One Sense of Humour Lost, If Found Please Return to Me!

I was going to write L a letter today, just now in fact, but....I'm not in a good mood;-(

It's nothing in particular just a few things that have tipped the balance, and me in that same process, into an unhappy funk.  I didn't want to write to L whilst in this mood or to have him worry about the things that are worrying me.  So, I'm going to dump them here and then clean in an attempt to purge myself.

First, I miss L.  Very much.  He annoys the hell out of me when he's here (more often than not) and I often feel like he expects me to only have a life when he's not here, which builds resentment.  All that said, I am missing him like mad and feeling the absence of him more keenly than I expected.

I got paid today but when I checked my bank account the amount was so little that I am assuming that they've got it wrong.  I'll have to wait until I get my wage slip to double check and will need to have a chat with someone but now I'm beginning to doubt myself....what if I've got it wrong (i.e. what the job was paying when I took it) and that paltry amount paid into my bank IS my monthly wage???  With that doubt comes about a million other questions like how am I going to pay off the rest of my loan, save for my Teaching Course, give K and R a wedding present, pay my sister L back for the tickets she bought for me to the Christmas Fare this coming Sunday, afford to go to London and spend the weekend with my friend T, afford to pay a train ticket to be there for my sister T's graduation and go for lunch, survive on that amount of money and finally and the most important one of all - tell L that I got YET another thing WRONG?

I've watched all the families on our estate putting up their Halloween decoration this weekend and all it's done is serve as another reminder that L isn't here.  We always get a pumpkin and carve it together.  My sister T and her husband always come to us and we either go out for a meal or get a take away.

Because I'm unsure of whether the amount I've been paid is right or not I've not been able to go out and buy sweets for the trick or treaters that will be coming out to play (beg really) any moment now, which means I will not be putting my porch light on and handing out sweets but rather hiding upstairs feeling guilty that I have nothing to hand out.  May be I'll go to Sainsburys instead and sit and have a coffee in Starbucks until I know they're all done.

A friend offered to take me to a mutual friend's wedding reception about a month ago, then two days ago she pulls out saying she hadn't realised that I don't live on the way to the venue so it's not convenient.  She was really apologetic but I am a little miffed to say the least.

I've had to evict yet more slugs from my house!

The plumber who came out Thursday to fix the cistern on my upstairs toilet didn't do the job properly resulting in me discovering my bathroom floor covered in water yesterday.  I called MHS yesterday - as I'm meant to - they sent another plumber who was supposed to arrive within 3 hours and didn't.  He couldn't fix the problem, so I have yet ANOTHER plumber coming out to me Tuesday afternoon after work.  Apparently.  Excuse me if I don't hold my breath.

After months of being clear of cold sores two days ago I woke up with one.  Thanks for that.

Well, I think that's enough negativity for one Monday.  I'm off to clean my kitchen and hoover my house, oh and probably throw out a few more slugs too!

A Little Ray of Hope

I'm not a particularly religious person.

I do hold rather long conversations with God at times, usually when I'm upset or frustrated, but I do not go to Church and I'm not entirely sure that God actually fits the personality and characteristics we've given him i.e. male etc.

That isn't to say I'm not a spiritual person, I definitely believe in things having a balance and needing harmony.  I believe that there might be something out there and if there is it doesn't necessarily take the form that we've prescribed.  I also believe, whole heartedly, that some of us are just a tad more sensitive to certain forces and energies than others are and personally I'm rather glad of it - wouldn't the world be incredibly dull if we were all 'in-tune' with nature and therefore the same?

The reason I'm talking about spirituality and forces and things being in balance is that for a long time I've been out of balance.  My equilibrium has been jangled and broken and discordant for .... do you know what?...it doesn't matter how long, the point is I was broken.  I'm not for one moment suggesting that I'm fixed and back to what - who - I was before I was broken, no, I have a long way to go yet but I am on the road to recovery.  I can (kind of) accept that I am never going to go back to the person that I was before, how can I when I've changed and my experiences have helped shape me?  Besides, any one who has day dreamed about a time machine to go back in time will no there is never any going back.  It denies progress and all that it stands for. The trying to go back to what/who you were before, not the time machine. Obviously.

To get back to my point on spirituality today I feel much better in myself, more positive, lighter I suppose.  I've been stressing endlessly for too long about many things, more recently about getting a job to share the financial burden, getting my personal statement done for my PGCE application, who I was going to ask to be referees, submitting it, waiting to find out if they like me enough to invite me to interview, the interview itself, how I was going to find £9k for tuition fees...plus a whole host of other things that I could reel off the top of my head but I'm not!

My feeling better could be put down to a number of things:

1. I've just had one hours worth of Reflexology (will blog about this later, if I remember) 
2. Have come to a trade agreement with the practitioner where we trade treatment for my organisation and administration skills - yipppeeee)
3. I've completed the first draft of my personal statement for help from others in editing, what works and what doesn't etc
4. I have the names of 2 people who are happy to provide me references 

and this last one definitely gave me reason to smile
   
      5.  A cheque for nearly £500 came to me as a tax rebate!

For the first time in long time I have hope.

So, God in whatever form or shape he/she/it chooses to take...something somewhere sent me that cheque when it - and hope - were needed most. That cheque is going to be paid in to my bank and swiftly transferred to my savings account, where it is going to stay, untouched.

Now to work on the rest of the £8,500 I need!

Wednesday Wonderings

I'm going to skip the part where I apologise and offer and explanation as to why these Wednesday postings have been far and few between, I'm just going to jump right in....

Why I can't get rid of the nasty and dirty black fly that is in my house?  Resident spiders feel free to help me out here any time soon.

How I knew when the phone rang last night that it was L?

Why when L goes away does my insomnia think it needs to come and keep me company?

Where I'm going to find or how I'm going to rustle up £9k from?  I'd rob a bank but I have psoriasis so my DNA would be all over the place.

How the slugs that keep invading my house are getting in the first place?  Yuck.

What I'm preparing for?  I keep spring cleaning and by this I mean throwing things away or donating, which leads me to have this feeling that I'm preparing for a trip that I need to travel light for.

What I can expect from Reflexology treatment?

How and why my sister T and I have apparently swapped personalities?  She is full of the joys of spring, loving, affectionate....and well, nice, and I'm a stressed out, angry, sometimes bitter and waspish 30 something woman.  What did I do to get that deal?!

If it is possible to feel any more conflicted about Christmas?  I've always loved Christmas, being surrounded with good company, great food, playing games and getting 'merry' .... but L won't be with me and I'm going to be spending it alone with my family with unresolved issues with them.  Oh dear...

Why there aren't any magpies in California?

Why I can't seem to grow and keep an orchid alive?  I think mine caught a cold...can orchid's catch a cold?

Who I have to pay for the house cleaning fairies to come and pay my disorganised house a visit?

Why when you're strapped for cash do you see so many things that you like and want to buy? What part of the brain/psyche is responsible for that measure of meanness? Any woman, even one like me who prefers food shopping to clothes/shoe shopping, would have to agree that it's total torture to be faced with so many pretty and alluring things that you WANT but don't have the money for.  I've never been one for just 'window shopping' It's depressing (note to anyone who wants to interrogate a woman, just make her spend a few hours 'window shopping' without being able to buy anything and I tell you....she'll be dishing the dirt on EVERYONE.  She'll probably make a few things up too if you allow her just the briefest of touches of that cute jumper.)  Could make for great entertainment, think Chunk in the Goonies...

If it's too sad to admit to saying I would help my next door neighbours out re-painting their married quarters before they move just because I didn't want to be by myself this whole half term?


If it's equally sad to admit that I can cold but thoughts of having to find £9k for my teaching course prevent me from putting the heating on?  Even for a short time.


What my chances are of the government doing a u-turn on allowing universities to charge £9k per year for courses?  Probably already wondered about this one but what I can say...I can't think/worry/stress about anything else!


What my chances are of finishing my novel, finding someone to back it and publish it and being given a cheque for oh I don't know say £9k for it?

All The Voices in My Head

I make up stories all the time.  In my head.  These stories are about everything and anything and usually done for no other reason than to entertain myself because I'm bored.

The devil is in the detail so here's an example...

Last year on Christmas Day, whilst driving with my sister in law T to her boss's house to drop off home made sausage rolls, we passed a dead possum.  In the 2 or so seconds that it took to drive by it lying forlorn in the gutter I'd made up a story for it, a whole story with a family and a Christmas Turkey and everything.  I'd given this dead possum - Pete - a family with a wife and 3 kids.  And maybe a pet mouse too.  I flashed forward (in my imagination) to Christmas Day this year and positioned the wife and 3 children sat around the table, with hats on their heads from crackers, a huge roast Turkey with all the trimmings on a platter and an assortment of vegetables in front of them.  The children were excited, they all wore those really awful jumpers with reindeer or snowmen on that we get or have got at one point or another in our lives.  Yet, mum calmly reminds them all that while Christmas is a very special time of year, they must remember their dear father who died on Christmas Eve last year....

I know, my imagination has no moral compass.  My humour is a little black too.  That aside, I found it relatively hilarious and felt the need to tell my sister in law.  Needless to say she was stunned...she laughed but I could tell she was ... concerned too.

The point I'm taking the long root to make is I have one hell of an imagination.  It's not perfect and more often than not it's a little disturbing.  I've no control over it either, it comes when it wants to or leaves me stranded with no access to a lifeboat to freedom from the stagnation of reality.  Like recently.

How these things usually work is that when I am bogged down under the weight of conformity with pressing and responsible things to do - like write my personal statement for my PGCE application - my imagination sidles up to me.  It whispers in my ear tantalising snatches of stories to lure me off to play in the balmy sunshine of a ephemeral world of dark manipulating anti-heroes, swords, broken hearts, princes, beautiful headstrong heroines and daring honourable deeds.

Still, it's half term, I've had the busiest month I've had a long time and I still have a LONG list of things to do.  Yet it's now that my imagination chooses to come to me, hand trailing through the long grass in the field at the back of my garden, calling to me, whispering stories and adventures to me in an attempt to lure me away from responsibility.

Thus, the Tinkerbell within wars with the adult.  Boy is it going to be an argumentative day in my head today!!

Moving Goal

Ever felt like no matter how hard you work, no matter how many hoops you jump through, no matter how many times you think your heart's desire is-just-about-in-your-reach some one moves the goal?

They walk into your line of sight and just as your about to stretch that last inch and your hand to close on what you want...they move the goal.

Ever felt like that?

That's precisely how I feel and I'm at that point where I just feel like throwing in the towel and giving up all together...but I don't have a plan B.

I feel so frustrated and fed up.

I'm struggling to remember what it feels like to be able to pass on good news to L rather than always having to tell him I was wrong about something or things have changed.

Goodbyes, Plasters, Gingerbread Men and Dog Tags

L put on his uniform and came back in to the front room.
"Are you going to blog about me going away?"
"No. I don't blog about everything." I lied.

L left for Afghanistan yesterday.  It's only a short tour but he'll be gone for Christmas....and my birthday.

I didn't realise yesterday that I was, in part, wishing my life away.  I clock watched all day, watching the hands creep slowly round to the time I knew he'd be off to catch the transport from the bottom of the estate.  That clock became like a car crash scene, you know you don't really want to see anything, you hope that you won't see anything but you look anyway as you drive by.  I didn't want to see our last few hours together slipping away from me but I couldn't help looking, watching...tick tock...tick tock. Then those last hours felt too heavy, felt like the slow painful task of pulling off a plaster and I just wanted to rip it off quickly instead of prolonging the sickening anticipation of goodbye.

Thus I wished away my last few hours with L.

I must have asked him a dozen times yesterday to not go.  I cried even though I didn't want to make it harder for him to go.  I doesn't make sense to say that I am not worried about his safety whilst he's there, I know (somehow) deep inside that he's going to be absolutely fine.  I worry about us though.  I worry about the distance that separation and intense situations - got through alone - create in a marriage.  I worry that it'll be a distance that can't be bridged.

Today I baked Gingerbread Men - well actually Gingerbread Christmas Trees, Snowmen and Stars because they were the only cutters I had - in a feeble attempt to distract myself.  I also did all my washing, dried it and made some home made soup.

Yesterday L gave me one of the small round discs from his dog tags before he left.  It's tucked into the pocket of my hoodie.

The Slippers

The alarm on Maggie's phone shouted for attention.

Maggie dragged a tired hand on her eyes in a futile attempted to rid them of encrusted sleep.  Another night of nightmares and lucid dreams were going to be the death of her, she was sure.  It was already proving to be detrimental to her health and emotional state, she shook her head as she thought ruefully of the tearful episode she had had the day before over the burnt pizza. It was just a burnt pizza but yesterday her failure to cook a frozen pizza had been symbolic of her life; her inability to get anything right, to make the right decisions, to make people happy, to make herself happy.  It was all the same really, pizza, life...

Maggie hauled herself up off the bed and padded to the bathroom, she gave her slippers a sidelong glance as she did.  Six year old sheep slippers that had cost Alex the grand sum of about three pounds, postage included, from EBay.  They had been a trial run purchase just to see if that website was any good, if it were all that it was said to be and reliable.  Cream and fluffy, a pink flower seemingly attached to the ear (sheep can't move for flower clips on their ears in reality) and a goofy cheerful smile sown for its mouth. Now they were tatty looking, worn down to the padding on the soles, grubby no matter how often she washed them, sagging tiredly to the side and had the shape of her feet permanently imprinted on the inside.  They had definitely seen better days, in fact they looked like she felt.  Yet despite all of that they always made her smile when she looked at them.  A bitter-sweet smile, but still a smile.  She had lost count of the amount of times she had gone to throw them and been unable to let go of them.  Each and every time she had held them over the opened bin she had not been able to bring herself to let them fall into it.  Instead she had put them back on her feet or in the machine for another wash.

She stood in front of the mirror and looked at her face disdainfully.  She had dark smudges under her eyes, her complexion looked flaky and had a unhealthy grey tinge, her hair stood up at odd angles that defied nature and she wore the same hopeless sad expression that she had been wearing for too long.  She didn't know what bothered her more - the fact she didn't care how awful she looked, that she didn't recognise the blank empty looking woman staring back at her or the big tears streaming down her cheeks.  Quite clearly it was going to be one of those days in which all she could do was cry, not the great racking sobs that leave you feelings strangely purged and tiredly unburdened, not the kind of tears that stop by themselves as though the cup of sadness was suddenly empty and not the kind of tears that leave you snuffling with rueful embarrassment.  No.  Not those tears but the kind that just won't stop, the kind that come in waves of inconsolable sadness and confusion, the kind that don't leave you feeling better for it and the kind that be get yet more tears.  Maggie put her head in her heads and gave into the audible bubble of grief massing in her chest.  She sank to the floor, gathered her knees to her chest, hugged them to her and stayed like that for some time her back propped up against the cupboard.

The sound of the letter box being pushed open in a hurry and the late morning post hitting the mat made Maggie raise her head.  It was nearly lunch time.  She wiped her running nose of the back of her sleeve as the pain in her numb buttocks began to seep into her awareness and she rolled her eyes.  She had better get up, get dressed and begin the day's work of pretending she was doing okay seeing as Alex would be home soon enough.  He would see her forlorn expression, see her unsmiling, see her withdrawal and not say a word.  That was how every day went.  When he was home that was and his job didn't have him wherever.  He didn't know what to say, what to ask and she didn't know how to open up and talk to him.  Closing her eyes and opening them as they started to well with tears again she saw her sheep slippers, slightly tucked under the chest of drawers and began to chew her bottom lip.

They were just a pair of worn sheep slippers.  And yet they weren't.

Alex parked the car on the drive, he sat with the engine off and the key still in the ignition staring thoughtfully ahead without seeing.  He searched within himself for the strength and desire to enter the house, thought of his Maggie so sad and so different from the beautiful odd-ball he's married barely three years ago and sighed.  He opened the car door and climbed out.

Maggie looked over at Alex at the other end of the sofa and bit her lip.  She wanted to curl up in his arms and be comforted, be told everything was going to be okay, be reassured and made to feel safe.
"Can I have a snuggle?" she asked quietly.  A voice inside her head begged for him to see her need, begged for him to understand what she needed and begged for him to take her in his arms and just hold her.
Alex shook his head, "it's too hot"
"Oh, okay."  She muttered and turned back to watching the TV but not before she glanced down at her slippers.
"Haven't you thrown those things out yet?" Alex asked as he got up and disappeared into the kitchen.  The sound of the kettle being filled and cups prepared momentarily drowned out the advert for the latest celebrity reality show.
Maggie put her bottom lip out and shrugged forgetting he couldn't see her through the walls.  "No, I like them" she finally said.
"But they look awful and they're so old" he protested from the kitchen door way.
"So" she replied darkly defensive.
Alex stared at her his blue eyes scanning her face and his mind thinking unfathomable thoughts until the sound of the clicking kettle sent him back to their cups.
"Why do you like them so much?" he asked setting her cup down on a coaster next to her.  "They're just sheep slippers", he continued sitting back down in his seat at the other end of the sofa.
She wanted to protest, to say no they're not.  She wanted to say that they reminded her of when things were good, they remind her of when she was happy and things were perfect between them.  Well, okay not perfect because she hadn't liked sharing him but they reminded her of when she wasn't like she was now.  They remind her of when they were happy, of when she hadn't felt like a failure, of when she had looked forward to him coming home, when he had been her light at the end of her tunnel and nothing had felt like being in his arms had felt.  It felt like another life time ago.  Another couple. Another life altogether.
"I don't know, I just do" she said instead staring down at her feet.

In bed Maggie listened to the soft sound of Alex's slumber.  She stared up at the triangular shaft of orange light cast on the ceiling by the street lamp. The curtains wafted eerily in the night breeze back and forth.  Back and forth.  Tears slid off her checks to land on the pillow.

The alarm on Maggie's phone bleeped loudly inches away from her ear.  She rolled over and tried to open her swollen eyelids.

Later, she tied the top of the rubbish bag and took it down stairs, at the bottom, just in front of coat cupboard were her sheep slippers.  With a frown, a deep heartfelt sigh of despair she swooped down and picked them up before disappearing outside to the bin.  She threw open the lid, dumped the full bag of things from her past in the bottom and held her slippers over the gaping maw...

...they were just a pair of old slippers, weren't they?