A New Space for Reflection

The Lessons Life Has Quietly Taught Me

Over the years, I’ve walked many different paths — some filled with love, some shaped by loss, and others that simply unfolded in their own quiet way. Each chapter has taught me something, even when I didn’t realise it at the time. Little truths. Gentle reminders. Moments that changed me in ways I only understand now.

Life Chapters is a space for those reflections. Not tied to grief, or Nan Notes, or my army‑wife years — just the simple, honest lessons that life has handed me along the way. The things I’ve learned about myself, about others, and about the world as I’ve grown, stumbled, loved, and carried on.

These posts won’t be stories so much as small truths — the kind you only notice when you look back with a softer heart. I hope they sit gently alongside everything else I write, another thread in the tapestry of who I am becoming.

Love,
Angie xx

Where the Words Begin

Thoughts From the Edges of Two Books

Writing has always been a way for me to make sense of the paths I’ve walked — the joy, the grief, the resilience, the love. I have two books growing quietly in the background of my life: one about being a Nan to my grandson in heaven, and another about my years as an army wife, “Wife of 5347.” Both are at different stages, both close to my heart, and both shaped by the woman I’ve become.

Behind the Books is a place to share the gentle beginnings of those stories — the thoughts, the sparks, the memories, the moments that inspire the writing long before the chapters are finished. Not drafts, not full scenes, just the heartbeat behind the words.

It’s a space for the journey, not the polished pages. A place where I can talk about what it feels like to write from love, from loss, from memory, and from truth. I hope it gives you a soft glimpse into the stories I’m slowly gathering, one quiet moment at a time.

Love,
Angie xx

I used to wonder if my writing should stay in one lane — one topic, one part of my life. But life isn’t lived that neatly. We don’t stay in one chapter forever. We grow in different directions, sometimes all at once, sometimes without even realising it.

So I’ve stopped trying to fit myself into a single space. I write from wherever I am — Nan, wife, woman, writer. Some days I’m looking back. Some days I’m learning forward. Some days I’m simply sitting with whatever life has placed in my hands.

Every chapter has its place. Every chapter has something to teach me. And when I look at it all together, I realise something simple and steady — different chapters, same heart.

Love,
Angie xx

Where Love Learns Its Shape
Two Grandsons, Two Paths, One Nan’s Heart

Some chapters of our lives teach us things we never expected to learn — and becoming Nan to Lucian and Saxon has been one of those quiet, transformative lessons for me. I love them both with the same depth, the same devotion, the same fierce tenderness… yet I’ve had to learn to show that love in two very different ways.

Lucian, who was placed in my arms as a baby and then taken far too soon, taught me how to love through memory, through presence that isn’t physical, through the kind of connection that lives in the heart rather than the hands. My love for him is woven into the spaces he never got to fill — the birthdays, the milestones, the moments that live only in imagination and longing. Loving him has meant honouring him, speaking his name, carrying him forward in the quiet ways only a Nan can.

Saxon, here in the world with his bright eyes and growing spirit, teaches me how to love in the everyday — through touch, through laughter, through watching him become himself. He is the chapter I get to read as it’s being written, the one I can hold, guide, and celebrate in real time.

Two boys.
Two stories.
Two kinds of love.
One Nan’s heart learning how to stretch, adapt, and hold both truths at once.

Navigating this has shaped me more than I ever expected. It has taught me that love doesn’t look the same in every chapter — but its depth doesn’t change. Loving Lucian and loving Saxon are not different loves. They are simply expressed differently, because life asked me to love them in different ways.

This is my journey of learning how to be Nan to both — honouring one through memory, and the other through presence — and discovering that love, in all its forms, is always enough.

Love, Nannie Angie xx

Lessons From a Lifetime of Love & Marriage

Where Love Grows Up

Some chapters of life begin before you’re ready for them.
Ours began when we were still almost children ourselves — seventeen and nineteen, suddenly parents, suddenly responsible for a life we were still learning how to live.

We were trying to be a couple, trying to be parents, and trying to become ourselves, all at the same time.
And layered on top of that was army life — the moves, the pressure, the separations, the expectations.
It shaped us in ways we didn’t understand until much later.

There were years when we were hard‑natured, when self‑preservation felt easier than softness.
Times when we didn’t like each other very much.
Times when the weight of everything we were carrying made us forget that we were on the same side.

But even in the difficult seasons, something held.
Maybe it was youth.
Maybe it was stubbornness.
Maybe it was love learning its shape before we knew how to guide it.
Whatever it was, it kept us moving — sometimes together, sometimes side‑by‑side, sometimes with distance between us that only time could soften.

Forty years later, I can see the lessons more clearly.

Love isn’t always gentle.
It isn’t always easy.
It isn’t always the version we imagined when we were young.
Sometimes love looks like staying.
Sometimes it looks like space.
Sometimes it looks like trying again after a season of silence.
And sometimes it looks like two young hearts growing up together, even when the growing hurts.

We are still learning each other.
Still choosing.
Still finding new ways to meet in the middle.
Our marriage hasn’t been perfect — but it has been real.
And real love, I’ve learned, is shaped by the life lived inside it.

This is one of my life chapters.
Not polished.
Not romanticised.
Just true.
A story of two young people who grew older, grew wiser, and kept finding their way back to the place where love becomes something you build, not something you wait for.

Love,
Angie xx

Finding the Woman Beneath the Roles

A Quiet Turning Point from My Thirties

I was in my thirties when I first felt it — a quiet ache I couldn’t name.
Something was missing, but I didn’t know what.
It wasn’t dramatic, just a feeling that grew slowly, like a whisper I kept trying to ignore.

For a while, I thought maybe it was something spiritual.
People would say, “I let God into my life, and everything changed,”
so I wondered if that was the answer.
But I’m not religious, and the feeling didn’t sit right.
It wasn’t outside of me.
It was inside.

And then, one ordinary day, it came to me with a kind of soft clarity:
I was missing.
Me.
The person underneath all the roles.

I had spent years being Paul’s wife,
Katyia and Natalia’s mum,
a daughter, a sister, an auntie —
every title except my own.

Somewhere along the way, Angie — the soul, the person, the heart —
had been pushed to the back of the queue.

Realising that was the beginning of finding myself again.
Not in a dramatic, life‑changing moment,
but in small choices, quiet shifts, gentle reclaiming.

And when I found myself,
I liked who I met.
Caring.
Loving.
A big heart that had always been there, just waiting to be seen.

I am okay with me.
More than okay.
I am home in myself now.

Love,
Angie xx