On this day

Time for another very personal post....   What can I say, I've got my reflective head on this week lol x

Tomorrow is my least favourite day of the year.  On that day, 15 years ago (how it's 15 years - my goodness, the time does fly!) we lost my Pa.  My dear, too young, Dad.  And my life changed overnight. 

I was very close to my Dad.  We were the same.  He was big, strong, with a laugh that filled more than the room.  It seemed to fill the world.  He wasn't afraid to cry.  He wasn't afraid to admit he was afraid. But he got on and did things anyway. 

He accepted people - all people, from all walks of life.  He placed no expectations or demands on anyone.  You were welcome at his table.  That's just how it was.  And it really is how it was.

Our house was full of a constant stream of people.  There was laughter.  There were friends who had fallen on hard times.  Even our milkman would come for drinks on Christmas Day!  My Dad showed love to everyone.  And he kept people, he forgave and accepted and there was always a place for you.

I miss his laugh.  I miss his presence.  I miss the one person I could talk to about any and everything.  I miss the bigness of his hugs - he was 6 foot 6!  It's impossible not to feel like a little girl when your Dad is a giant 😃

He had a quick temper (ho hum - I wonder who inherited that 😁😁) but was also incredibly quick to forgive.  He apologized.  He was humble when he got it wrong.  I hope I inherited those qualities from him also.

He was very practical.  He taught me to climb trees, wade in streams, stand against the current.  To hold my head high, shoulders back and face the world. 

He taught me to use a screw driver, wire a plug, build flat pack furniture, use a spirit level, put up a shelf.

He loved the garden and was so proud of everything he grew.  Fond memories of shelling peas in the afternoon sun.  Nothing tastes as good as food you have grown yourself, especially when you eat it at a full table full of chatter, laughter and love.

And when there was chaos he was calm.  He stood in the gap in so many situations others couldn't.  He did things people would never wish to do, because they needed doing and his shoulders were the broadest and could bear the weight.  Though he had been on his own since the age of 15 I think, he carried his load and everyone else's along with it, without judgement or recourse.

He was wise.  Though he rarely gave advice unsolicited.  But now & then he would call me, or drop round with a bunch of sweetpeas and something that was on his mind.  Or just to check, or say hello. And I will always recall our conversation on my wedding day.  He was right.  With all the love and kindness and pain it took him to say it, he was right and I was wrong.  But he smiled & loved me and walked me down the aisle anyway.  We live and learn.

He asked for nothing in life, and he gave with all his heart.  Until his heart gave out on him.  And the hole tore open in our lives and never has really been filled. 

So the world changed, in that moment, in that phone call.  In the unbearable silence and pain that followed.  But we find we do bear it, because we have to. If not for ourselves then for them.  Because it is the very last thing we can do for them, to live on as they would have wanted us to.

And that is my first August 18th.  But there is also a second.

The following year, returning from a holiday abroad that we had taken my Mum on (as she had wanted to be away in the run up to the anniversary) I knew something was terribly wrong.  I woke up in pain like I have never felt, I couldn't stand, I couldn't think, I was losing so much blood but all I wanted was to be home, to get back to England and sort it out there.  I made it on to the ferry home before I'd lost so much blood that there was no more I could do but collapse, quite literally, and let others take over.  A friend was with me, thank God, and I have hazy memories of the Captain and a doctor who had happened to be on board.  I remember ambulances - they sent a bike, to get to me on board before I could be stabilized enough to be moved into the ambulance.  I can't remember how much blood they had to give me, I only remember that it hurt and I was ready to go. 

So I was rushed to the nearest hospital - spent the night in intensive care with them attempting to stabilize me enough to operate, which they did the following day.  August 18th.  I don't remember the night but I remember the morning, I remember being lucid enough to sign the consent forms.  Them explaining to me what it meant and what I would lose.  And having no choice but to agree.   I remember I was alone.  My friend had taken my Mother home the previous day, and my then-husband was nowhere to be seen.  So I waited, terrified and alone and so, so, so broken.  And then a peace came over me, that this was the 18th.  I couldn't be so unlucky as to die on this day I felt.  It would be too much.  So it must be that I would be ok.  Or at least that was what I felt.  I had a sureness of it, as they came to wheel me down to theatre, still alone.

I'd love to say it was all ok.  It wasn't.  I remember being in resus.  I remember coming in and out of consciousness and I remember people (nurses or doctors) buzzing around me saying "Stay with me" and using my name.  But I couldn't seem to lift out of the mud.  Only afterwards they told me they kept losing me, and I couldn't come round.

And it was two days before they came and told me the extent of the surgery. Of course they came and saw me, many, many doctors.  And checked on the awful bloody great cut from one side of me to the other, and the drains and just everything awful, awful, awful. But I wasn't stable enough yet for the news they had.

And I can't remember how long I was there.  It's all a haze. I begged and begged and begged to go home but I had to get stronger.  More transfusions, morphine, blah, blah. blah.

Eventually I came home, what a dreadful journey that was.  No muscles so I couldn't sit up, lying helpless and in pain for every bump and pothole, feeling like I was actually having to hold myself together to stop splitting in two.  Turns out I was 😟  That night it ruptured and my whole abdomen burst open.  More blood, more ambulances, more panic, more pain.

Straight back to theatre.  Turns out they had nicked my bowel during the procedure, so I had subsequent infection.  More transfusions, antibiotics, morphine, horrific bruising and just horrendousness.   A day or two later, once I was stabilized again, they wanted to take me back in to theatre a third time but I refused.  They had struggled to bring me back the first time, I was too tired, too ill, too terrified to go under again.  They agreed the risk was probably too high. 

So instead it was an unbelievably slow process for my body to mend itself.  I couldn't sit up unaided for probably nearly 6 months, and even then not for long.  I lay and a District Nurse came every day, to clean out the hideous gaping wound. She had a hook she would use to measure the depth - you felt it hit the bottom as it went inside you.  She was good humoured, and we laughed together.  I knitted stuff for her baby, as I could do that lying down 😁

In the November of that same year, still unable to do anything for myself, I got a call early one morning. Very early.  The time of day you only get a call if it is that type of call.

It was my sister.  My Gramps (my Dad's Dad) had leukemia.  This I already knew.  But it was the end.  Come now, she said, if you are able to come at all it has to be now. 

It's a haze again of how we got there.  Lots of pain killers, literally holding an open abdomen together, lying down in a car, bump, bump, panic, panic.   We were in time.  Just.  We said our goodbyes, held his hand as he relinquished his life.  I have never seen anything so desperate.  My Gramps was a navy man, fought in the war, served on The Victory.  He can't have weighed much over 5 stone when he died, just over a year after losing his only child. 

I just remember the numbness that followed.  The blur of endless days until my body healed, and heal it did - all be it differently from before. 

And life went on, as it does, normality returns and you put away in their boxes the pains you don't want to carry every day, along with all the others you have stored and continue to store over the course of your life. 

And you smile and you live and you love and you try.  And you carry on, with what you have been given, and make the best of what is left.

And this I do, each and every day, to the best of my ability.  In all ways I am my Father's daughter.  I know this, I shall rise.  But on this day, these few days, every year, I am not strong.  I will stand and I will try but I am a little more broken on these days than the others.  For they are the days that changed me, more than any other.  And on these days the boxes rattle, they clamor to be opened, to be free.  And so I thought perhaps if I free them they will find their peace, and maybe I will find mine also.

xx

Letting Go

Ok, so I am going to give this a try but this is going to be a hugely personal post, so I'll see how I feel when it's written.

Yesterday was a day that overwhelmed me. But not in the ways you would think.  It was a day of victories, and kindnesses, and successes.  So why this morning am I crying into my cup of tea while DS is at his Granny's from a sleepover & my little starlet DD is still sleeping?

Because it's too much for me to lay down my strong.  It's harder than not.

I saw a quote this morning on social media that said something along the lines of - the people who never ask for help are the ones who never had it from the earliest age.   Well d'uh I thought!  Of course it is. But it's a hard pattern to let go of.....

Yesterday I went to visit a dear friend, and her sweet, lovely old Dad gave me a bag of vegetables from his garden and took me out to show me his pumpkins and sweetpeas.  It was so much like my old Pa I wanted to weep.  The gentle kindness and simplicity and openness of this dear man just touched my heart and lifted my soul, but also made it ache for my Dad who is long gone.

Then I went on to go and meet three more very dear friends who were coming to my daughter's show with me, to support and encourage her and cheer her on (in the absence of any actual family coming to do so........)   One friend whom I've known virtually since birth, one I've been besties with since we were 11 years old and the third I've known via the second for probably 15 years now.  I have a lot of old friends lol.  We laughed about it last night - joking if it ain't broke why throw it away.  And I love these guys (yes, they are all male friends - it is possible lol) and how they sat in the front row with me at a family show and cheered and hollered like proud uncles.  And I felt unutterably blessed that the gaps in my life are always filled, by some other loving soul who steps up to take the place of those who should've been there.  And it warms my soul. But it also awakens the sadness, reminds me that there was a gap in the first place. 

And then there is the photo I shared on social media yesterday.  I have a Facebook account, which is a small, private account of my real life 'tribe' and a Twitter account - which I only opened in January of this year - where I Blog, connect with amazing people, review and am followed by over 3000 people (that blows my little mind!). 

The photo was of me yesterday morning, having lost almost 7 stone in weight.  A fact which astounds me every day, every time I pass a mirror, or buy clothes (and have to go back out the changing room to get smaller sizes lol!), or when my son says 'Mum you are shrinking!'  So I shared it - because I am proud of what I have achieved, and I know many of my followers struggle with weight/ self esteem issues so I try to encourage others that we can do this.  Especially us hidden Mums, the ones who lose themselves in their children and lose sight of the way back to themselves. 

And luckily for me I have had only kind, positive reactions - no nastiness.  But that overwhelms me also.  When you have been hidden behind so many layers, for so many years, it can make you feel very exposed to not be.  I'm not a limelight kinda girl 😊 I really, really am not.  I am the girl who got her name because it was the name most similar to the boy's name that had been chosen for the boy child her parents were hoping for.  I am the girl who was tall, taller than her 'big' sister, taller than all the boys, with a shock of red hair when everyone else in the family was the opposite.  I was the 'postman' or the 'milkman's'.  I was actually born with a full head of my red hair, it claimed it's place right from the start, and I came to own the family joke that my Mother had told the midwife to 'put it back' when I was born such. 

And I understand all too well how this, and so much more, has made up all my layers.  But peeling them back is hard.  It's glorious, and empowering but oh so absolutely terrifying. Even with my army of magnificent friends cheering from all along the side lines. 

And today, I have more incredible, amazing kindness coming at me.  I bought one of those garden arches, the big wooden ones, some months ago.  I had one in the garden before but it had rotted over time, so I pulled it all down and bonfired it, cleared the area etc.  I painted all the many pieces of wood with coats of woodstain, after lugging them to and from the garage single handedly over several weekends.  But since then it has stood in the garage with me at a loss of what to do, as it is simply too big for me to be able to manage myself.  So I asked my Facebookers if anyone could recommend someone who would do a small job like that, on a shoestring budget.  Oh no said my tribe, some of us will do that.  Even though those some of us are busy with two small non-sleeping children of our own, and full time shift work, and a million other things we are doing for everybody under the sun.  We will come and do that for you. 

So this morning I am laying down my strong for a while and accepting the help I asked for.  Bit by bit I am letting go (or trying to at least!) and allowing myself the tears that come with doing so.

xx