So this is me

So this is me, the middle of the night; it could be any night, but it's Monday. I'm in chronic pain, as usual for me these days, and I know I will wake early with the kids but the chaos of today is stopping me from sleeping. The other day my brother and I were chatting. How to impose some order on my seemingly dead-end life. We thought of a blog. While he's off saving the world, he seems amazed and mildly appalled that all I seem to have accomplished at the tender age of 35, following so much promise,A grades and scholarships, a respectable Oxbridge degree, freelance work as a journalist in my twenties... is now two beautiful children, a string of broken relationships, and a serious chronic illness which renders me pretty much unable to do anything much except for drag myself through each day counting down the hours to bed.

So where to start, to claw myself back into the 'real' world? Why not start with this: the world I have got. Where I'm at right now, which is just about the polar opposite of where I hoped and thought I might be by now. I've always been vibrant, sociable, pretty, able to charm my way in and out of things, proud of being a single mum to my beautiful kids... and yet the last year or so has been so horrific I wake up every day still hoping it is all a nightmare and I am waking up to a life which no longer exists, without pain. So I'm starting here, right here, where I am, where it all begins.

Today my on/off partner, love of my life, fire of my loins (is that from Lolita? don't worry, he's in his forties), terror of my soul, co-dependent soulmate, revealed to me reluctantly that he had been telling me yet more lies, because it was 'easier'. More of that later. Baby Daddy no1 has sent me a text declaring he will never speak to me again because I am preventing him from seeing his child , just because a camping trip hasn't worked out the way he hoped it would - she'd rather stay at home with me. This apparently makes me into a monster who is withholding contact. Any day now he'll be on the ten o clock news in a Batman suit throwing flour at Cameron and co. My bladder has not been irritable so much as fucking furious. Pain levels high; emotion almost uncontainable. To put it mildly, it hasn't been a good day.

I did manage to mend a toy plastic rat tonight, though, but superglued my fingers together in the process (managed to un-glue them again with salt - it works, try it). Another half hour well spent.

Life is not technicolour right now, not even close. I live for my children, which I am not sure is healthy, in fact I'm sure it is not, but it's better than the alternative, which is giving up entirely. I choose to keep going, but anyone who remarks on how 'great' I look ('oh you don't look ill!') or how 'when it rains, you have to look for the sparkles in the rain', gets a squeeze of lemon juice in their eye from me. That's what I do when life deals me lemons. Fill up my water pistols with them and fire them at people. Metaphorically, obviously. I'm not a psychopath. I just don't like people who always try to fix things. Some things can't be fixed easily; sometimes you need to listen, not talk.