Heavens its been a heck of a month. First came Covid and then I scraped (SCRAPED!!) an eye-pencil across my waterline and did myself a terrible damage, resulting in a number of visits to a much perplexed casualty and two weeks of one eye getting yukkier and blinder by the day, so I had to sport an eye patch (and greet me hearties with a parrot on my shoulder), until it was discovered that it was more than the tear they thought it was and was instead a piece of something embedded in the tear, over which the membrane had tried to grow resulting in much weepy blind drama, until I eventually found my self sitting in front of a terribly nice lady at the eye hospital who fiddled about in my eye for what seemed like an age and eventually shouted “got it!” and lo and behold I was a woman in possession of two eyes again.
In the meantime life fell apart. A whirligig of chaos ran riot around the house and things started to back up, figuratively and literally. At the moment the drain is blocked yet again, so using the washing machine floods the garden and there is a pile of rubbish and old furniture across the back-gate that a certain someone has been promising to shift since September. The new vacuum cleaner doesn’t work and blocks at the drop of a dust bunny and the dishwasher remains dead so at any one time life fills stuffed with the great unwashed. I seem to have quite dramatically upset someone who turned up on my doorstep demanding to know why he couldn’t be in my life (and was hastily given short shrift), while he of the nice nights in the pub is all kinds of both lovely and confusing and thus has had to be on the receiving end of the kind of disappointed looks I am absolutely rubbish at issuing, over a glass of gin and tonic and an otherwise avoidant eye for his constant, persuasive smile could be a person’s undoing. Even she who has firmly made her mind up and is no longer available for undoing.
Finley is demented having missed a uni deadline as he has taken the moral high ground and refused to submit something he doesn’t see the point of, and at any minute he will be returning home, the first year of university completed and all the stuff currently jammed into his gorgeous little flat set to be hauled home and stored heaven knows where until he moves into a new student house in September. The fridge-freezer is already empty, with the cost of living biting hard and a general air of life gone to pot, and that is a situation only set to worsen once hunger on the hob returns and despite managing perfectly well without me when he isn’t here, demands to be fed oodles of culinary perfection at all hours of the day when he is! All that and it seems I was tootling about in the she-shed without renewing the MOT, forgot to attend an essential blood test, am losing and re-gaining the same three pounds because I can’t concentrate, have got to volunteer myself for a twenty-four hour heart trace next week because of my theatre fainting (though it is thought to be anxiety as all other heart tests are good and well), and due to said washing machine issues still haven’t attended to a little suitcase of clothes worn while glad-hopping my way around the Coronation with my lovely Racheal and other jaunts.
I do believe I’m a bit stressed myself. She says in delirious understatement.
Never before has life felt so beyond my control, so impossible, and thus managing all the things all the time all by myself in the midst of illness, injury and a social life I need in order to stay the right side of sane, is, apparently more than I can handle without coming to a halt and screeching “STOP!” in the manner of a nurse who has just fished something unidentified out of a weeping woman’s middle-aged eye!
So as I lay sleepless with worry at four-thirty this morning, I decided that what was necessary was a kind of RE-SET. A day in which I chuck myself off the hamster wheel and stop long enough to simply breathe, assess, make lists and phone-calls, end that which is not working and attend to all that which requires my attention. For I am a woman prone to anxious procrastination. A woman who decides well today is a day I cannot fix this or attend to that quite as perfectly as I would like so wouldn’t it better and frankly just darn old dandy if I popped it all in the worry box and ruminated on it for a little while longer? No, you MAD COW. It really wouldn’t. It would create more of the same and more of the same rapidly turns into kerfuffle and kerfuffle addles your brain and things get lost in the melee and wrong thinking takes over your head and hells bells before you know it your neurodivergent brain is so fuddled that only burying it under a quilt seems certain to resolve your issues.
I am nothing if not dramatic. For what choice does she at the end of her tether have?
So today I have stood with a metal stick poking at the leaves blocking the drain and I have made a number of calls asking for help with various issues. I have sat with fluffy coffee and clarified my thoughts on something bothering my mind and I have cleaned out the fridge to cement said instinct with purposeful work. I have hand-washed various smalls, run the washing machine through another disinfecting wash to banish the smell from the drain, told the cat off for being the cause of almost constant chaos, loaded the car up with stuff set for recycling, ignored my phone so I don’t have to deal with various emotional nonsense, made space in Finn’s room for the clothes and books on their way back and updated YNAB so I can make sense of the mess that is money right now.
And now I’m headed to the supermarket. Because woman cannot survive on spirit alone and doesn’t a person always feel better when she is at least in possession of loo roll and a tub of butter? Of course she does! In fact I do believe she can take on the world if she’s got lemons, white vinegar and a decent bar of dark chocolate too!
For rest assured, despite needing today after blinking my way through the past few weeks, I am a woman ready to take on the world.
Enough is enough. With strength restored and two working eyes I’m coming out a-fighting…
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