A New Year and A One Year Birthday

2018 started with a bang: many bangs from fireworks and the bang of standing watching them with tears streaming down my face...not from joy but from pure sadness and loneliness. What followed where 3 days of hell where it was like suddenly those closest to me in this no-horse town suddenly felt the need to tell me what a shitty person I am and how negative I have been. Mostly thanks to a few things I posted on Facebook, not in a negative manner, but in my typical dark sense of humour. Clearly I am not in Kansas anymore. And man do I miss Kansas.

So after the shitty start, things at least got better with the visit of my best childhood friend (24 years man!!) and my favourite person in the world, my mom. Plus I had my head down planning and baking up a storm for my girls' first birthday on the 4th of Jan. Throw in a visit to some of the most beautiful nature spots and I was feeling a bit more loved and positive.

So my girls' birthday went down well. It took me 3 days of baking to get the bloody cakes right but in the end I was super proud of my very first mommy-party-planner attempt. I have perhaps missed another calling, lol. I was told a million times that the girls were too young to care or remember, but for me it was a special event and one I know will have us looking back over the 200+ photos oooohing and aaahing at how cute they are. And it gave me something positive to focus on, a bit of purpose if you will. Here are some photo's of the day:

Anyway, it flew by and before I knew it I was sitting outside having a smoke (yes, I started again. sigh), contemplating life and wondering how suddenly, as a parent, a year seems to pass in the blink of an eye. I mean, time goes fast but man does it speed up when you become a parent!! And what a year it had been. I'd had two prem babies, struggled mostly on my own, realized I had PND and had reached burnout, lost my home and had to move far away from all I loved to a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, living with my partner and "father-in-law", then breaking off my relationship as my partner turned back into someone I thought he had started growing out of, moving again, this time into my very conservative Ouma and Oupa's house, having an old and never-forgotten ex boyfriend come visit and re-ignite the same love and longing as he had two years ago, and then it all culminating in this horrible new years eve. Can't say I looked back at 2017 with any kind of longing. Besides missing home of course. So this year I vowed would be different. Because we have that kind of choice to some extent and with my girls being older I am slowly getting back to feeling like myself and am able to start getting back into work of some sort. Financially, it's been horrifically tough so my main goal to be self supporting to some extent. I also realized whilst picking up a very (VERY) part time freelance writing job last year, that my insides do happy flip flops when people ask what I do and I say, "I'm a freelance writer." So I've decided to put my toes into the great big pond of freelancing and make a go of it. I have no idea if I'll be able to make a decent living off of it. Apparently I need a degree to say that I am capable of writing and the fact that I have been writing since I was first published at the age of 12 plus a good few years of content production and general self-taught knowledge under my belt, mean nothing. But I haven't given up writing in all these years and I've done a fair few jobs (paid and unpaid) which mean I have a relatively good starter portfolio. Now in comes the determination and not giving up. I am the queen of giving up when I feel like things are getting too tough. It's the reason I ran two businesses at minimal growth for 3 years when they both had huge potential. I'm just an idiot like that. But becoming a parent has changed many things and one if that it is no longer me I am really working for, it's for my girls. As a single adventure loving human I only had to live my selfish life and I was quite happy as a semi-independent free spirit. But now I have two beautiful little toddlers who will become beautiful little children who need schooling and after school activities and more clothes and food and and and. I want to give them the best; I think as parents most of us do. I want them to be able to develop their already evident musical affinity, or dancing because they are clearly their mother's kids. And I always dreamed of a Montessori education, or at least something not as narrow minded and ridiculous as mainstream schools. And what about family holidays? Or their first bike? Swimming lessons? I want them to really taste life and this is where my determination now stems from. I need to do this, for once in my life I need to be focused and follow through. So here I sit at 10:28pm after doing research on writers guilds, how to freelance and signing myself up for an actual blogging and online media short course. Because this blog, let's be honest, has been as half-hearted as all my other businesses, and I'm tired of that. I'm tired of being the one who just kind of does things but never excels at them.

So I think that this is quite long enough for now :P My eyeballs feel like they are swimming in my skull and I may fall off of my chair any minute.

Till next time

L xxx