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...

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...

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...

It was 10am on a Tuesday in the depths of November, and as the rain poured down for what felt like the 27th day in a row (but was probably only the fifth), I found myself in my GP’s office, in floods of tears.

I’d gone in for a follow-up on a chest infection, but as I sat across her desk and she asked kindly, “So, how are you?”, the floodgates I didn’t even know had been carefully shored up burst open and all the overwhelm of the previous months erupted – unstoppable. I cried and cried.

Of course – as unexpected...

Life lately has been all change. New country, new home, new schools for our girls, a whole new life to get used to, and goodbye to the sweet life we lived in paradise.   And my writing has been quiet for a while because of all the noise that’s been going on in my head. And my life. And my soul. All the push and pull of emotions that come with upheaval and newness. All the intensity of feelings when we’re living not just our own challenges, but every single moment of our children’s as well.   And it’s been hard! On...