Veronica Foale

Author: Veronica Foale

  • Well, crap. That snuck up on me.

    There is silence in the house and I am still bleary eyed, but I have made the effort to get out of bed 40 minutes early so that I can start writing here. It’s got nothing to do with the fact that I am so busy today that I won’t have time later. Hello November. You’ve sort of snuck up there, haven’t you?

    ***

    There is a psych appointment scheduled today. It’s been cathartic to go along each fortnight and just talk. Like every other mother however, last week I found myself dicussing my children. My fears and my stresses and the frustration I feel when I walk into the bedroom to find my daughter perched on top of my closet, eating my chocolate. She’s the perfect candidate for “owling” except for the screaming when she realises that she can’t get down.

    Real owls have wings daughter, if you’re going to climb up, you have to learn how to get down. Just don’t break anything.

    I spent an hour talking about my children last time, before the therapist gently mentioned that maybe we ought to talk more about me?

    Silly girl. She’s not worked with many (any?) mothers, I would put money on it. The children are me and I am them. The fears for their future are not things I can separate from my personal anxiety and the frustration I feel at untriggered meltdowns is just as real as frustration with other adults. Tempered with a lot more love, of course.

    I shouldn’t call her silly, in fact she is lovely – even if it is a bit disconcerting to be discussing the tangled web inside my brain with someone my own age.

    But that is okay.

    The main question is: Do you think she will help me work out how to get a cat into the roof, to eat the baby starlings that have hatched right above my desk? Because it’s hard enough to write a blog post half asleep, without adding shouting babies to the mix.

  • NaBloPoMo

    Someone shoot me now, I’ve decided that I’m going to attempt NaBloPoMo on this blog right here. Either it will extend me and make me write more, or I’ll jump off a (small) bridge (into a fishpond) half way through. Oh and have I mentioned, I’m getting MARRIED in November?

    I’m an idiot. We agree. Let’s move on.

    ***

    The timer is our God. Let us all worship at the altar of small magnetic electronic devices that count down seconds and beep obligingly at the correct time. Most screaming can be cured by a declaration of ‘I’m setting the timer RIGHT NOW’ and ‘When it beeps you can and NOT BEFORE.’

    Join me in my worship of the two dollar device. It will make your life easier too, with the beeping and the pressing of buttons.

    ***

    ‘I DON’T LIKE YOU!’

    ‘I DON’T LIKE YOU EITHER!’

    The shouting starts and I suspect that the trigger was a tale told about a biscuit stolen before the appropriate beeping from our God was heard. They shout it at each other and suddenly, my son is laying flat on his back wailing that SHE HIT ME and SHE NOT LIKE ME.

    Time outs were administered as my son sobbed his tale into my shoulder. The hit didn’t hurt as much as the chance that his big sister (his idol, his partner in crime, his mess making helper) didn’t like him.

    It feels like the morning is lasting forever.

    ***

    I declared myself to be happy that it was Not Winter anymore and the universe decided that it was going to teach me a lesson. Cursing at the clouds doesn’t seem to be helping.

    This is why I’ve changed my worshipping habits and you can find me making offerings to The Timer. Drips of blood and pieces of chocolate, maybe I’ve gummed up the works, but bugger me if it doesn’t look happier.

  • Sara Douglass

    Have you read this post by Sara Douglass?

    She died today.

    I hope her family were there to hold her hand and watch her last breath. I hope she wasn’t alone.

    The Silence of the Dying

  • Give me your broken

    Give me your broken, your battered, your dark. Give me your tortured past and your stories of hurt. Offer them up to me and I will keep them safe, here in the darkest depths of my soul.

    Your pain shows me that I am not alone (never alone).

    You are not alone either.

    I want to flip the world over and discover the underbelly. The soft, dark, rotting underbelly. No one is as perfect as they think they are. We’re all a little shattered, here, inside our minds.

    You can glue something back together, but it will never be the same again.

    ***

    If you keep pushing everything down; the pain, the emotion, the hurt and anger; sometime in the future, your brain will decide that you’re safe (right when you’re not expecting it) and shatter into a million tiny pieces. People will look at you and wonder, why is she broken now? What changed?

    Nothing changed, and everything, all at once.

    As they scratch their heads and wonder, pondering uselessly on your sanity, you’ll be left sitting in the middle of the room, the shattered remains of your mind falling on the floor, as you try and find the glue to glue it all back together.

    The good glue, the one that holds everything together, even as the salt water of tears threatens to dissolve everything again and the white heat of anger melts you.

    Not everyone finds the good glue.

    Some of us have nothing more than sticky tape and string, hopes and prayers, tangled remnants of song lyrics, to hold our brains together. I cannot say that this is an effective way to parcel up your sanity for use again. Maybe you should put it in a box and save it for later instead.

    That’s what I did.

    ***

    If you keep your sanity in a tidy little box and place it carefully inside your closet, closing the door after it, when people ask you:

    ‘Have you lost your mind?’

    You can reply:

    ‘No. No I haven’t. I know exactly where it is – it just doesn’t work very well anymore.’

  • Where did my year go?

    The time slipped away from me and when I stopped to take stock, I realised that it was September already and months had passed. My daughter turned five (FIVE – where do the years go?) and grew an attitude and my son spends his days clinging to my ankles.

    This is life, the time passes and the world turns, until it feels like everything has changed (but nothing has changed) and you’ve been stuck spinning in circles like a spinning top.

    How did I get to this point?

    I sat down to write, a few days ago and got stuck on all of the things that had happened. A sum total of All Of The Things That Have Gone Wrong and I stopped, stepped away from the computer, and had a panic attack. Surely that wasn’t me? (It was you.)

    I didn’t want to think about all of the reasons that I am Not Coping right now, until they slammed me in the face with the Not Copingness of themselves and I had to stop thinking.

    Everything will be okay, if I can just stop thinking about all of the reasons why things will never be okay.

    Then, everything will be okay.