Before My Time

I gasped, trying to clutch reality, trying to stop the world from completely slipping from my fingers.  I can do this, I tell myself.  I cannot believe otherwise.  If I do then where will it end?  The world, my world, my life, everything will fall away, it will be the crash of a tower of bricks, a slight wobble here and there, the slow bend of the tower  but then the inevitable crash.  It will fall.  And all will be lost.

I tell myself to hold tight, I grip my hands tightly,  cramped-ridden knuckles that rarely seem able to straighten anymore, as if life, health, self, world could be something tangible, something that could be grasped, something that could be kept held of.  I can’t keep hold of them; they’re more slippery than fine sand grains.  And the tighter I grasp, the faster they are squeezed from my grip.  I cannot win.

I gasp, every breath is a struggle.  The physical world around me swims.  The ridged concrete path swirls in a blur of motion.  The metal fence posts alongside do tricks that no fence post should ever be able to master.  The world will not stay put.  It will not allow me to get a handle on it.  I cannot keep it still.  I grasp out at it but it moves, slippery and fast, and unreachable.  Everything is beyond me.

You’re not meant to get motion sickness walking.  But I do.  It’s not like I have mastered some locomotive state.  Or maybe I did once.  Once upon a time, I was able to keep up.  Keep up with what?  Life, self, health, world.  No more.  I am slower than the World’s Slowest Walkers.  I know.  They keep overtaking me.

I struggle to breathe, like an asthmatic at the end of a sprint.  But I have gone nowhere fast.

My body ridicules me.  Me, that self I dream of being.  I cannot be.  I am crippled and handicapped and fighting a body whose war I barely even understand.  I am conspired against daily.  I lose daily.

I no longer feel safe walking by myself.  I don’t have the breath to think let alone scream in defence.  I feel shaky, vulnerable, weak, frail.  I am not myself anymore.  I can’t walk out into the world with the bravado that I used to.  I can’t take the time to enjoy a moment of solitude or the world around me.  I am too busy fighting.  There are days when I walk so slowly past front gardens that I get to know each and every blade of grass by name.  I don’t admire flowers, they get boring when you’ve spent five minutes walking passed the same one.  They taunt me, moving free in a breeze.  They have more speed than me.  They move whilst I am motionless.  One day snails will overtake me.

I muddle words and can’t remember whether I had conversations out loud, in my head or in my sleep.  I can’t remember what needs doing or even what I have done.  I forget where I am halfway through a recipe.  I forget ideas halfway through sentences.  I forget.  I forget.  Me, who has always been a memory keeper.  Me, this is my role, this my usefulness in the world, because I can remember.  And I can’t.  What have I left?  I console myself with sarcastic humour, reminding myself that at least at some point I will forget that I ever even had a memory.  But at the moment?  Oh no, I remember.  I remember the glory days.

The glory days that never were.

A golden age only exists in nostalgia, a better time compared to current woes.

And I do remember that there have never been glory days for me, I have never succeeded, not even at being myself.  And now I feel perhaps I would have a chance but it is all being dashed away from, like that tower of bricks.  I cannot stop them falling, I cannot stop the present and I dread the future.

My hand shakes.  I am weak and vulnerable and pathetic.

This is not me.

This is not who I want to be.

This is not who I should be.

I forget names, faces become foggy.

I mix up all my nouns.  If I can even remember any.

I get my sentences backwards.

More vicar, tea?

I don’t know if the world notices but I do.  I notice.  I see every single mistake, every single failure.  I, who have tried so hard my entire life to hide my weaknesses, my problems, now have them writ embarrassingly large across each and every conversation and each and every day.

This is not me.

The slow, painful steps that I am taking through life and the world.

This is not me.

I sit motionless, lost, unable to find the strength to do anything.

This is not me.

I cannot form sentences.

This not me.

I cannot remember.

This is not me.

But it is.

It is who I have become.

I didn’t get a choice.

I would have liked a choice.

Because I would really like to have life back.

I want another chance.

But something tells me it’s too late.

The sand has tumbled from my hands, I never had much anyway, and it cannot be found again.

I have lost.

Everything.

I have lost me.

Becoming a Parent

When do you become a parent?  Some go through heart-breaking agonies over countless years pursuing that very dream.  To others it’s a surprise revelation, a shock, maybe something that they weren’t planning on.  But most parents have a time period before the arrival to adjust, to plan, to adapt, to prepare.  For mammals, it’s called pregnancy.   These days parents can clutch a hazy, grainy photo and say that’s my child.  But are they parents in that moment?

I don’t think you become a parent until you have that small, fragile, vulnerable life form in your hands,  until you can feel the tiny, delicate heartbeat, until you have a life in your hands which is depending on you.  At that moment, two souls meet and join, a relationship begins and  every instinct and fibre of your very being swears an oath of protection and care to this small, fragile, vulnerable life form.

Being a parent isn’t just about having physical charge of a child, it’s not even about bloodlines or looking after one of your own species.  It’s about a very special bond between two beings, two souls, one dependent, one caring.

Even when that little one grows, leaves, fledges, matures, however they progress, that bond will always be there.  Your heart is joined to theirs and you simply care in the truest form.  Their well-being is intrinsically tied to your own, their pain is your pain, their hopes your hopes, their achievements yours …  Your heart soars with theirs.  And sinks too.

You can’t ever lose the emotional tie of a child, of being a parent to a little one.  It is more than memories.  It’s not facts or even really feelings.  It’s two hearts, two hearts that cannot be separated even when that little grows, leaves, fledges, matures.  And when the little one is lost, it is a heart that has lost part of itself.

It’s Been a Bad, Bad, Bad Day

Where do I start?

This morning?

When I got up at ten to eight so I could be ready by half past nine only to discover that it was now, for reasons that I really can never fathom, actually TEN to NINE?

I don’t do mornings at the best of times.

I am very slow in the mornings.

To find that, for reasons that I can never really fathom, I now only had a mere half an hour to eat breakfast, shower, do my hair, get dressed and get ready was a little bit too much to ask.

And definitely a lot more than I can cope with.

I should have given up then and crawled back into bed.

And yes, feeding me is a priority.  Without food, I cannot do anything.  In fact, I normally wake up at half past eight, have my breakfast then go back to sleep.  Without food, I don’t even have the energy to sleep!

But, somehow, unbelievably, I managed to do it.

I was frazzled.

And had to exit the house unpainted.

I don’t like going out of the house without my slap.

It doesn’t feel safe.

It’s definitely not kind to or fair on other people.

I was frazzled.

And then a half a dozen other minor things just didn’t go well.

You know, the sort of piddling trifles that really aren’t hugely important most of the time but when you’ve already had such a rotten start, they really don’t HELP.

I had to leave early, a proactive choice because I really didn’t have the energy to deal with a panic attack.

And by that point slowly crawling home on foot up a very nasty steep hill was actually preferential to staying put.

I came home.

I knew that I had a cake to make for this afternoon.

A basic, simple, straightforward cake.

(The previous one wasn’t, at all, and I will be telling you all about that another time but that cake does not belong on Bad Days, it was a surprising triumph (relatively)).

I made one exactly the same earlier in the week but plain not chocolate.

It took 45 min in the oven.

I started with just over three hours to go before I had to go out, me and the cake.

The cake, naturally, because this was already a very Bad Day, did not cook.

How can a cake choose not to cook?

I had to leave without my cake.

I was feeling so miserable by this point that I left the house in my slippers.

There was no way that I could face boots and bootlaces only to take them off five minutes later at my friends’ house.

I remembered my knitting bag.

And my mobile.

And the DVDs that I’ve been promising to lend for the last month.

But forgot my ‘handbag‘.

My handbag is also a security thing.  I feel safe with my handbag.

I didn’t feel safe without it.

It was the kind of day where having my handbag with me would make all the difference.

Well, probably not, but I’d at least feel slightly better equipped to face the Bad Day.

(Maybe I should start sleeping with my handbag as some sort of Bad Day prevention device?  Hmm).

(Come to think of it, I didn’t sleep well either).

It wasn’t too bad though.

There was a delectable cream sponge and profit-roles.

I like profit-roles.

Then I got the news that my external hard drive is irredeemably fudged.

I have lost my entire life.

Because, of course, my entire life is stored in data on a 500 gb hard drive.

Well, a lot of it was.

I think the Baby Photos were on it.

And all my downloaded knitting patterns.

And all of this year’s photos.

(Husband made a really cool shark biscuit the other day).

And all of the recipes that I’ve spent years writing up.

And probably a whole more ton of stuff that I have yet to desperately need and therefore miss.

I’m not bawling, not just yet.

But the Voice is trying to come back.

It’s just that I don’t like losing things.

And probably I do ‘hoard’ things, ‘useful’ things.

The kind of ‘useful’ things that probably mean that my life will go on, somehow, without them.

And husband says hoarding things ‘virtually’ is just as bad a vice.

But I just get so attached to things.

And I remember them all, just like old friends.

Each pattern or recipe or photo.

They mean something to me.

There is security in saving things, in having everything that might ever be needed.

And my blanky died.

Blankies are meant to last forever.

And I certainly wasn’t big enough to be ready to let go either.

So as I have no photos, I’ll leave you with a song.

A song that kind of describes today.

(Some of the lyrics might not be kosher, however).

Oh, and this evening I just found out that a dear old friend has passed away.

It’s been a Bad, Bad, Bad Day.

Can I go to bed now?

 

(So, of course, this link won’t work either).

Loss of Self

(Can I tell you a secret?

I grieve.

There are moments when I am broken in spirit and overwhelmed by a profound sense of loss.  I try to remind myself that there are countless thousands, if not millions, of people who are in a worse position than I am but my heart won’t listen.  I put a brave face on to the outside world, set that stiff upper lip but all the time my heart is breaking.

Most people feel that it’s handing over your self-care to another person that causes a sense of loss, a sense of shame and a complete loss of dignity.  But the reality is that illness, chronic illness, will have robbed you of every last shred of dignity long before you get to that stage.  That dignity comes from our identity, our sense of self.

I cannot think of anything worse than anything to abandon self-care to a stranger, someone appointed by a remote, impersonal power through a collective, communal sense of duty to look after those unable to look after themselves.  There is perhaps slightly more grace in being cared for by loved ones but maybe that’s the point and I speak too rashly and harshly.  Think of just the nursing profession, strangers who dedicate themselves to the care of the needy and vulnerable.  Sometimes we do have to hand ourselves other to strangers, to specialists and to experts, who are best placed to help us.  I think what is needed is trust, we need to be able to build relationships, to connect and to trust, whether that person is a stranger or not, when we hand over the very last vestiges of our dignity and identity.  Perhaps the sense of shame comes only from myself.  A sense of failure too perhaps.

There is that moment where your life divides into two parts, the before and the after, that moment when a doctor or other medical professional gives you that diagnosis.  Perhaps you only hear incomprehensible medical names and terms, perhaps you only comprehend that sense of fear, dread and threat.  But what is lost, and will be lost, is your identity.

If illness only deprived us of being able to climb Mount Everest, of running a marathon every week, of being able to run six international businesses at once … well, wouldn’t that be bliss?  Few of us really would be impacted after all.  But illness, chronic illness, is so much more than that.

I don’t have that clear demarcation, I don’t have the privilege of ‘having been’, I have been ill all of my adult life and in some ways I know nothing else.  That makes me sad, sometimes I feel cheated of my potential, of being able to have a life that I choose.  I’m not one for self-pity but grief doesn’t always rationalise, it is a tidal wave of loss, from which there is no escape.

In fact, it’s when things are going better mentally, when I find a focus that I feel this loss the most strongly.  I cannot be who I want to be.  I cannot be who I am.  I disappoint and frustrate myself.  When I can see so clearly what I want to do, what I want to be and yet this mongrel-beast gets in the way, refuses to let me be, never mind achieve, I grieve.  I have found my feet in one sense but cannot crawl from the bed in the literal.

It’s absolutely crushing.

I don’t want to climb mountains, or run marathons or international businesses, I just want to be me.  All those things that I have worked so hard to achieve, I have worked so hard to find myself and to be comfortable in my skin, to have that dashed away from me, it’s heart-breaking.

And so often it’s the trivial things where I feel that sense of loss so keenly, the sort of thing that you wouldn’t ever think could really matter or be important.  Things like being able to cut vegetables properly.  But when you think about it, it is a skill and one that maybe you had to work at.  It is something small that says a lot about us, whether we cook, whether we enjoy cooking, whether we’re any good at cooking … Instead the sharpest knife becomes blunt and clumsy in uncoordinated hands, food mushes rather than slices, there is no technique and if half the pieces are of similar size, well then, that’s a miracle in its own right.  And all the while, there is that voice inside your head that tells you ‘this isn’t me’.

But it is.

Illness isn’t a straightforward, downward slope to the total loss of dignity either.  It often ebbs and wanes.  Sometimes this can be more painful; you can’t accustom yourself to a level of loss before proceeding, or descending, to the next.  What you can do one week, one day, one hour may quickly become impossible.  You can’t take anything for granted.  Each new setback is enough to make you howl.  If you had the energy.

Our sense of identity is tied so closely to the things that we enjoy.  Not being able to do the activities that we enjoy, not being able to eat the foods that we enjoy … illness leaves no aspect of us, of our identity, untouched.  But it’s not just about not being able to do the things that we enjoy, take for example my knitting.  I love knitting.  It’s one of the few activities that I can consistently manage, although in varying proportions.  But it’s so much more than just a simple activity; it’s so much more than just one of those things that I do.   It’s an expression of personality, of creativity.  It is the way that I express myself.  When a week goes by where I physically cannot knit, I feel that loss keenly.

I don’t know if illness, personified perhaps, does target those specific skills and those things that so clearly define us as us, sometimes it feels like it does, or if perhaps we just feel the loss more in those areas.  If you never had a particular skill or talent then you probably don’t notice or feel that loss so much.

I know that there are people whose memories are bad, totally fallible.  I live with one of them.  This means I have even greater responsibility as a memory-keeper, I remember my memories and those of others.  I’m known for my memory abilities.  I am a guardian of family history and stories.

No more.

I cannot remember what I did yesterday never mind last week.

I cannot remember words or dates or things that I need to do.

Someone will tell me something and I will wonder out loud how they know that.  They then tell me that I told them, just a week ago.

Behind me there is a great void of nothingness, a black hole where memories could and should exist but I remember nothing.

I feel a great sense of shame, embarrassment when faced with the reality of this loss.  Actually, it frightens me more than I care to admit.

In so many ways, this is a loss of self.  I’m losing a skill that I am proud (!) of and I risk losing my history.  In a way, I become homeless, that sense of belonging comes, in the greatest part, through memories and remembered connections.

I have a fear of losing things, my biggest fear is forgetting.  It is why I write, it is why I photograph.  I’m terrified of forgetting.  I always have been.  Memory, remembering is important to me.  And now I am faced with blank spaces, black holes and that nagging feeling that there really is something that should be in my head right now.

And it’s becoming more obvious.  It’s hard to hide your memory problems when you can’t remember anything.  I’m oblivious to what has gone before, I risk repeating things or putting my foot in it, like the example above.

Illness takes everything away from you that is precious, independence, skills, talents, memory.  There is no dignity in being ill, just a profound sense of loss.

I grieve.)

Testimony from a Bad Day

This is a post that I wrote many months ago when I was really struggling, it never got posted for some reason.  Today, I’m struggling again and fearing what that means.

Whilst I cannot pick out the threads that Depression weaves through my life and thoughts, I am very aware of the limitations that ME puts upon me.  I know how my life could and would be so different if I didn’t have to fight this mongrel-beast every day.  However, I doubt myself and the severity, sometimes even the existence, of my illness.  Maybe it doesn’t help that ME is shrouded in confusion, political intrigue and complete incomprehension and lack of care.  Maybe it doesn’t help that people don’t take me seriously.

This is how my life gets.  Judge for yourself whether I’m making it up or whether I can really just try harder.

Do people really awake refreshed and eager for their day or is that just some fairy tale or something that only toddlers in on the secret of perpetual energy and motion know about?  Some mornings I wake and get out of bed in one move, perhaps my brain hasn’t quite woken up yet and told my body how and where it hurts.  Sometimes the pain, the ache, the stiffness kicks in as I round the corner of the bed.  Sometimes I can get all the way to the bathroom and back.  Maybe it’s because lying itself just gets so painful that my body is just glad to be stretching, moving again.

I feel every bump, dip and metal spring of the mattress, I feel every crease and wrinkle in the sheets, some nights my best friend of a duvet becomes a suffocating mass squashing the air out of me.  It’s just as well that I’m as flabby as this otherwise I’d have my bones to contend with too.  As it is, my joints can’t take their own weight and pressure and whichever side I lie on goes numb so quickly, fighting poor circulation and pins and needles all the night through.  I can’t regulate my temperature so even in the middle of summer (if we have with appropriate temperatures) I can find myself needing a hot water bottle, clutching it tight because I’m frozen through.  Other times, cold nights even, I will suddenly be  boiling hot, almost feverish and throwing the covers off.  Other times again a heat source such as a hot water bottle will scald my exterior but do nothing to take the chill away, it’s truly disconcerting having both extremes of temperature at once.  Lately, I’ve been finding that I don’t have enough strength to sleep on my side, I was using an arm to brake myself, hold myself up but I can’t even do that anymore.  I fall in a crushed tangle and I find myself more often or not sleeping flat on my face, which doesn’t help the breathing or the overheating, with my two firsts up by my head, baby style.  Babies can’t hold themselves up either.  It’s pathetic and uncomfortable.

I know a lot of people seem to think that it’s the norm to take a shower every morning, as if you’d self-implode in a miasma of bacteria for one missed shower.  Well, sorry to break it to you, ME will change that for sure.  Sometimes I have to think so far ahead, planning not just for each stage of my toilette but the rest that has to be calculated to allow me to make it out of the door in one semi-civilised piece that I have my shower the night before so I have plenty of night hours to sleep off the effects.  I rarely have one in the morning anymore.  Mornings are too much.  Especially if I’m expected to be out and about.  If not, it might be the middle of the day like some slovenly adolescent, especially in midwinter when the bathroom is freezing cold.

The shower poses particular changes.  When I stayed at someone’s recently I realised however that I should be very grateful that we have a shower tray rather than a bathtub.  I could barely climb in and out of that!  The biggest problem is the amount of energy showering requires; there are the standing and the heat and the steam and then the cold afterwards.  I can’t stand for very long at all.  And I’ve already mentioned that I struggle to regulate my temperature.  Sometimes I only realise how dead and cold my feet are when I feel the scalding water on them, slowly bringing them back to partial life.  Sometimes I have to turn the water hotter because it feels too cool.  I worry that one day I will get burnt.  I’m glad too that we have a shower that you can leave the temperature set rather than have to turn it through from off to hotter, I trust blindly that the temperature is the same as yesterday.

 After nearly every shower now, I end up resting on the bed afterwards.  Then there are days when I’m not well enough to take a shower at any point, even with nothing else to do.  I struggle with this, guilty because of this culturally induced belief of miasma.  I hate not having clean hair.  Even when I’m Depressed, unable to motivate myself to anything, I wash my hair.

Even if I take a shower the night before, my morning schedule still has to be simplified and reduced to the barest of elements in order for me to be able to manage a morning commitment.  Sometimes I get everything ready the night before and sleep right up as close to possible as to when I need to leave.  Other times it seems to work better that I get up about an hour earlier, do what I need to then have a nap before going out.

Just writing about getting up is exhausting!

There are so many things that need doing, so many things that I desperately want to do.  I lie or if I can, I sit up, in my bed and see the reminders of these things around me.  How easy it would be to pick up a book or a duster!  But is it?  I don’t even have the strength for that.  And it makes me feel wretchedly useless.  I lie thinking that I need the toilet and it takes me half an hour or so to summon the strength to get out of bed.  I walk slowly, stiffly to the bathroom then to the kitchen to wash my hands.  I’ll grab a drink or something whilst I’m up so I don’t have to get up again.  And then I have to collapse on the bed.  Exhausted.  For what?  I’ve done nothing.  I’m hungry but I don’t have the energy to prepare some food.  I go without.  Or wait until the next bathroom trip to grab a snack.  The washing up and washing piles higher.  But I can’t lift or stand.  Nothing gets done because I genuinely can’t do it.  It breaks my heart and destroys my soul every single day.

I’m so glad that we have a flat, all the rooms are close together and there are no steps between levels.  I can’t do stairs anymore.  And when I do have to go out then gravity usually helps me down, I don’t have to worry about the slow haul up the stairs until I come back.  Which is just as well or I’d never get out.

I can’t follow instructions anymore, even recipes.  I forget where I am and what needs doing next when I’m preparing the simplest of dishes.  Who forgets how to boil pasta and stick commercial sauce on the top?!  It’s ridiculous, stupid even.  And I hate it.  I can’t open lids and I can’t grip and turn tin openers.  I struggle to lift a pan of pasta only because it’s my responsibility to feed us both.  Graters are difficult too, dangerous at times.  I can’t slice cheese much less anything else.  The world’s sharpest knife might as well be blunt in my weak and clumsy grip.

I could go on but I don’t have the energy or the courage to face anymore things that I can’t actually do anymore.  It breaks my heart, and even my soul.  ME isn’t a choice, ME isn’t me.  But this is my life.

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Domestic Loss

Home is such an important thing.  There are those who try to confine its definition within four walls or a place on a birth certificate yet home is much more than just those simple, physical concepts.  Home is a sentiment.  Those who feel it find something very precious indeed, a sense of belonging, of safety and security, of love and peace.  There are those who have never experienced such a privileged and lofty feeling before, they may have a ‘home’ of four walls but whether they are the world’s richest or the world’s poorest, it remains just that.  Four walls.  Somewhere to sleep, somewhere to address envelopes to.  Home is much more than that.

Home inspires more than pride, more than the pride that comes with having the right postcode or the most bedrooms, it is something that calls to you when you are away and soothes your soul when you are there.  Home is where you belong, where your love is.  It might seem trite but home is where the heart is.  Home doesn’t have to limited to four walls or just one place, in the secure love it can be nomadic.

Home can be powerfully tied to one’s roots but it isn’t limited to that. Home can be a place that you’ve never been or it can be place where you’ve just arrived.

We all need to have ‘home’ in our hearts and our souls, without we are lost and adrift and the world is a lonely, isolated place.  It’s horrible to think that some have never known it yet perhaps in some ways, having it and losing it is even worse.  You fully appreciate just what you have lost whereas those who have never had it, whilst they may dream of it, cannot fully understand the impact that it will have in their lives.

There are those whose home is destroyed by others, the betrayal usually comes from those who are closest.  If home is a sentiment then domestic abuse is a bulldozer and wrecking ball.  To not feel at home, to not feel safe or secure, loved or at a peace within the home, well that is a the greatest tragedy.

Loss come through other means too.  Home can be abruptly taken away from us by a change in financial situation.  Many have known this painful grief in recent years.  It’s not just that loss of home which has to be dealt with in those circumstances but a myriad of psychological questions that bubble forth.  Having your home taken away brands you a failure, a failure whose life is out of control and who is unable to provide on every level for those who they love the most.  Four walls represent so much more than just a building.

Sometimes the physical home is what is violated but the impact on the psychological home is what pains and grieves the most.  The loss of any item in a burglary hurts but what is hardest to deal with is that you can no longer protect your home and the ones that you love the most, that anyone can just trample all over your space, your belongings, your feelings and devastate it.  You walk through tossed rooms but it’s the footsteps that echo in your mind that disturb the most.

Other times it isn’t actually what is recognized as crime that causes the devastation.  A tradesman, an expert, can violate that space, tearing holes in the physical and psychological.  Again, you’re left questioning yourself, whether you should have known better, whether you’ve let your family down, whether you’re a failure, whether you could have protected your space and your loved ones better.  In this case, it can be harder to restore the damage on all levels.  A robbed home is quickly defended by the police and insurance agencies, the pieces righted, repaired or renewed.  When the damage is from a professional in another field long years may slowly pass as the family lives with the consequences, in a broken shell that no longer feels like home.

Home can be damaged by its surroundings.  Home can be a moment frozen in time, before some catastrophe hit or some new development obliterated its surrounding countryside.  Home is never quite the same after that.  A childhood place of home can change hands without your say so, can be transformed into something unrecognisable by the passage of time.  You grieve for something that was, even if it was only ever an illusion, because the psychological pull of home is so great.  It is a sentiment not just a physical space.  As times erodes and neglect ruins, the heart is pained because of what is lost is so much more than just the physical reality.  The loss, sometimes abrupt, eats away at the core of who we think we are and where we feel that we belong.

Home is so important.  My heart goes out to anyone who has lost such a powerful piece of themselves, whatever the circumstances.  We are lost when we do not belong, we are broken when we know no love or peace, we are threatened when we have no safety or security.  There is no relief from the outside world without a home.  We all need somewhere that we can call home.  Not just four walls around us.

 

 

 

Poem

I haven’t written poetry for many, many years.  For good reasons.  I know that bad poetry is insufferable.  There is no excuse for such literary crimes and they should never be admitted to much less published on the internet.  So here is my first attempt, I know not how to improve it, if there is any hope for it at all, so you can throw tomatoes, tell me to delete this post or offer up some suggestion for salvage.

Poem

(inspiration from Christina Rossetti’s Song)

Plant thou no roses at my head

Remember me or not when I am dead

The words found me as a teenager

One of the few things retained from school

Something I believed, still a belief

Sometimes dying would mean relief

~

In my garden now, there stands a rose

Shooting madly for the skies, it grows

Sweet yellow blooms that I laid

One painful day on my father’s coffin

A day, a person that I shall never forget

My face the endless cascades wet

~

In my garden now, there stands a rose

In the wet mud between its toes

I placed you in the earth

Storm damaged petals, just like you, just like me

I will not forget

My guilt will not permit

~

Plant thou no roses at my own head

Remember me or not when I am dead

I am not worth remembering

Yet I remember you all

For in my garden there stands a rose

Whose sweet yellow blooms keep your memories close

~

If anyone has any suggestions too as to how to format this properly, they would also be much appreciated!  This template seems to have a particular loathing for line breaks.

I Dream

Do I dream?  There are the terrifyingly real nightmares that drag me down into an abyss of muddled darkness where the images and thoughts of my mind labour through an Escher-like treacle, flashbacks and subtle reminders from the subconscious attempting to make sense of the crazy, messed up world that I live in.  I skip through no fields of daisies.  I dream lucidly sometimes too, most often conscious only that I am dreaming and that I’m desperate to wake, to be free and to shake off the cold fingers of the night still grasping at me and trying to pull me back down.

There are other dreams too, a blend of the practical and the wishful.  I dream of paying the bills on time.  I dream of doing the things that need doing.  Quite often it just remains fantasy.

To accomplish great things, you must not only act but also dream, not only dream but also believe.

- Anatole France

Wise words, I wish I could carry them out but I dream of no future and I believe in little.

A few weeks ago, Just Be Enough prompted us to share our dream day.  I couldn’t think of anything, find an answer within myself so I left it and got on with not doing very much, as I do of late.  But the prompt stayed with me and I found myself reflecting on the subject regularly.

When we speak of dream days, perhaps it is of trips to mouse-eared theme parks that our minds turn to.  Some elusive, magical destination.  Something out of the ordinary.  (Mouse-eared theme parks hold no appeal for me, I’m not a fan of plastic commercialism or of rides that torture and terrify me and keep counsellors and osteopaths in business).

But the posts that came in from other readers were revealing.  Time and again, the same theme appeared.  And it wasn’t mouse-eared and there was no park attached to ‘theme’.  It was heart-warming and it got me thinking some more.

It was about people, often the people who are most precious to you, that everyone wanted to spend time with, to reconnect, to appreciate and to be with.

Isn’t that a beautiful thing?

The furthest I can dream is of having a day off, a day away somewhere in the sunshine, somewhere warm where I can sit, probably with my tent nearby on a campsite field, and knit or read or spend a little time just being me, just being in the moment with no pressures.

But if this was a magical dream day then I’d like a little more.  I want some other people to be there.  I want some good food to share with them.  And I don’t want to be the one making it.  I want sit down with those people and talk.

These people are nearly all dead now, there are one or two who are still alive, there are some that I have never met.  I want to sit them down and around my table, to talk with them and hear their stories.  There are some women in my family (whichever side or line) who have been incredibly strong and taken amazing journeys out of the ordinary, not just in place or distance.  I want to ask them about it.  I want to find out how they felt.  Some of those people I will expect them to leave their innate prejudice of me behind.  We will talk on my own terms, equal.  Others will, with me, have to break down walls of cultural and linguistic difference.  I have been separated from a family culture by the generation above me, by someone who was perhaps trying to better than their roots.  I appreciate roots.  I love stories.  I want to hear.  I want to connect.  I want my father to be there too.  I want to say goodbye.  And I want to hear his stories too.  Because I’m afraid of forgetting them and I always promised myself that I would write them down for him.

We will pass dishes and there will be meaningful, easy flowing conversation.  I will find the right words to break down barriers, I will find my place amongst these people and I will belong.

I dream.

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Birdy Bulletin

There’re dangers in getting ‘too attached’.  But how can you avoid attachment?  Care is what motivated you to take action in the first place, to get involved.  Care is motivated by respect and interest in another being, whether that being is on the same scale as yourself or not.  Attachment is just when that care becomes habitual, a relationship perhaps.  Should we choose not to care?  It seems that so many people don’t care, they don’t have the interest or respect or even plain common sense when it comes to dealing with their fellow planet dwellers, even of their own species.  Personally, I don’t think that’s a good thing.  It must surely be better to care, to have attachment, to show interest, to form relationships even if that means roughing the storms and dealing with pain and hurt.

I thought I would have very bad news to share with you.  I don’t know if I’m even really ready to talk about it but I know that many of you have been following the babies’ stories with much interest.  And surely you must all realise that not everything has happy endings.  When I was a child with an even lower scare threshold than I do now, I would only watch the films from the Mouse Brand because ‘at least there’ll be a happy ending’.  As an adult, I know that real life doesn’t, rarely it seems to me sometimes, echo those films.

We care and choose to get involved because we want positive outcomes, to do some good or make a difference.  But wanting to steer a future to the positive doesn’t mean we deny in our minds that it might not go that way.  Is it wrong to want or dream of happy endings?  Probably not.  Just sometimes we have to temper our fantasies with reality.  And reality can be harsh.

We nearly lost one last night.  It came as a great shock to us both.  And we found ourselves late at night having to make some very, very, very tough decisions.

It was our little Manky.

In the end, we took the decision to place him in a box overnight and see what happened.  Or rather to let nature take its own course even though we desperately didn’t want him to struggle.  He was struggling.

We went to bed in tears.

This morning the others woke late, that is twenty to six!

We fed them but couldn’t face opening up the box (it wasn’t sealed, it wasn’t airtight, just the cardboard box that we were first using for their accommodation with the flaps pushed down safe).

Just before seven, we heard something, a little something.

We couldn’t believe it.  And almost didn’t.

We heard it a couple more times and summed up the courage to open the flaps and look back inside.

It had been such a tough, long night.

He made it.  He was cheeping for his breakfast.

We couldn’t believe it.  I think we started crying all over again.

He’s still with us now, having regular feeds and on his own in the ‘hospital ward’ in the bedroom.

We still don’t know what the future holds for him.

I don’t know if we’d brave optimism but we’re going to keep feeding him.  And fortunately he doesn’t seem to be ‘struggling’ anymore.  We will see.

The other four are strong.  It seems.

Feisty seems to have lost interest in flying, maybe he scared himself with one too many crash landings.  It was a little concerning but it was reassuring to reflect that when many baby birds are found, especially at ground level, it is because they are fledgers who have lost their energy or whose feathers need a little more developing.  He could do with a good preen, that’s for sure.  Just got to watch where you put your feet!

Birdie seems to have switched species; he is no longer a cute blue tit baby but a feral pigeon.  And you know what I think of those.  He’s food motivated, probably that’s why he put the most amount of weight on amongst them all.  He’ll divebomb you if you walk in the room, just in case you have anything and he has no shame in stealing food from your own dinner.  Lunchtime we ended up putting them all back in the tank just to be able to eat!

All four are getting to self-feeding now.  We have little lids all across the back of one of the sofas, by the window where they love to be.  The husband’s chocolate spread obsession finally has a use!  They have one of water, one of baby food blend, one of mealworms and grubs and one of proper grown up bird food.  I think they’re most throwing the seeds around, judging by the evidence.  The sofa is totally trashed but fortunately it’s throws that I can wash and even redye so I’m being very docile and letting them get away with certain liberties.  Although of course we’re doing as much cleaning as possible.  It’s just a little hard when they take to wallowing in the baby food!

We’re also having a hard time keeping them off the cacti.  There’s some nasty little fuzzy needled ones too.  I don’t like cacti, they’re my husband’s.  I especially don’t like them since, when we were decorating last summer in here, my husband wisely left them on the floor.  I tripped over one of them and got lots of nasty little needles in my foot.  I removed them but wasn’t happy.  I was especially not happy when two weeks later my foot started hurting and we discovered several more needles.  He also keeps a spiky on the balcony so it can attack me when I hang the washing out.  This is not the way to domestic bliss.

Myself, I’ve gone from being a person who had never, ever held a bird before to being someone who can catch them adroitly and who has them perch and poo on me too.  Not so keen on the poop.  Funny enough.  We’re going through baby wipes, hand gel and antibac spray at an alarming rate.

Still can’t keep up with the poop though.

And we’re very exhausted from such a rollercoaster of emotions.  Drained.

But this morning when I read the Jester Queen’s latest post, I was very surprised to see my blog (or more technically my blue tits!) nominated for a blog award.  Now I’m pretty sure that this blog isn’t ‘lovely’ but I will accept graciously and I do thank her very much indeed, it was just what was needed after such a night and morning.

As it was my blue tit babies that triggered the award, I have set them up a page of their very own.  You see up at the top right with the other black buttons?

I am also meant to share seven things about myself that you don’t know about.  I think I’ll save that for another day, I’m all written out now.

And I’m also meant to nominate some other bloggers for the award.  Although I’d question the use of the verb ‘nominate’ because it is in fact a case of ‘award’, I make the decision and they receive.  Nominate would mean I would have to suggest them to a committee or something.  OK, pedantic moment other.  I’ll do that another day too.

Thank you for reading and thank you Jester Queen.

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The S-Word

~ Trigger Alert ~

I don’t like to court controversy in real life or on these pages and it’s most certainly not the reason that I’m writing about the subject today.  If you remain unaffected by this subject your whole life through then you have been incredibly fortunate and so has your family.  The statistics may tell you that you and your family will easily escape this cursed outcome but the statistics only tell of the ‘successes’, the mortalities.  There are thousands if not millions more ‘attempts’ each year.  Someone you know may well be one of those unreported statistics.

Even in this modern society where there are precious few taboos and the word ‘sin’ long passed out of fashion, the s-word remains both.  No one talks about it.  It is something shameful, confusing and ridiculously painful.  And we’re not even talking about its victims.

Are you prepared to talk about it?

We don’t do much in the way of preparing our children for mental health crises, perhaps we feel an almost superstitious fear of broaching the subject as if we were putting ideas in their innocent heads.  One of the reasons that so many parents aren’t prepared to talk clearly about the ‘birds and the bees’ to their children either.  But ignorance isn’t bliss.  Ignorance doesn’t save lives, protect innocent minds.  I know because I grew up in the most sheltered, naïve world that you could imagine, beyond that probably too.  I didn’t even watch television.  The s-word had never been uttered.  I start self-harming at nine.  Perhaps my attempts were naïve but they reflected a deep-seated pain that I knew no other way to express or to get rid of.  Ignorance didn’t protect me.  It won’t protect anyone else either.

How do you feel about such ‘attempts’?  It is easy to write it off as just some attention-seeking episode.  Perhaps it’s more convenient to our own perceptions of children, teenagers even the mentally ill as a whole.  Just doing it for the attention.  Perhaps it’s easier than having to ask questions or address a whole cataclysm of behaviours and feelings that we ourselves aren’t ready to deal with.  Perhaps it’s easier than realising that our perfect little world isn’t quite as perfect as we’d like to imagine, perhaps we’d rather ignore it than face the shame of our families, friends and communities.

But what if it’s just ‘attention-seeking’, a cry for help?  Does ignoring it not just do more damage?  A young voice that cries out desperately yet constantly goes unheard.  What are they learning and what messages are you reinforcing?  That no one cares, that no one takes them seriously?  Maybe it was a cry for help but what if it succeeds?  Would you not question even blame yourself for not having done more?  It’s easy, convenient to ourselves to tell them to pull their socks up, to get a grip but does it make it any better or easier for them?

The s-word raises more questions than there are answers.  It is a scourge and one that needs to be addressed.  Carrying posies and marking crosses on the door did little to quench the Plague.  We need knowledge.  And we need compassion.

Are you prepared to raise the issue when necessary?  Or when a loved one is in difficulties, will you shy away or tell them to get a grip?

I have a stubborn streak.  It seems to have kept me alive all these years.  Most days I don’t know why.  I never know how.  A lot of the time I am ashamed of myself for all those ‘failures’.  I should have tried harder!  Obviously there’s nothing wrong with me if I keep surviving attempt after attempt.

Does it make me weak and pathetic that I have failed?  Do we only measure success when it comes to the s-word by its mortality?  Is that success, achievement, a desirable outcome?

There are no easy conclusions, there is nothing straightforward.  Human emotions are complex and there are fewer more complex emotional situations than this pain.  It is pain that eats you away from the inside, a burning in your chest.  Physical, real, solid.  It is not a whimsy or a passing weak thought, a temptation.  Does that make you think differently about the s-word?

One thing I know about the s-word is that it happens, an ‘attempt’ takes place, when all hope is lost.  When you lose hope then you lose everything.  You have not been heard, you have no answers and the future if you see one at all is bleak and threatening.  I have not just lost hope.  I can’t remember the last time there was hope in my life.  Maybe that is why I keep going.  Because I know nothing else.  I might not be good enough, there might be no future or hope, there might be overwhelming stress and pressure but that is nothing new.  It is the loss that prompts the ‘attempt’.  Whilst I don’t believe, I can’t, that the future will be any better I am stuck in this rut of daily survival.  There is no shock loss that prompts me to drastic action.

The truth is you need to be able to feel to ‘attempt’.  We believe as a society that the s-word is the worst that it can get.  There is worse.  A lot worse.  The paralysing numbness that Depression can drag you down to, beyond the motivation to get up and put an end to it all.  The s-word is the tingle before your foot goes numb.   And if you happen to get better or have a good day, the s-word can be the tingle as life comes back to it.  The s-word can get you on the up as well as the down.  Did you know that?

I don’t have the motivation to act.  Maybe it’s because I’ve lost all sense of belief too.  In choosing to ‘attempt’, whilst acknowledging that things are at rock bottom, you also believe that you deserve better.  That this mess that your life is in is not the way it should be.  So you opt to take the only way out.

It’s the only way because there are no other answers at the time.  There is no one listening often.  There is no escape plan or people and organisations that you can turn to.  It can be spur of the moment, a knee-jerk reaction to a shock loss (it’s always a loss whatever that may be, not being listened to or not having your opinions heard or not being respected – those are big losses).  Sometimes it is planned, controlled and meditated on.  But there has been a loss and there is no hope.

Would you be alert to those changes, those warning signs in your loved one?

I do not praise the act but it is too easy to say that it is just a ‘selfish act’.  At a primal, emotional level then we have to act selfishly, for our  own interests and our own self preservation.  Sometimes we are cornered into choosing to self-destruct.  It is rarely done with thoughts to harm or betray our loved ones.  If it is then maybe then that is the genuine attention-seeking act of a hysteric.  It’s only when you get to that point yourself do you realise the tortuous state of mind, you will feel guilty and ashamed but what other option is there left?

You can try to reason with them but reason belongs to another world, to minds that are fit and healthy.  The logic has changed completely, a crosswire connection has been formed and things seem entirely different when they are in that place.  Reason is for an earlier time.  Love and compassion is what you need to give now.  And support, endless support.

Would you give that or would you be too busy reacting, dealing with your own emotions?  That’s selfish.

I can see how the succeeding is a good thing.  It appeals me too often.  The end of the hopelessness and all those burdens that I carry daily.  I can see why people end up trying.  Can you?  Sometimes I wish I could find the strength to do so because too many days I don’t know how to go on.  I have lost too much.  So much that I don’t know what I have left.

The s-words rips through lives and families and communities like a missile blast.  Jagged, cruel and indiscriminate.  The question ‘why’ echoes in every conversation that follows.  Although that seems obvious to me at least.  We don’t like to think that life can get that bad.  We like to believe that we were always there for them.  We like to believe that there were always other options.  But was there?  Were we listening to them, really, genuinely, deeply?  Maybe the ‘why’ is just a vocalisation of our own guilt, our own shame.  We like to believe that we could be better or stronger, we like to believe that we would do differently.  We also have to ask ourselves whether we should have done more or responded differently to that one we have lost.

How do you respond when you hear that some has gone that way?

If your friend or neighbour or colleague or loved one was in hospital after such an ‘attempt’, would you go to them?  Or would be more comfortable to pretend that it conveniently never happened?

If we never talk about it, pretend that it never happens, who are we protecting?  Ourselves and our own emotions or the people that matter?  It could be a child in your life.

There are no easy answers and this is just a viewpoint, a viewpoint of someone who has battled with Depression for over two decades.  I wish there was an easy way out regardless of my own personal belief systems and values but do you blame me for feeling that way?

Are you prepared to discuss the s-word in your life?