When Your Mojo Leaves You High and Dry

And a wee catchup

Throughout the summer months, I made a promise to myself, and to the couple of kind readers who checked in to make sure I was still breathing (just about, my friends, just about!), that I would hop into your lovely inboxes in September with a shimmery summer recap.

But here’s the deal. September is over and the leaves are officially falling and when I get up in the morning to drag my sorry body to the gym, the sky is the blackest kind of black and most poignantly, my eldest son was caught heating his bed with my hairdryer the last two nights.

And here’s the real deal: summer 2024 broke me. It was a shitshow, for lack of a better word. I’ve been waiting for September and it’s New Year Energy and fresh hope to put the pieces of me back together, but it looks like that will be an ongoing process. 

My iPhone photo albums will tell you our summer was packed with more core memories than ever. France! The Lake District! The North Coast! Camp! Sea swims and ice cream and s’mores and the greatest of all–more time!

But the truth is, our core memories are punctuated by trauma. I can’t think of a single summer memory without my body also tightening at the memory of a precious boy suffering in his own body and mind. I can’t savour the sweetness of summer without recoiling at the bitter aftertaste.

In the last few years, I have been careful not to tell a story that isn’t mine to tell. And while this one is the daily experience of my whole family (right down to the fourteen-month-old who just this morning rubbed his cheek on my cheek after noticing my trickle of tears), it ultimately isn’t mine. And maybe that’s why I’ve been quiet. Maybe, that’s why I’m still grasping for words and gasping for air well into Autumn–because the private stories we carry for our beloved are some of the heaviest.

Recently on her writing podcast, Ann Kroecher talked about what to do when, one day, you just stop writing. Or you stop doing the thing that makes you you. When the words stop coming or you feel you’ve misplaced your mojo, or, you know exactly where your mojo is—shacked up with a new writing partner who gives her more attention and can do the writing thing a million times better than you. 

Ann said she’s been there. In particular when a family member needed loads of caregiving attention (cue my sad floppy ears perking up like Bugs Bunny) and her mind didn’t have space to think creative thoughts, never mind time to sit down and get them out into the world. Instead, she was driving to appointments and sending documents to insurance companies and researching different therapies and dealing with the emotional strain of an unpredictable neurological condition. 

She said if your words feel forced or they’re eked out in blood, sweat and tears, it doesn’t mean this is the end–it means you’re endlessly human (my paraphrase).

And I don’t know why I needed permission to be human so badly. It’s a good human thing to have a heart that beats and breaks for others. It’s good to climb inside the belly of grief and curl up and take a nap, and then it’s good to get up again and laugh deliriously with your husband on your teal velvet sofa. It’s good to have a brain full of questions, a Google tab full of inadequate answers and a soul chasing peace nonetheless. It’s good to have oodles and oodles of words, and sometimes, it’s good to sit in the echo of silence.

So consider this email less of a cutesy recap, and more of a sloppy rehash. This is me poking my head above the parapet to say hi, I’m here, I’m human. And it’s good.

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In case you missed it:

When We Have No Answers, Only Presence at Mothering Spirit.
“The part of my brain trying to make sense of my child’s suffering cannot reconcile what my heart believes. My heart yearns to be held by the tender God who knit each of my boys together in my womb. But the God who knit my child together with a DNA pattern that makes life so difficult for them? This, I cannot reconcile. 

Can I really trust you?”

Multiverse Mum at Coffee+Crumbs.
“In my mind, the variables and forests of forking paths are endless, except for one factor: in every universe, I am a mother.”

Defining Word: In-between at Thin Places
”I keep wishing C.S. Lewis had explored the endless options of pools and worlds. More books, please. But maybe that was his intention, to leave us returning to the in-between and its endless myriad of possibilities. To leave us with the hope of stories still to be written. To leave us lingering here just a little longer, feeling the life growing beneath our feet.”

I did a run of four Sunday morning thoughts on BBC Radio Ulster about Taylor Swift, Flamingos, the ultimate walk of shame, and the need to jump (which is funny because sharing these publicly makes me want to jump out a window). While it’s definitely not my favourite or most comfortable form of communication and I absolutely cannot bring myself to listen back, I had fun coming up with these!

I made a cute reel on Instagram to mark the change in seasons. “For now, I sleep. Maybe I weep. And then I take hold of this next stage. Because, for one whole year, we’ve been joined by the umbilical cord of our hearts—and this can’t be broken by a birthday.”

A poem because my middle baby, the boy who makes me believe in goodness afresh every single day, started nursery school AND I AM FEELING SOME THINGS.

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The aforementioned sweetness 💗

All my endlessly human love,

Reb x