Time

Time is a rubbery concept... it flies when we're having fun - on holidays, drinks with friends, amazing sex sessions and feels like an eternity at other times - team meetings lacking direction, awkward conversations, waiting for a stellar sex session to begin....

I started thinking about time two nights ago when I was sitting in the theatre watching A Midsummer Night's Dream with a friend. We were marvelling at the language of Shakespeare - here we were watching a play written about 400 years ago which was still making us laugh that night. Marvelling at how language can traverse vast quantities of time like it is nothing.

It also got me thinking about my own little timeline. 24 years ago we performed Dream, one of my favourite Shakespeare plays, at high school. I was the Assistant Director, which is what we tended to call the Stage Manager at school for some reason. 18 years ago my first professional stage management gig was a Shakespeare play with a leading state theatre company. 3 years ago my husband and I attended a friend's 50th birthday party in fancy dress in the exact same place where I was sitting that night, now as a separated woman. It was a year ago that my ex began to prepare for the musical he would direct that would lead to him meeting the woman he would fall in love with and leave me for. And just a little over six months ago I was in a delivery room giving birth to our third child.

Time is a slippery beast...looking back on it it can seem like a moment and an eternity all at once.

Colleagues ask me how it is being back at work and how the time off went...how did it go?

In six months I became a mum of three, became separated, was diagnosed with depression and started my  journey away from ground zero. Because so much has happened, it feels longer than six months.

So I answer, "It's been a big six months, but it's good to be back at work". And I smile.  And that pretty much covers it.

Is divorce still a dirty word?

I was quickly trawling through my FB feed today, when I came across this comment from one of the contributors of ivillage...

My son came home from school today and asked me to explain what divorce is. I fobbed him off. What should I say? Jo xx

For a minute I thought I had stumbled across an Agony Aunt column from the 1950s. Really? Fobbed him off? Is divorce such a hard thing to explain to a child in this day and age? Don't most people know people who aren't married, or who are separated/divorced? Don't most kids see TV shows with people who aren't married or who have remarried? (or is it just my boy who shares my love of Modern Family?!)

The world has changed a lot since I was a kid. My eldest is 7, and I've had to field questions about homosexuality, teach about stranger danger, explain what certain unsavoury words are (even if the explanation is simply not to repeat them again), discuss death, religion and politics. I found myself needing to explain separation and divorce to him even before it happened to me, and it was by far one of the easiest tricky questions to deal with.

Survived the First Week!

I survived my first week back at work!

The first day was perfect - it was one of those days when everything worked really well in the morning - we even managed to leave the house looking like it hadn't just been raided by the Feds. I joked to my colleagues that it could only go down from here!

As I walked back into the office on Monday morning I genuinely felt glad to be back. Several people through the week commented on how well I was looking, and someone actually said I had a spring in my step!

I'm enjoying being back at work where I have a degree of autonomy and feel like I'm contributing towards something. Plus it works that I work with some really good people.

I met all the KPIs I had set myself for a relatively successful week:

1. All leaving the house looking relatively respectable!
2. Me getting dressed without agonising over what to wear thanks to a culled and organised wardrobe (but let's see how long that lasts!)
3. No wondering what to make for dinner thanks to my  menu plan!
4. Me being able to take lunch into work every day (thanks to above mentioned menu plan)
5. No spontaneous crying or surprising emotions at work!

Yay me!

So all in all, my first week went well!

Bring on week no. 2.