I suppose at some point I should really start to think about the beginning. To do so properly I will need some distance, but for now I can begin to mark it out loosely. To walk it through.
We (Lauren and I) moved “home” in early July. We landed on Essex soil two days after Rob had left for the Caribbean for three months. It was a messy shift made blurry by some travelling, back and forth to Falmouth and a for few days abroad, making the first month home seem to blend into only a matter of days. Writing in August I still feel like badly fixed laminate, expecting to peel away at some point. We are still waiting on our house in Colchester, the perceived limbo of buying in full force, but still languidly flowing forward.
Before that…
On a clear and slightly windy February night I sat bolt upright in bed. The window was slightly ajar, curtain shifting subtly and lazily in the small breeze. The moon was high enough to offer some of her clear cold light through the glass. This was the moment that I knew I needed to go back to Essex. I found a house I began to obsess with in St Osyth. This was also the same night I began to write about Ursula Kemp. I also had flashes of images, big ideas for two performance pieces, embedded in the mythology of my home county. They were so powerful I had to call my theatre company partner and we talked long into the morning. Omens all that my path had shifted back home.
In the morning I had a conversation with Rob, who after careful and difficult deliberation wanted to ask us to move closer than we had been planning. This was difficult for him to ask because it meant not moving to Cardiff for the second time. I felt like the fates were chuckling at us that day.
Before that…
We decided to move in earnest during the Christmas of 2016. Rob had been gone then for nearly two years. It was the first significant chunk of time we had had as a family since the end of the summer and it had become very apparent that if we wanted to preserve that status we would need to make the changes required to carve out more time for ourselves to spend together.
By this point I had begun to gain some traction along my own path in Cornwall. It had been slow and the experiences and effort taken to get there had been excruciating at points but things were finally pointing forward. I had had some teaching at the University made doubly enjoyable as I was able to work more closely with Richard Gough. It is a joy to watch him educate young theatre makers. I was also good at it and invigorated to rediscover pools of reserve knowledge that had long been laid beneath the detritus created in my mind by the requirements of daily life and motherhood.
My performance work had settled me into a good groove within the life of the town and would take me further in the coming months. I had settled into routines, bolstered by good friends, that left me feeling really contented. I had everything I needed, except the person that I had married. But for me there was a void that was forever waiting for his shape, sometimes patiently, often not. I have yet to confirm this with him but I suspect that he had long drawn a line under our lives thereby that point. Slicing away at the connective tissue to form a postcard for framing on the wall. To be looked at fondly and to reminisce but a fixed point in time placed in the past, in the wake of his life.
I’m guessing that, despite celebrating my little successes with me, it must have felt to him like I had succumbed to a located form of Stockholm syndrome. Regardless it was time to make a decision, for all of us, not just myself. We began to search for homes in Cardiff. We declared our intentions to our friends and to our families. We forged a resolve to leave town.
Before that…
The summer of 2016 was a turning point for me and for my family. We covered miles between Falmouth and Cardiff while Rob was there working for the BBC. Cardiff is a beautiful city, made more resplendent for me by the legacies of important performances that gloss my imagination, and for my daughter for that whiff of home that only settles you in the country of your birth. I felt motivated to put myself forward for a large-scale performance event leading to the chance to raise my voice in that capital, a victorious cry.
The city felt like the answer to our problems, a cauldron bubbling with everything that we needed as a family. Work for rob, creative opportunity for me, exciting corners for Lauren to explore as she grows into teenage life. And it was sprinkled with all of the extras that make a home. We would have people that we love around us, with plenty on offer to keep us happy.
My best friend and his amazing partner had already facilitated many of our visits and it was a welcome relief to spend time with them, it doesn’t happen enough. The food scene was rich and interesting, and one of our old homes from Aberystwyth (The best Deli in the country in my humble, we really were spoiled) was about to open there, potentially bringing more faces that we had loved in the past, and that we really missed, back into the world we might build there. And I had hopes and dreams that I anchored to that city by the sea. Imagined making music again, imagined using the Chapter café as office most mornings, imagined new stories calling. It felt like I was a piece missing from the puzzle of those streets and I was eager to find my place there.
So the idea of letting it all go was painful and terrifying and I still wonder if I might spend more of my life there one day. Perhaps the third time is the charm.
Before that…
We had tried everything we could think of to make our lives in Cornwall function successfully. But, like many creative folk we had been substituting the exploration of our skills for the daily grind in order to put food on the table. Perhaps we hadn’t really given ourselves up to either those skills or to the place enough to reap any reward but regardless we were at a point of crisis. It happened that Rob was finally ready to push forward with his career.
Whether we would have made the same decision had we known how it would cleave our little family apart for much longer chunks of time than we planned for, or how forcefully profound and affective the gap that we leave in each others lives is, I cannot say. But we are the kind of folk that value our imaginations so highly that I suspect this would be our only viable decision. Holding together whilst feeling unfulfilled, just because the alternative is frightening and risky, that’s not really for us. We may have each of us moved kicking and screaming through the last two and a half years but I still believe this was the only action we could have taken.
Rob moved away from the home that we had built there to find work that he could enjoy, that would value his skills and move him forward through life. We stayed behind. He was ferried away in his parent’s car in the first days of February 2015. Something of us died that day, as we blinked back tears and moved numb through the rest of it’s hours. But, as is the nature of things, something big was also born and we are still following along where it choses to carry us.