Motherload

This was the year I was going to crack it. I was determined to enjoy the summer holidays and family time. My daughter has just finished primary school, and this is her last summer before secondary. It feels like the right moment to push a little harder to get her to step gingerly out of the nest and start flapping her little wings. And it also feels like the right moment to get her to help clean the nest up, frankly. I put some activities in the diary, and sat back, thinking, "And they can amuse themselves around that skeleton structure". In those words, damn my hubris. As I sit here this evening, catatonic, I look back at the diary, and realise we've done an awful lot, and that I am simply tired. In the last fortnight, we have been to Sussex, the Cotswolds, and Wales, our son has starred in Frozen , I've had reflexology, and started running, I've worked on a book my daughter and I are writing, picked pounds of summer fruit, gone to an urban beach, daughter h...

I have been hysterical for the past few weeks, roughly coinciding with, oooh, the Summer holidays. There is something terrible about taking a holiday, an enforced holiday, when you have projects on the go, and people you need to keep talking to, for anything to go forward. Every summer, indeed every few weeks, I am told I need to take a holiday. Not for the good of my health, but for the good of my children and teachers... or rather the agrarian needs the academic calendar is calqued on. Summer holidays = harvest time. You couldn't keep the critters in school, or rather in church, so best invent a holiday for them. Parliamentary and university holidays were built around the same idea. Holy-days invented by the church to work around farming. Not so folk could go and do nothing, but so that we would all have food to eat in the winter. Given that we no longer live in an agrarian economy, or rather live in a globalized version which basically does away with seasons, why don'...

Several months ago, in November 2009, I attended a rather wonderful course at The School of Life (http://www.theschooloflife.com). The morning involved several exercises designed to enable us to reflect on our family makeup. The afternoon included a session introducing us to constellation therapy. Constellation therapy relies on a theatrical moment. It isn't (quite) a trick, but nor is it completely devoid of trickery. A group of people sit in a circle and compose themselves through breathing techniques. Someone offers a problem. He or she briefly names the problem, and has a short discussion with the therapist about the background to the issue. Then the questioner is invited to choose several people from the circle, who are to represent key characters in the issue. The issue is always interpersonal. These representatives are then positioned, seemingly at random, by the questioner, within the circle. The questioner acts instinctively, placing the representatives in a pattern, or co...