The cockerel crows. 5.30 a.m. I pull the blanket over my head, trying to hold on to the night, just a little longer. Some days there is a blurry moment just before I wake up, when I exist in a dreamlike state. I forget which bit of my life this is, forget that I am a mother and a wife and that I have a thousand things to do. I didn’t always have these roles, but I knew them well. I grew up in a busy farmhouse. My bedroom was in the attic. Some mornings I would lie staring through the skylight to the clouds, with a headful of teenage ideas about how I’d escape the farm. The noises of the kitchen would drift up the stairs. The kettle boiling. Dogs barking. Doors banging. Mum calling for help with the work or for me to get ready for school. I dreamed of being an artist and travelling, with days that opened out before me to create things, and with lots of time to think and read. I didn’t want the life of a farmer’s wife. The women and girls worked indoors and smelled of soap. Their chores never ended – washing, ironing, cooking and cleaning. Men and boys did the outside work; they smelled of muck. They lived by a dirty, wet and cold routine of milking, feeding and shepherding, and didn’t talk about much else. I hated the bind of ‘the farm’.

But, despite all my girlish ideas, I am now here, in my own farmhouse on a hillside in the Lake District, just six miles from where I grew up. I live with my husband, James, and we have four children – Molly, Bea, Isaac and Tom. There are also six sheepdogs, two ponies, twenty chickens, five hundred sheep and fifty cattle to care for. I am a farmer’s wife, and this is my story.

My dad often says, ‘You make your bed, you lie in it.’ I recoil every time I hear it, usually because he says it when I am struggling with something. I don’t find it kind or helpful. I know what he means – that we all live by our choices and they have their costs. It is kind of true, we can’t ‘have it all’. But that hard old saying doesn’t offer any possibility for change. It suggests that a bed, or a life, is made once and is then fixed like that forever. It suggests that you can’t ever grow and change but must simply suffer and endure. But I think we make our beds anew every day – life is really a constant remaking and reshaping of ourselves and our days. I am always looking for different ways to ‘make my bed’ and for ways to avoid becoming stuck.

A fly is buzzing at the window. I get up and open the latch to let it out. A cuckoo calls across the green valley. James has already gone out to check on a cow calving and the rest of the house is asleep, despite the racket outside.

I wrap my pale-blue dressing gown around me and carry three cups downstairs that the children have abandoned. There are telltale crumbs of stolen biscuits on the carpet.

I take my stainless-steel kettle to the sink, tip it out and refill it, light the gas on the stove and put it on to boil. I circle the kitchen, the room we live, work, cook and eat in. After shaking the cushions back into shape, I place them neatly on the grey velvet sofa. I pick up toy dinosaurs and discarded socks from the floor and tidy a pile of papers and yesterday’s post. The flowers from our garden have wilted so I gather them up and put them out, setting my grandma’s old vase in the sink to wash later. It would have been her birthday today. I wipe the table and straighten the wooden chairs around it. The flagstones are cold under my bare feet, so I find my slippers. Floss, our retired collie, is still in her bed with no desire to get up so early. She wags her tail at me gently as I pat her. I make some tea in my favourite mug and clutch it in two hands, the tea steaming my face. I go and sit snug on my nursing chair. I have kept it nea