Clover Stroud: On The Way Life Feels

I think I have burn out. I’m pretty sure I do. I’m not going to the Substack summer party tonight, which I had been so looking forward to, but it all feels too much. The idea of putting on good clothes and getting to London is definitely beyond me. I’ve never totally understood what the true definition of burn out is, and how it differs from exhaustion and overwhelm, which we are all familiar with, but when someone asks me something simple - What time is drop off? Do you know where my sneakers are?

There’s a gas station, sorry garage, quite close to my home, with a Greggs inside it, which is just one of the exciting new things in my children’s lives since we moved back to England. Greggs means they can eat a steaming hot sausage roll almost every time we pass that GARAGE. Three weeks in, we are still in a kind of strange other-wordly space, in which our new (old and beautifully familiar) real life in England still feels like a dream we have slumbered back awake to. Confusing?

I want to share with you the hazy beauty of standing with my ponies in the grass at 5.40am, and the salty crunch of a cheese toastie with cheddar that behaves like cheese, and the surprise I feel at the banks of wild flowers on so many roundabouts, and the delightful feeling of unwrapping newspaper from my old kitchen plates as I take them all from three years in storage and recreate my home, since all these things are happening every day.

Playback speed × Share post Share post at current time Share from 0:00 0:00 / Transcript I made a video for you about everything that's going on right now, the changes, the schools, the food, the circus, the feelings, and finding my place, bizarrely, in Breaking Bad I've had so many lovely messages of goodwill towards my family as we start the new chapter, so this is a little update on how it's going, what it feels like being back in England and how life is now We have been back for just over...

I’m writing this on Monday evening, after we arrived home on Friday. I’m sitting in my green bedroom, looking out onto the green view, of the green field beyond my house. Every now and again the train, which runs through a cutting near our house, passes by, but the constant is the sound of birds in the hedgerow, which is gorgeously overgrown, just outside the window.

It felt important to create a connection with you today, even though things are chaotic and ever-changing and I am crying and packing and writing and sweating quite a lot and swearing too. We’re eating really odd things that have been in the freezer a while alongside a LOT of take out. I’ve lost my hairbrush and have few clothes left that haven’t been packed up. I loved talking to you here: I cover a lot! I cry a bit and laugh too.

Every morning I find some biscuits to wrap in silver foil, like a little gift, and peel and slice carrots, which I put into a small plastic box with some hummus. Then I make a sandwich of turkey, pastrami or grated cheese, which I wrap in foil, like the biscuit gifts.

A few weeks ago I was helping out as a chaperone on a school trip, and started chatting to two other moms as we waited outside the museum, while every child’s bag was put through an x-ray machine. One of the moms had pepper spray confiscated from her bag since she it made her feel safer on the walk alone from the metro to her house. Our chat turned to self-defence, which inevitably lead to guns, specifically hand guns and pistols, and how to take a gun on holiday when travelling out of state.

When everything goes wrong, sometimes all you can do is let go. I have two big deadlines heading towards me in mid-May, one of which is finishing a book, and the other is moving my family back to England. Neither of these are, well, inconsequential. They are the kind of deadlines that wake me at 4.20am, while a nonstop reel of stress plays and replays behind my closed eyelids, until I get up and walk around the sleeping house at 5am. Moving always helps.

In a few weeks’ time my children will leave the life we’ve created in America’s capital, Washington DC. We will be returning to England, where we live in an extremely small hamlet on the Oxfordshire/Wiltshire border, surrounded by fields. Their lives will change dramatically, especially since they’re now all gone free range, and have lots of freedom and independence in DC.