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Our decision to move to Maine was a split-second one. I'll come back to it another day but for today I'm here to tell you my sad KitchenAid story.

We have a new KitchenAid in an attic in West London. Sami's cousin gave it to us as a wedding present after Sami put it on our gift list for all the baking of "cakes and what-not" he was planning. Thanks to our move to New York less than a year after our wedding, I don't believe it's ever seen the light of day.

In San Francisco, our brutally-honest-to-the-point-of-being-rude next door neighbour, Amy, donated her mother's original version to the effort to pre-empt her suffering of my production of further poorly hand-mixed cakes. It was a joyless beige, weighed as much as one of the children and plowed on through any beating or kneading task I gave it, emitting a grim but quiet drone like a babushka dragged out of retirement.

It came with us as we moved around, but in this Mainewards move, our approach to what came with us was in hindsight a little... aggressive, and for reasons of my own I still don't understand, the KitchenAid didn't make the cut. Instead it was donated to teacher friend so heavily pregnant she couldn't actually lift it to carry it out of our house. I wouldn't be surprised if it's still in her car.

As it turns out, for good or for ill I do bake, and a mixer is quite useful. Loath as I was to buy a new one given how resilient and sturdy those things are, I went on Ebay where I found a used one in good condition and I ordered it. I was so pleased with myself for having participated in another KitchenAid circle of life and with the wind of self-congratulation in my wings I commenced faithfully tracking its progress through the Ebay machine.

Until I Googled who was selling it: a company in Illinois with a snappy name belying the reality that they are, in fact, a pawn shop. I have bought someone's pawned KitchenAid, a transaction so laden with gendered pathos I find myself wondering whether it's possible to track down the person who pawned it to see if I can't send it back. Who was she? Why did this all happen? What came next?

Alternative suggestions from friends for reasons one might sell a KitchenAid:

newly adopted raw food diet? Gluten freedom?

A poisonous mother-in-law responsible for the original purchase?

Sticking it to the patriarchy AKA A rejection of the weight of gendered assumption in the giving of such a gift?

Ozempic?

I'm open to more, if you have any.

Aurelia is two today. She celebrated with a baby doll she named Arlo, an ear infection, a trip to Frosty’s Donuts in Brunswick where she whispered her first nonsensical secrets into the ears of anyone who would bend to her level, and later a birthday cake the other kids had decorated with a circle of rainbow DumDums. (As I watched them all delight in these lollies, I wondered whether the point of them is actually dehabituation? It’s just a boiled sweet on a stick after all, but all the pauses that get taken during the eating of them ensure maximum joy through repeated re-exposure to the flavour. Who knew?)

Of all the babies, Aurelia has inspired the most nicknames: Pig Blossom, Pogatoot, Tooty, Troll Mub, Rae Thug, Little Bean… She is a consummate bringer-of-joy and we feel outrageously lucky to have her. There's a saying about spirited children that we think of often: "better a character than a cabbage" and we joked while I was pregnant that just one cabbage might balance things out a little. As it transpired she's magnificent in her power, this Spring baby of ours.

One of the teachers told me this week that when they start tapping the maple trees, they often notice an increase in energy among the kids. In spite of ear infections and birthdays, we have experienced the inverse our house: children reading on any soft surface they find; playing quietly together; watching what's going on outside. Something has begun to shift in the environment. Changes of state are afoot, and the ice in the bay we look out on has started to recede in a little archipelago of bergs. Not quite Spring, but a softening en route to it.

Still, much of the land is still under a crust of ice. It's hard to believe that anything underneath can have survived such a sequestering - we (soft-bodied, vulnerable, distinctly unsturdy) would not, and yet things do. It feels like magic to look out over it and know it contains all that secret life - readying itself, awaiting signals from the earth and the air to which we, in our centrally-heated insulation, are entirely deaf.

I have a friend who was in the slow-making for several years. She’s a baker of old-world foods, and I’m sure she’d appreciate the fact that to me she, too, feels arrived at slowly and thus more fully appreciated.

Her child was in Zair's class and I would see her in the mornings at school looking bleary-eyed and uncomfortable, which I can now put down to the nocturnal rhythms of running a bakery combined with a visceral disdain for small talk. If she is an uncaved bear in her morning energy, I am replete with the boundless optimism of a red setter newly set out on a walk. I suspect she gave me a wide berth.

We made our way towards each other eventually, through conversations in the corners of kitchens at parties and at the peripheries of group playdates. Both in our forties, the way we present to each other has made me think about how friendship now - at this stage of life - feels different from previous times.

The other Big Ones were made as I've pulled through life: childhood friends who will be there forever because they're so embedded by time as to be as close to family as possible; those of later on, in situations that involved major and minor adversities: puberty; intense university courses; working together under awful bosses; being new together to unfamiliar cities, parenthood, loss. A little bit of external grit was required to turn them into the pearls they later became. I believed that it was necessary to pass through things with a person alongside you in order to truly identify with them; to be establishing common ground in real time.

In addition to shared experiences, youth lent these relationships a quality I now recognise as something newer friendships don't have. It would be easy to say what has gone is optimism if I were being kind, or naïeveté if I were being snippy. Perhaps it was freedom: freedom from what we later learned were real responsibilities to children and spouses and family that reconceptualised what we thought we knew of them before. Also freedom to: the freedom to be the one who calls the shots in our lives - staying up all night if we felt like it and not because we had to; making plans that only involved us that turned on a penny. Perhaps it was time.

The loss of these things has not meant a lack. Instead their places have been taken by what I hope is something heading towards middle-aged realism: an acceptance of what is and a willingness to meet it with as much flexibility and openness as we can muster. Sometimes it's a lot and for it we congratulate ourselves and each other. Sometimes it's none whatsoever and instead we rage and swear and sometimes resort to big drinks.

Meeting someone at this age is so different that I find myself grasping at a different way to describe the coming-together than the 'making friends' of old. It doesn't feel jolly in the same way as it used to. I get fewer images of carefree little girls holdings hands in long socks and pigtails skipping down lanes. In their place I see the mutual recognition of something like soldiers at peace: a nod, a moment of unbroken eye contact under the furrowed brow of the perennially harried.

I value her so deeply for the way in which has taken root in my life. She cuts straight to the chase when we talk for she knows our time is most likely limited. A part of me breaks with relief when I hear the big laugh straight from her guts because it tells me a truth has been unearthed and held up to the light; a demon of our shared experience exorcised. Together we turn big facts over and examine them from all available angles: marriages, motherhood, mortality.

I have noticed that unlike the friendships of yore, the space that exists in ours is as valuable as proximity used to be. We respect the room we hold around ourselves because we know it's a necessary resource to the myriad of people who depend upon us. It is a finite resource and we honour that. We have lower expectations of each other's availability and a deeper appreciation for the connections we are able to make.

I don't need to have been through the things that she has to acknowledge them. We don't even need to talk about them. Instead I can accept her for where she is and be grateful for whatever made her so gentle and curious in her handling of human experience. I've found her at this stage of life and I am grateful for whatever came before that presents her to me as-is: good and kind and wise and gracious. But also salty and stubborn and loudly allergic to bullshit of all colours.

Have you ever tried to rewrite one of Shakespeare's sonnets in your own words but stick to his word count? Tried to put back in place intestines that were coiled inside an abdomen by a power much higher than yourself? If so, you will know what it's like to try to return a game of Mouse Trap to its box with a seven year-old who's still home from school somewhere along a nebulous spectrum of sickness.

Last night was pancake night. Sami attempted to make crêpes to feed the hungry and excitable hordes while I was at a parents' evening. Someone spilled flour on the floor next to the oven (open, hot), through which Bella walked, slipping and landing in a wailing heap among it. Just as this transpired, Aurelia - who had dragged a footstool over to the stove to get a better look at the action - bent over to scrutinise something untold and set her hair on fire. Still, there were pancakes.

What you see above is my attempt to put lipstick on my pig of a breakfast of children's leftovers: boiled eggs, porridge, some fermented vegetables thrown into the mix to give myself the temporary illusion that I eat healthily.

Our house is merry chaos. Like if a circus and a zoo had a baby, only with less crowd control. We chose this; this is not complaint. I think so often as I go about my day of those who denigrate this work of caring as menial. To my deep shame, I internalised this attitude to some extent, writing off the possibility of the use of a mind through the washing and the cleaning and the cooking and and and.

I feel around me the assumption that this work, through its aspects of repetitiveness, tedium, mundanity, is grind: grunt work, domestic drudgery. Increasingly I suspect that this attitude come from a place of fear and of ignorance, because if parenthood has shown me one thing repeatedly, it's that there is no scope for ego in this game. We are need-meeters; conduits of resolutions to the myriad of problems of others. Who we are (what our hopes and dreams are) in the moments we meet those needs is irrelevant. We are temporarily erased.

The knee-jerk writing-off of this sort of labour as menial says more about the egos of the writers-off, than those doing this work. People who move through the world proving points about themselves, shoring up the requirements of their own existence through the seeking of external validation. Gold stars given and received.

I read recently of the difference between situation and existential boredom and it's helpful in this situation. Situation boredom is what we experience when we have nothing to do - perhaps when we are waiting for a bus (without our phones). That itchy, frustrated feeling of not being able to take any self-directed action. Existential boredom arises when your head and hands are busy, but your soul is not: that deep longing for something else that arises when a task is so repetitive it makes you start to question your own existence. It also shines a light on the workings of your ego, for what else lies at the root of a desire to do Something Else if not ego? I have come to think of my own as a recalcitrant horse set on a path by its rider but constantly pulling it's head in more desirable directions.

There is a lot of scope for existential boredom in the role of a carer, and whilst it's painful, its transformative. To be forced to surrender or set aside what you want in the majority of the moments that make up your day is a form of quiet, personal revolution. Often it's hard to know how we are being changed by it in the time of our changing, but those micro-adjustments accumulate quietly in the wings until one day something happens and we realise we are not who we were at all. With luck we are better: kinder, more patient, more compassionate, more able to laugh at the world. (Also: tireder)

I find myself wishing so hard that anyone who thinks this role is a cop-out of sorts compared to the world of paid work could spend one day doing it to see what is required. What that is is strength and acceptance of that ego surrender, and that is not for the faint of heart.

As Jia Tolentino recently put it:

"Like wiping a butt over and over and wiping a mouth and washing tiny hands, right? These things are often tedious, and they are holy... That's the thing that connects them both; it's submission".

I am raw with lack of sleep thanks to several games of musical beds last night. My brain feels like a maze I can't find my way through. Bella is home from school and bored, her brain entirely unaffected by whatever made her cough through all those dark hours. She lobs math problems at me for times tables I admit I never learned.

To great fanfare, last week temperatures entered the 40s (Fahrenheit!) which is the golden number for the start of maple tapping. Zair has been drilling holes in trees at school and placing buckets beneath them to catch the emerging sap. At 40 degrees tree magic starts to happen, a result of the physics of freezing and warming and the chemistry of the sugar and the gases in the tree expanding and contracting. Later this week they will "sugar": collecting their buckets and cooking the sap down to syrup (a ratio of about 40 parts sap to 1 part syrup), which they will serve at a pancake breakfast for the whole school on Friday.

It's been a delight to watch the building excitement around this end-of-winter milestone. I missed the seasons while we were in California, a sentiment Sami found baffling in his sweet spot of year-round sunshine and t-shirt temperatures. I remember feeling exhausted during our first November in San Francisco, ultimately realising it was because there was no Autumn of which to speak in that city (an annual Indian summer in its place) and my body and soul had been secretly anticipating the slow-down and contraction of summer's end. With no changes habituation occurs, rendering everything flat and unpleasantly expansive.

The seasons over here are the types of seasons I've dreamed of all my life. Seasons in glorious technicolour. It is each one individually but on top of that it's the transition of one giving way to the next; each change providing an opportunity to appreciate what was and anticipate what's coming.

I recently listened to this podcast called "Making the World Sparkle Again", about the process of habituation. In it they talked about the way our senses become dulled to something to which we have been repeatedly exposed, but alive to the thing once more when we take a break and return. By this logic, they described how enjoyment is heightened by stopping and starting things we like in order to re-expose ourselves to their novelty. The way they tested this was by getting people to listen to music that they liked, either in full or broken up. The people listening to the broken music were more likely to want to buy tickets to see the music live than the ones who'd listened uninterrupted.

In contrast, getting through an onerous task is best done in one fell swoop so as not to re-expose ourselves repeatedly to that which we find unpleasant. The example they gave was cleaning the bathroom: if you stop-start you keep experiencing anew the smells of bleach or your feelings about cleaning the toilet.

To live in seasons is to exist in a constant dehabituation loop. I am so in love with this snow, but I have also started to hallucinate green shoots among it like someone spotting oases in desert mirages. There's also something to be said for the necessary surrender to them. In perma-perfect Northern California it was unusual for the weather to get in your way (not for long though, I fear), giving rise to on overblown sense of one's own power over things. Here we are humbled it, with no option other than to acquiesce when it forces us inside. There's relief to be found in being forced to re-acknowledge forces great than ourselves.

This house we live in was owned by a man called Weld, whose son, Nat, now rents it to us. Weld died two years before we arrived, so we never met him but it feels like he’s part of the household.

Much of Weld’s stuff remains in the house, and moving in meant moving out that with which we couldn’t happily cohabit. A lot is still here: bookshelves three books thick; photo albums; sports equipment; assorted lobster pots. Sami works upstairs in Weld’s office in the turret of the building, which you can see in the far right of the picture above, although The Crow’s Nest would be a better name for it, designed as it is like part of a ship and decorated with nautical flags and an ancient buoy hanging from the apex of the roof.

Weld was deeply into a lot of things: the voyages of Shackleton; dogs; Italy and its art; American presidents; the sea. In the photos we find of him he is unsmiling and quite severe-looking, although Nat tells me he was no such thing. Above the front door of the house (unused, as seems to be the case in Maine as people favour the practicality of mud rooms over the formality of the front door) a carving of a naked Weld - carrying his fourth wife aloft and over a threshold - is inlaid in the roof. This feels more like the Weld we live with.

When my father died and we were faced with the task of deciding what to do with his books, I realised that certain collections do not hold together anymore once the person who gathered them is gone and the whole is deconstructed and compromised. It loses the glue of connections that made it coherent; that glue being the mind of its collector. Suddenly they’re all just old books. The warmth of the life that brought them together goes.

We go about this house moving things around in order to accommodate ourselves and our 87 children, mostly down to the cavernous basement. The office, however, remains reverently untouched. Here the collection remains in its totality, and it is here that it feels like Weld could be right with you, in among his university diplomas (a Harvard man); watercolour portraits (done by what I can only assume were the wives); signed but these days illegible baseballs. It’s the outward manifestation of Weld’s marvellous mind, and to exist in his house is to inhabit the negative space that is constituted by that mind.

I like that he’s here in this way, for us and for the children. The sense to which the negative space gives rise is a grandfatherly one. In lieu of being able to ask him questions we have the books. Still, much remains a mystery, such as why there are stone frogs set among the tiles throughout the house, and why someone with so many collections would be so averse to in-built storage.

I forgot I'd hidden the children's Christmas elves-from-the-shelves in an old nappy bag in December, with a plan to put them away with the Christmas decorations when no-one was looking. Two of the three were discovered yesterday to much shock and amazement. They were even more of Whole Thing last year even than in normal years, on account of us being on the road between California and Maine. New elves showed up (old elves had accidentally been packed in the shipping container on account of parental disorganisation) - Traveling Elves! Who come only to people making long journeys! Identical, triplet elves no less, who followed us across the country, popping up in motel rooms and friends' spare rooms wherever we were, returning to the North Pole each day to report on the children's behaviour, no doubt shocking Santa with tales of their diet of Jolly Ranchers and other gas station apocalypse foods.

Now they are here, in our house in Maine. Bella wrote a letter: questions. Did they know we are not actually traveling, but resident full-time in this, our new house? They were welcome to stay. But where was the third elf, Cardamom? A reply was received: explanations. The North Pole was cold; this house is warm. Zair's elf was on maternity leave after having twins (Holly and Mistletoe). All was well.

I can see why they might have wanted to be here this week. It was warm, or what we have come to see as warm in comparison to previous weeks. How our centre shifts! The sun shone and snow started melting and dripping from high places, beginning in a syncopated drumming and increasing into full-running streams to be avoided by those walking below. Snow recedes like a slow tide from roadsides and housesides for reasons I can't work out. Forgotten features are revealed in expanses of white like islands emerging from a sea. It is not beautiful everywhere: mud blooms up through old snow as the ground beneath thaws and the mud begins. I have been warned about Mud Season and I do not look forward to it.

But yesterday the snow returned; snow like the down of a gosling: fluffy and white but transparent enough to show what it's covering. I knew nothing of snow and I am not shocked to find myself constantly surprised by it. I find I default to food analogies when thinking of it: Christmas cakes, meringues, crème brûlée...

I am glad it's the weekend and we are all home together. The week was a hard one with some tender moments at school for some people. The process of settling in has not been uniformly smooth, so we try different things and hope one of the attempts comes good.

At university with me was a girl called Valentina. She was Italian and studied Film. She was abrupt and uncompromising in her opinions to the point of being rude, but also probably brilliant. Her hair was black. All of her clothes were just on the right side of unfashionable to be devastatingly interesting. Also, they were all black. She wore thick black-rimmed glasses, smoked cigarettes all the time she wasn’t on non-smoking university property and - most exotic of all - existed on espresso after espresso.

The second time I went to university, there was a girl called Ariadne. She was Greek and had wild, unbrushed hair and wore layers of eye make-up she never fully removed and with the benefit of hindsight I now allow myself to acknowledge that she was kind of a bitch. She also drank black coffee.

I’ve always aspired to be a drinker of black coffee. To be someone who didn’t require the softening influence of the milk, someone who paid for their caffeine in scalding heat and acrid, mouth-watering bitterness. I aspire to be less of a wimp, to require less comfort and joy to protect me from the things I don’t like in the world. I’ve wanted to communicate to the world that my unpleasant caffeine delivery habit is the one thing separating me from my own personal anarchy; that I am not to be messed with; that I am not a soft landing place; that my edges might be sharp and unpleasant.

Except they’re not and everyone knows it. Still, I trace my coffee journey from those first milky instant Nescafes, to Starbucks lattes, to the years of Emperor’s-New-Clothes Flat Whites, multiple daily quad-shot cappuccinos of my days with four newborns to now: a double shot with very little steamed milk and I wonder whether I’ve arrived. I’ve dialed in the combination of the requisite amount of caffeine combined with only as much milk as I need to make it palatable. Perhaps this makes me basic. Perhaps I’m ok with it.

In an effort to force myself out of this self and seasonally imposed hibernation of which I am dangerously fond, I joined the gym in Brunswick. I say gym, they say “rec” and if that word gives you 90s leisure centre vibes then you’re on the right track.

Which is also star feature of the place: a shiny, red indoor walking loop that I had to see to understand. The lady at the desk told me about it and I assumed it was something for running and there would be skinny men in short shorts and bibs going around and around somewhere in the building but I was mistaken. The whole place is built around this indoor track and it was BUSY. For wont of somewhere easily accessible to walk in the winter, people go there instead. There was something meditative about it - no one wore earphones, most walked alone or in quiet pairs. At one point on the journey around there is a mural of a summer scene of many leaves and perhaps some blueberry bushes and a child, but otherwise you’re just there, doing your thing undistracted; present.

Inside the track were some lively pickleballers (you have to pay for that, the receptionist told me, whereas use of the track is free) and some stationary cardio machines. There is also a weight room off to the side where I spent some time lifting heavy things with five old and very poker-faced men.

I loved it. I’ve been trying to articulate what Maine feels like compared with California, and the best I can do is to say that where California is air and water, Maine is rock and earth. The rec is my next piece of evidence for this. The sense in there with the looping track and machines that go nowhere is of peace with where you find yourself. As you walk in the door, there are rows of thick coats and boots lined up together. Not in lockers (the receptionist’s face when I asked for a lock to borrow told me it’s not a hotbed of crime) but just out, as though everyone in the building has just come in out of the cold to hang out with each other.

Following Vermont’s lead, Maine banned billboards in the the late 70s. The Governor at the time felt that there was enough natural beauty here that citizens could do without extra things at which to gaze, and I believe him.

It feels like a place where frills aren’t a motivating factor, or indeed a consideration much at all. Their absence and the reduction of much of the design of everyday life to function (weather-proofed) provides that peace: the places eyes land don’t demand attention in the way they do where frills are more valued. Perhaps the peace comes from that void - it’s visually quiet here. I suspect this is the first form of quiet I’m actively noticing so far.

We return here, but other things are new. I write this time from Maine, ensconced in wintery woods, among which sits two feet of snow with more on the way.

I've given myself a twenty minute window to write this, as small interruptions with hungry tummies will surely come running soon. The thing is to start and here we are; I've missed you.

I've begun this year with a renewed departure from Instagram, and as much as of the rest of the internet as I can avoid. I find myself reaching reflexively for my phone in pinch points during the day; moments in which I'm noticing I'd rather not give my undivided attention to the real things in front of me. I've started to pay attention to the friction I turned to the wormhole of the internet to avoid and it's been interesting. I feel like I'm showing up for my full life for the first time in a long time, and whilst sometimes it's uncomfortable because I've removed the escape hatch, for the most part it feels very good.

When I was small I spent a lot of time with a lady called Sarah who - as a teacher and even now she's retired - has maintained a childlike sense of wonder at the small things the world offers up to us every day if we look for them. I remember sitting with her one day as she stripped a lettuce leaf by leaf to make a salad. After lifting one, she held it towards me and said "no-one's ever seen this part of this lettuce before we looked at it now". Life without the urge to report it to the internet feels like looking at that lettuce. I stood at the edge of a snowy field last week and marveled at the fact that in that moment it existed in front of me there, not as something to be mediated through my phone; not as something I'm donating to the internet for people to scroll past in their own personal wormholes.

The thing with the friction is that it isn't erased. It builds up quietly like piles of laundry until one day your house collapses under the weight of it. I think I knew that all along, but for a while there I told myself I needed it. For me it was avoidance, largely, of things that made me uncomfortable: phone calls and all the other hard-work-but-ultimately-meaningful ways of staying in touch; the existential turmoil that arises after a certain period of boredom; sitting in the angst of the not-knowing-what-other-movies-I've-seen-Bill-Paxton-in.

But I'm here for it, and this other side feels good. I've been reading again, and that never doesn't feel good. This week was Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. I know I'm late to the party on this one, but my lord, it's beautiful.

Elsewhere I've been proceeding with caution through these unfamiliar snowy conditions, in which most aspects of our physical lives feel like science experiments. I did not know snow, and I'd imagine my findings are hilariously obvious to those that do. For now I feel a little like the Australians I'd encounter on the Piccadilly Line, fresh off the plane from their more southerly hemisphere - bewildered in their shorts and t-shirts in December, wondering what the bloody hell they've got themselves into.

On the way to school we drive through a valley. On either side of the road are vineyards and in the morning they are misty. One morning last week I drove into a butterfly. It flew towards the car and then through some process of physics I won't pretend to understand, it was swept up along the contour of the bonnet and up against the windscreen. I heard the tiny impact: a faint click like a small wooden bead hitting the floor. I was momentarily stricken.

I recognise that within an ecosystem a butterfly plays many roles throughout its life cycle, but to the layperson it can seem that their sole raison d'être is to exist as thing of pure beauty; a symbol of delicacy; something to be admired and marveled at. The semiotic readings of a butterfly are surely in the direction of things ephemeral and fragile; beauty alongside vulnerability. The Monarch, for example, plays both a symbolic and real role as communicator of the workings of global warming.

I tell the children not to handle them. Don't touch their wings! The scales will come off on your fingers! If they land on you, pay attention to how their feet feel on your skin: so tiny you can only sense them in plurals; so tickly on legs the width of little more than a hair.

The collision between my car - huge, relative to the butterfly; filled with an environmentally-irresponsible number of children - and that lovely insect felt like a mental juxtaposition playing out physically. The size, speed and and unnaturalness of the car meeting something that stands-in for the opposite of all these felt as a consequence both violent and shocking.

I can't quite shake the feeling.

Photo from here.

Today we farewelled our beloved Elías, who is moving back to Argentina. He was our shared (br)au pair and one of the sweetest people I ever did meet.

It took me a long time to articulate both to myself and to him what made him so special, but I got there in the end.

Leaving your child in the care of someone other than your co-parent induces guilt. This is a fact universally acknowledged by every mother (and maybe father) I know. To do the job of parenting to the standard we feel absolves us of the mirror-gallery of guilt we feel even when it is us caring for our own children, means giving more of yourself than is feasible, realistic or sustainable long-term. It means giving more than you think you have, hence the need for sharing the load in the first place. The guilt arises from your awareness of the delta that exists between what you know you need to give, and what a not-parent caring for them will be able to give.

It’s rare therefore that a stranger will give as much of themselves as a parent will, and really, nor should they as for them it’s a job, and being able to do that job successfully requires the setting of boundaries to protect both parties. Parenthood (despite whispered and shouted urgings from all sides) is rife with necessary boundary violations, at least at the start when small babies are involved. There’s no downtime; it’s a full-body, full-soul, all-in undertaking.

I realised that handing Aurelia over to Elías did not result in this guilt. Elías gave all he had and some extra at his own expense. Occasionally, I had to step-in and assert boundaries for him, fearful as I was that for him, providing that particular quality of loving care for a child not his own meant that on some level we were taking advantage of him.

He loved Aurelia like family, and for that he became family. It is rare to have met a young guy so sweet and so gentle and I already miss him deeply.

I recently read this book about the concept of a congregation in a secular age. The idea that struck me the hardest was Root's framing of our personal motivations as having shifted from objectively determined 'shoulds' to subjectively determined 'coulds'. In the past, when the shape of our lives was based more on religious frameworks, how we lived - from what we ate to the rhythm of our week to how we assessed our own performance - was measured against these expectations.

A good life was made up of meeting the criteria set out by a bunch of shoulds. As religion has fallen away as a morally guiding force in how we structure our lives, coulds have replaced them. Coulds are more numerous as they are subjectively determined, just as our performance against these objectives is. We could do anything with our days, weeks, lives. The possibilities and combinations are as numerous as the people making the choices. They are more anxiety-provoking as a result, being so personal. Everyone is going around inventing their own wheels of value and progress and success. In addition, as Barry Schwartz describes in The Paradox of Choice, having more options doesn't necessarily make us happier; conversely, it can leave us more stressed than we might be with a more limited selection of things to choose from. This is why I love a short menu.

It made me think about how we progress through life. You start off living by a set of shoulds, as dictated by your parents: what you wear, what you eat, where you go. Finally, you graduate to self-determination and worlds of possibility open up, hence the rumspringa-like atmosphere of university. You have access to all the coulds and for a short while we bask in the sun of the countless possibilities. Life is could! Ultimately, with time and increased self-awareness, we return to a set of self-determined shoulds: for me these are - among others - exercising vigorously, drinking what feels like far too much water, trying to stay off my phone. Nothing earth-moving, but nonetheless definitely a set of non-negotiable shoulds. I could stay up all night drinking delicious wine and watching something filthy, but I know tomorrow I will feel like a terrible and slow death so really I should drink this water and go to sleep.

I'm not sad about this process of constriction. It's comforting and nourishing in a way a night in front of Forensic Files (I don't know what you were imagining) never could be.

The kids have a song that they learned in kindergarten that they start singing around now:

"Spring is here, said the bumblebee, How do you know? said the old oak tree, I just saw some daffodils Dancing with the fairies on a windy hill"

It is here, darting in and out between rainstorms. It's been almost a year since Aurelia was born on a sunny day, which was followed by a night so black and rainy it was hard to imagine that the car that brought us home would make it through. Our first non-hospital night was spent in a cabin so freezing and so loud, the rain hammering the roof. We made a fire to try to warm ourselves, but I remember feeling reluctant to change her, not wanting to expose her tiny newborn nakedness to such inhospitable conditions.

I write this today listening to the sound of hail tick-tocking on the kitchen skylight, but this week I have felt the warm of the outgoing winter sun ('apricity' - did you know that word? I didn't), my bones seeming to defrost inside my body. At school there is a place on my route to dropping Zephy off where two paths meet and open out. Something about that point - the physics of it magic - funnels the scent of the narcissus that grown all over campus to meet me.

Spring is here.

Photo from here.

I was right: I cannot create with my body and my mind at the same time. In the time since I last sat in front of this blog, two babies have been added to the collection. I believe that's it. I've noticed a shift in my energy towards a desire to wanting to create with my brain again, and here we are, old friends.

I had grand plans for a while to move to a new website. A shiny, fancy one with more excitement. With time I realised I've grown quite attached to the simplicity of this format so again, here we are.

Alongside my desire to write has come another one, which is just to hang out. I suspect there is a connection between the two; a harmony between a creative, productive urge and one that has no goal at all other than just being. As I found my way to identifying the second urge, this article about the demise of adult hangs was published and some dots started to join for me. There is a sadness to the realisation that we don't just hang out and I wondered to what extent it's down to the way in which we've internalised capitalism's productivity mindset - we feel with a sense urgency that our leisure hours should have something concrete to show for themselves. Hard proof. We have come, perhaps, to undervalue hangs, the undefined aim of which is simply connection; the marinading and slow-cooking emotional investment in the friends and family with whom you do it.

Hanging is a luxury and a privilege with four small children. Today I will attempt it on a beach. My expectations are low, as experience has shown me that unless my hangtimes are child-free, my primary role is to switch between entertaining and containing, neither of which are conducive to much relaxation or slow anything. But like a laser, I identify the gaps between these things, and I squeeze the juice so hard out of a half-conversation, an overheard joke, a smile that lands on the face of a fellow adult over the heads of our offspring. I have become ruthlessly efficient within an activity defined by its inefficiency.

Sometimes you have to dive into it, and trust that everything else will somehow fall into place. I say that as someone who's hair has assumed a structural element on account of going unwashed for well over a week.

Today we will enjoy the beach with out friends Karl and Suhee. I have a vague plan to take Bella out of ballet for the morning and go in search of Sonoma Mountain Bread's Saturday morning pastries, which I will take to share with friends and the sand.

It's lovely to be back.

Photo from here.

My aunt Bella removes all the stickers from her fruit before it goes in the fruit bowl. She says it looks more like a still life that way.

We’ve all been a little tired the past two weeks. Zair just started school, Sami’s travelling and we’ve had assorted guests. At the moment, with all the changes taking place to our daily routine, I feel as though I’ve thrown many balls into the air and I’m standing back, waiting to see where they all land so that we can regroup and make peace with the new rhythm of our days.

Whereas before both babies were in nursery just around the corner, Zair’s new school is across the city in Pacific Heights, necessitating a school run which is totally new to me and not without its teething problems. Small thing, and given that I’m thirty seven it should really be no big deal. We practise and practise and it gets easier. Also, his days are significantly shorter than they were. A full four hours shorter, which means that as soon as I’ve dropped him off to start his day, I just about get home and do one small thing before I’m back on the road.

We’re all fine, but it’s perhaps not surprising how significant the impact of small changes are when life is a precisely organised choreograph of daily tasks with little children. In the face of the various social obligations for which we’ve lined ourselves up over the coming months, I find myself feeling very tired and rather flat, keen to snatch back any moment of peace and quiet as I can throughout the day.

I’ll be back to normal soon, and probably wondering what all the fuss was about.

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