OK, the yearning to go home is now so strong, I wake every morning counting down the days. Each and every delay in the house build (it rained this week; this caused issues for the roofers: dammit) makes me wince as I forward-calculate how many more days away. Where we are staying is fine, lovely actually, but it's not home and I'm homesick.
I try to embrace the new season of Autumn and get back into wearing jeans. I literally can't face another six months wearing skinny jeans (like, as in, literally, I can't even...) and so I scout around for alternatives. I wonder what a 41 year old, would-be-writer, mature student, mother, school run extraordinaire should wear? I consider why comfortable clothes look so shit. I wonder why I judge people who wear comfortable clothes as frankly - they are probably happier and will live longer due to proper leg circulation - whereas my legs are in skinny jeans. Suffering.
Consumed by book plot, I get up earlier and earlier every day, but somehow the day conspires to stop me writing very much. So instead I browse kitchens on Pinterest and try and decide what handles I should choose. My life right now; a strange time that I will surely look back on and say: 'remember when we left our home for a few months? How bizarre was that?' Then I feel the weight of this First World problem and mentally acknowledge it; lots of people have no home for much longer than this.
I mull over my reaction to change and how no matter how prepared I was for this phase, its affect has still been keenly felt. I find myself speaking to people about renovation projects and describing how deluded we were thinking it would be fun to house-hop for a season. It's not so much fun. I feel like I am on a holiday that I can't get home from. A perpetual delayed flight. Bearable but not ideal. And so - I have a glass of wine in the evenings. I miss having a view out of the window.
I am reading 'A Spool of Blue Thread' by Anne Tyler - which is maybe a good thing as she is a genius and just got short-listed for the Booker Prize, but also a bad thing, as for an aspiring writer like me, she is the master and it makes me think I will never produce anything even close to her dizzying heights. There goes the self doubt again. Funny old business!
Meanwhile, I have caught a cold. We are existing on food that can be prepared with only one saucepan and one serving dish. Pasta is a regular feature.
The good news is that we will one day move back. And one day all this talking about it and thinking about it will become a memory and it will be a real place again, with us in it. My son said the other day 'you keep saying life will be different when we move back home, but it will be just the same.' I see his point. But I am sure that somehow as we wait it out in the middle ground, we will get back and be different. Reinvigorated? Appreciative of what we have? A new lease of family life?
It makes me think a lot about what home is. Here we all are, in our home town, surrounded by stuff that is not ours, but is not dissimilar to ours. We have clothes, we have food, we see friends. But oddly there is still this feeling of disconnect. Yes, home is where the heart is, but it is also where you feel comfortable and safe and...to me at least...somewhat permanent. This is a transitory life, where I trail around with bin bags of stuff, trekking across town. The children will ask me where something is, my mind locates that item in the real house, I realise the place it was no longer exists (cupboards no longer there, walls no longer there, hell - even whole rooms no longer there) and I flounder!
And so tomorrow night I am taking my daughter to see 'One Direction' (again; yes fourth time, I know it borders on obsession). Those boys must be really tired by now. They need a break!
And then next week I start my Masters. Get me. A student again.
