New Year

And is it a new decade? I don't mean to be pedantic but I'm never sure exactly when a new decade starts - is 2010 the last year of the decade or the first year of a new one? There seemed to be much dissent about when the new millenium started - the end of 1999 or the end of 2000? Was there a year zero and if so, does this make any difference anyway? I'm rather confused. But, presuming it is a new decade, here's a quick resume of my decade, starting in 2000.

The new year of 2000 was memorable because me and my husband both had the worst flu we'd ever had and he had to delay starting a new job because of it. We had fairly recently adopted 2 cats, and I was working at a local FE College. During the year, I changed jobs to working for a charity which dealt with victims of medical accidents. I also started getting more involved with the local Pagan scene and with one specific group in particular.

In 2001 we bought our own flat and moved in in May. Towards the end of the year, I went part-time at work in order to be able to spend more time studying - I was coming to the end of my part-time degree. I started doing website moderating for the Pagan group I was involved with and also became their online agony aunt.

In 2002 I started the final year of my degree - it took me 6 years part-time altogether. I also started a new job for the government quango the Housing Corporation. It was another part-time job. I found out I was pregnant with my daughter within weeks of starting, and what with that and my degree I never really felt I got to grips with what I was supposed to be doing. I took my final exams at the end of the year while 6 months pregnant and stopped working at Christmas.

In February 2003 I gave birth to my eldest child, my daughter. Her planned homebirth went wrong and we ended up being transferred to hospital by ambulance and having an assisted birth which shocked us both with its brutality. Funnily enough, she took up the rest of the year. As planned, I didn't go back to work, and we were pretty much absorbed with her. We lost one of our cats, our beloved boy Sebastian to kidney failure.

In March 2004, we got married in a small, low-key but very enjoyable way and our daughter was the star of the show. At the end of the year, my book Solitary Eclectic Witchcraft was published. By the summer I was pregnant with my son and I spent most of the year being sick.

By the start of 2005 I was sick, shattered and depressed and ending up giving birth 3 weeks early in March. But it was a relatively peaceful homebirth as we had hoped and the rest of the year was spent adjusting to being a family of 4.

By 2006 we really needed to move out of our tiny flat but the process was not smooth and everything that had been planned since the spring of that year fell through just before Christmas, leaving us to start again the following year. I started self-publishing my writing, starting with a novel Towards The Sea, then my home education books Freya and Heath Are Home Educated and The Genie In The Teapot and then the follow-up to my previous book on Paganism, Thoughtful Pagan Living.

In 2007 I had a small article published in Green Parent magazine, then started writing for Hippyshopper, the green website. I also got published in Juno magazine and started the first of a series of articles published in The Mother. We finally managed to move house (and town) in July after a lot of stress. My brother-in-law got married the following weekend! It took me many months to settle into the new house and the new town, and I was still feeling upset and isolated at the end of 2007.

At the start of 2008, my job with Hippyshopper was cut and I started working for 63336 - a text-based question and answer company, where I've been working ever since. I also started meeting up with individual families in the local home education scene, culminating in co-starting a local meet-up in a park. I finished another novel, but have so far failed to get it published and am undecided about publishing it myself. I took over an overgrown allotment plot in May and we got our first crops from it in the autumn.

In the spring of 2009 we decided to formalise the home education group and moved it into a rented hall for weekly sessions in July, setting up our own bank account and getting our first funding shortly afterwards. I also joined a local fledgling Transition Group in the summer, but so far it doesn't really seem to be getting properly started. Our allotment was much more fruitful this year and we had onions for 4 months, potatoes for 6 months, and tons of carrots, swede, peas, and beetroot. We also had tomatoes, courgettes, strawberries, raspberries and French beans from the garden, and I made lots of jam from fruit either picked free locally or cheaply from the nearby Pick-Your-Own farm. I've also started work on a Young Adult novel. And started doing a course to learn to be a life coach.

And so, plans for 2010? My major plan for 2010 is to try and visualise in all areas of my life exactly what I'd like, ideally, and then try to make that happen, no matter how incrementally that might have to be. The dreams have to be as exact and ideal as possible, even if they are not practical or realistic, and only then must I sit down and work out in what ways I can achieve them. The dreaming is important, to give me the goal to aim for. I'm hoping to finish my course and start being a life coach. I'm hoping to finish my Young Adult novel and get it published. I'm hoping to continue working and running the Home Education Group and doing my allotment. I'm hoping to be inspired.

A poem!

Although I'm still struggling with my own muse, I'm happy to report that my daughter has no such problems and today wrote a poem (well, a song actually) which was inspired by an Enid Blyton adventure story:

Dire dark deeds
On the hill.
People being held
Against their will.
In the dark, dark house
There's a moveable floor,
And danger!

Musing on the Muse

I find it very hard to be creative at this time of the year; my inspiration seems to disappear as soon as the grey days start and rain falls. I've been doing some meditation on that and I think that my frustration at feeling unable to connect with inspiration gives my usual seasonal depression an additional edge. I'm no longer sure if it's the depression blocking my inspiration, or if my depression is partly fueled by my inability to create and both are caused by a third thing - ie the darkness.

My meditations and workings recently have all been centred in healing and health - for me and my family - but once we're all in good shape again, I'm planning to start meditations on inspiration and seeking my Muse again. For me, meditations on the sun seem a good place to start, but I wondered what other people use to kick-start their creativity while having a dry spell?

Obviously, being out in nature helps, but due to my back injury that has been difficult recently. This injury and our recent combined family ill-health have been a real shock to the system. It is scary quite how vulnerable we are, and how much of our carefully ordered life falls apart when I'm not very mobile even for a short while.

I think confidence has a certain amount to do with inspiration as well - or maybe it's just that confidence enhances my receptiveness to inspiration. I'll tend to question it less and act on it more when I'm feeling good about myself and my abilities. This is clearly also linked to my depression. Recently I read a certain famous series of books which, despite being bestsellers, are *really* badly written and it really knocked my confidence for several weeks. What is the point of spending years learning and practising my writing (and still not being published) when other people can get such badly written and derivative drivel published and have such a huge volume of sales?

Time is another factor. Sometimes I get a moment of inspiration but I'm in the middle of shopping, or doing some activity with the kids. If I was single with no ties or responsibilities I could write whenever the mood struck, through the night, without worrying about getting meals. I know these mundane things shouldn't interfere, but realistically they do. My kids have a prior claim on me, we all have to eat. Since my writing isn't bringing in any money, perhaps the time I spend doing it is self-indulgent and I shouldn't be trying to tempt the Muse at all. Maybe I should be glad I can't seem to write at the moment, and use the time to do some actual paid work.

I think I'm having an inspiration crisis, so I need to meditate on that. Any thoughts or wishes welcome!

What Mothers Do

Having been to a La Leche League meeting today in which people were kind enough to compliment my mothering skills and my children, and remembering from What Mothers Do: Especially When it Looks Like Nothing how easy it is to underestimate all the stuff you do as a parent, I thought I'd revisit the goals I set for our family life in January and see how we're doing.

• Succeeding at making at least 80% of the family's bread, cakes, biscuits and other such products.
• Succeeding in keeping the Home Education Group I helped set up last summer going from strength to strength.
• Succeeding in keeping on top of our allotment plot and garden - and have in fact planted 3 varieties of potatoes, carrots, parsnips, beetroots, leeks and Jerusalem Artichokes at the allotment, and strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, herbs, apples, pears, cobnuts, tomatoes, cucumbers, courgettes and French beans at home.
• Succeeding in keeping my part-time work going and contributing a useful amount to the household income.
• Succeeding in supporting my husband through his career change and re-training.
• Still attempting to decide on what I want to re-train as.
• Currently sorting out some submissions to agents of my recently-completed novel.
• My daughter is now reading fluently, my son starting to read and we're keeping up making special times of the day to read longer books to them both.
• Succeeding in branching out in our day-trips out to further afield and longer days - even though my son is slightly struggling with this as it really tires him out.
• Succeeding in cutting the food and household budget while still providing nutritious meals mainly cooked from scratch.

The trouble is that as soon as you achieve a goal it becomes the normal thing you do, so you end up doing more and more without realising how much you do, and then wonder why you feel tired, have no spare time, and haven't added any new goals in a while. So this is a totally boastful post to remind myself of how much I actually do! Hurray for mum everywhere!

Writing and reading

I've been a bit off fiction at the moment which is normally my favourite vice, but I can't seem to settle to a book at the moment. Maybe because I know I should be trying to finish the next draft of the novel I am writing at the moment. I still don't feel properly well though and having a head which feels like it's stuffed with cotton wool is not the best start for the complicated task of a third edit of a 90,000 word book. Or maybe that's just an excuse. Maybe what I'm really afraid of is that after spending a year on writing and editing it, if I actually finish it and submit it to agents and publishers they will once again unanimously reject it and I will once again feel like I've wasted my time and energy, and my confidence will again plummet. Obviously I'll never know unless I try and I really will try and pull myself together, but my confidence it pretty low right now anyway. None of my other efforts at novels have been published (well, unless you count this one which is self-published, but hardly a best-seller).
However, I have been reading some interesting non-fiction. United States of Hysteria: An Englishwoman's Journey Through the Madness of America by Anne Dixey is a memoir of a London woman who moved to Washington DC with her family 3 weeks before 9/11 and it is fascinating reading. Of course it is easy to be dismissive or scathing of another culture and ignore the bizarre things we do here, but there were many truly scary things in this book which made me appreciate little old England far more than ever before. Such as when Dixey's 5 year old daughter came home from school with the news that they'd been practising the drill for when a gunman is loose in the school (go into the toilets and stay very quiet!) after a gunman had shot 10 people over a 3 week period in the neighbourhood.
I'm just wishing that an American friend of mine who lives here now would write a similar book about her experience of the different cultures - I think that would also be a fascinating read!

I'm in The Mother!

It's always nice to get a nice thick brown envelope containing a good magazine, but it's doubly good when it's a magazine with an article you wrote in it!

Anyone who gets The Mother magazine, then check out my piece on page 12, The Birth of a Mother. Hope you like it!