want are two different propositions. What I cannot work out is I truly want something or do I want it because I still need to be right?.

Lets call myself a work in progress. Complicated. Men that need simple women, run.

Move over Carrie

2010-02-19T02:48:00.002Z

2.45 am

Exhaustion is really quite irritating when you are tired.

At the moment when you feel like you have reached the point of absolute exhaustion, inspire yourself to take one last step, and that is when you have successfully arrived to the next level.

Next level - coma

2010-02-19T00:03:00.002Z

This is not good.

The reason apparently for collapsing and smashing various body parts was exhaustion. She thought the chances of a TIA were slim since I could balance. I felt reassured at this. I have been banned from working and stress. Not working will add to my stress, since I get paid less.

I have been given the task of compiling a business plan. This is part of my new theory that if I throw myself into unpaid work experience, I may stumble across a vocation. Since it is not being paid for it doesn't really constitute work. Besides, I have said it will be completed by tomorrow morning

I am still only half way through, the lines are blurred, the floor keeps moving and my brain feels like it is bulging.

Perhaps the trick is to not move anything other than my fingers.

And to top it all, there are no eyebrow waxing guru's free in the next 72 hours

This is definitely not good.

2010-02-18T11:45:00.002Z

I collapsed at 2am. It was a deeply unpleasant experience and not one I recognise. With an overwhelming sensation of something ominous about to happen, it did.

I have a sore chin and sore hands. It's complicated.

Now I have a meeting.

Top tips of the day. Avoid starvation, stress, overdoing it and men

2010-02-16T22:57:00.002Z

I am typing in bed. I have resorted to an uncharacteristic retreat at least 2 hours earlier than habit would dictate.

I am without doubt, shattered. It has been an emotionally draining few days, culminating in a saint taking the Bitch of my hands for a week. Managing 4 children, a bitch, sleep deprivation and free work experience is catching up with me. Rediscovering and reinventing yourself after 20 plus years, at the same time as being a single parent and all that goes with it, is quite tiring.

I changed my gym routine last week. I couldn't walk for three days. Today I went back and tomorrow I shall be crippled. I appear to have a fundamental problem with being told that there are some things women are not designed to do. This is the point at which I have to prove that I am not most women and that I can do whatever it is that they have told me I cannot. I once trained as a Graphic Designer because the college lecturer said that it was not a career for girls. I hated Graphic Design.

I have never had any doubt that I am not like most women (or indeed most people). I have always suspected that I have an inner man . I fear that if I don't wax my eyebrows in the next couple of days, I may have an outer man too.

Mr Hand Stand Press Ups was in the gym again this evening. He has the most impressive and muscular body. In yet another Samantha moment, I was momentarily mesmerised. Yet no matter how perfect the body, how charming the smile - it still wasn't all there. This chemistry thing is an odd notion. Something you cannot articulate, you cannot see or rationalise and yet it is more powerful than almost any other sensation.

When you dissect the attributes of the few people in your life that you have chemistry with, it becomes even more unfathomable. Take the chemistry away and are they drop dead gorgeous? probably not. Are they perfect? probably not. Are they the most intelligent person you have ever met? probably not. More importantly, do they have nice feet? Probably not and yet, even with the acceptance that they are not Gods Gift - there is something there that you cannot shut off, a physical sensation that you cannot describe. What a complete pain in the arse life can be.

So the man in the gym did not give me the chemistry thing. As I lay sweating in the sauna I wondered if chemistry was all that important. Perhaps meaningless flings with hot bodies was fine too. It seems to me that people compromise all of the time. Perhaps the most common compromise is in fact, giving up chemistry.

I am not so sure that I could. Sex without chemistry is no more than a half encountered physical act. There is no sexuality. Sexuality is far sexier than sex. Chemistry is the sensation you get when you look at someone, when they stroke your face, when they look into your eyes and you feel things that are simply not able to be articulated. The anticipation with chemistry is more than a singular event. Chemistry creates desire, chemistry ingrains that person in your head, no matter how much you try to kick them out of it.

This is not to say that you cannot have a purely physical encounter with someone you have chemistry with (Commonly referred to as a shag). There is scope for all kinds of encounters when you have met with chemistry. Without it, there is only scope for one.

In the meantime, I shall hold out for chemistry and the sauna. They seem like a combination worthy of my consideration. As I watched Hand Stand Press Up man walk across the car park, I did wonder if perhaps compromising on chemistry just once; wouldn't be such a bad thing.

Occasionally, I yearn to be another person. Someone who is more able to compromise on morals, on integrity, on values. Someone that laughs at words such as chemistry, Karma and gut instinct. Someone that sees an opportunity and grabs it, by the arse.

In the midst of an unanticipated emotional free fall last Friday, a friend of mine said

"What can we do, what do you need"

"I need a spontaneous sexual encounter" I replied

"Oh" said another friend excitedly "I have one of those under my bed"

I feel ever so slightly jaded