13 years

Today I feel…so so strange. My solar plexus is doing cartwheels. In fact all my chakras are spinning weirdly, every which way, like I’m being teased apart, unravelling, dissipating and then being crashed back together.  I take a deep breath and everything spins again. Lurches like sea sickness. Just the most massive psychic disturbance. 

Is it because my boy is 13 today?  I dunno.  Thirteen years ago I became a mother. An archetype I never thought I’d constellate.  Thirteen years ago I was in a hospital bed in Taunton squinting in disbelief at a helium balloon with ribbons dangling from it that a friend (who worked in the mortuary at the hospital) had placed above the bed while James and I slept, exhausted (the pair of us) after our severing.  

I couldn’t believe anyone could be so feckless as to allow me to be in charge of this being; this precious person.  I knew then, with total certainty, that I would lay my life down in a nanosecond for him. I still would. I’m pretty sure I always will.  When I feel as if entropy is tugging me, when the dissipation becomes almost too unbearable, he tugs me back. My lodestone.  And then I worry because I don’t want him to feel pressure from the enormity of my love; don’t want him to feel in any way responsible for my happiness.  I suffered the weight of immense parental love. Isn’t that a funny thing to say?  Most people complain they weren’t loved enough – and lack of love is a terrible, terrible thing.  But too much parental love can be onerous too.  When expectation is so high that you cannot bear to disappoint.  And I hear my mother’s voice in my head soothing, ‘Never, never.’  And Erik the Viking. ‘Don’t be bloody stupid; come here, Trollop, and have a hug.’ Yes, he called/calls me Trollop. J And my birth father?  He just holds me close to his cable-knit cardigan, the one with the leather buttons, that smells of pipe smoke and wool.  He never said much. I can’t hear his voice. No. I’ve tried again but I can’t.

Anyhow. I didn’t expect to be writing this.  I was intending to go to the gym, to see if my body had mended enough (a sneaky attack of the bloody palindromic rheumatism thing I thought I’d kicked into touch) to let me stretch my limbs but the gym was shut and so I’m sitting here going back in time, projecting forwards in time and here, right now, my solar plexus is still spinning wildly and my boy is at school and my dead parents are dancing in my head and life is so very very very strange.