After surgery

Went into Vergelegen mediclinic on Saturday and had the hysterectomy. Spent much of the weekend groggy with morphine, over-medicated.

Not an easy time. The brag of my recovering heart, that strong fierce beat, the desire to get back to work, resume life. But slowed down by pain, anaesthetic, post-op trauma. Grateful for the care and love of others, grateful to be in recovery and no longer sabotaging my health.

Icy weather despite the sunshine, an unusually cold summer. Juggling the aspects of my life like coloured glass tumblers, terrified in case I drop one. As I balance along the tightrope and hope the invisible safety net is there. That is so often how I think of faith — what we hope in but which remains unproven and unglimpsed as yet. Shining and intangible, a web of love to catch us in its glittering mesh if we should fall.

Something incalculable

There’s never a perfect time to fall in love.

You always get sober too late, you always wonder why you didn’t do it years ago. All that wasted time.

And the reality is that time is not on my side.  I chose a solitary life almost two decades ago, chose to turn away from men, chose befriending over passion, chose to ignore my body’s demands for intimacy, chose to die a little rather than risk trauma again, rather than deal with the aftermath of sexual violence. Alcohol was the perfect little destroyer of worlds.

Then I sobered up and I fell in love. Time is not on my side. I am physically ill and tired, about to be rudely catapulted into the desert of menopause, wary and distrustful of myself, an innocent who feels ridiculous at moments, less experienced than any 21st-century schoolgirl. A difficult, not particularly lovable woman, in love and, incredibly, finding herself loved back.

Where to go next? Roethke’s line of poetry echoing in my mind: ‘We learn by going/where we have to go.’

So I close my eyes, lying sleepless and painfilled in the dark, knowing I will trust the reality of this love and follow it into unknown places. Stepping out of character into the welcoming darkness. One day at a time, the way I learned to get sober, to trust the intuition of beginning the world again and reaching out for a stranger’s hand in the darkness. Saying again those old threadbare words to do with need and tenderness and fidelity and feeling them come alive in my mouth with new meaning. Taking a lover into my ageing body and inexperienced heart. Feeling I have so little to offer, but it will have to do.

Outside my window there are swallows wheeling and looping figures-of-eight between field and garden, over the young olive trees, the flowering dombeya or wild pears, the red hyacinth and the pin oak on the corner, swallows obscured a moment in flight by the cobalt-blue shadow of mountains. Unself-conscious and at one with the journey. We learn by going where we have to go.

Without stopping

Walking the grey streets, the penetrating beautiful light, and feeling the chill of wind off the Hudson. Thinking of literary ghosts, Joseph Mitchell writing his precise descriptions of the Fulton fish market, Elizabeth Bishop on Perry Street, Jane Bowles and her chaos of nights in the Bowery, Kate Millett and loft living with nights of white mania, Jean Stafford and her sardonic mannered defences no defence at all against the nips from the flask in her leather clutch. Henry James, Edith Wharton, Frank O’Hara, Robert Lowell, the wounded lions roaring in a vanished rougher hunting ground. A haunting of books I have read, places I have imagined, grimy brownstones, tenements, speakeasy evenings, dawns in hungover streets. Joan Didion a young woman about to flee to the East Coast. James Baldwin cold-eyed and wry. Anais Nin glamorising Harlem. Thurber at the New Yorker. A fantasy of New York and the tragedy of writers I have read and loved.

Moving on, eight months sober and sitting in early morning meetings, the fast-talking confessions so familiar, the stories of living sober, failing and sliding and coming to sobriety in community on a tiny overcrowded island. Myself jetlagged, dazed, watching Brian de Palma’s Redacted and shocked to think of this nation at war, reading National Book Award Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke and feeling that Vietnam has never ended for the United States, feeling like an outlaw in Bush’s America. But in Manhattan’s AA I belong, because the alcoholic shit is shared, our mutual craziness. New York in autumn, racing against time, fighting jetlag, sober and sleepless in the city. Dizzy Gillespie playing in my head like an epitaph to the lost years, the bitter-sweet no regrets and ‘let’s get it right this time maybe’ feeling in a brownstone autumn.

Lucid thinking

In the middle of one of his poems, an invocation around the archaic torso of Apollo, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke suddenly pauses and writes, ‘You must change your life’.

I never get beyond that line in  the poem, it has such command and immediate reproach.

Last night Una had an oesophagheal spasm and I sat up with her waiting for the Isorbel under her tongue to take effect and ease the crushing pains in her chest. She spoke of her fears around my changing so much this year, stepping out of character, the new distance between us. All I could see was the damage I have caused her over so many years and all that I would not have done if I had been sober. There are no amends to be made except to stay sober and not make any more of those kinds of mistakes. My inexcusable cruelty and unkindness that has destroyed so much of her faith in herself and others, a friend who was there and never really present or honest or prepared to care for her. All I did was take and take and take — and then forget what had been taken.

And inexplicably she has forgiven me so much. As have others. I feel such bitter regret mixed with gratitude. These are some of the hardest and most rewarding moments of recovery.

But there is also the fear Una and others have at seeing me change, their wanting me to stay the same, to need them in unhealthy ways and to not grow. This is a separate issue and I need to address it differently.

Alcoholism just isn’t understood despite all the literature and popular wisdom on the topic, and the mysterious process of recovery baffles those outside AA. When somebody loved goes into recovery, friends and family feel excluded. The approval Una initially felt at my not touching alcohol, the novelty of it, has worn off. She now takes it for granted that I don’t drink. She probably thinks I could drink a little every now and again just to be sociable. My drinking is a thing of the past for her. On the other hand, my new involvement with the Fellowship is a nuisance and my intense new friendships and emerging ‘personality’ disconcerts and worries her. The subdued and secretive alcoholic self has gone and in its place is somebody unknown, more communicative but talking in a stranger’s voice.

It will take time. And we will have to go gently and keep the flow of communication open. The steep learning curve of sobriety is enough to give anyone vertigo.

Emotionally at sea

When I used to imagine myself getting sober I had this vision of the new improved Mary L A as remorseful, diligent, thoughtful, mature. Well-behaved. A non-drinking example to her former self.

Instead I am shockingly imperfect. More difficult and complicated and muddled and crammed with childish notions and contradictions than I would have believed possible. Selfish, mood-stricken, inconsistent, arrogant, outrageous. Full of suspect motives and careless impulses.

The only thing I can say in my own favour is that, together with my ageing and troubled and energised body, it is for real. This is who I am. Emotionally at sea.

Reconnecting with the bits of myself put aside when I was 29 or 33 or 42. With the misery of the neglected eight-year-old, the sulking teenager. But also looking beyond the tetchy, irritable, prickly and always and forever wounded self to those hurt by her, those who have helped me or reached out to me. The longing to move beyond all this self-stuff and get into the deep current of living, like lowering myself into the thrill of deep water and showing another how to swim alongside me. And learning from someone else how to swim in deeper waters, treading water, taking a tremulous but calming breath and diving into a new element.

What I once called ‘reflecting’ on my life was in fact rehearsing and controlling, planning, ordering  everything and subtly manipulating a broken existence into a semblance of OK-ness. Now I am just moving into the flow, deliberately choosing life and feeling and waiting to see what might happen next. For the first time it is not all up to me. Those in relationship with me also have a say. That is the hardest part of all. Relinquishing control and letting love have a say. Sometimes it feel like drowning or trying to breathe underwater.

Feeling the fear

Another golden morning in early summer and I am sitting at a battered yellowwood table listening to rock doves cooing insistently from nearby oaks and thinking about fear.

There is nothing scarier than intimacy. A friend writes  to me with unaccustomed tenderness and I get breathless with feelings I can scarcely name because it is so long since I have let myself feel them. I sit and my heart quite literally clenches with a small pain and then slowly lets go. When I go through to the bathroom, my face in the mirror is white, even my lips.

This is what happens when you forget to fucking live for two decades. It is like learning to breathe or crawl before walking all over again. The fear comes first, the terror of having to feel anything at all, the strangeness of it. Then the body shocked into sensation and longing and half-forgotten desires and going hot, cold, pleasure, pain, soft, warm, wet, alive.

Other women have made this journey back to the self and reclaimed the body, rediscovered the capacity to feel and give of themselves.To let myself be loved and not let the fear gain the upper hand. If somebody cares about another person, it does not spell annihilation. Coming back from the gaping cave mouth, the torrent, the frozen cataract. Into the sunlight of the Spirit, into human contact, into the heart aching like a muscle that needs more exercise, more blood, more tenderness. 

Taking time out

It took a while but I finally admitted to myself I was not well enough to work and began to postpone and cancel assignments, told the office I would not be in. Sat at home and just let myself feel the giddiness and weak nauseated feelings from blood loss and cramping, backache, the pain of the fibroids.

My daily life on hold. A routineless existence of the kind I once dreaded because it would have been synonymous with days sliding into blurry obliviousness, but now they are just days punctuated with cups of tea and low productivity.

 Accepting that I can’t get very much done and that I am facing major surgery. The concern of friends and my own anxiety like concentric circles in a still dark pond.

And the time alone is so valuable because it gives me time to chart the new beginnings, the new friendship in my life, the decisions around work, to muse over travel experiences, to think and feel my way forward in recovery. As they say, it is so much easier to stay sober than to get sober. Emotional sobriety has to do with the even tenor of the days, rebuilding another kind of life together with others in recovery, opening myself up to another kind of writing, a heightened awareness of the physical world, risking intimacy.

And down the road the rooster is screaming about love and need and triumph as the sun comes up between the mountains and the day begins noisily and full of the unpredictable.

New directions

Sat with coffee and mused over the unaccountable adventure of sobriety and all I thought would not happen to me.

You open the door to life and life brings in surprises and the unexpected. Joy and pain and the shock of new feeling. Encounters with others on the same journey who hold out a hand and then you are moving forward and the fear is less. You begin to trust where there was only dread and a hollow echo before. Waking at night you have stories to tell yourself and the warmth of new friendships, others who know your truth.

Truths the hand can touch. A community called recovery.

And one day at a time I have moved from abstraction to the specifics. This is what I will do right now rather than that. Each week I sit in meetings with others and listen. To help set out tea cups and wash up. To share suggestions and welcome newcomers with hugs. Help organise lifts. Sit with those who are struggling as I once struggled, caught in that familiar double-bind.

And then to return into the society that by and large has no idea of what some of us have to do each day to be like some of them, just to get up and live unanaesthetised, sober, undrugged, dealing with whatever happens in each 24-hour stretch. Looking at the fury and despondency and patterns of reactivity that come up over and over again, like waves crashing into a narrow  rocky gap. Learning to live with ourselves and others, learning not to run away or slide into oblivion.

Time, says a friend, time is what is needed. Give it time. And so I leave behind the lost and insensible years of drinking and wait for time to do its work.

Pleasures of the ordinary

Overnight it has rained and when I wake the house smells of newly baked bread and damp rainy garden, an earthy fragrance from the trees and soaked roses and wet earth coming in through the open windows.

Later I shall go and look at a dhurrie Sheila M wants to sell, old and shabby, but I like worn and cherished carpets or rugs. The one I have in the living room is threadbare and must be replaced.

Such a blessedly ordinary day. The mending of arguments, the making of amends, a slow patchwork of new life directions. Reading a passage or two from As Bill Sees It. Reflections on recovery and the inching towards emotional sobriety. I might never get there but I am loving the journey and the companions I am meeting along the way.

Coffee and a fascinating article by Richard Ford on short stories in the Guardian online (see Blogroll). Going out  into the back garden with a dog at my heels to pick a small handful of silver thyme and looking at furry sage and cistus leaves cupping raindrops.

A day that might be like any other. A day that is once again about reprieve.