This Simple Advice Is Soooo Helpful
I couldn't not share it
How to Build a Life is a newsletter for people bang in the thick of life’s mess and mayhem, who are still trying to find the magic. It’s written by me, Laura Jane Williams, author of 12 (!) books. I’m almost 40, a solo parent by choice, decorate my house like a tart’s boudoir, and lift very heavy weights. Those four things are my entire personality.
My latest rom-com is Enemies to Lovers, and I am the author of teen series Taylor Blake is a Legend too.
The scene: pub garden. 3pm. Kids playing Lego. Adults chatting. Sun not far from going in, but there’s still forty minutes of good weather left. When the rain starts, we’ll head off. Probably.
‘Sorry we couldn’t join you for lunch,’ I say to my Auntie Rose, who isn’t an Auntie by blood but she’s my mum’s best friend and I’ve known her my whole life. She’s never just Rose. It’s always Auntie Rose. She’d been in the pub having lunch with my mum when the kid and I had arrived, but we’d chosen to sit outside as a twosome instead of joining them. I add, ‘We just needed a bit of in time.’
I gesture to my kid. He’s made a friend, and they’re happily throwing Iron Man and Spider-Man figures into the dirt. Side note, the new friend’s parents keep looking over anxiously, and I keep insisting the kid is fine, he can play with the Lego! I don’t mind! And then when they go the mum says, ‘You’re not Laura, are you?’ and I say, ‘Yes?’ because the last time that happened I was in the sauna at David Lloyd and I love saying hi to somebody who knows my work but I hadn’t done my bikini line and my crotch was super sweaty and I couldn’t un-cross my legs because then I’d be “That author who has public hair down to her knees”. I couldn’t have that.
It was a moist encounter all around, in the end.
Anyway, it turns out that FIFTEEN YEARS AGO I taught her how to be an English as a Foreign Language teacher at the Italian summer camps I spent my twenties at!! She wasn’t anxiously looking over r.e. her kid taking the head off a Ninjago fighter, it was because she was trying to place me. I can’t overstate this: to see somebody in the Peak District, at the local pub, with your kids who didn’t even exist when you met in Sanremo FIFTEEN YEARS AGO is bonkers. I repeat. Fifteen. Years. In Italy!! That’s a whole other country!
Back to topic.
The reason my kid and I were at the pub was because I had completed a 12 noon deadline and was a husk of myself. I was also acutely aware that I’d spent two and half days asking my kid to fend for himself because I needed to finish something on time. And once I was done it was imperative that I a) finally brush my teeth and b) leave the goddamn house.
It’s easy to forget there’s a whole world out there when you’re busy.
‘We’ve been having big feelings at our end,’ I further explain to Auntie Rose, gesturing to Mr Big Feelings. ‘Six weeks is a long time to be off school, I think he’s craving a bit of routine now.’
My kid looks up. ‘No I’m not,’ he says, defiantly, which just about sums up what I’m talking about.
‘Ahhhh,’ Auntie Rose says. ‘He’s in the orange zone.’