So many ways to play

 

Another lazy hot Saturday morning, the heat climbing up over the 40 degrees C (104F), the newly tarred main road in melt-down (why do I so love the smell of hot black  tar?). My sensible housemate does not want a steaming bowl of classic French onion soup for lunch, she wants watermelon salad and then some pistachio ice cream.

 

I have been dexterously peeling and eating litchis with one hand while looking at cute-to-kitsch pictures of baby marmosets online. As a small child near Malindi on the coast of Kenya in East Africa, I kept  baby marmosets and lemurs rescued during bush fires and they would sleep with me at night, clinging to little tangled nests in my hair and sinking their sharp teeth into anyone who came  near or startled them. Even though they bit me several times when I moved too quickly, I felt guarded and safe.

 

Earlier this morning, after watering the poor heat-blasted garden, I went off and sat chatting to an elderly woman of 93 up at the local old age home. She was thrilled to see me but immediately began to argue with me as if I was a bad spinster daughter, telling me to find a husband and learn how to make a man happy before it is ‘too late’ for me. In addition, the room stank and I opened the window, which was not welcomed.

 

When at last I said rather crossly that I was going now, she hugged me as if I was truly a bad but beloved daughter and said with that sublime naughtiness of elderly women: ‘Now I can close that window and empty my bed pan.’

 

Anything that erodes selfishness by even a fraction helps me stay sober. A bitter pill to swallow but there it is.

My sister, myself

 

Woke up and the fever had abated. It will be a pleasure to get out of bed today and hopefully have a sociable and relaxing weekend. Next week I have masses of work to catch up with. Thanks for all the kind wishes –

 

While I was lying in bed, reflecting on a few issues, I thought about something I wrote to a friend a few weeks back. In my email I said:

 

 ’Sibling relationships are invaluable as a source of uncovering the hidden craziness of the family and I am often amazed at how many of us live with frozen or stalemated sibling connections, while denying to ourselves how this impacts on our ability to process feelings and anxieties.’

 

Since I sobered up, I have become aware of inner psychic blockages and no-go zones opening up. I am so grateful for this unsought and unexpected healing. It may arise from just a simple willingness to be changed and it is still something of a mystery to me.

 

I mothered my two younger sisters in my mother’s alcoholic absence. I failed to protect tham from our predatory father. I tried to keep them safe and I could not. As small frightened children we were enmeshed in collusion against unreasonable and dangerous adults, we had nobody but each other. That claustrophobic clinging and desperate attachment set in train the inevitable estrangement of our adult selves, as we fled the parental home and tried to get away and make new lives for ourselves. Communictions between us have been fraught and erratic. All three of us have been substance-dependent at times and I have no idea if either of my sisters have ever sought help. I do not know if my sisters have been able to mourn my brother who died suddenly and violently. I don’t know if they have worked through my mother’s suicide. We have been unable to offer one another practical or compassionate support while our father has lain in a coma, seemingly unable to die, and our younger brother has become severely alcoholic. 

We relate tenuously and disconnect frequently. I write to them and neither replies; my sister J calls and she is drunk so I will not speak to her. My sister K has baffling somatic illnesses and will only write about those. I don’t ask them for emotional support; I am still the elder sister, the older one and they are the little ones. It is hard for me to see them as adult and entirely possible they know and resent this.

 

Some years ago I worked in a media office with a features writer I shall call Sylvia who reminded me very much of my sister J. She seemed to expect me to prop her up and make excuses for her shoddy work. She took far too much sick leave and I decided she was a classic hypochondriac. I found her work poor and voiced criticism, but I did not like it when she received sympathy from other colleagues and I was seen as being unneccessarily harsh towards her. She was moody and a sulker and her private life was filled with dead-end infatuations.

 

When a love affair ended, she decided to emigrate. I had been distant and cold and often scathing about her. On her last day with the company, she came nervously into my office and sat down. She thanked me for helping her and said how much my writing and mentoring had helped her, that I had been tough but fair. She said that I had been like an older sister to her and she had often felt she was letting me down by being so ill.

I sat there and inwardly a huge painful transformation took place. I looked at Sylvia and saw her for the first time. She was not my sister J. Her illnesses may not have been what she thought them, but Sylvia’s suffering was very real. I had felt resentful and jealous and threatened by her and I had no idea why. I said goodbye so warmly that she began to weep — I hugged her and wished her well, deeply ashamed of myself and vaguely aware I had been in thrall to a negative transference connected to my lost sister.

 

Then the door closed again, and I went on in the drunken floundering and darkness for several more years.

When I sobered up, I was able to think about sibling rivalry and enmeshment and estrangement in a new way. I have been able to let myself feel the intense jealousy I felt towards my sister J because she was my mother’s favourite. I have lain awake at night feeling the envy I have of my sister K’s children, her life abroad. I have sat struggling with the resentment I feel that I had to mother small children when I was just a child myself. And little by little I have come to realise that my sisters are adult and separate from me, that they are not split-off parts of me or damaged by my brokennness.

 

Often we have to cut off and distance from family members or unhealthy situations. Getting away from my family helped me defuse and find a breathing space for myself when I was 18. It was necessary, just as it may have been necessary for my sisters to break with someone who was neither sister nor mother, but a child like them. Individuation takes time and it can be very hard.

Even though it may be necessary to cut off and distance from certain people, that in itself resolves nothing. The rupture has haunted all three of us. I don’t know what may be possible but for the first time in my adult life, the frozen stasis may be buckling and melting. Change is coming. What once seemed intolerable now takes on different proportions and I am ready for a new kind of contact or at least an awareness of what I need to do on my own in order to release that love-hate bond, to move forward in freedom and love. I am able to feel the loss of my sisters, to bear feeling that loss.

 

It is all about grace, the gift of staying sober and being receptive to the unexpected. The remaking of human relatedness. Fresh air blowing into a darkened and once locked room, what Kafka spoke about when he talked of finding an axe for the frozen seas within each of us.

Saying no and meaning it

 

I spent the day in bed and I am still in bed. My fail-safe soups are not doing the trick, so I am going to make myself a sizzling bowl of noodles with chopped fresh chilli, garlic and parsley. That will either set me right, or kill me with red-hot bliss.

 

Early last evening the phone rang. To my surprise it was a manager or executive honcho from a very successful chain of rehabs here in South Africa, rehab centres thriving on foreign youngsters shipped over here by their wealthy parents to get cleaned up in luxurious villas with great sea views and the option of touring game reserves as a reward for being good. Local addicts can’t afford such places.

 

Abe of Costly Rehabs Incorporated ( not his real name of course) asked me brightly if I wanted to become a paid facilitator at one of his rehab centres.

 

‘You will love the team we have working here, a great bunch of guys, really committed to making a difference – and you’ll get the opportunity to work with kids who have eating disorders, the self-cutting stuff, coke  addictions, heroin addictions, alkies, depression, body dysmorphic stuff, panic attacks, the whole toot. Did I say eating disorders? You’ll be given a discount to use the gym and saunas and there’s an Olympic-sized pool with mountain views, fabulous landscaped gardens, you have no idea… Just remember too that this kind of thing is going to enhance your own sobriety, Mary, you’ll be on a learning curve right up there with the rest of us. The group therapy sessions are really powerful, we’ve got two-way mirrors, state-of-the-art cam corders and video replays in high definition. So what do you think, Mary?’

 

‘No,’ I said and went back to bed. I probably don’t need to spell that one out.

When I am feeling better and less grumpy, I should compose a post all about the valuable lessons I have learned from my various encounters with snake-oil salesmen. Each time I read the BB, the honesty and smell of fear comes up off those pages along with the relief and thankfulness and amazement the writers felt at having been saved from certain death.

Years ago a Jungian analyst told me that deep down each of us knows if we are being lied to. We may not want to know, and we may not know why, or what the lie is about, but if we are paying attention and want to hear the truth rather than those deceitful sweet little fibs, we will know there is something wrong in what we are being told, cued in by  uneasiness and a stomach-churning nausea.  At the outer edge of that wonderful shining lie there is a grim line of shadow that does not go away.

O rose thou art sick

 

Which is the genius William Blake at his most lyrical, but I am just plain sick with some ordinary but puzzling gastric flu and I am staying in bed for the day.

The feelings of vulnerability are always intensified with illness, so it probably falls into the category of being hungry, angry, lonely and tired. The low energy and the loss of appetite, the non-specific sadness hanging around. Fortunately I am a great sleeper and I have great faith in homemade  chicken soup. I use one of Claudia Rodin’s recipes from her tome on Jewish food, so the chicken soup has a whole chicken set deep  in the big orange Le Creuset pot and plenty of lemon juice along with celery, canned tomatoes, garlic, red onion, parsley, peas, plus anything else that won’t sour the broth. It is the golden panacea for any sick person.

 

If I am still unwell tomorrow I shall crawl out of bed and make my second invalid’s staple, Soupe a l”Oignon, classic French onion soup with toasted snippets of bread and a fine Emmenthaler cheese grated over the top.

 

While I am in bed I plan to reread Pascal in French. Twice a week I am teaching French to a disabled farmer’s wife from the next valley. She was severely injured in a car accident some years ago and her jaw and palette were smashed to pieces, but she has had surgery and taught herself to speak again. Her son is playing rugby in France so she wants to learn some French before she goes over to visit him. We sit and enunciate slowly and painfully for hours, but the tutoring has revived my passion for French and the literature I studied as a young woman. How surprised her son will be when his mother attempts to discuss medival French philosophy with him over snails and baguettes at the local bistro! At some stage I shall teach her to comment on the weather – il fait beau, etc –  but why not discover what the Jansenists of Port-Royal were worried about and how to gamble on the existence of God?

Blaise Pascal:  ‘Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.’

The puppies loll in bed with me like voluptuous small Florence Nightingales. They have new collars from the Blue Cross in England, sent by my friend Janny, butter-soft leather and unfortunately very chewable.

 

At times like this though, I do miss my wise and sympathetic cat, now dead four years. He was the perfect sickbed companion and his purring was a great comfort. When I was feverish he would watch over me like a guardian angel, those large grey eyes flecked with amber never missed anything. The company of animals is one of the rarest blessings of life and altogether undeserved.

 

Now I am going back to bed. It is a cold and rainy day – il fait froid — and I am glad of the brightly coloured quilt and the furry pups.

 

Pascal:  ‘Happiness is neither without us nor within us. It is in God, both without us and within us.’

Probing the wounds

 

 

Last night, just as I happily turned off my computer and was about to find some flirtatious romantic comedy to watch on TV while eating cold roast lamb and wild rocket on sour-dough bread, I looked again at what I was supposed to be working on. Which is when I discovered I had written about 8 000 words of copy that had nothing to do with the brief. I had misread the brief and screwed up.

 

Not a good moment. I sat down with my delicious supper turning to ashes in my mouth. Once I would have resorted to the One&Only Favourite Solution and gulped down two or three litres of wine so that I could wake up nauseous and wretched at 3am, thereby compounding all my problems.

 

This time I probed the feelings of anger and frustration, probing until I got to the old fear of failure and dread of  inadequacy and all that gooey self-hating stuff that keeps me trapped in self. Good self, bad self, it makes no difference, the drama still keeps self centre stage.

 

And as always, once I could just sit and experience those feelings, the cramp and misery of them, something inside me lightened and I was able to think about tackling the work from another angle, doing some more research, double-checking the brief. I didn’t have to go out and ‘rescue’ anyone to get my mind off myself, I didn’t have to call anyone as I did in my first year — the learned skills of sobriety are slowly taking root. It’s all about feeling the pain and knowing we can survive that feeling of things, all about balance and proportion. Some trials or ordeals we can’t and shouldn’t face alone if we can reach friends or get to a meeting. But sometimes there is a brand-new asset called common sense that comes to our aid, one of the more gracious and practical gifts from our Higher Power.

 

And  just as I was heating my hot milk with cinnamon before bedtime, I had a call from a desolate alcoholic in Worcester who had been given my number by a mutual friend. She was very drunk and very sorry for herself and felt she had every right in the world to get more drunk — and wanted to get all kinds of incoherent things off her chest. I suggested she pour herself a large jug of water, go to bed and call me the next day if she wanted to stop drinking. For good.

 

She was so shocked, she almost sobered up on the spot.  

 

‘Nobody wants to stop drinking for good,’ she reprimanded me. ‘Drinking is one of the few pleasures of my miserable existence. I might have had too much to drink, but there is no need to be so doctrinaire! I sometimes think brandy is my only comfort in life and I can’t lose that old friend.’

 

So I meekly said goodnight again, and she went off in a froth of righteousness. I learned from quarreling with myself over many decades that arguing with drunks is a waste of time. If she doesn’t want to change her life, it is none of my business.

 

And spending time trying to help people who don’t want to help themselves is just perpetuating another old pattern. I grew up as the eldest sister  who was encouraged to play mother in a very unhappy family and I derived a terrible amount of ‘as if’ self-esteem from believing I could rescue my little sisters and brothers. To let go of that illusion was like swallowing hemlock, but once I had let go, I could move on and understand something about autonomy and taking responsibility for ourselves and what we shouldn’t look for in community.

 

Last week I called an old friend and in the course of the conversation I said, ‘What’s the best thing about being 33 years sober?’

 

Quick as a flash he came back to me.’ “The best thing? Well, being sober for 33 years.’

 

Time, I remind myself, time enough to get the hard work done and grow up.

Standing on tip-toe

 

Recapping my Sunday: the pups came back from the vet safe and sound, but Jez  had been sick all over the car seat. Her carsickness pills ( horrendously expensive) do not work. The vet praised the puppies’ glossy coats and lively affectionate ways, and they managed to corner a giant rotweiler in the waiting room and terrorize the poor creature.

Charlotte came around for lunch and admitted she is secretly a cat lover after Jez threw up on her foot. We made plans for reaching more people with the local soup kitchen — people are squatting deep in the bushes on the mountainside, afraid of xenophobic attacks and we must find a way to get in there and make contact. A friend called me from Harare and told me nearly four thousand people may have died of cholera in Zimbabwe — all preventable deaths. The average life expectancy up there  is now 26 years of age. It was not a good time for me, I went through the usual obstacle course of frustrated rage and helplessness.

 

But a friend from AA rang me in the evening and talked about how this last year has been for him, how he has stayed sober one day at a time. I absorbed everything he said like a sponge soaking up that honesty and humility. Over and over again it has been my experience that most people in AA don’t tell you how you should do anything, they just tell you what worked for them.

In the evening, we watched the Bobby Sands film Hunger, brilliant but excoriating. To recover from that we then watched the puppies dancing on tip-toes (up on their hind legs), doing their doggy jitterbug to amuse us. They must have circus poodle in them somewhere.

 

And just as we were yawning and thinking about sleep, in came some old Scottish expatriate friends bellowing about it being Burns’ Night and reciting ‘Wee cowering tim’rous beastie” etc, bringing along a steaming portion of haggis in a covered dish. No neeps or tatties to my relief. So the night ended sitting out under the new moon in the garden telling ghost stories about mysterious seal women and will o’ the wisp sightings near Scottish lochs, croft women with second sight and talking horses. Toasting the poet Robert Burns with mugs of cocoa.

 

Thank you so much Texan Daave and Heather for more Lemonade awards! I am so grateful to the blogging community for just being themselves, staying sober and taking it one day at a time.

An ocean of feeling

 

It is a quiet and sunlit morning, Sunday in a country village, with church bells pealing every so often.

 

The puppies have been brushed and tidied up and they are going to the vet in Worcester, about two hours by car.  They will be vaccinated  and given booster shots, given new rawhide chews and sterilised hoozes to gnaw on. The vet, Ilse, is excellent with animals and the puppies run to her and jump up for hugs.

 

While Una takes the puppies to Worcester I am going to play the Intermezzo in C, Opus 119 from Brahms. It is such a luxury to be able to sit all alone in the living room with the windows open and just listen to that music breaking open the locked doors within. As I listen to the range of tonal feel and the orchestra like a magnetic deflected conversation, pauses and interludes and cries of anguish or joy, I will be thinking about the young impetuous Brahms at 21 so desperately in love with Clara Schumann, herself an older woman married to the crazed alcoholic Robert Schumann, flinging himself into the Rhine to stop the chords crashing inside his head; Clara the outstanding and gifted pianist of her age, thwarted, hindered, caught between raising children and touring, practising her art.

 

As a young woman my mother was a concert pianist, travelling alone from the British colonies of Africa to study in Leipzig and Vienna. In Vienna, her hands began to tremble on the keyboard as she played Chopin  and she was sent to a doctor in a quiet back street lined with linden trees. He prescribed Valium to calm her nerves. When she returned to Africa, she was able to get more Valium. Then she began to wash down the Valium with gin and orange juice, brandy and ginger ale, imported wines. The gift died in her little by little although she would sit at the piano motionless for hours. She could not practice because she fumbled the chords. After my brother was killed, she would listen to Mahler, the Kindertotenlieder, Songs on the Death of Children, over and over again until I thought I would go mad with that heartbroken and unanswerable music echoing in my head.

 

For years I could not listen to many composers, would leave restaurants if certain symphonies were played. I listened instead to jazz, especially when drunk and maudlin. I blocked the hunger for Brahms and Schumann and Bach within me.

 

Sobriety has freed me of the past and I am rediscovering the beauty and power of those great Romantics once again, their Sehnsucht, the yearning and mania for soul-filled experiences and the Eternal. As I listen, the shackles  within me fall away and I can begin to fly. All that choked grief and anguish from my childhood is comprehended and transformed in the great musical passages of the composers that once inspired my mother.

 

When I was nine years old, my mother glanced at my hands and said dispassionately,’You will never be able to play, even though you have a fine ear: the span of your hands is too narrow.’ And I inwardly sighed with relief, that I would not have to sit and practise for seven or 12 hours each day, that I would be free to write. That I would not enslave myself to that  making of art, that I would not have to make the choices made by Clara Schumann. When she was elderly and suffering from arthritis so that her finegers slowed on the keys, she was given opium. The undoing of the artistic impulse through addictive remedies that poison the well at its source.

 

The tragedy of my mother’s life and eventual suicide would seem impossible to bear without that music she loved so deeply and which comes to me now, so late in my life, another undeserved gift free for the taking.

Listening to stillness

 

A glorious lazy start to the weekend — woke up to the delicious smell of grilling bacon and percolating Kenyan coffee. The birds had quietened down and the house was filled with sunlight and silence.

When I came back from eating out in a local restaurant last night, I went  into the back garden to scan the skies; a new moon is almost here, sometimes called the Dark Moon in Aquarius. This year it will coincide with a solar eclipse. At night the garden is deep in shadow and the scent of the ‘Black Knight’ buddleia with its panicles of deep purple blossom very strong and sweet.

Implicit in the Steps is the notion of attentiveness, sometimes called mindfulness. Listening out for the whisper of the divine, the wordlessness of God. It is about keeping quiet long enough to find stillness, the deep peace of the natural world. For most of my life my mind has been filled with empty noise, the clamouring ego, the sound and light pollution of our crazy society. Now the silence fills me at unexpected moments, within me and all around.

 

We went out to supper in a small local restaurant recently refurbished, simple whitewashed rooms with high ceilings and polished mahogany tables, the shimmer of reflective surfaces: mirrors, glass,  silver and lit candles. Slow smoky jazz playing in the background. The owner/chef Neil came to sit with us, recommending the Moroccan lamb with preserved lemons, the oxtail, the crisp green salads and Caprese’s layering of ripe slices of tomato and buffalo-milk mozzarella, spiced with bright green basil leaves. The place was full of couples and groups of friends, everyone laughing and chatting.

Neil asked if I still do food reviews and the laughter bubbled up inside me. As a food critic I was the strangest creature. I would begin the meal filled with kindness because the glass of cabernet sauvignon was going to my head and everything would seem wonderful, delightful, heightened and promising. After a few glasses of wine, my palate would be numbed and dull but I would go on tasting and passing opinions. Lit up and talkative. Then the second bottle of wine would be empty, but there would be liqueurs to have with great sugary desserts. More of my own voice prattling away full of conviction and vehemence.

And afterwards I would go home and make notes of what I had eaten, scrawled spidery aides-memoires so that when I woke up the next morning something would be there to help my addled memory. But as I sat writing, a sodden bitterness would come over me: I would feel bloated and dyspeptic and highly critical of the food — it now seemed too rich, the portions too large, the melange of tastes discordant — too garlicky, to buttery, too much chilli, not enough lemon, too little mustard, too much whipped cream. I would condemn what I had praised so lavishly earlier.  And when I woke hungover with indigestion the next morning, I would work out a compromise, trying to be fair and not blame my own excesses on the restaurant. Those endless juggling acts of the ambivalent alcoholic-in-hiding…

The longer I am sober, the less I am able to romance the drinking. All those ‘beaded bubbles winking at the brim’ were just illusions bursting as if pricked by a pin. Now Iam sometimes able to shut up and listen to the silence.

Fifty-Five on Friday

 

Because I love Shadow and need time out from beating up on myself. And I need to get in touch with my inner haiku. In 55 words or less.

 

You tell me

 it’s snowing on one side of the river only

obsidian river grey as mist

I’m there with you 

bringing the equatorial sun and

a pineapple

to make your mouth pucker

 I’m looking at night rain in your eyes

those who matter never mind

and the river’s flow is

just ice passing through

pineapple rings like hoops of sweetness

take another bite

Yes, I know it is more than 55 words, but I got hung up on the pineapple and wouldn’t let go of the word ‘obsidian’.

Fearless

 

Well. that was a surprise.

 

I had a short break from work and took the quiz to find out my word for the year and this is what came up.

 

I think of myself as a cowardy custard if the truth be told. I’ve run away from the consequences of my actions so often. I’ve lied to avoid embarrassment and said nothing when I should have spoken up. I’ve fibbed to save face. I have resorted to what I used to call ‘spontaneous inventions’ to impress others. I used to put smart little lies on my CV to entice would-be employers and was never caught out. I ran away and hid when a friend was dying and made excuses. I was not brave enough to tell a friend that her drinking would kill her. I stayed silent when the class dunce was mocked at school.

 

I have been afraid of the truth all my life. The truth pierces right through all the shabby fictions of who I pretend to be.

 

And I can’t even blame all the cowardice and lying on alcoholism because it was part of my life when young and it still went on even after I sobered up. Telling the unvarnished truth takes more courage than I am capable of.

 

The best I can do is to tell one small sober truth each day and make an inward note of all the exaggerations and little white lies and various dishonesties.

 

I’m not fearless and I wish I were.