All The Tears All The Time

So, long time no blog blah blah blah.

I’m typing this on my phone in the wee hours, so please forgive any typos or formatting issues. I might go back later and fix them. I might not.

2019 has been a clusterfuck. For lots of reasons. I might go into them another time. The end result is that I’m in a fairly deep bout of depression. At any given moment I’m 15 second away from tears. The tiniest thing can set me off.

So I took myself off to see a new psychologist, she seems to think the answer is self care. The problem is I don’t really know what self care looks like for me. It’s definitely not baths. I don’t mind a scented candle, but surely that’ll get boring very quickly? I’m thinking maybe it could be resurrecting this here blog? It helped me through some shit before, maybe it can again?

Eighty

My Dad would have turned 80 today. Yet another milestone reached without him here.

I miss him every day, but on days like today, I miss him more than a lot.

Dad with his parents. What a hat!

Dad taking me for a ride on the motorbike

Chyken & Dad

At our engagement party

In London with Mum to visit the Queen

His 60th Birthday Party

Pre-wedding touch ups

Dad sung a lot. He often replaced the words with 'doodle doo'.

Merry Christmas!

I find Christmas a very strange time of year. I like the idea of Christmas, but the reality has been quite difficult for me for several years, for lots of reasons.

But, that's just me and I know others don't feel the same, so whatever you like to celebrate at this time of year, and however you like to celebrate it is fine by me.

I hope it is everything you want it to be, and then some. I hope you get a gift that you absolutely adore.

I hope you eat all your favourite foods and spend time with all your favourite people. At the end of the day, that is all that really matters.

If you need me, I'll be over in the corner, eating trifle.

A Better Place? Nope.

 

If you are planning to go to visit a grieving family after the death of a loved one, and the best thing you can think of to say is 'Well, at least they're in a better place now', stay home.

I understand that you THINK you are saying something helpful, but you are not.

Even if that magical 'better place' is something you strongly believe in, I'm here to tell you that unless you are 100% sure the grieving person has the same beliefs as you, it will not help. In fact, it is downright upsetting.

Unless you have actually died and been to this other magical place that is 'better', you don't know, so please don't say you do.

Someone came to visit us after my Dad died and said exactly that. Almost six years later I can't help thinking about it more often than I'd like to, and it still makes me sad when I think about it.  It is in no way helpful when the only thing you want is that person to not be dead.

While I'm here, don't say things like 'at least it was quick' or 'at least you had time to say goodbye'. You probably think that is comforting too, but it is not. It's no consolation that it was quick, it still happened.  Have you ever had to say goodbye to someone knowing it might be the last time you will see them?  What on earth do you say to them? How many false alarm goodbyes do you go through?

It's also a bad idea to ask grieving people if there is anything you can do.  They won't know, or be able to put into words the things they need. Much better to arrive (with food is never a bad idea, there are tonnes of people coming and going and they all need snacks)

All you need to say to a grieving person is simple: 'I'm so sorry this happened. I love you. Would you like a cheezel biscuit?'

The Third Christmas

For the first time since my Dad died three Christmases ago we have a tree.

It feels... Weird. 

The last two years seeing Christmas stuff around the traps made me sad.  Really sad.  I wanted to spend the day in bed with a doona over my head.

This year?  I'll be honest, I've been going from being totally OK with Christmas to a blubbering mess.  Sometimes in the space of three minutes.  But, I like shiny things, so we have a tree.

Went shopping today and got these totally cool ornaments.

We also have lights on our house and an inflatable Santa riding a motorbike.  As you do.

Festive letterbox, anyone?

We have a very quiet Christmas Day planned. With good food, bon bon jokes and the repeat of the Carols By Candleight on TV.

And I think it's going to be OK.

All I Want For Christmas Is My Own Two Cents

Note:  If you're new here, you might want to read this earlier post for the background story...

I posted something on Facebook last week about how I wished people would stop writing things on there about Christmas, and more to the point that I wished Facebook wouldn't do the thing it has recently started doing where it tells me just how many people are talking about a particular topic.  I wrote it fairly late at night when I couldn't sleep and a billion thoughts were running through my head.  Although the topic was making me cranky, I tried to tackle it in what I thought was a lighthearted way:

It would appear that some people took it to heart.  I got comments on the post and a couple of people contacted me privately to tell me they weren't happy about it.  Apparently it is OK for other people to tell me to lighten up about it, but not OK for me to hate on Christmas.  I tried to point out the irony of the situation but got nowhere.  In the end, we agreed to disagree.  They went back to loving and I tried not to go back to hating, but it's really hard.  Christmas is bloody everywhere and it seems to have been since Easter finished.  I know this all started by one flippant post on Facebook, I know it shouldn't bother me, but I have been thinking about it a lot since then.  I've tried to work out why (apart from the obvious) very time I logged on to Facebook and saw Christmas mentioned I felt my heart rate rising and tears welling up in my eyes.  Surely I'm allowed to have a bit of a whinge about it on my own Facebook page if I want?

The thing is, I don't want to hate Christmas. I don't want to have this feeling of dread. I want to be excited about it.  In fact, I used to be excited about it.  I could barely wait for the first day of December to put up the tree.  I was the person who searched for the biggest, shiniest Christmas earrings with the most LED lights in them.  I still have them, somewhere, along with several Christmas t-shirts.  I wrapped my presents while watching the Carols by Candlelight on the TV.  I LOVED the lead up to Christmas.  If I'm honest, the actual day was usually a bit of a let down, but the lead up?  The lead up I loved.


But now? Every tree I see and every carol I hear just reminds me of what I don't have any more.

Christmas

It's almost that time again.  Christmas. 

Christmas had always meant 'family' to me.  It was a time to be spent with family, where presents were given and received.  By family.  When my Pop was alive, he ALWAYS arrived with Red Tulip after dinner mints (the thin square ones in the paper sleeve) for everyone and Tweed perfume for Mum.  She didn't like Tweed perfume, but she never told him that and he continued to buy it.  He would also have a packet or two of Mackintosh's Toffee De Luxe.

The Egg & Cream ones were my favourite.  I used to leave the Coconut ones for Dad because coconut is foul and gets stuck in your teeth and to the roof of your mouth.  Let's not talk about how I left the almond part of sorched almonds for him. 

Christmas day involved lunch with everyone around the family dining table, eating too much home grown roast lamb and the best pavlova in the world made by my Mum.  After lunch we all had a nap and then had leftovers for tea. 

Later on, when my siblings got married and had families of their own, it was traditional for us to spend Christmas Day at home, or with the in-laws, then we would all get together on Boxing Day.  It was an unwritten law.

That changed two years ago. 

Well, actually, four years ago was the last time we were all together on Boxing Day.  Three years ago Chyken and I spent Christmas in England.  We spent Christmas Eve in York and Christmas Day having lunch with his extended family, including his Grandma.  Despite me holding out hope until 11:50pm, it didn't snow, however I did see my first and only squirrel that day.  We spent Boxing Day in front of a fire in a 300 year old barn that had been converted in to a house.  Different, but still involving family, and we had celebrated Christmas with our Australian families earlier in December.

Two years ago we had our usual Boxing Day thing, but my Dad wasn't there, he was in hospital.  The rest of us had lunch and made plans to do it all again when Dad came out of hospital. 

Dad didn't come out of hospital. 

We never had a 'proper' Christmas that year. 

I doubt we will again.

Father's Day

I have lots to tell you about my birthday weekend, but now is not the time.



It's Father's Day today. My second one without him.

Here are two posts about my Dad I'd like you to read. Or re-read as the case may be.

My Dad

Port and Peanuts

If you are lucky enough to still have a Dad, I hope you made a fuss of him today.

If you aren't, then I am so sorry.

To my Dad, I love you and I hope I'm making you proud.

My Sister

I have the best sister in the world.  I know a lot of people think they have the best sister in the world, but they're wrong.  Here are but some of the reasons why my sister is better than yours.

*She is older than me.  Old enough that when I was born it was like she had a real doll to play with, and play with me she did.  She looked after me a lot when I was little.

*She saved her pocket money and used it to buy me Strawberry Freddo Frogs.

*When she moved out of home, even though things were really strained with our parents, she made the effort to come and get me and take me to her house for weekends. 

*She let me wear a pretty dress and be a junior bridesmaid at her wedding.

*She didn't get too mad when I spilt an entire can of lemonade on my pretty dress just before we had the wedding photos taken.

*She can do amazing things with hair.

*She used to let me cook things in her kitchen.

*She has the best stocked baking kitchen.  With all the right sorts of sugar and lots of different sized baking trays and things.

*She cooks me Meatloaf.  And sometimes meringues.

*She has entrusted me with the care of her children.  More times than I can count.

*She introduced me to Lolly Gobble Bliss Bombs

Accept no imitations!

*Even though she didn't like him nobody liked him, she supported the fact that I chose to live with a fucktard for almost four years.

*She supported me again when I chose to leave said fucktard.

*She always seems to know when I need reassurance about things.

*She helped me more than words can say when PTSD engulfed my life the first time and she is doing the same this time around.

*She is the first person I call when things go bad, and the very first person I call when things are great.

*She is beautiful. Despite the fact that she lets me cut her fringe with kitchen scissors.

*She loves me unconditionally.

*She gave Chyken permission to ask me to marry him.

*She pretended to act surprised when I told her I was engaged to Chyken.

*She helped me put my wedding dress on, and told me I looked beautiful.

*She proudly stood beside me as I took my wedding vows.

*She kept me together when my world was falling apart when my Dad died.

*She held my hand and stopped me having to walk out of the church on my own behind his coffin.

*She let me move into her house when there really wasn't room.

*She treats Chyken like he has always been part of our family.

*She is an amazing mother.

*She makes me laugh.

*She listens to me.

*She is hopeless at trivia, but comes along to trivia nights regardless.

*She is the bee's knee's, the ant's pant's and the cat's pajamas.

*She has no idea how wonderful she really is.

*She is my best friend.


Me & My Sister

 Today is her birthday. 

Happy Birthday to the best sister in the world!   I hope you have an amazing day. 

Thank you for everything you do for me. 

I love you.

Jo xxx

Band Back Together

Today I have a post published on one of my favourite websites,  Band Back Together.  It's a story you may have already heard, but I am still very, very, very proud to be with The Band.

*image from weheartit

{Driving Me} Crazy For You

I was told over the weekend that I am 'not a very nice person'.  I've spent a considerable amount of time pondering this, and I've come to the conclusion that it is bullshit.  If I was truly not a nice person then why would Chyken live with me?  Why would I have such great friends?  But then a little voice inside my head says 'If someone said it to you, then it must be true, and if it is true, why are you paying a shrink an awful lot of money for him to teach you to how convince yourself that you are indeed a nice person?"

Confused?  Let me set the scene for you:

There is a woman who is also in the cast of the show I am currently in, 'Crazy For You', who has been in several other shows with me.  Neither of us have every had big parts, we both have chorus parts, and are not really crucial to the plot or anything like that, we usually just hover about in the background.  She is an older lady, maybe 60ish (I am really bad at picking people's ages, so she could be anything from 40-80).  She spends the whole time we are on stage over-acting, and the whole time off stage questioning everyone else about what scene we are up to and what song this is and what the dance moves are and is it time to go on yet? 

All.  The.  Freaking.  Time. 

Never mind the fact that she has been to just as many, if not more, rehearsals than I have, she still rarely knows what she is doing.  And I will just state for the record that this has happened in all the shows, not just this year. 

During the performance on Friday night, this lady was late to arrive to the stage for a song.  Instead of just not going on at all (which is what i would have done, and I have seen other cast members do) she went on to the stage, but in the wrong place.  Which meant the other five of us were also in the wrong order.  Needless to say, that song and dance number was a debacle.  She made us all look like idiots who didn't know what we were doing.  When we came off stage she tried to make light of the situation by saying "Did you like the new version of that song?".  I replied, fairly bitchily, but rather quite restrained for how I actually felt 'No, actually I didn't."

The next night we were all waiting in the wings about to go on-stage and she asked me (for the THIRD time that night alone) if she went on first in this scene, or third, or last, or where.  All my restraint went out the window.  I replied with "I don't know.  It's not MY job to know where you come on."  The scene started and she (somehow) found her way on stage and we sang and danced our little hearts out.

In the dressing rooms after the show, while I was taking my make-up off, she came up to me.  The conversation went like this.

Her:  "I need to say something to you."
Me: "Yes?"
Her:  "Well, I was really upset by what you said to me backstage"
{I just looked at her}
Her: "In CASE you didn't know, I JUST lost my mother, so if I have been a bit confused, then that will be why" (She started crying) *
Me: "[her name], everyone has things going on in their lives, we all have problems and issues, but if I have upset you then I am very sorry, that was not my intention." 
{I then walked away from her and started to get changed.  It was a genuine apology, I didn't mean to upset her, I just wanted her to get her shit together.}
Her: (by this stage, almost yelling so the entire cast was now watching what was going on) "Well, I.. I... I don't think you're a very nice person at all"
Me:  "Then it is lucky for me that I really don't care what you think, isn't it?"
{She then started some very over-exaggerated sobbing and left into the other room, with several people going after her to fawn over her and tell her what a horrible person I am.  No one asked me if I was OK, probably because I wasn't crying crocodile tears to gain attention.}

The next day she kept giving me dirty looks, but although I overheard her asking others where she was supposed to be and what scene we were up to, she left me the hell alone.  Thank God!  Perhaps some good did come out of this and she will never ask me again?

Now, before you think I am a complete arsehole, please know that I do realise, with the benefit of hindsight, that I didn't handle the situation very well, but unfortunately, this is a symptom of the bullshit PTSD that I live with every day.  I have a very short temper.  However, I don't think a short temper makes me a horrible person, does it?  The difference with me and some others with a temper is that I don't seem to have to use my fists to get my point across.  That's gotta count for something, yes?

*Just so you know, I already knew this, as she had been at rehearsal the night it happened.  Why she thought it necessary to rehearse that night I'm not entirely sure, because when my Dad died, rehearsals would have been the last place I went, but, each to their own.  If there is ONE thing I have learnt in the last 18 months it is that everyone deals with grief in different ways.

Not A Fairy Tale

Once upon a time there was a girl. 

She grew up on a farm in the country.  She was the youngest of four children who were all much older.  She has almost no memory of all six of them living in that white weatherboard house with a blue tin roof.  Perhaps she should, because she remembers other things that occurred in the same time frame, but she does not.  She vividly remembers going to kindergarten.  She remembers her first day at school and yet she cannot remember the simple act of six people sitting around a dinner table eating roast lamb. 

What she does have memory of is fear.  Dark days. Violence.  Being picked up and thrown as Queen's 'Another One Bites The Dust' is hummed.  Watching as a dog mauls a cockatoo to death in her backyard.  There are other events too, but the details are hard to recall.  Perhaps that is a good thing?

She does remember living in a house of three.  Mostly happy days spent playing with her cousins and friends.  Working on the farm with her Dad.  Making cubby houses, riding bikes and wishing for a horse that never arrived.  She cherished weekends with her sister where her hair was braided and she made cupcakes in the kitchen of a ramshackle cottage on a hill. 

As the girl grew into a woman, the dark days returned.  She was alone in the white weatherboard house with a blue tin roof, but he turned up and interrupted her day with shouting and hitting and breaking and threats.  She wishes those days hadn't happened, or at the very least she wishes she could forget them.  But she can't.  They swirl around her, reaching out and piercing her soul.  Made so much worse by the refusal of acknowledgement from those that matter most, the ones who should protect her.

Eventually, the woman is forced to move away from the white weatherboard house with the blue tin roof.  Away from the shouting and hitting and breaking and threats.  She rents a little flat and spends a LOT of time at the pub.  She gets a crappy job and there she meets a man. 

There are happy days at the start, lots of happy days.  But soon the days again turn dark.  It happens rarely at first, the shouting and hitting and breaking and threats, but soon becomes part of her normal day.  She learns to live with it, after all, she has before, hasn't she?  She thinks about running away, but she is stubborn.  So stubborn.  The thought of admitting to everyone that she was wrong, that she IS wrong is more terrifying than the abuse.  What if she is not believed this time?  So she stays.  For almost four years she stays. 

Then comes a birthday.  She does not behave in the manner expected of her and he turns, like he has so many times before.  Lots of shouting.  Lots of threats.  Lots of breaking and even some burning.  To this day the woman is not sure what exactly happened, but something within her changed and she walked out the door.  It was not easy, there were more threats, some empty promises and a lot more shouting.  Eventually there was a court appearance, one of the hardest days of her life.  But now it was over.  Or was it?

The woman moved back into the white weatherboard house with a blue tin roof for a while. Life continued on. There wasn't any shouting or hitting or breaking.  The threats had always remained though, always in the background of any encounter.  She moved out of that house to the city and tried to work out where she fit into the world.

Many years later, she met the most wonderful man and fell in love.  He felt the same way and they started to make plans for a wedding.  She's not sure how it happened, but all the dark days that she had barely even thought about for years suddenly crept up on her.  She had a breakdown.  She started to doubt everything about herself.  She was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.  Luckily, she sought help and underwent therapy and took medication.  Life went almost back to normal.

The woman became a wife.  She promised to love and be loved, in sickness and in health, for richer, for poorer.  It was the best day of her life.  She went on amazing honeymoon to Europe.  Her husband bought her a cat.  Life was perfect.

By now, the farm and the white weatherboard house with the blue tin roof was owned by someone else.  No trace of her family remained there.  They all had their own families, in their own houses.  Her parents lived in the town now and it was there that the wife and her husband went to live while they built their own house.  They day after they moved in, the girl's dad was diagnosed with cancer.  Trips to doctors in the city began.  Operations were planned.  The prognosis was good.  The cancer was removed and chemotherapy began.

Her Dad had a reaction to the chemotherapy.  A bad reaction.  Barely any platelets.  Doctors not sure what to do.  Two days after Christmas he was sitting up having some toast one minute and was gone the next.

The girl's world fell apart.

Arrangements had to be made.  Music selected.  Flowers chosen.  So many decisions.  So many different points of view in a family of so many.  Nowhere to run to, she was living in the middle of it all.  Two days before the funeral it all came to a head.  Lots of shouting.  Almost some hitting. 

Even though it was no-one's fault, the girl got the blame.

She went back into therapy, back on the happy pills and is again trying to work out where she fits in the world.  Most days now she can see the sun shining through the dark clouds and life is getting better.

Once upon a time there was a girl. Let's call her Jo.

Unexpected

It's a funny old thing, grief.  It hits you when you least expect it. 

Last night when I was watering the roses in the front yard of the Castle I was not expecting it.  I had a wonderful weekend.  But one minute there was water coming out of the hose, the next there was water coming out of my eyes.  All because of a fleeting thought...

'Dad won't ever see these roses.' 

And he won't.

And it makes me sad.

And it has been a while (a good two weeks at least!) since thoughts of Dad have made me actually cry.  Sure, I have been sad, but not to the point of tears. 

One step forward and two fucking steps back.  When will I start to just move forward?  Ever?  


Hmmm... I'm having second thoughts, perhaps there isn't anything funny about grief at all?

Today I am grateful for my sister.  In fact, every single day I am grateful for my sister.