deny

Just made my green stuff. All the goodness. Carrot, Celery, Apple, Ginger, Broccoli, Spinach plus Turmeric. I usually make it in the early morning, but forgot. I never guarantee that I will like the taste but, as I recall from the medicine proffered decades ago, I will drink it because, apparently, it is good for me and ‘good for me’ with my sore bones and my guilty mind in mind, I decide to decide to believe in a sort of wipe-out, a cleansing, a restart. Not that I can, obviously. I remember once, driving down an even narrower lane than most on the island, late at night and legging over a fence in my long frock to hide from the police behind a nettle hedge after a riotous meal out. I have the tear in said frock to this day, although I did repair it with good needling and a heart. I think about this as I fridge my green stuff and chuckle. I could not leg over any fence now, although I probably would give it my best if nobody was watching. I am not one to readily accept the limitations within which I now live, those which might just attempt to contain me. I am not about to accept that, been too contained and for too many years. Enough on that. However, I am not interested in prowess. It’s enough for me to know that I could do what I once did, if suitably challenged.

Thing about this olding thing is that it is critically important to keep connected with other lives, with those in a younger generation who discuss things that leave me mystified. Just to connect, that’s the power of itself, and I know this first hand. Too much time alone, gazing at the beautiful view from my home, watching nature unfold, deliver and pullback is not enough. Humans are required, and not just a wave from a passer by. In my beloved cafe job, where I am looked after in ways that tell me I am respected as myself, the, at least, 33 yeasr beyond them, the granny. Here there is purpose. That’s what we can lose if alone and olding. And purpose is a thread, like a continuance in a tapestry, or a connective line in a painting, or in the way a business includes and settles. You are all important here, your difference matters, the things you bring, just you, matters. You are an integral part of ‘We’. It’s a belonging.

In an alone life with a mouthful of stories, with the scars and breaks of legging over fences, of the heart stopping awfuls of rushing to a bedside to sit all night as a child fought to breathe, of the disappointments, the leavings, the lack of communication, of the all-too-natural guilt of motherhood, I welcome the connections I have now. I can’t change the motherpast, nor make it better, but I recognise my place in the now of now. And I can smile.

Not every day can be positively thinked. Some days, randomly, it seems, come slam dunk, presenting little positive, no matter the incoming. Could be a card through the post, a gift, some encouraging words in a text or just a lift of light in a dark place. On those days these gifts mean little or nothing at all. The sun might be doing his best, huffing up to the top of the sky and beaming like a beatific parent but all he does is blind me and I blink or shade him away. I am impervious to positive on those days. I read that I am supposed to accept such times in such times and to ‘allow’ myself to do whatever I can and to not do whatever I can’t. Enter my ingrained teaching. You do not give in my girl. You get on with it, whatever it is. You present as positive and not only to the outside world but to your own self. I am up and down on those days, battling with guilt and shame. I am lazy. I am giving in. I am not presenting the positive. I avoid speaks. I avoid texts that ask direct questions about how I am. My finger hovers over the answer bit and slides away. I put the phone on silent and avoid mobile calls.

Tomorrow will be different, I tell myself and together, me and tomorrow, will deny and forget this day. We will. But a part of me knows another will come slam dunk and both tomorrow and I will flounder like goldfish outside our bowl. We will gasp for an air that is denied us and we will both think back. Could we have prevented this unpleasant situation, this day of nothing, of no purpose of no point at all, with an ending that doesn’t bear thinking about? I say no. I have worked through this before, many times. The days of nil point are just that. All we can do, me and tomorrow, is to really celebrate those random gifts of words, texts, flowers and smiles and make them bigger, in order just to get through the very long hours of pointless. Because that is how we feel. Pointless. Our purpose, our plan of action, our very raison d’être has died, is gone and with this gone thing, he took us too. We don’t want to believe it. We don’t want it to be this way, but this way it is. For now. That’s what tomorrow tells me. But it feels like a life sentence. These gifts that come are lifts for sure. They move my heart, jig me into thankfulness and light but they don’t last long, not on those days. I see them as hold points on the mountain I am climbing. That rock that juts out just enough for a foothold, that sturdy branch, that ledge. But they are not enough, never enough because I have to climb this flipping mountain and it looks to me like it touches the sky. I go through cloud, ice, snow and darkness, through fear, loneliness and loss. It is just me up here. Tomorrow stayed at base camp, wisely.

I know I have to keep climbing, accepting the giftly footholds, resting on safe ledges and then going again the next time dawn shows her light. I know this. But in my wildest dreams I never thought me on the flank of a mountain and certainly not one that is in collusion with the sky. Cloud covers me wet. Cold. Then the sun warms. This is how it is. One day at a time. Nothing I expect is what I get. I used to know who I was and where. Now?

No clue.