Month: October 2019

About

A head full of Coldplay

Designer Mum

I discovered this week that Coldplay are releasing a new album very soon. Hooray! The 16yr old me just did a little squeak and a swoon.

I have been a Coldplay girl since their first album, Parachutes, and saw them perform twice during the first few years. Both shows are still very vivid in my mind, and some fab memories.

During the last 10 years, I dropped off the fan-boat a little – mostly because I had other stuff going on. Met a beardy guy, moved house a few times, married that beardy guy, had a couple of children and got my freelance business off the ground! But, I am still a Coldplay girl. I can pin-point particular songs and albums to very specific points in my life.

The wonderful thing about music is that it has an incredible ability to infiltrate our lives that way. Music is like something that can inhabit us. So when we are reminded of a particular piece, it can magically transport us to moments, or people, or places in time. For me, Coldplay have been with me since my teens – so they have been with me through some stuff.

So, I hope you will humour me whilst I indulge myself a little (actually, a lot) and share three really clear times that Coldplay evoke in my mind. Thank you for indulging me, reader.

Yellow vividly reminds me of finishing my GCSE’s, and the summer of 2000

First up, Yellow, from Parachutes. I can still remember when this song was Jo Whiley’s Record of The Week on Radio 1, and this would have been when I heard it. I was on revision leave from school, to finish my GCSEs. And the more I heard it, the more I fell in love with it: the words, the guitars and the sound. Then I saw the video. Way back in tender 2000, when my sisters and I were all teenagers, and the music video channels were what we used to bicker over, I remember seeing this slightly geeky guy singing along the beach about how he wrote a song and it was called Yellow.

When I watched this video this morning, to put in the link for you, I was totally transported to my parent’s old living room, and I just completely smiled. This song is magic to me. It makes me smile from my head to my toes. And although I probably wouldn’t say that I loved being 16 that much, this song reminds me of how I would listen to it and be absolutely hopeful that someone like that would love me that much one day. (And if that person happened to be Chris Martin, even better!)

Fix You takes me back to summer 2015, living in London whilst doing my BA in Illustration

I’m not going to dwell on this one too much. Weirdly I’d never seen this video until I posted in the link, and it seems strangely serendipitous that Chris Martin is walking and singing again, but this time in London.

During 2015 I had completed my second year at Camberwell College, and was living with my art school friends in our big old house share in London. That summer I was working in a lovely shop in Covent Garden, and also starting to prepare for my final year at college. It was the first summer I didn’t go home, and I was ridiculously homesick. The words in Fix You married with how I felt exactly, and all I wanted, was to be at home in Shropshire. Even though I had a lovely job, great friends and lots of fun in London. I have a very embarrassing memory of listening to this on my headphones, completely balling my eyes out on a tube train, whilst sitting opposite a family who were quite clearly on holiday. What they must have been thinking, Lord only knows!

A Sky Full Of Stars sums up my learning how to be a mum to my new baby Sidney

This last one happily makes me smile top to bottom again. My memory of this song is linked to my maternity leave with Sidney, and how I felt about him. To me he was My Sky Full of Stars. After a totally normal pregnancy, his birth was a bit scary, and he then gave us another scare at two weeks old, so to say that I found becoming a mum easy, is about as far from the truth as you can get. But I think that is probably fair to say of most mums.

Anyway, once things had settled down, I used to take him for walks each day around where we lived, and this song resonated so much. Its uplifting and beautiful and brings tears to my eyes when I hear it. So much love in such simple words. Now, I often hear this song when I’m washing up in the kitchen when it comes on the radio and it just makes me so happy.

With their new album coming, I am really hoping that Coldplay will tour soon. I have been telling Noel for quite some time that next time they tour, I want to go. By writing this post, I’m definitely putting it out to the universe and declaring my Coldplay fan status! Please tour, please!

About, Mindset, Parenting

A rainbow of mental health

Designer Mum

As I write this, today is World Mental Health Day. This post was actually going to be called, “School Day, Short Day”, and be about how short the school day is, and how I now seem to spend all of my time clock-watching now, and the stress that ensues from that, when you are trying to get work done, or anything done for that matter. Instead, I am going to tell you about my week.

Some women will say that they don’t really get affected by the change in their hormones every month. I am not one of those women. My hormones have the ability to increase my core body temperature, undue my ability to think rationally, and they can also create torrents and torrents of tears. They also do other things too when I am particularly stressed, but you get the picture.

One of my favourite mummy friends put it perfectly last week, “It affects your ability to cope”. She couldn’t be more right. For the last week I have waded through a quagmire of worrying, tears and also a snotty nose. Anyway, yesterday it came to a head when I literally felt consumed with a familiar feeling of panic, which I haven’t felt in several months. The same old panic, which I now understand is essentially, “I won’t be able to cope if this happens” – whatever “this” it may be.

I also understand now, that panic of “I won’t be able to cope” is actually rooted to my self-esteem. I don’t believe that I will be able to cope if something beyond the normal, everyday happens, or, things might happen that are beyond my control. On a subconscious level, what I am essentially telling myself is “I am not good enough”.

So, what do you do when you feel like this? You reach out. Definitely reach out. Please, always reach out. Yesterday, I chose my dad. Over the weekend, when everything was too much, I reached out to my sister. Of course, the conversations that I had with them didn’t really alter anything physically, but in sharing how I was feeling, I could attempt to stop internalising. I was still feeling teary and anxious , but I didn’t feel so isolated by my feelings.

What I really wanted to tell you though, was this. As I was gathering in the washing after tea yesterday evening, still feeling panicky and worried, I saw a rainbow. A very clear, lovely, beautiful rainbow.

Now, when Sidney was about 2, he went through a tricky phase of crying every time he went to nursery. I used to tell him, that if he was ever worried, or sad, if he saw a rainbow in the sky it meant that everything is ok. He got that he would remember this, and if we ever saw a rainbow, we would talk about it and remind ourselves that everything is ok. When I told him this, I was thinking of the story of Noah and the rainbow, and the promise that God makes to Noah.

Now, I’m not overtly religious, and I spend my time focussing more on an attitude of gratitude and believing in the universe than going to church these days. But yesterday, God, or the universe, or someone powerful somewhere, had my back. Seeing that rainbow totally grounded me. It said, everything is ok. And I smiled. All the panic feelings, and lack of control pretty much melted away in that moment, and I went back inside the house feeling like my steadier, positive self again.

Today has been much more normal. Thank goodness. Thanks to that rainbow. All day today, I have thanked whoever sent me that beautiful, perfect, magical band of colours.