New Year - New You?

It is so easy to fall into the habit of not blogging.  Too tired, too much to do, whatever the reason, pretty soon it starts to feel like just another job to be got through.  And the longer it takes to get back to it, the more of a mountain it feels like to climb.  Apologies.  And in order to find the energy to start back up again I have allowed myself to limit the retrospective, so the past few months are going to be whizzed through.

Christmas was wonderful.  Full of family (although sadly none of the Malan family… wouldn’t that be an amazing occasion!), lots of food, generous gift giving, laughter and games.  I wonder where next Christmas will find us?
 

New Year ’s Eve was a cocktail party hosted by the parents of a friend of Sam’s, who live only a short stumble away.  It was a great evening; the kids stayed up till past 2am and were amazingly well behaved, garnering admiration and approval wherever they went.  Good times!!  Tom’s orange vomit at 5am was Fanta tinted and the start of a period of not wellness that he is only just getting over 16 days later.  Happy New Year!!!!

My 40^th birthday last year prompted the beginning of some deep “what do the next 40 years hold for me” thoughts. 

What do I want to do with my life?

How do I want to do it?

Should I work it out; will I even be able to do it?

Will I ever feel like a grown up?

I knew that I didn’t want to be a stay at home mum for always.  As grateful as I am for having had the amazing privilege of being able to stay at home with my boys during those strange and wonderful early years, I now need more than that to feel fulfilled.  Their need for me now is no less, it is merely changed.  They were once dependant on me for all their physical and emotional needs.  Now they are capable of sorting out most of their own physical needs to a greater or lesser extent, and they have a slew of friends, teachers and others to feed the many layers of their need for emotional and societal acceptance.

 Which is not to say they don’t need me.  They need my help and guidance to steer their path through all that emotional and social stuff and come out the other end the sort of men that I will be proud to call son.  When they feel the whole world has broadsided them, they need me just to love them and to provide a safe harbour.  But these needs are not the needs that require this mother to stay at home and dedicate herself to only them.  These are needs she can tend to while at the same time, she tends to her own needs.  So having come to this (fairly massive) realisation, I then began to go over all the possibilities.

Without sounding like a bleeding heart, I wanted to do something to help.  Mostly to help all those children out there who for one reason or another do not have a safe home filled with love and relaible adults.  Children who have been neglected, abused or ignored.  The damaged children.  Having my own children has made me very aware of how many children do not have even their most basic needs met and I thought maybe I could help in some small way. 

This led me on to thinking about becoming a foster carer, which is something I have thought about on and off since I was pregnant with Sam.  I did some research, and spoke to Steve to see if he could get behind the idea.  He could and my research suggested that we would be a suitable foster family.  To my excitement I also discovered that my local authority have a type of fostering called Mothers and babies – where you take in young mothers with their new babies and teach them and mentor them to give them the skills they need to become good mothers.  Right up my street!  And being able to get in on the ground floor, and help to provide those babies with a solid foundation, to provide their mums with the knowledge and skills so that their babies don’t end as one of those damaged children. As just another statistic.

I met with a social worker and after she left I felt like a deflated balloon.   We weren’t, after all, a suitable foster family.  I can’t even begin to explain how disappointed I was - my new start, my grand plans trampled underfoot before they had even begun.  It threw me into the doldrums to be honest and I couldn’t see what else I could do.  For a couple of weeks I was so despondent that I couldn’t get my head clear to find another plan.  I thought about going back to studies, maybe doing a social work degree so that I would be qualified to work in the field I wanted to be in.  But then I discovered that my previous studies left me unable to get a student loan, and there was no way we could afford the cost of me going back to university.  So, hope and dreams squashed again.  I was even more discouraged now and on Christmas day was having a bit of a moan and whinge to my sister in law Julie, when she offered me a simple and amazing idea – get in touch with Unisa, the distance university where I had got my BA degree, from after failing to pass one of my majors at Rhodes University.

The rest, as they say, is history!  I met the admission requirements to do my honours in psychology, and they had an option called Community and Health, which would qualify me to work within organisations who work in the community.  I could study it from the UK and write my exams in London, it was cheaper than studying through The Open University and my mom was happy to lend me the money to pay for it, and I could pay her back over time… all the pieces fell into place.  So I have registered for 3 modules this year and it will take me three years to do all 8 modules that I need.  I still have to wait for my registration to be processed, but, in theory, there is not a lot that can go wrong.

So, watch this space…