What do you do with the photos?...

Monday 28th November 2016

“It was the marriage that was important; Jane Austen rarely even bothered to write about the wedding.” ― Karen Joy Fowler, The Jane Austen Book Club

I am a sentimentalist, I keep trinkets and memories, letters and cards, things that mean something to me.  Tonight whilst looking for something I stumbled across my wedding album.  It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.  I didn't need to open it to know exactly the photos it contained, I had once spent hours pouring over hundreds of photos to select the perfect 32 moments that would forever be bound in that album to remember "forever".

You don't know when you're 24.  You don't know what it really means to connect your life to someone elses life and stay there.  You can't see all the ways you're going to become entangled, how you're going to bond to one another.  You don't imagine that your love might one day burn itself out.  I didn't know that one day that album might cause me pain.

It begs the question what to do with it now.  The original purpose of the album has vanished.  It represents the celebration of a time when promises were made and feelings were far different, a time when I loved and respected a man who no longer exists.  What would be the point of keeping it?  

I am told that as time passes my bitterness towards my ex will fade, but I cannot imagine that when that happens I would want to sit and leaf through 32 memories of a day when vows were made that my ex found so easy to break.  But I cannot erase my past, it made me who I am. 

Without looking through the album I know there is one photo that I want to keep.  One that was taken when I wasn't looking.  One where I was at The Mummas before the wedding, hair done, make up done, relaxed, happy and with people who loved me then, have loved me all these years and love me still.  
 

I have learnt a great many things this year about myself, about my friends, my family, about new people and about love.  My photo frames are now filled with new memories, my heart filled with a new love.   The old Lini isn't gone, she's just evolved, and the smiling happy person in the photo still lives inside me.  She's older, she's wiser, she's been bruised, but she's capable of looking back and not in anger.

Perhaps tonight is not the night to choose what to do with the rest of the album, bonfire night has passed after all!

**Note to myself for February 15th, it's ok if you still haven't decided! xxx

Laughter...

Friday 25th November 2016


Today is a just a short blog, a moment I wanted to remember.  I saw a quote online earlier this week, I shared it on Facebook.  "They told me that to make him fall in love, I had to make him laugh.  But everytime he laughs, I'm the one who falls in love."

When I met AD I told him that I love to laugh.  I'd had a pretty crappy few months, there were days I didn't think I'd ever smile again never mind laugh, but I did.  Time actually is a bit of a healer after all.  So all those months ago on our first date, I talked at 100 miles an hour about whatever came to my head at the time, and in turn I made him laugh, and everytime he did I found a smile spreading across my face.  The time passed quickly as it always does when we're together, too fast I say and despite me thinking I'd blown it, he actually asked me out again.

This morning I found myself making him laugh again, over and over.  It's a sound I adore. A sound all those months ago I knew there was something special about.  And everytime he laughs I light up.  It made me really think, if I could love the wrong person as much as I did, just imagine how much I can love the right person.

Love and hugs people, and a happy weekend xxx

About turn...

Tuesday 15th November 2016

I don't think I've ever grown up. I've got older, taller and wider but I'm not sure we ever really grow up.  How many of us look in the mirror and are shocked at the years that pass in our reflections because in our heads we are still the same youngsters at heart. And sometimes I make decisions with that impulsive youngster part of me.

When I wrote my last blog about leaving cadets, I told myself if it was easy to write then it must be the right decision.  It was an easy blog to write and therefore it fed into the parameters I had set myself about the decision I was making.  What I hadn't realised was that, by actually making that decision, and then attending at cadets to fulfill my final commitments, I began to really question why I was leaving, what was it that had changed within me so much.

When someone makes you feel worthless, it's hard to shake that off.  My ex blamed cadets like that was my affair, it took me away from our marriage, I missed important things because, "I can't, I have cadets".  A sentence I have been familar with since I was 13 years old.  He made me feel like I was to blame for him cheating, and in turn I needed to put that blame onto someone else, and since he had manifested cadets as a person, so did I.  I "fell out of love" with it, I avoided it, I found flaws I'd never noticed.

But even when I'd got behind my decision, the shock from my family and friends was evident.  Even AD who has only met me this year, and hasn't seen the preceeding years of cadet obsession was shocked that I was giving it up.  In reality, I felt like I had nothing left of me to give.  What I realised now is that's a good thing.  Noone wants me to give any part of the person who was resentful and sullen and angry at the organisation...

When I went back to 1372 to get the cadets ready for their practice DofE and my "final" weekend, my 9 cadets were full of spirit and enthusiasm.  Instead of sulking with a tea in the office like I had been previously, I was in with them, looking at routes, thinking about kit. The cadets all reacted well to me, they learnt from me, they laughed with me, and they knew that I was there for them.  I managed to convince them that carrying almost 20kg on their backs, wandering round the Chiltern Hills with a map and only their primitive navigation skills, sleeping out under canvas and eating pasta cooked on a little stove out of a mess tin was a good idea!  I met them at check points, I gave them hints and tips about the kit and food they'd chosen, and we celebrated their successes when they turned up in the right places and looked at where they could improve for next time when they turned left instead of right!

I sat around the campfire and with my Cadet BFFs we toasted my final night out under canvas with them, and I knew then that my resolve was fading.  I was with good friends, I had supported the cadets in their spirit of adventure, and I felt a sense of great sadness that I might never get to do that again.  I snuggled down in my sleeping bag and had a good think about things, before the inevitable interuption from my bladder and mile hike to the toilets! 

 
I knew when I woke up and I looked out at the Beacon that Lini wasn't done with the Air Cadets just yet, and I'm so grateful that even though Stacey never once said "you're making the wrong decision in leaving", she seemed over the moon that I had done an about turn and decided to stay.  I also feel a sense of renewal, revitalisation, like a new version of Lini was rising from the ashes of the old one, and maybe this one will learn about balancing cadet commitments with life and saying "I can't, I've got this other thing" every once in a while...

I am not too proud to say I made a mistake, my thinking was all wrong and my judgement was clouded by what happened to me.  So it may have been a storm in a teacup, blogging about leaving and now retracting it, but what I realised is that, just because you decide something, and you tell people about that decision, if you want to change your mind, you should and if you want to move your position you can.  You're not a tree...