Nine.
- February 16, 2022
- by
- Catherine Dietrich
She kisses me goodbye on the corner, and I stand on the pavement watching as she skips into school, her ponytail bouncing, each stride of her long legs taking her further away from me, further from the empty arms hanging uselessly by my sides.
My first baby has just turned nine, and this is how it is now. Almost a decade into motherhood, I’m standing at the end of the street, watching from the outside in. Teetering on the oh-so-fine line between being needed and… not.
It’s true what the old ladies tell you as your newborn screams for a feed in...
Absolutely Nothing to Complain About?
- February 12, 2021
- by
- Catherine Dietrich
In the best case scenario, it’s all just getting very dull, isn’t it? Well, really, it’s been dull for a long time. There was a hazy and non-specific light flickering at the end of the Corona virus tunnel after that jubilant announcement of a vaccine in November, but with non-committal information about when we may be able get that jab in the arm that will allow us to hug family again – and whether or not the jab will even work – it feels like we’ve just cracked into mile 21 of an ultra marathon: the cramp and fatigue are...
What Happens At Book Club…
- September 21, 2020
- by
- Catherine Dietrich
Last week a friend invited me to join her bookclub. With trepidation, and as a nod to my recent resolution to say “yes” more often than “no”, I accepted. Six months ago, I might not have… You see, for over half a decade, books and I have been going through a rough patch. Since becoming a mum, the prolificness of my reading has suffered. Instead of devouring books in every free moment I could find, I began to read only at night, and then only a few pages before unconsciousness beckoned and my eyes would close. It would take me...
When Back To School isn’t what we imagined
- August 18, 2020
- by
- Catherine Dietrich
My last baby is starting school next week, and as we dive into this latest round of “the last of the firsts”, my emotions are bubbling up and spilling out of my fingertips. I feel the weight of the importance of this moment, the bitter-sweetness of something that will never come again. I feel her excitement and her pride, almost as intense as my own, and I feel the space widening painfully between us as I pull back one more step to make room for her ever-spreading wings.
And then, for me, there’s the other feeling. The one that lies dormant...
Forty-nothing
- July 11, 2020
- by
- Catherine Dietrich
I turned 40 a few weeks ago, right at the end of week seven of quarantine… and it wasn’t the 40th birthday I had imagined. 40 is a milestone I’ve felt good about meeting for a while, and I’d planned to celebrate it shopping and sipping champagne in my favourite city with my favourite women.
Instead I spent it – as we’ve spent most days in 2020 – at home. And although it seems frivolous to grieve a birthday party when so many have so much more to grieve, it occurs to me that many of my friends will reach this...
A Little Love… from my COVID confinement to yours
- May 01, 2020
- by
- Catherine Dietrich
So… First of all, hello again! It has been so long since I’ve written any words on this little blog of mine, I feel I need to say that. Secondly, how have things been going for you? Aren’t these just the strangest of times we’ve been living through? There really isn’t anything I can say about it that all the memes on Instagram haven’t already said in a thousand different – much wittier – ways. But still, I feel like for prosperity’s sake, we should be recording for ourselves what our world has looked like during this strange slice of...
All The Things We Did Not Know
- July 08, 2019
- by
- Catherine Dietrich
Looking back now at this picture of us on your first day of the school year ten months ago, a lump rises in my throat: I look at our nervous, expectant smiles and I want to cry. I want to cry for those two people who had no idea that the hardest year of our lives lay ahead of us. I want to cry for our unwavering, as yet untested belief that things would always go our way. I want to cry for all the tears we had yet to shed. Most of all, I want to cry for all...
What I know for sure about expat life
- May 10, 2019
- by
- Catherine Dietrich
I never thought we would be the people who ended up leaving our home town and moving all over the world. As impulsive 20-somethings we left on a whim because I had a dream to live and work in the most exciting city in the world. I thought we’d be in London for a few years and then go “home” to Cape Town and live our adulthood as we had our very happy childhoods, on the slopes of Table Mountain amongst family and friends. But then one opportunity followed another and we kept saying “yes” to them… Thirteen years later...
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