To tell this story properly, I first have to go back a long way to tell you why I hate New Year so much.
New Year's Eve 1998
Everything was coming together after a REALLY rough run - a new house was lined up, moving in was just a couple of weeks away. My partner and I were engaged, the church was booked, we'd talked endlessly and we were finally - after an awful rough patch - on the same page.
New Year's Eve 1999
DEVASTATED. It had lasted just five-and-a-half weeks and he'd left me pregnant again. So here I was going into another New Year as a single parent, having had a shit year including emergency surgery at 15 weeks pregnant.
New Year's Eve 2000
Well, the 90s had been a complete washout but now I was 21 and SURELY the 21st century had to be kinder? I was a young single mum of two and I clung to the hope that I'd meet someone and it'd all work out for the best.
Yeah, that didn't happen.
2010
So I'm now 31, my daughters are about to turn 11 and 14. I've been alone for the entirety of the last decade. I went into the New Year depressed about that but also ill with stress about the back-to-work thing. 'Back' indeed! As I'd only worked for four-and-a-half months before becoming a full-time mum it didn't seem to count as going 'back' - I certainly wasn't going to drop into a nice admin job on the Home Office payroll again.
A week before I turned 32 I finally got a job - two, in fact. Cleaning. Absolute bloody nightmare. Morning job was in a Gov't quango office we'll call CC and that was 0545-0745; evening job was local Gov't offices we'll call SC and I was working there 1700-1900.
Now maybe that doesn't sound so bad but 4 hours intense exercise a day is not something a morbidly obese single mother was in any way prepared for and then there's the walking to and from each job - half an hour each way, six hours exercise each day and not enough time to sleep properly. By summer everything was falling apart, starting at my feet. Leaking pipes in the kitchen and bathroom did not help my stress level and despite the exhaustion I stopped sleeping.
My youngest daughter had an exceptionally bad year - she actually has been diagnosed with PTSD from it - and she started secondary school in the September.
2011
By summer my feet had all but given up from the mileage I was clocking. Ended up having to take sick leave for plantar fasciitis. My then best friend - who I'll call CD - announced she was enrolling with Open University (OU). Now I didn't think I was eligible for OU but if CD could do it I certainly could. I decided to sign up even though it was clearly impossible given my work schedule.
That's when a minor miracle happened - my boss gave me a promotion / transfer out of evening job SC and another morning job - Site Supervisor at the Museum of Somerset. This way I only had to walk to and from town once a day although it did mean working Saturdays, and working 0800-1000 I could do both jobs (15 mins being ample to get from one to t'other) and have the rest of the day free to study.
Leaving SC after a year and a half was bloody brilliant. I loved the new job at the Museum - I started there before it was reopened after a major refurbishment so I felt very protective of it. The museum was formally reopened by Mick Aston (RIP) of Time Team.
2012
I started my OU studies in the spring which gave me a real boost - no matter how awful the present I was working toward something better. Hope is a wonderful thing to have. I miss it a lot.
In the springtime I overheard a conversation which changed my life - I heard all my symptoms and I thought "Oh, your kid had IBS" and the other mum says "Oh, your kid is probably lactose intolerant, like mine" and I was BLOWN AWAY. I cut out dairy there and then and it took four months for my guys to recover from years of irritation but finally I was well for the first time in over a decade. Later I would go vegan following on from this discovery.
In the summer I took my kids to see three events of the London Olympics (dressage and water polo). A year after Mick Aston reopened the Museum it had a second reopening - this time by Prince Edward. I got invited to that event, possibly because I insisted on coming in that day to clean even though I wasn't scheduled to (or indeed, paid to) but royalty was not seeing 'my' museum anything less than pristine! I had also volunteered to do extra cleaning around extended bank holiday weekends where the museum was open but my company weren't working - this was partly going the extra mile for the museum, partly cos I was in town for my CC job anyway and partly so when my team was back on duty the work wouldn't be quite so challenging. Anything to make life easier in the long run!
Late in the year I hit a difficulty with OU - I had really wanted to do Latin but having started the course I realised my chances of passing might throw my degree in jeopardy and for just 30 credits it wasn't worth the risk. I told CD I was thinking of withdrawing from the course and she gave me a lecture on not being a quitter and how she always finished everything she started. BULLSHIT! She'd never completed anything in the decade or more I had known her and she'd dropped OU completely, don't think she even completed her first module! Not only that but CD was also taking the piss out of me as my mid-life crisis kicked in. This was bloody rich coming from someone older and less mentally stable than me. And that was the point I ended our toxic friendship. Part of me wishes she could've seen what came next but I am definitely better off without her.
2013-2016
At the end of 2012 I hacked off my hair, dyed it green and discovered a band called Fearless Vampire Killers (FVK). Then in April '13 I went to my first ever rock gig...and my second. This was the start of an epic three year adventure that led me all over the country mostly for FVK but it also inspired me to other adventures.
Meeting Laurence Beveridge, singer of FVK was a vital turning point - I lost 7 stone, dyed my hair a load more colours, got a bunch of tattoos, started painting again... Sadly in 2016 FVK broke up - I saw them 21 times.
Weight loss 2012-2017
Some of my paintings of Laurence
Some of my hair colours
In 2014 I acquired a black cat named Hennessy and went vegan.
In 2015 I became an ordained minister of the Universal Life Church. Yep, I'm the Rev'd Heggie ;) Mostly I looked up how people get ordained online and...oopsie!
Also during this period the opportunity to move back home came up. As my kids were growing up and there were precious few employment opportunities in Taunton I decided to make the move - but in summer 2017 when K had finished college.
Both my kids left secondary with an impressive array of GCSEs and continued on to (different) 6th form colleges. Erin passed her A levels and started at Winchester University in 2014; Kathleen had her heart set on Swansea. The move was 2 and a half years in the planning.
At the start of 2016 my job at CC ended as the offices closed. Shortly after I started another cleaning job in a school which was back to the split but no more early mornings and even the evening job was earlier - 1530-1770 - so far more manageable.
2017
I left my jobs in the summer, finished packing and moved to the new house. E got there a month beforehand; Hennessy moved in 10 days before K and I got there.
E and I had passed our degrees - I graduated OU in September with a 2:2 - BA (Hons) Humanities with Classical Studies. E graduated in October with a 2:1 - BA (Hons) Criminology and Sociology.
Unfortunately K's A-levels did not go well but many thanks to her then boyfriend for putting us onto uni foundation courses. It was all mayhem and chaos but we got her into the University of South Wales, found her somewhere to live and packed her off to the land of dragons.
Meanwhile E and I landed on our feet. Shortly after moving in E had a job offer from Lidl and while she was waiting for that to start she got a call on another job interview - which I ended up going to and got the job!
It wasn't great - contracted 4 hours a week, minimum wage and the travel expenses made it problematic but it was vital experience. When I'd been cleaning at the museum I'd applied for a proper job there several times before the manager told me I was getting automatically rejected because I didn't have any customer services or cash handling experience. Although I could no longer work there this shop job should tick those boxes if I ever got the chance to apply for a similar role.
Spoiler alert: Here endeth the good bit
Spoiler alert: Here endeth the good bit
2018
I had planned to do maybe 6 months experience at the shop before moving on but I'd started thinking I should give it a little longer as I had ended up becoming acting Deputy Manager of the branch! Figured that'd look pretty good on a CV.
So, I had been there almost 8 months and I was looking for something new. My contract was 4 hours a week but I was regularly working over 40 although not getting the sick pay or holiday to match. But the change that happened was out of the frying pan into the fire.
I have written other blog entries about my mum's stroke so I'll just do the short version here. April 16th my mum collapsed and was diagnosed 24 hours later (despite it being obvious from the get-go to us non-medical types) with a severe stroke affecting both hemispheres. She wasn't put on a stroke ward for the first week and she received no treatment.
I told everyone what was going on and explained I might have to just drop everything and go permanently; when we had a tentative discharge date I formally gave notice...but my supervisor didn't really believe I was leaving. By the time I got a leaving date set I was expected to learn a new computer system in my last week! It wasn't happening and I had a mid-shift meltdown. I walked out of my job with a handful of shifts left to go. I felt incredibly bad about it but I couldn't deal with the extra pointless stress - I should have left earlier but in all honesty we weren't convinced my mum would leave hospital at all.
My mum was released from hospital on June 21st and I have been looking after her ever since. It's not like I had an especially good or close relationship with her before. Also it means I have to endure my dad and stepdad's company far more than I would ever want to.
K passed her foundation course and transferred to Swansea to do the course she'd always intended to - aiming for a BSc (Hons) in Psychology and Criminology.
2019
E left her job early in the year after 18 months. She's now working in an admin job with much steadier hours. Hopefully, it'll work out for her.
So here we are, at the end of the decade and I am in much the same place as I started - no job, no friends, no partner, no life. Stuck at home getting no exercise so I'm getting real fat again; no money, no personal freedom, and an endless cycle of laundry / dishes / cooking and cleaning. I HATE IT.
Everything I worked for has come to naught.
Sure, no one SAID life was supposed to be fair but REALLY??? I raise two kids 100% alone and just when they grow up and go off doing their own thing THIS happens. FIVE-AND-A-HALF years working my butt off for a degree and this is how I end up?! Ye gods, what did I do to deserve this karma???
There is only one way this ends and it's not gonna be pretty. Being effectively (experience-wise) a uni leaver in my forties is not a place you want to be, and of course depending on how long she hangs on it could be my fifties or later. My grandad lived 16* years after his stroke. I've told my kids to make sure I DON'T look after my dad or stepdad. Hit me with wet fish, have me sectioned - just don't let me go there. I can't do this again. I'm not exactly coping now - it requires copious amounts of Quince Gin just to get from day to day.
Remembering
- Kathleen Marie Keating Hogben (1919-2010), my great aunt who my youngest is named for
- David Penfold (1978-2012), who I was at primary school with
- Sean Keating (1965-2014), my cousin
- Callan McClintock (1998-2014), who my daughter Kathleen was at school with
- Allister Keating (1963-2016), my cousin
- Rosalind Brenda 'Ben' Beckett Ling (1920-2018), my great aunt
- Michael Barter (1936-2019), ex husband of my godmother who lived on our road
- Serena Cheong Oi Yun (1984-2019), friend of many years
- Gwendoline Joyce Beckett Oxenham Smith (1924-2019), my great aunt
- Dave Rowlands (1938-2019), my uncle by marriage
