Today, we did something we’d never done before. We went to the Traffic Centre on a Sunday afternoon.

It was a bit peculiar. The Traffic Centre is really the only full-scale shopping mall in the North West, and as a result, it gets very busy. We go very, very rarely - partly because it’s thirty miles away, partly because we don’t really like shopping, partly because we have two kids to make shopping an even more unpleasant experience, and partly because we don’t really like other people much, and there are usually a lot of them there.

As a result, on the couple of occasions a year that we DO go, it tends to be evenings, or mornings, or some other time calculated to be fairly quiet, and it tends to be with the aim of achieving a specific goal as quickly as possible, and then escaping.

Today was slightly different. We’d actually gone for the food - we’d landed up in Warrington (which is half-way there), we needed some lunch, and it seemed like the best option. We knew that Sunday is a busy day in such places, and we were expecting it to be busy, but we weren’t quite expecting the sense of culture shock.

The place was crawling with people. They were all holding plastic carrier bags full of stuff. None of them looked happy. Within minutes of entering the building, we’d already heard two very unhappy children wailing, and whilst one was out of sight, the other upset me because he was only a baby, and he just wanted someone to pick him up, but nobody would. Actually, the happiest-looking family we saw were taking photos of themselves, posing in front of… the shops. Not even the big fountain, or the statues, just themselves, leaning against the balustrade of the balcony, in front of the shops.

It felt very odd. It felt like we’d walked into a closed community, full of rites and rituals that we, mere outsiders, couldn’t hope to understand. And the more people I saw, the more they seemed to be scurrying about like lab-rats - not going anywhere, not achieving anything, but never daring to stop.

I knew I wasn’t a particularly materialistic person, and I think I probably knew that I was becoming less so with age (and, let’s be honest, with the comfort of knowing I already had most of the Stuff I felt I needed - it’s easy to be snobby about consumerism once you’ve already stocked up). But I never expected to find the Traffic Centre so shocking in it’s total and uncompromising glorification and worship of the Accumulation of Stuff.

I asked Kevin how all those people found the money to keep going back so often, and buying so much - surely they’re not all tumbling into an abyss of credit card debt? I mean, I know that far too many people are, and I don’t, generally, blame them nearly as much as I blame the society that seems to coerce them into it, but surely not all of them? And even if they had the money in the bank, why on earth would you keep going back there, to spend more and more of it, on less and less?

It made me sad. It made me uncomfortable. It made me a little angry - consumerist culture is conspiring to dupe people into thinking that the purchase of stuff is going to make their lives better, and it NEVER EVER DOES. I felt like I’d stumbled into a huge, destructive cult, and that only I, the outsider, could see it for what it was - but just like with a cult, my clarity of vision would carry no weight with the insiders, precisely because I didn’t belong.

I’ve really never felt like that before, about something so inane and ubiquitous as shopping. It was a very odd thing.

Still, Daisy managed to accidentally Stick it To the Man - she pulled an entire shelf of merchandise ( which should have been screwed to the bracket, but wasn’t) onto the floor, with a very impressive crash, and was lucky not be underneath it when it landed. Apparently, she was trying to reach the windmills…

I’m getting more and more minimalist. I keep looking around my house, and wanting to streamline it, declutter it, make it less hard work to look at it. The couple across the road redecorated their living room recently, and when they leave the curtains open in the early evening, we can see how calm and simple and tidy and EMPTY it looks. And it makes me want to go and live there.

I’ve had a little more time to think about the good days and bad days, with a little help from the commenters on my previous post, and I got to wondering why I felt the need to explain the bad days away.

The fact is, not working is psychologically tricky.

I don’t miss work one iota. I’d long-since stopped enjoying it, it was a huge source of stress, and in the scheme if things, nothing I did there seemed very important. If I miss anything, it’s the relationships - and not even specific relationships, really (though there are people I’ve lost touch with, and I’m a little sad about that). What I actually miss is the day-to-day interactions. But actually, I get that vicariously from Kevin. He laughs at me, for treating his job like a soap opera, but as long as I get ten minutes a day of update on who’s in trouble with their wife, who’s pregnant, who’s fallen over drunk and damaged themselves, and who’s given the Big Boss an earful over something, I’m fine. A little bit of office drama is all I’m after, and it doesn’t take long to fulfil that need, even second hand.

There is a deeper need, though. You have to work much harder on your opinion of yourself, if it’s not externally validated by a pay-packet. When I was in work, however bad I felt about myself, there was always the reality that I was worth a certain amount of hard cash to someone, and that actually, there were plenty of people who thought I was good at my job, and respected me in it, as a bonus. That didn’t stop me from plunging into deep pits of self-loathing, but it was at least some kind of external anchor.

My decision to give up work altogether is an unusual one, particularly amongst the sorts of women whom I might consider to be my peers. Almost everyone works part time, at least, plenty work full time, and I don’t envy them a scrap. Life shouldn’t be lived at the pace that requires, in my opinion - at least, my life shouldn’t. It would kill me.

Because it’s unusual, and because it has now been accompanied by the even more unusual decision to home educate, I feel a faint, but constant pressure, to prove that it’s not a mistake. To prove that I can cope, that it is, indeed, the best thing for all of us, and that I’m capable of making a success of it. And that’s where it’s going wrong - I shouldn’t have to prove that, and in fact, I don’t have to prove it.

I don’t really believe in mistakes, and I certainly don’t believe in regrets. I make my choices in life to the best of my ability, based in the information I have available at the time. If the information turns out to be flawed, incorrect or incomplete, that’s not my fault. I did the best I could, and that’s fine. Very few decisions are unmitigaged disasters - most of them are about selecting from a range of perfectly reasonable options, and deciding which one to invest your energy into. Most people consider school to be the easier option - that may be true, it may not, but it’s just another option. I can invest my energy in educating my children, or I can invest in getting them up, washed, dressed and out of the house every day, so that someone else can educate them. It’s only different, not better or worse.

The point I’m trying to make, is that my mum stayed at home with her children, until I was nearly ten, I think, but she did so because it was normal, because no alternative ever occurred to her, and consequently, she didn’t spent those ten years justifying the decision, and trying to explain away and justify the bad days - which, as I said in the previous post, everyone has, in every role. It doesn’t make you a failure, it makes you normal. Except I get caught up trying to prove that. Which is a waste of my energy.

To be honest, my sense of my own mortality was already on my mind a little, even before the events of this week. That’s because something very odd happened, part way through last year: I stopped being of the current generation.

I’m pretty sure that as late as last spring, I was precisely that - the Current Generation, the one that’s actually Doing Life at this moment in time. And then, suddenly, at some point during the summer, I think, I became part of the Previous Generation. I was no longer Doing Life, I was reminiscing about Doing Life, and offering advice to the youngsters who were actually doing the Doing. I’m only 32!

It was a shock to discover that, whilst I think of my school days as being a few years ago (five, maybe?), it’s actually nearly seventeen since I did my GCSEs. That any recollections I may have about what it’s like to be a teenager, or a student, or a recent graduate, are so outdated as to be in danger of obsolescence. It’s a pretty sobering thought.

Remember this?

I ordered one!

We have no money. I struck a deal with my rather sceptical (if admittedly sensible) husband, that if I could scrape the money together from non-standard sources, I could have one, but not otherwise. And up to Saturday, I’d squirrelled away ?15 in cash from my baby shower, and ?6 in coppers when I raided Kevin’s slummy jar. ?21 down, ?128 to go.

Then, on Saturday, my mother-in-law called in, brandishing a gift of no less than ?120 “for the baby”. Out of nowhere. Kevin grinned, and said “Oh, I know exactly what this is going on…”, and since I’ve been let off the remaining ?8, it’s ordered.

I just feel really blessed. I had this gut feeling, all along, that the money would turn up from somewhere, I just had no idea where from. I even looked into how much freelance web development I’d have to do to earn it, but there’s not much market for freelancers who only want to earn ?150 every now and then. You’ve to either contract properly, or work for chicken-feed in the “I’ll give you ?25 if you write me an entire store-front application” crowd.

So, whilst I’ve done quite a lot of shouting at God, recently, about the iniquities of false labour, of losing my home birth, and of still being here at all, frankly, it seems only fair to point out that He does, in fact, provide, even when it’s things you don’t technically need, and maybe, just maybe, I should revert to my earlier belief that He knows what he’s doing, and hasn’t forgotten about me.

Sorry, Lord. Bit embarrassed about that.

I’ve been thinking quite a lot, recently, about fulfilling potential, and setting aspirations, and other related matters. I’ve been trying to work out what the fundamental difference is between intelligent, accomplished, creative people like me, and the ones who earn six-figure salaries. I mean, is there a difference?

On one level, I’m sure I have the capability to be one of those high-flying types. I’m clever enough, emotionally aware, academically accomplished. I have A Levels and degrees, and a proven ability to learn both technical things, and more philosophical ones. Somehow, though, I’ve never really seen myself as a six-figure-salary person. Why not? What am I lacking?

My mum says it’s an innate and genetic form of laziness. People who Achieve in this world pour their heart and soul into doing so, and I was never prepared to do that. What she means, to translate that into a slightly less insulting sentence (do you have to do that when your mum talks, as well?), is that I’m not actually motivated in that direction, because my priorities are elsewhere.

Put like that, I’m glad my priorities are elsewhere. I’m glad that I don’t believe in working sixty hour weeks, and changing jobs every twelve months, going hell-for-leather to Get On in that sense. I’m much more of a Stop and Smell the Flowers type, and I think my quality of life is much better as a result. I think that was just as true when I was out with my friends instead of revising for GCSEs, as it’s been at every stage since, including this one, where I ditched the rat race altogether to stay at home with Daisy.

I wonder, though, whether I grew of up with a sense of a limit to what People Like Me could achieve in life, and set myself fairly low goals as a result. At one point, when I was about seventeen, I went around telling people I was going to be the Director General of the BBC. It was a goal, and ambition, a stated direction to travel in. In the end, I never even attempted to get into the media industry, because that popular wisdom was that it was too cut-throat, and I just couldn’t imagine myself succeeding against ambitious people. In fact, by the time I was 21, I was in the university careers office, dismissing out of hand any graduate employers who asked for “motivated and ambitious” people, because I really didn’t think I was either. I couldn’t understand where the jobs were for the rest of us.

The Director General thing was never much more than a joke - I never really thought it would happen. Was I, deep down, pretty astute in my understanding of myself? Or did I limit my horizons? And if so, why did I limit them? Was it about the aspirations that were being set for me by my family? My mum shattered the aspirations and goals set by her family, by being cleverer than they could comprehend, and going to college, and becoming a teacher. Yet she’s always thought she’s stupid - at the bottom of the top class in the grammar school, narrowly missing the degree route of her teaching course, always feeling like she was running to keep up, and not quite making the grade. She was the first in her family to break out of the working class background into a profession, and that’s a huge achievement for anyone. I’m just not sure that, that done, there was anything comprehensible left for me to achieve. More of the same. I got a degree, I suppose, but so would mum if she’d gone to college twenty-five years later. She’s got postgrad qualifications now, anyway, so it’s all been superceded.

People would ask me, at school, if I was planning to be a teacher like my mum. Interestingly enough, no-one thought it appropriate to ask if I was planning to be a vicar, like my dad. I really couldn’t think of anything I wanted less - partly because I knew too much about the politics of state-sector teaching, and partly because… I don’t know. I wanted something else. Something more, bigger. I wanted to feel like I , as the next generation, was pushing the family’s collective achievement a step further. But I never knew what that thing might look like. And whilst I have, to some extent (there’s no-one else in my family with MA after their name…), I feel like I took the tiniest possible step in that Value Added direction, and went no further. Because that was my limit? Because I couldn’t be bothered? Because I was so afraid of failure, I was only prepared to reach a tiny way further on?

I don’t know. But it all makes it quite difficult to work out what to do with Daisy. If I was limited by a lack of confidence in myself, then I want to free her from the same trap, somehow. But the very thing that binds me, will affect the messages I pass on to her, and that’s a hard cycle to break. On the other hand, if my material achievements were basically limited by a fairly unmaterialistic value system, then that’s tied in with all the things I do want to pass on to her, including my faith. That makes it all a bit of a paradox, really, and I’m not sure I’d ever know whether I’d successfully resolved it or not.

I’ve noticed a thing.

When I was a child, the received wisdom of the time was that it was much better to get your traditional childhood illnesses before you were about eleven, because lots of them (I’m thinking of mumps and chicken pox, particularly) were much worse if you got them when you were older.

At some point, that wisdom has been replaced by the belief that it’s better still to get them before you’re five, because you don’t want to miss a fortnight of school for them. Erm, is it me, or are children under five particularly vulnerable to all kinds of things, and best protected as far as is humanly possible from as much disease as possible?

Admittedly, there’s only really chicken pox left - Daisy’s been vaccinated against almost everything else. But really, why on earth would I want my toddler to be laid low with chicken pox at such a young age, if it could wait till she’s eight, and a bit more robust?

My theory is that it’s tied in with universal childcare. People always did console themselves with the statement “It’s better that they get it now…” What they haven’t quite noticed is that children get all these things in nursery at 18 months of age, now, and that there is a lower limit beyond which it’s not better. The only thing worse than a sick child is a sick baby - and even if it’s not serious, and won’t do them any long term harm, it’s a miserable thing to have to deal with, for both the child and the parent. And maybe, just maybe, the rare complications of chicken pox will hit this particular toddler when they’re still too vulnerable to handle it.