Serendipity II

I have written about this before: when something happens in the space and time you need it to, and it feels beautiful. 

I decided to go and sit in the sauna for a bit after my swim on Tuesday morning. Getting a monthly membership to a gym with a nice swimming pool and other amenities, including the cafe where I am writing this now, is the best investment I have made in myself in a very long time. I love being in water. I feel transported; all gorgeous and mermaidey. Or dolphiney. Or somethingey. It is almost impossible to feel chubby in water, put it that way. I literally have to force myself to stop bobbing around and get out. I can’t think of another form of exercise that has such a cheering effect on me. 

I didn’t sleep well on Monday night. I woke up in the early hours feeling incredibly stressed. Worrying about youngest and his Stuff. He’d said something before bed that really spiked right into my heart and stayed there; had made my Phoenix’ feathers start to smoulder. ‘I’ll be ok when I’m older. I’ll have a wife and I won’t have so much to worry about’. 

These words made me feel such sadness and despair. Is my twelve-year-old really waiting for adult life in order to feel happy? What if (and he won’t be the first), the feelings that overcome him now, continue then? And what if he doesn’t find a ‘wife’?

I’ve spoken to school. They are working on a ‘toolkit’ of techniques to help him when he’s feeling bad. He has a card he can hold up when he needs to leave the classroom.  I’ve been trying to help him myself, too; share some of my learnings - mindfulness, full body relaxation, sitting with your feelings instead of trying to escape them. Countdown from three and then jump up and put a pumping song on. I’ve had a poster of things you can do to lift your mood and deal with anxiety on the bathroom wall for years. 

He is wise and knows that a walk outside, or doing some exercise, helps. But he is so often overcome. He came into the kitchen and hugged me and cried yesterday evening while I was making tea. Just because he was feeling sad and he didn’t know why. And I can’t lie. It takes everything I’ve got not to break down and cry with him. I held him.

Lately I have started explaining that he needs to be gentle with me sometimes, understand that his feelings impact on people around him and that we really need to be open to possible solutions. He has done play therapy and a bit of talking therapy. He says nothing works. That my being stressy is proof. 

It’s so hard not to feel responsible. To see someone you love, suffering. Not to see yourself as a ball of learnt anxiety. Having time off work is wonderful, but you don’t de-stress overnight. 

Anyway… I got into the sauna when I saw a couple of men leave. There was a woman in there. She started talking and if I’m honest, I wasn’t sure I wanted her to. 

 ‘Would you believe both those men have had quadruple heart bypasses?’ she said. 

‘Gosh,’ I replied. ‘What even IS a quadruple heart bypass? Is it a bypass you’ve had four times?’

‘I think it’s when you’ve had all four valves replaced. One of them was in intensive care for two months and needs to go back again for another valve replacement because the last isn’t working properly’.

I was silent for a moment, trying to remember what comes after ‘quadruple’. God, I feel like my brain is packing in.

‘The resilience of people is incredible, isn’t it?’ I offered. ‘I think if I knew I needed heart surgery, I’d just assume my time had come and give up. Either way, all that puts some of the things I worry about into perspective’. 

‘Yes, I think I might give up too, she said, ‘but I’ve got much better at not worrying about stuff as I’ve got older.

For a second I wondered if she has a significant other to put his or her arms around her and tell her that everything is going to be alright. I sure would like some of that in my life. 

‘I mostly worry about my children at the moment,’ I said. ‘My youngest is suffering terribly.’ 

To cut the conversation short, she asked me my name. Gave me hers. Told me she is a yoga teacher and a breath worker who helps children who are suffering from anxiety and low mood. Said that she could work with youngest and help teach him to breathe in a way that would help reduce his anxiety; explain the science behind it. Gave me a way of contacting her. I said I would, that we need help. Thank you. 

I went home and told my son. ‘Let’s try it, mum,’ he said. I found her number online, called, and have made an appointment for next week. 

Thank you, universe, for putting her my way. And thank you for granting me sufficient cash flow to be able to pay to try such a thing. And thank you for the gorgeous, perfect, smooth-skinned package of engaging awesomeness that is my living, breathing, second son. 

Ps I have forgotten my glasses, again, so cannot account for typos and the like herein. Universe, feel free to provide me with something serendipitous to counter my tendency to do this.

On bravery

The word ‘bravery’ conjures up different images for all of us, no doubt. Those lacking imagination, patience or erotic content in their lives might gravitate towards a knight on a horse with a massive lance. 

My ex was brave. Well, is. He escaped from communist Albania by swimming to Corfu and risked his life in the so-doing. Not just in the act of a by-necessity underwater swim in calm and cold January waters, but by trying to save two of his friends, by splashing around so that patrol boats with rotating knives underneath would come for him, giving them more time to swim away. His efforts were unsuccessful. 

On arriving, freezing, in Corfu, he stole some girls’ clothes from a washing line as he had nothing on him except speedos, and his passport wrapped in a plastic bag and tied around his waist. As I recall, wearing those trunks was also an act of relative bravery, but I digress. His story, not mine. And, incidentally, one I don’t think he’s told our sons.

A couple of weeks before the work on my roof started, I contacted the surveyor who had come round to assess the house ahead of my proceeding with the job. As someone whose recurring nightmare of adult years is her house falling down around her (‘Mum, you do realise this is about more than your house, don’t you?’, said my oh-so-wise eldest on one recent walk round the cemetery), I had some questions to put to him:

1) Might my house fall down?

2) Who pays if my house falls down? Only my dad’s latest wife lived in Tenerife and was completely done over by a cowboy builder and her story made the front page of the Sun. 

3) How badly can I f**k up, picking a bathroom suite for the en-suite?

He replied thus:

1) No

2) We are fully insured, as are you. (My Phoenix made ‘told you so’ noises at this.)

3) I wish I could come with you and hold your hand while you pick one. I like you. I liked you when I met you. And I still like you now. Would you let me take you out to lunch?

I mumbled something ungracious about my priority being the toilet. I was so taken aback. My Phoenix was pecking my head in fury but I swatted her away. Now was not the time.

But, that was brave, wasn’t it? Putting himself on the line like that. Saying how he felt, and not holding back. I don’t have much of that in my life. 

Note: I added in those inverted commas around ‘bravery’ just before hitting ‘publish’. Despite having used editorial skills in most of the jobs I’ve had, I find myself losing track of what is correct and what is stylistically optional, these days. A subject for another blog post, perhaps. 

A confession

With respect to the burning of my marriage certificate: the truth is, I could only find a photocopy of it. Knowledge of this has been on my conscience and I had to come clean. 

I have a box I keep important things like passports and now defunct E111 cards (😞) in, and I expected to find it there. 

Perhaps I had to hand in the marriage original, in order to get a divorce certificate? But that wasn’t in the box either. So god only knows where either are. More memories I’ve buried away, both literally and metaphorically. 

Anyway, I burnt the photocopy. Obviously the ceremony  was a bit lacklustre owing to the absence of ink on parchment, especially as the whiff of white sage was really starting to pi** me off. But on some level it achieved what I intended it to. And I may get another bash at it in future, if the real one turns up. 

On divorce

It seems strange to be writing about divorce so long after the event. Well, long enough to have forgotten when it happened, although I think there is stuff I’ve buried, rather than simply forgotten. And of course the wheels of life and all that churns around with them don’t stop turning just because you’re single, giving you immediate presence of mind and clarity of thought. Quite the contrary. And I’m dealing with menopause brain fog to boot. 

Anyway. I’ve looked it up. Absolute decision to end my marriage: October 2015; departure from our home with the kids: May 2016. Return to our home:  May 2017. Actual divorce, some months after that? I can’t remember and I honestly don’t care. I know that I went down to court to collect a flimsy white print-out of my Decree Absolute and thought, ‘you should be presenting this to me on parchment paper after the pain, tears and expense I’ve been through’. I looked around, half expecting a trumpet fanfare from somewhere above me in that high ceilinged place.

Six years ago, that process started. I read somewhere that it takes five to get over the breakdown of a significant relationship. I suppose that’s some kind of average based on roughly how much of a dick people tend to be/become. Hmmm. 

I am taking some time off from work. I am describing this as an ‘unfolding’. From the chair-shape my body has acquired due to long, hunched-up hours spent nestled at a folding table  in the bay window space of my living room. From the cellular compression I feel as a result of juggling a very intense job, home schooling and home life. From the extra layers of poundage my body has acquired due to 24/7 proximity to the kitchen, the removal of my daily commute, and the movement of food to near the top of my list of (available) pleasures. I can feel the poundage squishing around me and I hate it. 

It is also recovery time. To recover from the shock of Covid, I suppose - and the realisation that came with it that even a furloughed ex is one who is not going to do anything constructive with the kids, not even taking them out of the house in glorious sunshine, despite the fact that work had me pinned to my desk, helping support a Covid comms cell, a large team and a new out of hours rota. 

This period morphed into nine months of me acting up into a ‘head of’ job, that I already recognise will prove to be ‘one of the best jobs I ever had’, despite being on call 24/7, but would have been a lot more fun if I’d had a significant other to talk to about it now and then, crack a joke, support me when I was having crises of confidence, or chuck ideas around with. Or just make me a cup of tea once in a while or help me throw something together for the kids’ tea. Most senior managers at work are men who I suspect do not have to do everything at home as well as at work. It’s not impossible and I’m not moaning. I’m just sharing that it’s tough; that things are better shared; that I had to stop and rest before I broke. 

This time is also, it has only latterly occurred to me, an opportunity to recover from the battering that was my divorce. I kind of thought I had. Recovered from it, that is. From those horrendous 18 months of trying to separate myself from my ex, while he hung on for dear life, doing everything he could to stop me. From the fraught years of constant adjustment that have followed. 

I have wondered if the process numbed me somewhat. That in trying to detach from him, and detach from/‘normalise’ his behaviour in order to protect the kids, I somehow detached myself from reality. Became less able to feel, to cry. To remember. Life feels a little bit experienced from the perspective of looking through Perspex since all that happened. I remember the filter of the camera lens providing a similar (but welcome) distance when on work trips to developing countries. Degrees of separation from brutal reality. 

These days, the ex and I muddle along for the sake of the kids. And because we are still tenuously attached. What words describe feeling you would gladly never see someone again, yet knowing you would offer them the remaining seat on a life raft if your ship was going down? I feel muted, fuzzied, somehow lost, by the impact of his behaviour, yet also partly responsible. I feel terrible guilt at having ‘destroyed his life’ and ‘stolen his kids away from him’. Despite the problematic nature of those claims, I do feel that I supported him for years, let him lean on me in every possible way, and then removed myself from the picture - the metaphorical equivalent of pushing him off a cliff.

This week, work on my loft conversion starts. I fear for the battering this little house is going to go through, on the back of so much needless battering it received at the experimental hands of my ex. I remember the day he climbed up into the roof space  with a light for the first time, and sat in the ceiling hatch with his legs swinging through the gap. I remember his excitement at the size of the space and what we might do with it one day.

I gave myself this week and last to empty the roof. I’d made some headway with this over the summer. It has involved moving a lot of memories around. I wanted to clear the space and then perform some kind of healing, cleansing ceremony, ahead of the work starting.

Because I could. And because I realise I have stuff to let go of, too. That I want a new start for the house, but also for me. Not for the first time in my life, I realise there is stuff I no longer need to take responsibility for. Weight I bear that I do not have to. Behaviours that I assumed in childhood. Trying to make things better for people when, possibly, I had little or no impact and sometimes, no doubt, made things worse. 

So, in the final stages of pre-build clearing, I decided it is time to let go of my divorce process papers. Reams and reams of notes, court orders, second and third copies of form Es and finance papers. A copy of an early statement from my ex floated to the top of the pile. I read it. And saw there, in writing, untruths. Borne of desperation, delusion, mental distress and ignorance maybe, but untruths none the less. Untruths he screamed at me again, recently, on an awful ‘history repeats itself’ trip to B&Q. All this, went into the bin.  

My pheonix has been preening her beak on the collar of my ‘round the house’ body warmer. I can feel her thoughts. She knows that I found this house. That it was bought without my ex having set foot inside it because he trusted me to find somewhere in Bristol that we could move to. She knows how much I put up with and how much needless DIY I tried to stop happening. She knows that I couldn’t survive any longer in my marriage and that I tried to end it fairly. She knows that I had the right to demand change for myself. The right to Move On. My ex’s life and mine will continue to be intrinsically linked in some ways but I can only, truly, be responsible for myself and my actions. I don’t have to feel guilty any more. I am imperfect, but what matters now is the future. 

I found my chimes, and walked around the house, clearing the air, bottom to top. Then I went up to the roof, and lit a bunch of white sage that (smelt awful) I would waft around the house. Before I did, I burnt my marriage certificate. Watched the pieces fall onto the rafters. Left them there.

Head fog - an example

Today was supposed to be the first day of my time off New Regime: Get up. Get the kids out. Go for a swim and then sit down and write in the café area of the gym. Prioritise this above all else. Above endless housework. Tidying. eBaying shit. Cooking. My time off work was not taken in order to do endless domestic chores. Part of my ‘unfolding’ is to give space and time for my creativity.

I woke up. Good start. And somewhat surprising, given that I had slept on a too-short kiddie mattress on my youngest’s bedroom floor, owing to having given up on the decorating I started yesterday. Not the best night’s sleep. I would have taken one of the boys’ beds, but the slats keep falling out during the night, meaning that the mattress plus occupant tends to crash onto the stuff stashed below. Getting some planks is on my endless list of things to do. 

I went downstairs to feed to the cats and make a cup of herbal tea. I’m off anything with calories as part of my special Time Off fasting diet thing. I’d decided yesterday that I would go to the gym in my pyjamas as the only set of clothes not trapped in the wardrobe wedged against the bed of the room I have started decorating are covered in paint. So i didn’t need to get dressed. Apart from putting on a bra, OBVS. 

This meant that all I had to do, apart from yell up the stairs every five minutes (TEETH! LANYARDS!! GAMES KIT!!! BREAKFAST???), was put my iPad and keyboard into my gym bag. I recalled having decided to charge my iPad last night so that it would be alive and kicking, ready for the Big Day. Which meant all I had to do was find it. 

Holy Mary, mother of, etc etc. Not in the sitting room where I remembered having picked it up to charge it. Not on the side in the kitchen where I have a charger. Nowhere on the floor in the bedroom where I’d slept; where I might have absent-mindedly put it down. Not in the laundry basket. Not in the recycling with the pizza boxes. 

This was obviously NOT down to me or my incompetence. My Phoenix stirred briefly from its attempted lie-in. DUCKING universe. My shouts up the stairs became more frenetic: I SHOULD NOT BE HAVING TO SHOUT UP THE STAIRS! I SHOULD BE FEELING LIKE WE ARE A TEAM!! THE STATE OF YOUR BEDROOMS IS AN OUTRAGE!!! CAN SOMEONE PLEASE HELP ME FIND MY IPAD?!!!!

I did not find it. Distress was coming at me like sheets of Scottish rain. I felt wracked by ageing and incompetence. I don’t lose stuff. I don’t forget where I’ve put things. Head fog. :(

We drove to school in semi-silence, punctuated by a number of new life decisions as they occurred to me: ‘From now on, I am going to turn the internet off at 9pm every evening and you are going to Read Books and Expand Your Minds; Gone are the days of me taking cereal upstairs; You need to fill your own water bottles in the morning….’, followed by a short quiz on COP (Conference of the Parties), because youngest was super-keen to be one of the kids picked to be featured with his school on BBC Points West this evening (mostly, because he wants to be on the telly and not, unfortunately, because the environment is that high up on his agenda). The quiz didn’t last long because all I really know is that we sold out on the wording around our commitment to stop our use of coal (more on this another time), despite having listened to a monumental amount of coverage and spending a fair bit of last week worrying about the environmental impact of my hot tub. And no, I don’t usually drive the boys to school, but the gym is en route and I am having some bicycle pump issues. (Ahem.)

I dropped them outside school. Kissed youngest. Eldest stormed off shivering, because he’d left his coat at his dad’s house on Saturday. Which was apparently my fault.

Then I drove to the gym. Swam. Sat in the café. And wrote this… on my phone.