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satyapriyaIt comes on slowly, the letting go. You've spent twenty years monitoring everything: what your son watches, how he behaves in public, can he use public transport alone, is he in the right school, the right adult recreation service, could you be doing more for him, are the few literacy skills he learned at Special School deteriorating, how to keep him safe.
You have no more inside. You let him be all the adult he's able to be. You let go, and let go, and he eats what he likes. You acknowledge it's a shitty diet. You pretend not to worry. You know this shit will affect his health, long-term. But you have no more, even when the world asks you to have more. You find more.
You fill in forms, attend meetings, manage his finances, give him fifty opportunities to have a bigger world, all of which he says no to.
The world asks more, you find more, and your own world dries out from meadow to African veldt. You spend four years in Memoir Land, joking that your memoirs will be a boxed set. You spend a year disinterring your son's upbringing. You feel gutted at the end of it. You move on to other memoirs. You cannot face going back to any of them once they're written. They make you feel sick.
Your adult child withdraws from activities, spends his time eating biscuits, drinking soft drink, surfing the net for pictures of Pokemons. He develops a little pot belly on his skinny frame. You know you have to deal with this. You don't because it's one more thing on top of being: self, wife, mother, grandmother, carer, advocate, mindful pet owner, decision maker in the home, the one who directs the flow of tasks, traffic, and still calls herself writer, even when going beyond scraping the bottom of the barrel, and starting to address the lid, and outsides.
The tide seeps away so slowly that you barely notice it. You wonder why you can't lose weight, why your blood pressure wildly fluctuates between high and low, why sometimes your vision fuzzes, and you simply can't digest/take anything any more.
Your sleep is disrupted. You accept the low-grade resentment you have for your son. You have fantasies of backpacking through Asia for four months. You dream of screaming uncontrollably, and trying to leave your adult child with someone. Exes turn up in your dreams to be mean to you.
The tide seeps further back. Old wrecks are exposed, the pale sea floor. As you become more and more transparent about your life, you feel more out of control.
You suddenly have visceral flash backs to when you were near-anorexic, and how powerful it felt to go to bed hungry, and how fitting into size eight clothes, and a 10A bra were fascinating in a car crash way. (From age ten, you were a size 12, and a 12B bra cup, only going down to a 10, and then an 8 when anorexic, and now being a 14-16, and an E cup post-menopause.)
You don't know why you have the flashbacks.
Your memory and concentration suffer. You can no longer remember the previous page of the book you are reading. Getting a pair of your glasses fixed has been on your to-do list for a month.
Your body takes in all the magnesium offered it in drink, tablet, and cream form, in bath soaks, and foot rubs, and yet does not release its hold on itself. You are awake for hours at night, and exhausted each day.
You sign up for art journalling, and simply cannot put paint brush to paper. Your tarot instincts are gone. You have nothing to say on paper at all.
Then, your son's blood test results show it's past time to attend to his diet. He now needs guidance, when he has never been more self-determined, stubborn, and set in his ways.
After months of the tide being out, here it comes back in, a tsunami of emotion, and hopelessness. It pounds through your empty self. You are brought to your knees, flat to the kitchen floor, suddenly, while brewing a cup of tea. Your adult child is upstairs, and would not know how to help you. Your husband is out. You don't know what to do, besides swallow against your gag reflex, and curl around your spasming belly.
You have no more. You have NO MORE. All your clever imagination that has fed your parenting is simply threadbare flags torn by wind. You don't know what resources are out there, and you have no wherewithal to search.
There you are, back in the space of wanting it to end the only way that would be final. You have not been like this for a long time, and you know it's disordered to think like this.
You don't care. You let the desire for death sweep through you, because it would be better than the climb back, and the immediate request from the world that you 'deal with this'.
You know you need help. You don't know who to ask, and for what.
You retreat to the couch, a blanket, your half-cold cup of tea. You are chilly, even though it's summer. You cannot get comfortable. It's as though you are anorexic-thin again, and it hurts to rest one knee on the other, it hurts to have your arm on your ribcage.
You breathe in for counts of four, out for counts of four. Yoga training.
There is the expectation that you will pick yourself up.
You don't want to.
You have no more inside. You let him be all the adult he's able to be. You let go, and let go, and he eats what he likes. You acknowledge it's a shitty diet. You pretend not to worry. You know this shit will affect his health, long-term. But you have no more, even when the world asks you to have more. You find more.
You fill in forms, attend meetings, manage his finances, give him fifty opportunities to have a bigger world, all of which he says no to.
The world asks more, you find more, and your own world dries out from meadow to African veldt. You spend four years in Memoir Land, joking that your memoirs will be a boxed set. You spend a year disinterring your son's upbringing. You feel gutted at the end of it. You move on to other memoirs. You cannot face going back to any of them once they're written. They make you feel sick.
Your adult child withdraws from activities, spends his time eating biscuits, drinking soft drink, surfing the net for pictures of Pokemons. He develops a little pot belly on his skinny frame. You know you have to deal with this. You don't because it's one more thing on top of being: self, wife, mother, grandmother, carer, advocate, mindful pet owner, decision maker in the home, the one who directs the flow of tasks, traffic, and still calls herself writer, even when going beyond scraping the bottom of the barrel, and starting to address the lid, and outsides.
The tide seeps away so slowly that you barely notice it. You wonder why you can't lose weight, why your blood pressure wildly fluctuates between high and low, why sometimes your vision fuzzes, and you simply can't digest/take anything any more.
Your sleep is disrupted. You accept the low-grade resentment you have for your son. You have fantasies of backpacking through Asia for four months. You dream of screaming uncontrollably, and trying to leave your adult child with someone. Exes turn up in your dreams to be mean to you.
The tide seeps further back. Old wrecks are exposed, the pale sea floor. As you become more and more transparent about your life, you feel more out of control.
You suddenly have visceral flash backs to when you were near-anorexic, and how powerful it felt to go to bed hungry, and how fitting into size eight clothes, and a 10A bra were fascinating in a car crash way. (From age ten, you were a size 12, and a 12B bra cup, only going down to a 10, and then an 8 when anorexic, and now being a 14-16, and an E cup post-menopause.)
You don't know why you have the flashbacks.
Your memory and concentration suffer. You can no longer remember the previous page of the book you are reading. Getting a pair of your glasses fixed has been on your to-do list for a month.
Your body takes in all the magnesium offered it in drink, tablet, and cream form, in bath soaks, and foot rubs, and yet does not release its hold on itself. You are awake for hours at night, and exhausted each day.
You sign up for art journalling, and simply cannot put paint brush to paper. Your tarot instincts are gone. You have nothing to say on paper at all.
Then, your son's blood test results show it's past time to attend to his diet. He now needs guidance, when he has never been more self-determined, stubborn, and set in his ways.
After months of the tide being out, here it comes back in, a tsunami of emotion, and hopelessness. It pounds through your empty self. You are brought to your knees, flat to the kitchen floor, suddenly, while brewing a cup of tea. Your adult child is upstairs, and would not know how to help you. Your husband is out. You don't know what to do, besides swallow against your gag reflex, and curl around your spasming belly.
You have no more. You have NO MORE. All your clever imagination that has fed your parenting is simply threadbare flags torn by wind. You don't know what resources are out there, and you have no wherewithal to search.
There you are, back in the space of wanting it to end the only way that would be final. You have not been like this for a long time, and you know it's disordered to think like this.
You don't care. You let the desire for death sweep through you, because it would be better than the climb back, and the immediate request from the world that you 'deal with this'.
You know you need help. You don't know who to ask, and for what.
You retreat to the couch, a blanket, your half-cold cup of tea. You are chilly, even though it's summer. You cannot get comfortable. It's as though you are anorexic-thin again, and it hurts to rest one knee on the other, it hurts to have your arm on your ribcage.
You breathe in for counts of four, out for counts of four. Yoga training.
There is the expectation that you will pick yourself up.
You don't want to.
