Everydaystranger

Well it sort of has to be done, doesn’t it?

And yes, this is my decade in review. If you’ve opened a window or read a paper or seen any number of BBC specials running this week about The Noughties, then you know the events of the world.

Let’s see – 2000 started off interestingly enough. I had moved from Raleigh-Durham, NC to Stockholm four weeks prior to the new millenium kicking off. I stood on the banks of the water in Sodermalm and got hideously drunk with the rest of Stockholm while listening to Europe perform The Final Countdown live via a barge on the water. It helped that I was drunk. I was working for Company X as a technical writer and instructor, but a nice man took a chance on me (really he was just building up his people portfolio) and offered me a brilliant opportunity, which has more or less directed my career since.

Later that year my fiancé and I acquired Maggie and Mumin. We also got hitched in a teeny, tiny, ancient church in Stockholm and honeymooned on the Italian Riviera.

Highlights from the honeymoon including walking the Cingue Terre the wrong way and having to clean my new husband’s vomit out of the sink when he got food poisoning. It was maybe a sign.

Later that year, Kim died.

I don’t really think I need to add anything more to that.

2001 launched and I was working away. We travelled a lot both privately and for business. Work was stupid at that time – you could find yourself on a 12 hour flight in order to do a one hour presentation. Kick-offs for projects were held in far-flung places that people not only wanted to go to, but which the company paid for you to go. Looking back, it was a time of severe excess, a time that shouldn’t be repeated.

I held my first ever dinner party – it was an unmitigated disaster, as judged by the fact that I was so nervous I drank a little too much and actually went to bed while we still had the guests over. I also had my first IVF treatment that year. It worked, and I conceived Egg and Bacon. I remember finding out I was pregnant while at Christmas. I spent Christmas with my in-laws, cooking a julbord.

By the New Year, I miscarried.

2002 was an interesting time. We fought. A lot. We moved house, from a staggering apartment

to a lovely house.

I spent a lot of time running in the fields behind the house to Evanescence on the mp3 player. I had my first frozen IVF treatment, which didn’t work and I hadn’t expected it too, either. We fought more. We travelled some, to Greece where I arched my eyebrows and ate spinach pastries

and we had the first and only Christmas I’ve ever spent as just a couple (and why yes, that is Maggie).

This as mysteriously my unreliable sister and her unreliable husband hopped off a flight from NY-Stockholm with the presents I had them bringing over and didn’t get back on an airplane to come stay.

2003 was the wake up call. On January 27, I went home from work, lost the plot, and tried to kill myself. I spent the night in an institution and was then released to start my recovery. I was off work for 8 weeks and spent most of that time suffering from insane insomnia, even during the staggeringly beautiful holiday to The Seychelles. We fought relentlessly, even on the holiday we took to Turkey. We didn’t travel very much that year as the economy was struggling. Lay-offs had been going on in our industry for the past year, and the axe was starting to swing closer to home.

In November of 2003, I learned that the six rounds of cuts I had survived at work could no longer save me. I lost my job. We had already booked a trip to the US for Christmas, so we went. We stayed one night in NYC

and then flew to Dallas, where I cut all my hair off.

That trip was the end of my relationship with both my family and my ex-husband.

2004 dawned and I applied for any and every job. In Sweden one telecom position came open. Such was the state of the lay-offs, it transpired that I along with 11,000 others applied for it. I knew if I were to ever work again I had to leave Sweden. My ex had other ideas – he’d accepted a job working in China, and wanted me to go with him as a housewife and partner, to live on the “compound” the company had (”compound” being their words, “guarded protected enclave that the expats did not leave” was more accurate). That was simply not an option for me.

For the second time in my career, another manager took a chance on me. He hired me, and once my visa came through I moved to the UK in the beginning of 2004.

I turned 30 in a Moroccan restaurant in Prague.

Together, Alastair and I travelled everywhere – Stockholm (to fetch Maggie and Mumin), Amsterdam, Palma de Mallorca, Bahamas, Miami, Dublin, Venice, Scotland, Czech Republic…we were always on the go. We were also on the stay, as here I am phoning up and acquiring our first house to live together in.

Work saw me at Ascot (ironically as a guest of the company that had just laid me off) where I crossed paths with Prince Charles.

2005 was where work really started to knuckle down. I won an award that took us to Monaco.

I worked my ass off in 2005. I relaxed when I could, including a trip to Egypt where Alastair joined me as a diver and got certified for diving. Diving in the Red Sea is to be recommended.

2006 was relentless. Workwise it was the kind of year that goes down on the CV as a blinder. I went to poncy black tie award dinners and won award

after award

and the benefits included things like a large chunk of our household furniture, a trip to Glenmorangie Distillery in the Highlands, £5000, and a little ride on the Orient Express.

We found time to buy our house. This is what it looked like when we first bought it.

This is what it looks like today:

I also got a new man in my life.

Our first IVF cycle as a couple failed, and we went to Santorini and Crete to recover. It remains one of the best holidays I’ve ever had. I went with this guy:

No wait, that was the restaurateur. I really went with this guy:

When we came back we had another round of IVF, which succeeded and then also ended in miscarriage. To recover, I went inwards. I also called my Dad and asked if we could be in each other’s lives. He said yes, and brought along two people who have become a part of my heart.

I lost a child but gained a family.

Christmas 2006 Alastair and I flew to Whistler for some skiing. I also got a sparkly.

While there I started my fifth and most likely final round of IVF, which would also be a donor cycle where I would give half of my eggs to another woman (all the IVF history can be found here). It became the worst cycle ever. My protocol and the other woman’s simply didn’t match up, and the clinic was so concerned about over-stimulating my ovaries that they under-stimulated instead. At retrieval I had 8 eggs, 4 to each of us. Of my four, only two were viable. Both fertilized and became average (or as we called it “meh”) quality. I didn’t think it would work.

On February 21, 2007, I found out it did.

Three weeks later, I saw two heartbeats.

The rest you know.

On 2 October 2007 after the worst pregnancy imaginable, I was admitted to hospital. I was part of the 365 project and so took an awful lot of self-portraits of myself over time, but that night in the privacy of my hospital room, I took what was to become my favorite picture of myself, ever.

On the 3rd of October, my two little people arrived.

In 2008 I went back to work, to a career that had been faltering. I was sidelined. My work was uninteresting and, as a result, I started to do a bad job. I struggled through as we were otherwise busy building an extension to a 100 year old house that needed to house two adults and four children.

It was a tough year but my god I learned a lot about myself.

2009 has not been easy. The highs included not one but two new jobs, the lows…let’s just say they’ve been low and that there was a point where I wondered if I should be hospitalized. This past year has seen sadness of a level that should be illegal. It’s also seen great happiness and healing. I’ve gained friends that I will hold in my heart forever, and one of my longtime friends is now branded on my arm.

I handed back all of my things yesterday to my old company and thus weirdly am without a mobile phone now for a week, which feels mighty strange indeed (it might even be the first time I’ve been mobile phone-less since 1991). I start my new job on the 5th of January. Melissa and Jeff arrive tomorrow, and a big Crumplebottom party is set for the 1st. I’ll start to wind this up now as this has been a seriously long-winded fucker, but in terms of years while 2009 has been the worst year in many ways (although the ending of it thus far has been brilliant and I’m hopeful the next few days continue that upward trend), this past decade has been the best. Right now it feels like the norm – my daughter is jerking around in what may appear to be an electric shock to the untrained eye but is, in fact, her toddler version of dancing while my son rides his ride-on pony out of the lounge waving and shouting “Bye bye! Thanks for coming!”

In between the paragraphs and writing has been many things – the start-up of this blog, which undoubtedly the early readers have long since vanished. I became a veggie. I became a stepmother. I have been in therapy for a very long time and progress has been slow, but it’s been happening. I slept in a Viking bed carved out of ice in the Arctic Circle after watching the Northern Lights, and I have swum in the Indian Ocean with fish colored colors that don’t even have names (and in case you’re worried I’m heading into that “I’ve been to paradise but I’ve never been to me” rubbish, don’t worry, I’m swerving off here). I have been to over 40 countries in the past 10 years. I have fucked-up and failed and I have succeeded and I have loved.

I started this blog with the catchphrase “Just an ordinary girl living in extraordinary circumstances.” I stand by that, I am stupidly, geekily, astonishingly ordinary. I come from a background so rough that my psychotherapist has described it as “the single most unstable upbringing he has seen in his 30+ years of practice”. I may be ordinary yet my life has become anything but ordinary as I stumbled from place to place, heart to heart, as I started living life instead of living outside of it. Because that’s just it, isn’t it? At some point we have to stop being an imposter of the living, and start the living part.

I’ll be having a quiet New Year’s Eve with Alastair, Melissa, Jeff, and two little people snoozing upstairs. It’s like a Trivia Pursuit pie – all the little pieces will be here (hope that analogy didn’t make you gag, either.) My family. My home. I am finally home (although yes, I would most happily move to New Zealand tomorrow.)

New Years is exactly the way I want it.

So Happy New Year’s. I wonder if your decade has been as wild as mine…? Enquiring minds want to know.

-S.