I AM MY HOUSE

I had a dream, or something, that woke me up last night.

I was hovering above a small family. They were walking home. They had bundles of bedding with them as though they'd been forced out but now they were coming home. I watched them round the corner to their street and it was gone. Bombed. I saw the man and boys stop in their tracks, just looking, and I heard her, the mother, begin to keen and wail and I felt a wrenching in my gut.

They say that when women give birth, there comes a moment when we feel connected to all other women who ever have, or ever will, go through that experience. I felt her pain in the same way, the universal depth to which we feel ourselves and our homes to be one. I knew that she felt - that I would feel - that to lose one's home is to be destroyed.

We can analyse that, say whether it is right or wrong, whether a woman is or should be more than what she does for her family but let's not. Let's just acknowledge what is.

I wrote the piece below because of that dream. Or whatever it was.