Swimming Up Stream

Sometimes everything just seems to happen at once. Life will just be moving on, like it always has done, the days and weeks merging into each other and you all just going through the motions of work, school runs, dinner, bath time and bed. It’s all just your lovely kind of ordinary and you’re just going from one day to the next looking forward to the weekend, or that next thing on the calendar, the couple of hours with the kids before bed or that longed for night out with a friend. It’s normal and it’s lovely. It’s all you ever need or want.

But then a week comes along, or maybe a fortnight, maybe even a month, where everything seems to go wrong. Where you have bad news, where you’re let down or where things just don’t seem to go right. It could be having your holiday cancelled three weeks before you’re due to fly, it could be people showing their true colours at the worst of times, it could be family not being like family at all or it could even be about money – after all, money seems to play a part in everything.

But whatever that thing is, it seems to starts something, where the bad news spirals and where even the little things seem magnified into something bigger. It’s where all those plans you made seem to fall apart and where all those plates that had been spinning for so long just start to fall.

A cancelled holiday is just that – a cancelled holiday, but it was also the thing you kept those plates spinning for, the reward for your hard work and efforts. People showing their true colours is inevitable, but it still hits you to the core. Family issues aren’t new, they’re something you’re well versed in, but it still makes you break inside. And money? Well money makes the world go round, doesn’t it?

So when things start falling apart, and when your bad week turns into a bad month, and when it feels like you’re swimming up stream with no sign of respite it can be hard to think about anything else. But, there is always light at the end of that tunnel – there are always people that care about you, people who love you and things that make each day just that little bit easier.

One day you see a positive, and the next day you see two and before you know it things are looking brighter, the current is getting gentler and those plates are starting to spin again. But it’s a slow process, and it’s hard to make plans but, with summer around the corner, and so much time with the children nearly in reach, who really needs plans?

Life can be hard at times, and so much harder when you’re just trying to hold it all together, keep all those ducks in a row and just make it through to those nice times – the family dinner, the trip to soft play, that bath time that the children love so much. But, if you focus on those nice times, and find all the positives, no matter how small, the negatives don’t seem half as big after all.