Once upon a time, when the years had only just started beginning with a 2, I was at uni and my parents came to visit for the weekend. Which always meant a very good lunch and a reminder that life went on outside of the bubble of higher education where everyone is your age, social occasions happen on a whim, and academia seems really important. On one of those weekends, my dad noticed a poster up near some marginally recognised stairs, for a masters exchange programme which was essentially a fully paid year in the States and a postgraduate degree at the end of it. I had already looked at the po ..read more

When I was a teenager I lived in DMs. I had a black pair and also a purple pair. Between our friendship group we all had a coloured pair, I was purple, friends were cherry red and royal blue. We also all had short suede skirts from Kensington Market that matched the colour of our boots. We thought we were it. We thought we were making such a statement. Years later, my mum told me how much she loved that I lived in my DMs through my teen years because they were so good for my feet, having not done her own any favours by wearing the less podiatrically friendly fashions of her own adolescence. Fo ..read more

The week before last (the one before half term) was not a good week. Life, whoever’s it is, comes with highs and lows, ups and downs, you win some, you lose some. Always has, always will. But when you have lost the someone who you used to win and lose with, the someone who held your hand tight as you faced the storm together, it feels like the lows are lower, the losses hit harder, the downs kick you while you were already down. It was a catalogue of things going wrong. Things that had taken the investment of time, effort, energy and sometimes cold hard cash in the first place. Things related ..read more

There’s a saying about parenting that you are only ever as happy as your unhappiest child. And I think there’s a truth in it somewhere. Obviously, coming up five years since Steve died, none of the four of us left are where we are when it was all happening. But the impact of watching your dad die when you were so little trickles on through the years. Sometimes I look back at photographs of the children the summer before Steve was diagnosed, or that September when the cancer must have been there but we didn’t know anything about it, when they all went to school together for the first time, and ..read more

I don’t know if it’s a by product of having ended up in a life I feel like I didn’t choose, but I often go through waves of wanting to make big drastic changes to everything. I wonder if it is to do with trying to wrestle back some control. Of course there are many things in life we don’t have control over, but being a passenger to cancer and imminent death, bereavement, young widowhood, solo parenting, felt particularly disenfranchising, and I do think that some of my phases of desired recreation are in antithesis to feeling so powerless and ending up in a place I never wanted to be. And over ..read more

The changing of the year is always a weird one, because while New Year’s Eve is, for most people, a look back over the year passed and a look forward with hope and anticipation to the year ahead, it is, to me, the anniversary of the day that my life shattered. And so on top of all the “best-night-ever” hype that comes with the date, which I have always felt was laced with inevitable disappointment, because really it is only the passing of time, there’s this reminder of a day that means precisely nothing to anyone else, but was the pivotal moment of my life that separates the before and after ..read more

Another Christmas done. I’m a planner by nature (and kind of by profession) so I get a certain kick out of the pre-Christmas. Yes, it’s exhausting with all the things and being the only one to do it all, but I have my spreadsheets for the gifts to make sure that there are pretty much even numbers by category of gift, and I have my December calendar where everyone gets a colour so I can make sure I know when all the seasonal events are for each person and plan weekends of family festivities around them throughout the month because God forbid the newest teen says we are missing out on the “magic ..read more

In recent months I have realised something, and it’s this: it’s possible to become almost invisible. On initial reading, that might seem like a bad thing. But in some ways it’s not. I don’t know whether the world has changed, or whether it’s just aging, but there’s something nice about walking home alone after dark and feeling unseen, not expecting any “they call it banter we call it threat” from any male of the species who happens to have consumed the number of pints that renders him uncivilised. There’s something nice about not threading your keys through your fingers “just in case” like tha ..read more

In a matter of weeks it will be five years since Steve came home with that bomb of a terminal diagnosis from nowhere, in five months it will be half a decade since he was alive on the planet, and I deeply, desperately would like by this stage, after this long, for this to a positive, cheery place. For those who stumble here in the darkness of their early grief to be reassured that it can still work out in the end, despite the visceral implosion that is death tearing your family apart. A neat bow and a new happily ever after. A narrative of walking into the sunset. A story of hope. And I can sa ..read more

I’m getting the Christmas decorations out of the loft tomorrow. It’s the first weekend in December, and when Steve was alive we never used to do it this early, but since he’s not been here we seem to have joined the neighbours who spend the whole festive month with the fairy lights on (as I type this there are at least three houses visible from my window that have had theirs up since last weekend, so it’s almost like we’re late, which is bonkers). My colleague at work is sending her partner up the loft on Saturday to get theirs down too, so it’s obviously the weekend for it. She doesn’t go up ..read more