Everybody Hurts

So another teenager in our little Smallville circle has taken an overdose.

She decided the first thing to do after she’d taken the tablets was to text my daughter (yes, the one who did this herself a couple of years ago) and say goodbye. Daughter, in huge distress, rushes round to her house. Teenager is hysterical and explains to daughter what she has done.  Daughter calls an ambulance, teenager is rushed to hospital. Daughter has gone home distraught. I am rushing home from the city to see what I can do to console daughter.

I can’t tell her everything will be ok, because maybe this time it won’t be. The teenager in question is very troubled and has tried this a few times before.  Even if it’s a calculated gamble that she’ll pull through, I imagine that repeatedly putting your system, your kidneys, your liver through this poison and its equally toxic antidote, must weaken it over time – so your calculation might be few points wrong, and then… flatline.

As a parent, I’ve done the frantic dash to the hospital. I’ve sat and waited for the bloods to come back every half an hour to see whether she’s going to make it (paracetamol has a progressive effect so you can feel ok at first, but it’s doing irreparable damage to your liver, and so no-one knows at first whether the antidote is too little to late).  I’ve sat through the night in the adolescent psych ward and it was the most terrified I’ve ever been.

So I was pretty surprised that in all of this, the teenager’s mum has found the time to track down my number and ring me to complain about my daughter interfering in their private family concerns.

I explained that she felt she had no choice. She was told about the overdose and she immediately dialled 999 because time is of the essence.  She knows this from bitter experience. She loves her friend, perhaps she has saved her life.  The fact that the parents were downstairs in the house watching TV and the teenager did not talk to them but contacted my daughter instead is not our fault.

What is the world coming to? So much pain and so much anger everywhere. 

Impending

Oh shit - it's coming. I can feel it coming. I can feel it in my bones.  

This morning when I woke up, I lay in bed staring at the ceiling for 45 minutes. I had to run an all-day workshop for a client so this was not supposed to happen.  

I made it to the workshop (of course). I ran the workshop and it went really well (of course).  But I can feel it massing up behind me.

There are things I should do to stave it off. I should be downstairs right now pedalling it out on the bike. I should be out for a walk, a run, a swim. But already I can't.  I have seen friends, as many as I can - but my stress is at the house, in the place that should be home.  
A house stops being a home when any one of these things happens:

• You come home to find your husband fucking your friend in the house
• Your work is based at your house so work-people come in and out all the time with their own keys
• Your work is based at your house so when it's time to go home, your work is still there, blinking reproachfully in the office
• Your work is based at your house, so when it's time to go to work, your housework is still there, the Cyclops eye of the washing machine staring balefully at you over the piles of laundry
• You have already decided to sell the house so it's on the market and looks like a showhome with all signs of actual inhabitants removed
• You have already decided to get divorced and have allocated each piece of furniture in a horrible game of His'n'Hers

Since all of these things have happened in the house, it doesn't feel much like a safe haven. 

I was looking forward to getting a new house. 

Happy Anniversary

There wasn't anything much to celebrate about today. He forgot. But then again he always did anyway, so that was nothing new. 

I went for lunch with my daughter, I went out for tea with my friends. The sun shone - and I tried not to think about the fact that no-one wants to buy our house (or any house) at the moment because of the Brexit and so we are still glued-together in a situation that goes from benign indifference to thinly-veiled resentment to shouting and crying. Actually I'm the only one who cries, even though I think overall it's the right thing. 

So why am I crying? I cry for the wasted opportunity. We had such a great life. We had everything going for us. We had fun together, we had a lovely family. A lot of effort went into making that possible.  And therein lies the problem. 

Our fundamental disagreement is that he thinks I let him down - at home, in the business, in bed. Basically I drove him into the arms of other women. Few women are likely to be able to provide the full 5* service offering that I did, but hey good luck with that one mate. Strangely enough I disagree with his view of the situation. 

So on we trudge, still shackled unwillingly together. I am now facing the prospect that all the plans I made will come unstuck and I'll be back to square one. I am really struggling with this. I see a cloudbank of despair on the horizon and I am doing everything I can to outrun it.  Let's hope the wind will change.