Friendship

31 Wednesday Jan 2024

Posted by in mental health, Motherhood, Parenting

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I’m sorry if I’m a terrible friend.

It’s not that I don’t love and value you. It’s just that I’m running on empty.

By the time everyone who needs me every day has taken a slice of me, there is just… none left over.

I can’t give any more, or do any more, or be any more, for anyone else.

If it helps, please know you’re not the bottom of my to do list.

I am.

I think friendship in middle age does just have to look a bit different, sometimes.

Sometimes it’s not about the nights out you have, the deep and meaningful conversations – putting the world to rights, the laughs, the drinks, or the coffees. Sometimes it’s not about the hours put in. Sometimes it’s just a periodic text to check the other person is still alive. A fleeting catch-up on the fly to report the latest updates on crazy kids, ailing parents, and stalling careers.

Sometimes, friendship in middle age is an act of faith – object permanence for adults. You have to believe the other person is there even when you don’t see them.

I think I am here when people need me. When you’re not looking, I still exist – a tree in a wood when there’s no one to hear it slowly collapse in exhaustion. And I’m far better at holding your structural integrity than my own. I don’t think I’m mean, or using you, or taking more than I’m willing to give? I know in theory friendships aren’t transactional – but at the same time I feel so guilty, so much of the time. Like I’m not enough for you, or me – or anyone.

I wish I was better at object permanence, myself. I wish I could rest in friendships without feeling the need to make people like me all over again whenever I next see them. I wish I was better at remembering birthdays. I wish I was better at reaching out after a gap instead of being weird and awkward about it. I wish I was more organised. I wish I had more energy – more get up and go. I wish I didn’t find correspondence and diary management so terrifying and overwhelming. I wish I had more free time. I wish the smalls were easier, and easier to blend. I wish I was capable of peopling better and more often. I wish I believed, deep down, I was worth the wait, your time and patience.

So if you’re still my friend despite the scattiness, gaucheness, random silences interspersed with over-familiarity, the rampant poor time management and even more rampant self-doubt and self-pity – thank you.

I’m sorry if I’m a terrible friend.

If you bear with me I’ll bear with you.

And I’ll make it my new Summer’s resolution to do a bit better.

xxx

The Barbie Speech (for mums)

31 Wednesday Jan 2024

Posted by in Motherhood

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It’s literally impossible to be a mother.

It kills me to see you try so hard, and care so much, and that you still don’t think you’re good enough.

Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we’re always doing it wrong.

You have to be nurturing but not coddling, present, but not a helicopter parent, involved, but not smothering. You have to do everything for them, but not so they’re entitled. You can’t yell, but you have to make them listen, you have to gentle parent and keep them off screens, but also not let them cause a scene in a restaurant.

You have to breastfeed, but not for too long, or where anyone might see – you have to be a good mother and a good girl, and a good feminist, too. You have to put your baby down and let cry it out or you’ll make a rod for your own back, AND you have to lie with them until they go to sleep, AND get in your own 8 hours a night because you have to NOT do the school run in pyjamas, or with bags under your eyes, and it’s just a matter of sticking to a routine, but you should be baby-led.

You have to treasure every moment, even when there is screaming, and other people’s bodily fluids, and BOREDOM, and acting out the same play-scene on repeat, watching the same show, listening to the same Minecraft details, over and over and over again. You can’t complain about it being hard because if you do, you’re ungrateful, but if you’re not self-deprecating enough you’re smug, or a martyr, or some hybrid of the two – smartyr.

Only you’re not smarter, at all, because you’re so damn TIRED, like all the time, and your brain doesn’t work how it used to – but you can’t let the patriarchy know, because you still have to smash the glass ceilings for the sisterhood. You have to set a good example for your daughters, and chase the promotions and deliver the targets – and don’t, whatever you do, let down the team, or snap, or be BOSSY. But you DO have to be a boss, you just have to do it in a caring way – but also don’t show your emotions at work because that’s icky and unprofessional.

You have to love being a mother, but you have to love your career, too. You have to 9 to 5 but you have to be a stay at home mum, do the school runs, and the doctor and dentist appointments, the after school clubs, the interminable Saturday mornings at the pitch side and afternoons at endless soft-play parties, and keep everyone’s schedule, and keep up with the bombardment of school emails and events, and keep up with the infinite washing pile, and keep house – but not like a show home because your kids won’t be having fun there, but also not like a sloven because it’s gross and unhealthy, and make delicious, nutritious meals that everyone will eat, but not serve freezer food and not encouraging fussiness – and somehow fit all that into a 24 hour day and a 44 year-old human mind.

You have to maintain successful friendships, and go out on the town, despite being exhausted, but not talk about the kids all the time, even though they’re supposed to be your world, but not too much of it. You have to be an earth mother but you have to be a MILF, keep it classy and be natural, but not let yourself go, but also not be fake, or care TOO much about your appearance – because if you do you’re vain, or a cougar, or desperate – or asking for it. Still.

You have to be the perfect mother and you have to be the perfect partner. You have to pay attention to your relationship, do date nights, and keep the magic alive. You have to enjoy an active sex life, and you have to not talk about how it’s changed, or prolapses, or dryness – or not having really felt like it since 2017. You have to never NEED any help, but if you do, you have ask your your spouse for help/housework foreplay, because how is he supposed to know about it otherwise? And you have to do it in a way that doesn’t blame him, nag him, or make him feel bad.

You have to be strong – in the right way – but you also have to be vulnerable in the right way. You have to be real about mental health but definitely not in a way where you’re actually not keeping it together. You have to pretty cry. You have to let the next generation see your struggles so it’s not such a god awful surprise for THEM when they get here, too, but still make it all seem rewarding enough they don’t run screaming for the hills/hysterectomies.

You have to sacrifice, but without being diminished. You have to come last because your children come first, when it comes to career, food, sleep, meals, or just going to the bloody toilet, last in line, busting, with a wobbly pelvic floor you’re meant to be exercising four times a day without raising your eyebrows, because that means you’re not doing it right, and also causes wrinkles and you have to be smooth and never age. You also have to come FIRST, and prioritise grooming, and a gym routine and self care – because you can’t pour from an empty cup. Particularly an ugly, hairy, lined or overweight one.

You have to smile, even when it hurts. Even when you are the broken Weird Barbie. Stuck in your own, internal splits trying to do it all, please them all, get through another day.

You have to never get old, never be fat, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never show fear, never show anger, never lose control, never get out of line.

It’s too hard. It’s too contradictory and nobody gives you a medal or says thank you.

And it turns out, in fact, that not only are you doing everything wrong, but also everything is your fault in the first place.

You asked for this.

[An adaptation in honour of Barbie, this page’s cover girl, and the brilliant speech delivered by the also brilliant America Ferrera]

My house

31 Wednesday Jan 2024

Posted by in mental health, Motherhood, Parenting

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I love my house.

I moved in the summer before the pandemic hit. It was a big downsize after my divorce. I was so, so tired. I just wanted to rest and be SAFE. And it’s given me that, these four walls. If my life goes to shit all over again, I can afford it. I can still pootle along gently. I can breathe.

I’ve also questioned myself, again and again, if I did the right thing.

I’ve worried I’m lazy. That not going bigger and better and working harder and earning more and aiming higher and having more ambition is a cop out. That I chose retreat. That licking my wounds and living smaller (and out of catchment) and cutting out big rooms (and cars and holidays) might ruin my life, and the Smalls’ lives in turn.

Well the cost of living crisis has sort of put paid to that… As interests rates hike again I’m increasingly grateful for my cowardice/caution. (And the Big Small, after months of worry, is going up to big school with all her mates – also a massive relief).

I still love my house. I love that I can walk to the shop, and the vet, and the pharmacy, and the take-away, and the park. I love my neighbours, and my community. I love the security.

But some days, these same four beloved walls press in HARD.

Some days, I think I hate it, too.

For a start I hate that there is always something to do, and fix, and clean, and sort out, and spruce up – in an oppressive cycle we were never told about as kids, drawing the dream, the red roof, the four windows and front door in the middle, stripes of blue and green top and bottom. A starburst sun in the corner.

I hate the fact nothing is ever finished, nothing is ever DONE. You can’t stick it on the fridge with a magnet and just forget about it and move on to the next thing.

I hate that after four years it has inexplicably filled back up with all the junk I worked so hard to eliminate so we could fit into it in the first place.

I hate that post pandemic my life is STILL shrunk mostly to these rooms. To a short circuit around them, of school runs, and supermarket shops, drs appointments and very little that is much further afield, off the paper.

I hate that like millions of home workers, I feel the weight of the privilege of being able to pick up and drop off kids, put a wash on, wear pyjama bottoms and drink tea in the garden – and the pressure of being seen to be present and productive and switched on at all times.

I hate that I am on my own in it. Because funnily enough as a child I never drew stick me outside it, all alone. I drew company.

I hate that I am so often so lonely, here. So claustrophobic. Chafing at my boundaries. When I feel I am spring-loaded in my own body, ready to leap out of the picture, hurl myself off the set tracks I laid so deliberately.

I hate that as soon as I leave it all I want to do is get back to it.

I feel all of this particularly hard after the death of my dad.

I suppose it is partly the classic carpe diem of grief, wanting to feel and experience and expand to fill what life and time there is left. Like him, I am also on an ever-shifting continuum between the Myers Brigg I and E – sometimes drawing energy from others but needing time to recharge on my own.

And the balance right now is… off.

Some days I’m conscious the only real-life adult interactions I have are the small talk conversations at the school gate, at which I am only partially successful. This is not the social life I imagined for my adult self.

When the kids return, they have used up their own quota of other-people energy at school, or at their dad’s, and they want to veg, to hibernate, to retreat into their own little home world and not come out – not go out.

When the most anxious Small is particularly anxious, I cannot pry her from the house at a weekend with either force or bribery, and she rebels at the thought of my inviting others into her safe space. Babysitters and having mates round for an evening cuppa is not always possible, here. Bedtime isn’t always easy. This is not something people always understand.

There are days when I feel trapped in my own home, a prisoner of a nest I created. A haven which has also limited my horizons, a safety net that has become a sticky web – pulling my limbs down harder the harder I fight it.

And always always, just behind my shoulder, out of sight, is the knowledge of the spider that is waiting to eat me – the doom that stalks all of the anxious. (I wonder where she gets it from).

I’m not quite sure that there are answers.

I think that this – this trapped feeling – is maybe just… middle age. A combination of the squeeze of responsibility, the boredom of monotony, the gaping hole of loss, the reality of physical/hormonal exhaustion, the tick of the clock, the double-edged sword of home-working, the challenge of raising kids wired differently – in a world too fucked up to make safe for them.

This, of course, is the junction at which men start wearing sports blazers, buying two seater cars, developing a coke habit and dating women 15-20 years their junior.

As a woman my options are more limited. An extra glass of wine, maybe. A spring clean. Fluff up and feather the nest with a trip to Dunhelm and a few different cushions and lamps… Possibly a kitten.

I think as women we are often better at understanding how love and hate live together, under one roof, two sides of one of sheet of paper, scrunched up into a ball. We are so used to feeling more than one thing at once, often in direct opposition, and feeling the feeling rather than seeking a solution to the dissonance.

And we are good at smoothing out the wrinkles, placing it carefully in a memory box, starting over with a fresh sheet, every day if that’s what’s necessary.

This summer, I definitely need to draw some new lines.

Wish me luck.

xxx

How to be a grey rock

31 Wednesday Jan 2024

Posted by in Divorce, Domestic abuse, mental health, Motherhood

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It involves considerably less paper mache and craft supplies than you might think!

Grey Rock is a technique that people who have been in abusive relationships can use to deal with someone they still have to communicate with – for instance an ex they’re co-parenting with, or a close family member like a parent they’re trying to set boundaries with. It also works with difficult work colleagues.

It’s about being practical, boring, and unreactive – like a rock – so you stop feeding your abuser with emotion and reaction.

It is also very much easier said than done…

So here’s some top tips from women who visit this page, to help you put the Grey Rock theory into practice.

1. Write where possible

It’s much harder to consider and control your reactions and emotions face-to-face. If you are split up from an ex-partner for instance, or estranged from a parent, it’s highly likely you don’t communicate that well. It’s up to you to break the cycle and re-set your interactions, and the time and space written communication can give you to do so is key.

There is the added advantage, of course, that your interactions are recorded. This can stop an abuser from gaslighting you by making claims about what you said or didn’t say, agreed to or not.

It is also evidence, if you need it, for legal proceedings.

2. Think about the outcome you want

In every single interaction, it’s important to always have the end in mind. What is the outcome you want, and how can you best achieve it – or get as close to it as possible?

Don’t feel the need to rebut every point they make – it is a skill to mentally sift through the rubbish and find the nuggets you actually have to or want to respond to.

Take a step back, consider what you REALLY want to get out of every conversation.

3. Use single subject emails/texts

Don’t stuff an email or text with paragraphs and paragraphs of every little thing that needs to be decided. Pick one battle at a time. Keep it short.

4. Use short sentences

Imagine you’re talking to a stranger from space – or sending a telegram you pay for by word. You have to keep it really clear, really simple and break it down into easily understandable and actionable points. (Actual bullet points are probably going to annoy them, but THINK in bullet points).

If you go over 3 sentences, you’ve probably written too much.

5. Don’t rise to the bait

Don’t get bogged down, side-tracked, or distracted by other topics, accusations, grievances, or recriminations. Your abuser’s correspondence will inevitably be peppered with all of them.

I know you’re angry. I know you want to shout at them about how AWFUL they are, how that’s not what happened, how they’re wrong, how they can’t control you anymore – but you will only make things worse, mostly for yourself.

For so many people who have been abused, part of the problem is that you could never win the argument. You were always the one that was stupid, and over-emotional, and misunderstanding, and getting it wrong. Now you’re finally free some of you wants to fight back. I get it. But here’s the reality: YOU WON’T WIN. I’m so sorry. They’ve had more practice. They know your buttons. They ARE your trigger. And it is not going to get you the result you actually want…

The only way to proceed is to CHANGE the argument, by not attending it. Don’t rise to the bait.

The truth is this. When you rise up, when you show your strength, all they will want to do is push you down harder – back into your place. That’s not going to get you what you want or need from them.

6. Save your emotion for the right people

Obviously you have to vent. Because they are a WANKFOFFLENOODLE. But do it to your friends, not your abuser. Laugh at them together. Share the absurd responses. Cry and scream and shriek at how they still talk down to you. But only show your abuser the Grey Rock.

They don’t get your emotion anymore.

They are not worth the energy, or worthy of the honour.

7. Cut the chat, but be civil

With that in mind, forget everything you know about interacting with normal people.

Don’t ask how they are. Cut the preamble. You are not there to make friends all over again with this person. But neither are you there to make them more of an enemy… Be civil, but impersonal. Be clear about what you want/need. But do not wander into the thought process behind it, or how you feel about it, or why you think it’s a good idea.

Don’t let them IN. Channel Queen Lizzie – be aloof, unattainable; never complain; never explain.

8. Pacify, but don’t pander

It’s best to treat your abuser as a bomb that’s about to go off, or as an extremely extremely tired toddler, which we all know are much of a muchness. Don’t make any sudden moves that might startle them, or confront them too directly. Give options. Make it easy for them to ‘win’.

If you don’t, they will just come out swinging at you – and back you’ll go round the circle again.

That’s not to say you should roll over to their every demand. Those days are OVER, darling. You don’t have to go back there. But setting up the back of someone you are obliged to keep in your life is foolishness – and you are no longer anyone’s fool. Be reasonable. Be fair. Be gone.

9. Walk away

With that in mind, don’t continue a conversation that has become unfruitful. If you are going round in those never-ending circles, just step away. And don’t be tempted back into response once you’ve done so. Here’s some phrases to help:

I don’t think we’re getting anywhere, so let’s leave it for now.

I’m disappointed you feel that way.

I don’t agree. Let’s leave things as they are.

No.

10. Just say no

Oh, that’s the hardest one isn’t it? But you can just say no to your abuser, you know.

I know you’re used to making excuses, and trying to please them. I know at least 80% of you secretly still thinks they’re right and you’re wrong, because that’s how they’ve trained you. I know you’re afraid deep down. Even though there’s that rebellious bit that wants to fight now, you’re afraid of them. Even though they may never have laid a finger on you, you’re afraid of them.

But you can just say no. Honest. And it can be empowering:

No, that doesn’t work for me.

No, not this week.

No I can’t do that.

No, we’ll leave things as they are.

11. Don’t panic

It is in the abuser’s manual to make threats when they don’t get what they want – including the reaction they are used to from YOU.

When you say no, they will threaten you with court, with safeguarding concerns, with parental alienation accusations, with telling everyone what you’ve done and setting them against you, with phoning your workplace, etc etc.

Hell, they may even follow through.

Don’t panic. This is all quite standard.

Remember, just because they’ve said it, doesn’t make it happen, and doesn’t make it TRUE.

You don’t have to believe them, anymore. And other people won’t either. They can see through them from the outside far more quickly than you did, trapped on the inside.

12. Set correspondence boundaries

One of the best ways to Grey Rock is to stop being so responsive, literally.

They do not get to bully you by appearing constantly in your life – pinging in your pocket several times a day. Set rules. They are not allowed to contact you at a weekend unless it’s an emergency. They can only email on a certain address (set up a new one just for them), or call on a certain number (get a burner phone).

And then enforce the rules! Turn off the phone. Don’t look at the email address on your ‘rest’ days.

This will be hard. You are still in fight or flight and you want to know what they’re going to hit you with next – but stepping away is VITAL to help you re-charge the Grey Rock.

Be disciplined, with them but mostly with yourself.

13. Sleep on it

Except in the most simple of circumstances, never EVER respond to any correspondence with your abuser straight off the bat. This is for two key reasons. First, it trains them that you are no longer at their beck and call. Second, it gives you a chance to check your Grey Rock is grey enough and rocky enough.

It’s HARD to take emotion out of an emotional situation. Write your response, but then sleep on it. Read it again with fresh eyes before you send it.

I’ll bet money you change it for the better after a kip.

14. Find a Grey Rock buddy

Even better than sleeping on it is getting someone ELSE to read it before you send it!

You just can’t see clearly when you’re so embroiled in something. Find someone not directly involved who can check your message for clarity, reasonability, length and focus.

Tell them about Grey Rock.

In fact, tell everyone.

xxxx

Other

31 Wednesday Jan 2024

Posted by in mental health

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Sometimes, the Authenticity Gods, or even the more minor Small Talk Deities, are behind me. Other times they are most definitely not.

Sometimes I am this awkward marionette bent at grotesque angles to my own life, not quite fitting into it, into any given situation it presents – from work meetings to the school gate, supermarket checkouts to nights out, playing with the kids to coffee with friends.

Sometimes I am just too conscious of my body and my tongue and my thoughts. Of what other people are thinking. Of the world pushing in on me. And it throws me off my axis.

I’m slightly off kilter – a beat behind everything and everyone. Too loud. Too quiet. Too filtered and too unfiltered – saying or doing slightly the wrong thing at slightly the wrong time. Looking out of my own eyes from a long way away.

Sometimes I am just… Other. Othered. I’m not sure how else to describe it.

The really annoying thing is that I can’t really tell how or when it’s going to happen, but it is when I am stuck between selves that it is at its worst.

This is a particular problem (one of many) I think, for the co-parent. Because as a co-parent you end up living life in two halves; the one with your children, and the one without them.

In many ways it is a privilege – to get time in your own skin, to get the chance to play at being young and carefree, to shed the mantle of responsibility, to lower the mum mask.

But the flip side is that you’re split. You’re never a whole person in the same place and space.

Or at least I’m not…

I think I just didn’t know how else to do it on my own but to mum HARD, and then ‘me’ hard in relief/despair when I was without them. And I ended up with these two different lives that for various logistical reasons have never much crossed over.

Certainly the Big Small now always complains that I don’t feel like the mum she knows when she glimpses my other self – for instance when I’ve had a glass of wine and I’m with my friends, or The Boy.

It’s always hard when your parents suddenly feel like they don’t belong to you – I remember it from my own childhood, watching dinner partiers through the banisters. When your mum, your person, is suddenly not your mum but a stranger – and you feel them slipping away from you. So I get it. But sometimes, as I said to her, she doesn’t feel like she belongs to me either.

I feel the distance most keenly when she’s away on holiday with her dad – in the awkward, stilted phone calls that don’t flow like conversations do when we’re together. She’s not mine, in those moments. And I’m not me.

She KNOWS this about herself, as well as knowing it about me. She can articulate it. She said to me recently that she feels like she’s two people – the person she is with me, and the person she is at her dad’s, and that keeping up both is exhausting.

I feel that SO HARD.

Because I am tired, too.

Reconciling the different sides of myself, the different hats I wear, roles I play and moods I weather has always been a struggle. And it is both the cause and the effect of this Otherness.

I had this epiphany recently when I went away with a group, where I had to be two sides of me in both halves of my life AT THE SAME TIME. And I ended up doing neither very well… I wasn’t the mum I wanted to be, or the me I wanted to be. I was locked in weird self-conflict – as if the two halves coming together didn’t actually make a proper functioning whole.

I CAN be hugely present and in a moment and FLOWING.

But, sometimes – I can’t.

What I want for the Big Small as she grows up into whoever she’s going to be, is to be able to be her WHOLE self, the whole time. To embrace being different in different moments and emotions, without bowing to expectations – her own or others’. To live without the conflicts so many women face trying to please everyone and navigate their way through the binaries of personal/professional, mother/lover, leader/nurturer. To accept Otherness when it comes as a part of herself, as a part of being a human.

I want that for me, too.

Perhaps the best I can do at the start of mental health awareness week, is to try to be kinder to myself when I am stuck in Other. And shout out to all the other ‘Othered’, out there. The anxious. The autistic. The overthinkers. The hurt. The wary. The weary.

You are not alone, and you’re not actually out of sync with the rest of the world.

You are in sync with me, at least.

xxx

Perimenopause the Superpower

31 Wednesday Jan 2024

Posted by in mental health, Motherhood, Parenting

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I’m trying to view Perimenopause as a Superpower. So it’s less about what I’m losing – like control of my pelvic floor, fertility, skin elasticity, and rational thought – but what I’m GAINING, and how I can use it to FIGHT THE FORCES OF EVIL.

Here are 14 of my not-so-secret PM weapons:

1. Sweats/hot flushes

Yeah, just try it, Punk. Put your hands on me and you will BURN. Or slip off, like I’m a bar of boiling-hot soap.

Also I spend so much time fanning myself I’ve built up serious wax-on-wax-off karate moves.

2. Bloating

At the start of the day, my trousers fit fine. At a certain point in the afternoon, I can ping my top button off with the force of my belly bloat, and take out someone’s EYE. Even when they’re wearing a mask! Peeeow, peeeow.

3. Saggy boobs

Think Elastigirl, but in two very specific anatomical areas. I need someone to design me some sort of really cool leather bustier that flips down in a Janet Jackson-esq wardrobe malfunction.

Boobchucks. What a way to go.

4. Sore joints

I can tell you now which hip is going to need replacing in circa 20 years, because it’s killing me 80% of the time. Often the only relief I can find is to whip out a quick Downward Dog. The butt in the air thing might be more element of surprise than combat strike, unless combined with…

5. Wind

Personal chemical warfare! Some days I’m so trumpy I feel like I’ve probably created my own mini ozone hole that follows me round like the Pink Panther cloud.

6. Brain fog

Good luck trying to predict my next move, Super Villains, because I’ve just left my door keys in the goddam FREEZER, fed the cat the hamster food, worn odd shoes on the school run and basically have NO IDEA WHETHER I’M MOTHERFREEZING COMING OR GOING!

Oh, you think YOU’RE the disruptor? Lols! I AM chaos. Bring it on, beetches.

7. Floods

Face-off with Harley Quinn, in the style of Crocodile Dundee, only we’re armed with tampons.

“Oh, darling, that’s not a Period. THIS IS A PERIOD.”

**Unleashes the red flood gates of hell**

8. Low libido

Going to try to seduce me to the Dark Side? HA! Good luck with THAT strategy.

9. Mood swings

I’m basically, temperamentally speaking, the Incredible Hulk. You do not want to make me angry. You will have no idea what will trigger this.

Here’s the really powerful bit: NOR HAVE I.

Tick tick KA-FLOOFIN-BOOM.

10. Vaginal dryness/discharge

I can suck the moisture out of enemies at 50 paces with only my vagina AND/OR AT THE SAME PARADOXICAL TIME cast a discharge oil slick across roads so they crash their villain-mobiles.

You better hope and pray I don’t take off my enormous M&S granny knickers, Thanos.

11. Hair loss

The Joker will never be able to wash that make-up off for a full day of Evilling on the morrow, BECAUSE THE DRAIN IS PERPETUALLY CLOGGED.

That’ll wipe the smile off his face. Or not. (Depending on whether he has micellar water).

12. Insomnia

Trying to catch me unawares? Planning to launch a strike at the dead at night? I’M ALREADY AWAKE, Evil Masterminds! THERE IS NO ELEMENT OF SURPRISE, OR ANY POINT TO LIFE WHEN IT INSISTS ON EXISTING AT 3AM.

In fact, I’m so tired I WANT you to kill me.

13. Fatigue

Oh hey Lex Luthar. You’re not going to need that Kryptonite, sweetie. 2pm is now my own personal Kryptonite – when I’m literally at my most feeble crawling through the day on my knees. (Or too much red meat – when I’m doubled up in pain on the bathroom floor). AND YOU KNOW WHAT? I have to get up and fight through anyway BECAUSE THERE ARE NO OTHER CHOICES AND NO ONE ELSE IS GOING TO FETCH THE KIDS AND FEED THEM TEA AND PUT THE WASHING ON AND DO THE HOMEWORK AND LISTEN TO THEIR STORIES AND PUT THEM TO BED AND THEN GET UP AND DO IT ALL OVER AGAIN THE NEXT DAY OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN NO MATTER HOW MUCH IT HURTS.

I’m USED to carrying on through weakness, sickness, thick and thin.

14. Not caring

I’m still working on tapping into this new Perimenopause power, but it’s there, thrumming under the surface.

Increasingly, I don’t care what you think, anymore. I don’t care if you LIKE me. I don’t care if you’ve got a plausible back story to make your bad deeds understandable. Frankly, my dear, I DON’T GIVE A FLYING FORK.

I’m finally free.

JOIN ME.

(And pass to a PM hero you know).

Humanity

01 Saturday Apr 2023

Posted by in mental health, Poetry

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Am I real? 
Is the first thought
that fights its way 
through unfurling consciousness
and I press for five more minutes
to consider the question -
and gather my pieces 
until I am rendered solid enough 
to be -
or at least pretend -
humanity. 
 
And as I struggle together 
into an approximation 
of the right sort of shape -
torso/arms/legs/head -
the dreams scrabble for purchase 
on the smoothed, soothed shell
falling away in slow motion -
before they can tell me
what they were trying to say.
And I know deep inside 
I have lost something
key 
to humanity,
a secret - missing in action 
or inaction. 
 
And the day feels 
an uncomfortable play -
where I don’t know the lines
and they are broken
all wrong.
So I fake it, 
frozen under blue lights
awkwardly twirling 
on taught strings
until I can exit stage left -
back into gruelling darkness
spent
from the attempt,
at humanity. 
 
And when that is judged now
by how many fire hydrants
I can see -
in a grid -
and not by my capacity 
to love/think/create -
withered away under the cage - 
I know I have failed myself
playing someone else’s tune 
loudly over my own,
and that I am the slice
in the square that may count -
but may not - and I can’t
plot
my humanity
like this.

Happy Blancmange Day

01 Saturday Apr 2023

Posted by in mental health, Motherhood, Parenting

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This Mother’s Day, following hot on the heels of this International Women’s Day, I’ve decided I don’t particularly want to be a Strong Independent Woman anymore. International or otherwise.

Like many Mothers, I’m sick of being strong – of coping. Of carrying on. Of being congratulated for keeping lots of balls in the air or things on my plate, when what I’d really like isn’t flowers, or chocolates, or random toiletries (that’d probably give me a rash/thrush if I actually used them), but for someone to catch a few of the balls, or wipe a few things off my plate, instead.

I think, just for a bit, I’d quite like to be a Feeble, Heavily Supported, Local Puddle.

Or perhaps a Blancmange.

I feel like I could really put the Bleugh into Blancmange (said properly, not like it’s spelled).

First of all, it’s just a great, GREAT word. And I feel like it’s weirdly onomatopoeic for this point in my life. People who don’t enjoy the shape and feel in their mouths of saying the word Blancmange are frankly, Bleugh-wrong.

Plus, the Blancmange enjoyed its heyday in the 80s, a situation I very much identify with…

It’s also almost entirely made of sugar, and EXPECTED to be pink and jiggly, without judgement, which sounds like something I can really get behind, too.

Finally, it does not have to hold itself up and maintain its own structural integrity: it can flollop at will, and takes the form of whatever harder, firmer vessel is holding it – possibly a rabbit mould. (Surrounded by lime jelly grass, obvs).

Being passive and gelatinous and allowing someone else to shape my destiny and make my decisions sounds pretty damn good at the moment.

So today, Mothers, I hope you get to be a Blancmange. I hope you get to put down everything you hold up, just for a bit, and rest in a mould of some kind, resplendently wibbly.

Because all of us need to be able to wobble, sometimes, under the impossible pressure of being everything to everyone, keeping everything in mind, everything ticking over, everyone on an even keel. All of us melt down, sometimes, before we pull ourselves back together, try again, woman up. Re-form. Un-mange.

This Mother’s Day, rest, if you can, like an 80s dessert. Feel free to let it all slide. Gloop. Smell of strawberries. (An inevitable consequence of the crap smellies you will inevitably be gifted).

And if you CAN maintain your own structural integrity, go forth and be the rabbit mould for a Mum you know.

It’s what she really wants.

And deserves.

Xxx

Life doesn’t stop

01 Saturday Apr 2023

Posted by in mental health

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The trouble is, life doesn’t stop. Even when you want it to.

There is tea to make, and pots to wash, and school runs to do, and bedtime stories to read – with voices. And washing. Constant loads and loads of never-ending laundry.

Your washing machine does not mourn the dead.

Nor does the sun.

It comes relentlessly up day after day and bathes everything in incongruous gold.

The birds sing.

It is such a jarring contrast to what’s inside it hurts – like a chemical reaction – and you are thrown off balance by the violence of exothermic soul dissonance.

I find myself sliding awkwardly sideways through the too-yellow syrup spilled carelessly over the day – not quite in my own body, not knowing if the brightness hurts my eyes or my heart – but wanting it to burn more, hurt MORE. My movements feel slow, and I go about the frustrating minutia of life like an astronaut in anti-gravity, a wasp in honey. I am surprised to find myself at the washing basket, holding dirty clothes, not knowing how I got there. And I watch other people move freely and painlessly around like the world isn’t entirely wrong – and I am half in and half out of it, coming in and out of focus, out of sync, out of breath as the stickiness fills my lungs.

This sense of being in between – in between lives, and deaths, and memories, and dreams and nightmares – of being apart, from the universe, from others, from yourself – erases you. Grief makes YOU the ghost in your life. And you are either too insubstantial to feel real or too wild to feel human – living with a Hyde poltergeist straining just under your own surface.

I know this monster.

It has always been there, waiting.

There are times of my life when it has been small and weedy and I have barely remembered its existence. It has been bigger, and whispered dark things in my ears which I have pretended not to hear. And it has been a raging wild-eyed beast taking me over, thrashing and clawing and writhing and keening – a bloody, sinewed horror-scream made solid.

It takes many different forms and has many names – and it lives within many people, I know. It is Anxiety. Desperation. Depression. Grief. Anguish. Pain.

I have always tried not to let mine take over. When I can feel it I think small thoughts and try and have small feelings and do small things so as not to provoke it. I hang washing out, carefully. Not breathing too hard, in case.

When it has broken free in the past I have been taught that it is ugly – unsightly, unseemly. That it makes me disgusting. I have been left alone with it.

One of the only people who saw it, and could soothe it, was my Dad.

And now he’s gone and it’s HERE – and I’m afraid to let it out. I am afraid of the damage it will do if I don’t.

But I have been lucky. Because for the first time in many, many years, somebody ELSE has looked at it – directly in the face – and not been revolted by it. Somebody else has held me, and seen what’s inside when it is at its most out of control, its most grotesque – and not walked away from me.

I don’t think I realised how much I needed that safe harbour. From the sunshine and from the storm. I don’t think I realised how much I had missed out on.

The washing machine beeps.

There is school uniform that must be dry for next week.

Life continues to roll on.

All any of us can do is to try and keep up.

And maybe find people who will hold onto us when we can’t.

Windows

08 Wednesday Feb 2023

Posted by in Uncategorized

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There are four small, mid-blue squares. In between each one is a navy fleck, creating a cross. There is a dot in the middle, forming the centre of a miniature window. Undulating fields of them spread outwards forever, hypnotically consistent. They are so tiny and so regular they become gaping chasms – and I fall into one after another, over and over again.

It is the pattern of a hospital gown.

I wore this gown once, and held the little, incredible hand of a very new baby, drinking in her details with my eyes and her breaths with my ears, forgetting my own, counting the seconds between, living years in the gaps – until I am only eyes and only ears and only hope and only despair detached from all other senses, floating, waiting, counting, falling.

In.

Out.

Now my dad is wearing this same gown.

They are turning the machines down, and off. And again I am listening, straining to hear that next breath, waiting, waiting. I am holding his hand, too. I have held this hand many times. And I am here, marvelling at the familiar spots and lines and creases, baulking at the unfamiliar tubes, resting on endless horizons and horizons of windows.

And in the spaces between, getting longer, the breaths, getting shorter, I am tipping over their sills and into their pale panes – down into memories and stories and bits I’ve filled in for myself all mixed up, like dreams.

In.

There is a small boy with a distended tummy and spindly limbs, who looks like a Toad because he is very poorly.

Out.

He is a bespectacled student who is half cocky and who twists his tongue between his teeth as he picks at his nails, but will never know he does this.

In.

He is a husband who will always like his womenfolk spiky and clever and funny, who wore a pink shirt and a Beatles haircut on his wedding day that I only know from pictures, who plays and challenges and shows up.

Out.

He is a dad, with two small blonde girls playing crackadown bridge on the floor, talking long walks in the woods with a dog he pretends not to like, but laughs and laughs when she jumps in leaves, on sledges, goes crackers through the daffodils, and who cries and cries when she dies.

In.

He smells of cigarette smoke, and his moustache tickles when he gives goodnight kisses. He spends hours convincing a small girl who can’t read, or add up, or sleep, or control her bad thoughts – that what she CAN do is draw. Until eventually she believes him.

Out.

He is playing on a beach, swinging children over waves in shorts and cagoules, throwing them in the pool, telling them they’re digging the golf ball sandcastles all wrong.

In.

He jokes away and pushes out monsters of all varieties, vaporising the snakes with suckers climbing in at night, trapping cats with red eyes in his wardrobe – and later slaying dead-eyed husbands with withering contempt.

Out.

He is on a boat, plunging in the foaming sea, drifting on a peat-black lake, pottering on a canal, messing about on the river. I watch his bare legs walking in front of me and realise we share calves.

In.

He rides in a Mondeo steed to the rescue, of stranded people and stuck daughters, be they over-tired, over-emotional, in pain, in peril – imperfect. He alternates bracing and tender, holding back hair, stroking backs, tidying rooms, sitting at besides, fixing problems, being busy – being there.

Out

He is in a restaurant, teasing a waiter, forgetting his handbag – and making everyone laugh out loud.

In

He relishes debate and games and words and knowledge and hilarity – at Friday night fish and chip dinners with a box of Lambrusco, at Christmas meals with neighbours, cups of tea with Grannies, holidays with friends. And when I am the one to make him laugh, I glow.

Out

He is taking a group of girls on holiday, singing the rude words to all the songs. It’s everyone’s highlight.

In

He argues with a deaf dog about who is at the door when he’s on his way to work, because it’s him, and she literally just saw him leave.

Out

He is joining a group of prickly work colleagues who don’t like the holiday temp – and they love him, and like her more because of him.

In

He is salt and pepper bearded, like a badger. He is telling bigger girls about the cancer that they don’t yet know won’t actually be the thing that kills him, but won’t leave him the same, either.

Out –

He is deep in conversation, his arms crossed over his braces, listening intently, nodding along. He lets out a sudden bark of laughter, and starts wildly gesticulating with his arms.

In –

His beard is white, and cats check it for mice. He plays pounce and builds them platforms, and rubs their faces with blunt, dented thumbs – thumbs that used to rub my palms as he squeezed my hand.

His is cold now in mine.

The windows reel past fast and slow, in a snail’s rush, and I am afraid when the tears mean I can’t see into them anymore. I am afraid I won’t remember. I am afraid of the windows ending.

When I am afraid, I still want my dad.

There is barely an out anymore.

In is sharp, shallow, a tiny gasp.

I look up from the windows and catch my sister’s eye. She has been looking through her own, I see.

We laugh, suddenly, grimly, without humour, at how funny he’d have found this. The darkly comic timing of the breath you don’t think will happen… that you don’t know whether to want or not.

The old dead cow trick, fooling the city tourists.

In –

This patchwork man, sewn together like Frankenstien’s monster operation after operation, slaloming around death for decades, is stitched together of so many different, rich and contrasting textures – gregarious and grumpy, funny and fierce, unflinchingly moral and twinklingly wicked, an extroverted introvert, the reserved life and soul of the party, a socialist at the coal board, a born engineer student of humanities, an intellectual who loved fart gags and silliness, a fan of Beethoven and bodice rippers, infinitely patient and easily exasperated, a lover of babies and boats, cats and crosswords, chicken conspiracy theories, sci-fi and cinema, a vehement disbeliever in God and midnight mice – a collector of projectors deliberately, and people unintentionally.

And all the windows crack and shatter

In an explosion of silence.

He is gone.

We are left to pick our way over the shards of broken glass, down the corridor, away from him. Bleeding.

Out – into an alien world without him in it.

*

I am home now, holding that first hand again, my daughter’s, much bigger now. It is strangely new, like I’m seeing it with my eyes freshly peeled. I listen for her breaths, out of habit, learning, because I have somehow forgotten what my own should feel and sound like. I don’t remember them hurting this much.

My knuckles stand out, my veins raised in rivulets of blue. They remind me of his. And I know with heavy inevitability and half hope that one day she will be holding my hand, when the skin is even thinner and the spots even browner, listening for my last breath in her turn.

I wonder if the hospital gowns will have the same windows. I wonder if she will fall into them, and what views she will see. I wonder if I am doing enough to keep the glass clear, to fill the frames for her.

I wonder if I will ever be loved the way I love.

I wonder what I will do without him.