THE NARRATIVE ARC

A Love Letter to January

Finding beauty in the bleakness

“January is the month for dreaming.” — Jean Hersey

In the old calendar, January 6th is Women’s Christmas. Also known as Little Christmas, Old Christmas, Epiphany and Twelfth Night, it is traditionally the day when the decorations come down and the women take a day off after the extra domestic workload entailed by the festive season.

This year, I feel like I need a whole month of Women’s Christmases. Maybe a year of them.

Motherhood has always been like this for me: lonely, overwhelming, transformative, coloured by periods of intense too-muchness followed by brief pockets of spaciousness. Something akin to being battered by ocean waves and occasionally surfacing to catch a breath.

In early October of last year, my six-year-old son fell ill after a routine operation. He suffered a hemorrhage, sat up in bed one night and started vomiting blood.

When your child is sick, the world stops. Thankfully, because I live in a country where hospitals are good and healthcare is free at the point of use, his condition was treatable. But I saw how rapidly everything else disappears from view; it’s remarkable how the blinkers go on.

He is off school for a few weeks before I make the decision to remove him and look for a different school. When all’s said and done, he doesn’t start at his new school until after Christmas, and a few months at home with me.

The decision is influenced by several practical, carefully considered factors — but it is not divorced from the goings-on of the rest of the world. The seesaw scales of hope and despair. A feeling that things are coming apart, that we are living through something; a fervent hope for peace, and the primal need to hold our loved ones close in the face of it all.

Despite the sleepless nights and hospital visits, the worry and the disruption to my life, it is a privilege to spend that time giving him space to heal, letting him be, mothering him.

In a lot of ways it is like going back to having a baby, for a short time. I know in my bones that it’s probably the last time I’ll ever have a child so small, so needy, so much still a part of me that the only thing that can settle him back to sleep when he wakes in the night is my touch.

All mothers deserve to feel that. All of them.

And yet, balanced against the deep gratitude of being able to be there, as a mother it is difficult to admit that sometimes all you want is to be left alone.

Christmas arrives with all its sparkling baggage and by the time the new year rolls around, my soul craves space, solitude and time like nothing else. These things are like air to me, and I’ve not been able to breathe for months.

I feel as though I have crossed an immense bridge and landed on the other side in a muddy puddle, in a hundred pieces.

Winter feels safe, a place I can hide.

The white sun sits low over Windover Hill. Dove white skies, fading to grey. Grey skies reflected in the still waters of Arlington Reservoir. Wild geese, wild ducks. Mud on chalk.

A signpost marked ‘Cuckmere Pilgrim Path’ leads to a bridge. A muddy path through a field of sheep leads to a thousand year old church. A footbridge over a gushing stream, a wooden gateway. Water running over long grass. Pale green lichen hanging like wizard’s beards from blackthorn trees.

Inside the church, stillness. Peace. Chalk-white walls. White light pouring in thick, luminous beams through small windows.

Winter, The Void. To surrender to the unknown, allowing the fertile darkness of regeneration to nourish new seeds lying within. The great cosmic womb. Stop.

January, Women’s Christmas. With the children back at school, I am alone in the house. These few hours to myself feel like a wide open sky, soft grey in colour. Space to breathe.

Named after Janus, god of beginnings, gates, time, duality, passages, frames, and endings, January is a transition month, a doorway, a bridge. It gets a bad rap, but I am starting to think it might be my favourite month.

In the newfound spaciousness of my days, I go on long walks, whatever the weather. In the first weeks of the year a tremendous amount of rain falls. I walk the deserted footpaths and winding lanes as the cold rain beats out a comforting rhythm on the hood of my coat.

After days of relentless drizzle, the river overflows and spreads out over the fields like a fattened crocodile. One afternoon I spot a grey heron standing motionless where the fields have become silver lakes, mirroring the clouds as they move across the sky. A kind of stillness settles over me that I only very rarely feel.

The days go on in their damp, dank bleakness. The Scottish have a word for this: dreich. All is grey and brown. The land sleeps, bones of chalk, arterial rivers, muddy flesh. Her dreams are the sky.

“This is the time to be slow, Lie low to the wall Until the bitter weather passes.”

— John O Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us

After weeks of protracted gloom, a cold snap bites, bringing blue skies and the bright, bitter cold. Diamond frosted fields glitter in morning light. Flashes of red, brown and gold-feathered birds adorn the bird feeder. One evening I spot the pale shape of a barn owl flapping around like a paper bag in the lower field, feeding on her prey in the twilight blue.

Held in the warm belly of winter, I settle into the earth and feel the disparate parts of me decomposing like compost, sifting down into the darkness. I read a little every day, go to bed early, sleep deep and dream much.

Of course, life goes on. There is always the house, the kids, bills and tax returns. The world with all its clamour and want.

But January’s precious pockets of peace and space have begun to feel to me like that time just before dawn, when I rise early, make tea and watch the stars fade and the colours of the sky change before anyone else gets up.

Those in-between times have always been my favourite: liminal spaces where the ordinary rules don’t apply, and where magic is real. The quiet hour when the day feels like a blessing and the world is draped like a poem over the house, announcing itself in square pockets of light through the windows.

“I have always been delighted at the prospect of a new day, a fresh try, one more start, with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning.”

~ J. B. Priestley

Spring comes early to the South of England. Beneath a thick blanket of leaves on the forest floor, the green shoots of flowers and wild herbs are already tentatively rising. Somewhere in my bones, words and ideas and dreams are beginning to thaw and awaken, too, waiting to emerge when the ground softens.

Every day the sun sets a little later, streaking the sky to the front of the cottage in dazzling bands of pink, red and gold. There is so much beauty. If only in glimmers, the world is calling me back.

But not quite yet. The clock starts again in February. Until then, I’ll stay in January, deep in the dreaming, for as long as she’ll have me.

Thank you for reading 🖤 My book of poetry ‘The Honey in the Bones’ is available here