Yesterday myself and the girl Cups arrived in Spain, and something happened which has never happened to me in 47 years of travel, (if you consider my parents whisked me to Singapore aged 1 and my first holiday was Malaysia), I got pick pocketed, but although it’s a bit of a pain the loss of money, the hours in between have revealed a remarkable reality about what is considered loss in the ‘Dishwashing family’, and my heart and head are full of warmth and wonder at the wisdom of my darling Cups x

So we had just ordered dinner, I picked up my rucksack and realised my purse with my money was missing, (I keep my cards separate on travels), immediately my girls independently and intuitively announce they would trace their steps and check the room…

‘I was to sit and have my dinner’, they are calm and collected… We phone each other, no joy…

When they return I say to them, ‘let’s not panic, it’s only money, it’s a warning to be mindful, it could be worse, one of us could be lost’, then we chat about our trip to Malaysia and Nora who is missing, (heartbreak of loss)…we eat our dinner ravenously, we are starving…

As we sit together later on in the evening Alex and I chat and I say to her, ‘I like to feel that our money will be supporting a person or family in need and we have to allow the universe the money’. She agrees and recalls how in Kenya on her project last year they realised people stole to feed themselves, ‘it may not be correct’, Alex said but it didn’t make them bad… then Niks floats into the conversation from the other room and announces, ‘maybe someone needed the money’, she agrees with our reasoning…

We then chat about loss and how their ‘benchmark’ for loss is perhaps a lot higher than most people with loosing their dad to cancer’…

I know as a Dishwashing Family we may have been given an early, enlightenment as ‘to what it really means to loose’…and as awful as our loss was and is, it now means we are living a life of ‘reasoned rich reality’, which is not ‘marred or masked’ in ‘material or mindless want or worry’.

We awoke this morning to an alfresco breakfast, we are happy, we are healthy, and I am a hopeless romantic who believes she has two amazing, aspired adults in the making’

…and I can’t quite believe that ‘we made them and they really are mine’ xox