I do feel I have been cheated on that matter, that if I knew what I was getting myself into I might not have got there. Still the weird thing is that when my man said on Sunday that he was ready for baby number 4, I felt ready too. So one week before I was in “never have children!” mode and now I was considering popping another one out. So what would the little voices inside have to say about it?

The voice of reason is very clear “Common girl, get a grip, you know you just like the baby thing and you can hardly cope with having 2 out of 3 in school uniform with book bags ready every morning, why would you bring more misery onto yourself when you are just about to get your last one in school and get your life back? And get your figure back while you are at it!”

The voice of passion will argue “But it’s only another 4 years of my life, what’s 4 years in a lifetime? And I don’t just love the baby thing I adore it, it is pure ecstasy, it splits my heart open and makes me a better person! Surely a happy family is more important than a slim figure or well maintain kids?”

The sarcastic voice can’t help to remind me “Life back? What life back? It’s not like you had a life before you had kids!”

And the next day the kids themselves start telling me they want another baby, is there something going on? A family plot? The funny thing is that just as the subject is bought up on Sunday I watched my kids interacting happily together after a family night out and thought to myself “here is a precious moment which makes it all worthwhile, the baby isn’t a baby anymore and we’ve turned a corner” and I don’t know if that’s what went through boyfriend’s head too but as I was contemplating that thought he said “I think am ready for the next baby.”

What is even interesting is that it comes at a time when I decide to dive into the depth of motherhood to see if it is possible to be blissfully happy as a mum or if you have to wait 20 years to reap the benefice? Since it is very much my new topic I bought it up at dinner on Saturday and apparently it is impossible to be both a mother and blissfully happy, just because it involves too much sacrifice on the mother’s part. So it’s incompatible! Maybe the secret is to accept the incompatibility and then even if you are not happy, at least you are not disappointed!

Well I was very disappointed, since that same day I started a blog to uncover the secret of blissful motherhood, my first encounter on the matter says that it can’t be! So the next day I ask my man what is his opinion on our friend’s statement and apparently he approves: “you can’t be a parent and blissfully happy, you HAVE to sacrifice a part of you when you are a parent!” But it gets worth, because apparently if I can’t appreciate that it is because I have it easy as far as mum stuff goes. We live above the shop and the shop is a restaurant so already I never EVER have to cook and that I know because when we tried to move away I had to cook and it was tough! And then I have a perfect man who doesn’t only is a chef, he also washes, iron, tidy… So yes I admit I have it easy! But I probably wouldn’t have so many kids and considering another one if my partner wants one if it turned out he wasn’t such a hand on dad! We always joked that I was the man in the relationship and he was the woman; but may be it is truer than we thought.

I do believe there are 2 categories of mums, the one who enjoy motherhood, and they do exist I have met some who can’t wait to get their kids from school; and there are those who weren’t quite ready for the job. And maybe it is all down to how in touch with your feminine side you are?

So should I have another baby? I don’t think I could decide right now, I know I wouldn’t mind, but I also know I wouldn’t have it here, something would have to change, and that change could be my incentive, because even if I am shit scared to leave this place and change for a life where I would need to cook like normal people do, I also know that each baby bought me closer to my feminine side. So who knows, I might need another one to tip me over the edge and make me a true woman!

I could go on and on and on some more, and I probably will, about all the things I figured out last week-end; but the one thing I want to focus on right now is the matter of the little voices in the head. Where I come from, they are synonym of psychiatric hospital, so not an easy task to take on board. But after day one of the workshop, I started hearing them in a whole different way!

The idea of Mister “I-sussed-it-out” is that instead of feeling freaked out by the constant chatter in our head, we should get to know the little voice(S) in the head, figure out how they can be helpful and then give them a full time job. He has a point, they are noisy and omnipresent, so they might as well be useful.

Now I could share what came out of my exercise which aim was to sack my judgemental personae… Or you could try for yourself: The exercise is quite simple, you ask questions to the little voice, here my judgemental one, with your writing hand and you collect the answer with your non-writing one. Simple as!

The result is astonishing, I read it back later at night, after a little visit to the coffeshop, and OMG, I swear it was my soul talking to me! A deep side of me which I openly despise, and which of course I despise in everyone else, the judgemental “I” came across as the best thing that had ever happened to me. And it was, I swear a pure “Alleluia” moment. It’s is like a battle of me Vs me has been won… by me. And believe ME, I am reluctant to ever make my life easy!

I am also a believer that every book I pick has a message for me, it always has, even if it is just something I pick from a shelve, in the shop, the one line I read will be relevant .. So guess what, my heroine in the book I heard twice about, she is very playful with her army of head people, not to the best outcome so far, but hey, it is a fiction!

Why oh why do I insist on escaping my life now and then?

I have found going from selfish bachelorette to dedicated motherhood via not-so-dedicated boss in the space of 10 years very unsettling. Only to realise after all, that I quite enjoyed my own company and my very own free time. But it’s too late to mourn a life that I wasn’t really enjoying at the time anyway. May be I am just a miserable cow, matter dealt with, blog over!

Trouble is I know I am not a miserable cow, I think I am just going through a very feminine readjustment. I am also convinced I am not the only one going through that trauma, but maybe I am the only one so obsessed with revisiting her past to bring bribes back from carefree time.

Up until now I would say I kind of sensed something wasn’t as it could be, and I did search for it, for what I called my quintessential life; but I mostly reassured myself by assuming everyone else was wrong and I was just fine! That was until I did one of my ultimate “free-like-the-wind” week-end in Amsterdam. I chose Amsterdam because I like smoking. 

Problem number 1: I like smoking in a world where it is “oh so wrong” to smoke, it is for unassuming teenagers with mental issues. Trouble is, when I was an unassuming teenager with mental issue, it saved my skin. It made me rewire myself in a way that made me the happiest I had ever been. Well, it was a time when I had nothing else to do with my life than being happy, so it was cheating a bit. Now it might not be so appropriate with 3 kids and a business to self-medicate to get back to this place. But I am obsessed with this place and I am determined to get back there, even if it takes a little help from my guilty pleasure.

I have never given up on that place and up until now, the closer I got to it with my family is when I pack everyone away to Glastonbury. This is as real as it gets, once a year, for 6 days, the magic happens, it takes hard work and a bit of weed to harmonize with the place but I get there, we get there, as a family, eventually. It doesn’t make sense to anyone why would I go through so much trouble to get muddy. And even I sometimes wonder why I do it, but now I know, it is not just to stay young at heart, it is to express on the outside how I feel on the inside. It is a playground for my true self, my Holy Grail!

Now I have noticed that if I go away alone or if I smoke a bit I can get there, that’s why I chose Amsterdam as my destination of self rediscovery. The amazing thing is that it is probably the only place I can think off where I don’t feel like a smoke. I still have to work that one out!

So I am in Amsterdam, to escape responsibility and to let the magic happen. The excuse is, a workshop with a guy my man did a workshop with, and came back from in a very good place. My aim is to do the workshop and get lost… or find myself, depend what angle you look at it, and dance… in no particular order!

Thing is, that guy that did the workshop, he completely blew my mind away and now I am finding it very hard to readjust. I always knew it would be hard to land back, it always is, but this time, he really bought a lots of things home. He put words on my though, he made them real. And since I came home, I am struggling to shrink back. For the first time I don’t want to shrink back, I am done adjusting myself just because I am a mother and that’s what mothers do! And I can’t stop being a mother, so it is just like I have added one more “unknown” to my equation. I have been talking about it to whoever is ready to listen, but let’s be honest, nobody wants to listen, everybody is too busy trying to be a mother, focusing on being the best possible mother to care for my selfish ways… 

That’s why I chose to blog as a thinking pad, to get out all the things that are puzzling me! Because I might be the only one out there finding it so hard to put my life on the back burner so my kids can have a good childhood!

One thing we were told over the week-end is to do what we like to do after breakfast, to make it our life. All I took back home was the little joke he kept repeating: “don’t have children, whatever you do, don’t have kids!” HAHAHA. Not so funny after all when you come home and the 100% of yourself you’ve been working on all week-end is trying to shrink back in the 20% life you’ve created for yourself before going, when you were just quite happy to be 20%, when in fact you didn’t even know you had room to expend 5 time over!

So how do I make my life expend to meet the expectations of the 100% me I love so much. This is why I chose to blog to find a way to make it happen, because this is where my quintessential life lay. This is my treasure hunt and already this week-end gave me some a tool: Writing. I have not written for a long time, too busy being God knows what, but doing the writing exercises really gave me great pleasure and then I heard “Blog” 2 times since. That’s one of my rule, if you hear something twice in the space of a week it needs to be looked into. Maybe it has been mentioned to me thousands of time before, but now is the time, now is when I paid attention.

I had done the same thing with a book before I left for Amsterdam, twice I heard about it so I bought it, and it made me want to write. It also talks about the same thing that guy talked about, it just talks about it in a different way: The multiple personalities…