When my GP told me I could two and a half weeks off work because I was blatantly ill and exhausted, I felt like I’d been given the best present in the world: time. Time is what I always seem short of, these days – time to sleep, time to catch up on avoiding midden-esque status house-wise, time to give the small girl the sort of childhood I so want her to have (insert sickening images of wheat fields and kites, conkers and bonfires etc.) time to give Quercus the chance to finish work on various bits of renovation or construction, time to let him sleep, time to be awake and active and fun for the small girl, time to make dinner, to try to remember that if I look hard, I have still got a creative bone in my body. Time, in short, to do anything except wish I had more time.

Yet here I am, on the other side, and I feel as if I’m back at square one.

Of course, it’s all too predictable – I set myself sort of targets, when given any chunk of time; things which I will get done in that time, states of mind to which I will move in that time, levels of cleanliness or completion which will be achieved in that time. And then, if I don’t manage all of those states, I feel a bit rubbish about it, if I’m honest, which is about where I am now. I ended up having not two but three weeks off, which, added to the leave I’d already booked from work, means I’ve had about a month of freer time than normal. The things I really wanted to do were to see if Quercus going into the small girl at night would rejig our blatantly-not-working-yet-we-keep-doing-it-because-we-can’t-think-of-anything-else approach to her night-time wakings; we managed about a week of this (and it did seem to be helping; she goes back to sleep much more easily for him, and doesn’t expect feeds, of course, from the paternal bosom in the way which she – naturally enough – does from the maternal alternative) before she caught something horrible at a toddler group, and I simply hadn’t the heart to leave her to her daddy’s tender mercies (no matter how tender they truly are), when I knew that a feed and a cuddle from her mama would sort her out much more rapidly in this instance. So, cue a return to the original pattern – up a couple of times each night, much wailing if feeds were not offered, much knackeredness during the day on my part.

Then of course I caught the infection thing too – cue third course of antibiotics this year (and yes, I know they’re not very good for you, but I can’t see I have much choice, given that my immune system seems to be immune to nothing except a hard day’s work).

So, I went to Quercus’s mother, to escape the situation with the kitchen here (no work surfaces, constant dust and noise while Quercus worked his arse off to get the rest of the cupboards finished and fitted, over a very long period if working child-friendly hours) and to give him a decent working day which didn’t have to stop at five-thirty for the small girl’s tea and bedtime wind-down. And then the small girl had a bad bout of teething, and we got even less sleep, together with the normal frustrations of being away from home, under the weather, crabby and surrounded by constant – if well-meant and caring – twittering (and I mean that in its original sense).

So, here I am today. The kitchen is all but finished, which is a very good thing, but I am struggling once more with the constant sleep deprivation. The small girl is getting over whatever it is that she’s been fighting off, but is still a bit pathetic, and the normal activities I’d go for when she’s a bit listless but doesn’t really want to go out aren’t really on the cards because the worktops are covered in tung oil and thus not fit for small bottoms to sit on while baking is undertaken.

Part of me knows it’s rubbish to assess myself by standards of What I Have Done With This Time. I have read Naomi Stadlen’s excellent What Mothers Do, and I believe it wholeheartedly. Wholeheartedly. Except when applying it to myself, it appears. I so, so, so hoped that this time would just let me feel caught up. That the small girl would just sleep through the night on her own, without needing a parental nudge in that direction. That I would spend mornings in happy child-related chaos, and afternoons quietly knitting while the babe snoozed upstairs. This appears to be the day of mourning for the Month That Never Was.

The plus side:

The kitchen is so nearly done. There are cupboards, and I am putting things in them. The attic is half-empty as a result, as are the sheds.

I finished the small girl’s cardigan, and have started a second.

I bought lots of lovely beads and buttons at a shop in West Sussex while staying with Quercus’s mother; these are both playthings for the small girl, and objectively justifiable as crafty bits for me, which gets them extra points.

The not-quite-so-plus:

I’m still knackered, and I’m unutterably sad about it. I feel that this constant tiredness casts a shadow over what is in many ways the best (if hardest-work-requiring) time of my life. And I just don’t know what to do about it.

Tomorrow I go back to work. I’m dreading it, not because I loathe my job, but because, after a month of absence, people will probably ask how I’m doing, and, mostly if people ask that sort of thing, I cry, at the moment. I don’t want to do that. I also don’t feel ready to go back to that sense of treadmill which dominates the week when I’m too tired to be doing the things I have to do; it doesn’t take much for things to feel fine, but likewise, a few bad nights and I’m struggling.

I’m hoping that I just need to get a grip, and that, once the kitchen is genuinely finished, things will seem brighter. There is a list of things I need to do – tax-related stuff because of self-employed work, some copy-editing, booking the cats’ vaccinations – which is genuinely so daunting at the moment that I am employing tactics I developed during particularly  black patches on the PhD, evasion ploys which allow me to push unwanted information to one side, pigheadedly ignoring it until my mind thinks it might cope with it. The funny thing is, if I read someone else writing this sort of thing, I’d probably be saying ‘get some help! you clearly need it!’, but I still feel that this will pass, and I will be OK, and we will get there, and all the other things one normally chants at moments like this.

Ugh, in short. I think it’s time for some Earl Grey.

Much to my astonishment, the last-ditch email I sent David has elicited a response – I still have very little idea what’s happened as he was quite mysterious about it, frankly, but at least we’ve established some form of contact, and he’s emailed back saying he’ll get Jules to get in touch with us. So, that’s a big relief – I really hate conflict, particularly when it involves people I consider friends (albeit in a ‘I may voodoo you soon’ manner), and I’ll be very happy if we can resolve this amicably; it’s never good when you find yourself idly wondering if the police will be able to give you reliable advice on something, is it? So, fingers crossed, this will be sorted soon.

In other news, I am running away from home again. The kitchen is nearing completion, but the dust, grime and hours needed simply aren’t really working with a small girl who isn’t very well and a sleep-deprived mama, so it’s off to Quercus’s mother we go, we go, yo ho ho. Or something. This means no internets for a few days, but probably lots of knitting; I’ve finished that cardigan shown in progress in the last post, and am suitably stunned at my own wondrousness (er… ‘luck’ might be closer to the truth), so I’m now casting around for something new to knit. Current possibilities are, well, largely hat-related, although truth be told I’m a bit bored with hat-knitting; somehow I have accrued lots and lots of small quantities of very pretty wool, which means lots of small projects, really, unless I buy yet more wool, when what I really want is something more substantial. The only candidate for such an enterprise is, at the moment, a huge knot of wool which looks as if the cats had scrumbled at it for at least two weeks prior to its being forgotten in the attic for about six months. Ahem. This is rather dampening my appetite for starting, shall we say.

Hoo-ho.

And you? What’s going on in your neck of the woods?

ARGH.

So.

The letter that we sent recorded delivery to David, he who hath saddled us (apparently) with a caravan we don’t want, don’t own, and want gone, has come back to us – the post office attempted to deliver it, left a card saying they’d tried, and then it waited for two weeks in their depot thingy before wending its way back to us.

ARGH.

Is so annoying.

In the meantime, I’ve tried emailing David again to let him know that if we can’t raise him by post or phone, we will end up going round there, either to tackle him face to face or to find out if his landlord knows where the fuck he’s gone. It’s all so bloody unnecessary. That’s what pisses me off. It’s not like we want anything from him now – that ship sailed bloody months ago – but you’d think someone we once considered a good friend would have the decency to pass on a phone number, at least, wouldn’t you? I mean, obviously we did something to piss him off, but surely it must be clear that we’ve no idea what, and, if he ever does read this blog still, that whatever it was was inadvertent; I just can’t for the life of me work out what has happened here.

Fucking caravan.

Fucking situation.

Fucking prospect of over an hour’s drive each sodding way to see if he’s moved.

Fucking fucking fuck.

I find myself in the fortunate situation of having had my doctor give me a note which tells me to refrain from work until February 22. This, dear reader, is largely because I was approaching Def Con 1 in batshit* terms last week, which is to say that, on top of yet another bout of low-level illness, I’d had very little sleep and quite a few doses of Big Fat Toddler Tears (they being the bit where gentle grumbling turns into ‘wa-ha, wa-ha, wa-haaaaaaaaaaa’, with fully fledged tears rolling down the indignant little face). So, I found myself going out of the room and bellowing ‘why won’t you go to sleeeeeeeeep?’. Not a happy situation, but my own, dear reader, my own, at least in passing. So, the next day, I took myself off to the doctor, because I felt the need to vent at someone other than Quercus, who has had enough venting to install an entire system. And lo! the result was time off, which felt like the most enormous present I’ve had in quite a while.

Quercus’s mother came to visit, bringing stews, casseroles and large bars of chocolate (about which I was relatively abstemious, in line with my “a little bit of everything but less than that, you greedy cow” approach to what I eat), and she babysat for us on Tuesday, so we were able to go out on our own in the evening, for the fourth time since the small girl entered our lives over twenty months ago. So, extra sleep, things to eat which I didn’t cook, and the visible nature of our progress towards a finished! kitchen! AFINISHEDKITCHEN! has meant that I am not feeling batshit any more. So far, we’ve been making the most of this breathing space by focusing our efforts on the construction of the kitchen; as you can see from the pictures, the cupboards are coming along, and shortly there will be that blissful bit where I get to put things in the cupboards, and to organise ingredients into boxes, and to shuffle things around so that the nicest mugs are at the front of the row. I so love organising cupboards; it probably says something worryingly Freudian about the way my brain works, but what can I say: it soothes my soul. And there is going to be plenty of soothing to do – our attic space, which we only gained as part of building the kitchen and bathroom, is stuffed to the gunwales with kitchen paraphernalia which we haven’t actually seen for the best part of five years, given that it was housed in the shed, all in boxes, before its recent promotion to loft living. Ahem. I have a notion that sometime soon there may be a boot sale in our future.

A knock-on effect of the kitchening is that, rather than baking, I’ve been knitting – I’m on the second of the sleeves for the small girl’s cardigan, and have finished the back and the front pieces. It’s chunky wool, so is knitting up disgustingly quickly, which is just as well, given that my patience is never exactly plentiful. I’m also finding the hardwood needles I bought for this pattern rather pleasing to work with; the yarn slides easily, but not too easily, across their gently cool points, and I rather like the twiddly turned bits at the non-business end. I’ve been fortunate with the pattern, too, which I found for free on Ravelry, and not least because some very kind and deeply knowledgeable knitters initiated me further into the bewildering world of abbreviations and slipped stitches passed over, which is to say that they translated some badly-worded pattern bits for me, and hopefully I’ll finish the cardigan over the weekend – my first actual garment which isn’t a hat or a scarf or legwarmers.

I’ve also finally managed to turn an old woollen jumper of my father’s into a felted dress for the witchling – a soft blue-grey, it felted straight off in a hot wash in the machine, and it was just a matter of cutting the bits out and stitching them together (using the antiquated sewing machine, which is going through a relatively amenable phase, the unpredictable length of which only serves to heighten my suspicions regarding its having developed a personality). I tried several times to catch a decent picture of the small girl wearing the result, but so far she’s too quick on her feet; I’m taking her repeated grins and strokes of it as an indication that she likes it, and my maternal heart was so pleased at this that it threatened to beat itself inside out. My favourite bit is the felt stars I added to the front; again, rubbish picture, but that’s what those blurry pink and yellow bits are, honest, guv.

Also a work in progress, though it never feels that way, really, is the development of the small girl’s speech. Words are positively tumbling over themselves in her haste to articulate them – three-word phrases, emphasis, repetition: we have the lot. It is such a delight to converse with her; every month that has passed has found me thinking that this is it – she cannot get any sweeter, and this is the single most sweet age that there could possibly be, in any child, at any point, and then, THEN, I find myself rethinking as the next moon changes, and something new wanders into our lives courtesy of a very determined pair of size 3 feet. Possibly while clutching a percussive instrument of some sort. (And yes, technically, and I shit you not, the ol’ Joanna counts as a percussion instrument.)

Oh, and of course it’s Valentine’s Day on Sunday. So, time for some heart-related craftiness, methinks – our tenth together. To my mind, nothing says ‘I love you’ like a lie-in, and some eggy bread on rising.

* Batshit: a term generally used to indicate maternal insanity, brought on by a combination of Not Getting Out Enough, Not Sleeping Enough, and Generally Beating Oneself Up About Perceived Maternal Failings Brought On By Points One And Two.

… there will be a brief interval, during which I shall finish copy-editing two theses, one on the history of art, the other on nineteenth-century poetry. We are also fortunate in that Quercus’s mother is with us for a few days – I cannot express sufficiently how nice it is to have someone else to bring you tea, provide a tissue for the small girl’s nose, do the washing-up and generally provide a much-needed third pair of hands, while Quercus works on the big cupboard which will, when complete, cover about half of the red wall in the kitchen.

Also, there will be chocolate malt cake. Oh so very yes.

Ack. Haloscan is stopping its current free incarnation. I thought I’d stop using it, and go back to WordPress comments. And then I broke my site, for the umpteenth time, and of course I’m buggered if I know how to sort it, so until I can summon up the energy to fix up the mutilated CSS and the strange-looking header, I’m going with this oddly Germanic number.

Ick.

And also, bums.

Update: yes, still most of the above; just a quick question, too – does anyone actually ever use the search bar? I ask because it’s just possibly going to drive me demented; finding the CSS which governs its appearance seems to demand a peculiar combination of dogged determination and a devil-may-care attitude to the passing of time – I can manage the former, but the latter is proving tricky…