Rewilding in 2022: 2nd Progress Report - Touching the Wild

This season, I went vegetarian. I'd been kicking the idea around for a while, and my close friend Alice stopped eating meat after working in packing for an online food shop over Christmas and being slightly freaked out by the vast scale of naked, shrink-wrapped poultry she was faced with night after night. I'd tried to cut down my meat for a while, but found that, in a bid to prove to Dai that I wasn't 'depriving myself', the consequence was that I actually ended up eating more meat.

Then I took the Spud to visit some farm animals. The Spud has this real thing about sheep, and after a morning of watching him cuddle the lambs and brush their soft baby fleeces and feed them a milk bottle... Well, I was ruined for the Sunday roast, that was for sure. It's not been an easy adjustment in a mixed household where we generally all eat together, but I just can't eat meat any more, so we'll have to get to grips with it.

It could be argued that a vegetarian diet doesn't work well alongside a plan to rewild. Our ancestors, and many indigenous peoples around the world, of course eat meat, and any attempt to hark back to a less artificially complex, less industrialised lifestyle would surely involve some sustainable meat or game? I can see the logic in this argument, but even if I wanted to keep eating dead creatures for my own sensory pleasure, which I don't, we are also facing a looming climate crisis, and as an environmentalist I really can't justify personally eating meat either. So. There we go. I guess it's a modern, millennial kind of rewilding that I am doing here. But I'll take it!

Leena Norms has an absolutely fab, entirely non-judgemental, non-pushy video which sums up a lot of my reasoning around choosing this diet - here it is. 

One conflict I had this season was fairly laughable. In general we're not a daytime TV household, but I found that when I wanted to roll out my yoga mat in the morning, the best way to avoid being maimed by a toddler trying to "help" me into my poses was to flick Bluey on for half an hour. Except, when I then wanted to turn Bluey off again so we could get on with our day, all hell broke loose. Navigating the storms of tantrums and tears each morning made the yoga practice much less relaxing than it should have been (and the sound of Bluey and Bingo chirping away in the background was surprisingly hard to tune out during savasana), but I had noticed a difference in my strength and flexibility after only a few weeks of fairly disciplined home practice, and really wanted to keep going with it. Attempts to encourage the Spud into the garden or sandpit instead were met with dismissal on all but the sunniest of days. I'll let you know if I ever find a solution to this one!

On the topic of the garden, my feral approach to gardening was providing some interesting results. In the spring we discovered that our garden was full of bluebells, and I thanked my lucky stars that I hadn't just gone blundering in and weeded away everything in sight. It was also full of stinging nettles, but I was quite reluctant to pull those out, much to the confusion of visitors, as I had read that they're an important habitat for caterpillars and butterflies.

Our bird feeder had finally caught on amongst the local bird community, and we were welcoming blue tits, robins, blackbirds, and a variety of little brown guys that I'm not quick enough to tell apart. Unfortunately, the birds also ate our peas and beans, and the feeder also attracted a sleek, golden-brown rat, who at time of writing has taken up residence under our shed and can often be seen sitting beside our humane rat trap with what I'm certain is amusement. I know rats in the garden aren't ideal, but I'm reluctant to introduce poison into the environment, especially with my child around. It's also not the rat's fault we don't want it there, so we're persevering with humane traps and deterrents for now. We also have a resident hedgehog, which really surprised me as we live quite centrally in town and border a busy road. And a squirrel who races through the trees every morning as if commuting to work. 

Unfortunately we also have a large number of field mice, who set up camp in the house (and ate my husband's Easter eggs, much to his disappointment) - we tried catching them and releasing them far away, but they bred faster than we could trap them. Eventually we found ourselves adopting two lovely cats from someone who couldn't keep them any more. Dai mainly wanted a rodent deterrent, as sweeping up mouse poo is no one's idea of a good time. The Spud and I were excited to have family pets to stroke and fuss over. So everyone wins.

Social media has been my biggest bugbear lately. I've now got two different apps on my phone to try to help me manage my usage, and I find that I'm either turning them off, uninstalling them when they prove inconvenient, or simply opening social media in my tablet browser. This is such a big step backwards and I'm really not enjoying it. I don't want to be the kind of person who chooses their destinations by what will make the best photo. I don't like courting followers, and in all honesty I'm slightly alarmed by my propensity for oversharing. A lot of my close friends have recently stopped using Facebook and Instagram, just as I'm probably the most active I've ever been, and I'm steeling myself to follow their example. I might lose followers. I might lose book sales. But if I carry on on this trajectory, I feel I'm losing a lot more than that.

It's not all bad news though. The defining event of this season for me was my long-anticipated wedding. It was a glorious day, made even more special by the people who came together to share the celebration with us, and on a very personal note it was really the first time I was able to see how far I've come since starting this blog. I never realised that reducing my consumption was going to be a personal development project more than a financial one, and yet over the last couple of years my confidence has skyrocketed. I've learned that no one is watching and judging me because everyone is busy judging and monitoring themselves. I've learned that perfection is overrated and boring. And I'm lucky enough to be surrounded and loved by people who are supportive, open, free-spirited and kind. 

When I realised I couldn't dance in my wedding gown I changed into a vest top and harem pants. My bra had carved red divots around my ribcage, so I decided 'sod it' and took it off. I then spent the evening dancing with my friends, or by myself, without fear or self-consciousness. At one point, on my way to the toilets, I heard the throb of music from up a flight of stairs and followed it to find a live band in the building next door, where I danced with strangers on a floor strewn with golden stars.

On the weekend of our wedding, I walked barefoot on new territory. I worked a lock on the canal. I stood atop a long barrow and felt the wind stream through my hair. I saw my friends' faces bathed in firelight; I felt the prick of bird claws on my hands and legs; I drank mead with Druids; did yoga in a yurt; danced the Macarena with a flock of Goths.

I have tasted the wild. I have found the bigger life that waited on the other side of my inhibitions. 

Dai's interest in history has helped me widen my horizons, connect to the landscape, and begin to see my home country in new ways. Parenthood has changed my sense of self and taught me the breadth and depth of my endurance and strength. Growing older has taught me about seizing the moment and forging memories with those we love. Trying to reduce my consumption has led me to an animistic worldview and re-engaged my creativity.

Now that I have touched the edges of the kind of life I want to be living, I am more determined than ever to get there. I love the person I am becoming, and I am so excited to see what comes next.

Inspirational reads this season:

Strong, Calm and Free by Nicola Jane Hobbs

Dandelion Hunter by Rebecca Lerner

Going Zero by Kate Hughes

Sustainable Minimalism by Stephanie Marie Seferian

The Planet-Friendly Kitchen by Karen Edwards

Burnout

In April, I mostly felt like shit - not to put too fine a point on it. I'd had a moderate-to-severe headache on a daily basis for about a month, which wouldn't shift despite new glasses, a new pillow, herbal teas, earlier bedtimes, yoga, and drinking enough water to float a small battleship. I was popping more painkillers than I felt comfortable with just to stay functional.

I guess I shouldn't have been surprised - I had a lot on my mind. We were applying for a mortgage, and it had taken close to five months to get to a stage where we could actually submit the application to the underwriters. I'd kind of accepted that the whole thing wasn't going to come off, and we were going to keep living in our crumbling, single-glazed beige shoebox for astronomical rent (you get used to taps and towel rails coming off in your hand and the arctic wind through the lounge, but the window that could be pushed outwards like a cat flap was a bit of a problem, and the electrician doing a safety inspection was rather startled by the plug socket that lit up orange and spat sparks). Except suddenly it was starting to look like we might actually be buying a house, and I started looking at our library of books, mountains of baby toys and antique farmhouse table in a sort of dazed panic, wondering how on earth we were ever going to move it all.

Then there was the wedding. We had postponed it twice and then eventually cancelled when our venue called us to say they were no longer sure whether they would be able to honour our booking and wouldn't find out until a few weeks before the wedding date. We decided not to take the gamble. Now that the COVID madness looked to be drawing to a close in this country, the gears were grinding into motion again as we looked at starting from scratch. Our current plan is a quick legal ceremony with immediate family (possibly with me wearing my tie-dye dungarees if we are able to get a date before I can finish having my dress tailored) and then a handfasting next May, followed by as many very casual receptions as it takes to celebrate with all our friends and family depending on how many people we are allowed to gather together at any given time. 

This time I'm trying to do things in a stress-free way - no seating plans, no chasing people who don't respond to invitations, no printed invitations in fact. No make-up artist, no fancy caterer, no favours - just a nice pub with a Pagan bent and an interesting supply of local ales, and a meaningful ceremony followed by laughter and song and merrymaking into the night.

Except I was stressing about my no-stress wedding, because a good chunk of the extended family didn't know I'm Pagan, or at least Pagan-adjacent, and at least one of those people really, really doesn't do religion or spirituality of any kind and could almost certainly be counted on to say something that will make me feel three inches tall and stupid to boot. And I couldn't just not invite this person, for a variety of reasons, so I was trying to forge ahead without worrying about it and let their issues be their own, but that was easier said than done. (It came out all right in the end!)

Lastly there's parenting. This is generally not too bad, except we've rarely had an unbroken night's sleep in two and a half years and counting (this seems to be improving lately - hooray!) and apart from the occasional weekend when Topaz babysits for an afternoon, that's also roughly the amount of time since Dai and I were alone together. My personal time, now that Dai was on call again and couldn't do regular childcare stints, consisted of an hour a week when a family friend took the Spud to the park and I desperately tried to make the house less gross. Lately I'd managed to use that time to do yoga and meditation instead, which helps somewhat - the house can take its chances - but overall I think I was just... burning out.

My mind was full of questions and worries - about the environment, my family, our finances, some downright stupid but extraordinarily persistent ones about what to buy or to not buy. It was also close to the birthday of a dear friend who had taken her own life, and I found myself sitting awake at 2am thinking about how she always wore blue or turquoise or teal, or wondering whether it would have changed anything if I'd phoned on the Sunday instead of putting it off till Monday... So yeah, I hadn't been sleeping well.

In May we had a ten-day holiday booked. It would have been our honeymoon, but since we hadn't managed to get married yet I was calling it the Unhoneymoon. I decided to use that time as a kind of retreat - I'd figure out how to set up an autoreply on my personal emails, put my phone on aeroplane mode and ACTUALLY DISCONNECT and have a rest. No mortgage brokers. No solicitors. No estate agents. 

I was going to be present. I was going to play with my kid instead of trying to clean house around him. I was going to eat well and keep drinking lots of water. I'd even pack my yoga mat. I was going to go to sleep on time and not stay up late reading blogs and Kindle samples and browsing eBay for those beautiful rainbow skirts I never should have got rid of (I'd noticed my technology use shooting up again the last couple of months). I was going to retreat, reset, and get rid of this damned headache.

(The other solution I found was writing down all the weird niggles and worries that tumble round my head at night. It was like sweeping my brain clean! And that's how this post was born.)

The Curse of the Pinterest Wedding

By the time Dai and I got engaged, two years ago this month, I had been living free from disordered eating behaviours for four years, and I believed that I was fairly comfortable in myself. Post-baby, my weight had gone up quite a bit (or at least, my dress size had - I don't own a set of scales), but I quite liked having a softer, curvier figure and I wasn't bothered by my stretch marks. Birth was the most incredible, awful, arduous thing I had ever undergone - it seemed only logical that it would leave a mark behind.

I thought I was pretty happy with myself and had avoided the traps and pitfalls laid by the industries who profit from getting women to feel badly about their appearance. I don't do diets, ever - my eating is intuitive. I only buy products that I enjoy applying and that don't hurt or make me feel bad about myself - so no waxing, cellulite creams or anti aging products but lots of beautifully scented skincare with natural ingredients (I love Lush, because they don't market to a particular gender, they try to be low-impact, and their products smell great and are a joy to use), massage oils, botanical indie perfumes and really pretty eyeshadow. 

However, the February before the shopping ban I discovered that the beauty standards of the dominant culture can get in your head without you noticing, and smack you across the chops out of the blue, leaving you in tears over the way you look. For me, it was the day I tried on my wedding dress.

I'd taken a risk and ordered a dress online, from a dress designer on Etsy. I was so excited when it arrived - it was beautifully packaged too, with pink and blue confetti hearts spilling out of the box as I lifted yards of tulle gently, reverently into my arms.

I'd thought it would take me months and months to find a dress. I wanted tulle. I wanted blush pink. I wanted a long train. I wanted buttons, not a corset-style lace-up back. And I found it the first day of looking. I'd never imagined myself in a strapless wedding dress, let alone a ballgown - too traditional - but on the model it looked like something from a fairytale. I remember catching my breath and thinking, I'd really feel like a BRIDE in that dress.

But when I tried it on, I didn't feel like a bride at all. I felt like a frumpy troll. What an idiot I had been, to buy such a feminine dress, when I was such a great ugly lump. The wedding guests would fall about laughing.

I rang my mum in tears. "I hate the dress," I sobbed. "It'll have to go back." But I felt sick. If I didn't feel happy in a lovingly handmade fairytale gown that ticked all my boxes, what would it take?

Luckily for me (and my dress), my bridesmaids came swooping to the rescue. They stuffed me back into the dress and took photos while I laughed and smiled with them. When they showed me the pictures, the troll I'd seen in the mirror was gone. The laughing woman in the photos was radiant and joyful. She wasn't the slim blonde model from the website, she was me, with my bad skin and more teeth than a happy beaver, but I was glowing, and I looked great. The dress looked great on me, baby weight, henna-ed hair, tattoos and all.

I realised I'd been freaking out because I didn't look like an airbrushed model. I'd swallowed the wedding propaganda hook, line and sinker, and I'd beaten myself up because I didn't think I looked how a bride "should look". I was so disappointed that I had nearly let poor self-image and stupid, stupid patriarchal beauty standards affect our big day, and surprised, too - recovered from disordered eating, I was usually pretty relaxed about my looks, and I was shocked by my own visceral reaction and the surge of shame and disgust I had felt. Unrealistic expectations and picture-perfect overstyled social media weddings had a lot to answer for.

The Great Dress Debacle was not the only occasion during wedding planning when I felt the pressure for things to be perfect, and I had to make it my mission to let go of impossible standards. As my experiences in motherhood, and my mismatched wardrobe (after my ill-fated spending splurge and clearout, when I fell off the shopping ban wagon), were fast teaching me, if you try to micromanage every detail and make everything perfect in every way, you're on the road to disappointment. I had to forget perfection and just get on with having a good time. Screw Pinterest weddings. I was going to aim for fun, memorable, and ending the day legally married to the man I loved. If there was something blue at my wedding, it damn sure wasn't going to be me.

So I didn't attend a bridal bootcamp. Actually, I didn't go on a wedding diet at all. I chose to do my own nails with funky wraps from Espionage Cosmetics, chose hot pink glitter Vans over high heels, my bouquet was... No, I won't tell you that, or there'll be no surprises!... and my biggest and most indulgent splurge was custom lingerie of my own design made by Buttress and Snatch, whose beautiful fripperies I'd coveted for years. Instead of panicking over everyone looking at me, I kept telling myself "they've all seen you before! They know what you look like!" and kept on doing what would make me and Dai happy, whether it would look good on social media or not.

Don't get me wrong, I still had wobbles. I nearly had a meltdown at a wedding fayre wishing we could afford an events designer to make the reception hall into an enchanted forest (with white blossom trees on the tables, tea lights in glass globes hanging from their branches, and gold lace table cloths... It WAS beautiful, I admit), but there was just no way we could shoehorn it into the budget. Instead we planned our own decor for the cost of just one such arrangement, with dried flowers from a local florist, beer bottles we rather enjoyed sourcing ourselves, wooden rounds handmade by a friend working in woodland management, and little succulents in pots. 

When you plan a wedding, you'll never please everyone. Assorted relatives offered "helpful" criticism during the planning stages, and we had to learn to shrug it off and carry on regardless. I eventually came to realise that everyone's 'perfect' wedding would be different. This one was going to be chaotic, colourful, quirky, utterly imperfect (trying to coordinate wedding outfits whilst still breastfeeding multiple times a night led to little quirks such as the groom's buttonhole clashing with the bride's hair ornaments... All you can do then is own it like you did it on purpose) and OURS.

I could have sweated over every detail. I could have bought matching floral robes for the bridesmaids for a single getting-ready photo. I could have hired a car for a grand entrance, got hair extensions, dieted into a smaller dress, fake tanned, mani-pedi-ed, Wonderbra'd, freaked out about every pimple and pore. Blown the budget on a candy floss machine and a temporary tattoo station and a photo booth and a doughnut wall and a personalised cocktail menu and vintage tea cups as favours... And it still could never be perfect, because there's rain and mud and breast milk, ill-timed farts and stray eyebrow hairs, and who the heck would I be trying to impress anyway? Strangers on the internet, or my friends and family who love me already and really wouldn't notice the lack of a rose gold balloon arch? 

My friend Topaz noted in the bridesmaid group chat that I looked "like a majestic jellyfish queen" in my wedding dress. Indeed. And what more could any woman want? 

As it turned out, I was grateful I chose to take the philosophical approach. Our wedding was planned for May 6th, 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic was newly devastating the country. We don't know yet when our wedding will happen, or what it might eventually look like, but all I can do is continue trying not to get my knickers in a twist over things that are out of my control.

Thank heavens for wedding insurance.