Mummy, whats your job?

Today is a beautiful spring day in the Alps. Radiant raindrops on the trees in the valley, a dusting of snow on the hills just behind. Pineapple and I have just walked to school - and back home again. For some reason we missed that its May day, a bank holiday here and all is shut including school. Doh!

This is just fine! A chance just for the two of us to be spontaneous, as everyone else has also gone out with other plans. The boring but necessary tasks I had for myself also must be cancelled, as they all involved French functionaries. This holiday really is a little gift.

Pineapple teases me that she knew all along, and that I am silly. Silly, probably, and very far removed from the world of work. How else could you miss a bank holiday?

A few days ago she asked:

Mummy whats your job?, Pineapple asked.

'Well, its the same one as I had before. You remember - you came to the office on 'bring your kids to work day'.

That one'

'Oh….'

'Its just that since Matt died I have been feeling sad, so they have let me have a break, a rest'.

'Well, I am still sad too! she said emphatically. 'I am still really sad. He should be lying in his cot now, having a nap'.

Once again there was her empathy and strength of feeling: I waited for the request for time off school all the same, but it never came. So she has her day today.

As it happens looks like I am to be made redundant from that job. Probably very much for the best, but I was disappointed that that was the best solution that could be found. I had been seeing a return to work as a milestone that I had recovered enough to step back through the door: instead the conversations we have been having over the last month have thrown me right back to last September. For a while it has been as if all the intervening months and feeling-better-days have never been.

But beautiful days and the need to be spontaneous has reminded me of all the benefits of having nothing to do with them. There are other sides to it, but that’s the focus today.