Merry

Motherhood – it’s written in my stars.

March 13, 2015 by Merry 1 Comment

“Can you just write a note in my log book?”

“Is there anything for our lunches?”

“Need milk.”

“Have you booked my blood test yet?

“Will you be back to spend the day with me or are you at work all day?”

“Have you paid for my trip deposit?”

“When am I going to the dentist?”

“Neeeeeeeeeeeed milk!!!!”

Most of this – and probably 20 other questions, demands or queries – had happened before 8am this morning, while I was trying to justify myself in a text conversation to some one else, get 4 people and myself ready to leave the house, find my purse and laptop and not cry about the death of my favourite author.

By 10am I had delivered a sobbing toddler to nursery (cue enormous guilt), taken 2 to one school and 1 for a blood test and then to school, had a fairly serious and significant conversation to a governing body, been to work, rescued 50% of my laptop from somewhere I had left it and cried 3 times.

And that’s after a decent night of sleep, not something I get very often. Not something I’ve HAD very often in the last 17 years.

If I could have read my future way back then, I’m sorry to say I might have seen the current state of affairs and been a large step beyond daunted. I think we might have stopped several children earlier. Most days are an assault course of issues to be managed and problems to be solved, challenges that require a hugely speedy gear change from ‘older teen with quiet common sense’ to ‘younger teen with no sense at all’ to ‘toddler tantrum’ mode, time and time again. Most days I get to 10pm and I’m simply exhausted, mentally more than physically. This week I had 31 things on my to do list on Wednesday, mostly work but perhaps 12 or 13 small but time consuming things that needed doing to keep my not so small family running.

One lesson I’ve learned is that while a crowd of small children is physically wearing, teens are much more mentally exhausting, even if, by and large, they are good kids. And all of ours are. The pressures on them build up into pressures at home and mothering it is hard going, a mental agility game with regular hormonal sideswipes coming at you unexpectedly.

It leaves very little time for other concerns; one skill I’ve learned is to think on my feet quickly and try to make the best possible compromise decision that I can but I have to accept that a) that means I won’t always have a spot on perfect answer and b) I have very little tolerance for people with lots of time to ruminate and chew the cud.

I often tell people that I was truly hopeless as a parent when I first became one. My heart was in the right place but my skills were severely lacking. I’ve had to learn to control a temper that is fiery at best and an emotional side that requires me to learn to breathe in and out a lot. I’ve had to learn to be less selfish (and consistently too… 17 years of putting other people first and 15 still to go) and more flexible. I’ve had to learn not to live my life through my kids and let them take their own path and I’ve had to grow considerably in terms of my ability to lead by example and accept they might go a different way. And I’d say I still have a fair way to go.

I’d say I’ve learned most of the selflessness that mothering requires at the side of hospital beds. It’s then that you truly find yourself confronted with what unconditional love is. It strips away everything and leaves you stood opposite Death and all his potential and it strips you naked too. I’d bargain my soul for the life of one of my children and that isn’t something I understood until the moment I first held a child in my arms.

That’s not to say I wouldn’t give £50 for them all to go away and stop asking me things at 7.32am 😉 But the times that are great, watching them grow and achieve and mature, the times we have fun and laugh and love the moment? They make it all worth while.

This is a collaborative post.

On being found wanting. #InternationalWomensDay

March 8, 2015 by Merry Leave a Comment

Today is International Women’s Day and as it stands, in some areas of social media it will provide a focus for 2 campaigns, #ThisGirlCan and #LikeAGirl, both aimed at empowering girls to be who they are and love it, unencumbered by stereotype , sexism, paradigm and oppression. And oppression comes in many forms – media parameters of how we should look, historical overhangs of ‘ladylike’ behaviour, and the fear that allows men to call women ugly, stupid, fat or pointless to control and subjugate.

Just to be clear, today will see plenty of blog posts where powerful women with voices will – with pride and pleasure and brilliance – write sponsored posts to support both the day and the campaigns. This isn’t one of them (though I did write a post on Patch of Puddles that is, and was proud and pleased to do so in support of the topic). I mention this not because I’m sore at not getting the money but because of the wake up call it provided me. I think of myself as the poster girl for campaigns like these – strong, well worded, self made businesswomen, survivor of significant trauma, birther of 6, ferociously bringing up girls to be exactly who they want to be without fear of being judged for it. It has shocked me to the core to think perhaps I don’t have that written across my face, that perhaps I don’t make these beliefs loudly heard enough, that perhaps I’m not actually living these values hard enough.

I have to admit, I thought I was. And now I have to question, am I? And if I’m not, am I absolutely sure I’m passing on the message to my children that I want to. Because it is true that I couldn’t write a manifesto on what feminism means and use all the right words and it is true that sometimes I keep my head down for fear of being bullied or belittled or finding I was wrong. And if all those things are true, perhaps I’m not good enough. And that needs to change.

One thing I had missed though was that there are two campaigns running; #ThisGirlCan by Sport England and #LikeAGirl. So I’ve looked at them both, having had it pointed out to me by my daughters that in fact they are not the same.

#ThisGirlCan is about getting sporty, getting sweaty, never mind how you look or how good you are or what point you start from, your ability or the obstacles in your way. It’s about making a start and having no interest in how it looks from the outside.

Perhaps it epitomises the thought in my head the day a far from swoon-some bloke drove past me and cackled out of his window at me running, all almost 15 stone of me at the time.

“Yep. But I am. And you aren’t.”

#LikeAGirl starts with a negativity – ‘you throw,run,hit,jump like a girl’ and spins it to the positive.

Here is Fran, doing it #LikeAGirl.

Still my favourite tumble to watch #gymnastics

A video posted by Merry (@merrilyme) on Mar 1, 2015 at 3:40pm PST

If I’m honest, I have a preference for the first campaign in terms of the subtly different core values it builds on. I’m not really interested in even acknowledging these other negative comments any more. They just should be gone. I’m surrounded all week by female writers, female coaches, female doctors and nurses, young girls building businesses and young girls pounding the gymnastics floor for 16 hours a week, doing 100’s of chin ups, press ups, v sits, sitting down and crying because they hurt and the move won’t come and getting up and trying again.

I work every week with kids who will never be great gymnasts and look longingly at the 8-10 year olds flic-ing across the floor but keep working those handstands and cartwheels and balances to be as good as hard work can make them.

My personal passion is those kids, the ones who arrive out of condition and lacking confidence and who I scream with delight for the first time they do a vault that makes them high five me.

Yesterday, I happened to be chatting elsewhere with a lad on a trade fair stall I’m not personally connected with who said “Yeah, it’s the girls who create the products. We boys just aren’t so good at it.” A fascinating remark – on the one hand, rather depressingly telling and on the other, an interesting example of a self-deprecating understanding of a changing dynamic. He didn’t mean ‘we leave it to the underlings’, he clearly meant ‘we just aren’t so good’.

“Never mind,” I said .”In this day and age there is no reason why you boys can’t become as good as the girls”. He acknowledged the wink I said it with wryly, but I meant it. Girls can be a tough act to follow these days.

And then, on the other hand, they have so much to fight past still. The Team SCA video I’m promoting on Patch of Puddles is on YouTube; cynically targeted at this video about feminist empowerment was an advert for a site purporting to explain the mistakes girls make that mean they can’t maintain a relationship. “Catch a man and keep him dot net” or something tediously similar. And the sneers about International Women’s Day, dressed up as humour. ‘It should have been yesterday but they took so long to get ready’ has appeared several times in my digital day today. And we are supposed to laugh, take it in good part and accept it, like we are supposed to accept our worth being valued by our weight and our looks and the clothes we wear or the make up we put on. Still, unbelievably, supposed to accept it like ‘good-natured teasing’ is an acceptable face for ‘sexual harassment in the workplace’.

We are bad sports, if we don’t allow the grin, instead of being allowed to say, “You, my friend, are the problem here. Are you standing up for the equality of your daughter, wife, partner or granddaughter when you indulge in this? Are you absolutely sure you are allowed to comment on my person? Are you okay if I start discussing the length of your penis in the workplace, like you discuss my breast size?” Everyone should follow Everyday Sexism on Twitter, just in case they don’t realise the size of the battle.

But we fight it in our own ways – and maybe I don’t, as it turns out fight it loudly and passionately enough to be an advocate but I fight it in my home, in my home town and in my every day life. If a butterfly stamp can change the world, I’m stamping loud and proud with these four.

Do it#LikeAGirl #ThisGirlCan. Two campaigns I think this family has nailed on International Women's Day. #touchrugby #taekwondo #dancing #gymnastics #sport — Do it#LikeAGirl #ThisGirlCan. Two campaigns I think this family has nailed on International Women’s Day. #touchrugby #taekwondo #dancing #gymnastics #sport

They are my gift to the future, I hope. Sweaty, determined, not interested in being told no, not interested in any negative connotations of ‘like a girl’, passionate, smart, full of power and guts and grit and compassion, humour and consideration. And I hope and believe they’ll bring up their brother to believe the most important thing he can do is treat people as equals, proper equals where gender does not figure in the reasons for choosing or celebrating or supporting. I hope my son will grow up knowing why a dancer makes such a great rugby player and screaming to ensure women’s sports get equal viewing time on television.

That’ll be my legacy. It’s possible I have some work to do on my own role, but I’m proud of what I’m sending out into the world.

These girls most certainly can.

Don’t Write Bollocks.

March 1, 2015 by Merry Leave a Comment

You wouldn’t think it would be a difficult rule to follow, really, the one in the title. The internet makes us all writers, gives us all an audience, provides us with endless opportunities to read, learn, digest. It’s hard not to inhale information when Facebook is filled with links, videos, rants, shares and the like. And if you move your face from Facebook (clue is in the name), my word, you could learn a lot.

Let us not forget that in only a few hundred years we’ve come from not even being allowed to read the book we were supposed to live by in our own language, right through ‘the holy grail is a job being allowed to write for a newspaper or get a book deal’ to ‘open laptop and splurge opinion out to several hundred people at once’. And audience. A community. The ability to inform and be informed.

With that information dissemination blessing comes responsibility of course.

For the love of goodness, don’t press share until you’ve checked it is real. Snopes, my friends, Snopes.
For the love of sanity, don’t share repetitive, needy memes. If it starts “it occurs to me”… it needs deleting.
Don’t write something unless you are happy to stand by it (and that includes passive aggressive Facebook updates).
Learn fast: if you use Google as your doctor, you’ll be dead 6 times by dinner.

But Google. We could blame a lot on Google. If you are old enough to remember life before a decent search engine, you’ll know that once upon a time, when you searched for something you got, by and large, a useful page written by someone with a passion who knew something about the subject matter. Or, you know, possibly you would get drivel with the most important word in the article written 55 times in white text at the bottom of the page. But still, mostly you got somewhere real.

And then came ‘content’, regular updated content, which is a whole different thing to ‘words on the virtual page that someone really wanted to write’. Meaningful keywords and meta descriptions and all that jazz to keep websites fresh and lovely and churning over in the Google machine. And of course, so came blogs and all the wonder that is what blogging which can do. Which is great, really great. I love blogging. The world is made better by blogging. MY world is made better by blogging. Infinitely.

But if Google was a cupboard under the stairs, it would have a serious date with a 40 day declutter.

And I’m far from guilt-free. I make part of my living writing copy for websites, trying to put together something half way meaningful from facts gleaned off the internet, a few nuggets of opinion and ideas of my own and a healthy smattering of keywords and useful phrases. It’s not perfect but I do it a whole lot better than some people who also get paid not very much at all to assemble words on a production line. And of course there are the times when trying to write for money, on my blog or elsewhere, squeezes out every last individual thought I have and all the energy for writing something worth saying.

It happens. It’s not pretty and it’s self-defeating in the end, but it happens. Possibly as self-defeating as raging against your own industry.

The thing is, in amongst all these words and all the splurging of beautiful and boorish writing, of eloquence and assaults on grammar, come headlines like this:-

“Practical Tips for Thoughtful Self Gifting”.

It’s like something from the feverish dreams of a copywriter; charged with the creation of a mail-out sales spiel to remind humans, in the ever growing scream of cacophonous void that is the internet, to come and buy… come and buy.

“Here is help on how to buy something you want, for yourself”.

Really? Has the world improved for this? Are humans so dumb now that we need help – practical help – on buying something nice for ourselves?

If this is sales and content, we need a new ploy. We are filling the universe sized space of the internet with an ever decreasing circle of meaningless nonsense; once that headline gets past an editor, are we lost?

It’s an amazing thing, being able to find words, hear words, create words. It’s the ultimate liberty, to have the right to write and the right to read and hear. And the internet is made better by the raw outpourings and connections of words like these, the raging rant of the grateful mother, pulled under by the every day ordinariness that most of us don’t ‘Facebook’ for fear of either being sectioned, seen as less than perfect, or deemed needy.

My lovely friend Josie, who lives a life making a living much as I do, with words (only I fear, rather more connected to her soul as she does so) wrote about losing her voice online. I know I have; somewhere in the fear of accidentally plagiarising, being unoriginal, speaking words spoken yesterday or being shot down for daring to voice and opinion, I lost my words. I lost them – most of all – because I wrote with such brutal honesty after Freddie died – and nothing I write will ever be as good again.

But if we all think like that, soon the internet will be full of nothing but the cud of redigested copy.

I’ve taken a leaf from Josie’s book – grabbed a notebook and started hunting, in private, for my voice.

Review: Now TV

January 28, 2015 by Merry Leave a Comment

There is nothing quite like a family film to bring the Merrily family together. We get precious few evenings all in the house at the same time, so when we do, it’s lovely to just curl up under the large heap of crochet blankets we own and hunker down together with treats and great TV.

We’ve had the opportunity to try out a number of different tv services over the last year; being skinflints, we don’t subscribe to anything and our children have to put up with no more than Freeview. Our internet connection is appalling and even streaming iPlayer through a normal laptop is next to impossible and we’d long ago given up on catch up TV without a paid for service to streamline them.

In steps NowTV, with a box of goodies, a NowTV box, a month of their movie package and a large quantity of onesies!

I’d like to say that getting my teens to dress up in Christmas Pudding outfits was hard, but frankly, they’ll do anything for a good film and a lot of chocolate.

Did I mention the onesies??

Josie – being an elf – and trying out some of the craft ideas we were sent.

The very cute small boy one… (and his reindeer).

Our first task was to enjoy the delights of the Muppets Most Wanted film, which was a special showing for us to enjoy along with our treats and a Twitter part. This was a bit of a revelation for me; I didn’t realise that services like Now did ‘live tv’ too. I’m not totally sure why exactly, since live tv almost seems to belong to the past but it certainly was fun to sit down to something we had to ‘wait’ for – what a novel concept! (Of course, it was also available on demand, so we had the double delight of making ourselves wait 😉 )

The film itself entertained us enormously, as did the online chatter about it with @NowTV and other bloggers who were partaking too. You can’t beat a Muppets film for sheer outrageous ‘awful but good’-ness. (The end was a bit weird actually, somehow slightly beyond comically macabre…)

Anyway.

That left us with a month to enjoy recent and otherwise unavailable to them films on tv, an opportunity my children threw themselves into with relish. What they loved even more however, was the classics: Mary Poppins, West Side Story, Grease and a host of Disney with The Aristocats a top favourite. There are films that have not made it back out of our garage for Bene because of time or space and the convenience of Youtube that they wanted to introduce him to and the convenience of the Now box let us do that. Plus we were able to play it through the Apple TV box when the remote went missing, which was a major advantage. Registering a second device is easy – you can do 2 in total in your first month – and then another one a month with a maximum of 4.

Max and I indulged in some films we would not otherwise have watched – Batman for one – and really enjoyed revisiting Pleasantville, which I really think is one of the best films ever.

I’ve been a bit of a meanie since our free month ran out and not reapplied the £10 charge to add the movie package back in. I quite fancy trying out the entertainment package at £7 a month, though we are less people who watch casual tv than we are film and series watches; I can see a few ‘boxed sets’ I fancy though (funny to call them that when they so totally aren’t!) and I suspect I’ll be treating the kids to a half term film sub so we can do some family films nights again. I really like that the Now box allows us to use iplayer on our tv, which the AppleTV doesn’t, so that is a huge plus for me and the selection of films was good. We had a tiny bit more trouble with it hanging on our bad internet connection over Xmas than other services we’ve tried but it was minimal and only at peak times. At a £10 set up cost for the box, you can’t beat it really.

Thumbs up from us 🙂

Disclosure: we were sent a NowTV box and goodies for this review. Since we had to dress up as Christmas puddings to earn that right, all views are most certainly our own.

Why you won’t get a word from me.

January 2, 2015 by Merry 5 Comments

I’ve been watching with a vague, perturbed fascination as bloggers sign up to a defining word for the year. I noticed this happening last year too, in lesser numbers. Perhaps it is something like a January ‘Elf on the Shelf’ and it will sweep every manner of social media channel for a while, piling up motivational images and quotes and fueling a right on positivity wave that makes everyone happy, successful, creative and marvellous.

Perhaps everyone will be the happiest mum, with the most successful blog and the most improved photos with the most bestest selling of novels and the top pinned craft post by next year.

That would certainly be a lot of worthy happiness.

I might say I’d worry about the fallout, of the people who pick aspirational words and then measure themselves against everyone else as they sculpt a social media presence to prove how they’ve achieved it.

But to be honest, everyone else isn’t really my problem.

It’s not that I don’t understand, or even admire the sentiment and god knows we should all do whatever works for us. I had years worth of blogging where people repeated “You write about yourself online, for strangers, with your real name??? That’s WEIRD! It’s probably DANGEROUS! WHY????” at me. Years of New Year posts and aspirational planning, navel gazing or positive thinking.

I’ve not changed. I’ve been doing all that over this festive break too. (Not the new year post round up though, I’m rather scared of rocking the boat with those, these days and ending up in despair a year later.)

I’m certainly planning, evaluating, allowing myself the concept of a fresh start. It always feels natural for me to do it now, when the rush of Xmas at work closes down and we can breathe and be together and think about preparing ourselves and the business for the next onslaught. It’s not so much the change of year date that causes it as it being very much part of our rhythm.

I love a fresh start. I hate placing expectations on myself and anything imposed, even psychologically, on me causes an instant fail mechanism to kick in. The minute something external is measuring me, I work out how to fail. It’s a dreadful habit. If I join a diet club I figure out how to cheat so I fail. If I came up with a word, I’d come up with a reason at the end of the year why it didn’t work to me.

One of the girls wrote up a history of her life over the last 4 years the other week and it struck me painfully how almost nothing but Freddie, Bene and surviving have occurred for almost half her life. We’ve had no great amazing adventures. There has been very little fun or innovation or excitement. Nothing memorable but living or dying brothers. I can’t define wanting to change that in a word.

I can’t even define how I want my other blog to be in a word: I managed to say I want a return to “record” and “legacy”.

I’d like to be more meaningful.

I’d like to be doing more than surviving.

I’d like to get some adventure back.

I could sum that up in explore. Or grow. Or climb. Or create. And none of those would be all of it.

I don’t want to dream, I want to do. I don’t want to write, I want to publish. I don’t want to improve, I want to be brilliant. I don’t want to be a survivor, I want to be an inspiration.

I don’t want to publish, I want to publish brilliantly.

I am ready to shine, but I’m lacking the time or head space to do that in a way that I would believe if I did it.

Besides which, I can barely manage a week without one of 5 kids needing me to divert to focus on them and it is hard to believe in shining if mostly you spent the week saving other people from drowning.

No word can define what changes I want to make or aspirations I have to follow.

Success sounds too commercial. I don’t need roots, I need leaves and flowers and to thrive where I am so that I can transplant safely.

I’m bored of dreaming. I’m bored of existing. I’m bored of grey days and managing to stay breathing.

I’d like a little mystery and beauty.

I’d like to stand on top of the hill and say “I did it. I got here.”

I can’t do any of that with a word because there are about 6 people living in this body, all fighting for airspace and none of them believe in the same word. And that before you count the 6 people living in the house with me (all of me) who all need accommodating too. There is probably at least 6 of several of them too.

It’s crowded.

It is plans that work for me. Goals, measurable goals and ideas with a list to be ticked.

January has some simple goals.

Write 7000 more words.
Write a synopsis.
Send it to someone.

I need that out of my system. Either it will work and I’d find someone who thinks I’m worth publishing, or I’ll forget that dream forever.

Read 3 interesting books.
Lose 6lbs.
Run more days than I don’t.

After that, we’ll see. Best to re-evaluate in February. I might be someone else by then.