(Dream) life, interrupted: navigating life's crossroads

With two objectively adorable and awe-inspiring daughters, aged ten and five.

With our home just a hop, skip and jump away from one of the most beautiful beaches in Donegal. No, Ireland. No, the world.

With a couple of work-around-the-kids, just-enough-to-pay-the-mortgage, portfolio-style careers between us. Copywriting. Creative writing. A job - proper, professional, permanent and part-time - at a local toy company. (Getting paid to play with dolls four mornings a week is proper and professional, right?) Commercial photography. And fine-art photography.

And then...

The ever-looming threat of Brexit.

The proper, professional and part-time job turning out to be impermanent.

And reliable income streams becoming unreliable.

And then…

Feeling rattled by the dearth of traditional earning opportunities nearby.

Feeling overwhelmed, finally, by a sense of financial insecurity that had been creeping up. And up. And up.

And walking with a much-loved friend.

And wondering - out-loud - if it’s the end of the road, for our family’s rural, coastal idyll. 

And her saying, “Don’t go”.

And me not wanting to go.

And me racking my brains about what I could do, to make not going a possibility.

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.” 

The figs on the branches of my life-tree were probably always a bit more prosaic than Sylvia Plath’s. (Although, a husband and a happy home and children? Check!) But middle-aged and living in the middle of an admittedly picturesque nowhere, was it my imagination, my frame of my mind or a simple matter of fact; were there far fewer figs than once there were?

So, a fig-finding mission. And more poetic inspiration.

Mary Oliver was on to something when she posed the question,

“…what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”