Perspective

How do significant life events or the passage of time influence your perspective on life?

I’ve mentioned in other blogposts how losing most of my sight and becoming diagnosed medically blind a few weeks before my 55th birthday was a piffling nuisance rather than a tragedy due to other experiences I’d had…

After all when the worst has already happened struggling to see is just another obstacle.

However…

At the time the photos in this collage were taken I couldn’t have thought anything could have been harder.

Top left and bottom right were taken in our old home soon after my youngest son was born.

Top left I had the 3 children laying on the bed together to try to get a photo. The baby decided screaming at the top of his lungs was the best idea and you can see the anxiety on my daughter’s face on the left and how my eldest son is about to join in. It was 6.5 months after my ex-husband had his last violent “episode” and a couple of weeks after my divorce was final that the baby arrived- no wonder the older 2 still were anxious.

Bottom right is a photo my sister took of me and my youngest a couple of days after he was born. I was in my pyjamas and had just fed and dressed the baby.

I remember how overwhelmed I felt. How much I struggled to get the 3 children downstairs to go shopping (we were in a maisonette which was the equivalent of a house built on top of a flat). If the struggle to get out was hard trying to get upstairs with the shopping and children felt so much worse. It didn’t help that the neighbour in the flat below was crotchety and felt I should just be able to do it and put my pram/ buggy away all in one trip.

I used to take my eldest up first and put him in the bedroom with the safety gate keeping him in. Then take my daughter up and put her in the living room with safety gate keeping her in. Then take the baby up putting him in the playpen in the living room. Then it usually took 2 more trips to bring all the shopping up and put the pram/buggy (it was a double buggy with carrycot attachment and I put a pram seat on the carrycot). Frequently my downstairs neighbour would harass me as I was trying to take everything in because the children would cry and I was disturbing her by walking up and down the stairs so many times.

The other 2 photos are at the new house where it was on the “wrong side of town” for me as instead of being just down the road from my mum, I was on the other side of town. The baby had outgrown the carrycot so for a while I had a big coach built pram which held all 3 of them (eldest and youngest in the pram, daughter on the pram seat.

Top right the children are laying on a rug eldest on the left, baby in the middle pulling his sister’s jumper and making her cry.

Bottom left the children sitting on the sofa, on the left my daughter is anxiously sucking her fingers, in the middle the baby is beginning to fall onto his sister as he’s reaching to pinch his brother.

Looking back now it wasn’t so bad though then…

Twice a week we went to the “family centre” (because of the abuse that led to my divorce). I had social workers visiting my home until the eldest started play group. The neighbours on one side was a lovely large family and the other side a crotchety person.

When I say I was the wrong side of town it wasn’t that the neighbourhood had a bad reputation (it’s the area known to have the best schools, and some of the most expensive houses), or the house itself was awful (it’s the house I most regret moving from) but with such young children I was too far from family and the hospital and it was not easy to walk across town to either.

Unfortunately it’s only with hindsight we can see that some things we struggled with weren’t as bad as we thought at the time…

But then there’s the hell times that were as bad as they felt even when looking back through the rose tinted glasses of nostalgia.

Until next time