Not Drowning, Mothering.

I went to Veronica’s yesterday and watched Amy bounce on the trampoline as Vonnie pressed refresh on the bloggie’s twitter page.

I am thrilled to bits to be writing out a congratulatory blog post to the NDM, as her blog is well written and very funny. She writes about her  life with humour and honesty and I find myself nodding along in recognition. You really should do yourselves a favour and go on over and check out her blog, I have no doubt you will add it to your favourites.

I had a small visitor for a couple of hours yesterday afternoon and together we went outside and played in the mud.

Then we went down and fed the pigs and had a bit of a chat about how delicious they are going to be.

We went and raided the fruit trees and Amy found that she didn’t like the furry skin on the peaches but was more than happy to munch away on the plums.

This year has been a really good year for most of my fruit trees, due to a wetter than average winter and spring. We normally struggle for water up here and I am really pleased with how much fruit my trees have produced. Amazing what a bit of water does for a plant.

The whole time that Amy and I were pottering around outside, Harry the dog was at our side. Harry loves the apple trees as he is sure that those green balls are just for him.

And finally here is a photo of my latest garden project. The spouse cut an old water tank in half for me. This autumn and winter I will be busily filling it up with sheep poo, mushroom compost and whatever else I can get my hands on. I am going to turn all the vegie garden into a series of raised beds over the next two years, as sitting on a milk crate and weeding is just so much more civilized that kneeling down on my dodgy knees.

Once Amy had gone home I went to turn my laptop on and found that my grand daughter had decorated it for me. That was my day yesterday, how was yours?

In the last few months of Mum’s illness I was stretched really, really thinly as Mum had become less able to do all the stuff healthy people take for granted. Simple things like changing the sheets on her bed had become akin to climbing Everest.

Everything fell by the wayside, as the physical demands of caring for my Mum didn’t leave any time left over for secondary shit like my own housework or cooking. I am an indifferent housekeeper at the best of times and indifferent quickly turned to non-existent.

After Mum died everything became a major effort and for a couple of weeks I suffered a massive case of the couldn’t be bothereds.Cooking? Bleh. Housework? Who gives a fuck, shut the door. I just could not be bothered doing much of anything.

And then it started to rain and it rained and rained and rained. The dreadful grey wetness of winter nearly did my head in. Please remind me of that, when I have to buy water this summer and I am stressing out about bushfire.

Last week The Spouse was splitting wood and he developed a painful tightness in his chest. To cut a long story short, it wasn’t a heart attack as there wasn’t any of the hormone blah blah blah in his blood which indicates damage to the heart muscle,phew.

The Spouse is off to the cardiologists tomorrow for a stress test which will give us a clearer picture of what exactly is going on. His cholesterol levels were high at 7.8, which is enough to statistically give him the chances of  1 in 50 of suffering a fatal heart attack.

So now my control freak tendencies can really be let loose up on my family. The Spouse needs to lower his cholesterol and all the food choices he makes from now on will be supervised by yours truly.It is well past time that I dusted off the pots and pans and started cooking again. As soon as I hit publish I am going to make a large pot of  fish soup for tea.

But.

Some days an icy hand of fear just grips my heart and squeezes tight.

Some days the fear sits heavy inside my head pushing out all thoughts, except for the ones that tell me that I am afraid. I am afraid for my children, afraid of their choices. Afraid of the possible consequences of their choices, afraid of fear itself.

My fears which are the normal fears of a parent are magnified by the loss of my Mother and by the challenges assosciated with living with Ehlers Danlos. This post written by Achelois, gives me a glimpse into a possible future for my daughterVeronica and whilst it scares me witless, I know that Veronica is a strong young woman who will cope in her own indomitable way.

My son David had a dentist appointment yesterday. Pre-EDS, Dave would have just walked to the dentist from school, had his fillings and then gone back to class.

Post-EDS it is a whole different ball game.

David had to be assessed by a senior dentist in Hobart to see if it was safe for him to be treated at the small local dental clinic. The senior dentist  needed a copy of Davids echocardiogram report and so it took nearly four months of to-ing and fro-ing before it was decided that yes, Dave could be treated at the small clinic which is attached to his school. But, he needed to have a preventative dose of antibiotics an hour before his treatment.

I don’t know exactly why David needs the antibiotics before his dental work, it is something to do with either his heart or his lungs. The Spouse took the phonecall from the dentist and didn’t ask why, he just wrote down Dave’s appointment times.Gah.

David’s Echocardiogram shows that he has mild pulmonary hypertension and the right hand side of his heart is enlarged. He is fifteen.We have an appointment with a cardioligist in September and I am trying not to think too deeply about the implications for my son until then.

But again that icy hand of fear is giving my own heart a bloody good squeeze.

As I was sitting in the waiting room of the dentists, trying to ignore the crap on the tv, I was quietly worrying about my son. I was hoping that the dentist wouldn’t accidentally dislocate David’s jaw.Possible scenarios and implications of a dislocated jaw played through my mind, all I needed was a brunette mournfully wailing for Heathcliffe and the melodramatic scene in my head would have been complete.*Sigh* I have a very vivid imagination.

David’s jaw didn’t dislocate but it became very clicky during his treatment and they want a senior dentist to have a look at it, at Dave’s next appointment.

I know that Veronica has her own fears, regarding the  health of her children but at least she is spared the soul destroying doubt and disbelief, shown to me by the medical profession as I struggled to convince someone that my daughter  really was ill and not faking.

Since Veronica’s formal diagnosis of Ehlers Danlos Syndrome earlier this year everything has become much easier,well much easier within the medical system at least. That little piece of paper from the geneticist means that Veronica doesn’t have to fight to be taken seriously.Her children are being closely watched by the paediatric team at the hospital and there are protocols being put into place for them. YAY.

Isaac’s E.C.G showed a lovely, perfectly healthy heart. Perfect perfect perfect. That is one less thing to worry about and I can prise back one of those icy fingers.

Hmmm am amazed that you cant write 40 words yet you can type till the cows come home…. is this just writing for profit or just a sympathy blog………..god only knows

For fucks sake arsehole, if you actually read the post it is glaringly obvious that Veronica isn’t after sympathy. But of course self centred dickheads like you only see what they want to see. Leaving a nasty,anonymous comment is a cowardly, low act and tells me all I need to know about what sort of person you really are.

Achelois, a lovely English blogger has written about trolls in her latest post The Internet Bully & A Request her post is well worth reading.

I hadn’t really thought about trolls being bullies. I had just thought that they were a shadowy sub-species, sort of a cross between Gollum and Dr Phil. Full of useless advice and observations delivered in a slithery tone of voice.

“Oh yessss my precioussss you is not broken. You issssss pretending.You neeedsssss to get a real job and sssstop writing on the internetsssss.”

I have written a formal comment policy for my blog. It is up there at the top of the page. So in keeping with my current policy I will now edit anyonetoblog’s comment to amuse myself. Even though the comment wasn’t left on my blog, they harassed my child and as such only deserve my contempt. Veronica’s father’s feelings are quite unprintable.

Hmmm I am amazed by you.  you cant write 40 words without falling apart, dont worry writing is overrated as evidenced by my own pathetic attempt.  you can type away till the cows come home I adore you.….you should be writing for profit have you considered a career in journalism. just a sympathetic word or two from you will be enough to make me happy……..god only knows i couldn’t manage like you do.

There now, that is a much nicer comment.

Now on to some happier stuff. My friend Robin took some photos of my work and I have added a ceramic gallery to my blog as well. The photos are all thumbnails and you can click on them to make them a bit larger. The images are only a small selection of my work and I will be adding to the gallery as I find the time to photograph any new work.

You might remember that I was having an exhibition at the Lady Franklin Gallery in October. Unfortunately I had to cancel that in June because I just didn’t have the energy to think about an exhibition at that point in time. I have been invited to take part in a group exhibiton tentatively planned for November.Yay. So I have enough work lined up to keep me busy for months.

Remember the platters that I was working on last month? I have fired two of them and I am pleased with the results. They are gutsy pieces with a raw energy that make me feel a tiny bit hopeful.

These handbuilt platters allow me the freedom to just chuck some clay around and have some fun as well as giving me a large surface area to experiment with a range of different glazes. If you want to know what any of the glazes are, or how I got that interesting crawling  just ask me in the comment section and I will share the recipes.

I will finish up with a piece I made for my Mother. Mum loved this little vase and it will now be my inspiration for a series of  its own.

Easily a gazillion times.

As I am writing this, if I straighten up in my seat I can see Mum’s house. The house has been dark for a long time now. It has been empty for  two months and I am still nowhere near ready to sell Mum’s house. It is hard.

We shared a boundary Mum and I. The children grew up having free run over the two properties. It was always easier to walk down the bush track to Mum’s rather than walk the half a kilometre it is by road.

When the children were smaller we would swim in the dam in the summer and try and crack the ice with rocks in the winter. David learned to stalk a wallaby and identify animal tracks down at Mum’s.

Veronica would take a book and sit in the clearing halfway down the hill and read for hours, then she would invariably end up down at Mum’s

There were countless weekend phonecalls, from the children saying, “We are at Nan’s,we are staying for tea and can we sleep the night please?”

This photo was taken this morning from my back verandah.If you look underneath the text you can see Mum’s house through the trees at the bottom of the hill.

When the new people move into Mum’s I will be able to see them from up here. I will be able to hear them talking. I will have to drive past them every fucking day.I will have to watch as they change Mum’s house into their house.I will have the country woman’s fear of bushfire because all newbies light a fire and have it escape from them and if there is an escaped burnoff it will run up the hill to us. *sigh*

Then there is Mum’s tree. A magnificent ancient stringybark below the house. A family of sugar gliders live in that tree.Will they chop it down? What will happen to the proteas that Mum planted? Will they shoot the Bettongs and the Potoroos that  Mum loved? Will they have dogs that bark and drive me nuts? Will they make me sadder than I already am?

Veronica wrote a beautifully poignant post about how hard it has been to pack Mum’s life away into boxes.

We are going down to Mum’s again this weekend to pack up more of Mum’s things and possibly move out the last of Mum’s furniture. Veronica and I just get down to work and let practicalities take over. David mopes around aimlessly, muttering to himself, “This fucking sucks” and I snap at him for swearing, whilst at the same time silently agreeing with him that, “Yep this fucking well sucks big time baby.”

The only thing that is stopping me from digging my heels in and flat out refusing to sell the house is the fact that Mum and I had talked about it so much in the months before her death. Mum was adamant that I had to sell the house.

“You have to sell it Kimmy” was always her response to me saying I didn’t want to,” It will be my legacy to you.”

Mum’s legacy to me is so much more than the money the sale of her house will bring.

I am the woman that I am, because of my Mother. That is Mum’s legacy to me.

I have a zillion half written posts in my drafts folder. Posts that start off like this.

All I want to do at the moment is crawl into my bed, pull the covers over my head and pretend the real world doesn’t exist. Yesterday by three o’clock in the afternoon I was knackered and the idea of just going to bed was so tempting, that I very nearly did just that. Sometimes I think that Eliza Bennett’s mother in Pride and Prejudice had the right idea when she just declared it,” All too much!” and took to her bed.

I want to ring my Grandmother to see how she is going but every time I even think about my Nan I start to cry.

Then there were posts like this one.

I am sitting here in the dark trying desperately not to think about the lump in my daughter’s breast. Ha! Epic fail.There are two distinct voices in my head, one is telling me that everything is going to be okay. Von is breastfeeding. She found the lump early. We have a history of fatty lumps. Don’t panic.

The other is the voice of pure terror and it is whispering  the words, my daughter might have breast cancer, over and over at me. I truly don’t know if I have the strength to deal with a cancerous lump right at this moment in time.

I was supposed to return to Tafe that week but I went to the ultrasound with Veronica and Nathan instead. I cannot even begin to describe the relief that I felt when Vonnie was given the all clear. It was just a fatty lump. YAY.

We then went to visit my Grandmother, herself a breast cancer survivor. I hadn’t seen my Nan since the funeral and I couldn’t stop my tears. Nan held me close and I sobbed like a child bereft.

We three women who had been there at the end, sat and talked and cried. We shared our pain and our memories. Nan talked about Mum’s first day at school and we consoled each other with our recollections. With each memory shared and each tear shed we affirmed our love, not just for Mum but for each other. Our visit started with tears and ended with laughter.

It has been 25 days since my Mother died and the sharp edge of my grief is changing into a softer ache.

My Mother loved to cook and I have her cookbooks here with me. I am using Mum’s saucepans and her oven mitts hang in my kitchen. Small things of Mum’s that give me a great deal of comfort and pleasure.

I was using Mum’s pots the other night and I had emptied a pan of spaghetti sauce that I had made into a bowl. Harry the dog was looking at the pot longingly, hoping to lick the bowl.I  distinctly heard my Mother telling me, “Don’t even think about it Kimmy!” I smiled to myself as I did as I was told and put the pan on the sink to be washed.

Isaac had a seizure on Thursday and we are waiting to see if he has epilepsy, or if it is related to Ehlers Danlos Syndrome as well. When Veronica rang me and said she was in the hospital with Isaac, my first thought was, right I will just let Mum know. Then I remembered and I sighed with sadness but I didn’t start to cry.

Life is slowly returning to a familiar rythym. David is back at school. I have returned to my studies. The house is full of clay and Jeffrey is growling about the mess I make. Things are as normal as they can be and I am starting to think about picking up my camera again. I have pots in my head screaming to be made and Barbara’s bum is morphing into a ladybird instead of a stag beetle. I am still not dreaming but I know my dreams will return and when they do I will follow them.

I survived the sleep-over, though none of the teens actually slept. They stayed up all night watching DVDs and shooting aliens.

I fed the teenagers into submission. They groaned and rolled their eyeballs, they pleaded with me to stop but I didn’t listen. I just kept on taking food into the ‘party zone’. My weapons of mass distension were simple but effective. Pizza and hot chips, combined with timtams, twisties and lollies. Washed down with a gazillion cans of coke and lemonade. I had icecream and marshmallows in reserve if I needed reinforcements but it seems that the final packet of tim tams was enough. Throw an XBox and an eightball table into the mix and a good time was had by all.

Last week I was running on nervous energy. There were a zillion things to be done and very little time to do them in. My phone ran hot, my inbox was full and I was in a state of perpetual motion.

Yesterday was the first time that I didn’t have to drive anywhere or do anything.

So I stayed home and cried.

I cried for my brother who has taken all Mum’s photos. I hope they ease his pain.

I cried for my children who have lost their Grandmother.

I cried for Amy who knows something is wrong but she doesn’t know what.

I cried for myself.

I am going to build a garden for Mum. Thinking about Mum’s garden makes me smile. Mum wanted her ashes buried up here and we talked about her garden a lot.Planning Mum’s garden together gave us something practical to think about so that both of us didn’t drown in our sorrow.

I will listen for your voice on the breeze. I will look for your face in the stars. I will see you dancing with the clouds and I will hold you in my heart.

I love you Mum.

]]> http://frogpondsrock.com/2009/07/this-time-last-week/feed/ 18 http://frogpondsrock.com/2009/07/i-drink-alone/ http://frogpondsrock.com/2009/07/i-drink-alone/#comments Tue, 30 Jun 2009 22:15:45 +0000 frogpondsrock http://frogpondsrock.com/?p=2354 When I drank, I drank a lot. I always maintained that I was a beeraholic not an alcoholic because there was wine in the cupboard and half a bottle of vodka on the shelf and surely if I was an alcoholic I would drink those as well.Wouldn’t I?

I wouldn’t have a beer until I was sure that I didn’t have to drive any where. I never drank and drive. Not because of any respect for the law but because I was crap at drink driving. The one time I drove drunk, I crashed the car. You really need lots of practice to be a good drunk driver and I am not that dedicated.

My blog personality is how I am in real life. I am funny and sweet, I am generous to a fault and I really am quite a nice person. I am well read and I can discuss anything from the breeding habits of snails to the reasons behind the sub-prime mortgage fiasco.I am impatient and demanding. My way is the best way(naturally.) I am opinionated and very loud. I am a control freak who doesn’t know how to delegate. I say outrageous things just for fun. Politically I am so far to the left that it is a wonder I dont walk with a tilt. I dont suffer fools and I will tell you, if you give me the shits.

I used to gather up strangers(mostly tourists) and bring them home for a meal but Jeffrey made me stop doing that. I pick up interesting looking hitch-hikers and sometimes I drive further than I intended because I am enjoying the conversation.Children and animals love me and I am a natural born storyteller.I could sell ice to eskimoes.I like to talk and sometimes I forget to listen. I am an Aquarian fire horse and when I am angry I stamp my foot and my nostrils flare, I fire up and explode. Then I am done and my anger is forgotten and I expect every one else to forgive and forget as quickly as I do.

Alcohol magnified all those traits by 100 and you either loved me or hated me. There was no middle ground. As a result I have some very very good friends and lots of aquaintances that think I am an arsehole.

I stopped drinking in April 2008. Anzac day is always a very emotional day for me and I would generally get rotten. I had been drinking beer all day and had topped up with nips of neat whiskey. That night I was a belligerent drunk and I had a nasty fight with my son. David walked down to his Nan’s at 1 am with me screaming at him to get back home and dont you walk away from me etc etc.

I woke up the next morning knowing something BAD had happened and then I started to remember bits and pieces of what had happened. Oh Shit.

I put off ringing Mum for as long as I could because I knew she would be furious with me. When I finally was brave enough to pick up the phone she didn’t disappoint one little bit. Furious wasn’t the word. Mums anger was icy and terrible.

David came home later on that day and I apologised to him and we held each other close.

I didn’t make a conscious decision that day not to drink again, it just sort of happened. One day turned into two, turned into a week turned into a month. When people would ask me why I had stopped drinking, I would make some flippant reply because I was ashamed of the real reason I stopped. I had done something that I swore I would never do, I had become my father.I had hurt my son. Luckily the damage wasn’t irrepairable but his wounds were deep.

I avoided my Mother because I was ashamed.  I reluctantly visited her on Mothers day and we didn’t speak about Anzac day but it was there, the elephant in the room.

Six weeks later Mum was diagnosed with cancer and there is nothing like a life threatening illness to make you sort out your priorities. The elephant vanished with a pop and we embarked upon the next stage of our relationship.

I dont know how many times I said to Veronica. “I am so pleased that I am not drinking” and her reply was always, “We are so pleased you are not drinking as well.”

to be continued…

Organising a funeral is horrible. Mum and I had talked about her funeral, we had even gone to a funeral home together where I listened, as Mum talked about the music she wanted, the flowers that she liked and all the millions of small details.

We met with the celebrant(?) yesterday and I was under the impression that he would ask us questions about Mum and then he would write the Eulogy from the notes we had given him. Apparently not *sigh*

Luckily Mum’s favourite little Japanese tea rooms were close by. So my brother and his son Hayden along with Vonnie and myself brainstormed over lunch. My brother was left with the task of typing it up into a coherent Eulogy, which he would email to me, Vonnie and I would add any bits we thought of, email it back to Mick and he would email it to the celebrant.

AAAAAAARRRGHHHHHHH!!!!!!

This is really, really hard.

Today is also David’s 15th birthday. We are burying his Grandmother on his birthday. Oh shit. What the fuck was I thinking? Dont answer that ok.

I have tried really hard to make this last week as normal for Dave as possible but of course there is nothing really that I can do to distract him from his heart-ache, except hold him and try not to yell at him when he slams my doors.

I will just have to trust that everything will be all right for my son eventually.

Think of us today at three o’clock.

I am expecting a horde of ravenous teenagers up here tomorrow to celebrate Dave’s birthday,(which is on Tuesday, the day of Mum’s funeral *sigh*) I am deliberately not thinking about the mud that will be tracked through the house via the shed (eeek).

Dave’s original plan was to have his friends, who are all city kids come up here and camp in the bush. Tents, campfires, junkfood and a  large bonfire and ‘voila’ with the minimum of fuss, a good time is had by all .

Except that it is the middle of winter and it wont stop raining.

So now the modified plan is for the kids to all cram into Dave’s room as well as take over Jeff’s shed. Jeff is understandably less than thrilled at the prospect of his space being filled with strange teenagers.  All I can do at the moment is try not to think about it too much.

I have bought essential supplies as per the list David gave me. Coke, pizza, chippies and ice-cream, seem to have all the essential food groups covered.

Think of me tomorrow. I will be the one rocking in the corner.