Post 376: Getting worked up inside and out.
Keeping busy is one sure fine way of how to stop beating yourself up—until you stop.
The shredding was done and bagged and sitting there in a neat ball of completion. Happy days. Now what am I going to do…
My Darling had got up late on my orders and, after my earlier breakfast with the cat (we had separate bowls I’ll have you know), I sat in the lounge TV chair and tried my best to keep my eyes open.
Perhaps the extra little bit of morphine drip-feeding into my body from those pills is causing my tiredness.
It could be cancer, my mind suggests.
I hear laughing from my PB (Positive Brain) and I dismiss the thought, but the NB (Negative Brain), with its voice of scaredy-cat Zilly (a character of “Dastardly & Mutly and their flying machines” that used to spend his life trying not to fly and was always hiding his head inside his big yellow jacket)—(what a programme that was, Hanna-Barbera’s Wacky Races. Who is your favourite?)
But my NB (Negative Brain) tells me to get a tissue to mop up my damp eyes that can’t stop reading too much into the “clean before you die” attitude, quickly followed (while I’m still Zilly) by a need to hide and find easier things to do.
I can’t kneel down, so the first thing is to pick up the paper on the floor that missed the shredder slot. There’s only a couple of sheets but I can’t reach down to them. I had to employ help, with the long-handled gripper, the one with the pistol grip.
Once that was done I opened a few drawers of the enormous desk I have and started looking for things to disembark from the good ship Mr U.
I see this clean up as me having to get rid of things I would normally keep. So it’s no surprise it’s hard.
I saw an old windscreen holder for an old windscreen satellite navigator. Then I found a larger sat-nav, and I was starting to roll. This drawer was filled by that drawer, and soon I had lots of drawers open—but not too much coming out, just nostalgia.
I grabbed the handful of things for disposal and headed into the bedroom to use the bin in there as the next repository of these miserly pieces of junk. Well they are rehoused for now.
But I did need to shave and now the brand new rechargeable shaver is recharged, could be tested out on my chin.
To say that I needed a new shaver was not good reasoning. For one thing, I have never had to shave twice a day—more like twice a week—but I do try, and since the chemo last year the hair follicles have been slow to get back to work. Some do and some don’t—such is life after chemo.
But I gave the more quietly buzzing apparatus a go—but is it better than the one I’ve had for 30 years or so, which still works well, I don’t know. So why did I bother to buy a new shaver? Well, that just brings up the bad thoughts from my NB.
I’m buying things because I can.
And this is where I started to get selfishly despondent about family and money and things. And this stayed with me all day.
I did try not to moulder and fuss about these things but I just couldn’t help myself, so I asked for help online. On the Mac forum. Yes, here or hereabouts.
I sat down while my Darling went to the shops, after wiping more bird shite off the new car! Grrrrrrrrr.
She’s getting used to this happening now and every time it has to be done or else it will stain.
So she left for town to get the raw materials for a Sunday dinner (midweek), and I wasn’t going to stop her.
So I wrote this: “How do I order up a couple of grandkids for my 30-year-old kids?” as a post title.
I was later to have a few discussions about it and I still have unresolved anger about it.
To be really truthful I didn’t say a word of this to my Darling and thus avoided being told very quickly to “belt up and forget about it”. But I can’t.
My waning life, however long that’ll be, is one that will conclude with my wife and my kids getting everything for themselves. I say everything for themselves because neither kid has kids (yet).
There is the remote possibility that there will be a grandchild, perhaps—I know. But you don’t know my kids.
I wrote this to end the day’s discussion and this will show you where I’m at…
“My own personal moment I can remember even now as clear as day.
After years of being together while our friends’ chosen paths were either gifted by mistake or throttled back by natural disappointment, it was a long while before my Darling did that about turn and told me she’d like to have a baby. My Darling and I were always together on decisions and I followed in the wake of this huge new world that was about to engulf us.
We were 27 and 26 years old and she thought she’d run out of time if she left it too long. I went along, with confidence in us as a couple, to survive all that England and John Major could throw at us.
Although my Darling was born 13th of 15 in the county of Meath, Eire—I was middle of three.
We struggled to get the two we had and love them best we can. I’m sure they try their best to love us too. But at 58 (3 years ago) I became a statistic on a list I never knew existed. A list that never gets longer though new names appear on it every day.
Now I’m more interested in another statistical list to do with births in England.
Lordy, Lordy, what have we done? I didn’t realise at the time that we were square pegs in square holes and our kids are not sure whether to bother at all with all that love that comes from creation and becoming a parent.
The long and short of this thought process, put down in writing for all to see, is the conclusion that I’m struggling big time with my beautiful family we struggled so hard to nurture is not ever going to be the “norm”—at least where grandkids are concerned.
I’m sorry to be so selfish.”
End of…
Whilst my dearest Darling made a beautiful roast dinner and I played on my phone with my own issues and others being questioned and answered, we watched the series (murder at the end of the world), which had its own issues of mortality and generational hand-down and protection. But I stayed unresolved. Damn it!
I must do better with my lifelong tidy-up and I must balance my feelings about my kids being the end of the line for this (my) family branch.
If I’m a family failure I can deal with that, but it’s not my decision to make.
We already have an heir and a spare.
We have done our bit to fulfil our part of the life cycle for my family.
It’s only my head that can’t seem to sit in the same thought-space. I’m broken. I’m weird.
I’m overthinking on the way down to life’s buffers.
Good night,
Take care,
