Autumn arriving

Woke up and it was cold, a distinct chill in the darkness. Faint smell of woodsmoke in the air. Snuggled back down under my brilliant patchwork quilt and thought about the autumn, season of mists and bonfires and new planting, long cool blue days, the leaves tumbling from the trees, nuts and berries and fat golden pumpkins and ridged squash, squirrels gathering acorns, the birds departing for warmer climates …

Last night a lovely drive through to my meeting in the market town in the Breede River Valley. Long shadows over the wheat fields, the bundled stacks asymmetrical against the sweeping mown contours on the hillsides. Intense blue of farm dams locked in with pale green reeds. In the far distance the mountain ranges golden and purple like a mirage. Arrived to find a group of new members — the others had relapsed. One member two days sober and cracking his knuckles as he talked, sitting in a small room, unemployed, clinging to a group that scarcely exists. An angry despondent woman just out of a neuro clinic after attempting suicide. Moslem mother and daughter: the daughter addicted to a crude form of crystal meth, the mother wanting to support her but furious and enmeshed.

We sat and talked a little, keeping it real. No platitudes. Alcoholism degrades. Drugs kill. The messy anguish of lives that can’t be fixed by good will. My private unvoiced hatred of the rehab centre and local neuro clinic, recalling what a close friend went through, the careless, heartless treatment, the ineptitude. Greedy unprofessional helping services. Here in South Africa it is so often all about the money, fleecing the medical aid.

Afterwards, coming back, a meal at a village restaurant, calamari (grilled squid) and a Greek salad, the happiness coming up suddenly in me as I had my grape juice — feeling centred, that this is where I belong, that I can be of service here. My brokenness and truth has a part to play. We need one another.

Waking several times in the night, compassion like toothache sharp and sweet in me. My home group, my fellow sufferers. Trudging a long road together.

Grateful like ice cream

Waking up to birdsong and a quiet mind, a peaceful conscience and the chance of a good day ahead. Red-hot pokers blazing away in the front garden, lime-grey and pink sedums just starting up out of fleshy rosettes of leaves.

Dreaming that I was asleep in a beach house with three rooms beside the sea, a long curving beach in view, grey ocean. Three sisters or friends living there, and I was one of them asleep in my room. A buzzing intercom was calling me from sleep to go next door and help my neighbours but instead my sisters and friends came in to help me. I woke in the dream with a faint start and found a black widow spider crouched on the head above my sleeping head. The spider began to follow me, which did not surprise me, a dark poisonous creature. In the next room there was a view of the sea and the room seemed safer, less complicated with fewer hiding places. I went into the room of the third sister and climbed into a narrow single bed, one of two beds side by side, knowing she would look after me while I went back to sleep again.

In real life I have two sisters and have not seen either of them for 25 years. I communicate with only one of them in faraway New Zealand by email; the other sister is a stranger, due to what I can only call ‘family fall-out’. But in the dream the three sisters are together and able to protect and care for the lost children we once were.

The expense of spirit

A heavily pregnant woman in the meeting, drinking and coming out of a bender. Her voice slurring on the phone early  in the morning, unable to follow what I was saying to her, incoherent after a bottle of vodka and a sleepless night.

She is afraid the baby may be damaged. She has been drinking all through the pregnancy. As she drank before she fell pregnant. As she drank the night she fell pregnant. Passing out most days. Vomiting, ill, exhausted, nauseous but unable to stop. Tormented by the htought of foetal alcohol syndrome. But her own mother drank when she was was pregnant and the baby (herself) was fine.

She won’t stop. There are no social services here to intervene and at the end of the day it is her choice. Why should pregnancy stop her?

Alcoholism is fatal, but it is not always the alcoholic who dies. The destroyed lives and emotional wreckage are an open secret.

Each day in the village I see small children with foetal alcohol syndrome. Hardly able to crawl or walk, the flattened nasal bridges and unfocused eyes, the slow comprehension.   

Our statistics here are terrible. A shocking 122 out of every 1 000 Grade 1 pupils in the Northern Cape town of De Aar have foetal alcohol syndrome — the highest incidence of the syndrome in one population anywhere in the world.

And in the Western Cape, research shows that 88 out of every 1 000 Grade 1 pupils have the syndrome.

In comparison, the US rate of the syndrome is lower than one child in 1 000.

Sick at heart. Alcoholism really is insanity. And why should anything stop the drive towards death, that numb trajectory, least of all the matter of pregnancy and an unwanted child? My own mother smoked and drank through her pregnancy, no idea it might harm  her firstborn. But I doubt she would have cared if she had known. She had no love to spare at that time in her life, she was just gritting her teeth and enduring a very rough time because that was the lot of women in the colonies. Nothing to be done but wait out one pregnancy after another, one wailing child after another. Echoes of that despair are still with me all these years later.

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Lunar eclipse

Clear and brlliant evening early last night, the full moon spilling over into the garden. We went out for a Mexican supper and chatted over grape juice and unsophisticated but plentiful chillied-up con carne and ready-to-go reheated tortillas and fresh-from-the-can black beans. Very much South African village homecooking, enthusiasm without any idea what the real thing might involve. But everyone seemed happy enough, the restaurant full, harsh smell of chilli fried with onions,  small tables with dark red fake rosebuds in long-stemmed vases in the centre and little green jalapenos like jellybabies as decorative accessories on our side plates.

Got up before dawn and peered out, hoping to catch sight of the lunar eclipse (had seen the sky darkening through my bedroom window) but the first of the Cape autumn mists was rolling into the valley, obscuring the skies. Mysterious lunar events, invisible for the most part.

 Woke calm and clear, steady within myself. That feeling, by now so familiar, of gratitude welling up like clear water from a country stream. To have been given a second chance at life. Nothing very much in my life has changed outwardly, but inwardly nothing remains the same. This is the core of hopefulness, this difference and the thankfulness at being given a second chance to begin my life over.

Unless someone has found herself trapped in dependence and known that daily need to drink, waiting to drink, wanting not to drink, thinking of drinking earlier, wishing all one’s thoughts were not about drinking, the inflamed and turbulent thoughts while drinking after that brief euphoria on starting to drink, the dulling, the depression, the slipping away, the rages and storming — the passing out, the forgetting — waking ill and shaky, the conviction something terrible has happened, convinced one cannot go on like this, feeling as if years have passed while one was sleeping, that one’s life is sliding away under dark water, secretly, invisibly, inexorably. Drowning, dying. Waking again sweaty and nauseous, taking painkillers and analgesics and antacids, unable as yet to face coffee, craving orange juice or fatty foods. Itching nerve ends, upset stomach, pounding head and red swollen eyes, skin grey and greasy, the urge to vomit, the jitters, sudden bursts of mad euphoria, telling oneself anarchic jokes, moods seesawing up and down. Waiting to drink. Wishing one were not waiting to drink.

Feeling better at last, drinking again, the relief and pleasure of it. The sweet anaesthetic, the postponing and staving off of pain and anxiety, putting life on hold, taking the phone off the hook, not answering the door, ceasing to care about consequences. Losing oneself all over again.

And that is how the decades went by. As simple as that. As invisible and often as overlooked as a lunar eclipse in the early hours of the morning. Something darkening and disappearing from my life while I was not paying attention. Finally waking one morning to realise I had lost the will to live.

The gift of desperation given to me at last. To give up and admit defeat and ask for help was to begin again.

Reconfiguring the way ahead

And on this hot bright Sunday morning I am 11 months sober, have just spotted a new bronze fennel popping up alongside the drive, self-seeded. The dog yawning at my feet. The soi-distant lover still asleep.

Life is good. In some ways the same life as before by lived by a different person. In other ways a new life with new challenges and new relationships. Unsettling and scary but also wonderful.

As a child I so longed for the day when I would not be afraid of the dark anymore.  And now it is the hope that is itself scary, the light-filled possibilities and strangeness of change. So much has to be rethought and understood anew. So much surrender. My dreamwork is very busy these summer nights, not unlike the magical cobblers mending dancing shoes and clogs with invisible stitches by lamplight. So that I can go on by day, trusting to an inner wisdom that prefers to stay out of sight.

Reconfiguring the way ahead, taking a deep breath at all the unknown territory waiting just over the next rise. Wondering where to replant the dark and copper-bright fennel, what to write next, how to speak into absence, how to embrace that old fear of the dark and acknowledge the fear of dazzling and unsparing truth. Not yet ready for rigorous honesty. Not yet living in the light. But the door to the sunlit garden is ajar.

The life that I have is all that I have

It was a difficult Friday, the sun glinting like a knife over the mountains. Someone from  the fellowship phoned me and said he might have hit someone in a blackout, killed a person. He had a headache and ‘wanted to be good to himself’, asked me to call the hospitals and morgues.

I said no. Thinking about a fruit packer late at night, walking the long distance home, tired and wanting to get back to his or her family. The wounded person or the body would have been found along that busy road.

Starting to deal with things can’t wait. I don’t want to sit and hold an unrepentant  killer’s hand. He might have been in an alcoholic blackout. He doesn’t recall anything. He may have imagined the episode, a roadside mirage. But he still doesn’t want to get sober. And that is the bottom line.

The Perfect Smelly Gift

Una came back early and brought me a Valentine’s Day gift. A ripe slice of moist Gorgonzola. She doesn’t eat sharp blue-veined Roqueforts, ripe creamy Bries with sagging rinds or ‘rotten smelly cheeses’ like Gorgonzola. So I have this beauty all to myself. May it give me lurid illuminating dreams rather than indigestion.

In the field across the road a young farmer is riding a tractor around and around on the dry grass, mowning away. Perhaps he too is in flight from the world, existing on borrowed time.

Several years ago I went up to Sutherland for the weekend at the end of winter. Very still and peaceful, wildflowers everywhere, winds that smelled like salty snow. In the village there was a small cottage kept as a literary museum in memory of NP van Wyk Louw, an Afrikaans writer who had lived there in the late 19th and early 20th century. A rolltop desk with green blotter, cramped bed , an oil lamp, oval cameo portraits in grainy chiarascuro, low sloping ceilings and a narrow sash window looking out onto the flat emptiness of Karoo landscape. I stood there thinking of what it must have cost to have written in that loneliness, to have created and believed in a vision so at odds with the prosaic down-to-earth life going on all around in a farming community. To write through the bitter extremes of heat and cold, no electricity (and in Sutherland in winter, water freezes in pipes and basins, it is one of the coldest places in South Africa), nobody to speak with about literature, a handful of books on the shelves, a handful of memories of Europe. I might have been wrong — not knowing enough about this writer. But the small room and the claustrophobia within, the terror of open spaces without, the sense of writing from nowhere…

Sending postcards from the edge of recovery has that same eerie loneliness. The stupidity of a self-constructed prison that you cannot walk away from, the unlocked door that fails to open, the framed views looking out on nothing recognisable. Patience, I remind myself, so that the habit of freedom will take root.

And the Gorgozola succulent and impossibly rich, irresistible. It should be forbidden but amazingly is not. Symbol of love in a decadent guise.

Valentine quirks

A very unhappy week full of postponements and unsuccessful attempts to write. Long hot days of tedium and echoes from the past. Shivering with dread at moments.

But then waking to a tender Valentine poem from ee cummings, summer winds that smell of mown grasses, the sky’s radiant blue — a new day full of possibilities. In the living room a deep white china bowl piled high with red apples. Emails from friends, phone messages, the horrors of the night’s guilty dreams over.

I need to find meaningful work. I need to connect more. Yesterday S came by to check on her furniture stored in the garage and busrts in tears on the kitchen doorstep. Rage and self-pity, those old victim stories, all that has been done to her, how she is homeless, desperate, betrayed, abused, mistreated, none of it her fault, how she has only herself to depend on. Listening with cool sympathy to the lies and the nonsense, but seeing right through that vengeful pretence of being powerless. She would starve to death in front of her sister to prove herself a needy child. All this in a woman of 54.

The quirks of undeserved romance, the sweet mysteries of being cared for despite ourselves.

Shifting sands

Calls from bewildered people whom I have worked with, colleagues who miss me. The uncertainty of what to do each day, time hanging heavy at moments. Not sure what to commit to in terms of work, the year opening before me like a dark chasm.

And despite this dread, the pleasure of waking sober each morning and connecting with others who are also living sober. Putting one foot in front of the other on what feels like very ncertain foundations.

Why is that? Because in part I am rethinking my understanding of life and community and purpose. This should be comforting, but it is not. It is the taking of an inventory, and one that whisks out the magic carpet from under my feet.

And something else is sliding away from me, so that I am in danger of losing my footing. There is no confidence in the writing any longer. I don’t want to write what I know I can write, and I want to write in a way that at present escapes me.

Grateful I have a meeting tonight, that I can get attention off myself  and onto the struggles and successes of others. That I can relax in belonging and the shared daily reprieve.