DON'T SKIP THE SADNESS

I’ve been sitting with whether to share anything at all.

Part of me wants to fold this time away and keep it close. Perhaps it’s the Englishness in me — that quiet instinct that says not to make a fuss, to stay private, to carry on.

But I’ve also spent years sharing pieces of life and the feelings that sit beneath it all, because that is where my work has always lived. Home, belonging, beauty, love, the ordinary things that somehow become the most important things.

I read a line recently: don’t skip the sadness.

And it stayed with me.

There is a pressure, sometimes, to move quickly through grief. To find perspective. To arrive at something tidy and resolved. But some things ask us to stay with them longer. To let them be what they are.

When Mum was diagnosed, I thought grief would begin after death...that there would be a clear before and after. I didn’t realise how much in between there would be. How grief can begin long before someone has gone.

The knowing.

The waiting.

The measuring of time.

I thought we had forever.

We didn’t.

My nan lived until 99, Mum was only 77.

But I also keep thinking about the way Mum lived.

Mum loved a peaceful life. She noticed the small things. Music in the background. Family gathered in kitchens. Homemade cakes, costumes stitched together with care. Holidays that became stories we still tell. A way of making ordinary life feel held.

She created a sense of home for us that was full of colour and warmth and belonging.

And somewhere along the way, I think I began searching for my own version of that.

Not to recreate what she gave us — but to understand what home means when you are no longer a child.

Maybe that is part of why I have always been drawn to making work about home, feeling, and belonging. Not as a direct inheritance, but as a question I’ve kept returning to.

What does it mean to create a heart of home that you can belong inside as an adult?

Since saying goodbye to Mum, I’ve been learning to move through the days more gently.

Drinking coffee.

Looking out of windows.

Resting when I need to.

Not skipping the sadness.

And I’m learning that grief and gratitude can sit beside one another without cancelling each other out.

Maybe love was always big enough to hold both.

Love you Mum x