It’s been a long time again. Sorry. Forgive me. Life does this. It hasn’t been rolling along uneventfully. For a while perhaps, but not now.

In November 2025, I stopped using my walker full time, 8 months post surgery. So it was a slow, sometimes unforgiving recovery. But it was so necessary, so worthwhile. I am without the pain I lived with for so many years, thinking there was no way out. By November, I was ready to be me again, to start getting what I want out of this life of mine.

In December 2025, I applied for my first job since being put on furlough from my admin job in April 2020, five months pregnant with Gabster.

It was a role as a learning support assistant in the primary school my girls attend. I haven’t worked in a school since 2014, so didn’t rate my chances. I respect the staff there so just wanted to respect myself in the same way by simply seeing if I could get myself in the room. After all, it is the job I loved the most. So when I was offered an interview, I put my whole heart into the prep. I had to pick a story to read. Immy Squidge helped me pick out a book she loved and sat through many rehearsals with the teeny, tiny props.

Two weeks before Christmas, I got the job. I didn’t quite believe it, though I was buoyed up by the support of the wonderful headteacher there. He isn’t formal, he talks to you as a human and just like the children in his care every day, he clearly wants to see the best in you. I really like and respect that about him and though disbelieving when he called to offer me the job, I was so pleased. After 11 years away from the classroom, someone could still see the passion in me.

The next day, Kev, the girls & I travelled to Birmingham for the weekend, resplendent in our Christmas jumpers to enjoy Gladiators Live, the LEGOland Discovery Centre and Cadbury World. It ws just the best weekend, full of fun, care and just being together. I don’t think I could have known how much I’d need that to draw on.

I applied for the job driven by the memories of how I enjoyed doing it before. I just wanted to see if I could still talk about it with the same love. I’d had to step away eventually because I needed a better paid job in order to be able to get a mortgage, otherwise I would have happily done it forever.

But having stepped away for so long, I didn’t give any thought to what it would be like to go back. I couldn’t. I knew if I thought about it too long, I’d come up with the reasons I couldn’t now. And I so desperately wanted to try.  I wanted to bring money into my family, to be able to provide something. I wanted to feel useful, busy. Once I got the job, that was it. I was going to do the job because someone saw that I was still good enough to do it.

I should have thought about it. I really should have. Only up on my own two feet without the walker about 7 weeks by the time I started working full time for the first time in more than 10 years. I didn’t really consider what my body had been through in the past many months. I was so driven by the hunger in my mind for stimuli, I rightly (& wrongly) assumed my body would just carry me through because the part of me that lived in my mind as opposed to my body, that part of Jo really wanted to be good in this environment again.

It was only a six month contract to the end of the school year in July and I had a plan. With more recent experience with children on my CV, I wanted to move on to my Masters at last, to feed my mind.

My first day went by in a blur of names, getting used to responding to my married name; I was still using my maiden name the last time I worked in the classroom; and learning where everything was kept. I felt swept up and everything felt more familiar.

At the end of my first day, Kev noted that he’d expected me to be smiling. Wasn’t I? My brain felt alight for the first time in a long time. But by the end of the first week, with extra meetings and training to help me hit the ground running, my body was sounding the alarm.  

But I’m needed even more now, there are expectations on me as a professional again. There’s another thing I hadn’t considered. I hadn’t had a full time job since Squidge was born in 2016. The maths, as they say, weren’t math’ing. Very quickly, it became clear there wasn’t enough of any of my resources to go around. Enough time. Enough energy. Even enough balance. I fell. I hurt.

How on Earth was I going to make this work?