days of ups and downs...

It’s been a while since I’ve really been run over by grief. Today it came like a big double decker bus out of nowhere and suddenly I was flattened!

I didn’t think the day was that bad but I didn’t get much sleep last night and I guess grief has been bubbling under the surface for days.

The fault lines usually appear every school holiday, sometimes they miraculously hold but at other times they spectacularly crack.

And then there’s my dysfunctional kitchen which remains … well dysfunctional! The Aga is OFF AGAIN and I’m getting sick of microwave ready meals and cooking on the camping stove.

Plus I’ve been writing lots about the early months of widowhood. It’s still ONLY two and a half years since Andrew died. “That’s not a long time,” said my friend the other day. To me it seems an eternity.

What I miss most, what I’m actually grieving for at the moment is that hand to hold, the one that squeezes tight to let me know I’m making the right decisions. It’s a recurring theme of mine.

Of course I think I’m probably doing everything wrong, I’m pretty sure Andrew wouldn’t approve of some things I’m doing. He would certainly have a problem with all the money that keeps disappearing from the bank account as I spend it getting things fixed that he could have sorted in his own inimitable style much cheaper!

But the fact remains - 

the money is here and Andrew is not.

It’s what he worked so hard for, to provide for us, maybe he’s not frowning down on me after all.

On a happier note, I no longer have a hole in the kitchen ceiling …

 

  … and as of yesterday I now have some kitchen walls plastered ready for a lick of paint.

Then last night I received this fabulous comment on my re-ravelling Facebook page

Hi Sarah, I came across your story by chance earlier this evening ( much earlier actually as I have just sat here and gone back to the start of your Blog and read it right through!)  I have sat and cried and smiled and been inspired and encouraged! It is beautifully written. You say you want to turn it into a book. I think you must. 

There will be a great many people out there who might not ever 'come across' your Blog by chance as I have, or who don't even have computer access...but they will love reading your words. I look forward to your book being published. Thank you for your Inspirational writing… a Blessing to read

Well that was confirmation, as if it were needed, that I should carry on writing. That I have a story worth telling and the means to share it.

So that’s my week, the good and the bad.

Next week the boys are back at school, well youngest is while oldest completes his exams.

Next week the Aga is being serviced, the hot water will be on tap once more and I will be able to bake a cake and cook a proper wholesome meal!

Next week the plastering will be finished and hopefully I will get to see some real improvement in the kitchen. (I promise I will post more photos!)

And next week there may still be tears and moments that trip me up and send me sprawling flat on my face again, but hopefully the good will outweigh the bad, the sun will shine and I will still remember to smile.

Visual Dare - Flights of Fancy

Hello my name is Sarah and I am definitely a blogger and sometimes I even call myself a writer ...

I've not blogged for a week, too busy writing other stuff, like turning my unravelling edges blog into a book, it's all about grief and loss and it's been really tough this week ...

... then I started another blog post and I ended up going round in circles but eventually came up with an idea I plan to use another day.

That's the thing with writing sometimes you don't know what you have to say until you write it down.

Sometimes your thoughts run amok, getting ever more tangled and twisted until you smooth out the words into coherent sentences that are more or less grammatically correct.

Well let's blame Angela at Anonymous Legacy for what is about to follow. She posted this obscure picture as her Visual Dare prompt...

All I had to do was write 150 words and after a little while there they were, an exact word count unleashed upon the page with the ominous title Flight of Fancy.

I'm quite pleased with what I have written and I hope they make some kind of sense to you too...

Flight of Fancy

Irrational thoughts flew out of her head like dancers twirling on tiptoes. They rose higher trailing long sleeves behind them that embraced every emotion.

What if?

Why?

Who?

If only she could really let them escape and empty her head of all this noise once and for all but she had to catch them. They were too dangerous to fly free causing havoc in the space that exists between dreams and reality.

“Your thoughts, what you have in your head are precious. They are the elements that make you unique.” That’s what he told her, she had no reason to doubt the gentle cadence of his voice.

She tugged at the threads to pull her thoughts together into some semblance of order.

They billowed like balloons on strings.

She wound all but one back in.

Curiosity she left hanging and she followed it to see where it would take her.

The Wisdom of Snoopy!

I should be writing, well I am writing this now but I should be concentrating on writing my book and not writing another blog post.

I spend far too much time procrastinating especially on Facebook and Twitter, it seems to be a common trait among us writers, but look I am actually calling myself a WRITER these days – hahahahaha – how far I have come!

Today I found this snoopy cartoon on Facebook.

Whereas Snoopy has given up and crumpled up his writing I haven’t. Snoopy’s resignation has spurred me on to continue.

 

I want my story to be told and the best person to write it is ME!

A few years ago I bought a card which said 

“DON’T LET SOMEONE ELSE WRITE YOUR STORY”

Open it up and it reads

“THEY’D MAKE IT TOO SMALL”

I can’t tell you now whether I bought it before or after Andrew died but it is another reminder to WRITE and KEEP WRITING!

This evening I visited a friend who has just acquired a pile of fabulous fabric samples, usually I'd drool and think about what I could do with them.

"We need some new projects."  I declared.

"I'd like to cover the sofa." said my friend.

I thought long and hard about what I would really, really LIKE to do.

Suddenly the thought occurred to me, "I want to write my book!"

I hope to have the first draft finished before the summer holidays.

My aim is to finish chapters 3 and 4 this week then I’ll return to the blog... for a progress report, maybe a bit of flash fiction and some procrastination - but only a little bit!

It never rains - it pours

It started with a smell, a curious mixture of damp and burning.

My first thought was the drains were playing up again; I flushed the toilet and ran some water in the bath to try and clear it.

Then I wondered if the burning smell was actually the derelict house next door – maybe someone had set fire to it. I opened the window and all looked OK, no worse than last time I looked with its smashed windows and debris scattered in the yard.

It was only later I realised what it was, I’ve smelt that smell before, damp hot water leaking from the hot water tank.

Hot water that eventually finds its way through the floorboards and trickles down the wall of the kitchen.

This has happened before and I’ve always suspected I should replace the tank with its dodgy fittings before I get the kitchen done otherwise I might inadvertently set in motion a catastrophe in my shiny new domain.

But I’ve neglected it, avoided the issue, and pretended it  would all go away – some things are just too much to deal with in my still relatively fragile state.

The issue is now a problem I can't escape, there's a bucket on the kitchen counter catching drips!

I am resigned to everything falling apart again, accepting of the fact the Aga has to be once more turned off, there is no hot water and no way to cook.

This is life with all its “crunchy” bits as one of my lecturers used to say.

Just as I avoided the plumbing dilemma I have been avoiding my unravelling-edges blog. Finding all kinds of other writing and non writing stuff to fill my time. But I’ve been poked and prodded of late into some kind of action.

“You need to do something with it to give you closure.” Someone said wisely yesterday.

And they are right, I will never completely move on from this state of being a widow but without finishing this project I started so long ago I will never move forward either.

I have so many dreams and thoughts and ideas for my future but I can’t side step all the hard bits, I can’t put this off much longer.

I am away from the household disaster zone at the moment; my son has a tennis course today so I am stuck indoors beside a tennis court, with some power for the laptop but no internet access. All I can feasibly “do” is write and sort out my hundreds of printed pages from my blog to try and work out how this all goes together.

Meanwhile at home my friend’s husband has my house key and he has sorted out a plumber to call while I am out.

Who knows what I will find on my return but as I left I noticed a rainbow sky, that deep dark cloudy blue perfectly lit by sunlight.

I searched and searched and as we drove along and suddenly I noticed it, dim at first, then brighter arching fully across the sky. My smile mirrored the rainbow’s curve, growing brighter and stronger.

Maybe the kitchen disaster is a blessing, the timing is uncanny, we were all set to start putting a new one in from next week. So it’s three steps back before we start marching forward but I will get there one day.

And as for turning unravelling into a book? You know on reflection some bits aren’t that bad, I might just be able to do it!

I can’t add up without you

It seems to me my life is getting busier by the hour. I am never going to catch up with myself there really is too much to do. And now as if to emphasis the point something else has literally just landed in my email inbox.

It’s not that life was always easier with Andrew here beside me but at least I had someone to share some of the tasks with, someone to make me go to bed when I really was too tired to function and someone to hold my hand when it all got too much.

Andrew was also someone to check up on my mistakes. I had a really blonde moment today, I went to pick up the tiles for my new kitchen and when I returned I discovered they are about an inch smaller than the ones we already have.

This shouldn’t be a problem but I had based my calculations on just counting the number of tiles on the walls and ordering the exact same number (with a tiny allowance for half tiles and breakages – oh so sensible!)

Andrew would have checked, measured and measured again, we would invariably over order but there is no way we would arrive home with too few.

I just can’t add up on my own, my brain has turned to mush and I am getting very lackadaisical lurching from one mini crisis to another.

Last week I got in a muddle over tickets for Wimbledon. Our local tennis club is allocated certain tickets and members can express a preference and enter a ballot. I glibly selected and won tickets for the first Monday, Centre Court no less only to discover the next day when I decided to check the calendar that Oldest Son has his last GCSE exam on that date!

After a grovelling email and phone call to our efficient club secretary I managed to get them changed but I feel awful for putting her out and getting in such a mess.

On Monday I only just made a school governor meeting with minutes to spare, it had almost completely slipped my mind.

 

I am forever asking my friends for help with looking after Youngest Son while I ferry Oldest around. I’m counting the months until he is 17, fervently hoping he will pass his driving test then I will gladly get him a car!

It is his diary that is the fullest; May and June are full of tennis matches and exams.

Youngest doesn’t get much of a look in but he’s quite happy with the Wii and a bit of Lego (or a lot of Lego, he’s counting on getting the biggest Lord of the Rings set in the summer hols.)

So what about me, apart from playing taxi driver I am chief kitchen designer, I daren’t think about the muddle we will find ourselves in only a few days’ time. I haven’t even ordered a worktop or thought about flooring yet – GULP!

Obviously there is filing on the dining room table to be cleared away/hidden while we need temporary storage space for the kitchen stuff.

Then on top of the mundane household stuff there’s that old recurring dream of writing…

As I mentioned I have just been away on a writing weekend, now I am back I feel wrung out rather than rested. This is because I have decided I really must get my unravelling-edges blog into shape with a view to publishing and that is the manuscript I showed to the real-life-published-author who was running the weekend.

He would like to see more.

It’s not easy plunging back into that level of grief, the water is cold and icy. The emotions I thought I had laid to rest are stripped bare and churned up again. However I know I need to complete this project for my own satisfaction if no one else’s.

So my task is to write but in the real world writing becomes just another thing to do on a very long list.

I need to prioritise what’s really important between the house, the boys and all my other commitments.

I need to sit down and do some proper calculations. My adding up has been a bit unreliable of late and my greatest fear is that I make a huge mistake somewhere along the line.

It’s easy to buy a few extra tiles (OK another 160 tiles – I’m sure I’ve over ordered now!) but what if I spend my time doing something that turns out to be completely pointless? Meanwhile I miss other opportunities I should have taken.

Will someone check my adding up please?