Sunday 29 March 2015

Painful poems about parents

This one isn't really about my own mother- my relationship with her isn't quite this, but I have many women friends for whom it is true. 

THE RETURN

She’ll never give it back to you, your mother,
What she took for all those years.

You return in the hope, the belief,
That you’ll finally show her,
She’ll finally see,
Finally know….. you.

She will not wither you, this time,
You will show her your fullness,
Wearing the self you have gathered and woven
With your own work-worn hands.
And she will not pick at it and find
That loose thread you thought you’d hidden. 
She will not tug it into shape and
Flick away the speck that she can still see.

But she’ll try, alright.
You are still paying for the rental of her womb

And the interest never stops multiplying. 



This one is an answer to Stevie Smith - and is true. 

DADDY DEAREST

The only time he ever touched me
Was a blow.
A smashing hand
Crashing, crashing, crashing.
Or smashing words
Crushing, crushing, crushing.

I stand, small and determined,
Holding, holding, holding
Myself not to collapse,
Nor shed a single tear.
He WILL not win.
I will cow him into submission
By the look in my eye.

There never was anything else between us
Down the reverberating years,
Until you told me, near the end,
How you admired that small, defiant child
Who held her own against you,
And seemed to need no-one.

Yes, I recall that look in your eyes
As you raised your hand once more,
And I dared you, dared you , dared you
Hit me again if you can.
You said it was respect you felt.
My 8-year-old eyes saw fear. 



Welsh people may understand this last one. It refers to a story in the Welsh classical literature, the Mabinogi, where a man is rejected at birth by his mother, who curses him 3 times, that she will never give him a name, that she will never give him his weapons and armour, and that he will never marry a woman born of human kind. His name and weapons are tricked out of his mother by Lleu's mentor and guardian, Gwydion, and he is given a wife made of flowers. She is seduced by another man who is after Lleu's territory, Lleu receives a death wound in his heart and is transformed into an eagle and flies away, to sit, un-moving in a tree with a rotting wound in his side, until he is rescued by his mentor who is shown where he is by a sow. Eventually the wife made of flowers is transformed into an owl.  I identify with the shadow life a child is forced to live when rejected by her mother. And that only by allowing oneself to feel that, truly to know it and to suffer it, can one come into oneself and step into ones authority as a human being. The tale is complex and this poem probably only makes sense to me. 

LLEU LLAW GYFFES/ INNER MOTHER

I am the child of a woman
Whose mother turned her to stone
In her own womb.
That un-gift thuds on
Through my veins.
A skein of need
Looking for a final resting-place.

Children can be lost in time, you know,
And their ghosts inhabit others’ bodies.

I became lost Lleu,
Wounded, I could not fly,
Only cast heart-flesh and maggots
To feed creatures from the Underworld,
Wise creatures who led me back,
And called me three times by name.

Rescued, I rescue the princess.
She is faded, blind.
She has been sleeping too long,
Flying in the dark.
I take her hand
And lay her to rest on my own breast.
She is my mother, my child. 



LETTER TO MY 16 YEAR OLD SELF

I saw - or thought I'd seen - a  writing competition called Letter to my 16-year-old self.  I thought I'd write something, even though I wasn't sure I'd send it off to the competition. Bit too private, but I have been thinking a lot about my years as a teenager and now desperately unhappy and lonely I was.  It's a reclaiming of that time and a recognition of certain building blocks of my personality that were laid then.  When I'd finished it I was reasonably pleased with it and looked where I thought I'd seen the competition, only to find no trace of it. did I dream it? I thought it was in a very good magazine that publishes new writings on LGBT themes called Glitterwolf. The writing is of such a high standard I wouldn't stand a chance but very inspiring anyway.  Oh well! It was not to be, but I'm putting it up here.

LETTER TO MY 16 YEAR OLD SELF
I see you, walking, lost in your thoughts. So open, and yet so cut off.
Your thoughts are like dark birds that wing and crash around you.  They flit in and out of the landscape around you but do not encompass dog-walkers, men fishing, scrappy pale-skinned kids jumping on and out of the freezing Pennine water.  The river is a sheen of reflection, weaving among the boulders, but still deep enough in places to take plunging bodies.
You know you are connected to everything, so why do you feel so lonely?  Your eyes, I remember those eyes, are full of the mysteries of the universe, even though you feel you don’t get anything.
You haven’t got to that point yet where you find yourself fancying a girl in your year at school – that new girl who came in the 6th form, not one of the ones you grew up with in that grim boarding school who were like the sisters you never had at home.  You’re not there yet at 16, but still, you know there’s something you’re missing. You long and yearn for love, life, passion, wonderfulness, but you frown and shake your head when your mother suggests you go and meet up with this nice boy or that.  Your body throws up a force field that would kill anything that approached.  Well - you wish it would. It didn’t keep away that boy who made you fuck him even after you’d said ‘No’ a hundred times.
You make stories in your head. 
A young girl sets out into the world, journeying through the forest.  Unlike your family, her family has provided her with things she’ll need to face the dangers of her quest.  Her father’s tiger-skin cloak, her brother’s best spear, food, strong shoes, and in her pack, 3 magical objects given to her by the 3 old witches who sent her on this journey.
Her way is barred by a giant spider.  Even as she battles it she feels her kinship with it, as with all living things. 
In the City she finds a beautiful yet terrible queen. She longs to love her, but the queen locks her away in darkness.  The magical mirror she has been given becomes a light, shining from her own brave heart, but she must allow herself to go into total darkness before she can find the one chink in the walls that encase her, and break out from the maze-prison.

I long to guide you, dear one.  I am your old, wise witch who whispers stories in your ear and sends a shining white doe to cross your path and lead you astray from the path of normality.  But instead, you change into a black bird, and fly away.
I know you will become a feral urchin, scraping a life from day to day in a man-made world, till they come and bolt you to the marriage bed, the manacles dragging and clanking as you pace that cell and hold out your wrists for them to drain you, drain you. You don’t know if you are a child or an old, old woman, because you are still winging your dark flight, the heart beating in the abandoned basket of your ribs.

I did try. I tried so hard to turn you from this path you had nailed yourself to.  I sent women your way.  They knew what you were.  They smiled, invited you, but you just couldn’t see them.  I laugh now, thinking of this.  You thought you were the only one, when you were surrounded by them.

Just hold to your dreams, don’t lose them, they are your guide.  And believe me, one day – lots of days - you will shag women.  Gorgeous women and it will be glorious.  

Oh! And you know that other dream you had?  The one where you see yourself as older? Silver-haired and smile-wrinkled, still walking as you’ve always walked, determined, self-sufficient, connected to everything around you?

Well - the hair isn’t quite silver yet, but it’s getting there. And she’s been laying down a trail of breadcrumbs for you to follow all these years, so you can fly away home into your own ramshackle heart. 

Caring for my Mother Blog 29.3.15

Blog 29.3.15

My mother and I go through our lives, now, in a kind of dreamy haze.  Each day plods by the same as all the others.  Everything is such an effort for Mum.  Just getting out of bed, washed, dressed and up to the living room into her chair, is a major part of the day.  A shower day, Mondays and Fridays, has to be planned for and courage summoned.  The drainage from that bathroom is all wrong, so we can’t make it into a wet-room, all on one level, so Mum has a scary step up and step down from the shower.  She lies in bed first thing after I go into her room in the morning, doing her breathing physio exercises.  These exhaust her so much, she needs a break before attempting to get up. 
We both pass our lives in a dream.  She watches telly, listens to music while dozing, listens to her audio book when she feels up to it. I dream of the future, looking forward to the new phase of my life, but dreading all that I’ll have to go through to get there. 
In some ways it’s an easy life, in spite of the frustration and lack of freedom.  Compared to the anxiety over lack of money that blanketed my life before I moved in with Mother and choked any pleasure I could get, this relative financial comfort is such a relief.  Mum isn’t well-off.  Her pension, (widow’s pension from Dad’s scheme, basic state pension and attendance allowance) is not high when compared with an average family income, but the fact that there is no mortgage or rent to pay means that compared to a younger family living on the same income, she is quite comfortable.  It is a relief no to have that fear from not having enough to get by each month, but I hope I don’t lose my skills at living on very little, for when I am on my own again.  As long as I can live rent- and mortgage-free in the future, I think I’ll be ok.

But I ask myself, is this all that life is?  We grow up, beget children, then just maintain ourselves, keep comfortable, potter along, then slowly fade out and finally die. 
I see life as continuous growing and becoming.  I feel, in spite of the restrictions of my present life, that inside I am coming into the fullness of myself.  I am deepening and grounding myself, and all this is preparation for the next stage, where I will be ready to build something, and add something into the whole.  I’ve always tried to live my life by putting something back into the world , but in the past I’ve done it in a way that sacrificed myself, and dissipated my energy trying to meet everyone else’s needs rather than my own.  I don’t mean that I’m going to just live for myself in future.  I can’t see any point in that.  What reason is there for us to be here, as embodied beings on the Earth, if not to try to add into the whole? But I think I have learned to find some balance with my needs and others’.  This time with Mother is helping with that as I have to keep my boundaries firm with her, and I find it easier to do that than I’ve ever done in relationships. 
I hope that when I reach the stage Mum is at, of being too frail to do much physically, of needing to be very still and quiet, that I could still expand and grow in spirit.  Still be connected, come into deeper connection with Spirit.  But this can only happen if I’ve developed a spiritual practice before I get to that stage – I think.  The foundations need to be laid, and to become habitual.  I’m longing to get back to that.  I need my own space for it and it’s been too many years, decades even, since I’ve had that.  You can’t do your thing if you are living with someone who is hostile to it or just doesn’t get it.  
Mum was trying to do this too, in her own way.  She said she thought being on her own and being older would be a time when she could get closer to God.  Her way of doing it was to read the Bible every day.  But really, what is there to get out of that bizarre collection of grotesque, tedious and very occasionally sublime writings?  There are too many ugly things in the Bible, even the psalms and other passages that are reflections on relationship with God, usually end up calling down curses on their enemies or something like that.  No wonder Mum has given up, even though I did get her an audio version. 

For Mum, her great achievement in life was having us.  She doesn’t really see herself as anything in her own right.  But we can’t all say we are here just to give birth to the next generation.  It calls into question what is the point of it all?  At some point someone’s children have to actually do something, apart from just begetting the next generation.  If you live your life only through others, you never develop your own centre.
This takes me back to my puzzlement at not really having any particular feelings of connection with Mum.  I mean, I can feel a sort of impersonal compassion and caring for her, or impatient, or disgusted by her coughing up gunge from her lungs, I can feel stifled by the slow round of toileting and meals, I can feel afraid of what it’s going to be like at the end, or anxious when I’m on a day off and I don’t know if the carers are doing their job.   But I’m puzzled by the lack of any sense of connection with this woman who I’ve known all my life and from whom I have half my DNA.  But now I wonder if it’s because – on a deep, deep level – there is nothing actually to connect with.  How can there be if she has such a vague, vestigial sense of self?  If she sees herself solely as someone’s wife and the mother of her four children? Only someone in relation to others, a grandmother and great-grandmother. 

Maybe this aspect of her is just more pronounced now, even though she doesn’t have Alzheimer’s or anything like that, she is kind of fading out anyway.  Do we all go like this?  

Saturday 14 March 2015

Osteoporosis: a disease that deserves more attention.

Osteoporosis is a disease that affects millions of people, mostly women, as they get older. It is a scourge of old-age and yet it is never really heard about. Diseases like cancer and dementia get far more attention, yet osteoporosis is as great a cause of pain, ill-health and early death as these.
I’m seeing my mother become more and more curved over in the past year. She is in constant pain, from a new pressure fracture in her lumbar spine last August, and now another one in her upper spine and possibly a rib too. She is pretty-well chair-bound these days, the shrinking of her spine is matched by the shrinking of her whole world to the one room where she sits all day, only going out to medical appointments.
Not only that, but the decrease of the body cavity caused by the shrinkage of the spine causes crowding of the organs. The most common outcome of this is a hiatus hernia, where – basically- the stomach pushes up through the diaphragm, and begins to take up space in the rib cage, pushing the lungs aside. This, in turn, causes lung problems such as bronchiectasis, a more or less permanent low-level chest infection, which regularly flares up into worse infections.  
You begin to see why a bone disease can cause early death. The constant pain, the lung problems, immobility and loss of appetite – all take their toll. And the hernia can possibly strangulate, which – I suspect – is pretty well a death sentence.
It’s not an easy way to live, nor to die.
Looking at Mum I think if this happens to me - and it’s quite likely to – I’m not sure I’m going to stick around for it to play out its course. Mum just gets on with it, or if she is thinking anything else, she does not tell me.
I decided to look up some information about causes and prevention of osteoporosis, as I know a healthy lifestyle when younger can prevent it. I was a bit shocked to see some things on the list of do’s and don’t’s
Of course I know already that a diet with plenty of calcium AND vitamin D plus lots exercise (load-bearing and flexibility) are important. I’m alright there. BUT- and this is important- we can never get enough vitamin D just through our skins from the sun. Take a supplement. If it’s the only one you take, it will be worth it. And take it now- don’t wait till you get older or have the first symptoms of osteoporosis.
I also know already that thyroid disease and early onset of menopause can also be factors, so a tick in the bad box for me there.
I’m not surprised to read that smoking can aid the development of osteoporosis, as it causes so many problems and prevents the uptake of nutrients, and I am reassured to read that omega-3 type fats are beneficial for the bones as well as the brain.  
But I am a bit shocked to discover that drinking lots of caffeine is a no-no – how many cups of tea do I get through a day?
I also have found out that one type of regular meds I am on can also cause loss of bone density. No-one mentioned that to me before.

There’s nothing glamorous about the research into treatment and prevention of osteoporosis, which I guess is one reason it does not receive a lot of attention. There’s big bucks in cancer treatment; and so much still to learn about all the different types of dementia. But osteoporosis is just one of those things that seems to be about just getting older, and there’s no money to be made from teaching people healthier lifestyles.

But we should all care about it and it should get a higher profile. I’m down to have another bone-density scan, my new doctor is really hot on this. And I guess I’m going to check out those caffeine-free teas too. 

Sunday 8 March 2015

Caring for my Mother #2

I wrote this several weeks ago and thought I had already posted it, only to find yesterday that I hadn't, so here goes.

A Day in the Life of an Interminable Process
I've been dreaming about emptying Mother’s bedpan. There were dishes and bowls of it all over the bedroom and I spill them on the carpet as I try frantically to clamber over chairs and furniture that aren’t usually there.
I wake. The heating’s on so it must be after 8.  I pull on T-shirt and pajama bottoms and stagger into Mum’s bedroom.  God! Why did I drink so much wine last night?  I’m wooly-headed and a little nauseous as I empty and clean the bedpan, dry it, bring it back for Mum to use again.  At least she doesn’t call me in the night to help her any more. The pan rests near her on a stand I made for it from an old chair and a tray.  She holds her breath for such a long time, straining to squeeze out the last drops.
I leave her to do her breathing exercises and head for the kitchen.  The kettle’s on but I spot a pile of crumpled laundry I forgot to hang up last night after getting back from my afternoon out. No matter. It was pretty dry anyway from the tumbler. I peg it up in the back kitchen by the boiler and head back to bed with my first cuppa.
The milk-thistle I took last night is helping, but I take some more and wash down some paracetamols. Then I sit in bed, looking out at the trees and sky, blue and still, though they forecast gales. I sip tea and mull, enjoying this moment of stillness. Another cuppa then I hear Mum is quiet, no more gravelly huffing and coughing. Breathing physio’s over. It’s around 9 now.
I go down to her and pull on her vest and sweater. She says she’ll go to the loo before putting on trousers, so I put socks and slippers on her and pull over the walker for her to stand. She’s almost bent double as she pushes the frame ahead of her, little bruises showing on the backs of her thin legs, bare under her knickers. But I think her warfarin is ok at the moment.  She lowers herself carefully onto the raised and handled toilet seat, and peels out a used pad from her knickers and carefully rolls it up. I get her a clean one and put the used one in a dog-poo bag.  I run warm water for her to wash face and hands, help her up, flush the loo, steady her as she walks round to the wash-basin. She rocks backwards while scrubbing her face with the flannel. She would have fallen but I have my hand in the small of her back and she doesn’t notice.  Back to lie on the bed, trousers on, duvet folded away and time for leg and core strength exercises.
“If I don’t do them now they won’t get done,” she says.
My stomach lurches with hunger.
Into the kitchen with her neck-pad. One and a half minutes in the microwave – long enough for me to have a poo.
The microwave beeps as I carefully wash my hands. There is a painful split in the end of one thumb from all the hand-washing. Well, it’s because I gnaw my fingernails too. 
I put the heat-pad ready on the arm of the chair and glance into the bedroom. Mum is still lifting and parting her legs. Nip back to the kitchen and start putting out her pills in three different sections, the biggest lot for breakfast.   We’ve run out of one of her heart pills. I forgot to put in the repeat prescription till day before yesterday. I’ll have to give it to her later.
Now she’s sitting on the side of the bed.  She can do that unaided now, better since the last pressure fracture in her spine. She lifts and circles her arms above her head, except they don’t go very far up.  She looks like she’s doing a Mexican wave or signaling for help – not waving but drowning.
She’s ready now.  I help her stand, plod behind her with hands on her hips, steady up the two steps, grab the handrail, bars on either side of the door-frame, pause while I pull round the other walker, then, groaning, she heaves herself up the second step. Her body – tiny and insect-like - is still too heavy for her pipe-stem legs.  She gets across the edge of the carpet that sits on the too-slippery wooden floor, quite easily, but makes an issue of the wrinkle in one place, where I just couldn’t get it to lie straight after the last time I was alone in the house and pulled all the rugs up to clean and polish the floor under it. Seems so long ago – it was only late summer, when she went away to stay with my brother and twisted her back, the spine crumbling in a new place, and the months of pain and immobility since.  She told me yesterday to flatten out that wrinkle and my reply, that I would have done it already if I’d been able, was a little too bad-tempered, so now she edges past it, lifting the walker up as if it were inches high, making a statement.  
She sits with a sigh of relief and fumbles for the electric control.  I lay her fleece blanket over her while she whirrs herself backwards and raises her feet. Heat pad round her neck, other electric heat pad switched on. The sky is bright and clear with winter sunlight and there is a tiny edge of an old moon up there. It’s too bright for Mum’s eyes and I draw the curtain over.
Asthma inhaler, mug of water and spit-bowl. She fumbles with the puffer where it’s pushed into the spacer.
“Next time you wash the spacer can you make sure to line up the hole in the end with the mouth-piece? I have to hold it twisted round otherwise.”
I take it from her while she gargles, rinses and spits. I pull off the end of the spacer, re-position it two millimeters and re-assemble it.
Pills now.  I explain about the heart pill.
“I’ll go and fetch it later.”
Her face goes blank, incredulous. 
“I’m infectious?” she says.
I repeat myself, too loudly and try not to think “It’s not that you’re deaf. You just never listen. You never did, only ever heard what you expected to hear, not what I was actually saying.” (“Mummy, Mr Saunders pulls his willy out of his trousers when he’s teaching me sums.” “You naughty girl, telling such stories.”) 
Maybe never being listened to, is what makes her so deaf to others. It is a habit, ingrained over a life-time that now mimics real deafness.
It’s almost 10 o’clock now.  I need to eat.  Slice a banana into the bowl, small sprinkling of cereal and some blueberries – good for the eyes, I hear – soy milk and spoon.  Mum’s best meal of the day.  I sit it on her tummy.  She wears a small towel on her chest to catch the drips. It looks like a bib, but is more dignified than stains on the front of her jumper.  Tea, toast, marmalade, sliced in half, placed beside her while she chews slowly and noisily, each mouthful 37 times, as she’s always done.  Classical music crashes from the telly, thank God for radio 3. Maybe she is a bit deaf, she has it so loud.  At least it masks the sound of her chewing.
Finally, my toast, peanut butter, some blueberries.  I shift my weight slowly from one foot to the other, stand on one leg, plié and stretch, while I wait for my toast. It always burns because it’s the second lot in the toaster.  I retreat to the bedroom with a plateful and my third cuppa.
“Derek’s here,” Mum calls as I pass.  The gardener had been coming for about 10 years to help Dad then carried on after Dad died.  Mum never once gave him a cup of tea.  That only happened when I moved in with her.  “It never occurred to me,” she said when I first did it.  Her favourite phrase. Nothing ever did occur to her. Now she reminds me about his cup of tea.  But I’m still in T-shirt and pajamas, bare feet. He’ll have to wait.
I sit on the outside of the bedclothes, deluding myself I won’t get the crumbs into the bed. I think. Need to go to the market today, get vegetables, go to the doctors with the monthly prescription, go to the chemists to pick up the one I put in the day before yesterday.   I suddenly think of my own meds and get up to scratch around till I find a repeat prescription form and fill it in.  I pull on some clothes and clear my crumby plate and mug away, picking up Mum’s on the way through.
“I’ll go to the market today,” I say.
In the kitchen I gather towels and shove them in the washing machine with the rest of the pile in the utility room and set it going. The dishes can wait. They sit in water in the sink along with last night’s. I make a mug of tea and write out a cheque for Derek and take them out.  We chat briefly. The sunlight is bright and cold.  When I go back in Mum says
“I’ll use the commode before you go out.”
I fetch it and help her onto it.  The doorbell rings and I think it’s the nurse come to do her blood-test. I run up to the door, but it’s the meter man, come to read the meter. I open the garage door for him – he knows his way. It’s really cold out there, out of the sun.
When I get back Mum’s still sitting there and nothing has come. She holds her breath, straining. She always holds her breath.  Training as a singer means she can hold it for a phenomenal time. I feel myself stop breathing too.  They said at the chest clinic that she doesn’t really have asthma, though she’s been using her inhales for about 20 years. I reckon it’s all those years of holding her breath, not breathing, not speaking out, not crying, not even when she was a baby. It affects the lungs, holding the breath like that.  I have to make myself breathe as I listen to her not breathing.
She swears sotto voce.
“I don’t think anything’s coming.”
I help her up. Pulling up her knickers.  All the straining has made her hemorrhoid pop out.  It looks like a scrotum.  I avert my eyes and pull up her trousers.
“How about a walk?” I say.
“Ok, but only around the room, not the stairs.  I’ve no energy today.”
For a bungalow there’s a lot of stairs in the house, but it is built on the side of a hill.   We toddle round the room, circling out around the sofas and armchair, past the dining table, back to her recliner. I pull the side table out the way using the wheels I put on it. She sinks down in relief.
“Maybe I need another blood test for the heart pills. I just get so breathless these days.”
I nod and go to clean out the pan of the commode, even though she didn’t really do anything.
She tells me to pull the side-table back into place, just as I am doing so.  I notice I don’t flinch in annoyance as she does this. The afternoon off I had yesterday has left me with a little rosy glow - the dance class and the chat in the café after. Another couple of days and I’ll be back to feeling that no matter how much I do or how well, it’ll never be enough. But not today.
Derek’s gone so I get shoes and jacket on, woolly hat, scarf. I hear Mum calling her massage lady for an appointment. She thinks she can manage to get down there for a very short session.  Her neck hurts.  Once I’m all dressed for outside she calls me and asks me to get some birthday cards for 3 of the grandchildren – my nieces and nephew.
Parking is a melee outside the pharmacy and I have to wait for half an hour before they remember I am waiting and bring out Mum’s tablets. It’s quarter to 1 before I leave for Maidenhead market. At least I can park for free in the car park – its electronic eye recognizes my number plate as belonging to a disabled Blue Badge holder. I almost never have Mum in the car and the disabled parking in there is crap, always full up and in entirely the wrong part of the car park. But at least I don’t have to worry about having the right change to pay. I don’t have even one twinge of conscience about this – there have to be some perks to being a full-time carer and I can only hold so many things in my head at one time.  Remembering to keep 70p change isn’t one of them.  
All I need to do is buy the vegetables.  I think I’ll get chips on the way home for lunch. I loiter around the sales for a while but they never have anything I’d wear. I walk all the way up to level 7 with the vegetables, dodging people’s legs with the large bag in the narrow stair.  I feel loose and limber after yesterday’s dance class.  I buy one portion of fish and chips on the way home, quite enough for the 2 of us. No wonder everyone’s so fat these days, the so-called small portion is enormous.  As if she reads my mind that I am really buying for 2, the woman serving me adds a small extra piece of fish.  The car smells of onions when I climb back in to drive home, the smell of vinegar and fat mixing in.
“No time for a gin and tonic, Ma,” I say, “I’ve got chips, OK?”
Mum nods, looking unenthusiastic. It’s ‘Heartbeat’ on the telly, at full blast.  I warm her plate with hot water from the kettle and portion out fish, chips, tartar sauce, cut up her fish and squeeze lemon on it. A few mushy peas, she doesn’t really like them. I explain about the pill I’ve added to her lunch ones, that I have brought back from the chemist.  I sit back behind her at the table while she eats facing the telly. That way I can’t hear her chewing.  Except when she mutes the TV when the adverts come on.  I wish I could mute her and her chewing, but I know this is just me, my weird phobia-like reaction to something other people find innocuous.  I wonder if the reason I hate the sound of chewing is because of all the silent, hate-filled family meals of my childhood, all those years when Mum and Dad regretted marrying each other, before they settled down to numbness.
Finished, I go into the kitchen.  Better clear up.  I slosh the dishes out and stack them in the dishwasher, then get it all tidy and wiped down.
“You ok, Mum?”
“Mm. I’ll use the bed-pan. I can’t be bothered with the bloody commode.”
I’ve no idea why it’s easier for her to pee on the bedpan than the commode, but for a couple of months she couldn’t sit on the commode for the pain in her back, so I suppose she got used to it. I rub Vaseline on the rim of the pan and bring it to her. Pulling down trousers and knickers and hitching herself up so I can slide it under her, all make her slide down in the chair so she’s almost lying flat.  She’s swearing quietly. She always has. When I was little I didn’t believe damn and bugger were bad words, because she used them all the time. Now she says “Shhhhhit” under her breath and she even says “Fuck” – like we all do.  
She’s finished and I pull out the pan, rest it on a nearby sofa and suggest she stands up to pull up pants and trousers.  She takes ages to whirr herself to sitting, then lever herself up, it’s difficult from where she has slipped so far down the chair.  She farts as I help her to stand, my hand pushing her lower back feels the vibration of it.
She says “You’ll miss that when I’m not here anymore.”
I chuckle as I pull up her knickers.
“Yeh, Mum, that’s all I’ll miss, that and the swearing.”
She laughs too, but as she sits back down she says “I’m just feeling fed up with myself today,” and her face just slightly crumples.
I say, “Well, maybe we can go out for a drive somewhere if you feel up to it. A change of scene.”
She says, “I’ve made an appointment to see Ann next Thursday, 11 am.”
She’s sleepy now.  ‘Heartbeat’s’ finished now and she doesn’t like the next programme. She turns it off and settles back for a snooze.
“I’ll go for a walk to the card shop.”

Walking down the couple of miles to the shops I wonder what it would be like to live a life so uneventful. Not just as she is now, but as she has lived for the past 30 or so years.  To be married to the same person for a year short of 60, same job for a lifetime– well, no, more like 25 years as Dad stopped working in his 50s. Then the two of them just fossilized. Same opinions. Same house. Same décor. Same routine. Little holidays.
Just thinking of it makes me feel I can’t breathe. 
I know from most of my women friends that no matter what issues they have with their mothers - and we all have these - they also recognize how like their mothers they are. There is no such kinship for me. I can look at her face, the bones show so sharply through the flesh now, and I can see my own face. But the resemblance ends there. My closest friend, who knows us both, recently commented that she finds it hard to believe we are related as we are so unlike. No wonder I’ve always felt so alone all my life.
I come back from the shops with 3 cards, some sugar snap peas and 2 lemon sponge puddings, just as it’s getting dark. Mum is listening to her audio book on the Kindle I got her. She can’t read any more. The only changes in her life of the last few years have been this gradual series of losses, husband, choral society and choir, driving, friends, eyesight, mobility. Even church is too hard for her now. She once told me she thought this last period of her life would be a time to get closer to God- but reading the Bible didn’t seem to help with that and she had no idea of any other way to do it.
She’s lying back in her chair, eyes shut and jaw slack, like she’s sleeping - or dead, except her breathing is like the sea lapping on a gravelly, pebbly beach. 
I draw the curtains to shut out the dark and make tea. 
I like the book she’s listening to, Bernard Cornwell, something about Saxons and Danes, read by a man with a good northern accent – very Mercian. I slice up a finger cake on a saucer for her and place it gently on her lap, plonking the rooibos tea on the table by her.  She opens her eyes and says “Thank you.”  I take my own tea to the study and the computer.
Another hour playing silly games on Facebook, exploring Twitter, half-listening to the book, then the telly goes back on. A quiz show, then another. When I hear ‘Great Railway Journeys’ I potter back out to her area. I make her a gin and tonic and dole out some crisps and give them to her.  I rummage in the freezer and pull out some mince to make spag bol for lunch tomorrow. I put some salmon tartlets in the oven to cook for supper.  News on 4 now. I potter in and out, hearing about a whole town razed to the ground in Nigeria, so many people killed. More about Islamic extremists in Europe, refugees from Syria fleeing across the Mediterranean. It’s hard not to feel afraid. I don’t know what Mum makes of it.  She used to watch BBC News and thought the BBC was Socialist – but only because Dad told her so. Now I dominate her and insist on Channel 4 because it’s so uncompromising. I don’t want my news watered down.
The tartlets are finally ready. I eat well-back from Mum.  The telly is deafening but I can still hear her chew. Supper over.  Asthma inhaler, water, spit bowl. Electric toothbrush, more water and spit. Her breath is like a snore while she brushes her teeth.  At least she’s not coughing so much today. A warm facecloth for face and hands.  Nivea Q10 night-cream and hand lotion.  I decide to stay and watch telly with her and keep her company instead of going to the study.  ‘Endeavor’ then something about the Incas. 
10 pm and it’s time for the commode again.  She sits there for ages and nothing comes.  I can’t bear to stand around waiting for her.    I can’t think of anything to say or chat about.  Our eyes slide past each other.  I potter and fidget till she says she’s giving up.  I say “Maybe it’ll come if you use the bedpan when you get to bed.”
Down the 2 steps to the bedroom – harder and scarier on the way down.  I hold her tight, walking behind her, hands on her hips, steadying.  I pull her clothes off her, lying there so small on the bed.  At least it’s a single bed now. She used to be lost in the king-size she had before this latest pressure fracture. Her bed is electric now with a special mattress. 
She does go in the bedpan.  One less anxiety.  The other day she asked if I could look in and empty the pan when I go to bed at midnight.  I got really pissed off with her. Told her I needed to have some times when I was off-duty, not to still be on-call at midnight.  She hasn’t asked me again but worries about it getting too full if she has to go 2 or 3 times in the night.  I feel a bitch but haven’t brought the subject up again.
Hand sanitizer now, then eye-drops. 
I search in myself to feel anything for this woman who is my mother, with whom I share a life, mine entwined around hers like a married couple, but with whom I have nothing in common but some DNA.  We don’t even have any shared memories – her versions of anything from my childhood bear no resemblance to what I actually experienced. 
I almost forget to kiss her goodnight.  She always looks so happy and grateful for that last hug and kiss. I can remember her kissing me like that as a child.
I leave her to go back to my computer and my own space.

It’s hard to admit that I just want this to be over before too long.  All I can do is just keep breathing. 


Saturday 7 March 2015

Caring for my Mother

I’ve been watching a film that had a blogger as a central character, and I realize I am supposed to be writing a daily running commentary on my life à la Bridget Jones Diary.  Apparently this is what bloggers do.  But then my life would need to be one that showed struggle, and growth and discovery and conflict and redemption, like all fictional stories. I would have thousands of readers, nay, millions, who would identify with my daily round of …….erm……what?
Maybe it should be my mother who writes this blog.  What is she going through?  She is making a journey that we will all make in one way or another.  We’re all going there – senseless and incredible though it seems.  I too will grow old and frail and struggle on long after my body has passed its use-by date, until finally, I die. 
I don’t know if my mother’s death will be gentle and swift (oh please let it be) or if it will be frightening and painful, alone, in the small hours, in an intensive care unit, after I have gone home for a few snatched hours of sleep.  I keep trying to imagine it, to prepare myself for it.  I want to stay with her till the end, so she does not go alone.  To hold her hand and offer her my arm, as I always do when she walks up stairs, holding carefully onto the handrail on the other side.  Only this time the stairs will lead to a place where I can’t go with her, but she’ll straighten her so-bent back and let go of the rail, not reach for her stick, but walk forward and fade from my sight.  But who knows if that’s how it will be.
I do think of it but it’s not the time yet.
It’s become routine, this round of care.  But it’s strange at the same time.  She lies on the bed quite naked while I dress her.  She waits for me to pull up her pants, insert the pad.  She has no sense of privacy or modesty, all that has gone now.  I suppose it would be awkward if she was still embarrassed by it.  She doesn’t have dementia or anything, she’s still all there, but still I sometimes see –when she lies there, stiff-limbed, legs almost rigid and heels digging into the bed as I try to pull up the pants – I see a tiny baby, waiting for her mother or whoever was tending on her, to dress her or change her nappy.  I see that baby who was almost abandoned in her own home, waiting for whatever attention she was going to get.  I remember her mother, her slaps like a wasp’s, stinging and unexpected.  I know my mother definitely thought it was normal to slap a baby. Is my mother’s stiffening a memory, gone from consciousness now, of those slaps?  I see that story in her little, old body, held there even though it was never there in her conscious mind.  I hope I am tending on her better than she ever got for that first year of her life.  I hope I am tending on her better than I got in the first year of my life. 
I carefully piece together all the information I have been given, that no-one else seems to think about, least of all my mother. 
She was so weak, this 2nd-born twin that no-one knew was there till she began to be born.  So weak that she couldn’t lift her head unaided until she was about a year old.  I’ve never had children of my own so I don’t know much about the rates of development but I have met little ones of a year old and they are walking independently and climbing stairs at that age.  At that age my mother couldn’t even sit up. 
We know her mother – my grandmother - opted out of anything to do with motherhood after the twins were born. She took to her bed with post-natal depression and never got over it for the next 60 years.  We know this but has anyone ever really thought through the implications of it all?  While her twin and older sister were already up and running about, finding their way to company, my mother was helpless. This little weak thing, needing help to move around …. just like now.  How often was she left, forgotten, while the more lively children took all the attention?  Even now her feet have a little twist to them, the arches are humped up oddly, in a way that my brother the orthopaedic surgeon says is neurological, from her birth. 
I think about these things and wonder how much of this has been passed on.  I know Mum is a very different person from her own mother, and I know she wanted to be a good mother, which seems not to have been true of her own mother.  At least she tried.  But there was always a sense of bewilderment about her, as a mother. She describes herself as not having a clue, at least for the first one of us kids.  I read a book a few months back, called ‘The Emotionally Absent Mother’, and was amazed at how many boxes it ticked with me.  I begin to sense the deep impact this has had on me – not least in my sense that I would never be a mother myself. 

This all feels like blaming my mother, but I can’t. It’s true, she was a pretty inadequate mother to me, to all of us, but she did try.  She did her best.  She floundered through it without any idea because the foundations were never laid from the mothering she got from my grandmother. 

Friday 6 March 2015

This is extraordinary!! A friend shared a silly-looking thing on Facebook - you know how it is- you can't resist looking at these posts. This was about looking at your Moon Astrology. It purported to be telling you about the dark and negative aspects of your personality- as opposed to the normal Sun astrology.  I do all these things on Facebook tongue-in-cheek, but this one is such a true statement about where I am in my life -  living with my increasingly frail mother in her last years.
This is a time of asking questions of myself, looking into my relationship with Mum and with the rest of my family and asking myself hard questions.  I chose this task of looking after my mother so that I could re-examine my past, and my relationship with Mum, and from that, find my way forward. This Moon astrology thing seems to sum that up perfectly.


Black Moon Lilith Astrology Sign
Keywords
Family Rejection, Imagination, Karmic Debts, Emotional
About Your Sign :-
You will embark on a personal journey of discovering yourself and the truth behind your very existence. This may be scary and frightening and you will need to put up a mask of happiness for people around you. You will go back to your family roots, especially your mother asking questions that have never been answered before or may have no answers. You may not be sure of your inclination towards your family, to stay or not to stay. But this does not deter you from performing your duties towards your family. You need to keep your independence intact to be able to fulfill your obligations.


Monday 2 March 2015

Pensioner vote: a response to the major parties' wooing of my vote

Ok- yes I know this blog is supposed to be stories and poetry but sometime I write other things. Everything is from the heart and my heart is political. so here goes:
In the lead-up to the election the main parties are targeting pensioners because they know older people are more liable to vote.  They think we are going to vote for their right-wing policies because we are all more conservative and afraid of losing our pensions.  Speaking as a pensioner who has fairly typical views let me tell you what kind of policies I’d vote for.

1.  I want to live in a country where there is a fair system of taxation based on the principle that each pays according to their means. This means taxing earnings, rather than commodities, a higher rate of taxation on incomes above £150,000, and taxing international companies on what they earn in the country where they earn it regardless of where the company is registered.
2. I want to live in a country where my taxes are spent on providing services to the citizens of my country, not on lining the pockets of the pariah businesses that all our essential services have been out-sourced to.   What’s the point of pumping money into the NHS when more than half of it has been contracted out to privatized companies that are motivated by profit not patients’ needs? 
3. I want my gas, electricity, and water provided by publicly-owned companies that provide essential services at fair and accountable rates.  I don’t want to live in a country where I am telephoned several times a week by companies trying to persuade me to change my service provider and where failure to shop around and regularly change my provider will result in my being over-charged.
4. I want the railways to be safe, reliable and reasonably priced, not fragmented private businesses that don’t bother to maintain tracks where it costs too much.
5. I want the right to buy council houses repealed and proper council housing to be restored. I don’t want my taxes being spent on housing benefit whose sole purpose is to line the pockets of private landlords, whilst the benefit recipients are blamed for not being able to afford the inflated rents.  I want a stable and fair housing market where those on middle incomes can afford to buy their own homes at prices that have not been inflated by the abolition of council housing and its replacement by the buy–to–let money grabbers.
6. I want to live in a country where the needs of its citizens are more important than fighting wars abroad as a proxy/client of the USA.  Trident should be abolished and our armed forces reduced to a genuinely defensive force whose only area of operation is the borders of this country.  I want ex=service men and women who have been disabled mentally or physically by combat to be properly housed and cared for, not living on the streets.
7. I want to live in a country where everyone can retire at 60, if they wish, on a guaranteed pension, and the under-25s can have a fair chance of getting a job because the old people have retired and freed up their jobs.
8. I want to live in a country where people on benefits are not treated like criminals, where migrant workers are seen as citizens and where sick and disabled people who are unable to work are allowed to get on with their lives without harassment from another privatized, out-sourced pariah business    administering the benefits that we all pay tax and NI to provide.  

We had 15 years of New Labour under Blair and Brown, who did nothing to undo the damage done to our society by Thatcher, but rather, they expanded and developed her policies.  A vote for Labour is not an alternative to the Tories. They all have the same basic polices, which are to bolster up international businesses, the banks and the wealthy in the name of neo-liberal free-marketism, at the expense of the population as a whole.  Parties like UKIP are welcomed by them as they help to distract the voters from the real problems by blaming immigrants for the lack of jobs and low wages, not the disastrous policies of the government.  Not one of the major parties is seriously challenging this view nor offering an alternative.  The servile media help them in this by giving Farage hours of coverage, whilst ignoring or ridiculing other, more serious parties – like the Greens.  

What the main parties, in their targeting of us pensioners, fail to realize, is that we are the generation that had everything we grew up with and fought for taken away from us. Including our pensions.  Younger voters don’t remember these things – permanent contracts instead of zero hours ones, workplace pension schemes, council housing, a choice of whether to work after you had a baby because you could afford to live on one income, I could go on. You can sneer at me for wanting a return to outmoded ways and values, but, for all its faults,  that way of doing things worked a bloody sight better than what we have now.   When I lived in Wales during the Blair years I voted Plaid Cymru – not because I was particularly sold on the idea of independence, but because they were the only party of the left available. If I lived in Scotland I’d vote SNP for the same reason.  I live in England where we are being told that UKIP is the only alternative, even though we can all see plainly that they are only saying the same thing as the other major parties, just in a dumbed down version.   There is only one party offering anything like the vision of what I’d like for the future of this country and that is the Green party.  So that’s who I’ll be voting for.