Happy Ever After

8th November 2012

Today is another wonderful birthday treat from my sister and her huband.  After fish and chips at Monty’s on the Barbican in Plymouth we sit in the dark at the Theatre Royal, the curtain rises on Mathew Bourne’s Sleeping Beauty, Tchaikovsky’s music thunders around us and I’m totally transfixed by the dancers flying and leaping and swirling across the  stage in glorious gothic costumes.....plunged into the fairy tale unfolding in front of us......forgetting everything.....waiting for the prince/gardener ( because it’s Mathew Bourne) to defy the bad fairy and wake his sleeping Aurora.

I love every minute of it...love being out of the heaviness of my usual day -  wish I could be as light as that tiny slip of a princess, lifted again and again into the air by strong and trusted arms...up there where the view is clear....and  there is always a happy ever after....

Gratitude and Emptiness

7th November 2012

Another low calorie day.

Have you lost any weight? I ask my husband this morning.

I don’t know.

Why don’t you weigh yourself?

Because I want to go listen to the 9 o’clock news and see if Professor Thingy has won the American thing.

President Obama you mean?

A few minutes later he shouts up the stairs that he won. 

I like seeing my husband with a reason to get out of bed.

I dread what I’ll find when I come down to the kitchen in the mornings. Usually takes 45 minutes to clean up after the pussy cat.  Not too bad this morning......lots of pee to mop up this afternoon. Later I sit with him while our animal healer gives him some distant healing and I find myself full of gratitude for his presence in our lives all this time and for teaching me how to keep on loving when it stops being easy.......

I’m really really hungry tonight after my 500 calories.......but it’s only emptiness...not serious.

Walking Alone

6th November 2012

We walk in quiet woods this afternoon, along muddy paths lined with beech trees their leaves fluttering bronze and gold. We hold hands and talk about our pussycat who peed in his bed this morning. I’m choked with tears and memories of my father. It was this week a year ago that he was admitted to hospital to have a catheter fitted - the beginning of his decline.....

I hurl myself into the future - imagine life without our 16 year old pussy cat.....then try and imagine my life without my husband who walks and talks beside me now.

Knitted into that future I see myself walking alone in these woods - with two cold hands instead of one  - tucked into the warm cave of his....

Burnt Out

5th November 2012

I feel like one of those fireworks going off outside tonight......my fuse is so short it doesn’t take much for me to blow up and snap at my husband....

Will you stroke the pussy cat - I’m trying to get lunch...

I will in a minute  - I’m putting stuff away....

But a minute is too long - I can’t bear it for a second when the pussy cat squeaks at my ankles asking for something....asking for attention, when I’m hungry when I’m busy..... when I can’t find room in my heart to love him.....

I stroke him anyway - acid with resentment.....

I take him to the vet tonight, driving through rush hour traffic - dark already. The vet says there’s nothing to be done about the peeing everywhere.....no point in doing more blood tests....it could be his kidneys but he’s eating well so that doesn’t fit with a kidney problem.....

He says some vets euthenaise too readily - euthenasia is a priviledge and only to be used as a last resort - but he’ll do it whenever we think it’s the right time.....probably if our cat stops eating.....

But our cat just pees in his basket on the way home, eats a big bowl of Felix and scatters grey litter pellets across the kitchen floor, in his bed, up the stairs...... and looks at me with his dull wide eyes. All I can see there is my own abandonment, neglect and guilt... 

I wish I was a sparkler tonight insead of this burnt out catherine wheel with a blotchy red face...

This Sunday

4th November 2012 Sunday

We were going to have breakfast in bed like we used to sometimes on a Sunday but we talk instead, eating into the morning hours - our new curtains, pale silken waterfalls, drawn against the sunlight coming and going outside. My husband says I’m angry and upset all the time and I blame him and the pussy cat for everything wrong in my life, he doubts my love. I can’t deny it. The truth lies between us like a peace offering.

I want to read my novel. He wants to walk. We meet up later in the kitchen for poached eggs on toast interrupted by taking the pussy cat up and down the stairs for a drink in the bath.

My nephew calls and we comiserate about pussy cats. They have two and one of them is spraying in the house, one of them is pulling out her fur. It feels less lonely knowing we aren’t the only ones living day by day with distressed creatures - not knowing what to do for the best....

We visit dear friends - celebrating the completion of their beautiful new kitchen....

Later my sister joins us and we sit in hard pews at the back of a Honiton church for a service remembering those who died this year -  a roll call of names - one of them my father. I think about my big sister on a plane to Beirut to visit her new grand-daugher and my brother in Fiji on a spiritual retreat and I remember our father more easily in them than here in this big draughty building on a cold wet Sunday night in a small Devon town.  Like my grandfather 'had the sun in him', I’m glad my father had Africa in him  -  the place I remember him best....

Give Up Guilt?

2nd November 2012

Second intermittent fasting day but too busy to make our meals anything other than joyless. Too cold for salad but we eat it anyway and count out 5 walnuts - 10 for my husbad -  for protein. Gingered up cod and broccoli for early supper. The evening stretches ahead with nothing to look forward to....I hoover up a couple of raisins and hazelnuts from the gribbles of the flapjack I’m cutting up for tomorrow’s Christmas Fayre. 

I’m tense, grumpy, on edge, at screaming point all day with the pussy cat. He starts to cry at the closed kitchen door wanting to go upstairs to drink out of the bath - a terrible howling sound. The towel thing isn’t really working - I want him to drink from his bowl. It’s a battle of wills. I give in finally  - I wouldn’t leave a baby to cry for a second - what am I doing  - so what if he gets soaked? So what if he pees on the floor - at least it isn’t the carpet.

I’m asking myself what this little furry creature is trying to tell me. I really don’t know but some words came tonight when I asked him in my head what can I do.

It’s time to give up guilt.

Guilt about everything. I’m trying to imagine what it would be like to not feel bad about all my decisions.....like I said I’d make mincemeat to sell at the Fayre but I didn’t. Feeling guilty is insane and pointless and only hurts me....wonder why it’s so addictive....wonder how you do it.

Think I just heard the pussy cat squeaking downstairs. But I’m going to bed....and trust that all is well and things are unfolding as they should....

Whingeing To Surrender

1st November 2012

After our Deeksha meditation this evening we all sit round in a circle with cups of tea and delicious fruit cake. I’m astonished when my husband talks fluently and coherently about the state of the economy, the stock market, the banks. It was his area of expertise.  He knows all the people in the group but not all their names and it’s a safe familiar place. But he has no recollection of giving a lecture to a churchful of people a few years ago about his beliefs about money. And when we all start talking about crop circles he has no idea what they are so the conversation passes him by completely.....one moment he’s in the light and the next he’s in the dark....shut down by a word which has lost its meaning...

I’ve been thinking about this blog....notice I’ve started to whinge a bit.....complain about my lot......my father once wrote to me that he saw pain but no self pity in my blog.....so I suppose I feel I’m somehow letting him down now by feeling sorry for myself.....poor me - husband with a brain disease and sick pussy cat peeing everywhere. Don’t know how to say it really - except that tonight I hate everything, I don’t want it to be like this and no matter how much I tell myself that it won’t change till I accept that this is how my life is now, I can’t or rather I won’t do it.....that old familiar phrase - What you resist, persits -  feels like my motto.

But because I still want my father to be proud of me - however mad that sounds  - I’m going to find a way through - even if it means I have to risk whingeing all the way to surrender, and someone else has to read it.....