"Update, update, read all about it ...."

Hello?

Sorry, it's me here...

Yes I know it's been over two years but there are reasons. Maybe not good ones, but reasons nonetheless.

But I'm back, so where were we? Oh yes - trying to create a New Life!

So - how's that working for me?

Pretty good, as it turns out. To be fair, it still looks just like the old life - still ill (thank the peri-menopause for knocking me back five years in my recovery) but, oh, the light at the end of the tunnel is beaming down in all its radiant fullness and I am beaming back.

For instance, I sold four paintings in the summer - big, expensive ones at that - AND got a commission. All in the space of four weeks. Made well over a grand. Yay!

Now I'm not a simpleton - I know that £1200 for two or three months work is pretty pants by today's standards, BUT it is tangible proof that my paintings have value to total strangers - and these people are even willing to part with large sums of dosh to acquire them.

This is validating, edifying, and encouraging to me, and we can all do with a bit of that sometimes.

My lovely hubby Steve finally has a job, which also means that the financial dung heap we were living in is now merely a 'learning experience' fading into memory.

And please don't think me callous but my son has left home, and this has brought about the biggest positive change of all.

Allow me to explain - I ran away from home at 18 going on 12, to escape the life dictated by my parents with many threats and far too little bribery, and eloped to London with a boyfriend, a suitcase and two pounds in my pocket. Seven years later, I managed to get away from the surprisingly abusive and domineering boyfriend, but by then I was a single parent.

Fast-forward to last summer and I'm helping Sam to pack for Uni in Bournemouth. I'm tearful for me and excited for him - thrilled about the opportunities and challenges he is going to face, and wondering how much of a gap his beautiful, sunny energy is going to leave at home.

For the first time, it is just me and his father. Alone. Together. A couple. In the same house, but not as parents anymore.

We seem to have done it backwards because now we are finally having 'our time'.

I am a little scared.

Then Steve's new job takes him away for a few nights at a time, so I am truly alone for the first time in my whole life. I've been alone before, but only as an interlude, a small interruption of my wifely/motherly routine.


This is different.This life stretches out before me as a blank canvas beckoning. There are no calls upon me - I can fill the time entirely as I wish, so I use it to begin discovering myself anew.


It is heady and glorious. I revel in it. I am sickeningly lazy, followed by bursts of ridiculous activity at unaccountable hours of the day and night. I sing Karaoke until two in the morning. I lay in the bath until noon. I eat nothing but battered onion rings for lunch. I drink a whole bottle of Mojitos. I enjoy being me.

I notice that my life suddenly IS new - unprecedented, unexplainable, unexpected.

My husband and I find a new contentment and calm between us. We laugh a lot more. We have far fewer worries. It feels like none at all.

I am fifty-two. It took this long.

Louise Bourgeois said "I have been to hell and back , and let me tell you - it was wonderful"

I know what she means. My 'hell' has made this all the sweeter.

I am still ill. My feet twinge with pain at every step. But I dance on them anyway.