Woman at Work

It is another day when I don't know what to write. I am sure though that something will appear on the screen - it always seems to. If I can just keep typing. One more letter, after each one. Keeping going... Persevering....

life feels a bit like that right now...

When I get an attack of the hormones, i don't want to slog at work. I want to take life a bit more gently. I want to be one gigantic slob. Maybe a slightly creative or bookish slob but a slob all the same. I don't want to go for a walk, I want to go for a saunter, but I want it to be the only real thing I do all day. I don't want to talk but I do want contact, i want it in the form of nice undemanding hugs.

I came home today and I felt so tired. Is it fair? I don't think so. We are not people of equal effort. Some days we could work for hours and hours and it not be a bad thing and other days just turning up at work is wrong.... I never thought i would envy the women of other cultures who get to go into seclusion at this time.

We are bought up on the assumptions of feminism and the democratic culture that women should be treated equally and this means we can function fully all the time. Of course we can... but... I am not sure we should. Why do I have to prove anything?

Same with childbirth... Women get kicked out of hospital so quickly now. From what my Mum says, the hospital staff used to spend time with new mothers, making sure that they knew how to do the things they needed to, like feeding, burping, changing nappies and bathing. Women didn't have to work and keep house and bring up a family....

Now not all women want to stay home and not all men want to work. Why have so many choices been taken from us in the guise of giving us freedom? I am not saying I don't want to work. I want to be able to respond to my bodies needs. I want to be able to balance my life.

I don't think these set working hours we keep to allow us to honour balance or our womanhood.

But then what do I work for anyway? What does my work achieve? Not a lot of anything real to be honest with you.... Nothing about the work I do feeds anyone, or clothes them. The work i do is really just another link in the big corporate money machine... Definitely not a link in the chain linking us all together in love. Still I get paid and I get a generous holiday allowance, plus bank holidays. I also get training, maybe, in useful industrial skills. I believe once I have been there a while I will be eligible for a nice pension scheme which almost certainly won't support me for the many years I can hope to be retired for... Guess I shall be back there tomorrow then with my aching back and stomach and a dreamy lethargy more suited to spirit journeys than data entry.

Invisible

Sometimes some of my aspects feel invisible. I am some of the time a Mother. I have a stepson who has spent regular time with us since F and I first met (almost - he didn't know about me for a couple of months...). This role, this persona of mine is not recognised or acknowledged...

I never receive a birthday card, in fact I don't think he could tell you what my month my birthday is even in....

I don't receive a Christmas present. F is doing well if he gets a bad bottle of wine...

I don't get to go to Sports Day.

I don't get to go to School Plays.

I don't get cute drawings bought home from school.

I don't ever get a card.

But how does S see me? A couple of weeks a go he says that he likes it at ours best because sometimes we go out. He is still giving me hugs, even in his near teenage-ness, often without me having to ask. He comes and watches TV with me and things sometimes in preference to being with his Dad. He listens to me. He allows me to tease him about girls and things and although he would never admit it publicly, he loves these teasing conversations and gives as good as he gets.

I have tucked him in at night. I have read him stories. I have bought him clothes. I have washed him. I have helped with homework. I have told him off. I have fed him. I have laughed with him. I have cried with him. I have given him money. I have bought him presents. I have cooked for him....

But as a Mother I am invisible.

If anything happened to his mother, although I could never replace him, I could be me and look after him.

Nobody sees me as Mother though. My parents don't send presents for him at Christmas. They often take my sister and her kids out (they live much closer than I do) but they never send money for us to go out somewhere nice with S. They do send me money sometimes but S is below their horizon and they do not see me as a mother either. I don't think they see me as understanding some of the problems and issues of raising children.

As a mother I am invisible. But there must be people out there who are completely invisible....

Beggars on street corners...

Children locked in cellars...

The child in a class who is neither clever or requiring assistance and is quiet.

The women of certain cultures, in certain families....

The person who is abused but those who know are scared of the abuser and look the other way...

People in solitary confinement....

I read or heard a story once about a child who was ignored by everyone. No one saw her anywhere. Slowly she began to fade away until she really was invisible... How sad... I think people would fade away in some way. But I am not ignored, I am acknowledged as an important person in S's life by him in so many ways.

I think there must be people in blogland who feel invisible too. Wouldn't it be lovely if we could find all the new blogs and bloggers somehow and welcome them in?

Lymph Notes

I woke early and plan to go back to bed... but I needed to wait for F to go to work first. I had finished reading blogs and looking at emails and was bored, so I clicked on the first blog of note, cancer banter. I only read one post because a link took me to an old blog called Lymph Notes and I got a little distracted.

This blog is complete. It has served it's purpose to it's writer and has been left as a gift to any who find it later...

The writer is a gay man who has been HIV Positive for a long time. He lost many friends to AIDS, and I think his partner to. He is a man who understands the value of happiness and how to inspire others. Nearly a year and a half ago he was diagnosed with Hodgkins Lymphona and the blog tells of his journey through cancer to a complete recovery. In it he seeks not only to write his own thoughts but to show cancer can be a gift, a time to live at a different speed with different priorities, and how even cancer can be approached with happiness and humour.

This blog touched me deeply and I shall tell you why here....

My Grandfather sounds like he was a lovely man. A creative, sensitive soul, who although he was a music critic by trade, was well loved by all those he critiqued. Apparently this was because he had a sensitivity to his reviews and was always constructive. Many years later my Uncle (his son) lived in the town where he lived last and while visiting a pub, a man approached him and asked him if my Uncle if he was related to him (my Grandfather). He touched people.

When my Mum and Uncle were young, he moved to another town for a new job and they were told that they would move there to be together again. Only they didn't ever move. Eventually a divorce followed and my Grandmother remarried. My Grandfather was eventually engaged to marry another woman. Before they were able to marry he was diagnosed with Hodgkins. What was even more tragic about this was that his fiance's first husband had died of Hodgkins also.

They never did marry as he wanted his ex-wife to carry on receiving all financial aid related to him in order to benefit his children. My Mother was still young and my Uncle was even younger. They hadn't made their way out into the world yet....

Many years later, my Mother and I were sat with my Grandmother looking at old family letters and things when my Grandmother decided to tell us more about her relationship with my Grandfather. I don't think this was done in a nice and caring way. Apparently my Grandfather had been caught in a mens toilets up to things that nice married men with children shouldn't be doing. He lost his job, hence the move to a new town. There never had been any intention that they would all move to this new town and my Grandparent's marriage had been effectively over from that day.

My Mum felt betrayed. All these years the things she had been told and had thought had been a lie. There isn't any obvious way of getting at the truth either. There is a part of me that would love to know if he was gay or bisexual or if it is untrue. Hearing this about him made me feel very, very sad. He never lived to see a time when gay relationships could be discussed more openly and were accepted. What sort of life must he have lived, trying to be other than he was?

My mother has chosen not to tell the others of my family for reasons I understand. It is just to dificult and personal and impacts on so much of the most difficult times in her life. I did once discuss it with a distant relative and she said that the lady he was due to marry was very charismatic and had a sort of open house frequented by arty sorts. I could obviously never ask her.

One of his good friends had the fortune of developing a very successful career and as such he is relatively easy to track down. He lives on an island off the coast of Scotland (isn't the internet a wonderful thing) and he is openly gay. I have been saying for a long time that I shall write to him, not to ask that question but to ask of any old stories, or memories or even photos taht he might like to share. I know this friend was very close to him as he commemorated him in a very special way. Not surprisingly he is advancing in years and it worries me that my fear will stop me from contacting him and one day it will just be too late....

Reading about Hodgkins also feels very relevent right now for other reasons. I have a lump under my arm. It has been there for several months and has been prodded and poked by several people who think it is benign and just a cyst or an infected lymph node. I am due now to start antibiotics in the hope they will discourage it. If they don't I am to return to the Doctors. Although I don't believe it to be anything serious, and neither does my Doctor, I still had to mention the Hodgkins to him....

I think one of the saddest things about reading this blog is that this form of cancer can now be completely cured. How many years after he died did that happen? How big was the gap in time that meant his diagnosis was a death sentence?

And yes I know I have to write that leter.... Life IS too short...

Things...

We took Little Dog and S out for a touch of cavorting today. S and Little Dog were as normal a little duo act. I managed to lose my ball on a string in some brambles with a very bad throw. We discovered hide and seek. S hid and Little Dog did the seeking - it was most amusing....

Little Dog is learning manners a little. She was being a bit pushy with a dog, got growled at and backed right off. Another dog she wanted to play with had nervy owners. It was a big dog with a halti. It didn't seem aggressive and I just got the feeling, being a new convert to trusting my dog, that maybe they should trust theirs a little.... They would all probably enjoy it all a little more... i know we do now...

I did some crafting this morning but am a loooong way off having anything interesting to show. I have some ideas bouncing around inside my head though... For when I have a moment... Which will actually be quite soon as I have booked a week off, starting this Friday evening. It will be F's first week in his new job that week too and he will be doing a lot of evening shifts so I will actually get to see him to. I am going to really miss him and having him work shifts is going to take some getting used to.... It isn't that I will be lonely but that I will be lonely for him...

I experimented further with black onion seed tonight - i cooked up some garlic and onion with it then added some boiled potato, then some spinach on top so it wilted in and finally some toasted pine nuts... Yum... It went very well with the sweet chilli marinated salmon we had. S had to try a spoon full and on doing so he stated that the spinach wasn't as bad as he thought - not that he wanted any more... *laugh*

I need a bit of time to catch up on projects and things.... My jewellery pile has gotten higher and I still don't want to get back to making any... I have three necklaces and two pairs of earrings to make - most of which won't actually take to long... I reckon a good day and I could knock out most of them (I hope).

I would also like to get down to some letter writing and message in bottles that week too....

I have also realised a slight difficulty with my 101 things list - walsking Little Dog in three beautiful places each week... Walking around the block doesn't count. Beautiful places require the car.... Neither of us like the rain... Beautiful places aren't we go on rainy days... It rains a lot in Cornwall... On top of this, I am behind from when she was ill and had to be kept at home. I also have to decide whether it counts if F takes her somewhere nice while I am at work....

Thing is Little Dog can only take so much of this walking milarkey. Off the lead she just keeps running, backwards and forwards, in circles, after a ball, whatever, just at speed. She has some of the greyhound speed and some of the collie stamina so she keeps going longer than a greyhound would but half an hour of running and she sleeps the rest of the day. She collapsed when we got home and once I became available she managed to move a little in order to collapse on my leg....

I suspect that if I stick with my intention, this will be a hard target to meet... Without killing my dog with exercise....

Trust

Last week sometime there was an accident. It closed a road and was all over the traffic reports as I drove home. I later discovered it had been closed for hours. A cyclist had been knocked off and critically injured. It was touch and go for a time but they got over the worst and now face a long and slow recovery.

I don't know the cyclist.

I have never met them.

I do however know someone who knows them very well.

It is like that down here. Sometimes it seems that everyone knows everyone else. I had only lived down here a couple of years when I met F but before long we discovered that we knew about ten people in common. Everybody knows everybody else. If you sit down with a stranger for long enough you will discover a connection, even if it is a little tenuous. For F he sometimes discovers the stranger is a relative, several generations removed.

I went to one of F's work do's and discovered his new colleague was an old college friend.

I have a job going door to door promoting stuff and I meet F's first ever boss and an old family friend who clearly remembers him as a baby.

I work somewhere with confidential records that I have to sort and get to see more than I ever wanted to about an old neighbour, an old colleague of F's and the daughter of a near neighbour. Not in a bad way, just in a sad way...

These are just some connections. It happens all the time down here. I sit in the office at work and listen to people discover that such and such a friend of someone is suspected of having an affair with someone else's Mother. That the person who was stabbed was someone's relative. That the killers went to school with so and so. That someone knows my future brother-in-law.

Maybe in this context my unwillingness to put in my blog anything that could identify me to easily makes sense. I don't want my faith, my views and my feelings to be something people have a bit of gossip about. They are my private me, not my public me. They are not things I wish to discuss with the future m-i-l over Sunday lunch. I don't want to be that witch who lives on such and such a road because then people have expectations and chances are I won't want to meet them.

That is not to say that I am shy and don't want any of you to know who I am. A number of you know my real name and email me. A number of you have my address for art swaps and things. It is the random people who come by blogs or find them in searches, who leave nasty comments (not that I have had any but we all read blogs that have had this I expect) that I don't want to know who I am.

I have to say that generally people I know do not have the address of my blog. F does and Red. My Mum knows about it and I wouldn't have a problem with her reading it. If she read it though, the rest of my family would know to. The thought of telling my recently baptized (by their choice) niece and nephew what a witch is doesn't sound like fun. The thought of my Dad having to read about my feelings would make both of us uncomfortable. F only reads my blog now when he wants to get another take on how I am doing, the last time I know of was when big Dog died.

So what has brought all this on? I have a new follower. A very, very talented photographer (Hello Simon!). His blog is full of places I know. I know the names of some of the un-named and seemingly obscure places shown in photos. I suspect we live in roughly the same area.

In blogland, you slowly find and become associated with other blogs with similar focuses to yours. You can become associated with several different communities. I am part of a witchy / spiritual b-community, art journaling b-community, art postcard b-community and now I have made my first link into the Cornish b-community. This is a really big thing for me....

I think I am going to continue being cagey on my blog about my identity and the identities of those I know. I think I am going to open my arms wide to the Cornish b-community and trust that those that come to find my blog through this new link won't try and play detective and piece together any of the clues. Trust that I won't suffer from the negativity that others have and if I do that it will be contained within the e-verse and not spill into my life here in Cornwall.

So hello and be welcome here Simon..... and anyone who wants to see some really good photo's of this beautiful part of the world that I am lucky enough to live in, head on over to his blog....