I am lonely

I miss my mum.  The thing is over the last four years she has slowly become more than just my mother, she had become my friend and we spent a lot of our time together.

One of the reasons we returned back to our native North East of England when I was pregnant with Mini was to be able to spend time with our families.  When we lived in Berkshire my mum would visit for weeks on end and we really got on each others nerves.  We were not supposed to live in each others pockets.

So we reasoned that being closer would mean days out or afternoons shopping and we would all be able to get on better and you know what it was good.  Not always great, but it worked for us.

As the years went by we developed our own routine.  Every Monday I went round and helped clean up, Thursday meant shopping and coffees in town and I often spent Saturday with Mum and the boys spent Saturday evenings with her.  In between I ferried her to the hospital, GP’s and anywhere else she wanted to be.  We both grew in to the mother and daughter role.

She told me I was the best mother she had ever seen and that she knew how much I lived for my boys and I had learned to let her take out the boys picture and show the ladies on the tills her grandchildren without always wanted the ground to swallow me up.

We became firm friends.  She was a huge part of my life and now she is gone.  She filled my days when I wasn’t busy working from home.  She collected the boys from school when I needed an extra hour somewhere.  She was more than a mother to me.

Now I am alone.  I am lonely.  My friend I made back home has gone to work full time and I am struggling to fill the hours between dropping the boys off at school and collecting them.  I think my sister in law can see this, she popped round with flowers for me.

I find it hard to make friends and when we returned it was to a village and it seems that everyone here went to school with each other  and already had their own cliques and groups and I haven’t managed to fit in to any of them.  I come across as standoffish, but the fact is I am shy.  I wonder what people think of the way I look.  I don’t want people taking about my health behind my back, so I don’t talk about my issues in real life.

I did make a close friend when I fist came back, I was honest with her about how ill I was, but it turned out she just wanted things, she wanted the use of my buggy and the material things and when I got ill she didn’t visit or send a card and I couldn’t bear to stay friends with someone like that.  It affected me, it made me question my judgement.  I didn’t think she was that person.  I was wrong and I guess that it has made me much more wary of opening up to anyone in real life.

So as hard as it is to admit, I don’t have any real female friends here.  MadDad is my best friend and I suppose a lot of the time we are pretty wrapped up in each other, making sure our marriage works and that we have fun as a family, that we forget that having other friends is important.

I think I have fogotten how to make friends.