OK. So it was expected
that any breath could be her last.
I’ve sat with her so many times
as I raked over gripes from my past.
But what I’m still sitting with now
is the contrast between life and death:
one minute her chest’s up and down;
the next she’s drawn her last breath.
There was calmness in that in-between moment,
with sounds of her last snores and sighs,
as I sat in my ambivalent seat
making heartfelt, what-if goodbyes.
Why should I forgive
when you beat me black and blue?
Why should I forgive,
when you never said ‘I love you’?,
until you got awfully, really ill,
and you wrapped me
in embrace,
a blankness on your face.
Because you never could connect.
You always hit my face,
my cheek, my neck.
Yet your depleted, needy form
removes my urge to skill, perform.
And so I sit, allowed and free.
Unforgiving keeps me trapped
between the oldest, youngest you
and a newer, freer me.
Blame is a hot potato:
chuck it at the nearest hands
who’ll catch it, unawares
that it will stick and cloy and brand
them with stuff that isn’t theirs.
At first, my tissue fills with tears.
Unable to tolerate the smell, or my fears.
The nurses so kind, so matter of fact,
while my guilt and my grief are tightly packed.
But it’s not about me. Holding on tight,
she’ll let go when her heart loses fight.
Until that time, she’s curled tight in a ball:
no control of her mind, mouth, body or soul.
And me? I sit quiet, in a meditative lull.
On life and death, this is a chance to mull.
You seem to love my lack
of cash and space and time.
My stress gives you all the power.
My strength you tend to malign.
You love being in my car,
as I struggle to give way
to the entitled, selfish beings
you’d like me to disobey.
But how can I outwit you?
You strike from a nowhere place.
Can I forgive when in a hurry?
Or will you leave me in disgrace?
While you’re that shadow under the tree
out there,
you own me.
While you’re the road rage in that car
over there,
you own me.
While you’re that person who snubbed me
back then,
you own me.
While you’re that mess in my cupboard
upstairs
you own me.
While you’re that bilious resentment
in my heart,
you own me.
While I blame everyone else
for my own faults
you own me.
But take back all that stuff
and make it my own?
Stop the blame.
Retract the same-old-same?
Well, maybe day-by-day
I will start
to own myself.
I loved taking part in National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo). OK, so I didn’t manage the full 30 poems in 30 days, but I did post 26 out of the 30 ( I started two days late anyway).
I’m proud of what I achieved. I rocked up at the page pretty much every day for a month and wrote rhyming words about something front of mind that day.
Here’s what I learned from taking part in NaPoWriMo:
Thank you, NaPoWriMo!
Mother’s Day hasn’t been the same to me for the last four years. Yes, I have a mother who’s alive. But no, she hasn’t known I exist for the past handful of Mothering Sundays.
My mother is 68 years old. She has Pick’s Disease, an aggressive form of dementia. The illness has had her in its vicious and unrelenting grip for at least 10 years.
Unlike other gradual forms of dementia that strike when the person is older, my mother’s strain came early and was swift and debilitating. Four years ago she knew me, she came on holiday with me, and she looked like a ‘normal’, healthy woman in her mid-60s. Yes, she was conscious that she was losing her memory. But she could still walk, talk, feed herself and go to the toilet and have a bath on her own. She could even dress herself and order herself a cup of tea – though money could be an issue, as she’d be inclined to forget where it was or just hand over far more cash than was required.
In the space of four years, she degenerated from a functioning human being to a bedridden soul who has the cognitive and physical abilities of a six-month-old baby. She can’t sit up. She can’t walk. She can’t tie her shoelaces. And she can’t count. She doesn’t know her own name. And she certainly doesn’t know who the strange person is sitting beside her bed. Just as a child learns new skills, she has gradually been stripped of hers. As I am stripped of hope.
It’s been about two and a half years since she last recognised me. The last time she was able to talk coherently, she was fighting with her carer who was trying to get her into the car. And when I said, hey, it’s your daughter, come with me, she replied with much authority: “I don’t have any children!” At that stage she was regressing into her very early years, the way people with dementia do. And I had to hold the hurt of rejection without being able to show it.
So, the poor soul into whose eyes I look for some kind of flicker of remembrance remained lost and on the tips of her own netherworld today. Just as I remain lost in that space with a mother in body, and yet without a mother in mind.
What gets me through Mother’s Day is knowing that, somehow, I still have a mother in spirit.
Negative thoughts making your life a misery? Well, rather than ruminating on them and giving them oxygen, there’s a simpler way of getting rid of them. Just write them down on a piece of paper, rip them up and throw them away.
Write your bad thoughts down and let them go to be free of them. (pic: istockphoto.com/AnikaSalsera)
Sounds too easy? Too free of angst? No use if you just can’t let go…?
Research begs to disagree. It’s people who hold onto their negative thoughts who preserve them. Physically binning them – rather than just imagining you’re throwing them away – takes away their power. Here’s how… Continue reading
My heart went out to Gary Barlow and his wife Dawn when I heard how their baby Poppy had been stillborn. In my work as a therapist with women who have lost babies to miscarriage and stillbirth, I know there are intense feelings of loss around what might have been – the dreams that have been so cruelly taken away – mixed with intense gratitude for the blessings they do have.
A friend of mine recently miscarried her baby. She is a young, healthy woman, who already has a child, so she is baffled why she miscarried. She said: “When I heard about women who had miscarried, I used to think of it as matter of fact. But now experiencing it myself, it is a whole different world. It’s almost like I now belong to a club, where there are so many of us but no-one talks about it and women suffer in silence. Now I think: was there a spirit? Where has it gone? What was God’s reason to take my child away from me?”
I wish I had an answer. The way I chose to respond to her pain was in creative writing, via a poem:
To the twinkle that blinked Continue reading
inktuition 