Sometimes, despite the little voice in my head which questions everything I do, say, think, or even be, I think I am quite a strong woman. Most days, I feel an utter pillock, lurching from one dilemma to the next with little preparation and far too much prevarication, but just occasionally, I find myself looking back at a period in my life and thinking ‘gosh. Really?’. I think this might be one of those times, at some point in the future. I now look back on the time, the horrid, awful, terrifying time, when my mother was dying and I am astonished at the way I managed to keep going. Not in a Mother Theresa way, but just keep-on-keeping-on, sort of thing. I had just turned twenty-two when my mother died (my birthday is late November, and she died on December 14); I look at final-year students at the university where I work, and they look so young to me now, like little more than children. I suppose that having children of one’s own puts things in perspective somehow, and I find myself thinking about these things, particularly in the quiet (or not!) hours of the night when I am awake with the witchling.

Last night was a bit better, somehow, or at least it was different – the witchling woke at about ten, had a quick feed, went back to sleep, but woke again about twenty minutes later. I reached for some camomilla at that point, thinking that there must be something actually causing this waking, but by the time I’d made it back up the stairs, spoon in hand, she was virtually back asleep, with a little sort-of-perhaps-maybe crying which didn’t appear to require anything from me at all. I now begin to wonder if I am reacting too quickly at night – I know that she makes noises in her sleep, but I wonder now if some of the cries I have heard, and had myself upright in two seconds for, previously would actually have been self-resolving if I’d not made a big deal of it. I dunno.

And under it all, when I am not so tired that I am actually tearful, I know that this too shall pass, as Turquoise Lisa puts it, and probably all too quickly – already, the witchling has moved from ‘tiny baby’ to 3 – 6 months in clothing sizes, and things which once seemed roughly akin to giant when compared with her are now rapidly being outgrown. I think I need to learn to listen to myself a bit more – to stop trying to find a ‘cure’ for things that cannot be cured (‘you have a severe case of… Baby!’), and to believe that I can trust my own judgment without needing to research everything. See, this is what bloody years of being a student does to you…

Anyway. Enough of all this emotional bollocks.

In other news, Quercus is outside putting external render over a layer of Heraklith boarding today; thus far, it is not pissing it down, which, as well as being something of a miracle given that it’s Devon and October, means the work is going relatively well and he hasn’t yet achieved Giant Drowned Stoat Appearance, an unavoidable transition in any building work we undertake, in my experience. Who knows – soon, we may even have a back door without a large hole in it where it had rotted away on the old extension! Whatever next, I ask.