Count down to D day

D for departure. Four more weeks of work to go. I have been in London this week with long days, early morning starts, a roller coaster of commitments and meetings. While I am actually in a meeting or on the phone to someone I can hold on to the sense of doing the job, but when I sit by myself in front of a computer screen I can feel the world of work beginning to fade from me, becoming less distinct, muted, a corridor on the other side of a glass screen where you can see people move but cannot hear their conversations, don't know where they are going.

I arrived home last night tired to my bones, not feeling entirely well and just uncomfortable enough as a result of that not to be able easily to fall into the sleep for which I was longing. I am not good without sleep and I had spent the previous night wrestling with a work problem. I lay looking up into the darkness. Although the curtains were open it was still very dark with that black, thick darkness of the countryside. I a deep sleeper normally. I realised that most of the time that I have lain staring into the darkness over this last year or so I have spent thinking about leaving my job. I have played this over and over in my head here in my own bed in the deep country darkness and on bright full moon nights when I have got up and watched the silver grass for badgers, and in my bed in London in the orange sodium light of the street lamp outside the window. At least I am finished with that now. As I move through these days since I put my notice in I find I am happy, calm, decided, sure about following my course into wherever it takes me. I still get the odd panicked moment, mainly in relation to money. My husband and I have always kept separate accounts, although we have always treated our money as belonging to both of us. How much will I need? Will I have to ask him for money? The phrase "dwindled into a wife" comes from nowhere. God forbid. I push my sudden agitation firmly back into its box. We will sort it out. We always have done. Let it go. Wait and see.

So today I am home. My friend has been for lunch. She has just gone back to work teaching part time after eight years or so of being at home. We chat about her new job as we eat spicy carrot soup and the soda bread which I made this morning. She is loving the engagement with the wider world, being herself again, not a wife or a mother but the lady who teaches Chinese. Again my stomach flips and I have to remind myself that I can be here as much or as little as I want. I am not withdrawing from the world, just from my London life. I am blessed with the luxury of choice. She disappears to pick her children up from school. Suddenly I wish mine were still at school. That mothering part of life is so all consuming when you are living it and when it has gone it has gone so completely. The fire burns, drawing softly, crackling, a log turning into the flame. I am here, now, not ten years ago, not in the unseen future.

And how exciting, not to know what comes next.

A blogging friend of mine, Cait, is in the habit of counting her blessings. Here are mine for today:

I am here. I heard at work this week that a friend who was diagnosed with cancer on Christmas Eve died at the weekend and that another colleague who has been free from throat cancer for three years has been told he has secondaries in his lungs and his spine. I mourn one of them. I am overwhelmed for the other. There is no rhyme or reason to my good fortune but I am here, still.

I have the astonishing luxury of choice. After a lifetime of working because there was no other way to raise my children I have a husband who is prepared to say "If you want to do this, do it. We'll be ok." That is another extraordinary good fortune.

I have him. I have our children and my parents and wider family.

I live in a place of extraordinary beauty.

There are snowdrops.

And how exciting, not to know what comes next.

Changing my life

I have done it now. I have put my notice in. I have no job to go to and no immediate plans to find one. What kind of idiot puts their notice in during a recession? I am surrounded by people at work worrying about redundancy and I know some people who have already been made redundant and who are coping with the knocked sideways shock of it all. I feel almost guilty for walking away from a job in these circumstances but I am doing so, and it is not even a job I hate.

Work has been a huge part of my life for the last twenty years or so. When my first marriage failed I had to earn some money so I was pushed back into the world of work when my children were quite small. I remember vividly going into Manchester for an interview, wearing my pre-children work clothes, feeling like a child dressing up, and finding that walking along the pavement in my high heels with no push chair in front of me felt strangely naked and vulnerable, as if my children were my protection. But work was a help, a structure for the day, scaffolding which supported me when my foundations were still shaky, something I was good at. I vowed then that I would never be financially dependent on anyone ever again.

As my children got older I worked harder and longer. I married again and my husband was massively supportive, taking over vast swathes of home life along with his own job so I could work away and climb the ladder. I have had a lot from work: purpose, expertise, clout, money, intellectual challenge and great company. It has been my own thing where I have been nobody's daughter, wife or mother, just me, operating on my ability, sometimes high on adrenalin, making my mark. Sometimes it has made me sick, with worry or literally, and often it has made me guilty, especially when my children were younger and nothing was ever enough, either at work or at home. But it has been, with my family, the focus of my energy for a very long time.

I am still not 100% sure I am doing the right thing in walking away. The process of re-evaluation though has been going on a long time, since 2004 in fact. In that year my elder daughter discovered that she had an ovarian growth. She was twenty four, young, beautiful, in love, living in London and doing a ferociously low paid job that she loved. She needed an operation and I was in the midst of the last push to the highest aspiration in my job. I wanted to be with her so I jumped off the conveyor belt, took some unpaid leave and, when I went back, resolved to cut down from the frantic travelling and sixty/seventy hour weeks that had been my norm. She was fine, her lump was benign and the time with her was precious. I cut down to four days and the following year we moved to Wales to fulfil a long held wish to live out of the city.

We had only been here for about three weeks when I became ill myself (there is a blog about it further down the sidebar somewhere which was a way of writing the experience out of me). Life was turned upside down. This too was an ovarian growth. When after six months or so I emerged shakily on the other side I had the profound sense of having been given a tap on the shoulder: "Hey, you, weren't you f***ing listening the last time?" Not rational, I know, I know.

So I reduced my hours to half time, determined to find the time to do other things, to garden and write and spend time with my much loved parents while they are healthy and energetic enough for the time to be a pleasure for us all, not waiting until they are crumbling and so am I.

And I have done other things. I have made the very beginnings of trying to create a garden out of hill and stone and rough grass, scratching so much at the surface that it would barely be visible to anyone but me. I have started to learn Welsh but am still not even in the foothills, just trundling along the approach road. I have devoted a day a week to looking after my grandson, now nearly three, not always loving it as I have never been great with babies and very small children, but gradually finding real satisfaction in slowing my pace right down, sitting on the floor, playing the same games and reading the same stories and knowing that this is special for him.

But it is hard to do a job which is a 100% job with a determination to give it only 50% of one's time. It has become harder and harder to feel that I am doing a first rate job and that matters to me. I have swung from allowing it to take over and to begin to eat up my time and energy again and pushing back fiercely, knowing that I will not be true to myself if I don't spend time on non-work things, doing them properly with just as much commitment as any job. When I leave my hillside I rarely want to go, however good it is when I get there, and in fact if it weren't for staying with my younger daughter when I am in London it would sometimes be nearly intolerable to leave. Seeing her gives me a personal reward for being away from home and stopping doing that will be a real loss in stopping work.

So I am going to stop. What will I do? I don't know yet. Some more of the same: gardening, yoga, Welsh, family. Something new: I am to be treasurer of the Blackden Trust, a blog in itself. Something else.

Sometimes you just have to hold your nose and jump in.

Dear God, I hope it will be ok.

February 3rd

Astonishingly January has gone. I have always tried to hold onto the idea of February as the very beginning of spring, partly because I begin to long for warmer weather, for bulbs and lambs and catkins on the trees. However both Karen and Weaver tell me that Candlemas, which was yesterday, 2nd February, is the halfway point between the winter and the spring solstice and so, in truth, the dead of winter.

That is certainly how it feels today. The snow was deep enough to make getting up our track look an impossibility this morning even for the 4x4. We did manage to get in last night, leaving our other car in the village and making our way home through dark and driving snow, tentatively nudging up our icy hill in the Suburu. The house was cold but sprang to life with a fire in the stove, the oven on, the old oil boiler noisily churning out heat. Arriving home in the dark it was impossible to tell anything other than that the hill and the hedges, just seen in the headlamps, were heavy with snow. We woke this morning to a white world, beautiful, cruelly cold in the wind, immaculate.

Ian saw to the stunned and umimpressed chickens whose water was frozen solid. They were not interested in being out in this white world and hurried back into the house to squabble on the perch. I filled the birdfeeders in the little quince tree. My footsteps were hard and clear an hour or two ago but the wind is whirling and eddying the fallen snow, softening the outline like meringue which is not yet ready to hold its shape. Perhaps by tomorrow the footprints will have gone.
Last week I had been inspecting the snowdrops down by the bottom of the wall, growing in clumps of glaucous green leaves amongst tiny primroses. Today most have disappeared under the snow. The primroses are completely hidden but here and there one or two snowdrops droop, no longer the whitest thing in the garden.
The hedges in the cottage garden have hats of snow. I know you are supposed to knock snow off trees and shrubs and hedges so that the weight doesn't cause branches to bow and break but I don't think this is enough to give these hedges a problem.


So today feels like a strange stolen day. I have not gone to London, Ian has not been able to go to work. Cities and roads seem like another world, everything shrunk down not even to the valley but to this old house, tucked under the hill, doing its age old job of providing shelter against the worst of the weather. It is strange to think that this has been happening here for four hundred years. I wonder if it will stand for another four hundred.