I have been washing my fountain. This is not a euphemism for anything, I have actually been washing my little solar fountain because the grand children are coming today and they always make straight for the fountain.
I should have been washing my fountain a week ago on Monday, which was my birthday. As it was a Bank Holiday and no one was working, the family offered to come for the day but I put them off and instead stood in the garden in the freezing cold digging trenches across the lawn and crying.
I have such low self esteem partly because I’m married to a drinker, partly because of my childhood. The drinker problem seems to get to all relatives of anyone who will put a fluid before a relative in importance. All the months I was lying in bed with cancer and a broken arm and the OH was out drinking himself into oblivion did little for my confidence. In fact it is one of my perpetual worries now; if I get sick again, he’ll be off.
The other, in particular the birthday thing, is to do with my mother. I did hope it would improve when she was no longer around to be difficult. It seems to persist. Every year I dread my birthday, think I might be OK, on the day am awful up to suicidal and then the next day I’m fine as if nothing had happened.
For years, by which I mean all my life, my mother used to say on my birthday :On this day I do not think of you, I think of your mother who gave you away. I did have birthday parties when I was little but I was supposed to be ‘of service’ to my guests and woe betide me if I ever won a prize by mistake. My twenty first was terrible. My mother poured vitriol verbally in my ear in the kitchen and then pushed me into my relatives in the lounge telling me to smile. Perhaps her behaviour had something to do with jealousy or control, I really don’t know but I do know the effects are long lasting.
Yesterday I was round at my neighbour’s, she too had childhood difficulties with her mother. She was dismayed to hear they did not finish when the parent passed as she was hoping they would. But she did suggest I had two birthdays, like the Queen. A real one to be miserable on and an official one for larking around.
I see there was a reunion on the news of a lady and her birth mother who is 103. I was always told never to seek my birth mother because she would have forgotten me and made a happy life without me, her horrible mistake, and that if I turned up on the doorstep I’d be a home wrecker. Lately I have thought it would not be too clever anyway to turn up just as someone was looking for someone to care for them as they’d gone a bit potty. I don’t think I can do dementia a third time, having paid for the first two with cancer each time. I might have to do it with the OH unless he packs in the drink.
So – Happy Birthday – is it just a saying, as I always thought, or is it possible?
On the other hand, it’s all good for a writer. If nothing bad ever happened to you, you’d be slim, healthy, happy, well adjusted, happily married, sound of wind and limb with achieving, kindly, caring and appreciative relatives.
Completely abnormal, in other words.
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