Monday 24 October 2011

Ce n'est pas un blog

Catching, on the sunrise


filaments of gossamer flow

shaping the breeze

in fractured rainbows

arching out contours

of new light

fluidly enveloping

all about them

in the exhalation of a new day.



24/10/11

Thursday 20 October 2011

Grief is a very personal emotion, the manner in which it possesses its host is as unique as they are, yet it will follow a pattern, we each of us go through phases that can be labelled and identified. It is through knowing these points that we can lift the curtain that enshrouds us and connect for a whilst with others, who perhaps understand, or are kind enough to try.




2011 has been a peculiar year, it started on an absolute high, there was I, so sure of who I was, so painfully secure in my sense of self,confident and the vast majority of the time, Happy.

For a whilst I was in Love, and for a whilst it was all it should be... That as you'll know didn't last, I am incapable of being anything but myself, which is little use, when he whom claims to love you in fact wants a perfect other half, at times it was fairly volatile, and rather then walking away when the warning flags where first raised, no, I tried to help....

Looking back it was futile, and truly I am better for the absence of such a figure in my life, anyone who openly admits to manipulating you but cannot offer even a half arsed justification as to precisely what right they had in so doing, is well, not my kind of person.

And it has affected me, I have had cause to question and query my very way of being, facets of my personality were used against me as examples of precisely why I was the villain in that soap opera, equally things I cannot help where thrown in my face. I have long known I have a colourful streak of Aspergers running through me,and recently it was confirmed I have OCD - and throughout many a row, I have stood by what I remain to stand by: Sometimes I behave oddly because of how I am hardwired, I do not use that as a carte blanche excuse for my behaviour, simply that people may understand it.

Where is the grief coming in?

Well, I am not sat here, after a second sleepless night with eyes puffier then a bouncy castle over a lover cast aside some five months ago.

Merely the legacy he left me to deal with.



In February, despite many precautions being used I found out I was pregnant.



Known as I am for prevarication, every possible avenue forward was considered and the decision made was mine and mine alone, never really discussed with anyone until the point in time at which I was definite.



A process I went through alone, I carry the repercussions alone. I could not have predicted quite how profoundly I would be affected by the experience.

I will not detail the medical ins and outs, suffice to say it involves tablets and a variety of bodily orifices, after which you are left in a room , complete with its own toilet. Its a wholly clinical experience, not helped by the insistence you must be alone. Periodically someone comes in to check your collection of bed pans for the delightfully named 'products of conception'.

I to the annoyance of the medical profession held onto mine till I had been sent home many hours later.





I cannot think of what I saw as 'products of conception', it was a person. Tiny and not quite fully formed, exactly as I have seen twice in my life on ultrasound scans, floating in its amnion of crystal clear fluid. All translucent skin, and still, I can recall its face, its arms, legs the last visible bump of a tail and most strikingly the vivid scarlet patch which days previously had been a beating heart. I was advised by the Hospital to throw it in the bin or flush it down the toilet, I did not... whilst I had yes, decided that this being would never be, I could not thrust upon it the indignity of the sewerage network, or landfill. It was, wanted or not, a life.

I buried it up in the peaks, where the heather grows, and the grit stone juts out of the landscape, where the wind blows unencumbered by obstacles, and where I, and a great many others go, just to absorb that freedom of wilderness. Somewhere I find profoundly calming,and somewhere where it will never be alone.

Referring to that being as 'it' is an act of distance, for reasons I cannot explain I have always thought of it as a girl, perhaps because I have two sons and to have knowingly terminated another pushes my sanity too far. She, however would have been delivered within the next few days, and she was called Bethan.

And despite the decision to go through this act was mine, this decision was right for practical and emotional reasons, despite the fact I've had early miscarriages in the past and bounced back relatively quickly, those were natures choices not mine. I was not complicit in the act of ending a life in those instances. And when the vast majority of my time is spent raising two children, I cannot help but wonder how things might have turned out.



And so this grief, I will carry a whilst longer, possibly to my grave, I cannot predict the longevity of my emotions, it will in time become an easier grief, a sigh, a sad smile. Unlike that I have gone through this year for two friends, and my Great Grandma, I cannot find comfort in memories, I cannot celebrate the preceding life. I must then contend with the fact that I created this state of mind, and find a way out of it.

Friday 14 January 2011

this truly was going to be magnificent, I can but apologise.

I sat down some hours ago, with the express intention of emptying my head of surplus thoughts, in  a manner which might in some circles pass as pleasantly entertaining enough to read to the end, providing you haven't got half way through and vowed to hunt me down and stave my head in, on account of my inbuilt and evident pretension and mild superiority complex..

However, I found my thoughts too disjointed, and deleted twice lengthy tomes, believing them inadequate beyond sense, and incomprehensible beyond reason. In a state of somewhere between writers block and a sulk, which in a bygone  era by would see me reaching for the laudanum, I went for a bath, fell asleep, and it was whilst later laying 'pon my bed, examining the ceiling as is my wont, that it hit me..

Time travel, far from being a pursuit of the fictitious, reserved for the peculiarly sexy archetypal geek - an appeal borne surely of the fact they can go anywhere do anything for as long as they want, and be back before they ever left, so long as they don't cross their own timeline too often and create a paradox (see "wibbly wobbly, timey wimey....stuff"), no indeed it is a real concept, happening all around us, and explains so many complicit acts, and uncanny resemblances.

My ex, and indeed the father of my children, went through a phase of artful beard growth, accompanied by masses of hair, at the time this was an eyebrow raising annoyance, and as one would back then I assumed when I awoke at night alone, he was simply on the toilet..

Then I looked at the BBC news website today, and there he was...only he wasn't he was the Yorkshire Ripper.

I was naturally,  alarmed by this realisation, and having pressed the matter, I am assure that the reason he went through a phase of looking like a lady killer, was on account that back in time in the years preluding his actual birth, he was out of an evening, mutilating prostitutes with hammers an screwdrivers - it also explained why  could never locate the tools of the house whilst he lived here... Equally it transpires, that he has made television appearances as Damon Hill, and for a period was George Harrison. I must clarify, I am not spreading the belief that my ex-fiance has been living multiple lives, or indeed co- exists alongside various him selves in the same timeline and dimension, merely that in a world with a finite number of faces, there have been times, when he was called upon, to use time travel and stand in. Worryingly, this seems to be a genetic ability, my eldest son appears in Its a Wonderful Life  alongside James Stewart, and indeed, I suspect for a time, my ex father in law was Cat Stevens.

further to this familial bent to skip back and forth in time, for good, bad and frankly unusual purposes, I'd like to provide the conjecture, that in fact, we are all time travelling, frequently, without ever knowing, in an almost zen like manner - whilst sleeping perhaps, or when ones mind is not fully on task... How often have you had that sense of de ja vu or looked back on an incident and been able to make no logical sense of it, it fitted with neither your state of ind, or indeed regular pattern of behaviour, and yet you were there and recall it happening clear as day... simply, if we are able then to travel through time, in a quantum leapesque manner, then who is to say, that in our old age, when looking back, we are not able to ensure our destiny is achieved by making sure,the key moments happen, perhaps dementia patients are not besieged by a degeneration of the synapses, and it may also explain why occasionally you encounter someone who doesn't fit in their era - they simply got trapped here and must live out their days in this peculiar enormous world... it would explain the archaic language some folk use and indeed  their anachronistic behaviour... throwbacks if you will, may need just that, as they have been thrust ahead of their time.


Of course, this is but an apropos of nothing, these are the thoughts which filled my head, fighting for place, with the more fluid words, with the verses and passages to which you, the reader are so rarely privy...

Monday 3 January 2011

Evening All...

If I were to wade into an Internet forum this evening and voice my opinion, I fear the Internet may explode, or at least my IP address be traced, and a march of outraged adults descend upon my house, with flaming torches.. urging that I perhaps ought be burnt alive for neglecting to glibly say

" its outrageous, it needs to be resolved immediately and some lovely happy story lines brought in quick to dissolve the tension this whole debacle has caused"

Here we go again, Fanylions been watching Eastenders...

So...

lets outline the facts of real life that have been used in a storyline

fact one

babies die.

fact two

when grieving and in shock people often behave in a manner they have no actual control over, or recollection of immediately afterwards


So... and whilst yes its pushing things a bit in the old tolerance pre-watershed stakes, and has taken a bit of a swerve from its usual accurate portrayals of human behaviour when under significant distress.. I think perhaps a little perspective is needed...

Soap Operas tend to go for hard hitting story lines, its how they capture, and indeed alienate their audiences over time, they usually base these stories on extremes of human behaviour, they very rarely generalise, and certainly don't portray things as they wold normally happen in the vast majority of cases... precisely WHO would watch 29 minutes of inter cut scenes of folk having Shepherds Pie for dinner, playing on the Wii or nipping down to Sainsbury's for milk and fags?


So, its far from sick then, to portray a cot death... and indeed someone so far removed from reality by grief, shock,and frankly some kind of mental disturbance anyway behaving in what is yes an utterly reprehensible manner in a split second of madness.. what everyone's glossing over is this character tried to return the baby when she realised what she had done.. only it was too late, then her fictional husband turned up from Dubai and with no reason to suggest otherwise assumed this was his baby.. and well its spiralling out of control...

Remember whilst you sit and judge.. that you have a perspective all but one fictional character in this soap opera doesn't you KNOW the truth... you have the third eye on all proceedings..

Look for a moment at the research that has gone in, and the acting that is being displayed... the grief is palpable, the shock and sense of 'what have I done' is gut wrenching, nauseating, you will watch the guilty party unravel... and if they do something terribly predictable like a soap opera suicide following the big reveal.. oh you'll all be up in arms about that as well...

The same kind of storyline is payed out in dross, soft focus made for TV movies screened on Channel 5, no ones outraged by that..

A similar plot is found in the critically acclaimed Memory Keepers Daughter though obviously that didn't involve a direct swap - nah just someone suggesting a baby be disposed of because it was disabled, which isn't a great deal better morally is it?

Sunday 2 January 2011

Glad to see you back again..

Good Morning, bear with me reader - I've a layer of dust and cobwebs to clear, whole seasons have turned since last I graced 'pon your eyes, words of life here in my small corner of the world..

Right..

Kettles on, Coffee anyone, no.. suit yourself then..

Ah yes..

Happy New Year!

So.. where have I been, what the devil have I been doing (look at my facebook - nothing massive, nothing so pressing I couldn't have blogged some nonsense or other for you to read)

Its true, its been a quiet 5 months.. and actually its a pattern - abandon the blogosphere in summer and return come January, there must be a reason for this.. and there is, certainly this absence was prompted simply by having too many thoughts, too much information in my head and my inability to pin them neatly on my mental notice board, leaving it looking like an infantile scribble in there rather then a neatly ordered Spirograph.

And I've been adjusting to the new world order, dallying with sobriety (I lasted the course till November.. not the 2 years I speculated, but a good effort, and it HAS altered my pattern of drinking, which has to have been a good thing it wasn't habitual but things always have the capacity to go that way)life is no longer a battle with a small angry boy, we know the truth in 'what a difference the right school makes' and after a battle with my own thoughts, we aren't fighting the demon so hard at present, eating's never going to be 'normal' for me, but I do it a lot more regularly now, and even in public places, without hiding in a corner with a limp salad.. so that's a triumph.. and given Governmental cuts to certain types of funding early into their term I've had to go it alone, assessed and put forward for CBT in April/May.. and signed off the books in June - it would perhaps have been easier to give up on myself, but I didn't, did I.



So what have I learnt in the past 12 months...

I'm not dead inside after all - I have the capacity to feel, if not the better judgement to reign in those feelings when they'll lead me to my ruin... that sometimes even though you know you'll get hurt its worth it for the fun you'll have till it turns sour, I don't die of fright on roller coasters, that when you need answers, just accept the ones you are given, you my never know the truth, you may never distinguish between fact and blended information created perhaps with the better of intentions, gut instinct will be your allie don't ignore it.

And perhaps, the biggest lesson..

That when your happy in yourself,and with yourself.. that's when you have the most to offer others, and yet.. having mainly achieved that sense, I have come to realise.. I'll probably always be alone, loneliness will haunt me at night and the good days, the days of sunshine and near perfection will be mine and mine alone.. I only actively seek out an 'other' when my need to escape is at its highest, thus solitude is for the best...and certainly kinder on the potential 'others' out there. This state is obviously subject to change, I'll happily be proved wrong... I just don't need to be, I'm rather too content with how things are.


Anyhoo.. its day 2 of the newest of years.. I don't know what will play out, but for a whilst at least, I'll be hereabouts, pattering away on a keyboard with somethings, nothings and self indulgences.