Broken

 

This weekend marks four years since we left Perth. Four. Massive. Years. They seem to have flashed by like an express train, pulling carriages brimming with heavy baggage as well as so many joyful moments. So many that it will be impossible to recount. The places discovered. The visits from overseas friends and family. Daytrips and holidays. New friends made. Four changes of address. Epiphanies had. Conclusions reached. And not.

This past year has been an uncertain and worrying one for everybody. And for us personally the two prior were two of the most difficult and stressful years of our adult lives to date. I could just gloss over it, but I’m not going to, because pretending isn’t something I’m good at.

It’s been three years since I last posted on GrubsaboutAgain. That in itself is an indication of the kind of journey we’ve been on. We’re not so ‘about’ these days either, and not likely to be very ‘about’ in the near future. Essentially, we’ve been in lockdown for a year. For Noah, that’s about a tenth of his life. Limited to school and not very much else. Oh, how we’re missing cinema, theatre, libraries, cafes, football matches, daytrips. Wearing a mask has become a normal way of life, sadly. On the bright side, it’s a chance to practice smiling with your eyes! When restrictions eased for a time last year we managed to go camping twice to the Wye Valley and the Lake District (where we nearly drowned in our tent!). We also skipped over to London for a day and a night to sort out a passport situation and if felt so exciting after months of being ‘house-and-village-bound’. Fortunately, we moved into this lovely place just before it all happened and are grateful for the space inside and outside, and the various walks available – river, stream, woods. It’s a blessing really. If we’d had to endure it in our previous little box of a house I think we really would have lost the plot. And we’re grateful to have stayed well through it all. Others haven’t been so lucky.

Before all of that there was a wedding in Poland; both a summer and a winter holiday in Austria; a Christmas in Germany; several camping trips and countless days out to awesome places and of course our ‘two-year-mark’ trip back to Oz (this was meant to be our ‘decider’ but unfortunately didn’t yield too much clarity). Since the close proximity to Europe was one of the strong draws of living here, the past year of restrictions stretching ahead for the foreseeable future are a little hard to bear.

Moving into a permanent home a year ago meant opening boxes that had been stored in various garages since they arrived in 2018. It meant revisiting treasured things, things packed for the kids not knowing it would be three years until we’d look at them again. Most of it made it across the oceans and two house moves unscathed, and unpacking brought back so much of what we’d left behind. Some things didn’t survive the journey so well. Amongst them was a musical carousel of Noah’s, a gift from Mum when he was born. Cracked to seemingly irreparable bits. Bits I couldn’t bring myself to part with. Bits that lay on his window sill for almost a year, determined not to be discarded.

I cried. I know, it’s just a music box. But I cried for the memories in it, the stories, the little voice at bedtimes, the hope and the dreams that it symbolised. If you know anything of the struggle we experienced in the two years before lockdown, you might understand why I held the broken carousel in my hands and wept.

We made the blog of our Austrian adventure into a book that now sits on a stand in our kitchen. It’s read aloud often and is a lovely momento for all of us, but for the kids it’s a wonderful snippet of childhood to keep re-visiting. Those stories were full of humour – the kids were little, they said funny things, did funny things. The decisions we made then were not so impactful on them. And somewhere underneath was the knowledge that it was just a year out, a ‘not-forever’.

Having not opened GrubsaboutAgain since I wrote the last post, I’ve just read a few. They were quite funny too, some of them, words full of hope and humour. There’s a sense of the ‘not-forever’ in them, as it was before our ‘decider’ trip. I always intended to keep it going, if only for us, and as a diary for the kids. But a lot changes in three years. I just never had any spare time or any spare energy or any spare emotion. It was all taken up on surviving. Sounds dramatic, but that’s what it was. Not survival of the devastating kind: we weren’t homeless, dying, divorcing or starving. Just pure emotional exhaustion. Treading water and working desperately hard to keep afloat. To that point where you’ve barely anything left.

I’m 46 this year. I remember Mum’s 50^th. Dad turning up. He was 48. I was newly married with a beautiful 4 month old daughter. Life stretching infinitely before us. That’s what you think isn’t it? Life is infinite. You don’t think at that point of babies growing up and all the dreams you had for them fading away. You don’t think of the rug being pulled, over and over again.

In one of my last posts (30^th March 2018 to be exact) we had just received a letter that was to be the piece of the puzzle that everything else depended on. An offer for Amelia at the only secondary school available where I believed there was a chance she’d be okay. A swap of like for like. The one I’d spent nearly two years trying to secure a place for before we even moved here. When you have a child who has such difficulty in almost all social situations, a traditional school environment is a frightening place. So you get a bit picky about these things. You have to. The lead up to her start was tough, as it always has been in any new situation for as long as I can remember. The school offered transition days before the summer holidays that went terribly. So, come September, we were on tenterhooks. The first two days were horrendous. Foetal-position-on-the-floor-of-car-and-not-being-able-to-move horrendous. But miraculously, by the end of the week things seemed to be improving. We had a drink to celebrate (such was the relief!). That relief lasted five days. And then things began slowly sliding down hill. By October, the school itself began falling apart (the what why and how is a long story for another time). A good friend had been made and she’d left. Things went from bad to worse, worse than I could have imagined, and from then until the first lockdown, life was a dark tunnel that allowed an occasional pinhole of light to shine through. To see the spark in your wonderfully bright and capable child fade to almost nothing, listening to her question the point of her being alive at such a young age, to see no joy emanate from her apart from the most sporadic of glimpses, leaves a pain inside you that can’t be described. You don’t know how dark that tunnel is until you’ve spent some time out the other side and had the opportunity to look back. The puzzle piece didn’t fit. We had to imagine a new puzzle altogether. And in that one respect, lockdown was a Godsend. The absence of school allowed her to untangle and begin to come alive again. Home educated now, and thriving in her own way.

Alongside all this I sat beside the bed of my lovely Nanny P, held her hand while she breathed her last breaths. In the same week as Amelia started school, my stepmum Rita died. The heaviness of not being there, not being able to hug my Dad, had to be painfully contained so I could support my child through the hardest time of her own young life. During the second lockdown, being unable to attend the funeral of my grandad and visit my grieving Nan. And all the while carrying the guilt and sadness and grief and questioning, constantly, if we’d done the right thing.

At the risk of sounding too poetic, we’ve sunk to the emotional depths of the sea and soared the emotional heights of the skies. We’ve felt so many moments of pure gratitude. We’ve come close to unravelling. We have unravelled. We’ve loved and hated and everything in between. We’ve broken down. And put ourselves back together, countless times.

I know, it all sounds very gloom and doom. And possibly full of woe-is-me. I know people have experienced much worse, and I’m thankful that our family is relatively happy, healthy and safe. But our own trials in life are relative and valid. And you can’t know the difficulty of a situation unless you’ve experienced it yourself.

We do live in such a beautiful part of the world. Step outside to a view of rolling green hills illuminated by a wintery sun. There are walnut trees and mulberry bushes and elderflower in the garden, and a 12^th century church a few hundred metres away that chimes the hour. Our neighbours are lovely. We can buy eggs from local families down the lane who keep a few chickens. We can buy cheese made at the farm next door, and fresh milk in glass bottles, and local meat from the butcher or farm shops close by. But then there’s always Tesco with the unrecyclable packets and blueberries from Spain tempting you with convenience!

All about me, but what about the others? Well, Maciek of course has been on the same journey, but he’s enjoying his work here, and outdoor pursuits. He works in some amazing properties and often sends me photos of these awesome landscapes captioned ‘my view from the office’. And I send him one back with a view of the kitchen sink just to remind him of what he’s missing! Noah’s been on his own tricky rollercoaster which has added many cracks to my broken heart. And football being the thing he most loves to do, lockdown has been difficult for him.

Last summer Noah found a badger’s skull in the garden. We cleaned it and bleached it and kept it in a tub, for it’s teeth had fallen out and needed to be glued back in before being fit for display. It was left in that tub for months, in the downstairs loo. Its presence eliciting nagging reminders from me, ‘Will you fix that badger this weekend please?’. So last week I bought new glue. No excuses now.

And I went away dusting and sorting. And when I came downstairs there were my three favourite people at the table, with the skull, and all the broken things, being put back together. A ceramic owl sitting atop a pile of books, a snow globe carousel from Amelia’s christening, a family Christmas ornament with all our names painted on it. Amelia was holding the roof of the music box till the glue dried, and the band players had been returned to their circle playing their instruments. Those irreparable bits from the window sill back together in one piece. It’s not without chips and visible cracks. But it works. And the memories are still inside it. The music plays as beautifully as it always did, albeit with a slight tilt, and the story is different now. 

Sometimes, when you’re expecting the magic of Switzerland, you instead find yourself suddenly and without warning landing in Holland. It takes some adaptability to accept a less magnificent outlook, to appreciate that where you’ve landed is just as extraordinary and beautiful, in its own wonderfully unique way.