Well hello there.

I think it might just be time to be back on here again. I’ve had ‘a bit of a day’ and I realise this neglected part of my life called writing, must come back to bring me some joy. I’ve just had a little wander round the blog and it’s 10 months since my last blog – oops!

There is a very good reason for that.  We only went and emigrated over to New Zealand again. Yep that’s some crazy beans we ate somewhere along the way eh. We’ve been back in the land of the long white cloud since September. Back in March – when I wrote my last blog – we were beginning to make plans to leave the UK, again.  That’s why there has been silence from me. First because I didn’t want to share until we knew what we were doing, then once we knew, I didn’t have time what with all the organising, packing and saying goodbye. Then we lived out of a suitcase for five months, first two months travelling around the UK, the rest camping in a rented house in New Zealand, setting up life again. Blogging was a luxury that had to go.

I’ve thought about blogging a lot through it all.  Thought what a missed opportunity it was to not share all the details and the emotions that we were going through. Literally.

I would be packing up my Jamie Oliver saucepans for the third time in six years and think to myself, I should share this crazy shizzle to make people feel better about their own life decisions. Or I’d be standing in a 20 row queue to have our bags checked through LA airport, looking at the deflated faces all around me, wishing I could sit my sweaty ass in a bath of ice and think, this could be a funny blog to make fun of the non-Disney like circus the Americans put us through. Or there was the day I couldn’t stop crying because I just wanted to buy a house, so I could unpack and find my Kitchen Aid. Woooh I had things to say that day.

So many moments, so many blogs. Didn’t happen.

To be honest, until about two weeks ago, I just wasn’t in the mood to write.  I wanted to write, but if I’d sat down to share some thoughts, I would have got up 30 seconds later to organise something or tick something off my to-do list.  When you emigrate, there is always a task to be done. I’m a task-orientated person, so I haven’t stopped since June.

I am likely to talk about some things on here eventually. I mean there is a lot of material:

• Emigrated – repatriated – emigrated
• Children attending five schools in two years
• The financial implications of moving around the world
• What it’s like to be a ping-pong pom
• Deciding where home is
• How parents decisions effect children’s mental health
• Choosing to put others first
• Leaving
• Arriving
• Disrupted careers
• Losing a parent and then getting on a plane and flying over to the other side of the world
• New Zealand verses Blighty
• Self-care when you’re life is out of your control
• Unimaginable levels of stress

The list goes on, but I need to work out what I think about all of the above and what I want to share. What I think will be encouraging to others and what is just me having a whinge. Plus now I have unpacked my Kitchen Aid, I can bake and I have discovered a lovely free-from chocolate cake that you’ll thank me for sharing.

Anyways I shall get to my point. The title of this blog.

Fight or flight. It’s an “acute stress response”. An American physiologist called Walter Cannon came up with the term in 1920.  He realised, “that a chain of rapidly occurring reactions inside the body helped to mobilise the body’s resources to deal with threatening circumstances.” Rapid heart beating and shallow breathing, pupils dilated, pale or flushed skin, trembling. The response dates back to cavemen, when they would face danger, like a dinosaur wanting to eat them. Today, in my privileged life, I experience it when I am in a stressful situation where I am not totally in control.  In the last 10 months that’s been a daily thing.

I realised on the weekend. When my gorgeous hubby tried to give me a spontaneous cuddle in the kitchen whilst I cooked dinner, and I batted him away because I ain’t got time for that non-task-accomplishing business. That I have become fixed in the fight or flight mode. Perhaps I needed to be for quite a while there, just to keep things working for the family. But we’re unpacked, my clothes are hanging up in the wardrobe, we have a routine, Christmas is over, we’re not planning anything. There is nowhere I need to sprint to like Tom Cruise running in an action movie. I can stop and have a cuddle.

For the first time in two years. We just have to live.