Tuesday 7 June 2016

Life...sometimes.


I have been very quiet on my blog recently, sometimes life just stills you and for me writing anything has become almost impossible and that so includes this post.
 But I hate to see my little blog become one of those abandoned blogs that scatter the internet and frustrate you with their long past used by dates. So I have decided to write this to explain and hopefully give me a new start on the other side...please bare with me, this is from a sore heart...

 My step mum was diagnosed with terminal cancer on New Years Eve and since then we have been caring for her so she can spend the time she has in the comfort of the home she has loved for many years.

 Whilst I sit with her, the last 'grown up' in my world, (she has been my step mum for longer than either my mum or dad were alive to be my parents) she still has one last really important lesson for me. She is teaching me to live, I don't mean that to sound pretentious, I mean it in a humbling way...as death fades her quite literally before our eyes she is making me want to take the life I have and squeeze it like the precious thing it really is.

And so I have been taking a long hard look at my life and decided it needs shaking up a bit...now or never...

I know that we all have dreams and wishes that for many of us remain just that, something tucked away from the reality of life, to be escaped to when the need arises. My dream is not anything glamorous, it isn't about winning the lottery (hum), or about having a huge house, flash car or any of those things I stupidly thought mattered when I was young. For me it is now all about family, friends, surrounding myself with the people that matter and that pursuit of happiness or just that easy sense of contentment...to have the time to enjoy the simple things.  

With this thought very much in control of me I accepted a voluntary redundancy from a job that I have had for 12 years. A job that has offered me the stability of a reliable monthly pay packet. It has kept the mortgage paid so quite literally a roof over our heads right from my days as a single mum to where I am now in a happy relationship with a young son, step children, a grandchild even... so quite literally a lifetime! It would have terrified me only a little while ago to give up this job, the fear of those bills... but it is not the job of my dreams it doesn't make me happy... 

So now is the time to take one of my long buried 'dreams' and run with it. The dream I have of 'gardening' for a living, taking that secret garden from my childhood and turning it into something real...and to make that idea into something viable, to pay the bills doing something I love.

 I have started a horticulture course with the RHS and have been organizing some voluntary posts in beautiful gardens with the idea of surrounding myself with professional people who know what they are doing and who I can learn from. I have so much to learn!

 I'm not a 20 something bright young thing just starting out, nor do I have a partner with a secure wage that can keep those bills paid whilst I risk being penniless, neither am I naïve enough to think it will be easy. I am just looking at my lovely step mum and feeling finally brave enough to try because as that awful cliché says, life is just too damn short...wish me luck...