How leaving my hometown helped me get my life back

I began to feel hemmed in by the city while pregnant with my second child. Now, five years after embracing rural living, it still feels thrillingly new

I was 37 and pregnant with my second child when I started to get an uneasy feeling that I could see down a straight line to old age. I had been working for the same company for 13 years and still lived not far from where I grew up in north-east London.

I had always been a homebody – even when I was at university I came home for the holidays. But now, “living the dream” with a family, a flat and a cat, I felt hemmed in for the first time. While I wouldn’t say I had had postnatal depression, my sense of self had disappeared during early motherhood, along with any aptitude for life-affirming spontaneity. The idea of not disrupting this trajectory made me squirm.

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from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2WNHIEc