Scales weigh things, make a balance. On the one side, the weights. On the other the thing being weighed. At least, that is how I remember it, way back when I was young and weighing things. I even recall weighing a baby in the brass cradle when the nurse couldn’t get through the storm. Problem was that the ounce weights kept disappearing. I found one, once, in the bucket of a toy digger. I just guessed the baby weight, zoomed it up a bit and my guess was accepted. It was winter, after all, days thick with noise and storm and floods and falling trees. This was, and is, island life. I should report that said baby is now father of two and strong as an ox, but with a big brain. I also recall, during that and many other winters, the water clogging or freezing, the oil too expensive and the range very much off. Water came from mountain springs, travelling many blue-pipe miles to our home, a home stuck out in the beyond of beyond. I boiled kettles to wash my children, filling Belfast sinks in the old dairy or in the farmhouse kitchen and it worked like a genius because, with a few rubber ducks, some wooden spoons and loads of washing up liquid, they sat together, splashing and shrieking whilst I concocted a wholesome stew and tatties for an evening meal, whence I wheecked them out and into towels to eat. They liked being around me and I get that. Any of the five bathrooms were miles away and freezing. I would navigate around the abandoned calf within her straw bale warmth, bottle feed her from an old lemonade bottle (not with lemonade), check her eyes, ears, mouth, and then feed my family whilst she snuffled herself to sleep and whilst I wondered what the hec we were going to do with her.

In my life the scales unbalanced, and often, but here’s the thing. I like balance within myself. There may be none outside of me but within I will make it so. In the confusion of life, any life, the balance is in our hands. I believe it. At times the big bowl is too heavy, or too light against the weights and this demands a more weighty response. I know, I know, that scales are now the size of iPads and pocket friendly, but they weren’t once, so go with me on this because it represents balance more effectively. If there is a confrontation or a challenge, there is always that middle thing and it takes courage and determination to level. I cannot work out how to connect my new router. An example for you. The instructions presume I know new language. I don’t. So, my middle thing is to ask for help, after a long time spent beneath my old desk and among the cobwebs. I scrambled out, and up off my knees, and thought this. I have many talents but this is not one of them.

Himself always had a compass. It was within him. He knew where True North was, anywhere and any place in the world. He didn’t even have to look out, nor up. Whereas I might have been sailing across yet another sea and wondering where the hec we were, knowing he knew. However, he was not so good at compass bearing within a home space. Perhaps I clocked this, even though I was so young and so clueless about Farmer’s Wifedom, Motherhood and more. Perhaps I understood balance and wanted it for myself, my home, my marriage. I was never just the middle thing. I could land like a truck in the brass cradle, challenging him to find the weights. It didn’t always work. Men are shite at communicating feelings.

But what about now, about the chaos of life, the threats, the unsettling, the imbalance. Here’s what I think. We cannot change what is out there, but we can weigh the this and that of it, find the ounces, find singular balance. I tbelieve that the middle thing is personal choice. It was when I weighed my 4th baby in that storm, when I used my finger to level something that wasn’t quite scale-agreed. I think we are the middle thing.

Make the scales balance, with a finger, with choice, with attitude. And point true north with that finger.