HP Sauce

The surreal continues....

Yesterday was the day I chose to tell Y. All the way on the other side of the world, sun-blasted and sand-gritted, enjoying her freedom. I broke across it in her afternoon. There just isn't a good way to say the words. I've had to say them a lot recently – lots of calls – and they stick in my mouth each time, like jagged bits of glass in my throat, and I have to physically push them out, cutting as they sound. This call was the hardest of all, I think; cut the deepest.

Y's journey is now underway. Back from the north to one airport tomorrow, picked up by her grandmother at the airport and accompanied back on the flight to their home, and then they all fly out next week to join us.

My dear friend G is staying with me while S and the kids are away skiing. She is here for my spiritual succour – others may have wanted to know she was here to look after me, but G's strongest and finest help to me is in our talking. We have always worked things through; we have had a very odd symbiotic relationship through our lives where many and most of our significant events have been mirrored. She and I were both performers in our twenties, but lost our performing roles – hers to injury (dancer), me to stage fright (musician). We had our hearts broken in our early twenties; we then found the men we were to marry as our next relationship, and they were both men of a similar type. We married a few months apart, she and J moved to Spain.

So far, so explainable you could say. Then we found ourselves pregnant at the same time, with a difference of about three weeks between our due dates. G was overdue by a couple of weeks, finally pushed out M at 11am on Saturday morning, and we had the call from them an hour or so later “we've had a baby girl!!!!!” . I had been feeling funny all morning – was in labour without knowing it, a week early. We rang them back at 7pm with the news: “We've had a baby girl!!!!!” M and Y, born on the same day.

It has gone on from there. We had boys next, born nine months apart. Later, G and J reached a low point that resulted in J leaving G...the very day he left her was the very day that Jack and I found out he had cancer. Jack and I struggled through an incredibly difficult patch in the first year or so after his diagnosis. It was as though he didn't trust me: he wished to cancel me out, protect our children and their inheritance from me, write me out of their story, our story. It was an existential crisis of intense proportions: Jack was jealous of me having life where he would not. Which is actually an understandable reaction in a 48 year old man with undiagnosed OCD and control issues who is dying, although it was so tough to experience as his wife. In the end I kind of understood what I had to do. I had to dim my character, my natural responses to the world. When I offered nothing of conflict, big or small, it allowed him to trust me again. And it worked, at the cost of some of my identity. We became closer again, and he died trusting me and knowing that I would care and protect the kids to the end of my days.

G meanwhile got back together with J; they had already had their turbulent and pretty vicious divorce where they were as far apart as it is possible to be. Then a few months afterwards they both found themselves lonely and alone, and missing the essence of what they had had. So having been rent apart, they started to knit a new relationship back together.

There are more examples, but you get the gist. G is currently somewhat justifiably anxious that my illness signifies another big shift for her.

Anyway, back to the crazy day in question:

I was on the phone to Y, she was in tears, unable to grasp my news. Her wonderful friend A was there too, and was able to hold her. But A lost her mum to cancer when she was just 6 years old. And she knows me well, and so was upset in her own right. I told them both to have a hug, but to call me back as much and as many times as they wanted through their evening.

However....

Along with G, I had a friend J come to the house that day for a cup of tea, and another friend S there who had given me a massage, and was just about to leave. And then S went to the loo, and the door latch mechanism snapped off inside the door, and she couldn't open or use the handles. She was stuck.

The next two hours comprised me answering the phone to a devastated daughter, then having to put the phone down on her as G and J and I tried to find any tool that might work to open the door, then ringing another friend J to come over and help, then answering the phone again, but cutting Y short to ring an emergency blacksmith, then recounting the story of the shrooms to S to try and keep her calm, then answering the phone again, then letting the blacksmith in, then spending another twenty minutes there until he finally was able to release S from her incarceration.

So both my “telling” days have been kiboshed by rollercoaster events that took me away from my children once I had broken the news.

I really need to get on with constructing that shrine at the end of the garden. Libations and offerings to the unknown force that is in charge of chaos in my life right now. Once again, I really am sorry.....