A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.

And so it is that I'm sat here in my sofa, and quite unexpectedly my Little Big Boy is sitting here beside me.
As it turns out, it's not due to the greatest of circumstances though.

Back in September he went off to college, after having won the sponsorship of a shipping company, to be trained up as a Marine Engineering Officer in the Merchant Navy.
It was all excitement, the great adventure looming...

He's just completed 6 months training at college and he should now be waiting to sail out on the wide seas.
However, not all has gone as expected. Far, far from it, in fact.


If you have read some of my previous entries, you will have found out a bit about things that went on in our household some years back. What you don't know yet, is that since my boy was seven years of age, and came to Scotland, his natural father virtually turned his back on him. He has not had any time or affection for him. Contact had been non-existent for about seven years, until my boy became so frustrated and angry that we decided to try and build some bridges. It's a long story, but basically the gist of it is, that things never quite got off the ground. There has been some sort of contact, but not of the kind that can fill this huge big gaping hole in his life. I have a lovely boy, who I would give the world, but the one thing he misses in his life, is the very thing I can never give him.. and that is for his birth father to take a genuine interest in him and show him love.

I can only make a guess about how much he has hurt over those years, and still does.

I'm left completely powerless.

Like any teenager, he's been through the hormonal mill over the last few years, sometimes being as prickly as a scared hedge-hog. Probably prickly for the same reasons as that same hedge-hog. Other times, still just a little ball of fluff, needing to be hugged and cuddled, still very much in need of protection and guidance.

Just a few years ago, at the onset of his puberty years, whilst his young mind was trying to cope with the lack of meaningful contact with his father, together with all the usual turmoil that's part of growing up, his step dad was slowly losing grip on life, as bipolar illness took a hold of him.
You would think any young person could be forgiven for having lost direction from time to time, for feeling confused, particularly under those circumstances.

And of course, there have been occasions when all this teenage angst has manifested itself in a fight or two, in some rude words... but a mother's love is the most bottomless pit and nothing is forgiven and forgotten faster than the mistakes of a growing child. On top of that, I'm the first one to admit that I've been the one to handle some situations in the wrong way. Parenting is challenging at the best of times and especially your first born can turn your life into a steep learning curve.

We have generally had a good open relationship over the years, but there are always things that you simply can't discuss with your nearest and dearest.
Sometimes you need someone who is completely impartial.
On the subject of his birth father, I am all but neutral, in fact, it can make me feel so very angry inside, on account of my child. He's obviously very aware of that, and I just can't help myself, however much I try to suppress those feelings.

And so it happened that my boy felt the need to talk to someone about this. At college he found out about a counselling service for students, and decided to go and talk to a professional about his feelings.


I was actually really pleased to hear about this, (he told me straight away about the fact that he was using the facility) as I thought this was quite a mature decision, and definitely a much more sensible way to deal with his feelings, rather than bottling them all up and then to go out and get himself into a fight.


During those few sessions with the "trained counsellor" he spoke of some of his fears, about his own moods, etc.


Something very important to remember here, is that he has been exposed to someone in his family who was very, very ill with mental illness. He knows the symptoms, has seen what it can do to someone, and of course, it left us all shaken, including my boy. When he felt down and sad, followed by feeling angry, he started to wonder in his own mind if the changes of his own mood were "normal".

We often talked about this, and even though I kept on re-assuring him that what he felt was very normal under the circumstances, he obviously never felt quite assured enough.

I tried to tell him that going through puberty, having all these changes taking place in your body and your mind, makes even young people in the most stable of situations moody and confused. Add his background into the mix, and you can't avoid feelings of sadness and anger following each other in quick succession.


Living with someone who loses themselves in the grip of bipolar illness has that effect on you, I know, because I also found myself scrutinising my own mind when I didn't quite feel that great inside. It simply is a scary prospect, and you can't help but wondering, fearing for your own mental health once you have witnessed this from very close-up.


Any sensible adult and parent of a teenager could see that there is nothing at all out of the ordinary with my son, in fact, many people have said that they think he's coping remarkably well, considering what has gone on in his young life. The counsellor however, decided otherwise and referred him for a full psychiatric assessment. I was outraged!!! This was no help at all, this only left him in more doubt, whilst all he needed was some re-assurance.

This all happened very recently, so an assessment had not yet taken place when my son had to be seen by a company doctor to get a medical for Liberia and Panama (the two places he was supposed to go to over the next 6 months).

TBC very soon...

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.

Sleepless nights

Another night, another journey through a space filled with little islands of fleeting sleep in a vast ocean of restless wakefulness.

After a night like that follows, inevitably, another day filled with exhaustion, disorientation.

I used to be one of those people who would not be woken if you dropped a bomb next to the bed, how things can change though...

Lying awake at night, and drifting in and out of sleep, can leave you with a very surreal feeling.
It has definitely confirmed the fact that we all dream, every night. To be aware of your dreams, and to be able to recall images, snippets of the emotions that were linked to a particular dream, has filled my head to the brim. Whilst I'm touched by a moment of sleep, I feel as if I'm under the water, covered by ice, just about touching the hazy transparent ceiling above me, ready to resurface at any time. Lately I have been caught talking in my sleep too, which does not surprise me a single bit. Apparently I must dream bi-lingual, talking a very individual cocktail of English and Dutch.

I have been recalling so many memories, feelings of old, that it's left me feeling scared. They say that just before you die, your life passes before your eyes, playing out like a movie. I must have been on the brink of death a hundred times over that past few years. Always in the deep dark hours of the night, when everything is so quiet that you can hear so many things that you've never heard before. Before the birds wake and start to twitter. When they finally do wake, and I'm still there lying in my nowhere land, the noise is almost deafening.

Some of the night noises are comforting, like for example the gentle rhythmic ticking of the clock, a sigh or a soft sleepy groan beside me, a lonely set of feet moving along the pavement beneath my bedroom window. All those things remind me of being a little girl and staying over at my granny and granddad's house. It was just a small place, with one spare room. In that room was an upright freezer, which was too big to fit into the small kitchen, and I remember feeling soothed by the soft "whirr" and "tick" of the freezer's compressor. Ever since then, the sound of a fridge or freezer has been linked to a warm and safe feeling. Just like certain smells or tastes can suddenly pull you back in time. At night, when I have been awake for long enough for my eyes to have adjusted to the dark shadows in the room, I go back to long lost times. I live my life over and over, while I really should be fast asleep, my brain switched to a setting which will clear the days' worries away. It doesn't happen that way, so I try to look for another outlet. I write, I paint and mostly I don't manage and my head feels too full. I have been told that my paintings have a certain darkness about them, a sort of mystery. Some are deliberately so, but seemingly I drag that same emotion in those paintings that are not intended to be like that.
I love the smell of oil paints, they too, remind me of my childhood. There was never a single time in my memory, when I was not aware of my mum painting. There were always canvasses around, commissions to be completed, collections of odd paintbrushes stood in glass jars...
I have my own glass jars these days, and canvasses, a pallet that is slowly starting to tell a story of many paintings.
My mum often jokes, according to her, she was especially creative and busy whilst she was pregnant with me, and one time she was so engrossed in her work that she accidentally took a sip of her jar of turps, instead of her coffee. "That is when," she says "the painting bug was fed right into you, through my blood into yours". This bug in the blood has been going for a number of generations it would seem. It has been passed from parent to child for as many generations as can be remembered. It seems though that in every generation there is only one, which I find remarkable. I feel very blessed to have been given this ability and the fact that I seem to have passed it on to my own daughter gives me as much pleasure as being able to enjoy my own creative side. I look forward to a future where I can share all the love for things beautiful and creative with this little person on who I seem to have left more than my fair share of a genetic imprint.

And then the reality dawns on me... That must be exactly how my own mother felt when I was just a small girl, yet now I am in another country, and in many more ways than purely the physical one of distance, I am far away. I hope, every day of my life, that I won't lose my own daughter, I have secret little daydreams of her living in the same village, having children of her own, and having all of that close to me. At the same time, I know that I will have no right of decision in those things. If she grows up with the need to go and spread her wings, I will only be able to watch her make her way into the world, under her own conditions. My son is already spreading his wings and while I'm so happy for him to be able to go out and discover far off places, just as he has always wanted to do, I also feel him slipping through my fingers. I can only watch him while still watching over him from a distance. I need to keep cupping him in my hands, like sand, knowing that if I were to squeeze in an attempt to hold on, the sand would only slip through my fingers faster.

Waiting and chasing cats.

There are two front and two back doors to my house. A rather unusual situation, you might say, especially as this is not the result of two houses being knocked into one. The house was built around 1850, and has undergone various structural alterations in its 160 years, resulting in an odd layout. In the front there is a centrally positioned shop door, with a large display window on either side. To the left of that, at the very edge of the front of the house, is the actual main house front door. This door leads into a hallway, which has a broad, heavy back door at the other end, and a couple of steps to the side which lead you into the actual house. Some of the old villagers who remember this house in some of its earlier incarnations, believe that this hallway was once an open passageway through to the back of the house, which was later closed off by means of the front and back door.

We very rarely use this part of the house for anything other than storage space. All traffic in and out of the house tends to happen through the shop.

My son is home from college this weekend, as I told you in a previous post. Every time he does come home, he re-affirms my thoughts about parenting getting increasingly more difficult as your child gets older. So far, this weekend has not been an exception. He arrived home on Friday, after having caught a lift home with a friend who recently passed his driving test, instead of getting on the bus home from the train station. It worries me when he gets into his friends' cars. Every year a number of young people are killed in car accidents on the rural roads around here. And more than often, the driver is a young male who has only passed his driving test recently.
On Friday evening the cosy family get-together was, as usual, very short-lived. Within a couple of hours of arriving home, after not having been here for about 9 weeks, he decided to go and see one of his friends, and announced he was going to be staying over at this friends' house. The trouble with a 17-year old who lives away from home the majority of the time, is that the boundaries move quite dramatically over a short space of time. It becomes very hard to keep him in the house when you want to, because he has become accustomed to an independent life and is used to make his own decisions with just a minimum of restrictions.
So, I let him go...
All went well this time round. That means: he did not come home with a black eye, he did not go out drinking and neither was I called up in the middle of the night by the police. (must write THAT story one time!)
Around two o'clock in the afternoon he came strolling in, only to leave again to see yet more friends, very shortly afterwards.
I often wonder why I so eagerly look forward to his coming home. I need a reality check, because every time he does come home, I get my hopes up so high, looking forward to some quality mother-and-son time, only to have them quashed within 10 minutes of my son walking through the door. I don't think there is any malice in it from his side, but his brain is simply not yet wired up to empathise with my feelings as a mother. It is scientifically proven that teenagers temporarily lose the ability to identify the emotions and feelings of others, thus turning them into selfish creatures, whilst the complex process takes place of preparing and altering a young brain, ready for adulthood.

You will have started to wonder why I told you about the two front doors. Well, here it comes now: Last night, my son announced that he was going out yet again, much to my dismay and despair. This time round though, he was not staying over anywhere, but planning on coming home after his night out. That in itself filled me with dread, because I always worry that he will come in drunk and be sick all over the house. Not that that has actually ever happened as such, but I have this phobia, all to do with drunks and sickness... don't ask, it has to do with the way my dad behaved when I was growing up.

Now that I have my two new feline family members, we have to watch very carefully that they do not escape to the outside world through an open door. They need to be kept in for one full month, in order to prevent them from making their way back to wherever they lived before. The little patchy one (now renamed "Patch") does not seem too bothered, and seems to be very happy inside, but her bigger sister keeps pacing the floor, sits near doors and windows, meowing very meaningfully and scratching to try and get out. She has already made a leap to outside freedom twice in less than 3 days. The first time, I managed to grab her before she properly got out of the door, but the second time, I ended up dashing after her, into the neighbours' garden, wearing only my slippers and jammies.

It's going to be a very long month.

My son does not have any keys to the house, reason being that he persistently loses them. It ended up coming so far that I had to have a new lock fitted, because he managed to lose the last available key to the side-front door. I definitely don't trust him with any keys to the shop. So when he decided that he was going out last night, and when he also announced that he did not know what time he'd be back as he was going out with a group of friends to Newcastle, I did not really know how to solve the key-to-the-door problem. The added aspect was also the fact that I had to make sure that the cats could not be let out accidentally. Staying up for him to let him in, was obviously out of the question. Giving him a key to the shop was also not an option. The last possibility was to arrange for him to be able to come in via the side front door. This however, meant climbing over chairs, squeezing past bicycles and pushing his way between boxes. Another implication was that there was nothing else for it, than for the cats to spend the night well away from that part of the house, in the actual shop.

Being someone who suffers from insomnia, I don't sleep well at the best of times. The past night was no exception, what with the added agony of waiting on my son coming in and worrying about the cats escaping if he did not keep doors closed properly. I was awake until half past one in the morning, and when he had not surfaced by that time, I decided to go to bed. At four in the morning, I was woken up by a slight noise. I heard some rumbling in the downstairs hallway, however I did not hear anyone coming up the stairs.
After about 10 minutes, I assumed that the boy had made a very quiet entrance, and an even more remarkably quiet ascent up the stairs. This seemed very unlikely though. There are a few reasons why I cannot imaging not hearing anyone coming up the stairs: Firstly, the merest drop of a feather wakes me, so anything moving will not only wake me, but also keep me awake. Secondly, because the stairs are so very old, and extremely creaky, the aforementioned feather has the capacity of producing a thunderous noise when dropped upon the stairs, and lastly, 17-year old boys don't come in producing less than the noise of falling feathers after a night out. Something was definitely strange. After I had been laying in bed for a further 10 minutes, I started to become aware of the telltale signs of a door or window left open. I could feel a draught, and I could hear the faint whistle of wind blowing through the gap under the bedroom door.

Having had enough of the suspense, I got up and went on an expedition down the stairs. The reason for delaying this had been the fear of finding my son with a grey face, passed out on the sofa in a pool of vomit. I know it sounds awful, but it's stronger than my rational mind, and images like that haunt me every time he goes out. Careful not to wake my sleeping daughter, I crept down the stairs. I found the front door in the hallway ajar, allowing a chilly late winter wind to blow into the house. Thankfully, the doors between shop and hallway had been closed, so no cats had escaped, at least not yet...

When venturing further into the house, there was no sign of my son, his bedroom had been empty, he was not in the sitting room, in the shop, or the kitchen. The kitchen light was on, so someone had definitely been in. I even gathered all my courage and opened up the bathroom door to check if maybe he was in there, cradling the toilet, grey in the face, vomiting. (I really ought to tackle this phobia of mine!)

Because I have no longer got my old slim pre-kids figure, it would be quite tricky for me to squeeze my way from the back of the hallway, to the front door, past all the obstacles, in order to close it. An easier way to do this, was to simply go out through the shop-front-door, and close the side-front-door from the outside. With a sleepy head I unlocked the shop door, stepped out... and as I did so, the black cat (re-named once more: Sooty) slithered past my legs with surprising agility, making a run for freedom. This is how I ended up stalking through my neighbours' garden between four and five in the morning, in the cold, wearing nothing but thin jammies and a pair of slippers. I managed to get Sooty back in, to close the door and to get back in the house, covered in goosebumps, my slippers soaked by the early morning dew.
All this said and done, there still wasn't any sign of my missing son.
He did not answer his mobile (a very common trick).

Back in the kitchen, I made myself a cup of coffee, whilst I could hear a very disgruntled Sooty juggling some of the crockery and figurines I have on display in my little shop. Just to think that I had been so adamant about a "no cats allowed in the shop" policy. That lasted well.
After about half an hour's wait, the boy finally turned up. Stumbled through the boxes in the hallway, said hello as if nothing had happened, made a quick excuse involving something about feeling car-sick (often used to cover up beer breath!) and hurried up the stairs to bed. Needless to say that I've been awake ever since, and that's how I ended up sitting here composing this post.

I am willing to bet the last of my money (not much to lose anyway) that the rascal will not show face until well into the afternoon, upon which he will simply pack his stuff and head for the next train...
So much for family weekends.

I think I'll need to be patient, wait til he has a child of his own, before he will understand my worries, the agonising wait, and the painful frustration at always lingering somewhere at the bottom of the list of priorities. In the meantime, I'll just keep loving him dearly, keep hoping he'll come home for the weekend and spend some time with me, keep getting that regular wake-up call about the importance of teenage friendships.
I often wonder... was I like that? Of course I don't remember being like that, but then again the older generation never does. Deep down I know though that I can't have been that different in many ways. What I have come to realise over the years is that there is no greater love than that of a parent for a child, and that it is the one single biggest thing you will never be able to comprehend until you experience that love from a parent's point of view for yourself. As a child, or even as a young adult, before I had my own children, I could not grasp the overwhelming enormity of this feeling of love. Loving your teenager is not easy, it's not for the faint hearted, but boy, I wouldn't want to miss it for the world!