A big small world

Cherry and I spend a lot of time talking at the moment. She loves it when I share anecdotes, thoughts and feelings from 'when I was a little girl' and it has surprised me how many of them I had all but forgotten, until now.

I have begun to notice that it is in the raising of my children that I can rediscover, and continue to discover, what I love to do.

I can grow.

Before children there was work and socialising, but it's been a long time since I had any real 'hobbies' outside of riding my bike.

When I tell Cherry what I did as a little girl it hits home just how much I used to enjoy, that I gradually let slide, for one reason or another.

How small my world became, when I thought it so large.

Now the reverse is true. My world could seem so very small, but it's bigger than it's ever been.

As I tend the garden at home, grow plants, flowers, herbs, fruit and vegetables and think about how great it all is for my children, it suddenly occurred to me how great it all is for me too.

I love gardening, I always did. I love going for long walks, the kind of walks I go for with Cherry and Violet now where we just dawdle and take our time and look at things and play with things and get absorbed in things and ask questions and think and learn.

Caring for our guinea pigs has rekindled my love of all creatures great and small, as has going out with Cherry and Violet and stopping to pet every dog and talk to his or her owner to find out all about them and spotting woodpeckers, squirrels, foxes and little robin redbreasts in the woods.

At gymnastics classes we all take turns - myself included - to vault over equipment, balance on beams, swing from the bars and tumble on crash mats.

When they paint, I paint too. I loved art as a kid and loved to draw and paint even though I knew I was 'no good' at it. Now our walls are covered in pictures painted by the children - and even some by me.

I've been thinking a lot about my identity lately. Enmeshed as it has become with my children. A small part of me feels a little bit of a letdown for becoming 'that mum' who has picked up that she is starting to live vicariously through her children.

It hit home when I looked at my Instagram feed and realised that I was sharing picture after picture of Cherry and Violet doing things that I love to do and want to do.

The much bigger part of me is glad I have noticed, but tolerant. With two such young children there was never going to be a huge amount of time and space left over for me.

But I have remembered just how much I loved - still love - to ride horses and chuck myself around on crash mats and it has occurred to me that there is no real reason why I can't do all of this too.

This time last year I was feeling reflective as I prepared for Violet to turn one. My overwhelming feeling was that I was just not ready.

I wasn't ready emotionally to leave the bittersweetness of the newborn days behind.

Now I can see what lies ahead. I can see it in glorious technicolour, moment after ordinary moment. I can see that it's not just my children who are blossoming, learning, growing.

I am too.

Thoughts on blogging lately

I have been thinking about just closing this blog down. I blog infrequently and quite erratically, I don't stick to linkys or projects, and its general existence bothers me as it feels half-assed and a very real and public reminder of my overall tendency to start things, not put in enough effort then sort of tail off and leave them unfinished.

*Exhales loudly*

I have concerns about privacy, I sort of want to write stuff and have nobody read it for fear they will take wild offence and comment saying I am a horrendous bitch BUT I also love it when people say they like what I have written or it has struck a chord with them. I worry about sharing too much, coming across as inauthentic and guarded OR messy and needy, and I worry about my daughters' privacy too.

I worry that all I do is write about and post pictures of my children and that all I am is a mother to my children. Then any time I think about what I might do outside of mothering I feel this enormous wave of certainty that at the moment this is my greatest work, and it deserves all of me for the short years in which it is so all-consuming.

I can't be the only one who has these mixed feelings about blogging (and mothering), so for now I have decided not to close it all down.

There aren't any real rules to blogging (well, none that I would pay attention to anyway) and that leaves me wide open. Which is one of the reasons I find it so hard.

I've been a writer my whole career, a journalist, an author, a copywriter and a creative. These are all very different forms of writing that require different skills, but what they do have in common is a requirement that I mask the 'me' in favour of the information, the facts or the message.

As I've been writing in this way, for money, for more than 10 years it's hard to unlearn these habits and let my own voice come through and write at length about me, me, me. The best I can do is write about my children and my feelings about being a mother but that's only a tiny part of the story.

But the blogs I love to read the most, and find the most inspiring, do exactly that. They tell the whole story. I do of course love reading about other people's children and looking at crafts, recipe ideas, photos, outfits, fitness updates, houses etc, but the posts I love the most are the personal ones, where you get an insight into the writers' real mind and real life.

That's truly inspiring. And seeing as I get so much from such bloggers, without their knowledge probably (must start commenting more) I feel I do want to give some of this back.

I read all the time, books on parenting and child development in particular but also around the wider area of personal growth. Being a parent feels to me the biggest opportunity for personal growth I have come across so far, and sometimes I feel I am raising three children, dragging parts of myself out of arrested development and into full adulthood. That seems to me to be a story worth telling even if I don't really know how to start, or how it ends.