Plot twists, new chapters, and garden paths

Hello darling friends! It has been a while again, I know. Spring is finally on her way here down under and life has still been so very busy. It’s incredible just how long DIY and setting up a new home takes. Especially starting almost entirely from scratch.

Every weekend seems taken up with sawing, sanding, filling, and painting. We’re nearing the end of a big project, and I’m now tasked with drawing up a budget for the garden. The Mr has requested it in a spreadsheet, which is not my strongest skill, however I do have lots of pretty birds eye view plans I’ve literally drawn up, and lists of plants - but I guess Mr Mathematical want the figures, as opposed to just hearing me waffling on about the dream and what I’m imagining! I have a Pinterest board on the go which is really helping me to visualise what plants I just have to have. It is full of pinks and picket fences, I am nothing, if not predictable. Monalogue’s YouTube channel is also a favourite right now, as her garden style is exactly to my tastes. It’s such a pleasure to watch, but hard to do so without really wanting to add ducks to the wish list as well.

Our days outside of actual home-making are plodding along nicely, and we are nearly in some semblance of a routine. Arlo is enjoying school, has chosen where he wants to go for Secondary (gulp), and is really working on his own sense of independence. Mummy is no longer required to make a packed lunch in the morning, nor breakfast, and it’s taking some getting used to, not being needed quite so much in the practical sense. It’s an odd mix of feeling proud, and glad that he’s wanting to do these things for himself, but sad that those little years are long gone. It’s now a slow process of letting go. I do know he’ll need me more than ever emotionally over the coming teenage years - it’s just a shift to a new way of parenting that I need to get used to, along with the huge changes of our entire life as a family lately. It just all feels so fast! Like the pedal is truly to the metal and so I’m doing what I can to choose slow where I can.

Thankfully Arlo has discovered that he likes gardening with me, and it’s a nice way to spend time together. Last week we planted Peas, which he has always loved eating fresh from the pods.

Choosing to follow The Garden path

I’ve been thinking about lots of deep and meaningful things lately. It’s so true that a big move like this really does make you, well, think! Having lived in one area for so long, nigh on 25+ years to be precise, the routine of a familiar life really numbs certain things. You plod along because things are comfortable - but moving to the other side of the world really forces you out of your comfort zone and raises a lot of questions about even the smallest of things. It holds a mirror up to your beliefs, emotions, and feelings.

Not all of it is pretty. While there are things that are fun, days of sadness is a common occurrence too. In a way I’m mourning for the familiar, while enjoying what’s new. Missing my little-little boy and our homeschooling days, while marvelling at his confidence and new found love for “Aussie Rules Footy”.

Liking the new top-loader washing machine, but missing my old washing line and the view from my kitchen window… Bless my Mum’s heart, she sent me some Fairy Scent Boosters in the post because I was nostalgic for the smell of my old laundry!

I find myself looking back too, and missing a certain time of life. Not in a glum “can’t-let-go” kind of way, but wondering when last it was that I felt like all the puzzle pieces were together. It was 2017 to be exact, a lovely year from memory - we were settled in a good Church, I had fully stepped into my role as a homemaker, felt great about my appearance and physical health, and life was a bit, well, “smaller”. Which is the best way I can think to describe it. Arlo had recently started school, we had also started gardening and growing our own vegetables, and I had just published Ladies Like Us. The media madness and TradWife things, wasn’t even a thing yet. (Now, dare I say it, it’s even worse!) The little healthy, quiet, and normal bubble I was in before social media was a happier one for sure.

Those eight short years ago, I was just a housewife, and the two things that I miss more than all of it boil down to feeling comfortable in my own skin, enjoying a quiet life in the garden, and at home. Pottering between the veg patch, and a pot over the stove, cooking something delicious with what we had lovingly tended and harvested from our own garden.

Having a little bit of earth to steward, full of possibilities and wonder is where I find myself at my most rested and “in tune” with creation. Upon deep reflection, I’ve always known this - even as a child I’d gravitate towards my grandparents garden, the heath, or some wild place and would spend hours watching butterflies and bees dart from flower to flower.

I loved to lose myself in books too, and write - cultivating for myself a rich inner world and a healthy creative expression with no outside opinions or influences. I wonder, is this what we are all really chasing when we claim we want “slow living” or a soft life?

Blogging and writing books is, in a way, a good thing for introverts and the soft life. A way of letting the world get to know you, but on your own terms. It holds space for real life as well. It’s all deeply considered - this very post has been sat half finished in my drafts for three weeks now. I’m no longer pressured by immediacy and algorithms, or part of the popularity contest that being a “housewife” influencer has become.

In fact modern life on the whole, and many of its trappings have a way of distracting us from the most serene and slow ways of enjoying the world. I’m kind of feeling a bit too old to let any more time pass me by, and giving myself permission to be removed even more from it. So letting go of certain things over the past 12 months has had its growing pains, but the seeds we sowed in faith are finally starting to sprout!

These two know how to "live slow"

Blooming though the seasons

Before you lovely ladies protest at calling myself old, I know I’m not really old by any stretch. However, I am also not exactly a spring chicken - I’m very nearly “middling”, and this age and stage of life has got me wondering a lot about where I sit in the world, and what this season will hold if I don’t truly think about and claim exactly what I want from it.

An international move forces you to reevaluate the way you show up in the world. I have also come to realise that my confidence was knocked on social media, as a lot of negative people would comment on how I looked, and made lots of assumptions about me, and that kind of sticks with you. Though I’m an introvert by nature, I’m a confident one and can step out into the public eye if it’s something I feel passionate about, but advocacy for a cause can also put you in the firing line, and at the end of the day, I’m still a human woman who has feelings. Time is marching across my face now, and all that horrid trolling does funny things to your mind.

You couldn’t PAY me to go back to being 20, or even 30. At nearly 39 I am so much happier than I have ever been inside, but youth is wasted on the young. I wish inner beauty worked on crows feet!

A big reason why I have taken a step back in the media is because I believe that stress manifests itself in your body, and it really has in mine.

This is a time of healing, and I need to return to The Garden, in more ways than one. I’m glad to see it’s all happening in perfect time…

All this to say, I think that the call on my life from that time was meant to be, and I don’t regret it as I have learned so much, (this is a lesson in Ladies Like Us that I speak about quite a lot). I also realise that I don’t technically have to keep trooping on if it negatively impacts my own life. 

There are other ways to make a difference.

So what now?

Spring and Autumn have always been my favourite times of year. A time for growth, new planting, or harvesting your efforts. Eagerly anticipating blooms, or tasting fruits. Enjoying colour, and beauty, and light. To feel the warmth of the sun, and enjoying the wonder of nature.

My inner world is feeling a lot like this at the moment. I’ve been in a “Winter” of late - a season of rest, and inner reflection. Some of it made through personal choice to let certain things go, and learning what doesn’t serve me and pruning it out.

I have been making lots of time to put the “us” into our new home, hosting family lunches, and friends on weekends. Home is where the heart is, and it’s nice to let people into both.

As much as I am planning a garden to enjoy on warm summer days and a vegetable patch that will feed and nourish my family - I also need to plan, and plant, and re-learn how to water myself. I picked up this book last week as it really called to me. When things like that happen I feel like it’s a little nudge from Heaven in the right direction, and His way of showing me what it is that I need to concentrate on in my spiritual life.

We cannot pour from an empty cup as they say, or harvest what you have not planted. In the distraction of life, pandemics, TV appearances, radio shows, countless hours on the phone to journalists, and picking up sticks to move across oceans - I feel it really is time to bloom where I am planted.

What life will look like, and what fruit it will bear from now on, I do not know for certain (do we ever?) - but I do know that I must have flowers (and books), and a wholesome and loving home as possible, always and always.

A new path, brick by brick, chapter by chapter

I also know that a new book written by my own hand is on the horizon - I’ve been feeling the same inner nudging that I had before I wrote Ladies Like Us (which just had her 8th ‘birthday’ by the way). Thank you to everyone who has read it, and left such kind feedback over the years!

Ironically, this next book isn’t the one whose word count currently sits at 86,000 - the timing doesn’t feel right for that one, so it’s back to the notepad and pen, and little coffee dates to myself when I can steal away, to let what’s inside my head and heart flow onto the paper. Reading and writing will always be my passion, and I’m so lucky I get to do both of those things from home.

The delay in a third book is down to the fact that my brain is not one that can split into many places at once. I am an INFJ, and a Highly Sensitive Person. I also wonder if I have slight ADHD tendencies which I (like many women) have masked for years. It is a really interesting thing to learn about yourself. I’m not sure I would have necessarily admitted it in the past, but it makes sense to me and the family and friends I’ve discussed this with, in a lot of ways. I start so many things and leave them unfinished, and a real life conversation with me is like speaking to the dog in the movie Up… “SQUIRREL”!!! I am incredibly impulsive with my housework too, which I why you’ve never had a “schedule” from me, time restraints aren’t a thing in my life because I don’t like the feeling of failing to stick to things.

I don’t have an official diagnosis for it, and nor will I chase one - but just the relief of reading that “not all brains process in the same way” is enough. I guess, we are each made unique, and I’m choosing grace.

Perhaps all of these reasons are a bit of an answer as to why I never felt pulled towards having a career outside the home. It just always felt too emotionally overwhelming and restrictive. I like to create a haven for myself and my loved ones, (and do realise that I’m incredibly privileged to have the ability to do so). Writing too, needs to happen when there is quiet, and no distractions. I had that in my pre-TradWife media madness era, and in order to create, I realise that I need to retreat into my shell. To just be me and not what people looking from the outside in are expecting of me, or from me. I’m here on this planet to write and encourage, and oh how I need to write.

So the plot twist all along was that I needed to prune those branches hard in order to see the wood for the trees!

All this to say, that I might show up a little sporadically from time to time now, just while I’m getting into this new flow. However, please pray for me that it will bear fruit! Paperback fruit…

I apologise for this funny little post, because I know a lot of you come here for positive encouragement and advocacy rather than just keeping up with my musings, but I also know that a lot of you find comfort in reading the thoughts of someone who might be going through the same things, or feeling a similar way.

A lesson learned over the past year especially, is that there will always be plot twists in life! They’re unavoidable, it’s how you deal with them that matters.

With love as always, and I’ll be back soon