annanotbob2's Diaryland Diary
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5 things
This week has been fucking hard. I didn't realise how hard until I was telling my therapist about it this morning and she was getting a bit choked up, saying that me and YD have certainly had plenty to deal with. Which we have. This week's drama was supplied by SIL, YD's husband, a man I have thus far been very fond of but who I could now cheerfully punch. I've just deleted the beginning of the saga because it's not really my tale to tell, but in summary [I do go on to tell it, sigh], for over five hours last Saturday, on the coldest night of the year so far, sub-zero temperature and a fierce icy wind, he let us think that he was lost, with a broken down car and a dead phone, too far from home to walk, what with his MS and all, which is exacerbated by extremes of temperature. After a short amount of time I was so sick with anxiety that I called the police who agreed that he counts as a vulnerable adult and went into full " find-SIL" mode. So we have five hours of that before he calls YD again and admits he's in the pub, pissed. car never broke down, none of that was true.
I keeled over at this point. There's only so much anxiety I can handle, and the discovery that a big chunk of it was not only unnecessary but had been generated either with deliberate cruelty or with wanton disregard for the amount of life/death shit people we love are currently going through, not to mention those no longer going through it because they've fucking died, was more than I could bear..
However my girl is not for being pissed about with - when she came back from London she had him packed and in the van in no time, and driven up to his parents on the other side of the country. And until she came back, I was of course worried about how she was taking it, whether or not she was crushed by this sudden fracture of the marital relationship, whether she would need me to bolster her mood, encourage her to keep going etc etc. But in fact she's quite perky without him needing to be kept an eye on all the fucking time. And truth is, it was almost certainly the steroids he'd recently taken to stop an episode of MS developing, that caused him to behave in such an out of character fashion - they do make him aggressive and often quite nasty, but never before has he done something like this - which I wasn't going to write about but now I have. I don't mean they caused it, but they didn't help. I'm proud of my girl for showing she's not going to be fucked about with - that if he carries on like that there will be consequences. They don't know how it's going to go but they're having a break for now - he's in the tail end of an episode, so does need support, especially reminders to take meds etc and he has very little energy, and she's too angry to be looking after him.
It all affected me much more than I can say, not only on my own behalf, but on hers and on his, the fucker - all those hours thinking he might be lying in a ditch somewhere, getting hypothermia - one of the rough sleepers did die of hypothermia last week - it fucking happens.
So that's been me. All that and ED's op cancelled and my friend not getting a proper result about the lump in her neck, having to wait until the week after next for a biopsy. Too much.
I have mainly been walking, collecting firewood, and painting. Here's some of the firewood I've found on the beach, drying out by the radiator:
this is the painting of the downs, after I redid the sky:
I like it better, but when I took it to ED and put it in her pink room it looked pretty shit. Ah well. This is one I did on Friday, big, acrylic, fast, angry.
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I wish I'd untaped it from the board before I took the photo, but there you go. I didn't. Here's the beach, sun low in the December sky, lovely.
I am grateful for: a warm bed; two painting groups; a beach to walk on; an open fire; a blog to moan in.
1:25 a.m. - 11.12.16
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