I find as I get older and wider that much of life seems to be arranged around points of view. The corollary of this is that, if you cannot change the problem, perhaps you can change your perspective of it to make it acceptable, or in some cases, barely bearable, if it was unsupportable when it first presented itself.
Oh there’s been a lot of opportunities for learning this week!
First the OH. I believe he resents my car. I love my car. I saved up for it for years and bought the demonstration model from a proper car showroom and I love it. It is VW UP and it is just a little car, perfect for little me. The old car, which the OH bought privately with the last of his retirement handshake has now been scrapped. It didn’t owe us anything and had driven many more thousands of miles to and from my mother than we ever intended when it was bought five years ago to be a driving to the golf range and round town retired folks car. For that it would have lasted forever, for commuting one or two hundred miles a week it definitely didn’t.
No one could accuse the OH of being a saver. He is too fond of investing in liquid assets and too used to being overdrawn to have any truck with cash in hand or savings anywhere. When I turned up at the car showroom with a handful of money he was as nonplussed as the car dealers who had to go and find out what you did with people who just walked in with money and out with a car. They kept going into the back room and having a quick meeting and coming out going: are you sure you don’t want finance? What not any finance? At all?
I needed my little car that fits me so well. The OH had systematically destroyed my driving skills so that he would have a permanent lift to the pub. Buying my little car myself, all by myself was part of my rebuilding of my confidence.
The car is little. When I wanted a new washing pole I measured from the dashboard to the back window and got six feet. The new washing pole just fitted, carefully inserted and I drove home with extreme caution and about one spare inch for emergency stops.
When the OH announced he was going to buy the wood for the grand daughter’s swing I was sitting in my shed and I was still there when he came home with the results of throwing eight eight foot long wood beams into my car and slamming the tailgate.
I finished my cup of tea and sat for another half hour doing breathing before I went to look. The windscreen replacing people are coming on Tuesday morning. I am grateful for the chance to exercise and improve my patience and the wonderful opportunity to practice lowering my blood pressure by breathing techniques.
I wish I could say the same about current contacts with my mother. When we went on Wednesday she had been with other residents from her dining table to get her hair done, completely forgetting that her hairdresser and friend of many years was going to come the following day to do her hair. The hairdressing friend was very philosophical on the phone, I think she would be heartily glad if she never had to go to the home again. So we all agreed, especially my mother, that it would be better if my mother went with her friends each week to get her hair done at the on-site salon. Fortunately I have already had a go at washing and setting my mother’s hair in her ensuite, so if it all goes bird’s nest I can rearrange her twigs to suit.
Whether I can stop her setting off the fire alarm in the hot weather is another matter. Yesterday she was being kept prisoner in the heat by wicked forces. She sounded like an extra from Tenko, kept on a jungle cage for days, instead of the old lady sitting surrounded by antiques in front of a slightly open real Georgian window, with a cooling breeze, which she actually was. The litany of suffering was interrupted by someone bringing her tea and she had to hang up in order to choose which cake she would have. Oh the humanity!
People inflicting little annoyances on you is life, suffering from them is a choice, assisted by the long view that it’ll all be the same in a hundred years anyway.
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The view from the tower is always worth the climb.