Thresholds

Staying 'Welcome' with just the mat for now

This morning the weather outside matches the weather in. My waking thoughts are wild and battering against the sides of my brain. Howling through my head with a velocity on par with the fierce winds gusting and whipping through the trees out front.

My eyes squint at the cold, unrelenting ice white-blue-white-blue-white-blue pulsing of the neighbour’s icicle lights strung across their brickwork frontage. And rain pelts the panes of glass at my bedroom window.

I say my bedroom window but it isn’t really mine in any permanent sense at all. This is a rental property. Another rental property. The third in twelve years of renting property and making home in borrowed places. And today, on the first morning of a new four seasons of life, I am feeling a heaviness at this lack of permanent home and it sits marrow deep in my bones like a sack of wet builders sand.

I follow Alice Mara on insta. I love admiring the homes she creates in scaled down ceramic certainty and get a strong sense of the joy these bring to the people who have lived within their walls.

We only moved in last February, all five of us, to this house. That’s not even a year. The potential threat of being homeless was the unsavoury gravy that flavoured last year’s turkey too. That’s two Christmas turkeys on the trot tasting this flavour of scary gravy. I feel for turkeys, they’re such a doomed bird and a big, crown-sized part of me feels akin to them today.

Longing for the certainty and steady, comforting constance of a permanent home is not a new feeling; I’ve felt this need many times before now. Back more than a decade ago and after the hardest most colossally challenging season of my life I felt such a giant, stone-heavy need for home. To stay in one place for more than a couple of years, say five years even. Wishing for ten years in one home is what I yearn for but feels like asking for the moon.

It’s the first weather of the new year and it is wild and turbulent. We’d spoken about an early rise, to stoke with freshly brewed coffee and head to the wet slap of sand on the beach for a dilly dip and dog walk. Flasks and bags of brioche at the ready. That was the tentative plan for this time. In my mind’s eye, we’d be experiencing these bracing beach activities under a rousing, celeste blue mackerel sky with just enough energising onshore breeze to taste salt on our tongues.

Instead, I’m sat here, my limbs outstretched under winter tog quilt and blankets around the coiled and monochrome mass of dog blocking the bed. The house is still quiet apart from the outside clatter of the elements and interior crackle of my thoughts.

I remember reading Tim Minchin in an interview say I used to take my morning thoughts far too seriously, but I've realised I just need to get coffee and breakfast in me: a flat white and muesli and I remind myself right now of this wise observation. But can’t face moving not even for strong beans so think on regardless and risk it.

Project You, Women Are Angry and Roscoe Chico the dog

There are three books spread across the green/grey, woollen softness in front of me. One is this notebook into which these words are spilling. The other two books are pictured above along with the ‘dogstacle’ compromising my limbs. Roscoe sleeps on my bed and particularly likes the various ‘against leg bones’ positions.

One of the books is a guided journal full of prompts and exercises to gently steer reflection over the previous year and guide towards encouraging a plan and vision for the year to come. I say this blindly having, at this point, read only the inside cover and not further.

Recommended by Penny Wincer whose name will feature within the pages of it once I get going and irk the ink out of me. I participated in a course Penny led last year. It was brilliant and I also didn’t quite complete it.

I’m looking down at the inviting mauve, yellow and pleasing pinkness of the cover and meandering typeface, read the words ‘Project You’ at the bottom left of the cover and tears are pricking at my eyes because I feel so tired of me and exhausted by a lot of my circumstances.

I have a sensation in my chest that this is precisely the right moment for me to be reaching this book Project You, Goodbye 2024, Hello 2025. And yet catch myself thinking, ideally, I’d have begun to work my way through it back in late November when it dropped through the letterbox and ahead of the merry, mad, giant indigestion of December.

Ideal, though, was not the card I was dealt. I know, I know, this is precisely the point; there is no ideal. And the voice in my head trying to tell me that November was the ideal time to start the journal merits only as much volume as the voice in my head which just now noticed the pricking tears of relief to be beginning the thing now!

The other one is a reassuringly solid and chunky, pink brick of a book. Bright as a giant bubblegum orb in colour and with a bold, impactful, matte black typeface. Women are Angry and the word Angry is UNDERLINED which is good because we women need to notice it, our anger. And do something with it other than swallow it down to ferment in the caldera of female conditioning at our core.

Women Are Angry by Jenifer Cox also has a bomb on the cover. A big, black bomb illustration overwritten with the words ‘Why your rage is hiding and how to let it out.’

Women’s rage differs from men’s, Cox argues, because women are conditioned in a patriarchal society not to show it publicly (much as men are conditioned not to show sadness or fear). “Women have to stay in their place and be very nice, accepting and kind.”

A decade ago, after four house moves with four small children and all in as many years, the fact-based and very real fear of facing yet another home disruption on the horizon contributed - and quite significantly - to the end of a marriage. There didn’t seem to be a safe place to put down the weight I was carrying and rest.

I’m remembering now the rage which had (neatly and tidily) concealed itself within (lithe little runner) me back then and which I sensed was ticking. Anger about lost agency, choice and opportunity and anger which I resolved to voice and give blameless, word-shaped form to. And with some urgency, sensing its energy and imminent upswell.

And this was a detonation of sorts. Lots kind of blew up and exploded very quickly and splintered soul shrapnel chaotically and into different and new directions. Not all of these bad. Some vital and enormously invigorating.

I’ve listened to thousands of minutes of Jennifer interviewing guests on the podcast Women Are Mad she cohosts with Salima Saxton and which I adore. These 🧡💙 ← are their signature moj’s. I anticipate each of their episodes very much. These discussions have been a sonic salve through 2024. The WAM pods have introduced some wonderful new women* into my field of vision and I’ve been, at once, fascinated by their stories, comforted by discovering what irks them and which aspects of living drive them bonkers. I’ve felt in such good company.

Lately, I’ve not been able to afford a therapist and in the absence of the supportive scaffolding that I know from lived experience that talking therapy brings, I’ve a deep gratitude for these frank conversations and the honest disclosure of Jen, Salima and the celebrated colourful paper chain of female personalities they’ve brought to the room.

Last night around the table with friends, we all wrote down a resolution on tiny scraps torn from white paper which we then had to toss in to the flames of the fire blazing at my back. All of these people have very different experiences of home and different versions of having one to live in. I wrote ‘put down permanent roots’ and felt pretty jittery scribbling these hope-filled words in pencil knowing just how important this need is to me.

I noticed recently how much envy came up in me when someone said in conversation that they’ve lived in their house for twenty three years. A fleeting sense of calm and deep restful stillness flooded my system just imagining how divine and fabulous this might be.

And I know that may sound overly simplistic and that the person I am today has grown because of all these experiences of moving and packing and shifting and shedding of stuff, habits, expectations and views. And tat. Lots of TAT. Four children generate - if allowed to do so - an inordinate amount of tat. And because of all the discovering and settling and resettling and rediscovering. Because of the change.

But I’m also mindful that it’s entirely possible to stay put in one place and to invite a whole 18 tonne removal van load of personal transformation and change from within. To shift not place but outlook, to change not postcode but mindset and priorities. And how much less spenny this sounds to my frayed freelancer wallet.

And so, stepping over the threshold and in to this new year with a hard need to put down some roots - and a lot of hefty, bulgy boxes - and without an actual house to shelter us all within - not even a cute, little miniature clay one like Alice’s - I recognise it’s down to me to focus energy on rooting myself in the ways that work for me. To get outside first thing and stretch. To go for the long walks. To get the sleep my WOACA body dearly needs. To eat the good food and to speak kindly to myself. To swing the kettlebells and lift the hand weights so that, when the time comes, I’ll have the strength to put the boxes down.

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1. Women like Kate Mosse, Jayde Adams, Viv Groskop and Cally Beaton, Kathy Lette and Rebecca Reid 👌🏼✨⚡️