Guest post: Sarah the Suburbanite goes back to words.
Right about now I should be fast asleep in our little cabin at Disneyworld. What’s more likely is that DD is up and about with jetlag and the OH and I are holding our eyelids up with matchsticks. I’ll be unable to string a coherent sentence together for sure, so it’s with great pleasure and a whole lot of gratitude that I hand over to Sarah from for the first of three guest posts while I’m away.
Sarah lives and teaches in Norfolk with her son, (the AC) her other half, (J) 7 snakes and 2 cats. Her life has been complicated, ranging from fabulously contented to utterly miserable at times, but the death of her fiancé, Rich, in July 2009, gave her a bucket of perspective, and she looks at life a little differently now, because itwillallbefine (and, as she puts it, the other options are stupid!)
I volunteered to blog for Bodfortea, and then had a fit of “I have nothing to write about” and then several fits of “I could write about this, or that, or the other.” I nearly ranted about parents blaming teachers for county and national policy, but that would have been badly behaved, although cathartic.
Words have always played a big part in my life. I can’t remember not being able to read, or not being able to retreat to a world not my own, or not being able to find support somewhere in the printed text.
Obviously I now use a digital text, but I thought I would shamelessly take advantage of the guest blogger spot that I volunteered for, and inflict upon the blogging world some of my favourite quotes.
Sometimes, I want support. After my partner died, there were a couple of quotes that I leant on, lived on, and could be found written all the way through me.
Two were biblical – “I can do all things through He who strengthens me.” Phil.4:13 and “He upholds the widow and the fatherless, but the way of the wicked he turns upside down.” Psalm 146:9. (I took much comfort in the latter when we were badly treated by Rich’s family.)
One was the lovely Oscar Wilde. “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” When Rich was Read In to the Book of Remembrance in the RAF chapel, we saw this on Oscar Wilde’s statue on the way back. It tells me to keep going, to look up and onwards and aim high.
The one that always gave me a wry smile, was ” I know that God will never give me more than I can handle – I just wish he didn’t trust me quite so much.” Mother Teresa. How often I feel like that lady (I never would claim to be as good as her though!). This one is where I turn to when work is stacking up, when the child was coughing through the night with croup and I was teaching the next day, when I could only find one shoe and no socks!
Winnie the Pooh sticks with me through time as well. “Promise me you’ll always remember. You’re braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.”. This is the one I tell my class children when they are stuck, when their homelife is hard, when the playground isn’t fair, when they feel like they can’t do whatever it is. That one and “God made you, and He doesn’t make mistakes.”
Forever though, I reach to the end of a book that I read to my son on the night that Rich died. It is a childrens book called “No matter what” by Debi Gilori. “Look at the stars – how they shine and glow, but some of those stars died a long time ago. Still they shine in the evening skies. Love, like starlight, never dies”.
Words like these have healed my hurts, calmed my anger, soothed my soul, and blessed my mind. I’ve shared them when I can. I’ve leant on them, and now I’m wrapping them as a present and giving them to Bodfortea to pass on to you.
Enjoy!
Sarah blogs at and you can follow her on Twitter as .
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