A Comeback
For the last few years I have hidden my words within myself, making way for relationships, babies, sleepless nights, building projects. I have woken and pottered each day in the same Welsh town. Croissants from Mary’s deli, strawberries from The Salty Dog. A river, a bypass, a pizza place, a meadow. As towns go, I have found myself in a sweet spot, give or take a little too much rain. There is a cradling community who have seen me through things; a handful or two of my childhood friends, back for good from travels away; Welsh hills rolling like storybook illustrations, riddled with sacred oaks and burgeoning hedgerows. Red kites across mountain-framed skies. Moss and lichen under branch-cracking footstep. And, importantly, a closeness to the few who have chosen here, chatting round fires at parties which end with dancing in the light of the dwindling flames. My children have been born into a lucky, lucky vastness - open space and fresh air in an age when it’s a blessing and not a normality.
I have a sense of hiding here, tucked away from a contemporary world that churns on without me. I feel left behind by it. On low days I feel I’ve wasted my potential, out here in the outskirts of no-mans-land. I always thought I’d live in New York City for longer than I did. Have a glamorous career, perhaps at a fashion magazine that involved me getting dressed up every morning. But, while my babies remain small, I have needed to keep all the turbulence of pandemic-era politics held at arm's length, a train-ride away, and one which I rarely choose to take. Any news from a bigger world trickles into my awareness slowly.
My hiding out has ebbed and warped into questionable emotional hiding too, less healthy than the escape-to-nature kind, making a free world not always so free, after all. It doesn’t matter where we are if we cannot find our own breathing and centre. So there have been days and months of feeling like a stranger to myself. My written thoughts - once so plentiful when I lived as a nomad - over time have drifted away into the heads and pens of other writers, and my songs have gone the same way, too.
Hiding - this trap I have fallen into - spills over into my relationships too; before I know it I’m communicating at surface level, reflecting back only the sunny parts of the day. I hear a call from Jake to deepen. A request for vulnerability. I want it too, but it’s hard to find my way back there when I’ve gotten caught up in the doing of life, the busyness, the becoming a mother-ness.
Becoming a mother has been a lot. Watching my body stretch itself around fat healthy babies, draining nutrients firstly through the placenta, soon after from my breasts, then from my bones as I hoist their ever expanding bodies up and down staircases and streets. Meeting these two tiny people who have shaped and changed me forever and who require me to shape them in return - maybe I haven’t been hiding so much after-all: perhaps it’s been more of a necessary, temporary morphing, as all my energy is poured into the vessel of birth, unconditional nurturing, and the side effects of such essential exhaustions.
Whatever the reasons, change begins with awareness. And here I am today, mid-afternoon on a Sunday, which has forever been the most melancholy moment of any given week for me, clawing back my words and beginning again. This week I read this: ‘Stage a massive comeback in your life. Unleash everything you’ve always known you’re capable of. Grow. Be brave. Be free.’ It spoke to me of my hidden words, the ones that used to flow so freely. And the quote brought with it a permission to liberate them again, as though today was the first day of my life. I am the only one able to grant myself this permission, so here is my sacred space to try and fumble for words again.
