Well, partly, there has been this thing
called LIFE.
I am now teaching violin again: in
three schools and privately. I run a choir, have started morris
dancing again, have just completed a major rewrite of one novel and
started major rewrite of another. Am mother to three TEENAGERS,
chauffeur to said teenagers, cook and cleaner for said teenagers,
single mother (most of the time as Rupert seems to spend most of his
working hours staying in hotels in Prague and Zurich at the moment)
to said teenagers, sergeant major and counsellor to said teenagers.
Added to that I have a very active dog who needs two hours walking a
day and I have started on a personal mission to consume every last
blackberry in Buckinghamshire. Oh, and there's the gym visits as
well, to counteract the blackberries (and maybe the odd glass of red
along the way).
But the other reason my blog writing
has gone by the wayside is rather more complicated than that.
One of the reasons that I decided to
start writing my blog again, in the middle of last year, was because I
had heard that quite a few people were moving back to England from
Australia. I thought that if there were other families out there
considering the move, it might be interesting for them to read about
how we were going about it.
I would write with complete honesty, I
thought, chronicling our adventures, the ups and downs, the exciting
parts, the boring parts, the parts where we made mistakes, where
things didn't work quite as intended, the parts that went
particularly well. Above all, I would recount it all with the utmost
truth so that people would see what it was really LIKE.
And so I started to write, and almost
immediately, I started to lie.
Because, of course, it's not that
simple.
During those last few months in
Australia, there were times when I looked ahead to moving to England
and was filled with a wild excitement – but I knew that if I said
anything like that, many of my Aussie friends who read my blog would be
mortally offended. On the other hand, if I made too much of my real sadness
about leaving Australia, my English friends and relatives started to
email me and tell me not to come if I was dreading seeing them so
much and besides, David Cameron was just as bad as Tony Abbott!
In those last few months there were
things that happened in both my personal and professional life which
made leaving the country at once more devastating and more of a
relief. And I'm still not going to share them, partly because the
same reasons stand as a year ago, partly because I just enjoy being
mysterious....
And of course it wasn't JUST about me.
The children had issues of their own which impacted the whole family
and which, of course, I could not share either, but which made life
rather more fraught than would have been nice.
Then we came to England and I felt even
more conflicted. There were aspects of being in England that I loved
– I fell in love with the countryside far more than I had ever
expected, it was wonderful to be surrounded by family – even if
they were all making plans to leave England asap (well, two of my
sisters and Rupert's brother were, anyway). But I didn't want to
write too joyfully about being away from Australia – and anyway I
missed my friends there (still do!) desperately and still didn't want
to offend anyone.
The whole process of packing up our
lives and moving our family was physically exhausting – let alone
emotionally. There were weeks when I cried so much I couldn't go out,
or talk to anyone, weeks when I walked out into the countryside and
felt my heart bursting with joy at the beauty around me.
At one point I made a deliberate
attempt at being really honest – after it occurred to me that I was
maybe painting a rather rosy picture of our experiences - I didn't
want people to think that it was all going to be easy and then blame
me if it wasn't! So I wrote a blog about the exasperations of dealing
with uncommunicative councils and banks and school admissions etc,
whilst living in a house we couldn't afford to heat and was promptly
attacked on Facebook for being too self pitying.
So I would sit down at the computer,
shivering in clothes made for an Australian winter, with tears
running down my face because it was months since I'd had a proper
coffee and chat with any friends and write a blog about the beauties of hawthorn blossom instead.
Of course, in the light of the refugee
problems in Europe I can see that I do sound disgustingly,
horrifically self pitying. We are incredibly lucky to be in a
position where we can choose to live in another country just because
we wanted to be closer to our family and think it is better for our
children's prospects. (And doesn't include Tony Abbott, of course.)
Incredibly lucky to step onto a plane and fly over and that's that.
However, knowing that you are lucky doesn't
make you miss friends and dogs any the less, I'm afraid - and I'm not
sure that it should, but that's maybe for another blog post
altogether...
But what I have discovered is that
writing, in a public forum, about your life is one way of becoming
severely conflicted. Or at least, that's how it has been for me. I
would read my own words about hawthorn blossom and wonder if that's how I
really felt? It didn't help that I already felt as thought I didn't know who I was any more. Rupert still had his work, the
kids had their schools, albeit different ones to what they were used to. But
I didn't have any of my pupils, my string quartet, my orchestras, my friends. I couldn't try to get work for a while, because I felt my energies were needed at home. And I wasn't sure if I wanted to play the violin again, wasn't
sure that I would get any work even if I wanted to.
I got to the point when I was afraid that I no longer knew how
much my blog was reflecting my personality and how much my
personality was reflecting my blog.....
….and now it is up to you to work out
how honest this post is and how much of it is just me wanting to be
mysterious again....
*assuming you have noticed - or care
