Well it appears my New Years morning really are good ground hog days. I am sat here with a glass of bucks fizz, something in the background on TV and Adam snoring, totally identical to two years ago and in fact every single New Year since I haven’t been able to make it through to midnight and the bells. I have to admit that it really doesn’t bother either of us as neither of us have ever really been huge fans of the midnight madness, but we do both enjoy the chance of the post Christmas feasting of New Years day, once I have written this, well it will be time to make the scrambled eggs with smoked salmon trimmings through it, to be eaten with croissants, what’s not to like. Christmas and New Year are the only times we eat together now, for so many different reasons, but I don’t know if he said it to please me or if it was genuine, but for the first time neither day has been filled with meat as I really find it just to hard to deal with and Adam said he didn’t mind at all. I do at times feel as though I am forcing changes on his life, which he may not care about at all, but I do as I know all to well, life isn’t just about me.

I can’t work out why as the house doesn’t feel cold, but my hands and feet are freezing, which with the rest of me quite comfortable is really odd. I know it will be just one of those odd sensations that PRMS creates, but the coincidence of both hands and feet at the same time is as I said a little odd. I have been so busy this morning with all the New Years messages on Twitter you would think that my body wouldn’t have time to invent the impossible, but it seems nothing is a good enough distraction for that. If I haven’t already sent a message of happiness for the New Year to you directly or in reply, well I wish all who are reading now a very Happy New Year. Like many I used to wish people a happy and prosperous New Year, I said it, well once I could actually pronounce it, because it was what my parents always wished others and they them, I saw it as the right thing to say, no thought ever put behind it. It took me many years to drop the prosperous, but I guess we all get to a point in our lives where either traditions change or our values do, for me it was the latter, I realised that prosperity wasn’t the important bit and it didn’t make me sound grown up, just trite and shallow.

Growing up is the oddest thing that we humans try to do, I honestly don’t know why we are trained to believe there is this huge importance in being something we’re not. The only part of growing up that is important, is being able to get and keep a job, as without it, well life will be very limited, strangely the majority of us aren’t actually taught about or trained as to how we actually do that. I was lucky, as other than being taught how to be pretentious, I was also taught to work and to put a true value on making my own way through life. I have mentioned many times my growing up years, how I learned as we all do from not just our teachers but our parents, and just how deeply those double edged swords of life can cut. I will be 54 in a couple of months and I have just realised that I am still more deeply affected by my early years than I ever thought was possible. I long ago forgave both my Mother and even more so my Father for the terrible things they were responsible for, but I hadn’t really realised that there is hardly one thing I still do that I wasn’t taught by them, things that I had lost in amongst all the bad, as once you are carrying pain around you forget to say thank you for the good things and there were good things as well. Forgiveness isn’t enough, on it’s own it is a job half done, a start but not enough to make life as happy as it should be. I could sit here and make a list of all the things that I have let go of, but that list wouldn’t achieve anything as they no longer hold the pain, or the need to be spoken about again and again as they once had, but what I had never done was to look at my life and list the good things that came out of that time and there was a lot of good things, things I had brushed over and hidden under the corner of a carpet of pain. I guess it has taken me so long to notice them as they didn’t have the same strength and didn’t shout as loud, often the way of the good things in life.

Yesterday when I was writing about how important learning is to me even now, I omitted to say that it is my parents I should be thanking for that, they knew I had a hunger to learn things most little girls have no interest in and they not only let me, the encouraged me to begin with. My private education was the start, but time spent in my grandfathers antique store, not just cleaning and serving, but time with the cabinet makers and packing crews. Telling my big brother to let me help with his fixer-upper his car when he could, sending me to piano lessons, letting me spend hours discovering and bring home things mothers don’t want in their homes, but greeted with a smile. Letting me help in the dark room, or with decorating and DIY, even sending me to Art Summer school, nothing was out of limit’s and nothing not right for a girl, all of it be thanked for. As a child I felt they forced me into working for my weekly money, working for an hour before school every day and every Saturday morning for the grand payment of one pound, which for 1972 wasn’t bad. Now I thank them, even though it turned me into a manic bluebottle for years, if they hadn’t, I wouldn’t be writing this every day, regardless of what happens or how I feel.

Harder is to thank them for the things I had to forgive, as without all of them, well I doubt that I would be this person who doesn’t give up, who became determined to be herself and to enjoy life, regardless of what it brings. It some how feels right now to thank them for all of it, regardless of how I saw it at the time, or after, and not just them, but others too. We can’t escape our history, we can go back and change it or stop it from happening, if we could, well who would we be, I’m me and comfortable to say so because of them, good or bad, forgiven and thanked for.

Please read my blog from 2 years ago today – 01/01/13 – New Year nerves 

I am sitting here with a glass of buck fizz, Oliver Twist on the TV and Adam snoring, it may be a New Year but some things don’t change. lol. I woke briefly early this morning as……..