The other day I was watching an old episode of the West Wing where CJ Cregg goes home to Idaho and sees her father suffering from Alzheimer's. Suddenly, and this has happened twice in the car as well, I burst into hacking tears. I don't know why. Today (December 2nd) is my mother's birthday and the 6th is my father's death anniversary. On the 20th I turn 54 and I will become older than my beloved cousin.
I wrote to my cousin's husband that I feel a lack of love around me. Who can I melt into? Who can actually just hold me? We were not that close emotionally, but I could with my parents, and I could with my cousin - with no words necessarily being said. Now, there is no one. Yes, friends would give me that comfort, but I would not want to burden them - they have their own lives.
And, in the end, what does it matter? We all travel alone.
A few incidents:
She organises a trip to Brussels with her friend and gets the wrong month for the train and hotel bookings. They luck out and do not have to pay extra and now it is a funny story - but. boy, if I had been the culprit!
Obviously, I do all that needs to be done at home in terms of shopping and washing - tasks I am not trusted with when she is home!
One morning, she specifically says before going to work, 'don't run the dishwasher, there's plenty of space for dinner things.' There isn't, there's a bunch of stuff in the sink, but I don't argue. At the end of the day, she spends an hour and half re-arranging things and there are as many glasses and things left over in the sink as there were in the morning - and I have to hang around because I cannot clean the rest of the kitchen until she moves away from the sink! Annoying in a petty way and I point out that her hour and a half of delay made no difference whatsoever other than stressing both of us out. 'You don't know how to load the dishwasher,' was her response.
The following weekend she is laid up in bed with a virus. I do everything again - quite rightly - but, given that it is winter, I put some of the clothes into the tumble dryer. 'You should not have done that. If you are going to do that, you need to let me know. His sports clothes don't go into the dryer.' (They had not and there was nothing wrong with any of the clothes I had put in.)
And, yet, while I am upset at the tone and the anger, ten minutes later it is all sweetness and light. Is that real, can it be real?! How can you be so nasty to someone whom you are nice to less than a half hour later? I confess I cannot turn anger off and on like that.
Bollocks.
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