Reality

I look at my blog this evening and I think - Kate, what are you trying to say? That you live in a comical cheerful yellow world? That everything is light and easy and daft. Hello, what? What bloody nonsense is this?
Well of course I don't. None of us live in our blog worlds do we - most of us live in mundane reality. Blogging is merely a projection of ourselves - an image we can tinker with - airbrush and edit -

My reality is a fair bit dimmer and darker. It has great bits, sure, full of kids, family and friends. There's work, there's chatter. And then there's great long spells like now - spent in a chair in the kitchen, silent, alone and trying to figure it all out. Trying to reconfigure my life.

My man's gone. I'm facing imminent redundancy. I have a lot of stamina but no energy anymore, am generally easily baffled and confused - and I have 3 kids. Who need me. To be strong and ever present.

I've divorced, I've moved - set up a new home from scratch. Found a change of career and full time work after 13 years at home. Found Rob, lost him. All in three years.

I can't keep going I think. I know. It's time to stop.

Then I see my eldest son, who lives with his dad mostly, has sent me this poem. Which he's come across at school and he likes.
It comes out of the blue in an email.
And I remember my reasons to be.
And I send a copy to my own ever present and beloved mum.
And I press on.

(It is Untitled):

Mother, any distance greater than a single span
requires a second pair of hands.
You come to help me measure windows, pelmets, doors,
the acres of the walls, the prairies of the floors.

You at the zero-end, me with the spool of tape, recording
length, reporting metres, centimetres back to base, then leaving
up the stairs, the line still feeding out, unreeling
years between us. Anchor. Kite.

I space-walk through the empty bedrooms, climb
the ladder to the loft, to breaking point, where something
has to give;
two floors below your fingertips still pinch
the last one-hundredth of an inch...I reach
towards a hatch that opens on an endless sky
to fall or fly.


Simon Armitage