The builders are in and work has commenced on the house. This would be fine except we haven’t exchanged contracts yet. Everything seems to be to the wire, stretched taut with anticipation and hope.
I get out of the house as much as I can relishing the opportunity to drive myself around, listening to the radio and singing my head off. The windows wound down and the sun shining giving me the chance to actually wear the old sunglasses and feel justified in buying them. And I feel emotional connections, with people, with the land – I feel I am experiencing life through all of my senses, not just from inside of my head. I drive back to the village and feel I am going home.
Work on the house feels like a commitment has been made, and I feel o.k. making it. We are making the house our home, making it ours. So what is home? To me it is where my heart is, where I feel safe, accepted, supported, held, understood and loved. But I think it can be experienced in many different ways during the stages of our lives and come to mean different things depending on those experiences. Not all of them positive or welcome.
What are my plans then, our plans? What now I ask myself? What are my hopes, my dreams? I am scared to stay with this thought process. I feel anxious. I think that one of my hopes, my dream, is coming to an end, it will be no more. In the reality I can’t yet face, it may have ended already. To have another baby – there I’ve said it, written it down, owned it.
Ill health and pregnancy losses have seen me learning patience the hard way but I’ve a feeling the journey in this is to be more about learning to let go – about acceptance. Accepting how things are, that I could do no more, that I tried, that it wasn’t meant to be, that we are o.k., that a chapter is closing but the book is still a good read. This hopefully means a new chapter is beginning and I want to be able to embrace this and take full advantage of what it can offer. But I don’t feel I’m there yet.
For me, now, home really is where the heart is. Yet I unconsciously write down ‘hope’ is where the heart is. Is that where I am? Am I leading more from my heart than my head? Is that why I feel off balance, feel a sense of growing unease and discord in my very self? My head tells me that I have to be realistic; thoughts start to gather pace and race on threatening to overwhelm me. Does this mean hope could be more destructive than nourishing? Yet ironically I keep thinking of the phrase, “Where there is life there is hope”. However if I keep on hoping for something against all the odds will it become a false hope? Will I have actually set my hopes, and myself, up to fail? Can there actually be a point at which hope can no longer sustain us; that we have to let it go?
I face a difficult process then, disengaging with hope in a positive way. But not hope in general I remind myself. I ‘know’ that my life is made up of lots of very different hopes, both for me and for those I love. So I may have to let this hope go but thankfully I am not letting go of hope per se. Even if, in my sense of sorrow and loss, it can sometimes ‘feel’ just like that. How then to go forward? I pause and catch the lyrics from a song playing on the radio, “The lonely street of dreams…”. I am not on my own yet I realise I feel this is a process for me alone. I think this is about my sense of self; that this hope is so personal, so tightly bound up in me that I have to work this through. No one else can do it for me or even with me. Suddenly I feel very tired, but I’m glad I’m home.
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