A Bit Weird And Wonderful

10th December 2012 Monday

Hard to type with splits at the ends of my fingers - such tiny cuts, so sore.....it’s my dry, dry skin protesting the cold weather and my hands always in water....

My husband doesn’t come to our yoga class this morning - we thought it would be something to do together, with friends. He doesn’t enjoy it - he wants to get it right but the poses hurt  his body.....I find I can let it go - my disapointment....

While I bend and stretch and salute the sun, our sweet decorator paints the downstairs cloakroom -  a soft, pale greeny-blue like the shimmering inside of a paua shell from New Zealand...

I  stab holes in the Christmas cake with a knitting needle - and dribble it with brandy  - I’m sure I’ve overcooked it again.........no way of knowing till it’s too late and we cut it on the day....

I fill four fat glass bottles with the speckly mincemeat I made on Saturday and slosh in more brandy and orange juice as it looks like it needs it...

I don’t even like brandy....

The date for posting Christmas cards overseas has been and gone. I feel at a loss about how to write about this year to our friends and family  - how to put it in a few sentences  - how shock and grief and disbelief transmute into practising acceptance, giving up resistance and guilt and finding out what a budget really means.....with no idea where to start.......

And with the person I love becoming a bit weird and wonderful at the same time... 

Fairy-Lights Necklace

9th December 2012 Sunday

Not sad today..... in the company and cradle of dear friends......in a lovely, ordered peaceful home.....celebrating two birthdays..... flowers and homemade food on the table..... mulled glug wine on the stove....messages of love and wisdom and humour in 80 prayer flags for the birthday pair, strung up in loops in the window, bright bunting - each one so creative and colourful and unique....

I love it how we are all so different and still so connected - like a glowing necklace of fairy-lights.....

And this is what I’m giving up for Christmas - oughts and shoulds and comparing myself....

like wanting to go for a walk and wanting to stay in the warm as well -  and forgiving myself for choosing -  and loving -  the latter. 

Trusting I can still shine in our rainbow fairy-lights necklace...

Still Crying

8th December 2012 Saturday

I cry a lot today. They just come, the tears, and I can’t stop them....in the garden this afternoon hacking at the honeysuckle and pulling up the slimey trail of nasturtiums - reminding me of the summer and my mother - she’s always somewhere near by when I have secateurs in my hand......

.......in the kitchen stirring the Christmas cake mixture, listening to the Messiah.....making a huge batch of mincemeat as if there were lots of people to eat it.....

.......in the bedroom listening to my husband who is feeling lost and miserable.....longing for him to hold me.....as if his arms could make me feel safe .....like they used to......

.....clearing out the pussy cat’s cupboard - throwing away his medicines, his brushes...ringing the Cat Protection League to see if they want his food, his basket.... remembering all those times he sat near me like a calm and quiet king while I squatted on the floor weeping.....

.......reading the newspaper about the people having their disability living allowances cut.....and realising that that’s us.....those words could be in our future...... 

Now the cake is out of the oven and the house smells of Christmas.....this one without my father or the pussy cat......I”m always telling my husband to think about all the things he can do instead of all the things he can’t do anymore.....easy for me to say... no wonder he doesn’t take any notice ......while I’m still cryng for the past....still raking through the ashes there , searching for remnants of him....

Treats, Territories and Speaking in Russian

7th December 2012 Friday

I like this quote by Iris Murcoch in ‘The Sea, The Sea’

The secret to a happy life is continuous small treats.

 like refuelling at a pit stop with gulps of stardust...

which means I’d have to slow down long enough to even notice I was gasping and I’d have to change my mind-set that is fixed on when this is over then I’ll......

The thing is, is that when something is over there is always the next thing waiting in the wings to sweep into centre stage - like Christmas -  and for me all its attendant guilt-inducing I’m never enough thoughts......squeezing out treat thoughts...

Another pussy cat, youger and bolder, crapped on our pussy cat’s grave this morning  seamlessly colonising his vacant territory. So I cover the bare soil with a wide fan of arching fern fronds...a fragile boundary fence.

It takes me all morning to wash up last night’s wine glasses and make two birthday cards.

Then I remember a wonderful unexpected gift from a dear friend last night, waiting for me in the fridge - a delicious cheesy, garlicky nutty scone the size of a cob loaf, ready to put in the oven and bake. It feels like all my unallocated small treats rolled up into one lovely fragrant lunch.

I drive to a meeting with two women I haven’t met before whose husbands are at different stages in their journeys with dementia. I wait for half an hour at our agreed rendevous  - the coffee shop of a garden centre. Then discover there are two garden centres with the same name....I give up and  go home refuelling at Sainsbury’s instead, using my money off voucher so it only costs me £37 to half fill up my tank instead of £41.

Tonight while I peel a bright orange squash to roast for supper my husband reads the TV guide out loud to me, stumbling over each word. This is what it says,

An Island Parish - The chair of the carnival committe encourages people to take part in the annual scarecrow committee.

Afterwards he says, I have no idea what that means.

Carnival and scarecrow floor him. I explain, but he says he only vaguely understands. 

Luckily neither of us want to see the programme anyway. I realise I can’t really and truely imagine what it must be like to not know what words mean - unless I think of reading in a foreign language. What must it be like to be living in his world where the people he knows and loves are the same but we have all started to speak in Russian?

Knackered

6th December 2012

Too knackered to write anything coherent tonight after my husband’s exhibition of his Weird and Wonderful......just full to the brim with gratitude for all the dear people who braved the icy evening air and found their way to Unearth studio bringing their love and support and gifts.... and just for entering into the spirit of it all.....

Now the rain is slashing on the windows, no smoked salmon triangles or cheesy sesame biscuits left so we snack on left over peanuts and the cut off burnt bits of chocolate brownies and watch the news with our aching feet stretched out on cushions and the lovely feeling there is nothing more to do tonight except go to bed....

Telling People Now

5th December 2012 Wednesday

My day starts early in the kitchen with our heating engineer draining the boiler while I roll a hundred little cheesy balls in sesame seeds and flaten them into biscuits to bake tomorrow for my husbands’ private view of his Wierd and Wonderful Ceramics.

He says,’You used to have two bells outside your front door.’

I tell him why we only have one now. The other one was for my husband’s office. His face goes completely still when I explain that my husband has Semantic Dementia is. He says the father of a friend of his has developed Altzheizmer’s disease. As if it was the same thing.

I’m searching for olives in Sainsbury’s when my niece rings to say goodbye. Tonight she is on a plane to Katmandu in Nepal where she is volunteering for three months in a very isolated village. I can feel the hugeness of her journey in her voice. Her leaving stirs up echoes in me of all those partings in my life, those wrenching separations, and all those journeys I won’t make now...

In B & Q I dither in the paint section trying to find a colour to compliment the tiny mosaic tile in my hand. It shimmers pink or green or blue depending how the light catches it. I plump for two shades of a pearly sage colour which the assistant mixes up for me in minature pots, spinning them in his machine which looks like a microwave.

As soon as it opens at 4pm I sign up for Susanna Conway’s e-course called Blogging From the Heart and get in a muddle with my email address but she is lovely and friendly in her email and says it will be sorted out. It starts in January - it feels so supportive - something to help me out of my flounderings here on the page. I get so taken up with it that I let the chocolate brownies overcook and burn on the top. 

I start rolling the little sticky balls of fruit and nut truffles in cocoa powder while I wait for our man to come and finish the tiling in the bathroom. He never makes it as he’s stuck in traffic on the M5 after an accident. My husband gets caught up in the same traffic and never makes it to his piano lesson. The builder comes to look at the roof which is still leaking. I told him about my husband yesterday. He asks how he is today.

Later I take a bottle of wine to one of our neighbours as we missed their drinks party on Sunday. Standing in her lobby with the cold blowing in, I tell her about my husband and explain if he sees her in the street and doesn’t say hello it’s not that he’s being rude but just that he won’t know her name even though she may look familiar.

She thanks me and says it’s really helpful to know. She hugs me. It’s feeing harder now, as I tell more people, to not let my husband’s disease become a kind of identity instead of the disability it is....which diminishes both of us.

Siren Call

4th December 2012 Tuesday

I’m not really home yet. Part of me is still lodged in last week, walking along the sea shore with my dear sisters, hard cold sand under my soles, waves slushing in my ears, seagulls ripping through a cornflower blue sky above me, anticipating the salty, smokey golden bream I’m going to eat on the terrace of our favourite beach cafe, with the sun freckling my arms. In a place where I know how to be happy.

And home isn’t how I left it. No dear pussy cat to love and take care of and agonise over.  Leaving a huge pulsing space in my heart and in my kitchen and in the hours of my days.

I’m wondering what will wash up on the tide and fill that cave.  If I let it, probably just more of too-much-stuff-to-do. But I can also feel the tug of my husband’s need like a siren call from the future  - threatening a shipwreck in my reclaimed seascape...

I wasn’t going to blog tonight - feel I’ve lost the point of it. I’ve been reading Susannah Conway’s moving and inspiring book ‘This I Know’ - Notes On Unraveling The Heart’. I want to do her e-course about blogging. Her tips are to write what you care about, be honest, and don’t try and be wise. Her courses are so popular - her last one was fully booked up in ten minutes so don’t know if I’ll get on....

Now I can hear the rain directly above me, pounding on the sloping attic roof over my desk and the sound of my husband coughing in the bath. The smell of hot mincemeat shortbread I baked earlier is still lingering on the stairs. I keep thinking I can hear the pussy cat squeaking in the kitchen - calling to me, needing me.....