How am I feeling now, you ask? Well, thank you for remembering I have been under the weather. Finally, finally I went to the doctors on Monday, and was given medication which has helped immensely. But the fact that it has helped immensely also means that I need to be referred to a ENT (Ear, nose, throat) specialist to check and see if I don’t, in fact, have Ménière’s disease.
There’s a reasonable chance of this happening as it does run in the family, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.
But because I am feeling better, I feel a bit more resolved to do….something. I don’t know what, exactly. There’s a kind of restlessness that overcomes me whenever I recover from a sick spell, or return from holidays. A desire to function as a vital, impassioned, vibrant, person. To work, and create, without being shackled down.
It is these days, these moments, when, as much as I adore my children, my desire just to have a few moment’s peace (and when I don’t get it) just about curdles my patience. They sense this, and cannot understand my distraction. A better writer than myself wrote along similar lines recently, and I want to quote her delicious eloquence:
“Their eyes are growing sharper, more attuned to the outlines of fallenness in me, and the fact that they cope so well with the disillusionment is the most damning evidence of all.”
Why am I crying now as I am typing this, in the middle of a cafe, on a busy Sunday morning, as the people around me eat their eggs benedict and lick their fingers as they leave greasy prints on the corners of the daily newspaper? Perhaps because now I’ve written this confession, I feel guilty, and I want my children to arrive (as they’re about due to) and so I can bundle them up with kisses. It’s the conspiracy of ambition; this divide between the wanting and the wanting-to-want-to-know-what-to-do. I don’t have a handle on it yet.
On a better note, I’m starting to feel better about Friday. You know what did it? The little allegory in Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges are not the only fruit. (I’m reading it at the moment for the 1001 book challenge.) It’s about a sensitive Princess who’s afraid of moths. No one could cure her of her phobias or her sensitivity, until she visited an elderly hunchback in the forest one day. The woman wanted to die, but could not, because a whole village was relying on her, to do her duties as watcher, healer etcetc. The Princess agreed to take over the duties for the hunchback, who promptly died, and the Princess’s sensitivity evaporated because she didn’t have the time to worry about it anymore.
(Winterson tells it much better.)
But the point was, I was that Princess. So I let it go. There are better things to dwell on.
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Glad you are feeling a little better
Is this the post? If it is, I’m so sorry I didn’t catch it — because these are my exact feelings, at almost every minute of my life. It wears me down and makes me wearier than I need to be, with all the responsibilities I have to take care of them, the house, my writing and myself.
I will try to read that book. But, at church today, the minister told this wonderful story about an 86 year old man, who saw a young woman carrying a heavy load of wood. It was hot, and she was struggling. He went down to the women, and took the wood away (Albert Switzer, now I remember), and they said, “why are you doing that — you’re too old to carry wood.” Because she needed help, and nobody should have to carry a burden that large. The point was, God really doesn’t want us to do all of this by ourselves, and we can rely on a higher power. I think we have to. If I could just get some peace and quiet and alone time, when I don’t fall asleep, so I could pray.
There are those times when it seems as if I have to be away from my children in order to feel that sharp longing for them … and I vow that I will really be with them, fully, without resistance – and then I see them and all those mushy feelings last for about thirty seconds before they get all churned up with stress and resentment and anxiety. Yup – been there.