Why am I still here?

Isn't it amazing how sometimes one incident can force you into a situation of questioning whether you are in the right place and have made the correct choices? One unexpected occurrence can shake you into looking at things from a perspective that you've been avoiding for years. Take last Monday... Little haggis and myself were having a fairly leisurely day. I had begun cutting fabric to make her a new top and she was playing with her Lego, when all in a sudden I started to feel very unwell. Pain was gripping me around my chest and ribs, radiating out to my back. I was sweating, shaking and feeling very nauseous. So I lay down for a little while, hoping it would just pass. After about half an hour, the pain was still lingering, but the nausea had subsided, so I decided I was feeling well enough to prepare our dinner. As one who suffers from Fibromyalgia, I'm no stranger to pain, so I decided to dismiss what I was feeling as yet another symptom of said condition. An hour and a half or so later, we had had our dinner and the concert for the queen's diamond jubilee was about to kick off on BBC1, little haggis and I were enjoying a lovely bowl of ice cream (it was a celebratory weekend after all!). Shortly after that I started to feel very clammy and shaky and the pain intensified very rapidly. If I hadn't been 100% certain that it was completely impossible, I would have sworn that I was about to give birth. O.K., the location of the pain wasn't really spot-on, but the intensity was most certainly able to compete with the later stages of labour. It became so bad that nothing in terms of lying down, standing up, stretching out, sitting down in various positions, helped. I've never before had the need to call NHS24 and was a bit wary about doing so, but Little Haggis, who was getting very worried, insisted I call up. To cut a long story short, they decided that my symptoms were too much like those of a cardiac problem and called out an ambulance. Needless to say that I was in shock, upset and panicked. Those sentiments are very contagious, as within minutes Little Haggis was crying, together with me I need to add. Minutes later, the ambulance arrived and before I knew it, I had been linked up to an ECG machine by means of 12 thin cables, connected to the same amount of plasters with "poppers" on them. All the while, my poor Little Haggis was looking more ill and pale than I did myself. They soon established that my heart was fine (which is what I had thought myself to be honest). My temperature had gone up though and the pain was not letting off at all. So, in the ambulance we went, me on the bed and my little girl by my side in a chair, clutching her "Cowie" teddy. She is 11 now, but she looked very small and utterly lost, full of worry. The drive to the hospital took just a little less than an hour and all the while I felt like I was on a magically flying carpet... I felt extremely light-headed, teetering on the edge of consciousness. They wheeled me into A&E, popped me in a bed and not long after that a nurse arrived to attend to me. Blood samples were taken and it was around that time, the pain finally started to ease. Another series of funny little plasters were attached to my chest and nearby areas, more leads were linked up and that verified the fact that my heart was completely fine. By this time it was after 11pm and my poor Little Haggis looked exhausted. The same nurse came back and announced that it was most likely that I'd need to be kept in overnight for observation, but what to do with my little girl? Did I have any family or friends who were able to pick her up and have her for the night? The simple answer: I have no family here at all. My boy is all grown up, lives near Newcastle these days and hasn't got a driving license, so he was definitely not an option. I have lovely neighbours, they are the best, but I just couldn't call them out of their beds, so close to midnight. So, one option remained and it's exactly the one I was dreading, because I knew exactly what reaction to expect. My ex-husband, Little Haggis' father had to be called to collect her. The nurse kindly offered to call him up and after about 5 attempts she finally got him on the line. Of course, as expected, he was questioning the necessity of him coming over to collect his child, seeing as there are always numerous things in his life which seem to be of much higher priority and value, heading the list is himself. Even though it would not take any longer than about 50 minutes to get to the hospital from where he lives (probably less at that time of night, it being a clear, dry night with hardly any traffic on the roads), he eventually arrived about an hour and a half later. In that time, my condition had improved greatly, my temperature had come down to a normal healthy level again, the pain had as good as disappeared, and other than still feeling light-headed and very tired, I felt fairly OK. So he walked in, looked at me in that annoyed "you are such a nuisance!" kind of way and promptly declared that there was nothing wrong with me and "why the hell did he need to come out!?". The nurse pointed out that I had improved now, but I had been all but fine when I'd been brought in. Also, beside that point, he was not there to give his unqualified opinion of my state of health, he was there because his daughter had nowhere to go and couldn't stay with me in hospital. At the same time the doctor who had been in earlier, returned and told me they thought the pain had been caused by a possible gall stone, that this can indeed cause very intense, acute pain, but that I should be fine for now. Upon seeing my ex, she also decided that I was OK to go home. Of course she presumed that the man in my room was my partner or a relative with good intentions, who would take me safely home.... How wrong could she have been? Doctor and nurse out of the room, he turned to me and said: "Well, nothing wrong with you, so you can go home. I'll just be off then, I'm sure you can take a taxi home..." "So are you not going to take us home daddy?" asked Little Haggis, who by that time was utterly exhausted and slumped on a chair, huddled inside my dressing gown and holding on for dear life to her teddy. "No, that would add almost an hour to my journey, surely you can UNDERSTAND that I want to go to my bed and don't want to be driving round by your place. Just get a taxi!" was his reply. And with that, he just turned on his heels and off he went. By that time it was somewhere between half past midnight and 1 in the morning and there we were, one very tired little girl and one equally exhausted big girl who felt so dizzy that the whole world was spinning, left to get a taxi for a fairly long drive in the middle of the night. The nurse came back into the room and asked my little girl where her dad had gone, to which she replied: "home...". To say that she was incredulous would be an understatement. A taxi was ordered and after spending about another 20 minutes in a waiting room with one person who kept being sick and another couple with a small child who seemed to be suffering from croup, we were picked up by said taxi who took us home for the tidy sum of £50... I got a fright when I found myself in pain which I couldn't identify as anything I'd felt before, I got even more of a fright when the nurse on the phone to NHS24 told me there might be a cardiac problem, but none of these things shocked me as badly as the fact that this utterly selfish man, who I very stupidly married all these years ago, just walked out and left his own daughter and her mother who was not well, in a hospital in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night, to wait for a taxi which I could ill afford, not caring whether we got back home OK or not, as long as he was fine and soon back to his own bed. I came to this country for him, left everything behind, family, friends... all that was mine and familiar. I have remained in this country mostly for reasons relating to him, in order to enable him and our daughter to have good and regular contact. Any time I have thought about returning to my own country, I have been filled with guilt at the thought of taking my little girl away from him... yet, when we both are in need, he doesn't even feel the slightest hint of responsibility. And I just can't figure out why I am still here...

concrete setting

So... I've got writer's block...
And, even worse, I've got painter's block!
In fact, I'm stuck.
Not your usual sort of being a little bit stuck in the mud, forget about that. When I say I'm stuck, I'm more thinking along the lines of fast setting concrete being poured around me. Actually, you can add in some steel re-enforcements for good measure there too. That is the kind of stuck I feel like at the moment.

It could have something to do with the Scottish weather getting to me. After all, it has been raining day after day after day. Whilst half of Europe is getting scorched and Greece is going up in flames, I have had feverish dreams of water coming up to my nostrils, whilst the never ending sound of rain lashing down on the domed roof light keeps reverberating in my head all night.
It has been getting so bad, that my friends no longer dare to bring up the subject of weather, unless it's under the guise of a joke along the lines of "Is it true the Scots tow their cars behind their boats?" (hahaha! very funny...)
There have been days when I truly started to believe that the only place wetter than my garden was the bottom of the sea. But when you are stuck in your little bubble, as I have been all summer, all that is outside of it seems to magnify.

Another reason for feeling stuck, a very weather-unrelated reason, is the fact that I'm now fastly approaching my 37th birthday and I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up.
Somehow I'm waiting for something amazing to happen, for all the lights to come on at once, and to finally find clarity in the dark.

I know a few things: I know I want to spend more time being creative, I want to paint... I'd love to write more (and hopefully improve that skill), I also really want to see a lot more of the world. But like someone who has been given a number of unusual ingredients, despite the fact that they can't cook to save their own life, I have no idea of how I should make some sort of a feasible plan out of the given and known factors.

Sometimes, late at night, I lie awake in bed, thinking of that one year road trip I'd like to go on. In my thoughts I'm crossing America coast to coast and up and down in an Airstream that has been kitted out as a mobile art studio. The idea is that I would record my travels, the places and people I meet through sketches and paintings. Of course, at the end of it all, I would rent a great bright and airy studio in one of America's bigger cities for a couple of months, to finish off those pieces which have only had the groundwork done. All the while I'm soaking up the atmosphere, I'm meeting new and interesting people, I see places I never knew existed before... The climax would of course be the exhibition of the work. This exhibition would be a very rich patchwork of portraits and landscapes, all of them with an accompanying story, almost like a richly illustrated travel log...

Ah... one can dream...

How I got here (Scotland and the blog) part 2

During the upheaval of the move, I fell pregnant again, this time very unplanned. It was quite a bit of a shock, but we both decided that it wouldn't be so bad, having 2 kids close in age. Since we had just moved to a big house, there were no issues in terms of space. Once we had our heads around the new situation, we both really looked forward to a next baby.
Since little Haggis had been born, I had had some of the best months in the whole relationship, and I finally felt like my dream of having a harmonious complete little family was coming true. As we were focusing on our little bundle of joy, we seemed to fight less, and he had finally started to grow closer to my little boy.

The house presented us with a lot of challenges (I still live in that same house now, it's about 160 years old).

It required mountains of work, and even though I did not feel fazed by that in the slightest, D.I.Y was never his strongest point and at times he got very irate, blaming me for the move to this house. Apart from these issues about the work in the house, things were still going pretty well between us.

Then one day in early February 2002, everything went wrong...

During a routine scan, which had been delayed for reasons that I still don't understand to this day, I was told that all was not well with the baby. Suddenly everything started to move at breakneck speed, I was submitted to a quick succession of all sorts of medical examinations and 3 days later everything was over. I had been at around the middle of my pregnancy, had presumed, being that far in, that all was OK. We had told many people, and suddenly it seemed that the only option was a termination.

It was one of the very hardest things I have ever had to go through. I remember keeping it all together in the hospital, functioning on auto pilot. Being given medication to prepare my body for the abortion, then later getting home and howling like an animal. I blamed myself, I was convinced that the baby was not healthy because I had been on the pill, and had been taking painkillers after getting sick (which was obviously how I got an unplanned pregnancy in the first place). I looked for all sorts of explanations, I had not taken any folic acid from the start, I had been straining too much during the removal and the consequent time of decorating, clearing out, heavy lifting and D.I.Y. Of course there was also the other question: What if they are wrong, what if this is a healthy baby? What if they could let this baby grow inside me, and then put all things right as soon as he would be born?

The whole world caved in around me and I could only see myself as the murderer of my own unborn child.

There was a post mortem, and following that there was a very small funeral service, which was only attended by the two of us and the two kids. The post mortem did confirm that the baby had had Edward's Syndrome, a rare but very severe chromosomal defect. I dealt with this loss through finding out all I could about the condition, and after an initial period of excruciating guilt and pain I was able to start rationalising the situation.

There would have been no way possible for this little baby boy to survive in this world. It would have been highly unlikely that he would have survived a full term pregnancy, or a birth. And in the very rare event of this happening, no child born with this particular disability had lived beyond the age of 2, whilst having had an extremely poor quality of life, before things came to an end.

I had to come to the conclusion that this little boy had not been meant for this world, and that wherever he was, he could only be in a better place. Having had the termination was in the end, however difficult and heartbreaking, the kindest thing to do.

Initially, Mr Haggis seemed to deal very well with all of this, he kept a level head, was there to take me to hospital, and appeared to carry this all very calmly.

I was tearful and grief-stricken, added to that, the normal hormonal changes that unsettle a woman's mood after giving birth, I was one heap of misery. The one thing I could focus on was my little girl, who was no more than a baby herself. I remember how hard it was to do little things like looking at her little baby feet. It had turned out that the last baby had clubbed feet, and I just kept on thinking of this, it would rip me apart inside, every time. I had sought, desperately, for answers and solutions. "Surely, clubbed feet are things that can be operated on and corrected these days?" Every time I put my little girl in the bath, washed and dried her perfect little feet, I would have the image of this tiny little Foetus, with so many parts which seemed so perfectly formed, little lips, tiny nose and the most beautiful little hands, and then... his little clubbed feet. I was torn between an irrational feeling of wanting to bring my dead baby back, desperate to put things right, and another one of holding on to those little healthy living feet and never wanting to let go, terrified that something awful would happen. The whole event had all at once made me extremely aware of my own mortality. Suddenly this relative feeling of safety, that belief that "things like that" only happen far away, and not to yourself, was completely shattered. I became anxious and always on my guard, ready for the worst news at any time.

I wanted to talk with my husband about things, but he kept himself closed off, was not able to communicate about what had happened. Over the following months, his behaviour started to become quite irrational, he seemed to go through all the emotions. He did not sleep, or could not stop sleeping. He went from being very low and desperate, to thinking that he was on top of the world. But all the while one big thing kept coming to the foreground, whatever mood he was in, I did not fit in the puzzle. He grew, once more, increasingly discontented with me, making me feel desperate and unwanted. It did not matter what I tried to do, I could twist myself in knots, nothing ever sufficed, everything was a cause for criticism. When he was on a high, his sexual appetite was absolutely insatiable, which also put an enormous strain on the relationship. Unbeknown to me, there was still his addiction to porn which fueled all those feelings within him. He reverted to his earlier selfish behaviour, doing exactly as he wanted, detaching himself more and more from his family.

I started to feel that his mood swings were no longer within acceptable "healthy" limits, and thought that a lot of this had been caused by the loss of our baby and his reluctance to try and digest this. In the end, he was starting to become more and more aware of his own imbalance, suffering the consequences, like exhaustion and suicidal depression. After much talking I finally managed to persuade him to seek help.

It turned out to be a very easy diagnosis to make: Bi-polar disorder, formerly known as Manic Depression. He was a textbook example. In his late twenties, with a history of mental illness in his family, and with the Bi-polar disorder manifesting itself after a trauma.

Once the diagnosis was made, we entered a chapter of long trials of different types of medication. One after the other made him suffer from all sorts of side effects, and it took a long time, before a type was found that had only limited side effects and a justifiable beneficial effect. While he was suffering, laid out on the couch, in a state of despair, feeling physically ill, I was trying my best to look after everyone and above all to keep the kids quiet in order to give him peace and rest. Not an easy task with a young boy and a lively toddler at hand. I was aware of the fact that he needed me, and even though I was able to cope with the practical side of things, I found it hard to cope with the emotional side. I had felt lonely, cast aside and trampled on for so long, and suddenly it was expected from me to be the loving caring wife, ready to give all her love. I simply could not muster those feelings, I felt too empty inside. So much inside me had been killed, and it took all my energy to keep myself from going under, to look after my two children, that I simply did not have the emotional energy left to give to someone who had given so little to me. Yes, I felt for him, and no, I did not wish this upon him for one minute, but somehow I was just hanging on by a silk thread, for all kinds of reasons, other than my own well being and happiness. One day in March 2004, shortly before our little girl's 3rd birthday, something inside him snapped. I had been bringing a cup of tea into his office where he was, against doctor's orders, trying to work. For no explicable rational reason he lashed out, came towards me and threw me against the wall. It was the only ever time he was ever physically violent towards me, but it scared me like mad. I had often felt that there was some kind of threat to that effect about him, but nothing of the kind had happened up to that point. He literally had a moment of blind madness, was unable to see things as they were, and I just so happened to be the first one to cross his path.

He had been suffering from severe paranoia, thinking people were watching from outside the kitchen window, thinking someone was knocking on the back door, when no-one could possibly be there. He thought his boss had installed a tracking device in his car, tracing his every movement. He kept seeing things out of the corners of his eyes. It was unclear whether this was part of his illness or a direct result of the medication he was taking. Whatever had caused it, it was clear to me that I should not have been left to my own devices to care for him. I was simply not equipped to cope with something like this. The fact that I had no net to catch me, only made matters worse. I only had very limited contact with my own family back in Belgium. Friends were scarce and his family was also not forthcoming with any support at that time.

As soon as this sudden outburst had taken place, he left the house, driving away in the car with screeching tyres. I was left in total shock, so very very scared, holding my little girl, who was crying inconsolable as she had witnessed the whole scenario.

When he returned later on that same day, he just came to pack some clothes and left, he said he could not longer stay with us under the same roof if this was what he was capable of doing. His rational mind had more or less restored itself at that point, and the realisation that he could do something really irresponsible dawned on him.

He stayed with family, first a cousin, then his parents, and eventually he rented a small cottage on a farm not too far away from my house. This meant he was living on his own, still in a very fragile state, and I feared for him every day. I could not brush away images of finding him, dead, after him having taken his own life.

Because all had happened so suddenly, I had not stopped considering myself as his wife, I was still hoping things could be sorted out, the love might grow again, and we would end up back together, bringing up our little family. The summer came and went, the autumn did the same, and as the winter was on its way, I could no longer witness him being on his own in this run-down place. In the meantime, he lost one of his very closest friends to cancer, which was a huge blow at only 30 years of age.

His condition had somewhat stabilised, and we talked about giving things a new try, a fresh start. He had also slowly started to ease himself back into work, so there was more of a rhythm back in his life. Not long before Christmas he moved back in. The first 6 weeks were euphoric, there was a great sense of happiness at bringing our little family back together, everything seemed perfect. I had such a feeling of victory, having managed to glue things back together again. I just wanted to scream it from the rooftops: "Hey, look at us, we can do this! We will overcome the odds!" But this second honeymoon feeling soon started to fade. The spring came, and I was aware of the fact that we both felt miserable. We had, by that time, also talked through the sexual problems at great length. I had made it very clear to him, that if there was to be a new start for us, it could only include him and me, no secrets anymore, no lies.

He was back at work full time, which meant that every so often he had to go away for a number of days, up to a week. One week in May 2005, he went to Ireland. It was during that week, that everything finally became crystal clear to me. As soon as he had gone, I felt as if a great weight had been lifted off my shoulders. I realised that I had been walking on eggshells again since the start of the year. Being on my own for a week felt like such a relief. And then came the straw that broke the camel's back: I had to look something up in his Internet history about something we had ordered online, using his user name, and was absolutely devastated to find the whole history littered by visits to porn sites. My world finally fell apart for good. I just knew that I had reached the very end of the line. Upon his return home, we went for a walk. In floods of tears I told him that I could not go on. He agreed, saying that he had also felt the same sense of relief whilst being away. He acknowledged the fact that there had been further lies about his online activities, even though I still don't think that at that point in time he could fully understand the damage this had caused to my feelings towards him.

We agreed that the best solution would be for him to move out and for me to remain in the family home with the children. A number of very uncomfortable weeks passed, weeks where he would still insist in sharing the same bed, though nothing more than a disturbed attempt at finding sleep took place. During the third week of July I went away to take part in a residential Open University course at Bath University. It was during this week that he called me to say that he would be moving out the same weekend I returned. The week away was a real escape, I met so many people, and I made a point of putting all that was going on back home out of my head. I had not socialised like this for a very long time, and I suddenly felt like I could still be young, that deep down inside me, there was a carefree side, a liveliness waiting to break through and come to the surface. I even developed a bit of a crush on one of my fellow students, something I could not remember feeling for the longest time.

Eventually when I arrived back home from my week away, I found the place stacked full of boxes, ready to be moved out the next day. Everything felt surreal. The next day I took the kids away to the cinema, so that they would not have to witness their dad moving out. In the evening we returned to a half empty house and found nothing but total carnage. It hurt me to find the whole house in disarray. His lack of consideration for the kids was so blatant. I could understand that he might not have wanted to leave the house in any sort of acceptable state for me, but he could have given some more thought to the kids.

I tried as well as I could to restore some kind of normality, we went to buy some second hand sofas, a new kettle, and some of the other items that now suddenly needed replacing.

Very soon, I had no idea what to do with myself, I was climbing the walls, not knowing where my life was heading next...

T.B.C.

How I got here (Scotand and the blog) -part 1-

Blogging is still a very new concept to me. Today I spent some time looking up and reading other people's blogs, and I have to admit it has been a revelation in the most pleasant way.

To put you in the picture, I have to tell you first of all about my previous Internet experiences. The very first time that I had access to the Internet on a regular basis was in 1998, just after I arrived in Scotland. I took the first job I could get, which was in a role as a customer service representative in a large international call centre in the heart of Glasgow.
The place stretched out over several floors, where on each floor you would find a number of clusters of desks, each representing and communicating with one or two European countries. Being Belgian, I was hired to represent the Belgian/Dutch team, this meant that I had to deal with customers both in my native Dutch as well as in French. I soon found that it was only going to be a stop-gap, the workplace was far away from where I lived and the actual job bored me to tears. One of the very few exciting sides of the job was "Internet access"!
We were allowed to browse at our peril during breaks and occasionally when there were no phone calls to be answered and all other jobs were done,we would log on to our favourite websites. Most of my Belgian colleagues used the facility to keep up with the Belgian news papers and some of them also kept in touch with people back home via chat rooms and e-mail. This was my very first experience of communicating with people online, and I found a whole new world opening up for me. I soon became quite addicted to the chat room of my favourite Belgian radio station at that time, Studio Brussel.

After a few months I found a new, much more suitable job, close to where I lived. Initially I did not have an Internet connection at home, nor one that could be used for personal use at work, so I had to go cold turkey.

This was the very point where I stopped living in my native country. I had physically been in Scotland for 6 months, but in reality, I still lived with one foot in Belgium, going to a job with Belgian colleagues, speaking my own language all day long, living in the Belgian time zone. On top of that I had found a new cyber-circle of friends on the chat site, once more all of them Belgian. I found myself hankering to go back, missing my country and culture, but stuck in a situation I couldn't get out of.

In 1997 I met a Scotsman (the father-haggis) at my work place in Belgium. We had been together for only a few months, when he decided that he could no longer be away from his own country, and returned to the UK.
In all honesty, had it not been for a series of rather unfortunate events happening to me shortly after he left, I do think the relationship would have died a natural death over the distance between us.
I had been struggling terribly financially and ended up being evicted from my flat, with absolutely nowhere to go. It was initially a combination of my despair and his feeling of guilt, having briefly moved in with me, without contributing anywhere near his spending, that brought me here. There was also still some of the infatuation present, as usually found in an early relationship, which had not yet completely died away.

I soon found myself in a relationship with a completely different person from the one I'd met in Belgium. He had been a fish out of the water back there, unable to communicate effectively, ripped away from the surroundings he had grown up with. On occasions I had seen sides of him that I did not like, glimpses of aggressive and quite selfish behaviour, but I simply put it down to his home sickness, his frustration with a language he was struggling to understand, his inability to find a job that he enjoyed as a direct result of his inadequacy in Dutch.
When we first met, I think he was mainly attracted to me, apart from an immediate physical attraction between us, because I was one of the first people with whom he was able to have a full and meaningful conversation. A lot of Belgians speak the compulsory English learnt at school, but as he was only able to do low-skilled jobs, he did not mix with people who in general had a good knowledge of any language other than their own. My own English was good, having studied it up to quite an advanced level, and also having worked on the ferry between Oostende and Dover for a year or so before getting back to my studies.

Once here, I finally got to see this man in his own comfort zone, put right back in his original background (which couldn't be any further removed from my own). In the beginning of me moving here, I moved in with his parents, the two of us more or less living like sardines in a tin in his childhood bedroom.
Very soon, I slipped into a feeling of being lost and lonely, a stranger in a strange land. He reverted straight back to his old bachelor behaviour, and was much more interested in seeing all his free and single friends, than in spending time with me.
I remember being here the very first weekend, him going out for the night with his friends, me being left, feeling very awkward, with his parents, who I had only just met. He denied me all access to his pre-relationship friends, had no interest in taking me to places and introducing me to his country, and was not open to the idea of maybe meeting some other young couples, beside his single male friends, in an attempt to build up a shared social life.
The relationship did not work well, but once more I made excuses in my head, telling myself that living with his parents wasn't easy, that maybe I was too clingy, that he needed to get used to living with someone. There were many fights, and I often felt totally alone, very much trapped.

At approximately the same time as me finding a new job, due to the fact that my earnings were going to be quite good, we managed to buy our first property together. In the beginning, things looked up. There was the excitement about having our own place, the distraction of re-decorating it all, and for me there was the added challenge of getting to grips with a job in engineering in a language I still had a lot to learn about. After the first rush of activity, when things started to settle down into a more steady pattern, he was increasingly going out with his friends again, sulking and grumpy when his friends were planning a big bachelors' holiday to Turkey which he could not take part in.

Something that I haven't yet mentioned, mainly because I have never quite managed to get over it, and because it still fills me with a terrible feeling of guilt, is that upon coming here I had to leave my little boy behind with his father. I was effectively homeless in my own country, had been given the invitation to leave it all behind and start a new life in Scotland, but the invitation was strictly limited to me, and did not extend to my child.
I felt cornered, both by my little boy's father, who cried at my doorstep, telling me that I could not possibly take his child so far away from him, and by my new partner and his family, who clearly didn't have it in mind to have more than one person to come and move in.
I came to Scotland in late April 1998, and the very first time I got to see my child again was over Christmas of that same year. I had kept in touch as much as possible over the phone, but was often fobbed off with an excuse. He seemed to be in bed as early as 6 in the evening, and often I would be told that he was out with family somewhere.

Over Christmas I found out that I was not the only one feeling utterly miserable about not being together. I had assumed that he would be equally as happy with his dad as he had been with me, but nothing could be further from the truth, he simply had been with me from the first moment that he came into this world.
The split between his father and me had occurred long before he had any recollection of us ever having been together, and so, moving to his dad's home, however much he enjoyed weekends with his dad, was a huge change, and not one he adjusted to very easily. Shortly after New Year, I had to take him back to Belgium, and it took all my strength to go through the ordeal of leaving him with his father once again. As soon as we returned, I started court procedure in order to obtain full custody again. Thankfully this all worked out in the end, and by the beginning of May 1999, I was able to go and pick him up for good.

Shortly after this, the problems with haggis-father, which had steadily made their way back into the relationship, turned really ugly. On more than one occasion was I told to f**k off back to my country. The fact that he saw my young son as an intruder, and some sort of competition for my attention, made things worse. I would find myself going into work, feeling utterly drained, pleased to be away from the environment of the home, which felt like a ticking time bomb most of the time. We very nearly split up, but still, I was hellbent on making this work. I felt especially stubborn about it, because I had already been married at the tender age of 17 to my little boy's father, and this had obviously not worked out. I felt like a woman with a huge stamp on her forehead that read "FAILURE". I was going to make this work, come what may! Combined with that, my expectations had become very low. Whenever there was a fight, I just believed that this was how relationships were, that that was simply as good as it got. I also excused the fact that he could not get used to my son's presence, because of him not being a father himself, and him not being used to living with a young child. It seemed right to me to make many allowances and to simply wait 'til things fell into place in their own time.

It was around this time that I got my first home Internet connection. I gradually went back onto the chat rooms, for old times sake, desperately trying to get some contact back with my roots.
As I found myself alone, many times, while he was out with his friends, I would log on, after my boy was asleep and while away the hours, talking to people that I'd never met. It was all I could do to chase away the feelings of utter loneliness and the lack of friendship and any kind of social life. I was not being secretive about my online contacts, and was absolutely not engaging in any sort of conversation that could be deemed unsuitable for someone who is in a committed relationship. However, I still had accusations of being some sort of a cheat thrown at me.
So eventually, not wanting to compromise my relationship, I stopped communicating with others. Little did I know that all that time, he was using the internet to feed his addiction to porn. I had no idea, it had always been his dirty secret. Don't get me wrong, I am open minded, and I have absolutely no problem with people enjoying porn either on their own, because they are single, or together as part of a relationship, when both partners get a kick out of it.
It was the fact that it was all underhand and secretive that made it so damaging. It made me feel very betrayed and cheated on. It also made him approach me, sexually, in a way that really insulted me, and frankly turned me off completely. He had lost all perspective on a healthy real sexual relationship, through this warped view that often is presented in porn. He was living in a fantasy world, expecting me to act out the scenes in his head, without me even knowing they were there.

He became increasingly impatient and discontented with me, and often blamed the fact that my job absorbed a lot of me. I did work long hours, and found it hard to spend quality time with my boy, as well as believing that if I were to spend more time in the household, my partner might actually be happier and things would finally settle down. This resulted in me giving up my job as an engineer. The plan was that we start on a new slate, I would be at home, and I would attempt to do something meaningful with my paintings and try to get into galleries. The other huge decision was that we planned to try and have a baby. I was hoping this would cement things, it would make him see my son as just the little boy he was, and would allow him to feel first hand the feelings of parenthood, and therefor bring us all closer. I finished my job at the end of June, just in time to be at home for the school summer holidays with my son. By August, I fell pregnant with little haggis. The only big drawback of me stopping work was that we really felt the pinch financially, I had been the main earner, so suddenly we were trying to manage on less than half of our joint income. In theory it was enough, but you sooner get used to a comfortable financial lifestyle, than to reverse it. By October, when the worst of the nausea was over, two big changes took place. I started to do some self employed work from home, doing repairs and alterations for a dry cleaning chain (yes, a huge change from engineering indeed!!). He took on a new job, in the same sector he was already working in, but for a rival company who offered him a considerably better pay package. The result was that soon I had no time to concentrate on painting anymore, and he was more and more away from home to sales conferences, etc. It was at those conferences that he met a female colleague. I had a feeling almost straight away that something was going on, simply by judging how often he would mention her. He also spent long hours on the phone to her, under the guise of it being a business call. It struck me how he seemed to have so much fun, laughing out loud, while he had still very little time for me, and found nothing I ever said funny or amusing. And then... Not long before Chrismas, when I was just about 5 months pregnant, we married. It was all organised rather hastily, but in my stupidity and blindness I felt reassured about the fact that he was willing to tie the knot. For some reason, I thought once more that this would bring about a turning point, and that he would finally settle down, feel happy with me and become more committed. And so I became Mrs Haggis, I confronted him about the long phone calls with his colleague, he assured me that nothing was going on, and the phone calls stopped. We still had an internet connection, he used it mainly for his work (or so I was led to believe) and I would only use it occasionally to play the odd game of Scrabble, maybe to do some online shopping, but never to communicate with people. Little Haggis was Born in April 2001, later that year, in October, we moved to a new house, where there was a lot more space...

T.B.C.

First tentative steps.

This is it! I am inspired!
I guess I'm just one in a long long row, of course.
How did I get here?

Two words (or one name) : Petite Anglaise.

Sure, I had heard about blogs before. I'd never read one though, and to be honest, -please don't get upset with me now!- I thought it was something for weird computer geeks. I had this image of a virtual world, where people were acting out their fantasy lives, alter egos, you name it... through their blogs.

Being a bit of a book worm, I picked up "Petite Anglaise", the book, during my last hunt for my evening reading fix. I'm still reading it, as well as now having found the way to Petite Anglaise's blog.
In fact, I feel a little like a ball in a table tennis game; one moment I'm reading the book, greedily turning page after page; the next I'm scouring through Petite's archives, matching the book's events to the actual blog, whilst sneakily getting ahead, peeking at some of the newer posts.

I'm sure many women in their thirties, like Petite and myself, will recognise a lot of the situations and feelings she describes in her book and blog, however, I feel I have a sort of special kinship.
Not only am I the same age, I also find myself in a new country. I too, have a little girl, only difference being that mine isn't a tadpole, but a little haggis (topped with mayonnaise for that bit of Belgian-ness). The father-haggis is also not any longer in my life as a partner/husband, and a lot of water has flown under the bridge since.

My arrival in Scotland came about in quite a different way to Petite's move to France, but that is not of great importance. (If anyone does stumble upon this, and would like to know more, I could tell you the story of how this cunning Scotsman came and tempted me away from my lovely native Bruges...)
Looking at both our lives today, there are a lot of parallel lines, lived out on the two different sides of the Channel.

So, to get back on track, here I am. This might never be read by another pair of eyes, who knows?
The reason for writing here, is that at least there is a box to post my ramblings. I often write little bits, which invariably get deleted right before I can hit the save button. It seemed pointless to clog up the hard drive with things that I'd never show to anyone anyway.

My native language is Dutch as I am originally from the Flemish North of Belgium. I came to live in Scotland in April of 1998, already armed with a good basic knowledge of the English language.
I must admit though, that even now, after 11 years, I still don't consider myself fluent, or at least not quite as fluent as I'd like to be. Unlike Petite, I have not kept on speaking my native language on a daily basis (to my great embarrassment, I have to admit that my little haggis is not bi-lingual at all) and so I find myself stuck somewhere in the nowhere land between two languages.

I hear people speaking my native Dutch and feel strangely detached, it almost sounds alien, yet at the same time I can't quite master the subtle emotional nuances that are contained in the English language.

Of course when I first came here, my knowledge of English was more or less purely technical, and often my use of it lead to hilarious situations at the workplace. You could hedge your bets on it that someone would pick up on the slightest thing that could be turned into an innuendo, and then milk it for all it was worth.

My plan now? I will use this blog as a sort of notebook. You might find a recalled memory. Maybe I'll end up writing a bit about my everyday life. Or it could be that I post something of an observation, some thoughts, probably things as seen from a foreigner's point of view in this beautiful country I've come to live in.

I'm really curious to find out how the rest of this works, so I am going to hit the "PUBLISH POST" button...

Until the next time?