Growth Spurts For Grown Women

I have a new Monday morning feeling. It goes something like this…

yukkknnooooobleughhhhhhhhblah ugh

I am putting it down to the cost of living. Of gadding about on a Saturday night. Of luxuriating under cosy covers on a Sunday morning. Like a pig in so much swill.  A joy hangover! I am putting it down to shirking my domestic responsibilities.  To choosing the finale of Dexter (frankly disappointing) over sensible things like flipping ones mattress and licking the skirting boards clean. I am putting it down to a bizarre, frankly frightening mix of frustration and  deep contentment. A life with too many what if’s, a life, now that I am on the brink of being 42, that keeps whispering, is this it…?

Truth is that on a Monday afternoon, because of the yukkknnooooobleughhhhhhhhblah ugh,  I have taken up house-working  my polka dots socks off  and then for the rest of the week I ignore it. I know I shouldn’t tell you this. I know I should tell you that life is always the lavender-scented dream it often is, but I need you to understand that in housework as in life, there are seasons. And those seasons ebb and flow and that sometimes the house is all that matters and that sometimes we need to pull back from domestic obsession in order to experience exactly how life feels. Where we are at emotionally.  What we think about when we aren’t dithering about where to display our latest vintage acquisition.

This then is about housework as opium. Breaking an addiction occasionally that keeps us robotically living through the loveliest of groundhog days  and instead examining what happens when we choose to live outside our own four walls instead of in them. It isn’t something you can force. More it is the souls rejection of something that keeps us spinning on our own ivy wrapped hamster wheel. It is listening to the voice that says it doesn’t matter and creating enough space in our heads to acknowledge our need for more.

I have come to the conclusion you see that this is how life works for the Brocante woman.  For those of us who have a deep-centered need to keep on rejecting the status-quo in search of something more.  A hunter-gatherer mentality to acquiring more and then basking in it. A season of adoring what it is to be Susie Homemaker and then a season of understanding that our soul needs replenishing by something more emotionally and creatively challenging than polishing our tchotchkes. This I think is the only way to grow, for isn’t it absolutely essential that we keep growing until our souls expand to such a degree that every aspect of our life begins to feels authentic?

This then is what BrocanteHome has and always will be about: growth spurts for the all-grown up, almost enlightened woman.

Recognising our need to grow, to acknowledge our need to challenge our hearts and minds while keeping a house that reflects our spirit and nurtures us completely and utterly once the hangover common to Monday mornings arrives. A joy hangover that tastes of real life, resentment and boredom. A hangover that can only be quenched by dusting and cleaning and washing and  setting things straight before we fly the nest all over again in search of that more satisfying hair of the dog. So for a while we do the bare minimum, and then retreat into a head filled with ideas and giggles and singing and books and good food and amazing friends and little boys and burning the midnight oil and contemplating madness and bliss and anticipation of a future less ordinary.

Until our crystal cups runneth over. For they do. Suddenly we understand that the itch has been scratched.  That the growth spurt is over. That Monday mornings do not have to feel yukkknnooooobleughhhhhhhhblah ugh after weekends filled with laughter and inspiration. And that the time has come to luxuriate not in the extraneous but in that which we have been gathering. So we stop dithering and make decisions and stop filling our heads with plans and possibilities and come once again to exist in the now: to care for and nurture that which we filled our hearts and homes with until the season changes all over again…

For it will. Rest assured it will. This then, is the circle of our days. And for me this season of searching is almost over and for you it might only just be beginning. Don’t  resist it will you?

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