When I don’t write a blog for over 3 days, I become Judy Who. i do. Although, and I confess this, I am miffed. It’s only been 13 years since I have become Judy Someone and just like that in 3 days I have to trawl through Judy Blue, Judy Bloom, Judy Diacticus. That stopped me. Eventually I find myself, like a snivel in the shadows of someone else’s sneeze. It thinks me. I am such a Get Real Woman that it even works for me , albeit clumsily, at such times. I need to light up, to get out there, although where ‘out there’ means nothing to me, and by default, everything. I check my neck, my collar bone, my shoulders, my arms, wrists, fingers. I still work even if the working parts are a bit wonky, definitely escarped with striations, aka wrinkles. I am like a walking mountain, standing here after a gazillion years of marriage, a mother of five extraordinary kids, alone.

But and but, life throws me skywards over and over again. As long as I go out there I meet a softening, kindness, conversation, hugs, random lights lit in my day, as if everyone knows me, and they do. We share cuttings, ideas, plans, wee catches of their lives and of mine as we salute and pass by. The wakeup for me is to decide to rise above ground, to flower, and to allow that my name may be forgotten. And to laugh at that.

I kind of like Judy Who.