Staying home with a poorly child

This week, four out of five of my family have had a horrid fluey, achey, coldy, coughy bug. That's everyone except me. They had it in succession, like dominoes.

What is a normal expectation of an employer, regarding a parent with an ill child? It seems to me that it's such a grey area. I looked in our staff handbook, and it was a little vague, talking about responsibilities for dependants, and if time off was needed, to please try and give as much notice as possible. Yeah, right. Like flu bugs come along on a schedule.

I just don't know what is reasonable to expect these days. Is it standard practice, would you say, that a parent can phone up in the morning and take a day's sick leave to look after an ill child, as if they were ill themselves? Is it standard practice that they can phone up the next day and take another day? How many days in a row would be accepted without raised eyebrows?

I feel I'm pretty conscientious. As it turned out, I needed only to be at home for two days. I split one of the days with Husband, working in the morning and coming home at lunchtime. The other day, I went in first thing and picked up work I could do at home. It just so happened that one of the days I was off was a particularly bad day to be off. But these things happen, and I feel I really tried my best. I was in the workplace as much as I reasonably could be, and I made good use of the time when I had to be at home (actually, I would say I was more efficient than usual, but the whole working-at-home debate is for another day). I have been left, however, with indications that I was at the limit of what was acceptable.

I clearly need to talk about this with my manager, and I do have my annual review next week, which is a good forum because we can talk about the policy and practice, rather than one specific incident. The culture of the organisation isn't particularly family-friendly, but I hadn't been aware of quite how family-unfriendly it is. I've just been lucky that we've had a pretty healthy time since I've been in the job, and when a child has been ill, either Husband has been able to stay at home, or the child has been old enough and well enough to stay on their own with frequent texts to make sure that they are ok. (I didn't like doing that, but I guess I picked up the culture fairly quickly and realised that I had to save my credits for when I really needed them.)

I would like the process to work on trust. As I say, I feel I went out of my way to continue as best I could. However, I sense that I might be coming from a very different angle to my manager, and that's why I would like a few opinions on what is standard practice these days. Or does it vary hugely? I'm interested to know.

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Notes on a notebook

Nappy Valley Girl asked me, in her comment on my last post, if I always write blog posts in a notebook, and the answer is no. I rarely do so. I usually type them on the computer. I do, however, have notebooks that I used for writing at the time when I was blogging a lot. I didn't use them very much, so there's not a lot in them, but there are a few half-written posts, or thoughts scribbled down for future mulling over.

I kept one in the car, in the driver's door pocket, a big A4 size one, hardback, and sometimes I'd write when I was waiting to pick up a child, or killing time in a car park for some other reason (looking at you, soccer training). There were others that I took on journeys, A5 size, travel handbag size. There's a really nice leather-bound one, which I remember initially feeling was rather too nice to write in at all! Notebooks were for blogging on the go. This was in the days before smart phones (though I find it really hard to write more than a very short email on a phone, so that wouldn't have helped).

Then there was this little notebook, the one from which I was copying out my last post. It's mobile-phone-sized, and lovely to look at. (Sorry, not a very good photo.)

I have a soft spot for this one. It's not mine; it belongs to Husband. It was a present from a friend of ours, when I was diagnosed with cancer. She gave it to him, saying that he should take it along when accompanying me to medical appointments. It would be helpful to write a list of questions in advance, and to note down what the doctor said. She was so right on both counts. What a very kind, thoughtful, and practical present.

I came across the notebook last week when I was looking for one to take to a work meeting that I was going to from home. It was too small and flowery to be suitable for that, but I started leafing through it. It tells the story of those very intense few weeks, mostly in Husband's handwriting. There's a careful list of phone numbers (how many kind people rallied!). There are 'To Do' lists, including one titled "Thurs Eve", which must have been for the day I had my mastectomy, judging by the things on it (three phone calls to make, feed hamster, and e-mail friends/family). There are a few pages ruled into sections to make a diary, with notes of places the children had to be, and if someone was going to pick them up. I like the entry that reads "J will collect at 9am - go to donuts and then the zoo". I bet that was a fun day for them! There is a list of questions, in my handwriting this time, about Kindergarten - I'd obviously felt the need to send Husband along to an open evening suitably briefed. ("What writing do they teach, and in what grades? Cursive? Sports? How many times a week do they do PE? Music? Other non-American children? Homework? Playground - have a look.") There are lists of questions for doctors, and hastily scribbled answers -  the lists that the notebook was intended for. Lists that give me a bit of a jolt when I read them. Lists that contain "pain meds, steroids, nightmares, can I expect similar pattern next time?" And then there are my thoughts on blogging and writing, that you saw in my previous post. I don't remember where or when I wrote those. I know it was a few months later, because it comes after another, jollier, list, one planning a child's birthday party ("no 2 o'clocks available, balloons $12 doz, hot dogs or pizza, tell Jeanne 2.30 - 4.15").

Remember the idea of a notebook. It's a lovely thing to give someone going through a medical crisis, should you find yourself wondering what to give a friend in that situation.

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If there's one fictional character I've never liked...

I've started a new job. It's exhausting, isn't it? All those new people, all those new systems, all that tacit knowledge that everyone else has that you don't. And the pressure imposed by the need to appear competent, not to mention well-dressed, cheerful, pleasant, and... most important to this story... consistently alert.

It was Week Three that it happened - the moment that both Miranda and Bridget Jones would be proud of. Or not proud of. I'd had a busy morning. I'd gone shopping at lunchtime. I don't drink caffeine any more. It was the low spot of the afternoon. I had a one-to-one training session on the database with a colleague. The database... From 3.00pm to 5.00pm... In a warm, airless office... My colleague was showing me how to do lots of clever things, and there wasn't much interaction. I was mostly just watching the screen. Asking the occasional question. Trying to be consistently alert (see above).

I nodded off. Only for a few micro-seconds, probably, but who knows? Felt like a few minutes. As I woke up, for some unknown reason, I opened my mouth and said "Henry". I must have been dreaming, of English monarchs, or hoovers. In the split second where I realised that (a) I was awake, (b) I had been asleep, (c) one shouldn't fall asleep in the office, when a colleague is demonstrating the database, particularly when one is new, and (d) I'd just randomly said "Henry" out loud, my brain went into "save, save, save" mode, and I uttered the following:

"Henry... Horrid Henry... Horrid Henry... would be a name we could use if we wanted to set up a dummy record. For training purposes. On the database. Horrid Henry. Would be a good choice of name."

Then, failing to recall the great "stop digging" advice that is universally helpful, I kept on going.

"I was just having a clear out of my children's old books at the week-end, and there were lots of Horrid Henry books, so that's why his name is in my head. Actually, I've never liked the Horrid Henry books, so I was really pleased to be chucking them out, but the name must have stuck in my head. So we could use it. If we wanted to set up a dummy record. Just a thought."

(The bit about sorting out children's books was based on truth, actually.) I don't know whether my colleague was half asleep too, or just terribly polite. Perhaps she had already concluded I'm odd and was merely adding this latest piece of evidence to the picture. She seemed to be valiantly ignoring my jibberings, and continuing to stare at the screen, clicking away at search functions. I left the room, on the pretext of going to make a cup of tea, and as I did so, my brain woke properly, by degrees, until I realised that, irony of ironies, I hadn't actually uttered "Henry" out loud, or anything else for that matter. I'd just sort of dreamt I was doing so, in that half-awake, half-asleep, head-jerking-up moment.

The subconscious. It has a lot to answer for.

If there's one fictional character I've never liked, it's Horrid Henry. And now I like him even less.

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It's been a while

OK, so yes, it's been a while.

Husband has had a kidney stone for the past month. The treatment has been patchy. At first it was incredibly good and quick, enabling us to rave about the NHS and feel smug about how great it seems compared to all the health insurance wrangles involved any time you're ill in America. Then the machine which they need to zap it (lithotripsy, if you're interested) broke down, or the scanner did, or something, and they haven't been able to get it repaired for over a week. (And it's the only one in Scotland.) That doesn't sound too long, until you know that renal colic caused by a kidney stone on the move is said to be the nearest a man gets to experiencing the pain level of childbirth. Luckily it comes and goes, and has gone more than come, but Husband has been on painkillers for a month, which have left him washed out and half his usual self.

I've been applying for new jobs and have got one. You know how demanding a process that can be. There was one week where I had a job interview each morning on three consecutive mornings. It began to feel like I had a new job, and the job was doing interviews! And then there were second interviews, and every time, they picked a day which is a day I work (only 2 of them in a week, so what are the odds?) which is horrible, because you end up fibbing. I don't like fibbing, and I'm not good at it. I particularly don't like pretending in a vague way that I'm off work because my husband has a hospital appointment when he doesn't. Anyway, I got one of the jobs, and so I'm working out my notice. Hurrah. I haven't been in a happy place for months. You know it's time to move when.... oh, but I'm not going to share all my baggage on the internet, because we all know how that ends.

Two things I have discovered about myself in the past month or two.

1) When I'm in an unhappy situation, my shadow side comes to the fore. I really can be quite gossipy and bitchy, and even as I open my mouth and some of the stuff comes out to colleagues, I listen to myself and think "What are you like? I can't believe you're saying these things?" I guess we all have areas of ourselves to work on, and this is obviously one of mine. There are plenty of extenuating circumstances; it really has been very aggravating and personal. Nonetheless, I do not like this version of myself. When I go, I feel I want to leave a note on my chair saying "I'm a nice person really".

2) I am strangely motivated by the thought of saving 5p. Scotland has recently introduced a compulsory 5p charge for a carrier bag. Shops aren't allowed to give them out free any more. The 5p's go to charity. All in all, it's a good scheme. A very good scheme. I have found it intriguing to see how incredibly annoyed I am with myself if I forget to take bags with me when I go shopping, and how I will cram purchases into one single bag instead of splashing out 10p on two bags. I stuff items into my pockets, or handbag, or make my accompanying child carry them. It's not that I resent spending the money - it all goes to good causes, and it's cutting down the amount of plastic in landfill, and what the heck, it's only 5p. It's also quite good at making you decide how much shopping you're going to do in advance of arriving at the shop, which is a good discipline. I'm all in favour or it. I just get very cross with myself when I forget my bags. I now have various stashes of bags in the car, and a couple of those ones that scrunch up into the size of a handkerchief and live in a little wallety thing.

And finally...

10-yo, too, has written a blog post, having been away from her Harry Potter blog for a spell (geddit?). No comments yet, so if any of you would like to read about a day at the Warner Brother Studios, then please do head over here (and if you're thinking of going to the Warner Brother Studios, then do - it's a great day out).

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Seven years on; two years back; five years out

Well, life trots on, doesn't it? This blog started off, in May 2007, seven years ago for heaven's sake, as the witterings of a lonely expat Brit mother, deep in the heart of the Midwest, trying desperately to make sense of her new environment, and heartily grateful for every other expat blog, and every other parent blog, which made her feel not alone. We called writers of parent blogs "Mummy Bloggers" in those days, and I seem to remember I used to put a hyphen in "expat". Things change...

What I'd never really thought, until I read this post, was that I was one of a small number of women, who got the whole Mummy Blogging thing going in the UK. It was pretty well established in the US, but I guess I was part of the small wave that traversed the Atlantic. I feel a bit proud of that.

I haven't really kept up with the great surge that that small wave became. Blogging for me was always about writing, and the social media side of things didn't really appeal. I'm now having to get to grips with social media, as I'm in charge of "Commmunications" in my job. I've been saying for this first year that fundraising has got to be my priority, and that's right. There'll be nothing to communicate about, unless the money comes in and the salaries are paid. However, I'm thinking that in time, I can get myself off on a few training courses, and maybe develop a new interest and expertise. The organisation's website is hosted on Wordpress, and though I've never used Wordpress myself, my experience in blogging has given me a definite headstart there. If nothing else, it means I can talk to our lovely volunteer who is revamping it, without sounding too totally ignorant.

Life, as I said, trots on. I'm now two years back from my expat adventure. I always think it takes two years to settle in a place - especially if you have children and are bound into the school year. The first year, everything is new and you feel like an outsider, and it's all a huge effort. Life is exhausting, just trying to be in the right place at the right time, with the right child, and armed with the right equipment. Because you're trying to make friends, you're having to be super-friendly all the time. Yes, it's tiring. Then the second year is much easier. You're no longer the newbie. The new newbies don't know if you've been there one year or ten. To them, you're just part of the fabric, and so you begin to feel so. There's still that sense of newness though - this year it's become a sense of relief, that you know what to expect at each event you go to, each thing in the school calendar. You won't be the person in jeans, when everyone else has dressed up. But that sense of relief is in itself a signal that you're still a bit new. It's a detachment, as if you're looking on yourself from outside the action, reflecting "this is better than last year, because last year I was new, and now I'm not so new". I always think that it's the third year when you feel properly settled, because you stop stepping back and analysing. You're just getting on with your life.

But here I am, in blogging indulgence as ever, by which I mean that blogging always allows you that stepping back and analysing. Two years back... Yes, we're settled here, and I don't miss my life in the US any more. Just occasionally, like when we were driving through Normandy on holiday, and it was so flat, and the way the light looked and felt as evening drew on, at the edge of the flatness, made me think of the Midwest, and our long road trips there. But it feels like a memory now, not a loss.

The other milestone that I've passed this summer is that I'm five years out from my cancer diagnosis. That really feels odd. When you're going through the treatment, the idea of being five years out seems like a long-distant mirage in the desert. Life will be all well, if only you can reach it. Well, it's not quite like that. For me, approaching the five years made me rather agitated and churned up. I found a thickening around my mastectomy scar, which I went and got checked out, and which was nothing. It's probably been there for most of the five years! But of course that was quite an anxious process to go through. The doctor was so nice and kind, though. I asked him whether other people get panicky in the run-up to the five years anniversary, and he said, yes, it was very common. He gave me the impression that his diary is littered with women finding unnerving lumps and bumps, just as they approach that five year point. It's always so reassuring to know one is normal!

I've got an appointment later in the autumn, to assess what medication is best for me, and I'm not relishing that prospect. It's so long since I've had to make decisions about cancer, and it's often a trade-off: side effects of medication versus percentage risks of not taking it - those kinds of things. It always used to give me that feeling of "But I didn't want cancer in the first place!", and though I'm not in the same place emotionally now, I'm guessing those feelings can come flooding back.

However, I'm making it sound all a bit negative, and it really isn't. I do think that coming through cancer has given me a bigger zest for life, and an ability to tap into a well of joy that sits deep within me. Is this what people call "faith"? It was always there, but I can access it much more quickly now. And because life is full of joy and hope and is to be celebrated, I'm having a big party in the autumn, when I turn 50. It'll be a birthday party, and a thanksgiving. It's going to be a ceilidh, so there'll be dancing. Also curry, puddings, and wine. The guest numbers are a little out of control, but I'm in exuberant mode. I'm celebrating!

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How to get things over the Atlantic: people and money

Well, our American friends did make it. They had two nights on the West Coast instead of four, which was a shame, but then we had a lovely few days together here. Lovely.

Speaking of the difficulty of getting things over the Atlantic, I don't think I ever told you about the woes of getting our money over, when we sold our house in America. It's a bad enough feeling to be paying a monthly mortgage on a house which isn't shifting, but when you've finally sold it, have been to the American Consulate to sign all the papers in front of a notary, and spent an anxious day waiting for the confirmation email from your realtor, the last thing you want to find is that you can't get your money over to join you. That's a very bad feeling.

Before we left the US, we checked with the Bank of America (with whom we'd had a current account for 5 years) how we would get our money over into our UK account. Oh, no problem, they said. Hah. What they hadn't told us was that we would spend hours and hours... and hours... trying to work out how to transfer a large sum of money abroad. Hours spent online, and hours spent on the phone, getting through all their security systems, and trying to speak to an actual human, and then indeed speaking to an actual human or two, before finally admitting defeat. I suppose, to be fair to them, as a bank, you're always setting up systems which have to juggle ease of customer use against security. A tough balancing act. I'm trying to be fair-minded here. The last thing I would have wanted is for someone else to have nabbed that money. However, I have to say that the last straw wasn't the hours of frustration (at least a full working day...), but the fact that ultimately we couldn't even do it - I don't like being ultimately thwarted. It also rankled that we'd taken steps to check in advance, and had been assured there'd be no problem.

I can't even remember all the details, but I do recall that the bank wanted to send us a security code by mobile phone. The mobile phone had to be a US mobile phone. We, of course, didn't have one by that stage. We were working on some cunning plan whereby we gave the number of a friend's mobile phone in the US, and then they emailed us the code, and then we phoned the bank, but there was some reason why we couldn't do that - I can't remember exactly. Foiled again! Whenever we found some possible way, there was always a ceiling which was a few thousand pounds, and having sold a house, we needed a higher ceiling than that. We must have been desperate, because I remember at one point working out with Husband what would be the cost of getting the money out of a cashpoint till in the UK, little by little, over weeks, using our Bank of America debit card. Not a great option, and we worked out it would be hugely expensive.

What we did in the end was to set up an account with a company that specialises in money transfer. It felt a bit risky, but Husband did lots of research online, and the reviews seemed ok. World First worked fine for us. It didn't have that nice, solid, big institution feel to it that Bank of America did, but I guess we're the last generation who will feel emotionally drawn to that kind of big bank for safety. Those big institutions have really let the consumer down over the past decade or so, and they're going to have a lot of competition from people like World First, who we found to be very customer-focused and efficient.

Travelex is another foreign currency exchange company who specialise in international money transfers. I have no direct experience of Travelex, but if you're on the learning curve that we had to climb up, then do yourself a favour and take a short cut. Read some reviews, have a look at some expat chat forums. These new, lean, internet-based companies have a lot to offer the expat.

Disclaimer: For writing this post, I received a small payment from Travelex. The views are my own.
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Planes, Trains and Automobiles

Spare a thought for some American friends of ours. They are people we knew when we lived in the Midwest, really special friends (don't want to be too gushy here). They made it over to see us, and tour round Scotland a little last year. This year, they are going to Spain, but stopping off in Scotland again for a few days en route. Or so they thought...

Their story really is like that film. You know the one. Steve Martin trying to get home for Thanksgiving, and the journey being full of just about every twist and turn imaginable.

Our friends (parents, travelling with a 9 year old and a 7 year old) were going to arrive at Edinburgh airport at 8.00am yesterday. I was going to meet them, spend the morning with them, help them turn round, hire a car, and see them on their way. They were going off to Girvan on the west coast for 4 nights, coming back on Sunday, to spend 5 nights in Edinburgh, seeing us, before heading off to Spain. Just to recap, they were due to arrive at Edinburgh airport at 8.00am yesterday. They are currently in the departure lounge at Atlanta airport.

1. Their flight schedule (via Chicago) was randomly changed, pushing it 12 hours later, which they were notified about by electronic voice message over the phone. Frustrating, but not too bad, as it was actually a better flight schedule (via Dallas). 
2. Storms over the Midwest meant that their new schedule was badly disrupted. They were re-booked (via Chicago).
3. Randomly, the one connecting flight to take them from their city to Chicago was cancelled. Not a weather issue (the storms were over), no explanation given. It was the only flight cancelled that day. Just random. They were rebooked (via Atlanta).
4. They contacted me from Atlanta airport. The plane pushed back from the stand, but encountered some problem in one engine. They sat for 3 hours while mechanics worked on it. They then disembarked, and are now sleeping on the floor of the departure lounge. 

With luck, they'll make it to Heathrow this evening, in time to get a flight to Edinburgh. But they may well have to spend the night at Heathrow and come up tomorrow instead. That will represent a delay of 48 hours. Yes, you read that right: 48 hours. Instead of spending 4 nights in a cottage in Girvan, it will be 2. Though luckily, this whole sorry saga won't have eaten into the time that we will be spending with them, which would have been much more tragic.

Not so much Planes, Trains and Automobiles, as Planes, Planes, Planes. Spare them a thought.
 

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I think you'll be surprised

First off, thank you all so much, you fabulous peoples, for all the gems of advice. Pure gold, it all was. What I really want to do, is to move you all in here, so that you're on hand for any future dilemmas I may have. You wouldn't all fit, what with us not having a spare room, let alone 15 of them. I'm thinking I might buy a big property down the road, and you could all go and live there. I'd call it "The Advice Shack", and I'd pop round every time I needed a decision on anything. I could hire out your services to cover costs: "Top Notch Advice for All Life Situations". On the other hand, you probably would miss your families, and maybe this doesn't look to you like a job opportunity that you can't resist. OK. Stand easy. You can stay where you are, and I'll just tap into The Advice Shack in a cyber way. Probably simpler all round.

Well, peoples, I stayed. I did. I stayed. I rather surprised myself, and reading back that last blog post, it does sound as if I was pretty much on my way out already. However, I was glad to have 10 days or so before I had to make the decision, and I just hung loose. I kept deliberately putting the conscious decision to one side. Every time my rational self wanted to pick it up and get it sorted and tick it off the list, I would tell her to put it down and leave it alone. I'd done all the listing out of the pros and cons, so I tucked that information away in my head, and used it as a background to pottering on, doing the job, and trying to see which way the path would lead.

I can't explain why I stayed, because I'm not entirely sure. I think, when it all came down, I had a strong feeling that having something outside the school, something mine, something that might lead on to other somethings, was more important to me than I'd realised.

The meeting at which I had told my employers that I was applying for other jobs, and discussed options, was extremely annoying. I felt patronised, unappreciated, voiceless. (At one point, I said the following: "I've been in this room for 15 minutes, and I haven't finished more than 2 sentences. PLEASE would you let me say what I want to say." for yes, I do work with people who can talk at me for 15 minutes without pausing, and then interrupt me when I open my mouth.) I came home furious, and it took me a couple of days to calm down. But I did calm down, and Husband said "You've got a great offer on the table. I couldn't quite understand why you were so angry at being offered totally flexible holidays..." Having calmed down, I realised that I do like fundraising (bits of it, anyway), and that no job is perfect. I did think that I ran the risk of being a little bored and  isolated in the Library Assistant job, and though, of course, jobs are always what you make them, my gut feeling was that in a year or two's time, I'd regret the choice. A shrinking of horizons.

A boarding school can be a rather intense bubble, and I tried to imagine what it would feel like, sitting at the library desk six mornings a week (yes, six... Saturday morning school included), when Husband or one of the children has got involved in some wrangle or other, and I imagined it could feel claustrophobic. My current job is two days a week, and then I can walk away. Arrangement of hours can be quite a significant factor, I think, and I don't underestimate the freedom I have at the moment to fit my job round my life, rather than the other way round.

Those elements were important, but I also had a deep-down sense that I just wanted to win this battle. Something gritty inside was telling me that I do have a bit of a pattern of leaving difficult work situations, instead of working through them, and, while I wouldn't have sacrificed family happiness or the chance for an easy life for that gritty something, nonetheless, I did listen to it, and the more I listened to it, the grittier it became. It felt like I'd turned some kind of corner. Perhaps it was that moment when I told someone to shut up and listen to me, or perhaps it was that over the following week, I found a way of working that was ballsily focused on making my own job a success, rather than worrying about other people's situations or the future of the organisation, or perhaps it was that I had in writing an acknowledgement of what I'd been saying for months about the fundraising target. (Yes, ballsily is a word.) Anyway, I felt the corner I'd turned was an important one. I'd done a lot of leg-work in a new job situation, creating order out of the chaos that I'd inherited (my predecessor lasted 7 weeks, and then there'd been a long gap), carving out my role, making sense of it all, developing a workable strategy - I didn't want to waste it all. I stayed, and I'm glad I did.

A rather odd thing has been happening. I've found that I've been treated with more respect than before. I've been listened to (just about...), appreciated, supported, and my judgement backed. In return, I've tried hard not to close down defensively quite as quickly (though who likes being talked at without pause?). This week I'm about to pull off (here's hoping) a large funding coup. If successful, it will make a big difference to the organisation, but more than that, I feel that in the process of working on it in its final stages, collaboratively with certain individuals, important things have shifted. A colleague said to me "I think you've been an agent for change in the organisation", which was a nice thing to say, and yes, I think probably true.

That's all got a bit touchy-feely hasn't it? The other factor that's helped is that I've booked 6 weeks off, through July and August (not the entirety of the school holidays, but good enough, and to work the other 3 was my choice), and now I feel I can look forward to enjoying the summer, whereas before, I was looking on it as something to be got through.

So, till next time in The Advice Shack...

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Aaaaaarrrrggghhh

Promise me there's light at the end of this mother-of-teenagers tunnel...

Is there?

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Close to home

I don't know how to write this post. I don't know what to say.

I live a mile and a half away from that boy's home. His front door is a mile and a half from mine. I searched my garden and garage. I joined the hundreds of volunteers, silently, slowly walking in a straggling line, eyes on the grass. I'd walked my dog exactly there on Wednesday afternoon, just hours before the story broke on Thursday.

People talk about community spirit, and I went along, thinking I could do my bit. What I hadn't realised, was how completely emotionally involved I would get. I haven't been able to stop thinking about that little boy. His face haunts me. I want to cry all the time. I've been horrible to my own children, and then wanted to cry again, for having been so horrible. I might have said "What do you mean, you won't eat a banana, when there's a little boy who's out there somewhere, lost and alone, and maybe dead? How can you make a fuss about a banana?" I might have said that. It didn't help. Him, or us.

I don't know why geography matters. These days, shouldn't we all feel connected to each other? What's the difference between a child missing here, and child missing anywhere else? I'm not part of the immediate community. In a city, a mile and a half takes you across maybe a couple of localities. When the media says he was from a "close-knit community", I wouldn't consider myself part of that one. All I know is that geography matters. Even today. I've been swept up in this in a way I couldn't have foreseen.

He lived a mile and a half away. His front door was a mile and a half from mine.

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Happy New Year - and may it be a slow, long one

I've had a lovely Christmas, with a long break off work, and time spent with family and friends. Drank mulled wine. Ate mince pies and cream. Salvaged a turkey that was in the oven for 3.5 hours before I noticed that the oven was on a grill setting (and a low grill setting at that).

But it's also been the Christmas when I've struggled with one of the after effects of having had cancer, one which seems to be getting worse as time goes by. I find it very hard to put into words, and the best I can do is to say that it's the opposite of what I wrote about in this post. But it's vaguer. I can't put my finger on it. If I was making a film, I'd have myself looking in a mirror, stretching out a finger to trace my features, and then the image in the mirror dissipating into vapour, with a mocking laugh as she disappeared.

It boils down to a re-figuring of the shape of life, in terms of time. That happens as we get older, and we all struggle with it. You can tell that by the ridiculous way we are constantly surprised by the normal steady beat of time. We express amazement when another year passes by. When we have a birthday or anniversary that ends in a 0, we say "how can that be?" In our hearts, we're all 23 year olds. We bore the children of our friends by talking about how they've grown. Of course they've grown! Duuh! It would be odd if they hadn't. Somehow we all feel we're fighting against the passage of time. Perhaps when you've had cancer, that rational knowledge - the clock is ticking and life is finite - passes into lived experience. I don't like it.

What's changed for me is that a little note of urgency has been added. It's only little. It's imperceptible most of the time. But it's there. And it's got a grim irony, because the more you feel you need to be making the most of time and holding onto it, the more time slips away from you.

I find it hard to relax. I plan things, and they're nice, and I do them, and then I want to move on to the next thing. Perhaps I want to create that memory, tick that box, and then make sure I get on with the next one. You never know how many boxes will fit into the timeline, and you want to get as many of them ticked off as possible.

I find it hard to be in the moment. This is a modern day complaint, isn't it? I'm sure many of you will identify with this. I read articles on Mindfulness, and I totally believe in the value of it. But I can't do it. (So please don't leave me any handy hints in the comments.) I'm always thinking about what needs to get done. I have a false sense that when I've done everything, then I'll be able to relax and smell the roses. But I know that I'm never going to get to the bottom of the list. It's not even a real list, where I can tick things off. It's just a ghostly feeling of a list, that's always there. I've had periods of my life, long ones, where I've understood that you don't wait to smell the roses, that the roses are all there along the way releasing their sweet perfume if you'll only understand that the point is to smell them as you go. But at the moment, I can't seem to do that.

I build time into my life in positive ways. I go to yoga once a week, I walk the dog, I have hot baths, I spend regular time with people who energise me. But I still feel the tightness of the Time Thief on my back. He feels like he's got a large clothes peg, which he puts over the vertebra at the bottom of my neck. It hoicks my shoulder blades up and in. That peg seems to be there, and tighter, more and more.

I once picked up a leaflet which talked about the after-effects of cancer. On the list of after-effects it mentioned "a fore-shortened sense of life". It was such a relief to read that. Yes. Those words summed it up perfectly. It's always such a moment of comfort and sustenance to feel "I'm not the only one - this is a 'thing' - this is normal". I'm grateful for that leaflet, but it didn't tell me what I could do about it. So I've made myself a little word-joke, and I think of myself as living "life on the foreshore", but I'm a bit stuck as to what I can do to get myself a little further back onto dry land. (Please don't recommend a book on Mindfulness at this point.)

Postscript: In the writing of this post (how awesome is the process of blogging?), I realised that, since this is a 'thing' and since I'm not the only one, there must be wisdom out there about it. So I've googled my local Maggie's, and I'm sure that is going to be a good place to start. It's so odd that I haven't thought of that before. My local Maggie's is a 5-minute walk away, and of course it's the obvious resource. That's the thing about the Time Thief, though. He robs you, with his evil clothes peg, of the time and space you need to think about how to help yourself. He's a very clever devil. He must be clever because even Google can't pin him down (and Google can do pretty much everything). I googled "grinning devil with clothes peg" to see if I could find an image to end this post with, and it didn't throw up anything appropriate.

One of the upsides of having had cancer...

... is that you really love your birthdays. I do, anyway.

Last night, Husband took me out for a meal. It's not quite my birthday, but the date worked and logistics seem to dominate life at this point. And I'm not fussy - it doesn't have to be the exact date. I didn't know where we were going. Husband just told me it was going to be nice, and to dress up. It was a posh gig at a very fancy restaurant in town, and there was a bill that I didn't see, but I know was ridiculously large. I don't care. I loved the evening. Loved every minute of it.

I love celebrating that I'm here. "Every year is a bonus," I told Husband. "Every year since 2009 is a bonus." I might not have had these years. That thought, that knowledge, that tremor in my bones, brings with it a deep humility and an exhilaration. I wouldn't have paired those two emotions, but in my experience, they can arrive together and get along nicely. For me they do, every birthday.

I might not have written all these blog posts (and yes, I know I'm meant to be on a blogging break, but it's my blog and I'll write if I want to). I might not have moved house, back across the Atlantic with the family. I might not have seen all those children's concerts and plays, and planned those birthday celebrations. I might not have seen my daughter in a hockey match. I might not have watched The Hunger Games with my son. I might not have helped my oldest choose his GCSE subjects. I might not have owned a dog. I might not have done ALL THAT LAUNDRY! I might not have seen the beauty of this truly fabulous autumn. I might not have been to the Isles of Mull and Skye. Most of all, other people might have carried a yawning gap in their lives.

I couldn't live life with this awareness at the surface all the time. It would be too exhausting, and would alienate me too much from daily life. When I was being treated for cancer, and life was so odd and chaotic and nothing felt right, I missed normal life. I missed it terribly. So I'm happy that the intensity of all that emotion has faded over time, and that life trots along again in its normality. But on my birthday, and at occasional other times, I dip down deep into that pool of gratitude and marvelling that lies at the very bottom of my being, and I drink from its waters. For a while, I truly love that I hate my hairstyle, and that I haven't got round to putting up the new curtains, and that there are always balls of dog hair fluff in the corners of the kitchen, and that I shout at the children when they're being annoying and then feel guilty afterwards, and that the endless untidy family clutter gets me down, not to mention ALL THAT LAUNDRY.

So Cancer, you're a beast, but you've inadvertently given me this gift of glorious birthdays. I love it, and it's a darn good excuse to spend an unseemly amount of money on a restaurant bill.

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Driving Miss Iota: Part 3, in which I reach the crux of the matter

I don't like motorway driving either. In fact, it's motorway driving that makes me most anxious. Driving in town, any bumps you may have are likely to be fairly low impact (not always, I know, but usually). But on the motorway, it's a different story.

Last time I was driving on a motorway (a couple of weeks ago), I found myself feeling really quite agitated. This is not good, I thought. So I kept calm, breathed regularly and deeply, and the moment slowly passed. Then I started digging around in myself. Why is this becoming a problem? I was in a car crash 8 years ago. Is it something to do with that? The more I thought about it, and tried to get in touch with whatever goes on at my gut level, the more I realised that this isn't about me and my driving. It's about 16-yo.

You know those mothers who tell you, when you're short of sleep, up to your elbows in dirty nappies, and trying to settle a fractious baby while keeping a busy toddler amused at a table in a café, "just wait till they're teenagers"? You know them? Well, they do have a point.

I've spent years of my life, at a conscious level and at an unconscious level, waking and sleeping, keeping my children safe. It's part of the very fabric of my being. It's what I do. It's second nature, and third, and fourth, fifth, sixth. I protect them from harm.

I've supported their necks when picking them up, covered electric sockets, put kettles out of reach, used 5-point harnesses, understood what an isofix fitting is, purchased shin pads, strapped on helmets, and not let them put things round their necks. I've taught them how to cross a street, to walk carefully by the side of a swimming pool, to check the depth of water before diving in, not to talk to strangers, not to play with sharp knives, matches and electrical items. I've cut grapes into safely chewable halves, stopped them putting marbles in their mouths, moved furniture away from upstairs windows, kept plastic bags in a high cupboard,  not left them alone in the bath, not allowed them to squash pillows over each other's faces, phoned GPs in the night, written my mobile number on their wrists, and held their hands when walking along pavements by busy traffic. Busy traffic. Whoa. Stop right there.

Now, it seems, I will soon need to stand back, while one of them takes control of a small metal box, which travels at speeds which can only be described as ludicrous when you think about the softness of the human body inside, and let him hurtle across the land in extremely close proximity to other small metal boxes, all of which are controlled by mere mortals, the majority of whom mean well but inevitably suffer from lapses in concentration and errors of judgment, and a small minority of whom are raving lunatics who can't tell the difference between the length of a car and the length of their own body appendages, if the distance between their front bumper and my back bumper in the outside lane of a motorway is anything to go by. It's a far cry from the 5-point harness.

I can sense that my recent anxiety about driving is anxiety about letting my oldest drive. I know I have to, and I know I will, but, Bloggy Friends who've travelled this road already, how on earth do I do this?

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Unsettled

The weather is unsettled. Summer and winter in the same day, several times over. As I write, I look out of the window and it's hailing. Ten minutes ago it was bright sunshine, and the sky was blue.

I am unsettled. Two family funerals in the past two months. Two house sales in the next two months. We close on ours in May, and my mother completes hers in June.

We aren't going to be at our closing in person ("closing" is the term for the meeting, where the seller, the buyer, the two realtors, and the title company, get together, usually at the premises of the title company, to sign off on the deal). We have the necessary documents, which we are going to sign, next week, in the presence of a US notary at the US Consulate General in Edinburgh. I've made the appointment. I found the act of making that appointment disproportionately stressful, necessitating a phone call to the Consulate General and the careful reading of their website. Anyone who has been through the process of getting a US visa will understand why. I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that as I dialled the number, my heart started pounding. It was the memory of previous trips to the US Embassy in London, huge stacks of paperwork, photos rejected for random reasons, dealing with lawyer-speak well beyond the understanding of mere mortals like myself, slightly humiliating medicals and endless vaccinations, all at great expense and all with so much at stake.

My mother is leaving the house she and my father moved into, on 1st April, 1963. I was born in her bedroom. We gathered the family over Easter, to celebrate our family having been in the house for exactly 50 years (Easter Monday was 1st April, if you remember), and we had a lovely time: 3 generations, 16 people, 1 dog. But now it really is the final countdown. Contracts are being exchanged today (unless the solicitors come up with still more items to research), and completion is on 7th June. This really is it. Furniture will go to the local auction house. Belongings will be packed into a removal van. Items will disappear into boxes, to emerge in another house, in another town. Furniture, belongings, items, which I've known all my life. My roots are being severed. I don't like it.

It all makes me feel jittery. My hands and feet are permanently cold. I confess to spending more time than usual in a hot bath at the moment.

Where do I belong? I very nearly drove off on the right hand side of the road yesterday. It gave me a jolt. Don't I know which country I'm in by now? I couldn't find the spices in Tesco the other day. I looked up and down the "Homebaking" aisle where I knew they'd be, but I couldn't see them anywhere. I found the herbs, so I knew I was close. Then I saw them, and I realised why it had taken me so long. I had the wrong search criteria in my brain. I hadn't been scanning the shelves for spices in glass jars. I'd been scanning for spices in little red tins. Little red Kroger tins. Do I still think I'm in Dillons, not Tesco?

I suppose I'm like the spring. She has one foot in winter and one foot in summer. I have one foot in the past and one foot in the future. Blue sky and hail. That's me.

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My Postsecret - Part II

It was the summer of 2007. We'd been in America for a few months, and I was through the honeymoon period and into the classic low dip that typically occurs 6 - 9 months after you move to a new place. But I didn't know about that dip and its timing, so I was just miserable and couldn't see an end to being miserable. The children had started their 12-week summer holiday - and no-one had told me about THAT. I had no idea how to manage TWELVE WEEKS at home with the children. We didn't know many people well enough to invite them over - I'd have thrown myself into playdate exchanges in the early days a bit more if I'd known about the 12-week vacation to come. It was over 90 degrees every day, and I'm never at my best in the heat.  I felt trapped inside the house. I was paranoid about the children getting sunburnt, and there were mosquitoes everywhere. I asked people what they did during the long summer break, but no-one really seemed to have any answer, except "the pool". The children were 10, 6 and 3, and, though I came to love our neighborhood pool in future years, it didn't hit the spot at all for us that year. I had to be with 3-yo in the small pool, and I wasn't confident about the two older ones being on their own in the big pool, so I hovered at the gate between the two, trying to watch all three, feeling hot, worrying about sunburn, and longing for Scotland. And there still remained several hours of the day, long, slow hours, each day, every day, before and after our trip to the pool. Husband was rewriting his PhD into a book, and we'd set aside the summer weeks for him to do that. It was a very lonely time. It was when I started blogging.

We'd already done the museums and other attractions in the city. Several times. In fact, I decided that if anyone said to me "There's a great zoo here. Have you checked out the zoo yet?" I would decapitate them on the spot. Yes, I had taken the children to the zoo already. Full of maternal initiative, me. I'd been more than once, actually. It was hot and dusty and full of sad, enclosed animals. "But thanks for the suggestion", I always managed. 

I decided I needed to get out of the city. A trip or two. That would raise morale. Part of what I had anticipated would be the fun of moving to a new country was the chance to explore. What I hadn't realised, and what I was finding out slowly, was that truly, there wasn't very much to explore where we were. I don't know if I'd envisaged a few little Cotswold villages, with tea shops and play parks, in the middle of the Great Plains, or what, but I'd expected something, anything, to go and do and see. I mean, wherever you are in the world, you can get to know your surroundings. Can't you? Surely? There's always something to go and visit, isn't there? Well, not so much in the middle of the Midwest. And especially if it's very hot, and you have three small children in tow, and you really don't want to make stopping at McDonalds the treat of the day. And you're sad and lonely and low on internal resources.

I had a great aunt, who was a big traveller. She used to say, if you're in a place and don't know what to visit, go and look at local postcard stands. You'll discover what's interesting nearby. Well, there weren't any shops with postcard stands where we were, but I asked in Wal-Mart, and a rather surprised assistant showed me a very small rack. I realise, now I understand the place and the way of life there so much better, that to find a postcard at all in Wal-Mart in that city was rather amazing, but at the time, amazed is exactly what I was not. I nearly cried. The selection couldn't have been more under-whelming. They were mostly jokey ones about cattle, or tornadoes. Great. There were a few pictures of fields of sunflowers, and yes, you could have a nice day out looking at sunflowers if you were in Tuscany and there was going to be a pretty little village snuggling against the hillside where you could order pizza and San Pellegrino and enjoy watching the waiter chat to your bambini, because everyone knows the Italians love children, but trust me, you can't really do the same kind of thing where we were. Unless you want to end up in a McDonalds, and my kids had already had way too many McFlurries that summer. Anyway, I had 12 weeks to fill. A day of sunflower-viewing wasn't going to make much of a dent.

Then I hit rock bottom. There was a postcard of a grain elevator. Do you know what that is? No? This is what they look like.

                                                                                                                      Photo credit: walkersquawker.net

They're big, made of concrete or steel, always white or grey, and not interesting. At all. The caption on the back of the postcard said "sometimes known as 'the Cathedrals of the Plains', these majestic structures can be seen for miles around". That was the final insult. Cathedrals of the Plains. I had swapped King's College Chapel, Westminster Abbey, Salisbury Cathedral, St Paul's, for these brutes? The beauty, history, design, and interest of cathedrals for the modern utilitarian ugliness of grain elevators? How could anyone dare compare them?

I bought the postcard.

I wanted to write "I hate living here" in huge, bold capitals on it, and send it to Postsecret. It felt really good, just to think about doing that. Perhaps I'd make it "I really, really, really, REALLY hate living here". But I didn't write that. First, in that irritating way that life has of laughing at you and debunking your most intense moments, the first couple of biros I tried wouldn't even make a mark on a postcard (and I obviously hadn't discovered Sharpies at that point). More significant than the biro issue though, was my pride. I was committed to making a success of our overseas adventure, and I had decided that the foundation of that commitment was the "Not wrong, just different" approach to life that was the title of my blog at the time. To send an "I hate living here" postcard would be to let myself down, and to let my blog down.

The modified version that I came up with, and I think this will make you laugh because it's so very Iota, was "I can't believe I'm living in a place where they make postcards of grain elevators". But I didn't even send that. I don't really know why. I kept the card, though. It lived in the desk drawer, and I used to take it out and look at it, and think how much I hated where we were, and how homesick I was for the land of my family and friends and cathedrals and tea shops.

Time passed. I grew to love my life. I never loved the place, but I loved my life in it, and we found ways of making it work, even though it wasn't Tuscany or the Cotswolds. A highlight was our annual Thanksgiving trip to Colorado, when we would drive for 12 hours across the Great Plains, in search of mountains. I loved those journeys. We got to know the route, and found places to eat on the way that weren't McDonalds. In one cafe, they even recognised us from one year to the next, and opened up for us once when we arrived a few minutes after closing time. I grew to love the Plains, and to cherish the opportunity that life had given me to experience new things in a new place. It would be stretching it to say that I grew to love the grain elevators, but I made my peace with them. You need landmarks to place your eyes on, as you drive across the flat landscape, and there's something about them that's large, solid, and comforting, like lighthouses. "Majestic structures", I suppose. They survive when nothing else does, when a tornado passes through. And actually, if you look at the photo you'll see two grain elevators, an old and a new. So I suppose there is even a historical interest to be found in grain elevators, if you look out for it. 

When we were moving back to Britain, I got the postcard out. I was going to write on it "I used to hate living here, but now I'm really sad to leave", and send it to Postsecret. I didn't, though. As I said, Postsecret has changed. Brash sex revelations have replaced the weekly feast that I used to enjoy, of the tiny, sometimes whimsical, windows into the lives of strangers. It was no longer the right place for my secret to be aired.

I can't even remember what I did with the card. (That isn't a very good ending to the story, is it? It's the truth, though.) I vaguely remember ripping it in half and putting it in the bin, bidding it farewell and telling it "you've served your purpose; I don't need you any more". But I also vaguely remember tucking it into a pile of papers, thinking it would be fun to see it again. I hope it's the latter memory that's correct, because when that picture postcard surfaces, it will be like greeting an old friend.
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Finding my new normal - Part II

So why is there a Part II to this? It's because I want to share with you one of the things I learnt, through having cancer. There is no normal.

Of course there is, in one sense. As I said at the end of the previous post, I like being normal. "Normal life" is something we all take for granted... until it's wrenched away from us.. and then it seems like a golden blessing. As I write, I can see the buses going past my window, full of people going about their daily lives. Jobs, shopping, visiting. Who knows what they're up to? Most of it not very important, probably, but all of it part of a big whole. Each day, each element, is like a stitch in a tapestry, contributing to a picture.

Most people come through a major illness with a desire to appreciate the little things of life more, a determination to live every day to the full. I think that's wonderful. But it's also a bit exhausting. You can't do tapestry on speed. Tapestry is often a slow, plodding, meticulous task, and you can't fall down in admiration at every stitch. So yes, I do appreciate life and I do want to live to the full, but I do also have grumpy times (yes, really), and get fed up, and I don't remember to live each day as if it were my last.

The change I notice in myself, is the change of understanding of how life unfolds. Before cancer, I thought life was a line. I might deviate from the line, but then the task was to get back to it. For example, I battled with the idea of living abroad with the children for too long. I was happy for them to have an American experience, and I'd have talked about "broadening their horizons". But really, I looked on it as a deviation. Their real life was somehow hidden away in a cupboard in Britain, and I'd get it out and polish it up when we got back. But I now see how life exists in the deviations, because they're not deviations. They are the very stuff of life. And it's not just the visible. I think I'm able to accept change and disruption at my very core, in a way that I didn't used to. If I was a cake, having cancer wouldn't be a bit of the icing that's gone a bit wrong, that I can scrape off, and cover over with new icing. No. It's one of the ingredients, in the mix, in the baking, in every bite. It's in the flavour.

Unless I am alone in this (and I am perfectly happy to accept that I have a personal level of unique weirdness), I think it is an important truth, but also a difficult one to get hold of. I find it hard to explain. I see it in various aspects of life. Some of our deep insecurities come from a sense of not being who we ought to be. Even at a fairly superficial level, we are bombarded with the image of what our body should look like, what our face, our hair, should look like. When you move house, it's easy to feel permanently inadequate, because your house doesn't look like the ones in the catalogues, as they should. It's as if there is an imaginary straight line, that we are deviating from. But guess what? That imaginary line, where we're all slim, healthy, happy, fulfilled, with our scatter cushions perfectly arranged on our sofas, doesn't exist. When I had cancer, one of the overwhelming, yet hard to define, feelings, was that I shouldn't be having cancer. This shouldn't be happening to me. It was a deviation. But it did happen, and it still is happening, in that it is part of me now. I wouldn't be who I am, if I hadn't had cancer, and I am who I am. And that is it. To go back to my earlier example, I used to resent being in America, as it was somehow preventing the children from having the life they ought to be having the other side of the Atlantic. But I stopped seeing it like that. They are who they are, their lives are as they are, and that is enough. My house doesn't look like an IKEA catalogue, but that is.... hang on... I really would quite like my house to look like an IKEA catalogue. I guess I have some progress to make on that one.

I haven't described what I wanted to describe very well. I can feel words like "embracing change" and "acceptance" hovering around, ready to fall onto the page and sum this up for me.

And, if you've read this far, you'll be pleased to know that the results came back from the lab, and that everything they tested was benign. That was the word the doctor used: "benign". Maybe she had a sixth sense that if she said "everything was normal", it might have prompted a monologue on the word "normal". You can see I've been thinking about it... just a little.
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Finding my new normal - Part I

The title of this post is stolen from a blog I follow. I found it, because it's written by an American living in London, but that's not what the blog is about. The author lost a baby at full term, and has written deeply and movingly (that sounds so patronising and cliched and I don't mean it to) about that. Now she has a second baby, and is navigating life in the new-baby-new-mummy world.

I don't want to compare life after cancer with life after losing a baby. It's a wrong comparison. But some of what she has written recently has resonated with me. I absolutely love the title of the blog. "Finding my new normal". It just seems to encapsulate so much. When we moved back here to Britain last summer, we started a new chapter, in a new place, among new people. We were building a new normal. I had a choice, have a choice, whether to tell anyone about going through cancer. Or not.

I've chosen not to. It wasn't a decision made in advance: "I'm not going to tell anyone". No. It's just that it never quite felt like the moment. There's one person here who I knew before we came here, and she knows, and maybe that one person is enough. I see her often, and we have hardly ever talked about cancer, but perhaps it's enough that I know I could. I did share with her the details of my recent health scare (investigative procedure didn't find anything nasty, but still awaiting lab results to confirm, thanks for asking). Perhaps this is the ideal situation. Just one person, a person I can trust, who I can talk to if I need to. And of course I can always share what I want to on the subject on my blog. That must make a difference.

I suppose part of it is a desire to be free of that label. I want to be me first, and a breast cancer person second (notice I didn't use that word "survivor" which I really loathe). It's not that it's a secret. I'm not afraid of telling people. I'm far enough on now, that it doesn't dominate my life. I can talk about it without it being too overwhelming. It's just that if you don't tell a new friend early on, then it would feel a bit odd when you do tell them. It somehow takes the conversation, and maybe the relationship, into a different register.

It feels good that "I've had cancer" is no longer the top of the list of my daily mental agenda. Perhaps that's why I haven't told people. I don't want it to be. Perhaps I'm afraid that if I tell them, then it will ratchet back up the list a little. Would the casual "How are you?" be weighted with a little more significance? Will I have to say "I'm fine" with a little more emphasis than I usually do?

I'm at the point where I'd be happy to be in a supportive role to someone else going through the same experience. I know that, because I've recently heard of someone with a breast cancer diagnosis, about to start chemotherapy, and I've sent a message, opening the door to further contact, if that is what she wants. I said "it's not a secret, but it's not something I talk about very much". And that is where I am. It's easy to see how something like a cancer history could become a dark secret, and I don't want that. It's nothing to be ashamed of. One in eight women are going to go through it at some point in their lives (are you doing self-examinations, ladies? ONE IN EIGHT...). But I don't want to bang the drum, either. I'm not that woman who is throwing herself into fundraising, campaigning, getting involved. I don't want it to become my identity.

I like "my new normal", actually. I like being a normal person. I did terribly miss normal life, when I was going through the valley of the shadow of cancer. I expect that's why I haven't told people. I like being normal again.
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Regurgition

OK, so I realise that last post was a bit obscure, but I don't know how much medical detail you want. In a nutshell, I'm on Tamoxifen, which gobbles up the oestrogen in my body which might otherwise go and feed any sneaky lingering cancer cells. Yay, Tamoxifen. Great job. I sometimes visualise it whizzing around my bloodsteam and lymphatic system, looking for little particles of oestrogen, and snatching them away from under the nose of a sole mutant cancer cell. But one of the side effects of Tamoxifen is that it causes the lining of the uterus to thicken. Not so yay, because that raises your percentage chance of developing endometrial cancer. Not by very much. But a little. So that's why, if you're on Tamoxifen, they like to go scanning and poking around to make sure your misbehaving old uterus isn't harbouring anything that shouldn't be growing there.

When you've been through cancer, you have no "it's probably nothing" hidey-hole. Because you know it probably isn't anything, but it might be. So you have to find new ways of dealing with daily life, while waiting for the next event (investigative procedure in Feb, and 3-4 week wait for results, since you asked).

Sometimes I feel I'm not very good at life. Do you ever feel that? That's not a very helpful way of looking at it, is it? I mean, it's not a competition, or an exam. You can't take a course in "Life: how to deal with its ups and downs" and then get an A or a B. There's not a correct way of going through these kinds of things, is there? There's not a correct way of going through anything, come to think of it.

I used to find it helped to write, so, well, I guess I'll do some of that.

This is what my morning was like. At breakfast, we told the boys that they were going to have to pay for the Xbox Live payment of $99.99 that has been automatically deducted from our credit card. No doubt, at some point in the past, we had a conversation about "if you sign up for this, you have to make absolutely sure that it's not a recurring payment" etc etc, but of course that conversation is long forgotten. They weren't too impressed with our assertion that this is an excellent life lesson for them, that adult life is FULL of having to negotiate your way through systems that you sign up for, that bleed you at any opportunity, and that learning the consequences painfully now will prepare them well for the future. I have a nasty feeling that Husband bestowed the following wisdom on one of them: "This is what life is like; suck it up, kid".

Somehow, the Xbox Live payment conversation segued seamlessly into a voluble expression of my dissatisfaction with the state of their bedroom floors. It seemed logical to me at the time.

12-yo had to be in formal wear (love that kilt), because it's the Burns Supper tonight. This involved a lot of running around, ending in me saying something along the lines of "I've just remembered that last time you wore formal wear, we agreed we'd look it all out the night before, and get up 10 minutes earlier". Great moment to recall that particular jewel of wisdom.

And that is why I HATE the whole cancer journey. Actually, it's the second reason I hate the whole cancer journey. The first reason is that everyone refers to it as a journey, which is a horrible cliche. The second is that it spills over into the whole of life, so that even if you do what you practised with your nice therapist, over months, and acknowledge the anxiety and nervousness and all the other emotions that you're feeling, they still spill over into your everyday life, and you end up giving one of your children a really hard time about a missing kilt pin.

As I was walking the two younger ones to school, I announced that we'd all had a bad morning, and that therefore, I was declaring that today, 24th January, is officially National Rubbish Day. (Except I think I used the word Cr*p.) Every year, we will celebrate National Rubbish Day (Cr*p Day). 12-yo was horrified. "It might be someone's birthday. It must be someone's birthday. That's not very nice for them." I pointed out that our wedding anniversary, 27th January, has become Holocaust Memorial Day, and that's not very nice for us. Life isn't fair. (I may have used that "suck it up" phrase again.)

Which reminds me, it IS our anniversary on Sunday, and I've booked cinema tickets on Saturday night to go and see Les Miserables. Not only is it meant to be a very good film, but I thought it would give me a good opportunity to have a cathartic cry in a dark place. I'll be the one saying on the way out "Poverty? Starvation? Revolution? Imprisonment? Betrayal? Death? I can't believe they made such a fuss about it. I mean, this week, I've been dealing with a LOST KILT PIN."

I'm going to stop writing now.

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Returning reluctantly to an old theme

So I haven't blogged about cancer recently. Those of you newish to my blog might not even know that at one stage in its life, it was a cancer blog. Does that exist, actually? A cancer blog? Do they call them that?

Don't worry. No serious announcement following. Just an "I recommend we check this out. It's usually nothing, but if you have it checked out, then you'll have peace of mind". I hate those. They're too... familiar. That's what it is. It feels like going back into a country you were happy to leave behind. You've been through security checkpoints and passport control, and you're on your way. Then someone stops you in the road and turns you back.

"I've heard so many women say that", said the doctor. "They don't want to go back into it all again."

"OF COURSE WE BL***Y DON'T" I wanted to yell.

But I smiled, because she was so incredibly nice, and sympathetic, and good at explaining everything, and sensible, and had time for me. I smiled, and I said "I agree it makes sense to check it out". And I felt the tears at the back of my eyes, because I always feel those when doctors are kind to me. It's a result of all those times doctors haven't been kind, or had time, or been good at explaining, and have instead quoted percentages (as if percentages mean anything).

I'm not worried. The symptoms aren't even quite right, and the doctor is very clear that the procedure is just to be thorough. It's good to be thorough. She thinks it's nothing. She thinks it's fine. So I'm not worried. Nah. Worried? Me? Nah. Little old Mrs Stoic in the corner? Worried? Nah.

I'm not agitated. That's not why I turned off the Today programme when they were discussing the breast cancer drug Tamoxifen, which I've been on for over 3 years now, and got to the bit about one side effect being an increased risk of endometrial... issues.

I'm not concerned. That's not why I phoned and told my mum, saying "I'm going to tell you something, but you've got to promise you won't worry about me". Because that's a sure-fire way of ensuring she doesn't worry about me.

I'm not anxious. That's not why, when my daughter caught the virus that's doing the rounds, I got into bed with her, and held her, warm and soft, in my arms, wondering whether her headache might in fact be a brain tumour, and imagining...

I'm not jittery. That's not why I'm sitting here with cold hands and feet, browsing websites on relaxation exercises, thinking about making vegetable soup, wondering if I should go to Sainsbury's or perhaps take the dog out, or both, and then reading another blog or two instead.

I'm not allowing myself to get carried away. That's not why I've been on to our realtor in the US, trying to get some movement on our house, so that'd be one less thing for Husband to...

Worried? Of course not. I'm only blogging about this because I thought it would be interesting to write a post about the NHS, and how it compares to my experiences of medical care in the US. A thoughtful, analytic post. Prompted by my visit to that nice doctor. A post about the NHS. Yes. A good topic for a returning expat blog. Don't you think?

Iota's Six Top Festive Tips

Long-term followers of my blog (you poor sad people, don't you have anything better to do?) will know that I really love Christmas. So as the season starts to roll, I thought I would drip my distilled drops of wisdom, accumulated from experiences old and new, as to how to make this Christmas the most wonderful of all.

1. Don't get a spaniel puppy. They poo and wee a lot on the floor. They humiliate you at puppy training classes. They bark when they are excited, which is a lot of the time. When you discuss this, outside, with the puppy trainer, she will talk about rewarding good behaviour, as if you need to become an expert in canine CBT. You will be nodding and smiling, while all the while you will be thinking "or we could just buy a kennel and he could live outside". Shouting at your puppy does not help.
2. Don't have sons. They are incapable of distinguishing dirty clothes from clean. If you have to have sons, wait a few decades until Lasik have invented a corrective procedure, that will be offered to parents of boys at their birth. Shouting at your sons does not help.
3. Don't have daughters. They are like whirlwinds of chaos. They have 'art projects' everywhere. They insist on growing their hair long, and then they don't want to wash it because they are too busy when it comes to bedtime. Shouting at your daughters does not help.
4. Don't get married. Husbands are always right about everything, and it's very annoying. They put on a sad face with sad eyes (see "spaniel puppy" above) when you shout at them. 
5. Don't buy Christmas stocking fillers. You will hide them and then not remember where you have put them. Don't even bother with the shouting on this one. Those pesky stocking fillers will not hear you, and even if they do, they will not answer.
6. Don't buy Christmas decorations. Don't buy fancy cardboard stars from IKEA, and wait till Sunday night to put them up. You will have mislaid the light bulbs, and it will be too late to go and buy some more (even if you could be bothered), because this is Britain where shops shut at a stupidly early hour. You won't be able to make the stars hang straight, because electric flex is so deliberately wayward, and because, quite frankly, the world is against you. Surprisingly, shouting at the IKEA stars DOES help.

If you follow these six tips, I guarantee you'll be full of festive cheer, and the season will envelop you in a flurry of goodwill and jollity, as if you were in a blizzard and every snowflake was a warm wish of happiness.

This post is part of the BritMums Christmas Blog Hop.

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