Coping with life | writermummy

My Finch App suggested I make a playlist of my week. It’s a wellbeing app, so guessing this was meant to be a positive experience. 🫣 I do try to be upbeat and positive, find the glass half full. I’m digging the garden, planting geraniums. I paint and crochet and keep the house running.

But the job market – particularly in the charity sector, the last place with work-from-home roles – is dire. We’re still living on our mortgage but trying to pretend we’re not, so the kids can live a semi-normal life.

I’m still battling: For EHCP implementation, for a sixth form bursary for our ambitious boy. For a job, a plan.

So it makes sense for my ‘Week’ playlist to be Noah Kahan. Heartwrenching lyrics set to catchy upbeat country tunes. I’ve picked a lyric from each song, but it’s like choosing a line from a Lucas Jones poem, i.e. impossible.

1. No Complaints

“I filled the hole in my head with prescription medication and forgot how to cry, who am I to complain?”

I started a new medication six weeks ago, to help with tension headaches and to aid sleep. It did both. But a side effect is that it silenced the conversation in my head. All of it. I’m an empty space, usually with a Noah Kahan lyric stuck on loop.

It’s actually quite pleasant, but also disorienting and worrying, since I feel no sense of urgency about anything. You need clean laundry? Sure. Oh yes, the laundry. I’ll do it. What, no clean socks? Oh.

2. Paul Revere

“And the world makes sense behind a chain-link fence. If I could leave, I would have already left.”

The song is about running away. I do dream of it sometimes, but you can’t run away from yourself or your responsibilities. And, sitting here in my island of hedges and birds, with the gates shut, life doesn’t seem so bad. It makes sense.

3. Hold it Down

“Now watch me self destruct, right on time. I’ve built up every wall I’ve had to climb.”

Haven’t we all? My therapist called it self-sabotage. Building up reasons why I can’t apply for jobs, or trying too hard in interviews but then letting the neurodivergence slip out and blowing it. And now regretting those interviews I turned down out of fear that I wouldn’t cope or would burn out again.

4. Bad Luck

“Sometimes I hate it, my lack of patience. How sometimes love feels like a noun in some new foreign language.”

That inability to understand emotions, other people, the world, is real and a constant challenge. The number of times I misunderstand the kids, can’t read their faces or misinterpret their words, and create tension. And when we’re all thrown together, as we are at the moment, it’s hard to escape that feeling of living in a foreign country and feeling isolated.

5. The View Between Villages

“The car’s in reverse, I’m gripping the wheel. I’m back between villages and everything’s still.”

I grew up in the area where I live now, even though I left for many years. The place is full of ghosts and memories and sometimes I get trapped between then and now. I find peace, sitting in my car in Waitrose carpark, drinking free coffee and being unable to doomscroll because there’s no internet. 😂

6. Pain is Cold Water

“Pain’s like cold water, your brain just gets used to it.”

It’s certainly a truth that you adapt to the life you’re living, but only become aware of it if something shifts. Like only noticing the head-conversations when they’re taken away. The lyric also reminds me how much I love wild swimming and can’t wait until the water reaches 15C in my nearest lake. And that I have a membership to our local pool but just can’t quite get there.

7. Growing Sideways

“Cause everyone’s growing and everyone’s healthy. I’m terrified I might never have met me. Oh if my engine works perfect on empty, I guess I’ll drive.”

Okay this is a sneaky one as it’s two different points in one quote. The pain of watching other people progressing and moving forward and living while I am stuck in a loop, wondering who I actually am if you strip away the people-pleasing and trauma and responsibilities. And the last line is what I used to say to my therapist when she’d say, ‘but how are you?’

Ironically, my actual car isn’t working perfectly, which is bringing home the lack of money and need for a job this week. I need my car, not just because public transport is nonexistent here and I have arthritis, but because it’s my safe place (see above).

8. Howling

No quote from this one. I only found this song recently and it’s so raw and true, this isn’t a song of this week, it’s a life anthem.

So, what songs describe your week?

Recently my use of ‘Mummy Words’ (mostly ending in uck) has increased exponentially. I seem to be in a permanent grump, with the children, the dog, the weather, the traffic. And it expresses itself in short sharp swear words.

I did wonder if it’s because of some of the parenting blogs I follow on Facebook, that make swearing not just okay but a fundamental part of surviving parenthood. My favourite at the moment is Peter and Jane. If you haven’t come across it, and you have children living at home (or indeed a husband addicted to gadgets or a judgy dog) and you don’t mind more than a few words ending in *uck and *wat, then I highly recommend it. It’s easily the highlight of my day, although possibly it contributes to my rage by vicarious experience and empathy.

But, thinking about it more recently, I have realised what swearing is to me at the moment. It’s a packet of cigarettes.

I started smoking when I was fourteen and realised it was the only way to get a break when working in catering. I did a summer stint in a posh burger bar at Goodwood Races, and soon joined the girls having a crafty fag in the ladies toilets.

I rarely smoked excessively. Only when I absolutely hated my first proper job, shortly before having a breakdown and quitting everything, did I reach anything like a twenty-a-day habit. Then it was because two other girls I worked with were having a hard time too, and the ‘Fancy one?’ email used to come from one of us to the other two at least every half an hour.

I quit smoking when I went travelling in New Zealand and realised I couldn’t possibly afford it. Until I fell for the manager of a hostel I was staying in, and learned how to roll my own so I could cadge a light on the hostel steps – the only way I’ve ever known how to strike up a conversation with a stranger. It worked too, we lived together for a while.

Of course I quit smoking for good over eight years ago, when I discovered I was pregnant. I can honestly say I haven’t had a single one since. But I’d be lying if I didn’t say I’ve inhaled deeply a few times when passing someone with a roll-up or a Marlboro Light.

I am a hypocrite too, because I hate smoking now with the zeal of the quitter. I don’t even like people vaping near my children, and I’m amazed anyone still does it.

Except…

At times like this, when I’m super-stressed, and the world feels out of control, and people are asking things of me left and right, and the children are being vile, and the weather is awful, and I just want it All. To. Stop. I miss it.

I miss drawing deeply in anger on a burning stick, I miss the camaraderie of the cadged fag. I miss the control. The doing something. The reason to be still for five minutes to do nothing but breathe, even if it is breathing toxic life-ending chemicals.

I realise that my current addiction to coffee, my previous need for a glass of wine every night, my constant search for chocolate or cakes or something to feed the soul hole, are all part of the same thing. Trying to fill the void. Trying to find control in chaos.

And my latest addiction? (Apart from wine and coffee and chocolate and sleep). Swearing. Being able to use forbidden words. Relishing the bite of them. Giving myself permission to tell the family to FO to their face, however wrong it is, just to take back the wheel of my life and who I am as a person.

I love my family. I love my life. I remember being shocked when my doctor asked me in a judgemental way if I didn’t like my children and regretted having them, when I explained my antidepressant dose didn’t seem to be enough to survive the summer holidays. And I couldn’t put into words the dichotomy of love and hate, of giving everything for them but yearning for something for me, the finding of self in being a mother but the massive loss of the self I used to be. The loving being needed but the suffocating prison of it. The days when I can’t breathe because of the pressure of needing to be a person I’m intrinsically not inside: calm, patient, loving, tactile, organised, nurturing.

And on those days I go back to my life working in a bar, or travelling, or hanging out with educated women who say fuck, and I swear.

And I love it.

Can I cadge a swear word?