Turning leaf

October 29, 2012 //

I’m struggling with autumn, think it passed me by last year but I see it this time now with all it’s misty dankness, its inviting skies, teasing and flirting. Showing off the colours, how much more blue can it go and the colours scream out like they used to. For how long. before they lose their moments, turning crushed and flat, slippy patterns on those boots and too many times to slip back home with scuffed knees and you had to rush off to work but put the kettle on for me first. And the constant Sunday inevitability, the desire to walk in the forest, our incompetence doing it, the battered maps and tired feet. Confused expressions in the corner of a field and we weren’t cut out for the county, we did it and loved it for twenty minutes but paths always merged and gates looked the same and I’m not sure we ever ended up where we thought we would, ironic really. And we’d rarely get out before two, one pm, if we were focussed and you two would laugh at my rucksack, stuffed with eventualities and triangular bandages for the fall that didn’t happen. But I didn’t have anything for that unseen moment, well you wouldn’t, would you? And we’d do the rounds of familiar places, the villages you knew from before with bits of stories we didn’t tell anymore and round again with our son, new tales and teashops, grateful for hot mugs on burning, aching fingers. And I’d always forget my gloves despite how many pairs I had. The practical ones your Mum bought for us both, the nice but too thin from my 40th and the two pairs I’d adored from the last Christmas, quite similar and two for one, thats why you bought them. And despite bigger gifts, I loved their fluffy nonsense most but I never got to wear them because I forgot them on the last coldness to Portsmouth and then February came.

And you always drove and I directed and we tried to find somewhere new but it was often somewhere similar or same and we laughed at the animals when our son was younger. High entertainment from ponies and cows, shrieking at it’s head through the window and the seemingly endless fun of following a wild boars bottom down our winding road home.
And the late afternoon air gets up your nose, the huddle of deep pockets, the negotiation over who’s turn for tea and our son, rustling ahead, leaves in hood, bound to be hungry in the car.

And pushing back time brings on these moments and they’re all around me now like the scattered crunch we threw and tried to capture year after year, occasionally timing it right in the umbers and ambers, the old gold leaves of our days.
Seems odd, is this the fourth time we’ve shifted the hands? A pointless exercise in manipulating numbers.
Not driving to the forest today, not getting up passed your books with the Problem of God et al and now I look at the problem of language though I’m not getting very far. And I only do the clocks that matter, my phone corrects itself, wish I could. My appliances are static, the oven beeps absent mindedly with random alarms, from the days when they stayed and Mum cancelled standby. And I haven’t got round to finding the instructions so it protests and flashes irrelevance while our son sorts and checks the things he needs. Clocks and faces that tick despite evidence to the contrary. Sitting here in their out of synchness.

I should get up, not run through our
Sunday scripts trying to spend the day, to not do any of it. And you, not ringing Tim, sponsered by Accurist and your best watch got scratched on that last trip to town.

My problem with time.

I struggle with autumn.

Tags nature, our son, the forest, the weather, travel

Categories Grief, Loss, parenting

Caught

October 10, 2012 //

I can’t get it, can’t think, can’t feel, lying in the grey milky nothingness, poking at the wounds, wanting to tear in deeper till the pain makes me pass out, like I did back then. And the timeline’s all muddled, three layers of games playing round my head as I look through your old curtains, tired and pointless, them and me. String theory flowers, rippled water marks, encoded circles buzzing a language I can’t hear. How old is the thread that machined out this pattern? This place of fabric that hung at the front of our world? We inherited it with the moving in, someone else’s choice that we never quite erased, scrunched up, shoved in and abridged on the new shorter windows nearly nine years after the first home. I lie through it today, watch myself come and go between the weft, wanting to replay every second that passed infront of them as they hung silently in our life. I can’t catch it, can’t hold them, too many, too slippy, too loud, too quiet, a slipstream to nowhere. Wanting to lose myself in their mess but I’m too empty, too voided, struck out, cast off, dispatched and detached. I hook myself on to the wavelengths, imagine myself a photon in this drizzled day, not wave, not particle but both and neither simultaneously as I move unseen in and out of the circles, weaving myself through something that feels like it’s there and I’m only the messenger, carrying light, passing through two places at the same time, my strange experiment in being, only a moment of physics, whatever moment means.
My diaphragm inflates out of habit, the only sign of shifting in my ennui. The radiators need bleeding, hear them creak their protest as I drift back with less urgency now, back to the drive up the motorway, waiting for the new keys, the empty rooms Pisa-towered with boxes and your pretend settee with no real redeeming features apart from not being the floor.
And I flail in the net, knocking scales of my battered body, gasping for memories trying to catch our world. Was any of it real, were we really back there, then in the walls that made us? It’s too slippery, I have to follow it’s nature, hold it briefly into focus before it eases through my fingers again out of sight, back to the pool it came from.
And my slight hunger reminds me I’m still here now and time continues to gnaw away at me.
It’s all just numbers, an exotic language of the forms, just out there marking it’s self. Fifteen years since we opened that first can of worms, two years since our squally sailing round the bay and twenty months since the packing away of a way of being, a sliding down the bank into the mud at the edge of the river carried by your quotes to fish the big waters alone, where “all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
I am haunted by waters.” *

Remembering and reeling,
Reel me in.
X

*Norman Maclean- A River Runs Through It

Tags anniversary, books, nature, rites of passage, the force

Categories Grief, Loss

Re-Birth

September 19, 2012 //

Twelve years ago I couldn’t walk…
And this is where I came in, last year, this place and a stumbling newness of words.
I’ve travelled through my unknown lands, a chaos, grappling through the forms. I continue to travel.
And now at 19 months from the event horizon, I drop away, unseen in a flat spin of memories.

Sept 11th

Don’t know where this is going, lying dazed, approaching the birthday memories, the hours, images frozen outside of time. Week to go remembering my static life, my mornings dozing, finding a position without pain and your sandwiches left in the kitchen. My wooden brick tower, unstable, smooth and bright, clattered down recently with the reality of Secondary School seeping in. Opening up new areas of grief, new pain to look at, but not just now. Tidy the bricks into a pile, I’ll have another go later.

Sept 12th

My strangeness continues. Feel the tightness around my head, temples pulling. Miss the cold air, the early walks. Can’t drop him now but watch him from the window, Mrs Danvers as my Manderlay burns around me. Can’t remember if you’d watched that film now, it was on the list though, the one I’ve taken over. The book pile for me that I need to shake myself into. Stuck on the edge at the moment, decisions to take but can’t quite do it. Pulled towards it with an inescapable force but leaving it, tempting it, hanging on till last moment, before I take the steps I know I need to. Everything’s got bundled together, layers jumbled, jangling in my mind. Newness for our son, carrying his backpack of potential, just doing it because you have to, but doing it his way, our way. His birthday screeching up at me, things to do and be, someone in this time of years guise. All the things that will be done like I used to do, now same but different. And I flash to cake decorating in The Hours before the mother lost the plot and the toddler running after the car. I squeeze the phone tightly as the pressure builds in my head. It’s all coming at me today, cut up images, chopped up magazines of that world, glossy and slippy under my feet, over printed shouting fonts. Trying to tidy the thoughts but they keep falling around me and I can’t help stop and look.
My day seems set in the 1950s, my buttoned up cardigan, shiny pearl circles, fast forwards to Mother at the sink. I’ve gone away to before the pain, playing on the big floor with the old radio by the chipped cream legs of the ironing board and the clips in my hair, oval hard plastic, pull it out of your eyes. And she has so much to do, that child to get to where I am now. I rub my forehead hard, the water drips down the side of my face as I get a text in the current moment.
Now under your light shade that I watched forever through the dark November when my back didn’t work after the place I’m building up to. The hours with our baby while you bought home the bacon. And back then, right now booked for inducing on Friday, waiting. Sitting still in the time before.

Sept 13th

Watching the light play with shapes on the curtain. Feint movements from the world outside, a broken fleck of sun draws down the side of my upvc. There’s a small distant drone under the sound of the blood in my ears. I bet the dog walkers are out en masse, I miss them, I must go back when I’m through this.
The shadow branch bounces in the obvious wind but I can’t hear it. Feel cornered like back then. Shoved into the edge of the settee, barricaded with cushions as we played Take the Brain and despite my pain induced lack of strategy, I still took you to the last piece. You beat me in the end, of course but I had a huge bag of pic ‘n’ mix to soften the moment. And now I’m up against it again but it’s a self created battle with myself. I know what I need to do but I’m still wrestling with the inevitable. Now and then waiting for the trigger, lying here in my broken clock.

Sept 14th

Watching the cursor flash as our son walks hurries down that road, think his friends were late today, he seemed to be rushing as I oversaw the process through our web covered window. He must be approaching the lights by now, just by that dark tree, that corner that I noticed as we hurried past in the Rover after early morning calls were made and I’d manoeuvred, judged and backed up somehow into the front seat. Up all night thinking today was the day and scared but focussed as we sped past School where our son will be turning left now. And the days and rooms lie ahead of me, the flock of faces at the end of the bed, the table on wheels and plastic food, the waiting, the conversations, the stabbing lack of sleep.
But in the present I have things to prepare. The familiar film runs in the background, know it so well. I flit in and out of it, looking at me, at us, seeing the pain but not quite feeling it.
My head aches with this new phase, a mashed slop of messy memories stuck on the end of my spinning wheel. Pullling and easing, stripping and smoothing them through the contraption, weaving and binding them into a shawl for our baby. To wrap him up in it’s stories, swaddled in the narrative of who we’ve become. Right now I can’t move for wool, spiky, smelly, stuck up with bits of bark, too many shards to pull out before it becomes yarn. I’ll just stop, lie in it, feel it’s harshness, comforting in it’s complexity. I have little energy to weave, now as then, hanging on, driven by a primal force, to protect and nurture. Clinging on to see the job through to the end.

Sept 15th

Flipping between two hospitals, metres and years and lives apart. Inextricably there, day two, room three, ceilings and sounds stretching out, trapped down the wrong end of the telescope with disembodied feelings, detached above the beigeness.
And 19 months ago. A dripping unreality, the inked in names on the bedding, the startling bright blue curtain on chrome, altered waiting. Baby pink crisp cotton of then immobilised in hope, wrapped around This Other, a terror of waiting. Lost in my little room, inching fingers through the days.

Sept 16th

We tried to get a signal in the bathroom, up by the frosted window with the wire mesh crosshatched through it and I leaned up the wall near the end of my strength. Day three, weekend staff change, round we go again, more explaining and the night was wrung out like the day ahead, pitiful, minute moments peeling my resistance.
I lie flat now in the way I couldn’t then, so much to do today, prepare for tomorrow. for me and our son. Must shake off the imagery, turn it down and come back to the present. I look up and away, staring through the ceiling, my head thunders, storming layers of time.

Sept 17th

Don’t know where I am. Yesterdays hopes faded with the day easing me under the arms into their toffee vinyl chair. Sleep was a delusion in that empty hard cocoon, desperate, dependent, clinging to the Dawn. And you, helpful, helpless, riding alongside. The faces, decisions, bluster round my stillness and on my present bed I feel the instinct to sustain, in those grey isolations, a purpose carrying me through pain.
And flip back now, it’s all in place, a newness tonight, a birthing out into another world. The Eve of something, then and now.

Sept 18th

And I’m slap bang back in it all, my drugged up whole five hours of sleep and I’m wired and I’m waiting. And you’re there in green and blue as our son walks now, to school, with his cough and rustled sweets for the masses. And my head drones on with last night while faces from that room back there hover and plan their campaign. Johnny V pops in the frame, do you remember him with his too black hair, his smoothness, his words and his news? Tucked, miles away in the corner of the room, tinkering, as I began my assault of the day. To the faceless cold hard hostile team I tried to haul my granite, lost deep inside, lying on my side with your fear as they chiseled into the mortar.
And my head beats with the tension between here and there, a whiteness, walls that come and go, a forced angle not fit for my spine. And before the fading takes over I smash myself up by The Other bed, as the other pain calls out and I don’t know which way is up anymore.
And in two different rooms, light-years apart, in both I fade into the loss.

Numb.
And the hours stretched across the room, my stubborn strength till shove came to push. My early evening end game. Checkmate arrived with the hands of the clock, your words at my weak jokes. And the ceiling changed for the last time. My carefully taped tape, whale calling out through different lights.
And the sounds and the colours. And the feelings and the heat.

Until, until

The moment, our moment
The holding, the look.
The love.

Sept 19th

Twelve years ago.
Immobile. Breathing. Each breath for our son through six days that carved me into someone else.

Until.

The Second Carving. Six days that live with me in my void, just over there, on my shoulder.
Both moments frozen in perfect pain, crystallised, distorted, bright and eager, hanging there, known and needed. I drop through my wormholes, flash flick into them, beyond time and space to my unwrapped evolution.

Two moments of permanence, happening now and a lifetime ago. Arcing over me, pulsing from me, feeding my identity, sustaining my growth.

A circle of pain, freezing me, forming me.

My parallel journeys merge into one through love.

This gift of pain
Then and now
Being and becoming

Holding him. Still holding on,

as I walk.

Tags our son, rites of passage, the force, transitions, travel

Categories Grief, Loss, parenting

Boldly going

September 4, 2012 //

1st September

12 years on from when I was due to give birth he unpacks the plastic bags and crunchy cellophane, clambers into the new clothes and shrinks and grows at the bottom of the stairs. Everything has room for change and I manage the feelings until the look is completed, as he sits on the bottom step and shove stomps his foot into new leather, just like you used to. He sits bundled up wearing rucksack as we test ourselves out, tiptoe through some honesty and hug in a crumpled sharp creased moment until he says he’s hungry.
I need to iron in the words like I did the first time, back in the old house in the old world in a pain that seems quite simple now.
Right now I just want to play and bake and not think ahead and we’d all have our chat together reminding him what’s important but now I do both parts. I’ll get the ironing board out in a while, he’s bought down a collection of Bionicles, I need to sit on the floor and find us in the battered box.

8.15, 4th September

He left slightly early wrapped and ready and everything said, with our special trick that only we know about, prepared and firmly in place. And he bundled off looking left and right and I snatched one last photo as he strode off on his path. I stood my post at the bedside where you put your shoes on but it was his own shiny black that reflected our world today.
And while they trudge in unison, nattering with excitement and nerves, prepared and unprepared for the road ahead, I look out of our window at the quiet dark path. He didn’t pause today, much too smart for the tree swing. I can see an early autumn flower from here or maybe it’s leaves shifting colour. I’ll have to walk down there and check. Everything looks heavy, milky grey sky, looks like rain but it’s not happening.

Probably halfway now, I wonder if he told them the joke? The one he rehearsed last night while we chatted and I tried to sneak in a few extra bits of bolstering for today. We’ve done enough, both of us, somehow. It’s all there, the groundwork, the understanding, the careful words chosen, the words left unsaid but felt at the deepest level.
If I stay here for a while I might see the primary dribs and drabs of faces that I knew. Such a loud stillness, a contrast to my old hurried pattern, my old shapes, an energy of movement.
Leaving now, I’ll carry the bottle and panniered p.e kits when necessary. September was always for reflection, a change of pace, a re-grouping. Marking time and feeling the momentum and that odd combination of familiarity and apprehension, everything the same but different. Same colours different sizes, sharpened pencils, new lunchbox, crumb free corners for a while. Catching up with old faces and noting the reinvention, the fresh haircuts and glossy dyed strands of new look teachers.

He’ll be there soon. I miss the change in energy, the stretched elastic at classroom room door, the last chance words, the look. The turning away and walk back, noting more in the silence or the footsteps of friends whisking me to somewhere else. I won’t see them today, any of them or that life. That’s not my world now.
The elastic is stronger, deeper, wider and is at full stretch as he will be amongst a swarm of controlled chaos feeling everything with enough inside to make it so.

I feel strange, odd, like I’ve forgotten something, or I should be somewhere else. I’m quietly calm and then a friend texts. My rock, who made the transition through the worlds with me. And she remembers me today and she imagines where I am. I push salt water around my face and reach for the box again.
I’ve moved to his room now where I perched on the edge of the bed on that sharp flurescent morning. When he got up quickly and sat on the stairs while the winter air chilled my pale unwashed face. And now I’m here with the collection, the pieces of a childhood and My First Bunny whose been with us since he was three months old. He looks how I feel, unravelled by hours and love battered, nap scrubbed up the wrong way, pink threaded nose rubbed brown with time. Smart white collar, frayed and rough, grey and bent. A tear drips down my nose and bounces of the back off his head. I push it into plush and feel the softeness that remains. There’s a tiny hole somewhere in the ear but I can’t find it now, the back of the ears are a finer fabric, gentle velvety, a smooth chocolate to the touch. I remember when we first opened it, bought by Carol and Gary, they moved to Wales didn’t they? she knitted me a beautiful white shawl and came round when your Mum was here, and our son was loud and pink and smelly and I couldn’t stand up. And in the Christmas video, my voice, happy and tired, laughing as he grabbed it the wrong way up and shoved it’s foot in his mouth. And the label. Labels always held such fascination and I study it now, easing me round the dial of the clock.

He’ll know his tutor group by now as I hear our years and hours playing out over the pain and it’s like a well loved film, quoting it back to front, upside down. Freeze framed loops of a life lived elsewhere, that runs in my head all the time. The noise, the colours, the laughter, the words of an earlier space while I’m stuck at the moment, pressing replay in the toy cupboard of my mind. It all seems so raw like a time travel to back there. I’ve popped out of a rabbit hole and landed in that life and I can observe and feel it but I can’t interact, I can’t make any changes, I can only watch and be.

I’m coming back into the present, a puzzle ball rattles behind me, a horse lies sideways across the bonnet of a car, spy equipment discarded on the carpet, espionage dealt with for now. And all around, surrounded by Lego, favourite then and now, his pedanticness, his attention to detail,
his ability to built, to construct, to make something beautiful from a box of bits. Something fit for purpose, clever, intricate, doing the job it was designed for.

Our son, always a builder, always a plan. Building again right now, just out of sight, just out of earshot, with all the love and the things that we gave him. One brick at a time, solid foundations, a new structure that we can’t see yet.

Constructing in new colours.

He pulls down his top with a sharp tug, we know why.

Back at the front of the house the sun is doing it’s best, it catches the edge of a back windscreen. A sharp line of white breaks through the dust.

I put the toys down.
I’m tired now, need a hot drink.
X

Tags his mum, our son, rites of passage, Star Trek, transitions

Categories Grief, Loss, parenting

Part Two – Perestroika

September 2, 2012 //

11/8
Stuck my head out in the blackness after midnight. Wicked, biting wind cut through, my hair whipped and danced around my head, a few lights decorated the distance. I need to sleep, being pulled and drawn into somewhere long and dark, new and romantic, a sharp, strong, vodka kicked cocktail of emotions. Going to bed too late – but don’t care, this is hard but better than the settee.

11/8 St Petersburg
Well Toto I guess were not in Kansas anymore.

Tired. But up and ready in Russia.

Sun tries stubbornly against the slatey, chunky, thin, angular horizon.
While they sleep in English darkness I’m looking out on a country shaped by oppression, carved by change, limping with uneasiness, clumsy, proud of it roots but awkward in it’s reinvention. No wonder I feel at home.

Bitterly out on the steely Neva, under the Bridge of Brides where tradition throws wishes into it, moving swiftly past palaces and fortress, sitting on top of boat. Interrupted sky, getting colder, eaten by grey bleakness, harsh and frozen.
Along Peter’s Great river to the widest part and into arms of the Aurora Dawn hearing her first shot, thinking of our own overthrowing.

My own arms turn to ice, still holding the effects from the Cathedral. Was unprepared for the images inside the Church of the Spilled Blood and how in a beat I was taken back to the Cistine Chapel and the smell and hush in the colours. And the tension between trying to be there and see it beyond the crowds and not to consume it like everyone else. How can you take your own moments while grabbling on to our sons hand amongst the shoulder shove of a greedy band of strangers? And trying to keep sight of the guide and what number on a stick are we looking for? And you were somewhere out there in the loud quiet, in the hot clamouring fug, mind the steps, where are the steps, hold on, hold my hand.
And not far from two years later I stand looking up in a different space-time at a different ceiling, lost in the colours, in the moment, encrusted in the pain, frozen into the delicate detail reaching out to me through the light.

Subdued buildings frame our coldness, soft monochrome symmetry as we catch the stories. Waiting for the Prince of the purple sails, sleeping out amongst the trees until her ship comes in. And he arrives knowing a Princess’ wish, dying his sails to meet her needs. So purple becomes symbolic of hope and I buy a purple scarf for their folklore and my needs.

In the evening we march back through immigration, passed the impenetrable soulless sheet steel of Welcome. Look into the neck twisting mirror, avoid eye contact, wasted smile, stamp and go.
Sit with hope in the theatre and discuss the patterns on the heavy gilt dripping curtains. Our son sees banana gold waves as we look at the columns of smiles. After our chiselled out granite morning, the contrast of sound and colour, a party of fanciful fabrics lands with a comforting shock. The frivolous costumed energy spun its stark revolt against the earlier cruel greyness and we enjoyed what we could in our plush pockets, a world away from anyone. Seemed displaced somehow and out of time, a teasing humour, joyous fun bursting out, unexpected, dancing freely in the way I used to feel.

And back through the night, spots of neon pierce the gloom, wrapped in an enchantment from the evenings culture. The energy, exuberance, so alien to my life, so vibrant, drenching me in a tradition and fairytale.

12/8
Today in the Peter and Paul Fortress, looking up again, away from people. The ceiling, gaudy gold dripped splendor gives me neck ache while I cannot deal with the caskets and the rush-crowd-click of people photographing marble. I can’t deal with the size and the shape and the words and the imagery and although they’re all long gone Emperors of a Romanov resting place, I shuffle past and look up and beyond. I feel disgust as they clammer to consume moments of history. And outside our guide mumbles on in his gruff appealing slightly indecipherable sintax about Anastasia and if they find her there’ll be another funeral. And I close myself off and away and want to escape but I can’t.
Managed agony of the traditional choral Russian choir in a small white hush with nails dug deep into fingertips, to hold on tight through the velvet harmonies. Objectively so beautiful but I had to lock the feelings in layers of decorated wood because if I started… well, you know.

Somehow its too much like Pisa. The cobbles are hard to walk on, hard to see, they take me back to our last holiday and rushing round market stalls before finding you standing, waiting and my bartering for an umbrella that hasn’t seen the light of day yet because it reminds me of back then and the time just before.

And inside to prison confinement, a different suffering, the wire bed, stone floored isolation and a gnawing presence of my own hard cell.
The struggle back today, intermittent successes as we follow the polyester hand holders, sweet but agonising. Walking behind them, magnetic hands, dressed the same, strolling in a land I thought I’d know.

We leave soon heading for Helsinki. I feel confused and restless. Grey, low skies with a beautiful cold symmetry.
The threatening cloud frames gold leaf, a softened shape splintering the skyline. I’m muddled, tired and teary, feeling everything and nothing in one breath. Remembering too much, thinking too loud. Swamped with the days experiences, encrusted with anniversaries and vividly coloured moments that stay inlaid, despite time. The light breaks through, lighting up the old part of the docks, flicking a strange glow on the rough Brezhnev breeze block buildings and the huge hotels.
I can’t think anymore.

The ship stirs up silt, the gulls are busy. My predictive text tells me I’m a King away from anywhere but I don’t feel it. My land comes with me wherever I go, it’s in everything. There’s no escaping this rule, The revolt is always against myself, it’s a tireless cyclical coup.
The water settles to ripples, the breeze twirls and plays, I stare into the distance. We are moving away, we are moving towards our next place taking this with me. It’s ok.
Rebuilding.

I feel calmer now we’ve shifted west. The frosted glass laps and breaks alongside, sun dipping as we glide. A stillness that belies it’s depth. I sit out, feet up with merlot-my own spilled blood, wrapped in my Estonian shawl, warm, cool, tapping on screen. Our son unimpressed by the line of small vessels, he’s in a different place.

Stick with it. Be.

13/8 Helsinki, Finland
Our day, a good day on balance. Both of us laughing and shrieking as we bounced and battered over the snow, following leather tethered huskies. Despite the benefits to my chiropractor it hurtled us through a new experience, slipping us closer, lapping it up in our ice sculpted memory. And after the slapstick snowsuit removal we blinked back out of the dome into the bright Helsinki coach park, our sixty seated sleighs groaning under the weight of Finnish gifts.
After our day of contrasts -5 to 22, I listen to where I am but go back three years and the call from your Dad. We go upstairs to tell you and you just say was that the hospital on the phone and you know and we give you some time alone. And now I’m here and the thick unyielding fog is back and although the sun is on my feet and the rush in my ears, none of this is real.
I am not here, this did not happen x

14/8
Lying here waiting for the motivation to get up looking at the date and steaming, churning slowly towards tomorrow. It’s daylight out there, from the quiet soft patterns on the ceiling I expect a cloudy, thick wash when I push open the heavy striped curtains. Still back in yesterday and thinking of my time with your Mum and the encroaching fog. And that’s all I feel now. A jellied, gloopy greyness, swirling, lumping, sticking to me changing my outline, slowing me though not enough to stop. I feel her on my arm in the first of the homes. That was August too and the little house we rented opposite the train station which confused and distressed her, before the journey back over Pendle and I sat in the back and stroked her hand. And you burst through the fog now like a lost ship, harrowing, calling it’s memories, it’s stories creaking with the swelling wood. And I swoop up and out of the the whiteness, remembering, feeling, right back there in our life with our son in year two, you in familiar conflict with your brother and the slow un ravelling around your Mum. And I am not here, this is too alien, this is not my world. I am not floating gently to the next place in a life I feel displaced in.
I’m fragmented.
I need to get up but I’m a collection of pieces. And tomorrow is the 15th.

15/8
Sat out the other side of Denmark, smelling the seaweed, too far from home. Nothing works, I can’t deal with people, their carefree consuming irritates me, their happy end of holiday faces replete in too much of everything. I feel flat, I’m uneasy with a bile that builds steadily. The suns round the corner, we are anticipating the edge of a storm. I touched the edge months ago, if anything, more queasiness will be a good fit tonight. I want to be thrown around, tipped down the corridors, bounced of a floor that drops away because that’s just how it is. That’s the instability in my head. I don’t care that it’s the last formal night, I plan to shove down a main course and run, only facing it because our son wants to and we spent some of the early nights having tea in the room. I’ve done necessary avoidance for a while. Right now I’m wondering why I bother, is any of this worth it? Should I do something totally different without these significant triggers? How am I going to get through the remainder now? Sun, white speckled deep green, lulling, soothing, calming but it has much work to do to take away this feeling.

I’m in no place to assess the merits of this trip, I do know why I did it, but leave it now, let it be. My eyes and cheeks are getting sore as the heat creeps round. It’s a strange place, manageable when it’s tucked away inside but when it comes out to play, screaming terror in your face, the frivolous surroundings and people push me down, darker, deeper, more absolute into my familiar wound. That’s it I suppose, the wound, hacked off limb with no anaesthetic, throbbing quietly, changing my gait. But now it’s bathed in salt from the North Sea, rubbed up and down the gash, burning feeling back and right now I’ve lost my bearings, compass points to nowhere I know well. Messy metaphors are muddled like me and I can’t do anything, be anything, interact or rest. I’m back 18 months ago, waiting and knowing. And in my current space feel like a waste of carbon.

Sailing home
So what
Void

16/8 Bruges, Belgium
Opened curtains to busy port. Rode out last nights storm, sheets of white lightning switched flashing energy across the ocean. Despite my empty lowness, a clamouring fear seeps in. I feel our paper boat, soaked and torn bashed about on the waves. I’ve run out of what I need, I’ll be glad to get home.

Wandering through quaintness, 335 steps up to the top though we don’t climb it and it still looks like the other old honeymoon towers. Gargoyles in windows preventing evil spirits. I look in their eyes but they can’t stop these feelings. Alms houses, quietly line the lapping river, built for deserving old people and widows, so we’re told and I smile on the inside.
Our son rests his head on the side of the boat, he pulls at passing trees like on that boat trip in Warwick on our way North for your Mum’s service.
Everything looks like somewhere else, like the trip you enjoyed down the river in Canterbury when the flowers reflected in the water and we stayed in the upside down house.
The guide drones on like a cross between Poirot and Captain Manwairing with a laconic, guttural style that quickly loses it’s charm and too many men are wearing your clothes though their height and walk are all wrong and I can’t escape anything, and I’m here and it’s lovely but I can’t click to Enjoy.
Poirot points out the Weeping witch, appropriately a rare version of your tree and an uneasy medieval air follows me around like a child in a red duffle coat.
And we come out, through the market, passed the beer collection and somehow magically, into Florence. And it’s all so familiar, taking me back to before and I struggle with every step, failing to be in the moment.
Sweet bells chime like our Millennium Evening over the shackled church where judgement was passed in a spit and well aimed old tomatoes.

When Piorot finally concludes his act we ache back to the room and a sickly sweetness stays in my throat after too much Belgian fudge, which held some appeal for a moment but can’t take the edge off anything really.

While I tap, I hear the churning port, clanking it’s freight. A place in motion, no time to pause. I’m tired of all the faces and considered accessories. I’m hiding away from the last cheery sail off. I don’t need to wave bits of plastic to mark where I’m going.

We’re going home.

I know it in my flatness, my weary sense of some achievement, my bag of dirty washing, my presents for those that matter, my frustration for the way it couldn’t be, my sadness for the way it had to be, my understanding for the way I try, my pride for me and our son, my acceptance of the need to change, my gladness of the welcome that waits, my resolve to keep at it and my relief at the tears that come so freely now.

As you used to say, in a stolen Martin Clunes line ‘you’re going to keep going out with me till you bloody well enjoy it…’
I think the same may be true of our new life now.
We are heading home in twenty minutes. The sun beats down over the stacked up crates.
I need the quiet stillness of home,
I need to stop,
I need to be.
I know why we made this trip.
I know what we did.
I know.
Following your way.
I travel – therefore I am.

17/8
Drizzly, wet, low, dank Southampton.
Dirty grey hatchback creeps through the early morning mist. The city throbs. I shake my hair down.
Our pilot ship guides us in on our way.
We are home.
Now what?
X

Tags anniversary, cistine chapel, his mum, our son, the weather, travel

Categories Grief, Loss, parenting

Part One – Seasick

August 26, 2012 //

Watching the thin white line of reflected sun brush the horizon, the constant rush brush, gentle background push of waves, the breeze plays round the back of my neck, the cloud thickens. I still feel vague heat on my feet and the hardness of wood reminding me of the weight of my legs as they rest on the table. The sea is calm and I sit in the quiet new after yesterday’s challenges and the soul sickness of the evening.
Last night surrounded me in a vomiting panic having sat through a shared table meal, battered by the sweet old couples who had over 90 years of marriage between them. And I did my best to be antisocial and focussed on the middle distance as she painted pictures of when her husband was “so ill and do you know they even did the last rites but look,” arm squeezing laughs, “he’s still here today.”
So glad our son had eaten enough and I’d had enough, I dropped a hasty napkin, nodded my ashen face at them and took the spiral staircase to be sick in the lifts.

And now after a sobbed sleep I am still here, interrupted by voices, so I’m going in. Sun breaks through, spilling light onto the distant flat grey. Need to think how to approach today.
It all seems so pointless, empty, absolutely nothing working and the days drill out before me like the endless sea. This negative wave feels so solid right now and huge windmills appear off on our right and I feel my self railing at things I can’t conquer. It’s pulling up on the horizon like something to sail into.
Something planned for that turns up with expected unforeseeness, skirting round the turbulence but feeling the swell. This is getting me nowhere, unprepared for this hollow cold sharp wanting.
Deep out breath, need to move.
It’s getting nearer.

7/8/12 Copenhagen, Denmark

Woke close to windmills in a busy port of grey spiky tug boats and a weather that’s as unsure as me.
The dense fog of the last two days has eased with the new landscape. This is why I do this. Our way to see outside our boxes.
Six years ago I was surrounded by them, packed high and full and we left the old house for the long journey round the corner, to spread out and grow in the garden. And now the garden gets left as long as possible and I’m trying to help us both grow.
The sun is forcing through over the pillars and cranes. Windmills still waving at me – need to fill the rucksacks.

Inland I stand behind, watching our son move through the clamouring clicking, to grasp his own image of The Little Mermaid and feel an affinity, out of my element with a new identity, striving to get to a place I can’t reach. And we float by spires wrapped in dragon tales and I’m comfortably lost in our story.

I watch the wirlygigs squat gracefully into the horizon trying to hold their image until they become distant sticks, eaten by the clouds, left in a crisp and clean world, smokeless, efficiently giving it back.
White ribbons build in the heavy, green black, rushing alongside and away. The turbines have become today’s badge. I remain in a strange place, I’m probably trying too hard.

Back then we’d moved in by now, kettle on, our son back from friends, takeaway for tea amongst the dust and newness.

They’re still hanging on, they’re not quite out of sight yet. White lines caught by the sun. A plane breaks my thoughts, cuts over us at right angles. Some other collection of others, heading somewhere for some reason. So much movement while I stand and sway and watch. I look right, I really can’t see them anymore.
I look left in the direction we’re heading.

8/8
Challenging sea day. I sit out now, need my sleeves rolled down. We seem to be chasing another ship. I lean into the wind, studying the change of clouds and a strange yellow smudge arcing to the right. I realise it’s our trail of smoke, pastel pushed into the whiteness. The clouds hang low and light as a small propeller plane chugs over the stern.
Deep in Baltic coldness, the charcoal rich water threatening a bitterness, while gentle summer blues above me imagine it’s warmer. I feel calmer out here, drifting with it. I have to hang on to what works and ride out what doesn’t.

9/8/12 Stockholm, Sweden
Woke into a still flat grey crispness and a Swedish landscape that lifted me. Finally a sense of being far from home and finding something new in the clean lines and welcoming gulls. Today needs to be better and right now I’m hopeful.

We head out for a while I listen to tales of oak war ships and short nights. A balanced place to live, thirds of lakes, parks and buildings. Protective copper coated wood blurs by and the too clever loud family telling everyone about everything. Oh-Well-Done-Toby’s mum is on permanent broadcast, filling the coach with tales of Alicante and her superficiality gnaws into the weakened gaps of my armour. We survive the 150 metre high gondola ride to the top of the city between bridges. I turned my back away from their annoying distraction and focussed on our sons face in the morning light. High and away from everything familiar, I hold the memory carefully in my hands.

We pull away from considered, ordered neatness and leave under greyness as seagulls strafe us in the search for fish. Mixed up monochrome sits heavily over warm soft buildings. My void is filled with something I can’t put my finger on. I wave to strangers. The cranes look like compass points over the rock, pushing development, change and growth. I’m fascinated by the gulls and join them on the breeze. Everything in flux.
My transience remains.

Heading further East, a coldness easing in. Strange landscape, small obscure islands litter the calm metal sheet of water. Patterns knit and weave across it as we push through. This bleakness has a comfortable familiarity.

10/8/12 Tallin, Estonia
Struggling with our sons button pushing. How do I make this work for both of us?

The dock is edged in odd concrete shapes, curving round, kissing the car park like some herd of frozen creatures. We’re both interested in them for a while and re connect before the search for our coach.
We bounce and rattle over cobbles hearing tales of new brides dropping rocks into lakes, releasing balloons and doves to say goodbye to their old names. And I’m struck by their hopeful romanticism, persisting amongst the un nerving medieval backdrop.
We pass the Palace of Happiness as our light, youthful guide tells us her family were on a waiting list for a phone and if you’re too far down you just don’t get one. I tap away on my screen feeling privileged in my Western pain.

And up passed the Kissing Hill where they come to take photos after the service and the old cars and vans beep their loud tradition at the frequent newlyweds.
Deep into the town and Toompea Castle flashes me back, looks like our Italian lakes and the castle we climbed on honeymoon. And the steps were steep and narrow and you photographed me from the opposite tiny window. And we were trapped in separate turrets, feeling our story unfold over the ochre courtyard beneath.
And I wander round with our son in the current Estonian moments as our still, bright cine reel jumps and crackles it’s plot through the narrow passageways. Passed Long Leg street and Short Leg street, joined at the point where old and new meet and the town limps with contrast, like me.

Sitting out later. Seagulls are back, the shawl I bought is too thin for any warmth but the opposing colours appeal to me. I remember fifteen years ago and heading south for the start of something new and now I drill in further East, feel the harshness of a culture torn from trust, a bitterness of identity and I feel odd, misplaced, misunderstood, marginalised, uprooted and overthrown.

This day has been a better one on the domestic front. The plentiful, traditional non-essential essentials gave us both some lightness. The delicate, uneven, thin lilt of accents reminded me I’m far from home and the earlier severity of the weeks feelings have frozen to strangeness in this slightly unyielding place.
I see a town split, a contrast of needs and wealth, a place of redefining. Their flags wave blue, black and white. Blue of rivers, black of soil and white for purity – Hope. Proud to no longer be prize or target..
The gulls follow us and fly so low and near. I watch their feet sway in the wind. There’s a growing harshness, I go inside. getting ready for the feelings and moments to come.

Tags anniversary, our son, the weather, travel

Categories Grief, Loss, parenting

Mother of Pearl

August 21, 2012 //

My head is blocked up with half remembered thoughts and feelings and images from a time that rests no where.
I remember her carpet and the hard chair tucked away that I would sit on, half there, half keeping beyond the main event. And the early days of the dog with the ball and how I avoided the bitten, slimy missile despite our toddler’s interest. And its brighter now, I can see her limp shuffle in through the half obscured door, the one with the slanted plastic handle . Was it inlaid with mother of pearl or have I made that up? I can see it though, I can feel it, smooth, cold, swinging back by the grandmother clock with all it’s innards showing, messed and tinkered with, damaged by the real disease in her life. And she could never leave him, not now, back then.

And I remember the spiralling moments, the constant theme, the anguished words to save her, to take her from where she’d set root. But it never happened, couldn’t happen and although we looked at options, it wasn’t her time, wasn’t possible. And while the conversations play out in my head, your burning rage and desperation, feelings I’ve come to take on, to make my own, I see her bending with the little yellow dumper truck. Its full of big safe duplo bricks and they tipped rushed in a primary mess besides her chairs and our toddler fiddled with them for a while. Our preschooler built-invented places as we waited for her to rustle in, get back, to look for something once more. And we’d whisk her away before he could say too much. And we took her to Blackpool and fought through the coldness to feel like naughty children, buying her fish and chips though ‘he’ said she wasn’t allowed to have them. They were full of fat and grease and not good for her but it wasn’t her arteries we were worried about. And I can see her in that small cafe, wrapped and powdered in her warm brown coat and you sat on her right, proud, devoted, concerned. And she turned to you and said “it’s nice here, did you come here with your parents?” and I felt something in me drop away, a moment, a split second and I saw the claws of the process digging in stealthily, into her button bright mind.
And a look passed between us as you answered her but we spoke no words till later.

And all my time with her is swishing around me like the way I used to dance when I used to be that person. And I think of her in photos and your favourite one of them. Probably Thetford, might have been northern and she was around fifty, briefly made up, smiling with her small mouth, arms linked with your Dad. And he was dapper and knew it and he smirked in his self satisfied way. And as I think of him I hear his loud bluster burst though, his I’m-a-right-funny-bugger-sense of self that hid a broken sensitivity. So I see the photo, black and white although it may have colour and you always thought he looked like a young Frank Sinatra and I could see what you meant. They were your memories from before, when your Dad was still there, when life was ok, when you rode bikes with Nigel. A simple unburdened child’s moments, impossible to see the future is, with a torn and ravaged mind and an adult pain walking away from the first of the many homes she was displaced into.
And I only knew her properly for twelve years and many of those were the fading but before it all began I caught a glimplse, an distilled echo, a sound reverberating on the air, like a half remembered song that nestles in your head, and I saw her through the looking glass and knew who she had been. And we connected and remained and the song stayed in my mind and I sat close with her inbetween us and stroked her permless hair. And I know what I said and I can hear it calling now, coming back at me through the love, through the memories, through the moments.

And I couldn’t comprehend your pain but I get it now.

And now I flip to warmness, heavy august air and the grounds are lush, rich green, the birds sing but we can’t listen to them and the gravel crunches as we stand studying our shoes by the door. And I’m there holding your pain and our sons hand and his shirt is tucked in as best as we could manage. And I’m in the thick still quietness re seeing what we saw. Hearing the things we chose together and the weight of our sons arms around our shoulders and I saw your Dad take your hand as he sat on the very edge, keeping my place warm though we didn’t know it. And they had advised us the curtain rail needed oiling but it really didn’t matter in the scheme of things. And I sit there now feeling the hardwood, slippy beneath my trousers and my eyes are not as sore as I’d expected because I’d little left after the moments from the day before. And we have that time and I know what I said and the song you played me sometime later.
And I sit there numb with feeling, noting the circles on the fabric and as I look up again they hide my yellow petals.
And as I’m deep inside it our son wakes and asks me who invented warp drive and tells me the consequences of achieving Warp Ten.

And I think to myself about the song I chose and how I sat through it again eighteen months later and now our son aims his Romulan War-bird at me, dispatching fully operational quantum phase torpedoes in my direction.

We’re leaving now, window down, warm breeze on my bare arms, heading south, no one really talking. Car heavy with our thoughts.
Our sons downstairs, I get a moment to finish this though my earlier deep filled silence is scratched with American dialogue bubbling up the stairs.
I’m numb with feeling again, I don’t know what day it is, what year it is, who’s life I’m living. You’re on compassionate leave and I wait for you to come in from the shops.

You fill the house and I can’t move for reality.

I’m there frozen in time, miles and moments from the first seat. And now I sit on the end of the row and I see me from above, small and curled, thinner than the week before, taking up no space as I fill everywhere. And they look at me from the back and the side and my hair hangs round my shoulders and once or twice my head drops down. I sit brittle glassed in black, I wear her scarf again, I am not there as I look out, passed and above, through the high window out beyond my surroundings, over houses and towns and roads and hills, up the motorways to Pendle hill where you photographed me holding her arm and our son was heart beating deep inside me but right then I didn’t know.
And he sits beside me in his moment as I clutch his hand and never release the hold. And I wear the Tao necklace, can’t remember where you bought it. But it’s made of wood and one of the circles is a slightly different material and the white side is shaped from mother of pearl, like the door handle in her lounge.

In two seats, two moments
Love linked
Shimmering from pain.
X

Tags anniversary, blackbird, his mum, lost, our son

Categories Grief, Loss, parenting

Bedtime story

August 3, 2012 //

I’m just floating at the moment, feel I’m drifting lightly with the current, simply, purposelessly being carried. I see me bumping over ripples of water, a small stick with no direction.

It’s been like this for a while, for this first termless week. Ambling through moments and I feel uneasy like there’s something waiting, something approaching, an inevitable trap and none of this is quite real.

My finger taps faster as the thoughts and feelings are unlocked. I remember last summer and the constant nothingness of the settee. The late night sneaking to Sainsburys when the crowds and faces had gone. The steely preparation, the loin girding, the pretence coated determination to take our son away…

And then doing it. The saturating fear, the deep yet hollow pride, the choosing, the knowledge, the fight, the resolve, the drip feed strength that came from a natural instinct, to survive, to protect, to build, to heave against inertia.

We did it – we travelled at 6 months.

And in a couple of days we’ll do it again.
The feelings are back, similar shapes to before but now a fairytaled patchworked eiderdown, rich with ancient thread, silky weavings of half recognised pictures, appliquéd layers of days of grief, aged, loved edges fretted smooth by anxiety, quilted memories dense with pain. I see me from above, shrink wrapped in images, swaddled in this time last year.

This time last year the blanket was new, raw and rough to the touch, insistent, persistent, factory fresh colours bleeding all over my small white body. I clutched it, wore it, had no choice, hid inside, subdued submerged. Scared and shaking.

I’m still covered now. The dye has stained my skin, the feelings imprinted on me, tattooed into my being. My stark cold cell with prison wire-wool bedding has morphed into a wood cutters cottage. The clanking steel bed, spine achingly stabbing into my tired muscles has grown into Grandma’s bed, narlded, chewed hardwood, hard work to climb into, deep and crisp and even the pillows patterns entangle themselves into my hair. It smells of ginger biscuits and warm wisdom and the bed fills the whole room, the whole house and the story itself.
I look down on my tiny curled up words, tightly balled under the thick eiderdown. I feel the fabric. Squares bartered for from distant bazaars, scraps found fusty in the backs of cupboards and specially chosen pieces, picked out for their own precious qualities. I see the image of the feelings, the timeless pain sewn in with love. Stitched in tears, embedded in the weft. Calloused fingertips from the dig of the needles, watching the deep hued yarn slip in, out and up, slowly encroaching over the fabric to form my coloured narrative.

I flip outside my cottaged world, neighbours voices push through the open window, an out of place anonymous whistling of a disturbingly happy worker and a grey soft stillness of a summer town after rain.

Back in my cottage I burrow down further, pulling the familiar close around me. I see the colours, feel the silk, know the pictures woven through grief.

Last year, this year.
Same experience, different shade. Same loss, different shapes.

Same story, different cover.
Different moment, same love.

I pull back up and out of the image. See the roof from above, the heat of colours inside diffuse out through the windows, casting a hazy warm light into the air. The red tiles fade to ochre, the chimmney chuggs out the pain until it smokes pencil swirls into the overhanging trees.
The knotted tangles of growth tighten their grip around my shack, the green turns to grey. I float higher till all I see is a wood. Dense, complex, matted with change, hiding me underneath, my place, my rooms and my bed. One heavy embroidered shield cloaking me, small with strength. I sleep under it all.

As I let go, up and away, the landscape falls back, slowly widening my view from the dark forest to the trickled silver river in the distance, the soft flowing water and its relentless rhythm. My focus shifts back to the stick, sodden, peeling, carried by the current. Drifting along with the force.

Our son stomps up the stairs engrossed in his own story
‘Powering engines – Now!’

I need to finish the packing.
X

Tags our son, the force, travel

Categories Grief, Loss, parenting

Last time

July 30, 2012 //

Friday July 20th

Feeling restless, going up to school in an hour, allowed to meet him today because it’s the last time. Will position myself away from the masses and take photos for him and then, en mass, we’re going to the park where I’ll watch from a distance and note how he’s changed and enjoy the excitement in his end of school face. I’ll feel his whipped up, giddyness at leaving and the bubbling buzzing chaotic energy of their rites of passage.

This morning I approached assembly in a trance. He’d left ahead of me so for the first time in ages I made the walk and heard my footsteps, a quick and gentle fall on familiar gravel and saw how the leaves had changed since I’d last been that way. I heard us through the years, the mornings of another world, the hot sticky hand that I hold in my mind and the slow slipping into who we are now.
And it looks like every other walk but it’s never been more different. I think I’m early and plan to sneak in but everyone else had the same thought and there’s just one seat left at the front. I’m sandwiched between two people I can cope with, that’s the best I can say. And I feel an unexpected sadness for the laughter and connections that I had with these few people and how they usually keep a safe distance now. But an ingrained pattern remains, even now and I can’t help joke with a face from the past and it’s a bubbling, potent mix of fear, love, disbelief, pain and pride.
And the seat is perfectly placed, puts me in a straight line with our son and the keyboard behind him just under a display shouting ‘Courage‘ made of tinfoil. And I stare at the letters hearing the message and tap away as the chatter hums and builds. And it hurts when I laugh with this person and remember how you’d worked with her by chance just at the end of the old world and we smile at the current situation like we used to years ago, while I feel oddly calm and brittle at the same time.
And the other face ventures a question about how our son is feeling and she says Jack will miss his friends, while I note what that word means to us.

In this anticipating hub bub I’m invisibly present feeling every single second in the deepest way.
A tiny sibling finds his feet and wobbles towards me, drops his bottle and I watch it spin-dribble on the floor, swirling me back to toddlerdom and feeling the thread that connects.

So I sit there aware of all our previous hall moments. The Christmas productions, his kangaroo with my sneezy fur sack hanging from his tummy and he started to look pale, coming down with something and was ill on the last day so you took the presents in for us. And the following year, the set of antlers, sparkly and copper, that I constructed with him for the whole group and blustered them up to school in an enormous bag on the windiest, wettest day possible.
And we always sat at the front and you videod it on the big clunky thing that Al sold you just before it became obsolete. And in Key Stage 2, too grown up for animals, he became a shepherd and then a king. In year 5 he wore the bright gospel outfit that I spliced together the night before from cheap t-shirts and you couldn’t come because you had a meeting and I sat there alone trying to work the brute of a camera while all around me tapped and clicked and made tiny whizzy beepings on their small black things, while I cranked and creaked the silver machine in an aim to capture the footage.
And we somehow arrived at last year and I crawled through both performances of Year 6 speaking parts and him in huge glasses playing the Boffin, which you would have loved. I got through the show flanked by huge pillars of friends sandwiching me with support until the second showing where I sat by an empty chair and couples doubled around me like they do now and it looked like the space belonged to me and no-one asked to sit there. So I breathed through the final Christmas show, encased in an obvious space, like I sit here now while some of the dads have been let out with time off for this last key event.

And all our school moments pass before me like a parade of who we were and the tension builds while my pretence is stretched at the seams. I sit here thinking of all we’ve done in this new world and how I’ve eased us limping to this point.

So I breathe steadily through it all in a quiet, tortured pride. I edge through the moments, manage my way round the songs, surprise myself at my composure until he plays the keyboard. And I see him practicing with you and listen to his careful notes, watching the progression of his commitment through the pain. And I’m held and surrounded by immeasurable things while the pretence cracks just enough when they give him something silver that neither of us saw coming and I can’t work the camera in the mess of joy and pain.

I huddle around the outskirts afterwards as t-shirts are signed and the clutter of emotions continue. After the presents had been dispatched we took his cup and photographed him in the reception class, back in the place where we left him playing with trains on his first day seven years ago, when I felt the tug of the bond and thought I understood separation.

And now I need to get ready, time to leave the settee and the soft ticking clock that has marked my time in this world and that one. The fingers that crept round through every pick up time that announced we’d be back home soon. The dial that hands brushed over when one world became the other, when our son sat here with his grandparents and I was somewhere else, about to faint, when time stopped completely despite appearances.
Same tick, same measurements of time, entirely different world now and it will still tick in the background later when we finally come home, when I bring our son back from Primary, a final fading of that background colour of his life that gave us some much needed structure when we shifted worlds.

Endings
Beginnings
Circles of loss

Time to say goodbye – again…
Xxx

Tags friends, our son, rites of passage, transitions

Categories Loss, parenting

Uniformity

July 19, 2012 //

Another venture to the Secondary environment but this time with me for a uniform evening. Anticipating the walk back with bags full of the future, held together with a mess of pride.

We hit the hall, packed with families out in force. Dads bought out for the evening, helping holding bags, standing around looking awkward and keeping an eye out for a familiar face to bond with. Piled high with plastic bags folded, polyester creases in place, bored, restless children being reeled in, to try on and size up. I bump into the usual suspects who I hung with at the start of Primary and now here we all are at next phase, although our worlds separated months back. The dads hang around like clothes horses, observing shoulder fit and nodding and we rustle passed them, I try to stay focussed on my job.

We started out well but our sons strop wasn’t far away and it built steadily, gaining strength alongside my frustration, holding it in, holding it together and I coped through the rugby shirts and even the jumpers with a vivid flashback to him bouncing on the bed in his bright red primary sweatshirt. But now the blazer is wrapped around him and the shoulders are slightly big with sleeves that need adjusting and you should have been there to help, to share, to probably have skulked off and sat somewhere out of it while I joked and compared notes with the mothers. But you weren’t holding the bags or guiding us on the fit of a jacket and he looked up at me for a second with your eyes, with his messy end of day hair and I felt it all and saw how we’d got to that place. And how that point in space-time had bought us to the shiny buffered hall floor, with us hot and tired and grumpy, with him reluctantly being turned round and tucked with flappy penguin sleeves that I’ll sew up over summer and my patched up house of cards fell around me while I saw it all for an endless moment.

Doing it, getting on with it the best we can, as your Mum would say ‘making a do’. And I remembered how you hated clothes shopping, always kept things till they came round again like the awful green shirt that could only be worn out of irony and I flip back to the protesting Saturdays, the buying of the new suit and how the right girth made the sleeves too long but with the right sleeves it wouldn’t do up at the front.
And I’d do my best to advise you and it was ok in the end. And the blazer you bought with your Mum, way before her decline when you’d both ventured into Manchester and you would only wear it on a less formal work day when you could get away without a tie and we joked it was your Terry Wogan look. And none of these things could be referred to or laughter about because It was just me managing and judging it, in this world and getting through the bare necessities as quickly as I could.
But if you’d been there physically you’d have felt it, you’d have recognised the moment too and you’d have got something in your eye.

And we bundled ourselves out into the quiet playground and darned up our issues in time to walk home. And we retraced the steps past the other school, the one where we’d watch the firework displays and you’d always bump into Phil and disappear off by the burger van and we’d walk home carefully through the darkness, herding children with our friends, lit with tubes of snapped fluorescent light while you chatted to the gardener discussing seeds of thought. And we’d tumble through the doorway, watering, smokey eyes ready for hot-dogs and hot mugs and it was all so very normal – but not today.

Today I walked through darkness in the early evening dusk, bouncy yellow bags blaring out the new school logo, banging on my legs while he swung his bagged up blazer, half chuffed, half annoyed. And we were lit by our resolution to mind the curb and keep walking, one tired foot in front of the other, with new things to wear in a new world with the first of many jackets to come.

A careful necessary stepping out to a point when the sleeves aren’t too long and he’ll look in the mirror to shave and see you looking back.

I left home with our son, a seamless echo of the boy you knew but came home with a teenager, a flash forward to the man ahead.

Tags his mum, our son, transitions

Categories Loss, parenting

Turning leaf

Caught

Re-Birth

Boldly going

Part Two – Perestroika

Part One – Seasick

Mother of Pearl

Bedtime story

Last time

Uniformity

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