keep in touch

keep in touch

I found myself mulling over these words last night as I put away a couple of cards from work. My job finished on Friday, budget cuts meaning release of all temporary staff. People rooting for nice things to say in the awkwardness:

you’ll be missed

good luck

I will miss your cakes and medication (I always have pain killers in my bag and it did not go unnoticed)

and

Yes there are some people from this workplace where effort will be made to stay in touch now we are no longer in close proximity for 37 hours each week.

Yes some of the keeping in touch is guilt laden because of the manner of release (please let us know where you go next so we don’t feel so bad.)

Sometimes though these three words are tossed carelessly into the air for something to say when we find ourselves at the uncomfortable point of saying goodbye to someone and moving on. Because we don’t know what else to say.

There is one person in my life for whom keep in touch is a diktat. Someone who wants me to do runabout because they want a self-centred need to be fulfilled and this neatly avoids them having to ask for help.

Over the years we have moved around a fair bit so I have encountered a number of farewells. I aim to try and only use keep in touch honestly and not throw it away. But I am sure that in reality when the goodbye moment arrives, there has probably a good deal of word-tossing.

Equally in the awkward, help-stop-this-scene-going-on-forever situations like last Friday in the office I genuinely have no idea what I said in those last minutes as I clocked out for the last time.

PS I am taking a few weeks off in the run up to a close family wedding before resuming a search for new work

a hello

Hello

If you have come to this space via Twitter you won't find much recent writing.

From May 2014 I started reacquainting myself with knitting due to the news that we would become first time grandparents in December 2014 (OK I went a bit OTT because all the patterns I found were so darned cute.) I found a wonderful wool stockist Tangled Yarn who lives just up the road and sells the most divine wools and boom, I was hooked! Not only was it blankets and clothes in minature, but suddenly people were getting scarves as presents (whether they liked it or not.)

Just around the time that grandson was born our daughter announced her engagement. Quite quickly she and fiancee decided to get married sooner than originally planned leaving us with nine months to plan from the beginning of 2015. I volunteered to knit bridal and bridesmaid shrugs and once the patterns were agreed, I have since found myself on a schedule to complete them in time.

So currently creative outlets are knitting, music (leading worship at church at least 2x per month) and photography (mainly grandson though I am also on Instagram as piano_jo ) Worship leading weeks involves several hours of preparation and practice, to-ing and fro-ing with others along with the full time job, blah, blah.

Writing is on the back burner for now but I will be back (my head and those around me need it..)

when a month is a wipe out

This has been a month of protracted sadness, more where the see-saw has been doing its up and down daily work as usual but it has been harder to bounce back out of the down parts. Hard slog and wrestling.

It is fast approaching those two months of the year when the journey to and from work will be in darkness, encompassing each end the light in between while I work the hours at the job which may or may not run into next year.

In the middle years of life I have greater self awareness than ever to know when the sad times are taking over and more self-help tools and other people walking the same walk than ever to deal with them.

I know this month was situational triggered, a small insignificant thing looking at it, which underneath has created currents pulling me helplessly this and that way. I have much to look forward to with the imminent arrival of a grandchild. Right now I fear I will not feel the joy when this happens.

I know I will rise again eventually, life-savers keep hauling me towards the surface. Singing  is restorative in a way that nothing else is (even when as this week others are bantering over the top their preferences on the finesse of presentation.) There was a glorious rainbow end refracting against broody skies last Monday, just a brief vertical show on the day six years after Mum died. Enough to remind me that I am remembered.

I have been quieter on Social Media and more under the radar in life for a while but like a lot of others (either on Social Media or in life) it mostly goes unnoticed unless I say something. Which is mainly awkward (for others when I say something and me when I don't.)

So for those of you who are complicated, quieter and more under the radar than usual...

Yeh darkness is doing its darndest to snuff out the light, but it is always light somewhere else and I am hopeful that sooner or later it will come back again.

a big fat 3 good things

The checkout assistant waited whilst I rummaged through my handbag for my purse. Not surly, gum-chewing impatience, just a quiet, all-the-time-in-the-world patience. As I inserted the credit card in the machine she said ‘You do like butterflies and turquoise don’t you?’ It hadn't even occurred to me that I was all matchy, matchy and I was genuinely impressed with her attentiveness and observation.

This weekend just gone we visited our son and daughter in law for the last time before they move south, taking them and our grandchild-to-be an extra 2.5 hours away. I have mixed feelings about them being so far away but I know they have heard and prayed about the God-whispers calling them into a new chapter of their lives. (And should you southerners not look after our grandchild there will be wigs on the green.)

We attended morning service at the church where D has been working for the past few years. We have been there a few times before and in different contexts. The prompt to recount these things is strong. It feels good to be thankful, but I know in tiredness, vulnerability, and motorway traffic jams, gratefulness will easily evaporate.

*****

26 years ago we attended just the one service in the same church when D was a baby himself. We stayed with the minister and his wife. She observed me with him and suggested I might have depression. She was the first person to ever mention it. Then I had no idea, but now I am grateful to her more than she will know. Young motherhood was one of those pressure points which made the depression rise to the surface. It is not until much more recently that I have accepted depression as part of who I am, not just another sorry episode of failure (except during the tired and vulnerable moments.)

Thankful she noticed.

Much more recently we went to another service at the church as a family, a rare free Sunday when we could all be in the same place with all our grown up children. The speaker was talking about times when money was tight for him and his family, when their children were growing up. Hand-me-down and severely price-slashed winter coats, familiar to ours in the years when we were still a clergy family. 

At the end of the service D turned to me and said to me ‘You gave up a lot so you could spend time with us when we were little and we always had everything we needed’ (Rough translation ‘almighty cock ups notwithstanding I think you did an alright job’ - I’ll take the compliment). I know that whichever way motherhood had been done, stay at home or working, the way would have been littered with mistakes on all sides.

Thankful he noticed.

And on Sunday just gone within those same old stone walls we sang these words:

You are my rock in times of trouble

You lift me up when I fall down

All through the storm, Your love is the anchor

My hope is in You alone

I was overwhelmed with thankfulness at what God has done with, for and through us over the years. In spite of all of us really.

Then Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Shen. He named it Ebenezer saying “Thus far the Lord has helped us” 1 Samuel 7:12

*****

This morning as I left for work a butterfly was gently flexing its wings on the wall by the front door. And then in the revoltingly overcrowded, standing room only train my nose was pressed up against the blouse of the woman in front (unobtrusive evidence and truly honestly not a selfie)

the dogfather (on moving and closing sub-chapters)

On the walk home this evening, clutching my cup of Costa Gingerbread Latte, I passed the local recreation ground. As I did, a man walking a beautiful golden Labrador was just leaving the park and heading for a 4wd vehicle which was labelled‘The DogFather’ and in smaller letters towards the rear ‘dog walking, training and psychology’.

Today we finally gained possession of the keys to our new home and so it has been marked the closing of a sub-chapter of our lives. Over the last few weeks we have mentally been crossing things off on the calendar:

Him – my last commute when all the schools are not on holiday

Me – I tweeted this morning 'Last commute from this station 2day from next week will be an even less glamorous style of cattle wagon but more frequent #looking4positive 

Him – my last crawl through 40 minutes of traffic daily just to get to the motorway

Me – my last Gingerbread Latte from the Costa in the village

The train journey reading today was the final chapters of Rachel Held Evans’ book A Year of Biblical Womanhood. I particularly loved the last part where she looks back on the year with a grateful heart for all the things that have happened and lets those pesky sins that cling, float away downstream with crumbs of challah bread and a grateful heart.

I walked homewards, via the village and my heart similarly filled with gratitude. For what’s gone before and how we have reached this point in our lives. Middle-age (OK and some), having taken a circuitous route, but finally in possession of house keys *\o/*

(O yes and my phone has been vibrating very frequently with likes and comments since I posted the facebook status ‘Keys. We have’. Many friends have willingly prayed, willed, sent good vibes, felt and shared the house-buying pain.)

Inwardly singing my favourite words from Phatfish songs made tears prick my eyes as they often do:

How good it is to be loved by You

I will say of the Lord He is my refuge, I will say of the Lord He is my strength, I will say of the Lord He is my shelter and hiding place

I know for sure, particularly when I am mindful, I can look back and ‘see’ each of these things in and between every little detail along the way. Sometimes it has been hard to see forwards, to know what it’s all for. When solicitors have dragged their feet or 'forgotten' something (apart from their bills.) There have been times of significant debt in the last few years and sleepless nights worrying about that.

And moving into a new home won’t mean we have arrived. Nor will it be our perfect dream home in that all-eggs-in-one-basket manner that they hope for on the tv property programmes.

There will be plenty more curveballs in this life.

There will be days when I forget God’s goodness.

But for me today the DogFather and his strap-line was a particularly apt thing to see just before I turned the last corner and arrived home.