Up-and -down. Like a yo-yo. This day of hiding in my lair & keeping depression at bay...ends with joy. For no particular reason. F and I wash the dinner dishes together and sing and groove along to F’s compilation CD -Jack Johnstons Bubbley Toes and Isaac’s Somewhere over the Rainbow and Marvin Gaye... I’m completely in love with my son at such moments. lime green rubber gloves and all. Have to restrain myself from giving him the ‘adoring’ look., which causes him to scowl and roll his eyes and become suddenly less adorable.
Always that little tinge of bittersweetness, the knowledge of impermanence, that he must grow up, move away. Speaking of impermanence, both our moods change like the weather. He was grumpy and anti-school when I picked him up from the bus stop this arvo. By dinner time, dancing around the lounge room whooping. Later we improvised together on the marimbas. There’s nothing sweeter than this. Meanwhile D. was busy packing for his 3 weeks in Melbourne.
No matter how crap I feel I can always access some good, sane part of myself for him. And for therapy clients too. Thank God.
Denis got takeaway lunch from the health food shop and brought it home to share with me. He knew I was feeling a bit pathetic. Told me he had heard Steve Biddulph talking on the radio, on the subject of boys becoming men, initiation/rites of passage etc. apparently when Richard Adie asked him what essentially is the difference between a boy and a man, Steve B said something like ,” A boy thinks he is the centre of the world; a man understands he is here to serve - his community, family, other people ”
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It is August 30th which means my mother died eighteen years ago today. I can hardly believe it. She died on a sunday night in a country hospital in Queensland, with a view of a white weatherboard church out the window. Bells ringing, people going in & out on the morning of that long harrowing day. The descision was finally made to give her the morphine shot, after hours of watching her writhe about , as if unable to get free from her cancer-ridden body.
Later that night, when she was gone, her lifeless head resting on the pillow looked to me like a marble angel. Back at her beloved beach house we all -even the most cynical among us - felt as if her spirit was intensely present, so loving and harmonious - and free at last. We stayed up all night, drinking and weeping, and watched the sun rise over the ocean. Why am I revisiting all of this? She is long gone but I still miss her. Sometimes I worry that I dwell too much with the dead.
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