I wear a ring with a tiny emerald – the May birthstone – on my finger.  It represents all my May loves.  My mum and dad were both born in May; my Gran, too, and my husband and son (all three on May 10th!).  Both my mum and my aunt died in May, and this May was the tenth anniversary of their deaths. So many lives to be marked and so many moments to stop and take it all in.  I think I’m always a little bit unhinged in May. As you know, I love birthdays.  I put a lot of thought and energy into making them special.  This year, the boys’ 6th and 43rd birthdays landed right between the two tenth anniversaries.  I swung from sad to birthday clown and back again, more or less wiping myself out in the process. 

Let’s start with the birthdays: my boy is 6! I always assumed, before we had Piglet, that your child would be intrinsically known to you. That who they are and how they operate would be obvious to loving parent eyes.  But Piglet has challenged that idea for me.  He’s so many things at once.  I feel like I’m always trying to tease out threads of who he is, to learn more, to solve the Piglet puzzle. My biggest goal as a parent is radical acceptance of who my children are but the route to that is always trickier than I would like.  My own upbringing and prejudices trip me up all the time. I can’t begin to summarise what a fantastic kid he is and how much I love being his mum; and also how much I have grown and learnt about myself and others through being his mum.  And we’re only six years in! So much to come. I cannot wait.  I think six is going to be a really fun age, I’ve got good feelings about how well he’ll wear sixness.  

The birthday weekend was gloriously sunny.  There was a hot tub on the patio and a trip to the seaside for an epic picnic with family.  The icing on the rainbow sausage dog chocolate cake melted in the sunshine and the head collapsed off. The candles wouldn’t light in the wind. Despite that, I think Piglet had the best weekend.  And most importantly, he got stocked up with lego.  Ross had a nice time, too, but he knows he’s the support-act to Piglet’s birthday these days.  

Gloriously sunny seems to be a bit of a theme this month.  It doesn’t seem quite right to be able to assume, in the UK in the spring, that tomorrow will be dry and sunny.  I think we only had two rainy days between mid March and late May.  Creepy! Unsettling! Pleasant! Like toxic positivity. It’ll be interesting to see how a dry spring impacts the rest of the year.

And then to the anniversaries:  I wrote a blog post about my wonderful aunt who died ten years ago.  You can read that here.  And then mum’s anniversary was exactly a week later.  I’m not normally too unsettled by anniversaries, especially as the years have passed.  But something about the ten year marker has landed differently with me.  The body keeps the score, doesn’t it.  Grief is not linear. May, in all her intoxicating beauty, feels heavier this year.  On mum’s anniversary, I bought a fancy pastry (rhubarb and custard, very Longmuir) and sat down by the river near the Little Turbine House to eat it and sit in the dapply sunshine and think and draw.  I had just taken an enormous bite when a deer came down to drink from the river.  She stayed for several minutes, coming closer, looking me in the eye but not turning to flee.  It was such a beautiful thing. I don’t really believe that our loved ones come back to visit us in animal form. It’s not an idea that has ever appealed. But if my mum was to return for a moment, she would be a deer, gentle and peaceful, drinking from the river. 

Moments later, I looked down and honestly, the most enormous weird flying beastie was running up my bag strap onto my lap. Huge! Easily the length of my pinkie finger. That jerked me out of my reverie.  I don’t know what it was – someone suggested a cicada but I don’t think we get those in the UK, nomatter Drygrange.  Suggestions on a postcard, please (drawing above).  

One of the things that always hurts about not having mum, dad or Molly in our lives, is that they didn’t get to be part of it all.  They didn’t get to love Ross (for long) and meet their grandbabies and see me grow my business and be wildly proud of my sister in all she does.  But, of course, they are part of it all.  They are the foundations on which we are rooted.  I think being in nature helps me feel part of that narrative – this tree that I can touch was here before my grandmother was born.  It remembers generations of people who walked in these woods and sat on these stones. There was a full moon over the birthday weekend – that is the very same moon gazed at by my mum, her mum, and generations of mothers before her.  We’re just here for a moment, death is the ultimate in FOMO, but for me, the comfort is in the dependability of the earth turning and acorns growing oaks. 

I suppose that is why the climate crisis is so unsettling.  Where to look for comfort if the seasons feel unfamiliar and there’s no promise of the sequence of spring into summer into autumn.  Of course, it is so much more unsettling for those whose lives are already being made impossible by unlivable conditions.  My concerns are light-weight, I understand that, in comparison.  

You see what I mean?  May was a lot.  I also had a wonderful trip down south, with Trix, to visit two very-dear-friends and their families. It was soul-food and excellent and, inevitably, I was homesick for Piglet and Ross and Drygrange, because these days I am a stone, growing moss, who should not be moved.  Drygrange forever.  I have also continued on my journey of being permanently sleep deprived, but that would need its own journal entry to deal with.  If Piglet is six, that means I have been exhausted for six years now.  Maybe June will be quiet and sleepy.

Here’s all my May sketchbook pages: