On Losing My Footing & The Climb Ahead

This time last year I was single & working (fairly) hard. I was the manager of a cafe, & felt more or less on top of life, except that I had nobody to share it with & tended to eat a lot of cake instead. These were things I was working on, though strangely my weight wasn't much of a knock on my confidence - I had some very pretty dresses, & was very 'out there' in said pretty dresses. I'd joined match.com & had had some dates. It was all pretty fun but I definitely remember hungering for more than carrot cake. In a very cliched way I wanted to love & to be loved. It was all I could really think about & I imagined it would be a long & arduous journey to hunt down a man of worth.

It was around this time that I decided to enrol on a climbing course. Though I was mainly motivated by the fact that it was always something I had wanted to try but never got round to, I have to admit that I had half-jokingly expressed the idea that I might date a man who was courageous & bold - ie a mountaineer. In hindsight someone had clearly been spiking the chocolate cake, but who was I to know?

I went to the classes with my good friend, & then boss, L, & enjoyed it thoroughly on the climbing front, though our instructor was disappointingly skinny & boyish, not at all heroic. Never mind.

I never got to finish the course, though a few weeks later I met (via match) a man who I would soon fall for, who would love me & who I could love without any fear. Though he wasn't a mountaineer, he was, & is, everything I had wished for, not in the particular form I had imagined, but in every form I have needed. If it was a crap novel he would be 'the one'.

Fast forward to today. I live with 'the one' & what is more we have a precious baby girl. Not long after we met, we 'fell pregnant'. I'm not sure how you 'fall' pregnant but that's what happened. I fell in love & then I fell pregnant. Next I sort of fell off the face of the earth. After all that falling I'm now attempting to do a bit of climbing, back into the world & to become the woman I was a year ago. After finding love so easily I had no idea that all that stuff I previously had & finding my footing in the crevasse between family life & adult life would actually hardest things to achieve.

Its all about finding strength & balance, being agile & enduring the particularly tough bits as well as having good mental control.

I suppose the point is that it is easy to think 'What is life, if you have nobody to share it with?' but we should also bear in mind the thought 'What is love, if you have nothing to share?'