The Empty Chair

Having said I was in a writing group but not submitting, I then found myself posting a poem after all. Funny how things work out like that. 

The prompt was about writing a letter  -  I was astonished at the number of women who wrote to their miscarried children. It's an experience that is explained away by statistics: the miscarriage rate for women over 35 is 25%, and for women over 40, one in three pregnancies won't make it to full term.  So, yeah, pretty much anyone has been through this experience and it's supposed to be like getting a flat tyre or being gazumped. A bit of a pisser at the time, but hey that could happen to anyone, move on, get over it. 

it struck me that there a lot of women pretending to be ok. 

I've written about this before, although I don't really talk about it - no-one does, do they? Didn't that happen ages ago? Haven't you got two beautiful children now? Do you think it helps to keep on thinking about it? What an awkward topic. It will make everyone feel uncomfortable.  Keep calm and carry on. 

I'm going to lose the last stanza, which is fitting since a 33% loss is in line with my age group.   But now it is floating about like a spirit without a resting place, so I'm going to let it anchor here in the clean white empty space. 

Your growing up marked by

No lines on the door frame

And unlit birthday candles

Just Fine

If people ask you how you are, for goodness sake don't tell them.  

When things are bad, the only people who want to hear all about it are those fuelled by schadenfreude, the ones who always thought you needed bringing down a peg or two. Quite a lot of the mums from school fall into this category.  Happy to drink my coffee and eat my cake. Happy to use my nanny, then my au pairs, to help them out in a tight spot. Happy to accept teas, lifts, sleepovers when they had other plans.  

I thought there was a longitudinal reciprocity in this.  And I thought at first that enquiries into my wellbeing, or lack of, were rooted in concern.  That now the time had come for them to help me in return. A sleepover for the Troubled Child. A trip out to cheer up the other one. An invitation to pizza, coffee, spa days. Lifts and pick-ups, even a hand with the many, many appointments we now have to attend. Silence. Where are you now, you bunch of bitches? 

The larger group of people don't want to hear any bad news at all.  They loved hanging out with me when I was the life-and-soul. I've had a great idea! Let's do this! Let's do that! Picnics. Parties. Dinners. I'll arrange this, I'll arrange that - tickets for a show, a day out in London, a weekend away, a holiday. We had plenty of money too, and we were generous with it. Why not? They were our friends, and as Charlie Sheen said, "If I'm eating steak, my friends eat steak too".  Where are you now, you fuckers? 

The people who give a shit about me and how I feel can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Exactly, precisely. They know who they are. This is hell and high water, and here they are. 

Fingertips

Inching my way up the cold unforgiving flank of each week is almost insurmountably difficult.  My approach involves an hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute focus in which I edge from one precarious balance to another, all the while resisting the urge to tumble backwards into oblivion simply by letting go. 

From a distance each week looks as smooth and hard as Portland stone, but right up close there are toeholds, tiny ledges to hold me a up a little while, until I can settle my equilibrium and creep tentatively to the next situation.  A phone call. Ten minutes with a magazine. A walk over a bridge before a meeting. A coffee. A little chat on Facebook.

So what happens when I reach up, fingers straining at full stretch, to find the next place to hold on has gone? I'm doing this climb without a harness - when does a gripping point become a tipping point? 

I've never been climbing so I don't know what happens next. 

Come Up and See Me

If you can't make someone smile, it's a sure sign you've outstayed your welcome, I reckon. 

Back in the day, I could make your eyes light up. Light up the room. Light up your life. Lighten your load. Light your fire. 

Now I am in the negative. A black sun radiating darkness, casting white shadows like the ghostly outlines of the Hiroshima victims, their absence etched forever into the stones. 

The distance is growing between us every day you do not smile when you think of me. I am so lonely in this cold, quiet place where no one wants to come. I never had anything to offer you except myself, but neither of us thought at the time that this might be more of a burden than a gift. 

There is no need to shoulder it.  Lay it down and walk on with a spring in your step. 

Epistolary Emission

In my writing group (to which I belong but no longer submit....) the prompt this week is Letters. As we're poets, we only tolerate the vaguest of prompts. Who would I write to, and what would I say? 

A few years ago my sister wrote a letter to my parents. She said she was advised to do this by her psychotherapist. I feel pretty certain the advice might have been Write not Send. Anyhow my parents received this letter, taking them to task for bestowing upon my sister a raft of problems not in any way of her own making.  They were distressed and bewildered by this letter, and it made me really angry. For heaven's sake - we are grown people in our forties, surely we must own our situations by now?

Perhaps I would write to my sister.  She says that since I had reason to suspect her husband was cheating on her again, I should have told her not to move the family to Australia, where she is now abandoned as a single parent and can't have her dream wife-life.  I could explain that I started a conversation with her about whether it might be a good idea or not, to which she responded "don't try to make me change my mind, you're always pissing on my plans. It's all arranged, we're going, we've resigned from our jobs, bought the flights and paid six months rental up front on a flat".  At her leaving party, I was so worried about the situation I cried for the whole evening, which did not go down well: "pissing on my party".  I could write and ask her why she recently, seemingly randomly, blocked me on Facebook. But I probably couldn't be bothered.

Perhaps I would write to my brother and ask him why, when I took him on board to do some work for my company after he lost his job, he hardly did any of the things he agreed to but still pressed for the money.  Awkward  - better to leave that letter unwritten and move on. 

I don't need to write nice letters to people I love and care about  -  I make sure that I tell them the things I want to say when I see them.  Why wait? Life is short. Say the things that are important while you have the chance. 

Dear John letters should be banned as a matter of course. The least you owe someone you've cared for is to look them in the eye as you say goodbye, and to allow them the courtesy of the last word.  

Perhaps I would write to my younger self.  I might have some advice, but at this point in my life I don't feel I could write anything encouraging. How could you make a young person understand the joy of being a parent, of amazing sex, of love, of good books, of a project well done  -  but that all of this is tempered at best with the tedious drudgery of work, hoovering, sock-washing, and at worst streaked through with the terror that you might outlive your children. 

Dear Universe. Please tell me things are going to get better. Please tell me my girls will grow up to be happy, healthy adults. Please tell me I will not always feel as lonely as I do right now at this moment. Please?

Couch Potato

I've been seeing a counsellor. 

She thinks that I need to work on acknowledging my emotions. She thinks that the putting-things-into-boxes-then-ignoring-them strategy may not be a sustainable approach in the long term. She thinks there are too many boxes now, and the things inside the boxes are banging to come out, and the boxes are rattling and the lids are coming up and oh my god it's like that scene in Poltergeist where all the bodies start bursting up out the bottom of the swimming pool and and and....

Even writing about the boxes opening makes me feel a bit panicky.  I've spent my whole life boxing. Why would I stop now? 

Well yes, there is the small matter of the breakdown. Of the being tracked down by the police. Of the escorting to hospital. Of the nearly being sectioned.  That. 

I insist on referring to it as a "meltdown". Somehow that isn't as scary, and makes it sound rather wry and perhaps more like a tantrum or a bad day. As I explained to the emergency psychiatrist, I'm not mad: just sad, scared, lonely and really fucked off. 

Three months on, I don't feel any different.  Most of the time I don't feel anything at all.  If I open myself to those feelings, it will be horrible, won't it?

"Have you tried writing things down?" she asked me.  That's when it really struck me how far I was from myself. Three months of seeing a counsellor and I hadn't even told her I'm a writer. 

Can You Tell What It Is Yet?

“I can’t help feeling sorry for Max Clifford. He only groped a couple of wannabe’s, back in the day. Things were different then. It’s unfair to judge people on today’s standards for things that happened in the last century”.

How can you be so wrong?

Max Clifford was jailed. You might have thought it was different way back in the good old days when he was feeling women up in his office, but guess what? It was ILLEGAL. Back then. Back when some people thought it might be ok. Like one-for-the-road was ok. Like smacking one on your wife was ok.  It was against the law. And the sentences being handed down for these dirty old men are the tariffs for the offences at the time they committed them.

Yes Rolf, there are often times when “it takes two to tango”. But not when one of you is a grown adult man and the other is a frightened thirteen year old child. Yes Max, she wanted to be on Page 3. But that didn’t give you the right to touch ask her to take her top off and touch her breasts. Yes Jimmy, you raised a lot of money for charity – but that’s not the legacy you’re leaving behind in the nation’s memory.

Do we miss the Good Old Days? Those were the days when a girl couldn’t bend over to pick up a dropped paperclip in case her boss put his hand up her skirt. When she couldn’t smile at her colleagues for fear they would take it as a come-on. When she had to walk home from the station a different way to avoid being shouted at as she passed the building site. When her college tutor persuaded her not to make a complaint about the student who raped her at knifepoint because “these things are so often a misunderstanding”.

Dirty old men are being hung out to dry after a life-time of leering, lechery and illegal assaults.  These things are so often a misunderstanding – but if a few extra heads roll, it’s not going to trouble me over-much. In the overall cosmic scheme of things, if all the attention, the discussion, the debate, the jail-terms make someone re-think his own  behaviour, then it might just make a difference. Max is taking one for the boys, and it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. 

Write Now

Anyway, my counsellor pointed out that if not-writing makes me feel as if I don't exist, it might be a good idea to consider writing.

It's quite a bold assumption - do I want to acknowledge that I do indeed still exist? I suppose I can't float around in limbo forever, physically vital, heart beating, head aching whilst my mind is a dead, flat fog. 

So here I am. 

I'm trying. The rest of my life still ahead of me, dammit. There it is in the picture: a blank page. 

I had better write myself better, write myself a better story.  Keep your fingers crossed for me.