The fire’s out and we aren’t ash…
Well, I was pretty cross there. Did you think we had both been burned into piles of ash by the heat of that fury?! Well, we weren’t burned to pieces but we were forged into something else by it. It was a fire branding fury that burned a lot of chaff away and left me with a much clearer idea about what I should do next. So, at about that time I decided that enough was enough. The bigger truth is that in fact I wasn’t enough. Not on my own at any rate. For several excellent reasons I hadn’t enough left in my own tank and the Cornish life that we had set up was draining me and was about to toss my precious Jig out into the unforgiving waves that lash the Cornish coast relentlessly. Our hideaway was becoming a prison and there were savages at the door. Savages who did not speak our language and who were refusing absolutely to let us try to speak theirs. My distrust of patriarchal bureaucracy as any sort of useful support team was already pretty solid. You could sharpen knives on it now.
It is a year later, nearly. I have moved us all back to our home city (Bristol) and into a rental while we sort the house situation out. We have been letting Treguddick out on a holiday rental basis but now that I think it is sold (agreed if not actually done yet) I feel as though this whole moving process is winding down. The deciding to move, the actually moving, the sale of the place that leaves me with such mixed feelings and the glimmerings of a new life here in Bristol has taken a year. That’s about right I think. Big changes need a year. A full turning of the seasons and moons and all that each phase brings with it.
As I write all three of our younger children are in school although Jig is on the move again. His field trip to mainstream seems to be drawing to a natural close and this new moon is about properly focussing on taking the next choices carefully and gently. I am working part time (more on that later – I have built a job that I just love and am very lucky) and so our options for Jig must take that into account.
The truth is that I know what I should do. I should take him out, keep him home and take all that we learned from our out of school life in Cornwall and simply transfer it up here for him. But I am bruised and scared this time. If ignorance is bliss then naivety is the mother of all adventure. I know that there is another adventure out there but I am less naive, sadly. We are currently holed up in a gentle harbour but we can’t stay here, Jig needs to learn somehow and he needs to be taught by someone like me on a good day, on a very very good day, on the sort of day that is currently still out of the question. And he also needs to hear someone else’s voice – an essential part of growing up and away from me. But its pretty quiet out there, there aren’t any calls in the night that sound like a voice that he could follow. So, for now, we are rolling gently in a small boat, anchored by attending mainstream under the tightest of rules and procedures for a short time in the week and scuttling back to me to fit in around my new working life. It’s working for now. Just.
Thanks for waiting for me to come back by the way…..! XXX