Sitting With Myself

The garden is starting to take shape in the half-tamed wilderness kind of way, my little falling-down-house is my version of clean, the children are half-reared and happy, work is hectic, but rewarding.  I’m looking and feeling better than I have in years.  Life is good.    

At the moment, I'm taking half-days annual leave from work each day, supplemented with late night emails and calls, to juggle childcare and caring for my Spanish student.  That might sound like chaos, but it works. 

On Wednesday, the Spaniard asks if he can bring a friend home for dinner.  The girls from across the road pop over.  My pair, cycle their bikes into my Hobbit House and announce that then were all hungry, pre-dinner, and want pancakes with Nutella - our traditional go-to snack when we have foreign students staying. There was a lovely buzz in the house.  I observe how the younger children puffed out their chests and act out in front of the Spanish boys who warmly go along with it.  The pancakes can’t come fast enough. The table sprinkled with lemon and sugar.  They all eat until they have pains in their bellies. 

The Spaniards retire to the sitting room to sing along to Spanish rap music and the children experiment with slime-making recipes in the kitchen.  Surprisingly, they don’t wreck the gaff.  Mixing cornflour with shampoo yields interesting results. 

I take a cup of tea in a china cup and sit in my beautiful space in the balmy heat.  Butterflies, birds, the cat rubs by my leg, as the soft breeze hits my face.  Surrounded here by nature, family, visitors, I feel as lonely as hell.  It’s a very familiar feeling these days. 

I’ve been running on empty for about 4 years now.  Within this time, there was drama piled on top of drama.  Unpleasant as it was, the drama acted as a big roll of sticking plaster, distracted me from the job in hand – to just sit and be with myself.  The temptation is to just keep running – to help my mother, to visit a friend in need, working, busying myself, to rush into a new relationship.  I can see why Forrest Gump ran for 3 years, 2 months, 14 days and 16 hours.  It’s so much easier to run than to stop.  But now, all of a sudden, the drama is over, it seems.  I have peace and stability in my life. I thought it would bring me happiness (and it has), but overall, the feeling is loneliness.  

It’s not that I want someone to help me with my garden, or to cut my hedge.  It’s for someone to sit and admire it with me, to laugh with me about how crooked my clipping efforts are.  It’s not that I want for someone to pay for me to get my hair done.  It’s for someone to notice that I’ve had it done.  It’s not for someone to organise for my car to be NCT’d.  It’s for someone to send me a text to see how it went.  Or the important meeting a work.  It’s a bear-hug from a man other than my giant baby brother.  It’s for someone to buy me an ice-cream while I wait in the car. 

I stand in the graveyard at the funeral of my friend’s mother last week and I’m happy for him that his wife is there to support him in her quiet way and feel the loneliness come over me again that I went through my father’s funeral without that someone there for me.

All of things that I crave involve having someone special in my life.  But part of that feeling is just another sticking plaster - a quick fix remedy.  

For now, I need to dust myself off, enjoy the new found peace and just ‘be’or as Forrest's momma said, 'you have to put your past behind you before you can move on'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKKmzmeU5-0