Stuck

May 09, 2025

Maybe it’s just that I’m hurtling through time faster than ever, approaching middle age at something like terminal velocity, but the year seems to be going by so fast, whilst I’m feeling a little stuck.

Stuck in London

We’ve been physically confined to London for this year so far, and for the foreseeable future, whilst Theo undergoes treatment at the hospital and we wait to hear when his next (and hopefully final) operation will be. We’re immensely grateful for the world-class care we’re receiving, and for the NHS and its hardworking people. Theo’s managed to skip some of the waiting times because when we were first told that it could be months until his first examination under anaesthetic, I promised the surgical registrar,

“We only live thirty minutes from here, so if you ever have a cancellation, he can be here with all his clothes off within the hour,” and then I had to make it very clear I was referring to two-year old Theo and not Reliable Husband James.

I’m 90% sure we cleared up that ambiguity, because she’s made us their first phone call whenever a space opens up, and so Theo’s effectively been able to jump ahead on the waiting list, and his treatment’s been quicker. But in other ways it’s been slower; Theo’s had to have two additional surgeries and needed additional recovery time, but meanwhile we haven’t wanted to be away at all in case we need to bring him in again at short notice. So we’ve been stuck here at home this year, spending all our holidays in London. But how lucky are we, to be in the greatest city in the world, with its world-class theatre and restaurants, plus lots of fun and free things to do with the children, from Fulham Palace to the Benjamin Franklin House, the Science Museum, National Gallery and the city farm, as well as our favourite local playgrounds, the library, and the leisure centre, with friends around for birthday parties and playdates.

For Ariadne’s seventh birthday, we went to a nature day and had a picnic in Hyde Park, after which James took Theo home for his nap and I took the girls out on a pedalo. The pedalo was James’s bright idea, so I’m not sure why we decided to to it that way around, but the upshot was that it was just me and the girls at the lake, with the staff explaining that the strong wind made it tough going that day. They gestured to a small flotilla of pedalos which seemed to be stranded in the very end of the lake. We also weren’t put off by the fact that neither girl was tall enough to reach the pedals, so I’d be pedalling solo. Not trivial, especially for someone who hasn’t been at the gym for leg day since early 2011. The Hyde Park pedalos are absolute behemoths. Luckily this makes them incredibly sturdy. How do I know? Well…

“Mummy crashed the pedalo five times!” Ariadne reported to James afterwards. “Four times hitting other pedalos, and once hitting a post.”

Ottilie (5) is famously not afraid of anything, but she definitely had a few moments during the longest twenty minutes of my life i.e. the minimum pedalo hire period.

Gripping tightly to the side of the boat, she screamed as loudly as she could, “Turn the boat around! Go back!”

“Why?” I wondered whether she could see something I’d missed.

“I don’t want to go in the lake!”

Me: Hey, little lady pirate, what are we doing?
Ottilie: We’re on a boat.
Ariadne: It’s the best day of my life! (worried) Ahh! We’re going to run over the goose!
Me: Wish you were here!
Ariadne: THE GOOSE!

We didn’t fall in the lake, but we did spend quite a lot of time going in tight circles around it, and we didn’t make it particularly far in any one direction. We did make it back in time, but for most of our pedalo excursion, it felt like we were stuck. Pedalling at maximum capacity to only to stay at a standstill.

Stuck at Home

Meanwhile, we thought we should make the most of being at home at Easter, since it’s a time when most people in London go to visit their families or away for the long weekend. So we put out an open invitation for Easter Sunday lunch to our church, for anyone who was around, thinking there probably wouldn’t be very many. Our kitchen table seats ten, maximum, if we use the children’s toy boxes and the piano stool and my office chair, and we can seat the children at their craft table, so we wondered about closing the guest list when we reached fourteen, but in the end we just said yes to everyone, because it always works out in the end. We ended up with twenty-two of us for lunch, at which point we just roasted as much lamb (10kg) and as many potatoes as we could fit in the oven (2kg), filled all our biggest pots with vegetables (braised red cabbage, normal cabbage, peas with leeks, lettuce and spring onion) and a saucepan of gravy, made two bread-and-butter puddings (one chocolate and raspberry, one hot cross bun) and a rhubarb pavlova, on the basis that rather than trying to actually calculate quantities, the only sensible thing to do was just to cook as much as we possibly could.

I think a roast dinner is by far the best way to feed a crowd for lunch, because if you slow roast the meat and let it rest then there’s time for the Yorkshire puddings1 to go into the hot oven whilst you carve, and you can cut the vegetables, peel the potatoes, put the joint in the oven and assemble the pudding the night before. We’ve never yet run out of food this way, even though on occasion we’ve had to ask people to bring their own spoons. And chairs. We didn’t this time though, and so some of our friends were round the table, and others were in the garden on picnic mats, eating roast dinner off their laps, but I don’t think anyone minded.

A Sticky Situation

We had Ariadne’s birthday party at home the week after, and the theme was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. They decorated their own aprons with fabric pens and then made their own chocolate bark: swirling milk, dark and white chocolate onto baking parchment and then adding sprinkles and chopped dried fruit and nuts of their choice. I was interested to see what they would combine: white chocolate, strawberries and mango for a summery vibe? Ruby cranberries and jade pistachios on dark chocolate? Would peaches go with anything?

Except they all pretty much just wanted sprinkles, which obviously I should have known.

Then they designed labels with a logo and a name for their chocolate so we could package it up for them to take home, played party games and sang songs and blew giant bubbles in the garden and had a birthday tea, which culminated in my parents’ chocolate fountain being pressed back into service, along with another kilo of chocolate, two kilos of strawberries and a tower of profiteroles…

Ariadne and some of her real-life, human friends

…and everyone took home a party book, along with their chocolate and their apron, in accordance with my birthday party commandments (thou shalt minimise the single-use plastics, and try to make sure it’s not too fun)

Is it even a party unless you’ve hit the boxset (not for individual resale) section at Books2Door or The Works?

Anyway, it was fun, they had fun, we all had fun, but afterwards everything was just so sticky. I was chiselling chocolate off the table with a bench scraper. We had to clean the chairs with hot soapy water, and the floor, and the door handles, and the light switch in the toilet, not to mention the birthday girl herself:

Stuck at Work

At my next birthday, I’ll be forty. And wouldn’t it be more surprising if that wasn’t triggering any kind of midlife-crisis-adjacent questioning of my achievements and future trajectory? It’s not being modest to say that my “achievements” to date have been modest in the extreme.

My day job is really lovely, and I’m very content there. A couple of years ago I was privileged to be selected for a career development course with other mid-career women, where we were put up in a country house for two overnight jollies and did a lot of self-reflection, strategising, and (in my case) crying. I was pregnant with Theo, and had just heard that I hadn’t made the final round for a promotion I’d applied for, and we’d spent the last month on an adventure by the sea, having taken the girls out of nursery and moved into an entirely unfurnished house with no internet…anyway, it was great, and I made some amazing friends, and afterwards I realised that as much as my day job suits me, I learn interesting things, work with nice people, and (I think) we make a positive social contribution, I really wanted to give writing my best shot.

And here I am, three years later, still at the same job, but with some exciting writing projects in progress, the children at a stage they will only be at once, where they entertain me a lot but they also need me a lot, and my manager at work is leaving and it’s the most obvious next step in the world to apply for her role…and I’m not.

It’s hard to get promoted anywhere from my level - to go from being a doer to being a manager. I’ve never line managed anyone, in fact, partly due to a personality test I took at a job ten years ago which told me I should never be in charge of people or things (ouch). But I always thought that’s what I wanted. It’s why I did some awful jobs early on in my career, and worked at places where I was constantly humiliated and insecure, where I was scared to walk into the building on a Monday morning and forced myself to smile through it all. It was all supposed to be “for” something. A J-curve that would eventually catapult me upwards to a point where it would get easier, and more rewarding, and better rewarded.

And so I wonder if I’m being really stupid now, by choosing to remain at a standstill. (I don’t mean to sound arrogant; of course it’s not necessarily my choice, and there’s every chance that if I did apply for promotion again I’d be knocked back. But this time I’m not even going to try.)

I guess right now, I really want to stay right where I am. To be at home with my family, as much as possible, and to really take a chance on writing. Except writing is slightly at a standstill at this exact moment, even though there are various things in progress that I’m so sorry! I can’t say anything about! Yet…

In this situation, the advice is to keep showing up and keep writing the next thing.

Except I haven’t really. I haven’t shown up here for a few weeks, and since I handed in the synopsis for book two (all credit to Randy Ingermanson and his snowflake method, my single favourite free resource for aspiring novelists) it’s gone no further.

“You have to write something completely different,” another writer in a similar position told me at the weekend. “Like if your marriage is going badly, and you have to have another relationship2, you don’t start seeing someone who is just like your wife. Of course not! You be with someone totally different.”

Which is solid advice, as far as it relates to novel writing, specifically, even if I wouldn’t have put it like that. It made sense coming from the guy in the leather jacket though. We were at my friend Mayo’s birthday drinks, and since Mayo is a talented writer and also one of those people who everyone knows and loves, it was a highly entertaining time catching up with fascinating people who I only see once a year.

I haven’t been showing up for writing, but that’s given me time to show up for the birthdays of my friends, not just the children’s friends (although we are deep in their birthday party era right now), to show up for family and our newest family member…

…for friends visiting from overseas and my NCT group, to grieve with a friend suffering a bereavement and to have my mother-in-law to visit for the first time since my brother-in-law died, and to realise that even if I am stuck right now, there are so many people who have stuck with me, and things I care about enough to stick up for, and that being forced to a standstill for a while is okay. It’s going to be okay.

Stickers Save the Day

And finally, this weekend I had to get out of a situation entirely of my own making. Ottilie (5) was beside herself with delight on Friday afternoon, the class mascot having been bestowed on her for the long weekend. Whereas I just had that oh no, do we have to book a museum now? feeling.

But we just did normal weekend stuff. So normal, in fact, that we kept forgetting to bring the thing with us and ended up on Monday morning with hardly any photos of his weekend. If only I didn’t have a deep-seated animosity/fear of AI, otherwise this would have been easily solved. Instead, well, I did my best…

In some of these photographs an orangutan sticker has been substituted for the real pretend orangutan

Well, we do our best. Have you ever had experienced this sense of feeling stuck, or having to drag yourself out of a situation you’re not sure how you ended up in?