After two years of trying for a family, we (my husband & I) got sucked onto the IVF production line. Two years & six IVF cycles later, with not one positive pregnancy test, we were utterly wrung out & exhausted in every possible way, and I quickly fell very flat and into a period of grey depression which took me 2-3 years to recover from. I did work through the IVF and did go back to my professional work afterwards, but looking back found it very hard to cope with the stress of it all, resulting in many teary episodes.
I knew I needed a creative project and was ready to do up another house. At a time when I had hoped to be literally creating a family I knew I needed to channel my creative energies in a different way, and so I swapped my first little house down south for a lovely old house in the centre of the historic castle town of Harlech on the wild west coast of Wales to do up as a holiday cottage for my husband & I and my family & to let out. I gave myself permission to do up this house as my project, my job and spent a year and a half working on it pretty well full time. I channelled my creative energies into renovating it, from the filthy work of labouring and insulating to sanding and lovingly restoring all the floorboards upstairs. I also renovated two Grannys' worth of furniture for the house with the help of my lovely Mum, painted an old kitchen dresser unit in bright colours creating my proudest work of art for the house, and made curtains and cushion covers with gorgeous bright fabrics, bringing joy & colour, heart & soul into the house, which many of my guests have commented on since.
It wasn't long after I started work on the house that I fell in love with it and with living in North Wales, and knew in my gut that I wanted to be there, to live there in North Wales and that it was the right place for me to be in this chapter of my life. My husband was very committed to his job in London and had no interest in moving to North Wales or starting a new life, but this didn't dampen the feeling… maybe I knew I needed to create a new life for myself as an independent woman... I knew somewhere deep inside me I wanted or needed to be near the mountains and the sea.
So nearly 7 years ago now I started out on this path into this new chapter of my life, just 3 and a half years after my last IVF cycle finished. Although it has been incredibly hard in many ways and at many times, I have never looked back, or wished to go back to my safe secure suburban life where I was looked after and maybe cosseted. Here I am free to be me.
Being in the mountains makes my heart sing and being by the sea calms my soul, and the light the gorgeous light is my medicine, so it seems I came here to North Wales to heal and regain my mojo and feel again that joie de vivre. In the mountains there is nothing missing for me, everything melts away, the past, the worries and stresses of work; there is only now, the present, this moment and the sense of moving through the landscape under the ever-changing sky and its gorgeous light.
Here in North Wales I think I am living authentically, true to me because I have freed myself from the expectations of a career and children and the generally accepted concept of success. I knew almost immediately after my IVF finished that I wanted to make the most of what this body could do, even if it wasn't very good at making babies, and so I wanted to relish in it being able to dance and sing, garden and dig and work, and walk & climb in the mountains and cycle along lanes and be the passionate life-loving woman I am. I knew deep in my gut this was fundamentally important to me, and that I wanted my work or a part of it to be physical, to use my body.
And so it is.
I have created a new life for myself up here in North Wales, a tapestry of varied work & projects, mostly involving physical and outdoor work, which keeps me very busy and pretty fit. My work now is primarily physical, gardening, managing a woodland and building, renovating houses. There seems to be very little time for paperwork or sitting at my computer, hence the huge delay in writing my story, which I have wanted to do for 3 years!! I have definitely re-found my mojo and motivation for work, and am coming out of a very intensive all consuming phase of house renovation trying to find and create a better balance of work and play.
(And it is the satisfaction I got from creating this beautiful house, bringing life and colour into a bland and soulless house that fuelled me to buy another house renovation project here in Blaenau Ffestiniog. Four years on I've nearly finished one of the cottages which is to become my home, a home I have made just for me, and I am nearly ready to move in... It's been a long and very hard journey but I hope it will be a delightful space to live in and to share with friends. )
Physical work and adventure has become so much a part of me and a part of my life up here in North Wales, that it is no longer about not being able to have babies, in defiance of what this body isn't very good at, it is just about being true to me as an individual and what I love doing.
I think creativity will be an ongoing important element in my life, I know it to be so. There are many more things I would like to do and make, curtains and cushions for my new home to start with, and to pick up things I used to do like rushwork and basketry and to learn new things like upholstery and weaving.
Meg
