Coconut oil on my hair, Dr Ho between my legs, Darwin’s Doubt in my hands.
So, it begins. My day.

Well not quite. It began at 3am when I woke up soaked, thanks to what my girlfriends tell me are peri -menopause night sweats. After changing, I google “peri” and discover my nocturnal perspiring has landed me “mythical super human” status, similar to that of a good or graceful genie. Things are looking up, until I realize I’m looking at the definition for the noun. Alas, the prefix is nothing as exotic – “around, about, near”. Sigh. Near to what?
Well, in a word, death. And on so many levels dear reader. Trust me, don’t go there.
Well, bollocks to the doom mongering.
I close my laptop. Take a moment. Dig deep. Listen hard.
And… there it is……the whisper…I’m only just gearing up. Followed by the bellow, Pause me? (hell) no!
(Have you noticed how scarily spot on some aptagrams are? Take a look at these truth tellers.: Stressed = Desserts; Parliament = partial men; princess Diana = end is a car spin; Apple Macintosh = laptop machines)

Comforted that I’ve redeemed my state somewhat, albeit not to mythic proportions, I return to my beauty sleep. Even that’s no longer the hallowed sanctum it’s meant to be.
News nugget(again courtesy of my golden girls): side lying is the new unforgivable sin, followed closely by non-silk pillow covers. Reason? The damage they cause to my already compromised collagen strands.
Apparently, these lovely lasses have let me down, and I mean seriously and irrevocably, gone AWOL. They are meant to be in STRAIGHT ALIGNMENT, giving them their springy tautness. But, and here’s the lowest blow molecular biology can give a girl, the little buggers now allegedly resemble a (wait for it) haphazard, freshly dropped pile of pick up sticks.
Haphazard. Freshly dropped. Pile. Pick up sticks.
Haphazard. Freshly dropped. Pile. Pick up sticks
My collagen.
How? I mean, is there not some indelible design code, they are meant to follow until the end of time?

The blows keep coming. Apparently, only back lying is permissible. Have you ever tried sleeping on your back? My point exactly. There’s. Nowhere. To. Go. Nothing. To. Cuddle. You just lie there like a chimp and can’t sleep. So not only am I sweaty AND crinkly, but now I’m tired from NOT sleeping on my back all night. I’m so tired, even my tired is tired.
I’ve tried to cheat the system by lying on my side with my face hanging off the side of my pillow – anything to get some sleep. But alas, my body betrays me whilst I slumber. I inevitably awake with my face buried deep within the covers of my very cotton pillowcase.
Sigh.

But today (injection of enthusiasm) Deader Rear, is a day of new beginnings. This blog.
Why this blog, indeed, why another blog?
Reared Dare, I’m with you. In fact, I’m seriously against this blog, and in fact have been dragged to my computer kicking and screaming.
Before answering, let me ask you a question.
Did you know that there is an actual prescribed, recommended number of words for a blog, cited as best able to engage readers? I kid you not. When starting Social Chain, young hotshot Stephen Barlett came across a lot of conventional advice. Each time he’d ask himself, “Is this something I know to be fundamentally true?” Invariably, he’d toss said advice and go with his gut. The point being…. well I’m not sure actually… except that I’m clueless how long this will be but it’s not because I’m clueless. It’s because I’ve carefully researched conventional advice and found it not to be fundamentally true. Or simply put, bollocks.

I digress.
Say I was to come to your house now, A Dearer Red, (love) and whisk you away to a beautiful mountain summit. Gone the noise, the blaring, the frenzy.
And say we did a Steve Bartlett – shut out all the voices and asked ourselves “What do we know to be true?”
I bet everything I have (yes, all my credit card debt – budget, straight, revolving – is now yours), that if we were quiet enough and brave enough to listen, we’d hear two things:
I have beauty inside of me.
My beauty matters.

I have 4 kids, and my second oldest, Jesse, has Asperger’s Syndrome. He also has a dream- to be an Olympic champion swimmer for GB and win 14 gold medals. Jesse doesn’t have a swimmer’s body but he has a champion’s heart. When he first started training, he hardly moved in the water. The times his trainer broke up their strokes I remember standing on the side of the pool, craning my neck sideways, to try and gauge whether he was, in fact, moving (forwards, sideways, backwards…. anything?).

As I’ve watched him train and yes- start to move, fast enough to win medals- I’ve discovered the 4 secrets that make my son a success- irrespective of whether he wins races.
Jesse truly believes he has greatness in him, or in his words, “I pee gold Mum”, and he’s decided to go after it with everything he’s got.
Through sheer dogged persistence he persuaded his uncle who was the strength and conditioning coach for the Springboks to give him a personalized training program and he trains his little heart out. Literally.
Being on the spectrum he is quite a concrete thinker. So, this little guy’s third secret took me kind of by surprise.
He doesn’t believe what he sees. He just knows there’s more to him than meets the eye. He is not the sum of his too -small -body – parts. Made up is not what he is broken down.
And he’s not planning on giving up until he has either succeeded or failed -magnificently.
Although we named him Jesse, his self-appointed nick name is Simba, chosen for the vowels it contains (if I’m honest I still don’t really understand). How apt for a little boy with a lion’s roar.

When I travelled to Russia to adopt our 2 youngest children, I spent some time in what are known as closed homes. Nothing can describe the conditions in these homes. It wasn’t just the smell, or the complete and utter isolation these children lived in, or any of the awful things I learnt that broke my broken heart over and over again. (Is there a number to how many times a heart can break and heal) It was that these children were the forgotten. The world had given up on them. They knew no one was coming for them and they had lost hope. They had never been given a sense of their own beauty. They had never discovered it for themselves.
And so, life for them makes no sense at all.
They do not know what they were made for.
They are beautiful – more beautiful than words could ever describe – but they have absolutely no idea.

I don’t have all the answers, but I know two things for sure.
We all have beauty within us – each so different. Elizabeth Barrett Browning hints at this for me: “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”. Beauty, like love, has no end of faces.
And, just like the children in the orphanage, I’m lost as soon as I can’t see my own beauty and its place in the world.

Because where beauty is found, something else bubbles up. Joy.
Now I know that joy doesn’t always look like happy or laughing. As with beauty, there’s a spectrum.
The reason I know this Dear Reader is because I’m a very deep person. Ask any of my friends at the Collagen and Coffee mornings. I know a fair amount about spectrums with an Asperger’s son and my own undiagnosed….umh… diagnosis. They’re broad.

On one end of the joy spectrum we have life sucks.
It pretty much bulldozes me over, but even lying down I know who I am. I’m so not laughing at this end. I’m tired, wheeling, ducking, weeping, surviving – just.
But who I am remains. My purpose remains.That’s joy.

On the other end we have plain sailing. Everything is working out better than we could’ve dared hope. Lots of happy here. Lots of crazy cackling. Hands up who needs more of that. I spy a few Jet Set Gellish at the back. My favourite colour 😊
My gosh, we need more of both. And women who exude both.
Formidable. Soft. Certain. No need to prove ourselves. Gentle. Bold. Strong. Unafraid. Convinced. Sure. Easy laughing, mad laughing, bubbling over women.

If I’m honest, this blog scares me.
In finding my own beauty, I must let you in to the uncut version of my life. Beauty is truth, truth beauty.
But what if, when you see the truthful me, you don’t see beauty? Seriously, my “How to win friends” is more likely to read “how to bin friends”. In fact, I might be up there for a re-casting of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s nest. I could never tell you how crazy or bad I really am as I have a family to protect. I mean there’s a time for total honesty and then there’s a time to hold back. You can’t really be honest with fat people, can you? That would be heartbreakingly rude. Even I know that.

But, and I’m kind of banking on this (please God don’t let me be the craziest)- we are all a lot alike.
Maybe, as I stumble, zap and blunder my way to beauty, you will see yourself in my journey and fumble, your way there too. (Or maybe you’re already there, in which case, please can you take over?)

Becoming beautiful takes time. I mean micro needling is a minimum of 1 hr and that’s without the Platelet Rich Plasma treatment afterwards. There’s no one moment, there are many. Be kind to yourself in your becoming.

It’s also scary. You know what my son whispered to me on the stands before his race? He snuggled up close and so softly came the words, ““Mum, I pray the glory comes”.
I stopped rummaging for his energy drink and drank this brave boy of mine in.
For all his talk of peeing gold, Rocky-like determination, training and dreaming, he never stops being scared.

As he climbed onto his diving block, I looked at my son’s life and took the challenge it gave me. We can’t know what will happen IRL (in real life). No matter how hard we fight, how determined we are, how much we try. But no matter the outcome IRL, and I’m really hoping with all my mother’s heart that he wins his Olympic golds, Jesse will have become all he could possibly be. No one can ask more of themselves.

None put it better than Theodore Roosevelt:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat… The man who does nothing cuts the same sordid figure in the pages of history, whether he be a cynic, or fop, or voluptuary. There is little use for the being whose tepid soul knows nothing of great and generous emotion, of the high pride, the stern belief, the lofty enthusiasm, of the men who quell the storm and ride the thunder.”

Simba hopes glory comes.
Without knowing for sure what that glory will look like he dares to dream, to give his all, to never give up.
He dares to ride the thunder.
Dare we?
——————————————————-
Do not go gentle into that good night
Dylan Thomas, 1914 – 1953
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.