I was not going to blog today because I cannot write as well as this, and I wish I could.
Then I pulled myself together.
Recently life has been tough. Sometimes life is just like that. From nowhere in particular a black fog descends; the world seems a very dark place and it is hard to see a way through it.
It is hard to see a light at the end of the tunnel when you can't even see the tunnel never-mind any glimmer of light that might be at the end of it.
For me, at least, I know feelings like this will pass because they always do. The trick is to keep walking. Sometimes, however, the fog is denser than usual and moving forward feels more of an effort. Sometimes it just feels easier to stop, but then the misery would swamp me completely. So I plod on. There is no other way to go, and thank goodness for that.
And it is six-year-old IJ who has dragged me out of the bad space, once again.
At the weekend with a stack of revision ahead, two very tight deadlines to meet when my brain was only half-functioning, the realisation that IJ's uniform remained unwashed on Sunday evening and I'd forgotten to do a supermarket shop, the news came through that a friend was experiencing some serious post-op complications after a recent spell in hospital.
And I nearly crumbed.
Then IJ, caring and sensitive as always, put her hand gently on my arm and said,
"It's okay, mummy. I nearly cried yesterday. I thought Shaun the Sheep had died. He hadn't died, he had just fallen over."
And we laughed and IJ wondered why I was not being quite as sensitive as I should have been to the plight of poor Shaun the Sheep.
And that us why children are wonderful, because they can pull us out of a dark place and make us realise there really is a bloody good point to this all.
They are the best medicine by far.
