annanotbob2's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Day 16 I'm half watching that documentary Three Identical Strangers, about the triplets that were adopted by different families as part of a study and only found each other by accident later. Really shocking, but also not. It was 1961 and I can confirm that there was no fucking concept of emotional wellbeing at that time. My mother died in 1955, when I was a baby and no one ever told me where her grave was, let alone took me to visit it. I was 40 by the time I summoned up the nerve to ask my father, only to find out that her grave was in a town fifteen miles from where we'd lived till I was fourteen, a town where we went every year to do Christmas shopping. She was barely mentioned - I certainly knew far more about my step-mother's dead first husband - my dad was gutted that it had never occurred to any of them that I needed to know about my birth mother, that I needed some connection to the reality of her as a person, that it wasn't all just a story. I'm almost booked onto this writing retreat, going on the bus, very cheap, with my friend J, who is my long term writing buddy. It's been overwhelmingly hard deciding what to do My decision-making capacity has fucked right off. It was hard enough choosing which soup to have for lunch (kale, spinach, beetroot and chick pea or spiced roast root veg. I chose the former, eventually, delish), never mind picking a holiday fucking miles away. But I'm going, on the grounds that a person is more likely to regret not doing things than doing things - and if it's awful I'll forget about it anyway. I remember that brilliant CPN I had (Community Psychiatric Nurse) advising me to ask myself what would be the worst that could happen, in the ordinary way of things, not including car crashes and other wild unpredictable shit. I could be bored or annoyed, but I can manage that for a few days. I'll take my laptop and my kindle and I can always go for a walk. I've decided we need to include our Sammie in Christmas somehow. There's a thing going round on Facebook: "Christmas in Heaven/what to they do?/They come down to Earth/to spend it with you/so save them a seat/just one empty chair/You may not see them/but they will be there". I cannot begin to tell you how furious that poem makes me - raging, livid - and here I am all worked up again and it's late so I'm going to bed. Today I am grateful for: J, who has been my friend for over twenty years, despite her being my boss first and a bloody awful boss; also having a visit to M - I needed them both today; furry slippers on a cold evening; yoga; lovely dog - people used to tell me how brilliant it was to have a dog and they were right, such a companion, brilliant. Night night xxx 12:29 a.m. - 17.12.19 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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