Well.........hello strangers!!

Im sorry its been a while since I blogged - I have been through some personal changes (WTF did you expect from me!!!)

erm....well....I promised to get back to the story of the navy love rat....and I wont let you down, but I just wanna fill you in on whats been going on the last few months.....

1) The big news - the worst news - is that my son has been diagnosed with a rare heart condition called "wolff parkinson white syndrome". He's OK - it can be fatal, but mostly it can be controlled by drugs, or an operation. I dont fully understand it all at the moment - we have an appointment with the paediatrician in September and I intend to give him a full grilling then.....in the meantime, "spuds" is doing well and coping VERY well with it all - much better than his mother, im having a nervous breakdown inside, but im trying to hide it............

2) My BF has cheated on me twice in the last 4 months - I only found out about them both recently - they are both ex girlfriends of his back in Birmingham. Totally devastated. Not much more to say on this. We are still together, trying to work through it..........im not sure I want to work through it, to be honest, but until my son is better im afraid im taking the easy route and just getting on with things at the mo

3) Ive wound up my business - its not been performing too well, as we have had a rotten summer (weatherwise!) and ive not been able to get to as many fairs as I would have like because of my personal life. Im not sad about it - its had its time and im looking forward to new challenges.............

4) My latest challenge being that I am retraining - taking my career in a new direction......................ive only gone and got a part time job as a trainee fishmonger!! I LOVE LOVE LOVE it - my boyfriend hates it - says its not feminine, but seeing as he has cheated on me I figure he can go f@ck himself frankly (well, instead of other people....)...............I like it. SO THERE!

5) Thats all folks.................im now going to remove the blackhead strip from my nose and get ready for work. Hope you all well and OK - i will blog again asap - promise!!

Oh, and if any of you want to get in contact - heartbeauty@live.co.uk - id love to hear from you!

Smoking is bad for you....

So anyway - there i am, the council had moved me to the roughest part of Ashford, but I was soo glad to get outta that house (which did end up being repossesed, by the way) that i wasnt even bovvered - new flat, new start. Simples.

Life was pretty good there actually - my flat (actually a maisonette, with two HUGE bedrooms ) was spacious, my neighbours were lovely - a german couple on one side who didnt really say much but always smiled and a younger couple of newlyweds on the other - very friendly, they were. We had a top floor flat, which did give us wonderful views over the Kent Countryside, and if the lift was either broken or had kids pooing in it or teenagers sh*gging, well that didnt matter either coz there was a staircase - and to my mind I needed the exercise anyway!!

So we settled in, me and my son, Arnie and Daphne had long since passed, but we were blessed with a house rabbit called Allie, who used a litter tray and attacked people when you opened the door to them (handy when you live on such a rough estate!) My son started school and I met a fella (possibly one of the shortest relationships in history - one day ((IE just after our first date in the local Wetherspoons)) he took me out on the balcony and announced that he was a "smoker". Yuck, I thought, followed by "well as long as he doesnt do it in the house, or near stu, then I will learn to live with it". Unfortunately when he told me that he was a "smoker" I hadnt realised he meant the "wacky backy" and was horrified when I found him the next day on the balcony outside my flat stoned out of his head at 3.20pm just as I was walking stu home from school. So that ended that. Not one of the great romances......!!

It was hard but I managed to save a few pennies from my wages at the old peoples home and took stu on holiday to Butlins at Bognor - we got a single parent discount and had a great time - except there was this one couple who had about 5 kids who decided that because I was a SINGLE PARENT I must be REALLY LONELY and they basically stalked me the whole week we were there......I couldnt go to the bog without the mother putting her arm through mine and asking if I WAS OK? or if I was LONELY? or asking if I was bored ON MY OWN?! Like I was some suicidal nutter or something (thank god she hadnt met me two years before....!!!!) Anyway, despite the stalking, it was a great holiday and I will always remember it as the time my stu made his stage debut - he fell in love with the show the Blues Brothers that the redcoats put on everynight and he turned up for every performance, front row with his black shades on and wouldnt take them off. In the end the inevitable happened and they had him up on stage for one of their numbers - im still busting with pride to this day!!!! Thanks to all the Redcoats - you guys work bloody hard and we had an awesome time..xx

My parents, as ever, were supportive in their own way - mum bought stu and I tickets for Disneyland Paris on Valentines day - its not like I had to wait in for the Postman! I will never forget this trip- mainly because it was so bloody cold (there was ice on the lake around the princess castle!) but also because it was the first time I really laughed hard since the biological one and I had split up - we went on some pirate boat ride and stu really enjoyed it until it came to the last bit, when the boat goes down a small "waterfall". Well, stu flipped out!! He stood up and shouted to everybody to get off the boat "OH No! We are IN DANGER EVERYONE" I hardly noticed the waterfall - was trying not to pmsl and what with all the french ride attendants screaming "assez vous assez vous" (or something like that!) and trying to cling onto stu, it was a hell of a ride! Not quite as bad as when he got out of his bumper car to thump the french kid that "bumped" him, but nearly........!

So yes, although we were evacuated from our flat nearly every night because some tosser fell asleep with the chip pan on and although I (briefly) dated a pot head, and you couldnt use the lifts because of the sh*gging and the pooing, it was good times here......i genuinly have nothing but fond memories............

Then I met the love of my life (well, he was at the time.........!!) and my world got turned upside down...................

How to become a single mum....

I guess I should call this post "how to be a single mum - whether you like it or not"!!

Well, in a nutshell, I didnt like it....my lovely son was conceived by "accident" (make of that what you will!) At the time, I was working in folkestone for Le Shuttle Holidays (the holidays department for the newly opened Eurotunnel) Not to boast - but it was a fantastic time for me - I worked with the most amazing people, I would go into the office on a Monday and the boss "M" would say - "the opening of the tunnel has been delayed, we need to do something with you guys, so we are sending you to St Tropez for a week - go and visit some hotels and write about it for the Euro magazine"

So off we would go - you cant imagine the chaos - 14 girls and a gay admin supervisor ("P") in a minibus off to the south of france....only it wasnt always the south of france, sometimes it was Belgium (claim to fame - I shook the hand of the tour guide who gave Arnold Schwarzenneger a tour of Brugge when he was Mr Universe - there may be bigger claims to fame out there - but I doubt it.....!) or Holland - urgh! spent 3 weeks in Holland with my work partner in crime "Mo" and I was puking the whole time - which was when the penny dropped that I had a serious medical problem (didnt occur to me I was pregnant!) I thought I had stomach cancer (i can be a little dramatic and plain thick sometimes........)

So, it was a good life - living in Folkestone right next to the beach (my rent was £30 a week!! How times have changed!!), freebie trips abroad, it was just me and my one eared hamster, Arnie (yes i love that austrian film star!) against the world.

Id been seeing this guy - for 3 years - it wasnt serious but we were committed to each other when I fell pregnant....so he did the right thing, became Mr Committment, we bought a house back in Ashford and I left work so I could play mommy - which was something I loved (playing mommy, not leaving work - i missed my friends)

So there we were, 21 years old, mortgage, baby, 2 hamsters (i got arnie a gf called Daphne) and we were broke and sliding into thousands of pounds worth of debt to keep the wolf from the door and inevitably things broke down.............we were arguing a lot, had had a few "mini" breaks from each other - ie he left and went back to his mothers. Only I was so happy and in love with my bf and my baby that I hadnt realised how bad things had got.......till one day (and I SWEAR it happened just like this) my ex (or "The Biological one" as my sis calls him!) Ate his dinner in front of the TV, put his plate down on the floor, told me he was going out "for a while"........and that was the last I saw of him for 3 weeks.

He wouldnt take my calls at work, he wouldnt come home and he wouldnt tell his mother where he was staying......and im gullible......but genuinly believe it when he tells me a year later that for those 3 weeks he stayed in a tent in the woods .... i dont think he had anyone else, i think he had a breakdown - up to that point he had been a good bf and a good father - I just think he lost the plot somewhere along the way, had a breakdown

I guess on the plus side - it woke me up.........i did all the normal bridgette jones breakup things - drank wine, lost soooo much weight, dyed my hair blonde (it DID NOT suit me!!) Moved back in with my mother (awkward, that one....!). Got a part time job in a care home..........

Anyway all this time the Biological one didnt give us a bean in financial or emotional help......he said he needed a break and didnt want access to his son.....then a few weeks later he said we could live back in the house, which would have been great for us, as frankly moving back in with ones parents is difficult to say the least....and im quite sure they were sick of me too!

So we moved back into the house. The bio one and I had been seperated for just over a year at this point......and things settled down for a while...........until I found out that he had stopped paying the mortgage..........and got his gf up the duff...........long story short - horrible time in my life - he basically stalked me for ages - turning up at the house in the middle of the night, demanding to see his baby son at 1 in the morning (then smashing my head against the wall when I refused to let him go up the stairs) , kicking the front door in, sleeping on the end of my bed whilst I was in it (how creepy is THAT?!)

Eventually I got driven to a breakdown and begged the council to re-house me and son on the basis that our lives were endangered.....and I mean I lost the plot - I still loved him - I was about to be made homeless, bailiffs were knocking on the door, he had got someone else pregnant, and the only time he came to see me he either hit me or threatened me........i stopped eating......wouldnt leave the house. I even got the bloody Chicken Pox.....bless remember my mother dropping off food parcels at the front door and then running across the road before I opened the front door so she didnt catch it from me.....! I dont know why i stayed - i could have gone back to my parents.....stuborness? breakdown? I think I was just incapable of making a decision like that......little did I know that this was just the start of my problems......!!

BUT - here ends chapter one.......coz in the next thrilling installment i'll tell you all about the trials and laughter of being a single mother on the notorious stanhope council estate in ashford - imaging "Shameless" but with more stabbings, more drugs and some of the nicest people you can imagine - and i mean that from the heart.....