(Re) Telling My Story

For the longest time, I have felt like a failure. The kid who peaked during academia and then managed not to do anything useful with the a plethora of As at GCSE and A-Level, two degrees and a masters that early success yielded.

Sure, each qualification came with hours of fulfilment as well as a good grade - I love learning. And of course a lot of friendships and fun featured along with that fulfilment. Each sphere of study pushed me forward in that they allowed me to grow and change and move onto or into the next phase of my life. But, ultimately, my question has always been 'Where has all my work and study actually gotten me?' My answer, a resounding abso-fucking-lutely nowhere. Or for the last six years of stay at home mumming at least...

My teething kid didn't care that I had seen legendary educationalist Ted Wragg lecture in person during my time at Exeter and I had an admirable grasp of pedagogy. Hell, my deep understanding of all things child development and learning wasn't even relevant when it came to the actual child development and play-based learning going on around me for most of my early mum life. I was too fecking exhausted and touched-out to even want to play peekaboo or Barbie, let alone examine the wonder of watching a baby realise object permanence or a three year old use imagination to creatively explore their environment and the inner workings of society on a micro scale.

My study of media and the structure of comedy, or the in-depth analysis I have done on the detail of storytelling, didn't add anything to my enjoyment of books like The Hungry Caterpillar or shows like Octonauts. My appreciation of most media consumed during the last six years can be almost entirely described as 'gratitude that it kept my child in one spot long enough for me to achieve something as inane as hanging out the laundry and washing dishes'.

In short, what I had learnt prior to having kids was rendered even more useless than it had been before and no one, my self included, really cared that I had ever done it.

Even the fact that I used to be a pretty good classroom teacher - which is kind of where all the school things had led me - didn't seem like a success anymore when I looked back on it. That my skills were not lost on either my students or my management team over the years (both groups of whom have always been wonderful and complementary about what I was doing and how I was doing it) wasn't that flattering really was it? Because, well... it was just teaching. It's not exactly rockets. Not in senior English anyway. And I was only a teacher. Not a HoD or a DP or any of the other acronyms they favour in the time poor realms of education, which by my mid 30s when I left the profession saw me lagging behind many of my peers.

That once I travelled the world and lived a life of adventure then? Well, yeah. And now I don't. Plus that was just backpacking. It wasn't like I travelled the world with a fabulous job or on the back of a jet set lifestyle I'd created for myself as one of Forbes Top 30 under 30.

By now, you've probably picked up on the fact that I have spent a large part of my adult life entirely dismissing any of the things others considered my achievements.

If I heard 'Wow, you have published a book?!' I'd shrug. Self published, so, like, whatever.

'Your Mermaids and Astronauts Insta page is beautiful!' Meant nothing. After all, I mostly didn't take the pictures and despite the odd attempt in the last three years to get on board with it and build my following, I think about four people ever comment on anything I put on there and two of them are my immediate family members.

'What sweet kids!' Had me simply reflect that the bribes and pleas to not be dickheads while we were out had worked and really it had nothing to say about my parenting which - I have known from the get go to be somewhere around 'very average' on my best days.

And so, "I don't know how you have time to run a business, look after such small kids and write!" served only to remind me that I didn't and as such, was failing on all fronts by allocating only a portion of myself to each. A portion that was never enough. And that never enough meant I couldn't seem to make any of it good enough.

Quite good enough for what, I never looked too closely at. I just knew that I wasn't. And that was my story. I didn't know where I wanted to be, just that I wasn't there yet and that the tale of my life was pretty unimpressive thus far compared to everyone else out there.

But, that's the thing about stories. They are what we make them. The series of events in them can be exciting, enthralling or enchanting if we chose to tell them as such. If we look at them through the eyes of someone who understands that the journey is way more engaging than the destination anyway our stories take on much more meaningful shape. So, I'm retelling my story to myself over and over in a better way - because, I got it wrong. I told it, wrong.

And how did I work this out? Well, paradoxically, it has taken adding into the mix another business. This is the one where I actually make my least money in, am on the bottom rung of and was more than a little skeptical about getting into. Yet, what it has done, is to help me grow past this incredibly harsh judge I had become of myself and to appreciate who I am and what I have achieved thus far.

To grow my mind and my dreams and my story into better, more beautiful versions of what they were before in spite of the fact that this life-addition has brought no real achievements as I would previously have recognised them. No huge riches; no celebrated glory.

This is the gift that was in the box with the network marketing business I bought: Self-development in terms of WHO I AM and not WHAT I DO.

A gift massively valuable to someone who has spent the last six years at home parenting. Something which in the eyes of a huge portion of the rest of the world (& in my own pre kids) is a synonym for - nothing much at all. Someone who had taken to feeling pretty shit about everything they'd never actually achieved and dismissing all they had because they didn't seem big enough by society's standards for someone who was almost 40.

Thankfully, these days, I look back on that old path and that old story with a fresh set of values. I see it not as a road paved with pointless successes that never led me to the important, prestigious and well paid destination I desired, but as the perfect path to allow me to experiment and to succeed and to fail and to try and to give up and to get up and to slow down and to speed up, until ultimately, it crossed close enough to this one new one that I could change direction. This new, twisty, rose-lined track that has caused me to throw out what I had previously seen as 'success' and 'failure' and focus instead on the dirt beneath my feet and the smell of those roses.

So, I'm retelling my story now. I see the value in the books and the business and the babies that I don't do perfectly and never made me the next JK Rowling or the calm parent I imagined I'd be. The beauty in the swimmers I created that aren't stocked at David Jones or worn by the children of celebrities. I see the learning and the growing and the creativity and the joy. And I am now proud of all three and my part in them.

I haven't lost sight of the fact that my tale will have a conclusion, my journey will have a destination. But I get now that ultimately that will be only a hole in the ground, so I should probably enjoy the things on the way a whole lot more and celebrate my successes based on how they feel to me - rather than whether they measure up to the versions of the same thing other people are doing or the definitions of success I was sold at school and by society at large. Definitions which are hampered beyond measure by becoming a parent, but thankfully, often rendered moot by it too as we strive for ways to succeed that are perhaps a little outside of the box we're used to and therefore challenge our perceptions of it.