'The Feast of Life' by Sheila

At the feast of life I feel as if I have gorged myself whilst others starved. 

 I live in the most beautiful place, I have a wonderful family and a fabulous lifestyle. I have been a mother for 27 years, an autonomous home schooler for 20 years and a foster carer for 10 years. The youngest of my four children will be 16 next week, and I have a very loving relationship with all my family. 

There has been a lot of luck involved of course, but luck is also what you make of it. My husband and I have shouldered crises that would have finished many couples. We are stickers! We have made all our own bread for over 20 years, even taking it on holiday. Perhaps it is the bread that has kept us both so healthy.

Now I stand at the threshold that all parents reach - I am no longer a parent of children. My role of 27 years is drawing to a close, I have space in my agenda. Having had my spirit fed so plentifully for so long I yearn to give something back, to support other families and nurture other children, to share some of the wisdom that I believe I've accumulated. I have written a book and I have been trying to get myself out there, but it's hard. I have a soft underbelly; and I'm scared. How easy it would be to withdraw, claim to have tried and failed. Get on with my luxurious life. But I have spent years gorging myself at the feast of life whilst others have starved and if I don't do something I will be ashamed.

Maybe I could open up my home. I have a spare bedroom and space for campers, I could run courses, or support groups, at the very least I could show people how to bake bread and make peanut butter. If someone with my awareness and good fortune can't give back who can?

Desire and fear course through my veins in equal measure, as Mumford says “If my enemy was bigger than my apathy I could have won!”

'Diggers and Dreamers' by Pamela

These days we try to create community on computers.

I will imagine us all sitting warming our hands and cheeks around a fire on the screen. It is glowing orange and red on a cold and windy black night. We snuggle up to our mouse to ‘google search’ a wide view of a starry sky.

Sitting around a real shared fire was more my idea of community when I moved to the countryside almost twenty years ago…and we did. You know, with wood and streaming eyes from the smoke. Well, not on cold and windy black nights…in fact only on warm and balmy summer nights. Survival did not depend on whether the chocolate had melted properly around the bananas wrapped in aluminium foil (placed carefully in the glowing embers of the fire). That was after the chicken thighs had eventually been cooked in the indoor kitchen oven. It had taken the barbecue too long to either burn to a cinder or leave the centre pink and raw.

The ideals of ‘back to nature’ were always pitched against the reasons human beings had invented technology to make most things easier. I discovered that young, fit and full of energy were the main requirements to living sustainably.

Our young earnest couple who lived in a caravan in the middle of a large field had a vision of converting the world to pumpkins ( they came from Australia) They wanted to fill the field with pumpkins and make pumpkin soup, pumpkin pie, pumpkin smoothies etc. to sell at festivals and eventually have their own Pumpkin Restaurant. He then tragically had a stroke, in his early thirties, becoming partly paralysed.. Pumpkin Dream Ended. So did their marriage. Like I said, young fit and full of energy is the main requirement to ‘working with nature’.

Any age, shape and fitness can sit on the computer and talk to the rest of the world. As my teenage children do…even on a warm and balmy summer evening when I would much prefer they came and ate melted chocolate on mushy hot bananas.

When they were younger, the chocolate was a strong enough pull to have them sitting out and enjoying poking a stick into the fire, or even better melting a pink marshmallow in the flames, so the outside went dark and crunchy and the inside was soft and gooey. But not now, as teenagers, addiction to face book, tweeting etc, are even stronger than addiction to sugar.

So why am I telling you this slightly cynical tale?

I guess I have become more of a realist since my dream to ‘live in the country’ began twenty or so years ago. 

My new husband and I (both in our mid thirties) researched many communities around Great Britain, from a book called ‘Diggers and Dreamers’ The title was to show that there were different kinds of people attempting to make new pioneering ways of life Those who tend to focus on the here and now practical things that need doing (diggers) and those who see the vision and hold the dream of new possibilities (dreamers). I was definitely in the dreaming section. Fortunately husband is enough of a digger for a balance.

How many times have I crashed from the idealism of how humanity might be to the pain and grief of how we actually are?

The fights over where the fire was to be built, by whom, from what and where?

Power politics and fixed opinions create just as much conflict within a community of environmentalists in rural West Wales  as well…anywhere else. It did eventually lead me to train as a mediator in my endeavour to see how we can respect and meet each others needs. It had not been my idea of idyllic ‘life in the country’ for war to be waged over where the ducks can splosh around without putting diverse wildlife at risk. 

In fact, I would say that the last twenty years of living the dream  have slowly but imperceptibly transformed this dreamer. I hope not into a cynic, but one who has developed a reality check of time, patience, endurance, and practical application required to do just about anything.  

We need each other, to overcome why the google search for ‘community sitting under a starry night’ ended up with a ‘no connection…please try again’.

Even computer communities have their problems.  

[Click here to visit the Diggers and Dreamers website if you are interested in exploring intentional communities and alterntaive living in the UK ]

'A Day of Revelation' by Suzanne

Being part of this project has been a revelation to me.

I am many things, a mother, an emerging artist, a homemaker, writer, student, though many times the home bit takes over. My life is a constant balancing act, and sometimes it feels like I am only doing the mundane, necessary things. However, spending a day with a photographer and film-maker made me see my life in a whole new way.

The images are of me in my home environment, but the simple fact of being seen, being acknowledged, even in a simple way by someone taking a photograph, brings such a beauty to this.

 Many of us within the home feel a sense of invisibility, as we go about our daily tasks often unseen.

The process of being seen, through an experience like this, brings a new value and focus to the seemingly everyday things we take for granted, but actually do have immense value in the bigger picture. It makes me realise that although I do creative work, the work in the home is also a part of this. This only became clear to me today.

'The beginning of our story' by Angie

So, I thought it may be a good idea to write a little more about the journey that has been taken for me to get here, beautiful west Wales.

 I think it is important to say a fair bit about the challenges and celebrations I have experienced being the mum of a child who is (sometimes) disabled. The impact that this has had on my other child, my husband, myself and friends and family. I say 'sometimes' because Molly is only disabled when attitudinal or physical barriers are put up in front of her. She has and always will have learning difficulties but she is not disabled by them. She is disabled by people being unwilling to accept, welcome, include or involve her. Or people refusing to adapt activities in order for her to take part. Happily, we have had an incredible welcome and experience since being here. For example, everyone (bar one) we have met have instantly accepted Molly for who she is and not asked us intrusive questions like "oh, what's wrong with her?"

She already goes to a kayaking group at our local swimming pool once a week. The young people working there welcomed her unconditionally, they were open and happy to allow Molly to use the kayak in the way that was comfortable for her. There is no pressure for her to do what everyone else is doing or in the same way. Such is their inclusive and welcoming attitude that they took the time to forward us details of other acitivities they thought molly may enjoy. 

Tonight we are trying out another local activity. A local venue, provides (free of charge) an opportunity for anybody and everybody to go along and make music. there are no restrictions on what 'music' is. You can play/use an instrument, use your voice, a stick, the floor, your body - what ever feels right for you. i chatted with the woman who facilitates the session last night . I did not label Molly in our conversation but i did explain that it is unusual to find activities that are welcoming to people who perhaps need real freedom to express them-selves and she really understood what I meant. Tomorrow evening we're trying out an African drumming group. Oh yeah, and, Molly is also going swimming with her WONDERFUL PA/friend Fran each Thursday with other families we have made friends with through the Home Education tribe.

 

The only disablist attitude we have encountered here was at a specialist service youth club. We were 'sign posted' to it by the social worker who was helping us apply for Direct Payments for Molly. In the past we have steered clear of specialist services, holding the strong belief in inclusion and therefore opting for non specialist options (there's loads of stories attached to that comment). So, anyway, to cut a long story short...

We arrived with Molly to a not particularly enthusiastic welcome (and I will say at this point that despite our historical choices we entered into this experience with openness and a desire for it to be right for Molly) we went ahead and got chatting with various people. Molly was great, she explored the new environment, sat with the other young people there to have a cup of tea, stayed within the boundaries (that is, she didn't wonder off outside) and was generally appearing to have a positive time. However, about 20 mins into the visit I was then introduced to the youth leader who proceeded to tell me she didn't think the group was right for molly and that they couldn't meet her needs! Shortly afterwards (I won't go into any more details), Molly was ready to leave and we never went back. Molly has not mentioned it since, so I know from experience she is therefore not interested in going again. 

I have described that experience  to demonstrate the difference an attitude makes. By making the statement she made, the youth leader was instantly excluding a young person she knew nothing about, had met only 20 minutes previously and made no attempt to ask her, me or Rob for our knowledge and expertise. She put up that barrier I mentioned earlier and disabled Molly. 

And of course the positive and the negative experiences I have just described were not new to us coming here. They have been a part of our lives from the moment Molly was labelled.

 

Fortunately, we chose a path of inclusion, instinctively, but also really importantly because we became a part of a network of parents who believed in and fought for inclusion. I trained with and worked for that network, an organisation called Parents for Inclusion who provided support to parents of disabled children wanting their child to be included in mainstream school/activities and who were experiencing barriers to that happening. And there are 18 years worth of stories here, but for now, I really want to focus on our move to west wales from more recent times.

We had talked and dreamed about selling up in London and moving to the country to be self sufficient and live gently on the earth for years. We had tried a couple of times. The first time we thought the Brighton area would be a good compromise, we looked at properties but actually the truth in the end was we were not ready to leave London or our network of support , we were still learning how to cope with the barriers being thrown at us.

 

Some years later we considered Hebdon Bridge, because it had a reputation for being an open minded community and I had parent contacts from my work, even a job offer. We put our house on the market and travelled up to Hebdon Bridge with a pile of property details. We weren't able to find a property we really liked and on the last viewing I had a wave of panic and had to get back to London as fast as our little Combi could manage. It took us about 8 hours to drive back, plenty of time to talk through my panic, our dreams and what our next steps were going to be. 

As it turned out, our next steps were confronting those things we were still finding difficult and working out what we needed to change. The first major change was opting for Education Otherwise. Oh yes! And what a triumph that was. Not without it's own challenges and upsets but the doors that kept opening up for us once we started to seperate ourselves from the system was FANTASTIC. Both Molly, and we, at last had the freedom to learn in ways that were meaningful to Molly, respectful of who she is, without pressure, without being impossibly graded and labelled, at her own pace. She was at last enabled to make real choices (by that I mean choices that were actually meaningful to her) experience supported independence and boy did she flourish - we all did. 

I apologise to my son on a regular basis that we had not opted for home education for him - we didn't even know we could when he was going through the system. He, Jake, had his own struggles at school. Mainly that he was not being allowed to express his developing identity, he recognised so many of the rules and regulations were nonsense, he witnessed and experienced, himself, injustices carried out by those people whom he was 'supposed' to respect - dying his hair pink and wearing a piercing under his lip was a punishable offence and he was made to sit alone in a room all day. He was told his appearance would hinder him ever getting a decent job, in a bank for example! Well, "thank goodness" he, and we thought! So, once again Jake - "sorry"!  

Joking apart, I do wish I'd known I had the right to educate my children outside of the school system sooner than I did . At least I was able as a parent to support my children through the trials of school and I hope, I believe, I enabled Jake to grow with a strong understanding of human rights (he did also bare witness to the struggles we had in fighting for his sisters inclusion) - he did in fact go on to study and achieve a degree in Human Rights! 

The other interesting change happening in our lives was that the friendship group Molly had grown up with actually began to disperse as they all got older. We had hoped for and spent years nurturing, with the support of the parents of those friends, the relationships and friendships to have longevity. For many years there was a lot of getting together, sleep overs, party's, trips to panto etc. But none of that secured the friendships into the teenage years. In fact, what happened was her 'best' friend eventually totally ignored Molly and her neighbourhood gang were all off out doing teenage stuff which Molly could not access without support. In amongst that though she was still able to 'do stuff' and had a busy, happy time of it. That was only possible however with eventually being able to access Direct Payments. Thank god for Direct Payments!! (Yes, another story is there in waiting). 

By the time we left London Molly had been going to Peckham Shed (AMAZING inclusive theatre group) for years and loved it, a cycling club every week and had a pool of 4 wonderful Personal Assistants with whom she went shopping, swimming, to festivals, to cafe's or just hanging out. So, you may be thinking "why did you leave London when things were working well?"

To be continued......

Voices of the women involved

 Hi, my name is Suzanne.

I am the mother of two children, age 9 and 6. We live in the Swansea Valley.

I am interested in art and creativity, healing, yoga, writing, and community gardening. I also love felting, and I am just beginning my journey of exploration into this area. My real focus and the thing that underpins everything for me, however, is community, and the idea of bringing people together. We live such busy and often separate lives and connecting with others can be such a powerful and healing thing, but something we often forget to do.

By being involved in Llan, I am hoping to use my experiences as a mother to explore and deepen my artistic practice and gain direction and focus. I also hope to explore areas that I haven't worked in before (particularly film), learning new skills that I can use in the future. Or at least I think this is what I want to get out of it. I have a really bad cold and am knackered at the moment so it is hard to think straight!

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My name is Angie, I moved to magical, mystical west Wales only 8 months ago with my husband and one of my children, the eldset staying in London making his own way in life. I am gradually finding my way in connecting to community and making friends, important not only for myself but really importantly for my 18 year old daughter, who has learning difficulties and so is very dependant on me helping her to be involved in community, finding activities and participating.

 

My ancestry is Welsh, I knew I needed to be here to grow as a person and have the opportunity to live gently amid the beauty of the trees, streams and tranquil valleys, and also for my daughter to have the freedom of movement she loves and be a part of the amazing inclusive community that we have already found and is ever growing.

 

Becoming involved in the Llan project has really given me a platform to express and share the journey I am on and relight my creative fire, coming from a performance, creative arts past. Being connected to the small group of women that we are in the Llan project is both rewarding and exciting. I love being in the presence of other women, listening and learning, sharing and communicating our thoughts, ideas, fears and dreams. 

 

I hope that what I have to share will resonate with other women and particularly other women who are mothers who have a disabled child. Our move to Wales took many years of thinking about it and many years to shed our fears that it would not be right for our daughter. So far it is working and we are all finding our way in our various ways.......

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 Hi, my name is Sheila. I'm the mother of four fabulous children. I became a young mother by “accident” 27 years ago but it was the best accident of my life. Since that time raising and loving my kids has been the defining influence on the way I live.

I am nearing the end of a 20 year experiment in home schooling and feel extremely lucky and blessed to have been able to do that. Home schooling four children has kept me very home based and I have been so happy here. I have written a book about my parenting experiences and thoughts which is free to download at www.wisechild.org.uk

My home / Llan is an extension of my family and I absolutely love it. Half way up the north side of a windy hill top, and 8 miles from the nearest shop, it's not perfect (quite), but after 17 years it feels part of who I am. I want to be carried out of here feet first.

In the bits of time I have left over after parenting I am a wife, foster carer, gardener, environmentalist, mountain biker and fun loving loonatic! 

I joined Llan simply as a way of promoting my website but I have already gained so much more than that from it, connecting in an intimate and honest way with other women is very soul strengthening. :)

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Hi 

Mothers and homes…??  mmm…
both VERY TRICKY SUBJECTS for me...

I guess that why I have arrived in this project.

I am Pamela, by the way.

I never had any babies and I always wanted to be somewhere else.

Longing for Home.

Cwmhiraeth.

Became an adopted mother aged 48yrs to my adopted daughter (then aged seven) and her brother, my adopted son (aged six).

Now they are eighteen and seventeen. There is many a tale to tell there. But not yet. Not now. Not right at the beginning when we all hardly know each other.

Oh…I am also recently a grandmother since daughter had a baby when just seventeen years old.

If you have done your maths right you will have correctly worked out that I am sixty next year. How can that be? I don’t look sixty. Nor do I feel it. Whatever sixty is meant to feel like??

And I still want to marry Cliff Richard.

That is also a tale to tell, and I will tell it. If only to discover how it ends.

Maybe you will see that it is not so extraordinary, as I sit in my renovated longhouse within an old stone farmyard in rural West Wales.

We lived in a yurt for the first two years, me and my husband , arriving in my ancestral homeland almost twenty years ago. Another story. Seems I have many to tell. 

Home building was, for me, frustrating and painful...the anxieties of getting planning permission, the near break up our new marriage as we sloshed around in mud and rain. There was a lot of mud and rain. It was, after all, rural West Wales. 

We worked hard to pay the builders every month as I climbed up and down a ladder in my nightie amongst the building site and cement mixers. We were also trying to make a baby (in my early forties!?)   

My husband’s stubborn determination kept his dream going, whilst I railed and ranted. With his care to every detail, sheep fleece insulation, green oak lintels, solar panels, sustainable fuel of log stoves etc. The house slowly appeared.

The baby didn’t.

It took around five years to build our home and much longer to make a family.

I once read that a birth mother gives birth from the womb and an adopted mother gives birth through the heart.

I liked that.

Wombs, Hearts, Homes and Hearths. Welcome to Llan.

That was Pamela’s voice.

Can be read softly or loud. As the reader, you will decide. That is the strange thing about voices on blogs. x