September Wave of Change

September is a good month for change, isn’t it?

Fuck January. You can’t make changes in a month where you’ve just endured an outrageous amount of time with your family during which you needed to maintain a constant level of inebriation, the hangover from which will suddenly hit you on Jan 1st as you stand at the junction to the new year, the next 365 days snaking out in front of you like the yellow brick road but one that leads not to a sham wizard and a promise of home but to more of the same in your sham of a life unless you DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT THIS YEAR BUT PROBABLY WON’T AND ESPECIALLY NOT RIGHT NOW WHEN ALL YOU CAN THINK ABOUT IS CHEESE.

Ahem…

Spring is also fucked. It’s meant to be a time of renewal and rebirth, when all of nature is going at it like Wayne Rooney when his wife’s expecting. It’s meant to be a time when you can ACHIEVE SO MUCH MORE with the days getting longer. Why on God’s unholy earth would you want a day to last any longer than it has to, thereby delaying your arrival at wine and alone time? Also: achievements are for children. We have no need to achieve anything more than existing, and even that’s a remarkable, erm, achievement.

Give me September. Give me longer nights with sprogs in bed and space for my head. Give me the chill that means jumpers and socks and fires and hot water bottles and falling leaves and conkers and driving everywhere again even though I already drive everywhere because the weather has no tangible impact on my hatred of walking when you have somewhere to go.

*Walking without aim is different. And walking without aim in Autumn is the BEST walking without aim you can experience.

Of course September marks the beginning of the end. Everything starts dying now. But this decay is not (the only reason) why I love it. September is also the month when I began to grow both of my babies. I know this may reveal something about the copulating habits of Gwyneth and I during the month of August, but the result is that when the sun begins to hang lower in the sky and your breath starts showing up in the cold night air, for me it brings back those two Septembers, eleven years apart, when I was feeling terrified and excited and incapacitated by nausea, all at the same time.

As I am now.

*NOT BECAUSE I’M PREGNANT.

This morning on the way back from taking youngest to school, I walked under a tree on my new street and got clonked on the head by a conker. They were pattering down onto the pavement like gunfire. As I quickly dodged out of the way (me and trees have a kinda combative relationship of late) I thought how impossible it seemed that it could be September already. I thought about how much in my life has changed since last September and how much more will have changed by May/June; the months both the kids arrived in the world.

Tonight is eldest’s last evening at home before I drive her to university tomorrow. By May/June she will be nearing the end of her first year, will be confidently imbibing skunk and vodka on a Monday lunchtime and heading home for the summer, full-up with stories, hopefully none of them featuring pregnancies or arrests.

By May/June youngest will have somehow become eight years old. And with all the hope I have left swilling around in my upset, wine-soaked soul, he will have adjusted to this new life, to this two-home, sister-less life.

By May/June, I will be 44 yrs old and living alone with my scars, both old and new. And if there are any drops of hope left for me, it’s that I will have stepped-up to this single existence with only a modicum of shameful behaviour and a maximum of three county court judgements for non-payment of life.

Tom Waits said, “I’ve been riding on the crest of a slump lately.” I know it, Tom.

But September brings the wave of hope and I intend to ride it…all the way to gender reassignment surgery because I am such a total NINJA AT THIS CHANGING SHIT THAT I MIGHT AS WELL GO THE WHOLE HOG.

It turns out I’m also a ninja at healing:

Silly Selfie September is back ON…