happy impending new year, estwhile readers

I miss blogging.

And yet, each time I think of doing it, I am struck with the intense awareness of not knowing how to write. I know how I don't want to, but I've no idea how to create something new, and appropriate.

And so, I never do.

I'd like to take the 'I' out of it, but I haven't a clue how, really. I don't even know what I want to read, other than silly romances, a guilty pleasure which delights and annoys me in equal... measure.
I have zero confidence that any opinion I might have that's longer than a sentence could have any worth, anymore. And in the absence of a blogging community, my posts will just sit here, I know, so they need to be more complete than they used to, when the intention was to create a conversation.

And so... back to a weblog, of sorts, perhaps, with recording and observing, and a view to just ... writing?

Roundup:

Work is stable, though I don't feel any interest in committing to it in a way that would make me feel I was excelling, or competent, and this doesn't feel good. Hovering question: what could I retrain at, at 42/3, that would translate into a profitable, satisfying job, given that I have a very dependent teenager and an 11 year old, no spare money, and a deeply questionable work ethic/energy level?

Hmm. That's an open question.

On the home life front, my mind is more peaceful, as I have released the feeling of how things should be, of what life I should live, and get, and give, as evidenced in the early, frustrated, lonely, anguished years of this blog, to a very great degree. I am much more accepting of a life without an intimate relationship, with few friends, and much of my own company. New Year's Eve doesn't matter any more, and the craving for arms around me lessens all the time. I feel this is a good development, even if the pressure to be optimistic and have expectations still lurks. Those things did not serve me well. This is definitely less painful.

My daughter has retreated ever further, now staying in her room (or talking to her dad and brother on the landing (and more recently, *in* her room! Big development!) because I sneaked in to try and kill the moths (haha, I just wrote 'mothers') it was infested with last summer, and she busted me and was utterly betrayed. It was the final straw, and she refuses to come downstairs anymore, except in the dead of night. I haven't seen her in nearly 6 months. She is happy, in her limited, safe little space, she has cleaned her room very nicely, which is amazing, but it's not really good. We go on, we wait and wonder. I have no answers, and am pretty much constantly tormented with guilt at my mental health induced parenting mistakes, the ghosts of my father's PTSD rage that haunt us all, the massive, massive regrets. I still don't know what to do with this, but I feel it more acutely than I did when I was in the middle of making all the mistakes. Then it felt like it could still get better, now it just feels like irreparable damage, and time slipped by too soon.

My son is doing great, despite anxiety, he's growing up a lot. He's wonderful but needs more friends. I hope secondary school will provide them for him. We need more space. We're spending all our money mentioned in the last post on building an extra outside room for his dad to sleep in and put his stuff in, so Bodhi can have his own room. He's very excited. He might even be able to have a sleepover, now Olivia stays away from all human contact by day.


That's the big update.

Christmas was fine. Nice. Despite two whole weeks off before it, I still didn't manage to transform the house into a minimalist Christmas paradise. Again. But that was to be expected. I bought nice second hand kitchen chairs, after 16 years of embarrassing folding furniture. They're pretty. My kitchen is Blue now, but it's the Wrong Blue and I don't know what to do about that, exactly. Paint it again in another 5 years, probably.

My room has suddenly started smelling of something like mouldering feet, and I have no idea what is making that happen. It's a distracting, disturbing smell. My sense of smell tortures me. I would be tempted to sacrifice the smell of flowers and sunshine and the sea and baking to free myself from the olfactory torment of solvents and 'parfum' and smoke and body odour and mould and all the other bad things, so painful are they, and such a hassle my problems with them are to other people.

Ok, enough of this. The question for now, as suggested last night by a dear old friend is, how to make myself magnetized for the good things I want and need, rather than the opposite?

Does fear of those bad things draw them in and feed them? It is my experience that optimism and hope have been destructive in the past - but I also believe strongly in allowing one's brain to direct one towards good things. I will make the vision board I've been planning for years. But this idea of magnetism is important. How to change our... frequency? Is that the right term? I have no interest in being hit in the face by any more frying pans, 2019. None at all. 

gratitude

For literally years, I procrastinated filling in the form for the carer's allowance grant that's available to people with children with special needs.

Years.

Despite a friend who'd done it giving me her form and family impact statement letter.

Despite being unable to afford basics like health care and mental health care.

I finally got it done and posted it off in April of this year. I stressed about it, about leaving it so long and losing us money, about not filling it in well enough. About the fact that at the moment it only goes up to 16, and now my daughter is 15...

A couple weeks ago I silently begged for one big, good thing. Something good to happen to us, something encouraging. A lottery win, Olivia coming out of her zone of self-protective self-destruction, the grant being awarded us.

Today, finally, the envelope. A Yes!

With backdating for the maximum of six months, the annual respite grant, and the monthly allowance (including a Christmas bonus). (And free home insulation, after a long wait!) We get a small lump sum, because of the backdating and respite grant. Respite's not an option for us, but oh... we need this so much. There will be dentist visits for myself and Bodhi, and counsellor visits too, for our shitty anxiety and miseries. 

The plan was to build a small log cabin house outside for Axl - but he suggested it would make far more sense for it to be Olivia's little apartment. We were going to have to borrow to the max to do it, but now, with this, we can build it, and still borrow a bit to make our shitty bathrooms into normal human people's bathrooms. And we can turn the heat on in the winter, as the boiler hopefully won't bother her, or the heat, and we can clean out her room, and let Bodhi have it a place of his own, space for his stuff, friends to stay over.

And Olivia can have a space of her own, that feels private and safe - we are in the midst of a crisis - she found out I'd been in her room, killing moths (she was lying about a moth infestation). She reacted very badly, and has not been out of her room since - in the great heatwave we're having, with her zero heat tolerance. She's barely eating and drinking and seems to think she can stay in there forever. It's irrational and self-destructive, but she blames it all on me. Her solutions to her problems cause her incredible suffering, yet seem more rational to her than, say, facing the pain of having a shower.

I hope this will bring her joy and a sense of safety again. Nothing is simple, of course, there will be a host of sensory issues to contend with... but it's a good solution.

I am so grateful. Something worked. Perhaps more luck will follow. 

I just had my mind blown a little bit. By the tweet of a lovely intelligent, educated, cultured woman on twitter who has a great marriage and family and is having a Sunday in bed with tea, told she deserves it because she is an 'excellent wife'. And then her sweet affirming tweet a little later, 'I really am an excellent wife'.

We don't think about that so much today, do we? Or do we? I know Mary does. Why haven't I noticed before, in the same was as I'm thinking about it now? I was a terrible wife. There were extenuating circumstances, but the result was all the same in the end. And the worst part is, I'm not sure I thought so much about it, I was so wrapped up in all the things that were stopping me being a good wife. I'm pretty sure I thought about what kind of husband I wanted my husband to be, though. I thought about me. I bet I didn't stop to think about what I needed to be, and how to take pride in that.

Partly because of all the extenuating circumstances, partly because of immaturity, and that I was probably not being able to be a good wife because I was being... not a bad person, exactly, but a mess of a person. Which maybe comes to the same thing. I really don't know how the scales measure weakness and self-absorbedness over actual evil, if such a thing exists.

I suddenly feel this is a thing we should be learning again, despite it's awful 1950s connotations. How to be a partner. I feel gripped with a fear that I never considered that at all. How awful.

This period is being a bit of a tough one. And I'm dieting, so I can't suppress all the misery with food. In fact, I'm going to lunch shortly, and I'm not having a cooked breakfast (which is cooking now) and that sadness alone is making me want to cry too.

Little things my son does still melt my heart.

Today in the stupidly-expensive, pretty things shop he admired an old fashioned dial phone (in red melamine) with a kind of awe.

I love that he gets the beauty of the design of an old phone without ever having used one, without ever knowing that to be a phone-shape.

I miss them. I've been thinking of buying one, actually, as the cordlessless is far better for us.  The only problem is that then I won't be able to have private phone calls on it. Not that I have phone calls often at all, but ... there are still certain subjects that neccessitate a closed door. 

I hate my brain part 1,023

I was just slicing a tomato, and started to  cry because I remembered the bit in Harriet the Spy where everything goes wrong and the kids in school steal her tomato sandwhich because they're bullying her because they read her notebook.  She always has one and she's probably on the spectrum, thinking about it now.

I just want to eat a sandwich, brain, just let me do that in peace? 

I have something sweet and fragrant on my fingers, I'm not sure what it is or where it might come from (other than the possibility of maple syrup and fake bacon, though that seems improbable). But it's reminding me of the Christmas that I got a wooden strawberry impregnated with Body Shop strawberry fragrance in my stocking, and my sister carried a giant hardback copy of Anne Rice's The Witching Hour across the Atlantic as her Christmas present to me. And now the memory of that compelling, cloying, strong strawberry smell and the sensuous, evocative descriptions of faded New Orleans grandeur and murderous mystery and magic are forever interlinked. The book reminds me of the strawberry, the idea of the smell reminds me of the book.

It's a really good book. She linked her vampire and witch worlds so well, I feel. Anne Rice was such a part of my childhood. I'm glad I had an older sister, and therefore got to read the vampire novels when I was in my early teens, when their romance was oh, so timely and appreciated.

I'm procastinating so deeply and for such duration that I've reached a whole new dimension of paralysis. I'm wasting my summer worrying over but not doing things I should have done months ago.

I did go swimming with Bodhi yesterday though, and it wasn't so cold and we had fun in the waves.

And we just went and played the kind of tennis children and unsporty fat ladies play, if you can picture that. We met a darling beagle puppy who might have been called Maggie, or Meggie, I couldn't tell because her owners were South African. Or possibly from New Zealand. Derry was significantly under-charmed by the puppy and ignored her existence.

I could go visit my ex colleagues in Tenerife in the Autumn. But I don't know if I want to - my anxiety is telling me things about how it might feel awkward and I'll be in the way and I'll talk too much and they'll wish I wasn't there, and my whole travel anxiety makes going away on my own more of a chore than a delight in the long run. So I kind of want to give up on the idea, but then I really need a holiday and I'd love to eat nice tapas and drink cheap tasty wine and be elsewhere. e

I don't know.

This blog post is brought to you by my attempts to at least do something more worthwhile that looking at facebook and commenting on things no one needs me to comment on for ten hours a day.

I fumble to write. I've been driving round, thinking of things I'd like to say here, and yet never quite making it to the page nonetheless. I miss blogging, but at the same time I don't, as the great apathy that overwhelms any urge I might have blankets me in a depressive certainty that I've nothing to say of import, and no energy to say it. Even though I'm aware there are people who'd be happy to read a post I wrote, I still can't imagine stringing words together worth reading.

Here I am though - it might be good to lump something out, de-clog my brain a bit, that's cluttered like this bursting at the seams little laptop I bought without realising it had no storage space.

I had an observation yesterday, in work - we have one bi-annually, from our director, who's a very unimposing, easy-going woman who's younger than me. She's very beautiful, too, red-haired and vulpine, but I think utterly unaware of how attractive she is. I normally stress about observations, and have anxiety dreams about work, but this year, having had two perfectly good ones, I decided to just ... not. And it went excellently. I'm glad - I frequently feel like an inadequate teacher, even if it's only language teaching I do, rather than secondary school teaching. I'm lazy, I don't make massive efforts. I've been doing this too long and I don't care about it enough any more. But it's good to know I've still got the ability to do it right. And it's good to get some feedback that's positive. The rest of the time it's really just me feeling like a failure and my daughter hating me and the relentless jab of memories and regret. Ha! Yeah, I have my period.

I just finished reading Bodhi the last Harry Potter book. Do you know the Limbo scene in the station where Harry talks to a dead Dumbledore and chooses to go back and keep fighting? And a raw, foetal Vodlemort is lying moaning and mewling in a corner? It struck me that that's where Trump is emotionally - without all the trappings of his inherited money and status, he'd be as effective as a bitter, impotent infant Voldemort, trapped and helpless, of use to no-one. Imagine Trump on survival island.What could he contribute? Could you even eat him?

I walked out of work into a sea mist and a gentle drizzle today and the smell of salt hit me in the face as if I was playing in the waves. Such nostalgia for holidays and swimming and cold and fun in the water. It hasn't rained here in a long time and the earth and trees are throwing out such smells. It's grey but utterly lovely, evocative and sensuous.

I'm so glad it's Friday. I've to drive for hours to return the dog we fostered to the shelter tomorrow - I don't want to but I need rid of her, I can't take it any more. We've done our accidental bit, and I've well and truly learned my lesson. She rolled in horrible poo today on her walk, and I had to drag her into the shower and well and truly traumatise her by washing her. That made me feel bad, but ... roll in shit and pay the price. There was no way to do it gently as I had to just force her to stay there with all my strength. Yeesh. Derry loves the shower. He's a pain in the ass, but we got so lucky with him.

She's out of practice (she showed me a far better one from some time ago). I know this is just a study of her own sweet hand, but it's hard not to see a fist pump.

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My daughter has been an artist since she was very small, and she and her dad would paint in the mornings while I was at work. She would embark on pictures with the utmost confidence - 'I'm going to draw a tiger' - and then she would draw a tiger, and paint it too, and boom: tiger.

A while back she stopped, angrily insisting that she couldn't draw any more, it didn't work, to stop telling her she was good at art because she wasn't anymore, if she ever was. And there was no point practising as much as she'd need to to be good because she wasn't interested anyway.

For those who don't know, she has Asperger's and extreme sensory processing disorder, and is in a very stuck, locked down state - she has had no education for three years now, pretty much, other than what she finds herself. She's been stuck at home for two years, unable to wash or change while her clothes disintegrate on her.

Recently she found some old pictures in notebooks, and started showing them to me. And then she started adding to them; the miracle of Pokemon. It continues, this spark of interest.

This is not quite the gratitude I felt watching her run down a hill with her friend in the sun after two months at home unable to wear clothes several years ago - but it is deep, nonetheless, and layered.