Hey My Love

Hey my love,

This week has felt like one long, messy, beautiful heartbeat.
I thought I’d sit down and tell you about it — the way I would if you were lying next to me, and I was tracing shapes on your hand while I talked.

The days have been starting slowly, in the best way.
I’ve been waking up wrapped in my ridiculously soft bed, the kind of bed my kids say is “dangerous” because you could easily oversleep and miss school.

Most mornings go like this:
my smallest one climbs into the bed, leans close and whispers,
“Good morning mum, it’s morning,”
and points to the light that’s sneaking in through the curtains.

There’s that first stretch, the weight of the blanket, the feeling of warm skin and cold air. Then I drag myself to the kitchen, hair gone wild, and wrap my hands around a big mug of coffee that basically says, in Finnish and with swear words:
“Yeah yeah, I’m trying my damn best all the time.”

It makes me smile every time I read it.

And then there’s Dashboard Disco.
That’s what I call my car — my everyday circus on four wheels.

Imagine this: kids in the back, music loud, and the dashboard blinking at me like a Christmas tree. Warning lights, mystery symbols, doors that sometimes decide “nope” when I try to open them. It’s a love–hate relationship, but there’s something strangely comforting about it too.

I wrote a whole song about that car.
It’s chaotic and a bit broken, but it carries us where we need to go.
A little like me, maybe.

Work has been its usual mixture of exhaustion and magic.

One of my favourite days was “take your child to work” day.
My daughter came with me, and from the moment we walked through the door she was… radiant. Calm, grounded, smiling in that quiet way of hers.

She joined the kids on the floor, helped with the more challenging ones, and somehow held the whole room together with her presence. My colleagues kept telling me how balanced and gentle she is, how naturally she handles the children.

I stood there watching her and thought:
oh.
I did something right.

There was birthday cake, a forest trip through soft snow, kids eating pizza and drinking juice with red noses and bright eyes, and a little dance outside while the snowflakes fell around us. I came home tired to the bone and full in the heart.

When the children at daycare got pizza, I promised my own kids we’d have our very own pizza day at home too. So we put on Italian music, turned the kitchen into a tiny trattoria and just let the flour fly. Little hands pressing dough, tomato sauce finding its way onto cheeks, laughter bouncing off the walls… for a while, the whole apartment smelled like a pizzeria and sounded like a holiday. It was messy and loud and absolutely perfect.

Home, of course, decided to add its own drama.

One evening I opened the door and walked straight into a wall of smoke.
The smell hit first — burnt, heavy, the kind that clings to your hair and clothes. For a second my heart stopped. I imagined flames, alarms, sirens.

But it wasn’t that.
The fuse had blown and saved us, and my poor old dryer had finally given up on life. May it rest in peace and never set anything on fire again.

So now on my mental list there’s:
new dryer,
new vacuum (the last one also died on me this week),
car battery change,
back doors to fix,
inspection coming up,
hopefully a move to a bigger, healthier home…
and somewhere between all that, a small wish to one day sit in an actual salon chair, with someone washing my hair and saying, “just relax, we’ll take care of you.”

In the middle of all this “real life”, a melody visited me.

I was sitting by the window in the kids’ room when a Christmas song suddenly looped itself into my head — soft, emotional, a little bittersweet. I grabbed the mic and recorded a rough demo right there, toys on the floor, daylight fading outside.

No studio lights, no perfect acoustics.
Just me, a microphone, and a feeling I didn’t want to lose.

I’m shy about my own songs.
Playing covers is safer; people like hearing what they already know. They sing along, they clap, they book us again.
But my own songs… those are little pieces of my heart, and putting them out into the world feels like stepping outside without a coat in the middle of winter.

Still, every time someone tells me I should share more of them, it moves something in me.
Maybe one day soon I’ll be brave enough to let them go.

At one point I was prepping some eggs for the kids’ snack, and when I opened the carton I realised I’d apparently received a little piece of chicken butt as a free extra. Lucky me.

So here I am tonight:

The kids have crumbs of pizza still hiding somewhere under the table.
The air in the apartment smells like tomato sauce.
There’s a soft chill creeping in from the windows, the kind that makes you pull the blanket up to your chin.
My body is tired in that good way — from swimming hall echoes, grocery bags, little feet in the snow, and all the memory of the week.

And in the middle of it all, I’m sitting here with my laptop, writing to you.

To the you who reads this.
To the you who maybe also juggles bills and dreams, kids and loneliness, cosy mornings and complicated messages from strangers.
To the you who sometimes wishes someone would ask,
“How was your day? Really?”

I hope you can feel this:

I’m here, typing these letters as if I were talking to you, my long-distance love.
I hope my words wrap around you like a warm blanket, the way your presence — even from far away — wraps around me when I imagine you reading them.

And I hope, more than anything,
that my letters make you feel even a fraction of the warmth I feel
knowing that you’re here,
reading them.

Until the next one,
hey my love —
sleep well tonight. 🤍