Life in progress

Tag Archives: support


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Solitude

I often wonder if I am alone.

What I mean to say is, I am most happy when I am alone. My imagination and I get along very well, as do I with my loud music. I am happiest when I can dance when no one is watching. I am free-est when I can sing at the top of my lungs, knowing no one is judging my ability. I am most content when I can write without distraction.

So, am I alone in this? Is it a artist thing, or is it just that I grew up as an only child and got used to it at an early age?

I wonder if it has anything to do with the ability or the need to create.  I’ve always had my imagination to keep me company. I remember (and it was a memory just jogged this morning) trying to write a book at my mother’s friends’ dining room table – when I was five or six years old. As I grew up I would imagine for myself a different life, in which I had friends and enemies alike. I would write pages of conversations.

Of the people in my real life: an artist friend of mine, with whom I was discussing this topic the other day, told me that she also is happiest and most content when she’s by herself. My mother and my other friend (yes, I only really have two) dislike being alone. Both are creative in their own ways – my mother knits and sews, and my friend is an inventor – but they are not artists as such.

Neither of them understand this need I have to be alone, and so it makes me wonder if I’m strange. I can only ask my artistically inclined acquaintances…

Am I alone?


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The Sandwich Generation

I am truly of the sandwich generation. On one hand I have my kids, two of which who, even though they are growing older, will probably never be out of my care because of their special needs. On the other hand I have my octogenarian mother. She still lives alone, and can take care of herself quite well despite the fact that her memory is beginning to go, although she doesn’t drive much any more. Farther than two minutes away requires that I pick her up and take her where she needs to go. Her biggest problem is that she’s lonely. It is the cause of most of my problems as well.

To give a little background, my mother moved to Canada with my father and their two best friends. My mother is the only one of the four still alive. Adding to that, she decided to follow me both of the two times I relocated, so she keeps leaving all of her other friends behind as well. I am now all she has, being an only child and being that all of our extended family is in the U.K.

My dilemma arose today when I wanted to go back to Kingston for the day to do some research for my book. My mother didn’t want me to go, because she is fearful for my safety. In the end I agreed to come back to town before it got dark. What does this mean? At the age of 49 I have a curfew that is even earlier than the one I had at 16.

While I feel that I should be allowed to “grow up,” she is so worried about being left completely alone that, whenever I have to drive out of town (I go to Kingston regularly anyway for the kids’ specialist appointments) she is immobilized by fear until I get home. The last time I went to a movie without telling her, she left no less than 14 messages on my answering machine.

It’s difficult enough to struggle with having a life of my own outside of being a mother, and that’s what I am, 24/7, unless they are with their father. Apart from two weekends a month I am raising them single-handedly.  But having to answer to my mother as well is close to intolerable.

I had hoped that writing it out might show me a solution, but it seems there may not be one. Being of the sandwich generation is far from appetizing.


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Summer Camp

You never know what you’ve got until you lose it. It’s a saying we hear all the time; sometimes in moments of profound loss, sometimes it’s trivial. In my case, in many ways it’s the latter.

There’s no summer camp for my youngest son this week. I used to think it was a luxury to have the time to write. Now, however, my luxuries include sitting for more than two minutes at the table to eat a meal without being interrupted, showering, and going to the washroom.

The latter of these I believe, falls into the profound category.

So if you see a woman walking around the grocery store buying finger foods, with stringy hair and smudges of dirt on her face and with eyes bulging out of her sockets and her legs crossed, try not to point and laugh. It’s probably just a woman who’s missing summer camp.


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Adventures on my Paper Route – short and bitter

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Just a quick update today for those of you who are following my sad little story. I was standing with my back to Nosehair when I took these pictures today so he wouldn’t see the final moments of his neighbour standing tall (though I think he could still see over my head).

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You can see the large parts of the trunk falling. While compared to the news of the world this is really nothing, I find it sad when these old trees come down. We’ve lost a few in the last year. Hopefully Nosehair won’t be next.

Kira suggested yesterday that Charles might send over some of his Windemere characters to help out with Nosehair’s cause, to avoid becoming one of my newspapers.  Charles?


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How comments can hurt

It didn’t start as a comment directed at me, but it bothered me nonetheless. The discussion was about a situation in which a man, with a disabled wife and a small child had taken a weekend ‘off’ to visit with friends and came home to find his wife had died. The comment, on a friend’s journal, stated that the commenter couldn’t understand why, if the man loved his family at all, he would need a weekend away from them.

I am a single mother of two disabled kids with whom I live alone. I love them more than anything in the world – but I need time off! By the time their father’s scheduled weekend with them comes around, which is supposed to be every two weeks but is more often not until the third weekend, I’m all but pulling out my hair. Loving them doesn’t preclude the work that’s required to look after their every need, nor does it make up for the fact that I don’t get any more than five hours of sleep a night when they’re here.

Back to the comment: I tried to explain to the girl who made it that it’s not that clear cut – that there are many things that go into the care of the disabled and the very young. She came back to say that she knows – and that she looks after her disabled parents. I fail to see the parallel. In the end I got the last word, telling her that she is a better person than I am.

It’s probably the way the conversation was left that bothers me the most. That I couldn’t make her see I’m not a terrible person and that I don’t not love my kids because I need time to myself to recharge and re-align my emotions, still sits badly with me.

It makes me wonder whether people out there with different problems than I have are just reluctant to look deeper into the difficulties of others or if they simply don’t care to try. It’s this ‘it’s not my problem so you must be doing something wrong to make it yours’ attitude that worries me. At the same time I hope they are never put into my situation, a little part of me hopes they are. Not very altruistic, but there you go. Sentiment breeds like sentiment.


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March 11

Japan - Kyoto park2When I visited Japan in 2005 I was struck by the beauty of the land with its mountains and valleys, towns nestled in between as though they had grown up from the ground and the way the Japanese make their culture known, from the most magnificent temples to the tiniest of window boxes.

But what most deeply affected me was the people themselves. Their capacity to give of themselves to a complete stranger without asking anything in return was astounding. I found that all I had to do was stop on a sidewalk and look at a map and someone would invariably come up to me and ask me if I needed help to find where I was going. I had people walk far out of their way to escort me to places I wanted to go. In fact, in Kyoto I did my best to get lost, just in order to have a reason to talk to people. But it wasn’t just the fact that they were helpful, it was the eagerness and the grace with which they offered.

I promised myself when I got on the plane to come back to Canada that if ever I had the opportunity to help a Japanese person I would go as far out of my way as so many of them did for me. Unfortunately that opportunity came in the form of disaster. Two years ago today I grieved when I learned so many of these wonderful, generous people were lost, and all I could do at the time was send money. I hope that I will be able to go back, next time to help with the restoration of a beautiful land laid to waste.

It’s odd, I suppose, that a born and bred Canadian should think of a country almost half way around the world as home. But that, I do. I love Japan and its people.

Itsuka Nihon ni kaerimasu.


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My mind is a landscape

Mountain

I see a vast plain lying prostrate at the feet of mountains, bowing to their majesty. Mountains which look up, extending their noses, straining to reach the praise of heaven. And a sky so blue, yet feathered with winglike clouds.

I have so many stories inside me, just begging to escape, from fingertips to keyboard. Tales of wanting and of contentment. Of bad behaviour and of good. Of kink and of chastity. And of faraway lands that are waiting to be discovered. Just like my landscape.

Now that I’ve got that out of my system…

I’m thinking about starting up another blog to go alongside this one but for more of the naughty type stories, so I can keep this one more family-friendly. And by family I mean MY family in particular. I think my biggest problem is not knowing how to properly separate the categories on this site, so that I could perhaps keep the nice away from the nasty and vise versa, and just keep one single blog.

Anyone have any suggestions? Advice? Sugar? Coz I’m also out of sugar.


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Invaluable

The most supportive people in a writer’s life are the ones who understand when it’s time to *whispers* go away.