Monica, and being 22.

I remember the Monica Lewinsky “scandal” very well. I say “scandal” because with 20 years in between then and now I’ve revised a lot of my thoughts about her, and Bill Clinton, and that time, and how I feel about it all. I was about 14 when it all kicked off and Monica seemed like a glamorous, go-getting woman in her 20s to me, someone who had her life together and was going places and knew what she wanted and how to get it.

Obviously the age gap hasn’t changed but now I feel much closer in age to her, which is the usual feeling you get as you grow older. I’ve been the new college graduate, unsure of myself and trying to figure out the working world and my place in it after the security of years spent in full-time education. I’ve navigated the world of older men in my workplace, and walked the tightrope of years spent being polite and never quite being sure if something is what you think it is or if its something you probably shouldn’t have to put up with.

I’ve been thinking about being 22 and being around people in power, and being around one of the most powerful people in the world. I’ve been thinking about sex, and what I regarded as sex, and what other people, mostly men at least twice my age, think about sex and consent and right and wrong. It’s uncomfortable to look back at 22 year old me, and think about 22 year old Monica, and the choices we made and the things which happened which weren’t really choices at all.

I’ve listened to  season 2 of Slow Burn and what other people said about Monica and how she navigated all that pressure and how, shamefully, she became the punchline of so many jokes about sex and power and men and what they do and who they do it to. I thought about my clothes when I was 22, and how I probably would have considered a navy dress from Gap as the ideal choice for working in an office.

I think about the working world now and my place in it and if things have changed and if a 22 year old in my workplace would be treated like Monica, regardless of how many people proclaim #metoo and talk about consent and condemn the actions of men in power who take what they want. I think about the current man in the White House, and the 22 year olds who work in that building, wearing the Gap dresses and figuring out their place in the world and I hope their world is better than mine was when I was 22 and when Monica was 22.

But I don’t know if it is, or if it can be, knowing what we know about everything that’s happened since Monica was 22.

Tiny Sparks of Joy

Using everything up. Two not great old bags of coffee beans made one nice jar of ground coffee once they went through our grinder.

Homemade pizza on Saturday and Sunday.

Finally organising our photos and developing a system to manage the thousands of images we’ve accumulated over the years.

Getting myriad small jobs done once we actually decided to get started.

Drawers with nothing in them. Always nice to have extra space.

Simplicity and Its Enemy

Since I moved out of home, my beds have always had white bedlinen. Some of it was whatever was the cheapest cotton option I could afford at the time, some of it is Fancy Bedlinen from Fancy Brand Names. I love the simplicity of it, and the fact that even if the shades and textures are slightly different it still looks co-ordinated and crisp.

These bundles are all the bedlinen we own which fits our fabulous king size bed, excepting the set currently on the bed. There is too much of it, far too much. Some of it is getting worn and yellow. Some of it doesn’t feel quite as nice as it should.

One of my missions for the next month is to work through this pile and reduce it to exactly what we need. We don’t need nearly 30 pillowcases, for example, and for some reason we have twice as many fitted sheets as flat sheets. We left one particularly well loved white duvet cover behind in France. Just because we have the space doesn’t mean we should keep everything.

The main thing holding me back from letting a good proportion of this excess go it that I’m not quite sure where it should go. The clothes recycling point in our area doesn’t take sheets. The zero waste Facebook group I’m in doesn’t have a lot of leads. There’s only so many cloth wipes we need, baby still in nappies notwithstanding. I’m sure someone has a use for well loved slightly yellow cotton sheets.

 

Mother Hood

I will return to work next month. It’s been almost a year since I went on maternity leave. A year is a long time, and a short time. There’ve been days that felt like they went on for a year. Birth is hard, for babies and for the people who birth them. Some days feel like they happened only last week. I remember the days lying in my hospital room, watching the light change on the red brick wall I could see from the sash window. I remember the days where baby slept so much that I felt the fog of sleep deprivation lifting. I remember days where nothing I did seemed like the right thing.

It has been a good year, and a bad year, and an average year. I’ve felt regrets over significant things and trifles. Does going back to work make me feel guilty? The honest answer is no, not even a little bit. I am very lucky that I have the option to work part-time in a role that stretches me just enough to feel like a challenge but not so much that I feel stressed out on a regular basis. The real guilt I feel is that I’m not doing enough, because the time management skills I had before I had children seem to have disappeared.

I used to fit so much into my days. I would work, study, meet friends, continue hobbies, take holidays, relax with books. I still do most of these things but they feel fragmented now and I find it hard to focus on some things that used to come naturally. I wish I’d written more during this past year. I wish I’d pushed myself more. But what would have been the point, I wonder. And how could I or should I have done this.

I beat myself up by comparing myself to the other mothers who get so much done, or achieved so much more than I did before children came along. I wonder if the me I am now couldn’t sustain more ambition than I seem to have settled on. I wonder if an external force could have propelled me forward. I wonder if my age could turn into a motivator.

I’m not sure how I measure my success in life. Is becoming a mother a metric of success? I was lucky; I conceived easily and my children haven’t presented some of the myriad challenges other parents face. Is it having a secure job? I’m not sure; my job is part of my life but I wouldn’t be considered a wild success in the role. Is being married a success? Surely not; meeting someone you want to marry is largely down to luck and chance.

Part of me hopes being back at work will push me out of the mother identity a bit. Every time I’ve been on maternity leave my world seems to shrink a little. I have a vague sense that there should be more. Maybe there is, if I could lift the hood a little.

Holidays and Their Aftermath

We had an amazing time in France. We love campsite holidays and this was our fifth one, so I feel like we have it down pat at this stage. We dropped our snobbery about boxed wine, for example, and embraced the challenge of drinking five litres of Bordeaux.

The only downside to a self catering holiday where we packed our car with everything we needed and more than one thing I know now we can live without is the Putting Away of the Stuff on returning home. Countless loads of laundry and ironing, organising space for the 150 bottles of wine we came home with and restoring some order to the house took the better part of a week.

It’s good to get away, it’s good to get home but it’s still a lot of work. 100% worth it though.