😳 Thoughts That Stop Me From Sleeping

An update on: Nomad Life

Hello Restless Ones,

This week, I shared the new family nomad plans on social media and it all went a bit bananas. What with that and the fact that temps soared to 31C in the UK (what in the blazes?!) it’s been a big week.

A big warm welcome if you’ve just joined this mailing list from social media channels. This newsletter is the place where I go deeper — we cosy up and get snuggly with longer, more detailed words.

Nothing is off-limits and I’m working each week to share whatever my wayward, creative noggin’ says should be put out into the world.

It’s quieter here. It feels like the olden days when we used to call one another on landlines and stand still to listen. I like it, very much.

This weeks post came from me scrolling though the notes app on my phone, which is where I brain dump my thoughts when something significant goes down.

It’s an update on the plans for nomad life.

Enjoy and catch you next week,

Anna xx

The Thoughts That Stop Me From Sleeping

An update on: Nomad Life

It’s early May, and a photographer is coming round later this week to take some pictures of the house, ready for it to go on the market.

There’s a bubble of nerves in my belly and I can’t quite put my finger on why I’m feeling unsettled. It’s as if I’ve had one too many coffees, even though I haven’t drunk any. I’m jittery.

The idea of the house being on the market is nothing new. We’ve been gradually de-stuffing it for a few months now — making piles in the cupboard under the stairs to go to the charity shop.

The greatest challenge in all of it has been clearing out toys. It’s only a few months after Christmas and despite us asking friends and family not to go mad with the present buying, they did. I don’t blame them; I get it. The promise of a visit from Santa makes us lose our minds, but there are so many crappy plastic toys it makes me feel… icky.

By this point, I’ve developed a finely honed system to get toys out of the playroom, on the sly, whenever I can. To max out my chances of success, I have a holding area.

I move the toys out to the food pantry at first, and leave them there for a week. If the kids ask ‘Mumma, where’s ‘the farm / ice cream truck / tractor?’ I casually retrieve it from the pantry and pretend I ‘found it’ somewhere else around the house.

If they don’t ask about a specific toy, then, after a week in the holding area, it can graduate to the charity pile in the cupboard under the stairs.

So far, this process is working a treat.

All of this cleaning and clearing is unifying in a way. Amid the chaos and logistics of the mundane everyday, the de-cluttering is bringing me and Jamie closer together. We’re moving, side by side, towards a new, freer life. And the de-cluttering makes the change seem tangible. It’s visible as each week goes by. There is less and less holding us back our minds, but also in a physical sense.

As part of the clearing process, the estate agent has advised us to take down any photos of our family from the walls, and to only leave generic stuff up.

It’s a strange thing to depersonalise a home while you’re still living in it. Making it as blank as possible so that someone else can see themselves in what still is our space, but will be soon be theirs.

Our bedroom, which once doubled as an office, with a large, colourful world map nailed to the wall as a background for work calls, is now bare. The bedroom looks like a bedroom again, and that’s weird.

The kitchen has perhaps been the biggest transformation. Where there were once ten different boxes of tea and four options for fresh coffee beans, piled up on a shelf above the kettle — all that remains are two tea boxes, some eggs and a pot of instant decaf.

I’m not sure what we’re trying to achieve with minimising the beverage choices. Perhaps we’re attempting to convince the strangers that come into our home that we live an ordered life. Or that we’re the kind of people who only drink a few different teas. Maybe we’re pretending that we’re the sort who might have time to sit down and eat eggs on toast while drinking their coffee, without a small child attempting to stick their fingers in it.

Once the kids are asleep for the night, I’ve been spending the lighter springtime evenings sugar-soaping the walls — gradually scrubbing away their pencil marks.

It takes a while to remove the ‘person’ that Storm drew on the wall of the bedroom when she was three, and the red crayon lines Rocky drew just last week - when I asked him not to. He looked at me, crayon in hand, and did it anyway. His first genuine act of defiance. (I kind of liked it).

And so I scrub. I wipe. I scrub again. Knowing, all the while, that I am scrubbing away us.

After a particularly long and productive clearing ‘sprint’ one afternoon, the house suddenly feels empty. Hollow. There’s too much space. It all feels so impersonal.

I stand in the hallway, looking at where a photo of Jamie’s dad once was — a black-and-white image of him having just completed an ‘ice swim’ — now replaced with a generic watercolour of a snowy landscape. I glance over at the wall above the stairs, which used to house a hotchpotch of frames with our favourite travel memories. Frames which are now in a box. The memories now only in our mind.

I stand here and feel sad. It’s not a scary sadness, but a wistful kind. I call out to Jamie, who’s in the living room.

‘It feels like we’re already moving out, you know?’

‘I know’ he says, coming to join me in the hall.

That night, as I get into bed, I feel anxious. The wave of worries hits as soon as my head makes contact with the pillow. The buzz in my belly is out of control and my mind is working into overdrive. It’s processing the reality of all of this.

I try the usual trick of turning onto my front, because often the pressure of laying on my stomach calms me when my brain wants to have a panic-party. But the front sleeping attempt does nothing.

Turning onto my back again, I search for where the feeling is coming from — trying to catch one thought which is racing across my mind, and get a closer look at it.

The thought that plays on repeat is this:

What if the kids come to some kind of harm in this new life? Because if they do, or if anything goes wrong, it’s all our fault. It’s my fault. For being so restless. For being selfish. For wanting something different: for not being able to accept what we have.

I wrestle with the thoughts for a while, but at midnight I give up on sleep and go downstairs and make a peppermint tea. I open the fridge, scanning for a snack, and decide to welly in to the kids’ Petits Filous Fromage Frais (strawberry flavour). This is an emergency, after all.

Each pot lid’s underside shows a picture of a piece of fruit performing an action, accompanied by a word like ‘run,’ ‘skate,’ or ‘ride’.

I move to sit on the sofa, then peel back the lid of my pot and lick the creamy goodness from it. ‘Jump!’ says the lid, and I smile.

I know now that I’ll just stay here, on the sofa in the still of the night, for as long as I need until my nervous system calms down. It could be twenty minutes. It might take an hour. I remind myself that this is all part of it. It’s all part of the process.

I’ve been here dozens of times before. I know well enough that this kind of reaction is not to be taken as evidence that I’m making a mistake. It just needs to be observed. To be sat with and fed Fromage Frais. To be listened to. And to allow time for these wayward thoughts, to find their own way out.

👆🏻❤️ P.S Did you know that tapping the heart icon at the top or bottom of this post means that more people will see it? Doing it tops up my writing juju, and it also means you’re entitled to extra fromage frais.