Today Rose held down the fort while I got a very needed sleep in. Then we swapped and I got Poppy to sleep on my back and did the dishes, cleaned the kitchen, hung a load of washing, planned dinner, and walked to the shops for ingredients. Some days you win.

My three lovelies have all been down with the flu. Sickness is hard. Yesterday all three were feverish and miserable when we had a blackout. Rose had the great idea of going to the beach to enjoy the cool wind there. It was beautiful. On the tough days I have to work so hard to contain my fear that I’m not enough, not good enough, not up to this, and that it’s always going to be this hard. Last night my beautiful girls cooled off in our van by the ocean while I read James Herriot by a battery powered lamp to them. Just like my Mum did for us.

I stood in the rain and felt it wash something dusty and old and indefinable from my skin. I splashed in the puddles and drank rainwater from the roses in my garden, sweet with the taste of the petals. The magic still works. I’m a Mum and so new at balancing all these needs and managing my anxiety and wearing so many different hats. I rocket between bright joy and deep contentment and intense frustration and jagged fear. But out in the night under the sweet water falling, I’m still who I used to be. Still enchanted by the world.

I don’t know how to balance it all. There’s days I give and keep giving, I turn myself over and over into what those around me need and I do it gladly or I do it through pain and exhaustion. I do it because that’s my job and I know how it feels to be young and to need someone.

There’s days I make time for myself and find I’m not sure what I need anymore, that I’m numbed and confused and it seems easier to keep giving instead but I can taste the trap in that, the way needs get disconnected and met secretly. I sit at white canvasses and hate what I draw, eat foods I don’t like, feel empty and twisted. The less I listen to my own heart voice the harder it becomes to hear.

And work too, my other great joy, trying to find how Mothers do this. How to stop my work being a kind of alarm that rings under all my time, telling me I am not doing enough and should be doing that instead. To be where I am and rest into plans and schedules and embrace the messiness and uncertainties and compromises with joy. I have worked so hard to have some kind of career. I have to remind myself that it’s okay to be inexperienced and uncertain, that it’s okay that I crave this other part of my life, that I need it too and that it also brings me such joy.

I’m so new at this. When my children are hurt or in danger there’s a panic in me like an atom bomb. I let it go off in the desert in my chest and keep breathing calmly – we’ve got this. My beloved Rose, so generous and kind, sleeps a million miles away on the other side of our bed and I find whole weeks go by where I barely kiss her and the ever present guilt – good enough partner? good enough mother? – drives me further away. But when I ask myself to be selfish I run to her across the room and dive into her arms. I remember my sweet love.

She holds Poppy and I burn my candles at both ends for short windows, replying to emails, painting, taking calls and making plans. Art comes to life all around me. A hailstorm of hope and relief. This is my place in the world. This is the work of my heart. And then the small hours, not doing but being. Poppy nursing by my side and the fuschia blooming through the window in tiny pink fireworks. Stroking Star’s hair. Sitting in the garden with a friend. Stirring soup on the stove. God in the small things. Another load of nappies pinned to the line.

Looking for the patterns through it all. Ways to be present, fully, all the different parts of me that need to be here to breathe the air. The children grow so fast while I am looking somewhere else. The opportunities wither if not grasped. I am loved and valued. My world is a garden full of life and I’m tending it, learning how to grow each different thing. Beyond grateful at my good fortune. Spending my self completely in these things I adore.