Category: family

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Lurve and Marriage

How could anyone in their right mind pretend to ‘like’ autumn? Who wants to be reminded of death, darkness, cold, and the knowledge that for the next half of the year that’s what’s to be expected?

Well, admittedly, death, darkness and cold are inevitable parts of life, and we all have to face up to them and accept that that’s how it is, but do we have to embrace them?

Try to believe that you’re not alone, thrown here by chance into this god-forsaken century on this god-forsaken planet. That there is goodness and beauty and hope in this life, sunshine and stories and singing and, in the foreseeable future, springtime again.

I’ve been reading about ‘love’ this morning, and suddenly all the bitterness and disappointment and despair that I have managed to rationalise away has come back in that old familiar rage of: ‘Why me? What’s so awful about me that I don’t deserve/am not capable of being loved?’

So I cry and shout and stop just short of smacking my head, then I will sit with it, face up to it, observe it for what it is, composed of chewing over old disappointments and rejections, sexual frustration and hopeless fantasies, envy and jealousy, shame and self-blame and simple loneliness. All this will pass just as winter will pass, or night. I will have breakfast and get involved with what needs to be done (back to the website) and remind myself of the many reasons why I prefer living alone.

After all, ‘romantic love’ is a social construct, composed of sex, companionship, physical affection (ie non-sexual touching), shared child-rearing, practical support, emotional support, interest in each other’s interests… I have found all of those in various relationships at one time or another, but never all of them rolled into one. I can see it might be unrealistic, to hope to find them all at once, but what is the minimum to settle for? Is it asking too much to hope for more than one or two at a time? By the end of my marriage, I would say that’s about what was left (companionship and practical support, and both of those were pretty lukewarm). For some couples, it seems there’s a fundamental loyalty that underpins all of those and keeps the relationship going when those other criteria have become irrelevant, something I’ve observed in my parents’ and siblings’ marriages, maybe it’s just inertia and lack of imagination, or maybe it’s True Love, who knows? (I wouldn’t, because I’ve never experienced it, and maybe that’s because I’ve never met ‘The Right One’, or more likely because of a fundamental flaw in my personality).

Well there you go, I’ve written and rationalised my way out of my rage again.

I heard the rain in the night, gently, the sort of rain that patters on the roof and makes you feel glad to be safe indoors. It’s been threatening for a couple of days, and now it’s here. Time to hunker down.

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Detritus

I think: if I start writing, maybe the ideas will come? And in a way they do, but they’re not necessarily ideas I want to write. I think: if I do twenty minutes of movement, light candles and incense, sit quietly, maybe the thoughts will go away? And sometimes they do, but mostly they don’t. I lie in bed and do backwards-counting exercises to try and stem the flow so I can get back to sleep, and sometimes it works, but mostly it doesn’t.

Why am I constantly engaged in battles inside my head? Is this just normal, does everybody have this never-ending struggle to manage their thoughts? I used to think that, and that it was just me doing such a lousy job of it. Now I’m not so sure. Now I think: maybe it’s my curse, maybe it’s just another part of my chaotic weirdness. Maybe it’s the cause of everything.

This morning, in bed and after, I was thinking about fear. What am I so afraid of? Failure and rejection, that’s what I thought. I deal with rejection by avoiding contact with other people, pre-emptive rejection. Failure is trickier (not that avoiding human contact is always easy). The best ways of avoiding failure are never to try to do anything and to give up – I am an expert on both of those.

But what did I say a couple of weeks ago? ‘The greatest pleasure in life comes from doing something you don’t want to do and then knowing that you’ve done it’? True enough. Life is a bugger sometimes.

I remember getting into a conversation on Facebook a while ago about the ‘detritus’ that accumulates in your mind, that you have to wade your way through. I feel like I said something quite clever, but now I can’t remember what it was. There is certainly a lot of detritus in my mind.

I’ve just remembered a conversation with a counsellor over twenty years ago – I know it was in autumn 1999, because I saw that particular counsellor then after my parents had died in late winter and we’d moved house over the summer and I was getting about three hours sleep a night and was referred by my GP for six sessions of counselling, but she was offering bereavement counselling, and as I told her, after six months since their deaths I didn’t feel I’d even started to mourn them. But what I remember telling her was about this big well of shit in my head, which I can never empty and which keeps getting refilled all the time. I think the idea came from the title of ‘The Well of Loneliness’. But what was in my well? Loneliness, certainly, but not just that: shame and guilt and fear, and of course , failure and rejection.  

Within ten years I’d left my husband, in the hope that that would bring me new opportunities – which it has, it has, but why has so much stayed the same?

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Gloomy Monday

I am here again – today, anyway, though it remains to be seen whether I will post this or just rant to myself. I went to stay at my daughter’s for the early part of last week, after my infusion at the hospital – quite a last minute decision, to do with me going to see their new house before she goes back to work full time, and not knowing when we might be able to meet again. I came back on Wednesday and came down with a cold Wednesday evening, which I’m now over except for an embarrassing cough, a nasal whine and a cloud of gloom that I’m struggling to get out from under.

Aha, autumn, increasing darkness, getting colder, and nothing to look forward to in the next six months but more of the same. Yes to all of that, but also commitments; an Xmas jumper promised to one person and a website to another, both of them started over the weekend, neither of them particularly well.  

One of the joys of combined singledom and retirement is not having regular commitments to do things for other people. Although it has been said to me that the best way to make yourself happy is to make other people happy, for me it just creates so much stress and worry beforehand, and the outcome is so uncertain – what if they don’t like what I’ve done when I’ve done it? What if it all turns out to be crap? For example, if I’m crocheting something for myself and I hate it when it’s finished, I can either unravel it or shove it into the back of the wardrobe and never have to look at it again (which is what mostly happens with the things I make). But if I’m doing something for someone else, I have a certain responsibility, and they have certain expectations which I have to meet. And what would happen if I fail to meet those expectations? Another failure to throw on the ever-growing pile, but with the added sense of shame and guilt of knowing that my failure is not just a private one but visible to others.  And even if they say they like it, how can I ever know that they’re being honest and not just trying to spare my feelings?

A crowd of starlings just flew past my window and over the roof – or the roof of the next house down the terrace perhaps. There’s a word for it – isn’t it ‘murmuration’? Or is that when they all get together and make a noise?

Yesterday was sunny but chilly. I stayed indoors, though I know there’s lots that needs doing in the garden to stop it descending further into an ugly green mess. Will the weeds die back in the winter? There’s no guarantee of that. Today it’s grey and gloomy, which is a good enough excuse to stay in. Already been to Sainsbury’s, and committed to going to yoga this evening. That’ll be enough.

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Voluntary Self-Isolation

I’m not required to self-isolate, because Cyprus, having an extremely low infection rate, is one of the countries exempt from travel precautions as far as the UK government is concerned. (The attitude of the Cypriot government to people from the UK entering their country is somewhat different, hence the need for negative tests on the way in). But I’ve decided to do so voluntarily, because – well, basically because it’s a good excuse not to have to go out and interact with other people. And I have been mixing with a lot of people –not just on the plane, in the hotel and at the wedding, but also at Heathrow and on the trains and buses to and from it, so it’s a relief to spend a few days – even a couple of weeks – home alone with Miko again.

I was pretty much exhausted for the first three days – not sure why, because my sleep was no worse than it normally is, although there is a two hour time difference. On Wednesday I wrote something, but it was such a moany mess that I gave up and decided not to share it, while yesterday I didn’t even try. So here’s my effort for today.

On Sunday evening Laura was trying to persuade me to go up and stay with them for a few days, but it was really the last thing I felt like doing. I know that she wants me to see their new house -I want to see it too. And she kept saying: ‘we don’t know how long it will be before it’s possible again.’ I thought she meant because she’ll be back at work full-time from next week, but I’ve been thinking about it since. It’s true, we really don’t even know if Christmas together will be an option.

It feels as though the wedding and holiday has been a kind of watershed- for most of the year it seemed so uncertain that it wasn’t even worth thinking about, then when they came to visit at the end of July and I realised that she was still making plans (buying bridesmaids’ dresses etc) it felt more real, and then began the period of will it/won’t it? It’s caused so much uncertainty and stress that now it’s over, it’s both a relief, but also highlights how uncertain everything still is – and it’s brought back into focus the ways I spend (or waste) my time, the commitments I’ve made (or perhaps should be making) to myself and others, and my lack of motivation to do anything at all, the lack of purpose and satisfaction in my life.

Well, I’ve made a start – on the least threatening and stressful thing – bringing my finances up to date, checking my statements, filling in my spreadsheets. That’s the thing I always resort to when I want to feel as though I’m doing something useful. There’s always a ‘right’ answer, which I can find by checking and double checking, and it exercises my brain.

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Equinox – Back Home

Equinox. Equanimity, equability, equilibrium? Time to restore all those things? (though I’m not sure if the second is a real word, and if so, how it differs from the first. To be ‘equable’ is to have ‘equanimity’. But the rule of three prevails.)

Miko has made it plain she wants me to come on the computer. So here I am/we are, she on the desk, currently looking out of the window, with her tail caught up between the last two fingers on my left hand

Arrived home at nine-thirty last evening, after a fairly stressful – because not very well planned – journey back from Heathrow (bus to Woking; another bus to Guildford; train to Fratton; then taxi home). By asking for advice from real people, not trying to find it online, I avoided the rail-replacement bus most of the way and the connections worked like a dream.

And as for the holiday and wedding, booked over a year ago, almost cancelled the first time when Thomas Cook went out of business, but reorganised through the efforts of the bride (my daughter) negotiating directly with the wedding planner and the hotel and rebooking the flights (which were changed again as recently as a couple of weeks ago, from Gatwick to Heathrow). Then this strange spring and summer, of not thinking about it – at first because it seemed so far in the future, too far to worry and plan on it ever happening, not knowing what the situation would be by the middle of September, whether there would be relative freedom of travel or we’d be back into the second wave by then (never seriously thinking it would ‘all be over’ in time). Then Cyprus opened to British tourists from 1st August, on condition of getting a negative covid test within 72 hours of flying, and it started to seem like it might happen after all – so then all the stress and panic of having to prepare for maybe going or maybe not going, and that awful last week of having to organise the tests and not knowing until the day before we left that I was actually going.

After all that – it could have been a massive anti-climax. It wasn’t. Wonderful hotel in a fabulous location, lazy days of relaxing and swimming, playing with the grandchildren, watching them play, eating too much, drinking too much, walking on the seafront and reading in the shade. And a beautiful ceremony on Thursday, overlooking the sea; the bridesmaids (all seven of them, in ages from four to not quite ten times that) in blue, the bride in an elegantly simple cream dress, my little girl, so happy, after all her herculean efforts to keep this dream going. Feeling like minor celebrities in the massively under-occupied hotel, as total strangers among the fellow guests smile and say hello afterwards.

And now, back home, with unpacking and washing and Miko reminding me of my morning writing ritual, wondering what happens next, and where life goes from here.

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Days Like That

Haven’t posted anything for the last few days as I’ve been working on my submission to the inquiry of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on dyspraxia. Don’t know what they’ll make of it, but I did it anyway. I pulled together all the bits into a first draft on Wednesday morning; edited it on Thursday; then tidied it up, did the covering email and sent it off yesterday, in good time for the deadline at 5. It was 2,750 words in the end, just fitted into four pages, a very personal rant like the stuff I post on here.

I thought I would write 500 words today, but I’ve left it a bit late… didn’t get up till 7.30 and I’ve been to Tesco, then started on answering emails, and now the morning’s half gone and I still haven’t had breakfast.

I posted a cartoon yesterday, both on my personal timeline and the dyspraxic adults group.

https://scontent-lht6-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/117389940_10156978386461853_7954745779455467567_n.jpg?_nc_cat=100&_nc_sid=8bfeb9&_nc_ohc=u4aQUO4IzlkAX_Pizl4&_nc_ht=scontent-lht6-1.xx&oh=baf1401aac35c8d355809e44d346db1d&oe=5F711DC8

On my page I got 9 responses, on the group 105 plus 20 comments (admittedly there are a lot more people on that group than friends on my page!) But although everyone can laugh at this – and lots of well meaning people say: ‘we all have days like that…’ responses from the group were more on the lines of: ‘SO relatable – thanks for sharing this!’, ‘So fucking true Linda!’, ‘Oh dear gods yes! *facepalms*’ and one lady who said: ‘does anyone else get anxiety because they have so much to do…? I’m moving out soon and would love insight on that!’ I didn’t know what to say to her – because that’s exactly how I was feeling yesterday – but I suggested she post the question as a separate post, and might get some helpful advice.

Where is the line in between ‘days like that’ and a sense of underlying chaos that pervades and disrupts a whole life?

A young man posted: ‘Does anyone ever feel alone in this world with having dyspraxia?… My family just doesn’t believe a word I say even though they know I have issues…’

Here’s my reply:

‘I think the way your parents and siblings understand and accept you for who you are makes a huge difference. When I was growing up in the 1960s there was no understanding of neurodiversity at all, just kids who were ‘difficult’ in various ways and were expected to fit in and get on with it. This left me with massive issues of social anxiety and lack of self belief which have affected my whole life. Although I have had relationships in the past (been married twice), I never feel that anyone has ever truly understood and loved the “real me”, just the idea of me they have in their own heads, and until I found out I was dyspraxic two years ago, I felt all of that was my own fault and hated myself for it. Now I live alone and am comfortable with that, but it took a long time to get here…’

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Early Years

This is the opening I’ve written for my submission to the APPG inquiry into dyspraxia. I know it will need editing – and the post is longer than usual, because I’ve included a poem.

I was born in 1954, and at the time of writing I am 66. I was diagnosed with dyspraxia less than two years ago, in October 2018, and am still coming to terms with understanding it and how it may have affected my personality and experience of life.

I am the youngest of three children, with a sister (six years older) and a brother (four). I’m sure my parents loved me and did their best for me as they saw it, I don’t think I was ever abused, physically or sexually, but I struggle to find any happy recollections of my childhood. I felt as though my parents and siblings belonged to a closed world of ‘big people’, a perfect family unit of four, but that somehow I was the odd one out, a spare part, surplus to requirements.

I was a shy and timid child, and found it hard to make friends. I was always small for my age and late in reaching puberty. All this made me ripe for bullying – not so much the physical kinds, but the verbal, psychological kind, mostly from other girls, but also from my brother and his friends (unlike me, he was charming and popular, and still is), occasionally my father, and later my brother-in-law. If I complained, I was told: ‘you’ve got no sense of humour’, ‘it’s only a bit of fun’ or ‘don’t take any notice and they’ll give up’. Somehow, it wasn’t the teasing that was a problem – it was my response to it.

Maybe none of this is directly related to dyspraxia, but it is part of the emotional landscape of my childhood. More significantly I was untidy, forgetful, clumsy, ‘cack-handed’ and constantly in trouble at home for all those reasons. I learned to be ashamed at a very early age, and it was constantly being reinforced. Sometimes it felt very unfair, and I became resentful and sulky, for which I was criticised even more. Two years ago, my brother gave me a present – a tee shirt with the slogan: ‘The third child is always the difficult one’. Oh how we laughed.

I was academically bright, always in the top stream, and in 1965 I passed the 11-plus and followed my siblings to the local grammar school. However, although I enjoyed learning, I don’t think I ever really ‘shone’ at school – maybe because due to my shyness I didn’t engage in class. I don’t remember any teachers taking a particular interest in me or encouraging me, even though (perhaps because) I rarely did anything to cause trouble. I was terrible at practical subjects and sport, but I got on with my academic work quietly, if a little slowly, and slipped under the radar. I was always a ‘good’ girl – except at home, where I was evidently nothing but a trial to my parents.

Here’s a poem about that time which I wrote a couple of years ago:

The Awkward One

I never learned to smile.
I never learned to play the happy fool,
to put them at their ease,
to read their minds.

So I became
the awkward one,
the difficult one.
I learned to be alone.
I never learned to make a friend,
I never learned the way
to make them love me.

I hated mirrors, and cameras,
I hated the plain, sulky face
they showed me.
I knew that face,
with its curtain of straggly hair,
and that skinny body,
would never be loved.

I never learned to turn on the charm.
I had no charm.
I never learned to play the game.
I turned inside myself,
became invisible,
played my own game.

© Linda Rushby 25 March 2017
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Along the Way

Back again.

This does feel like a chore. I seem to have slipped back into that demotivated state where I really don’t want to do anything. Maybe it’s the heat – doesn’t help, that’s for sure. That’s quite an odd phrase for me to use: ‘for sure’. Slipping back thirty-odd years into Dallas-speak – maybe it’s the heat – though it’s nowhere near as hot as it was there, but then nobody went outdoors at this time of year, they stayed inside and froze in the air-conditioning.

This morning, doing my exercises in the spare room with the window open, I felt stifled. Usually I have a high tolerance for heat, but this is getting even me down.

Taoism – must’ve been in a pretentious mood the day I mentioned it. How about Existentialism? Let’s throw that into the mix.

My yoga teacher said (a while ago now, must be, because we were in the Community Centre at the time, not the park), that the difference between fate and destiny is that Destiny is the true purpose of your life, what you should be doing if you allow everything to happen as intended (by whom? The Universe, or God, or whoever). But Fate is what happens to you anyway if you’re not following your Destiny. I liked that, I thought it was a nice distinction, even though I don’t believe there is such a thing as a ‘True Purpose’ to the Universe that underlies everything that happens. Why should that be? I suppose, to my ‘left brain’ (if we want to go back to that cliché) it’s quite clever, because it allows an ‘out’, as positive-thinking based philosophies often do: ‘Oh well, things didn’t turn out the way you wanted or expected, but that’s because you didn’t want it deeply enough, or you didn’t believe in it enough, or because the Universe has a different plan for you, which you can’t see right now, but one day you’ll see why it happened this way.’

Looking back over life, or history, it’s easy to see the Way that brought us here, the turning points, the (sometimes) tiny events that can trigger enormous consequences. We look back, and we construct a pattern (because that’s what humans do), and we can see that, well, that had to happen for this to be the way things are now. But we can’t know what would have happened if that point hadn’t turned, or had turned in a different direction – we can speculate, perhaps, but we can never know.

The example that just popped into my head wasn’t ‘tiny’ at the time – in fact, I’ve always thought of it as a tragedy, until just recently: the fact that my grandmother was widowed with five children at the age of forty – but if she hadn’t been, she wouldn’t have moved from Manchester to Cleethorpes, and my parents would never have met – pretty fundamental, from my point of view (and my children’s and grandchildren’s).

More along this thought path another day, perhaps.

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Surprise Visitor

I had a lovely surprise yesterday afternoon. I was sitting in the garden when there was a knock on the door, which surprised me a little, because although I was expecting my daughter and the grandkids, it was a bit early considering she’d messaged me not long before to say they were in McDonald’s at Petersfield services – and also I’d left the door unlocked, and usually the kids just barge in when they get here. I was even more surprised when I opened the door and saw her brother waiting to be let in. I knew they were trying to meet up here while she was staying (it’s his birthday today), but apparently there was an email and two texts which I’d managed not to see, saying that he was coming, but that his wife was staying home with the two dogs. I must be getting even scattier than I thought I was.

Anyway it was lovely to have the four of them here, it was almost nicer in a way that it was just us without their other halves, (although I get on well with both my daughter-in-law and prospective son-in-law). We sat in the garden drinking prosecco and tea (Simon was driving) while Simon and Flick (whose birthday is next week) opened their presents from me. Then my wonderful offspring managed between them to fix (for the time being, at least) the shower room light switch, the speakers on my kitchen music centre and the strimmer.

There’s another family birthday coming up next week: my little cat will be fifteen on the 6th August. She’s still not eating – it’s been over a month now, and I am preparing myself for the worst.

I may or may not be writing in the mornings while Laura and the children are here. Depends on when everybody gets up. Yesterday I didn’t have time because I’d had a rough night then slept in till 8 and was in a rush to get to a writers’ group meeting for 10.

I feel I should have more to say. Life gets in the way of thought and writing.

I’ve downloaded a sample of a book that was recommended to me on Amazon. It’s very spooky the way it does that, because it is about a writer who is trying to write a biography of DH Lawrence, and a novel, and is a stream-of-consciousness rant about how he miserably fails to write either (but writes this book instead). The opening section got me hooked, though I can see how it could also be massively irritating to a lot of people. Like this blog, it rambles on and on without ever getting anywhere, although he is obviously doing that deliberately and skilfully, whereas in my case it’s just about incompetence and lack of imagination and talent.  

For a brief moment, it made me determined to stop fart-arsing around (excuse the expression) and actually do something with my writing. A brief moment, until reality set in again.

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Addictions

Yesterday evening I remembered something else the counsellor said last week, which was that the image of me smashing the mirror and thereby myself made her think of ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’. My first thought was: no, that’s not right because it’s not my idealised image that I want to destroy, it’s the ‘real’ me, but then I realised that it’s the portrait which is the raddled and depraved monster that Dorian has truly become, and that he destroys to achieve the peace of self-destruction.

Can I find peace without destroying myself in the process – if peace is what I want? I sometimes – when I’m striving for the positive – feel grateful that I’ve managed to avoid becoming addicted to drink, drugs or risky sex – (though I also suspect that my life would have been more enjoyable with more of that, especially the sex). The fact that I didn’t go that way wasn’t down to lack of inclination or innate moral sense so much as lack of imagination when it came to the possibilities, not knowing how to go about getting that sort of a life, and assuming that it wasn’t for the likes of me, that I was just too boring. So I tried to become Mrs Sensible, although the irony was that I was equally shit at that; not bohemian enough to make it as a Bohemian, but miles away from being bourgeois enough to be convincing or content as a bourgeois wife. Then I searched for solace in the life of the mind, and thought I’d found my true calling at last – except that the intellectuals weren’t ready to budge up and let me in, either.

Somewhere in all that mess I managed to spend twenty years raising two children – for which I’m grateful every day, because if I hadn’t I would now be truly alone. Not that emotional support in old age is the best motivation for having children, any more than financial security is a good reason for marriage – but sometimes life has a way of subverting your best intentions and aspirations by providing (you just might find) the things that you need.  

So I didn’t become (as a kind friend once predicted) an alcoholic, or hooked on anti-depressants, or any other kind of prescription or non-prescription substances. But am I addicted to self-analysis, to rumination, to trying to tease out what exactly feels so wrong? I can see there’s a strong argument for that, and also that all the self hate, anger, frustration, disappointment, is just as dangerous and self-destructive as any other kind of addiction. But like any addict, I don’t really have a choice – if there was ever a time when I could have chosen another path, it is too far back in the past to unravel and retrace the steps that brought me here.

Where does ‘trusting myself’ fit into all this? What about trying new things, learning from failure, acquiring wisdom, moving on?

It’s raining. And I need my breakfast.