The following piece was awarded First Prize in the OU Students Association Welcome Week Writing Competition for Welcome Week 2024 (28 Sept – 6 Oct). The author is Sarah, who lives in Middlesbrough and is studying MSC Psychology .
You’re just a mum now, that’s all you are. Those beautiful little people you created are now your soul. All of you. Your name replaced with …mum, stored in a phone with a million other play dates. Your emails plagued with requests for another £1 coin, a costume last minute, 20,000 toilet roll middles. The school runs, being the nurse, the teacher, the referee. You blink and six years have gone by and that ‘few months’ you expected of not putting yourself even 17th let alone first has expanded and continued. You don’t really know who ‘you’ is beyond the snot wiping and cuddles. So you start to explore the idea, and most things seem impossible, to continue to be ‘Mum’ and work enough to feed and clothe your little gremlins is a juggling act a clown couldn’t maintain. Then you find something you can do that with some acrobatic and flexing that brings just a small amount of ‘you’ back! My children will always be my world but my masters course has just opened up my universe to be that little bit bigger.
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