The ever after

In this place where love once lived
a dried up festered dream remains.
Golden rust of autumnal woods,
meandering paths of possibilities
waiting for us to walk down them
with love songs on our lips;
Now lost are the ways, harsh and tangled.

Loving once only to watch it die
not in a glorious poetic moment
but putrefy, with age and resentment
in a cheap terraced house of no note,
magnolia, with unfinished edges.

There is a child.
His pure hymnal laughter
shatters the mortuary air.
Another child grows
oblivious in my warm tomb;
astounding that cadaver like
I can grow a perfect life.

That mother was a patchwork quilt,
threadbare patches screaming apart,
she never held it all together.
And then this mother
cracking face and bleeding eyes
barren goddess to a child.

Can a child grow without dreams?

(July 2013)

The other reality

Night brings on other realities
of a languid woman of lusty hues,
spreading her limbs apart in desire,
and him. Dark eyes and dark hair
beautiful and clear and burning.
He could desire me, admire me,
snake his arms around my waist
kiss my neck to envious eyes.
He could, and I would let him,
now, when my limbs are liquid,
my man and my child locked
away in another reality.
I could even let this woman look
into his dark eyes and fall.
But I know, through my stupor,
that if she were to look over his shoulder,
the dreamy mist would give way
to ugly black dying shapes.
Why should this lust fuelled night vision
have anything more than the inglorious end
of the other reality of day?

(From early 2011)

The Priory

(The Priory became the only sanctuary from the persecution of my own thoughts. Could not imagine life on the outside. And yet, here I am, well and getting better. Looking in at that place from the outside is nice.)

(Remembering Gary, Hilary, Matt, Danielle, Lana, Toby, Becca, Beth, George, Richard, Caitlin. And Caio, Bhavna, Nicola, Christos and Harry.)

I remember that place
where I walked with those others.
Rough carpets and blank ceilings,
bland pictures that said nothing,
nothing that could reject or invite
or allow belonging.
And us others passing through this place,
mothers and children, addicts and saints,
stories flowing into stoic walls.

Curtains of ivy framing sash windows,
consultants ensconced in warm academic rooms
upstairs, at the tap trickling drugs that blunted our demons
while we raged and wept on the lower floors.

The garden with the border of red tulips,
defiant buggers that demanded we look.
Deflated balls lying around
for us to kick and ruminate over
while we talked and walked,
bared and covered.

The cold corridors with doors along it
like a tedious metaphor.
I stalked and sweated there.
Once I opened a door and looked in
on a child woman's tormented mind -
raped, addicted, judged, ashamed.
I ran back down that calm, cold corridor
and through my own unremarkable door.
Demented hermits we were behind the doors.

In my room I lay still, watching TV
day after day, escaping my thoughts.
They came with food and drink and care
and too loud voices and too bright lights
and made me wake, shower, eat and step out some.

There was love and philosophy and some simple things
pragmatic grit and resolute hope.
A little bit of everything went
into the making of my new peace.

On my last day, I was alone a lot in the garden.
The tree strewing pink blossoms
effortlessly, impartially,
on whose bed I sat and stared
for an hour at air.
A perfect circle of time,
broken perfectly by my child's embrace.

Outside in the disjointed world
I remember that sanctuary.
We others are among everyone.
No one hears our gnashing teeth
through the chatter of rambling days.
I'm learning it all again, how to be
a mother, a wife, God's loved child,
How to just be.

Art Therapy

I feel ready to share what I wrote and write some new stuff about my time at the Priory, recovering from my breakdown. I met some wonderful folk there and I want to make sure I remember them. So here's the first instalment.

For George the doctor and Richard the musician.

On an insolent day of April blue
I sat with alabaster shadows.
Wan faces turned away
from tempestuous tulips
that hurt our eyes.

'Paint a picture. Anything you see.'
I see fear but I won't look
I won't look I won't look!
I gather my blankness around me:
white, clinical, sanitised.

'How about some colours and brushes?'
I say I was never one for art.
Shrug. Pick up the brush.
Ragged grotesque strokes.
Shame. Strangled scream.
I told you I didn't want to look.

George showed me his work:
a darling delicate daffodil.
We were children then
daring through our infancy.
A few pallid petals
that survived a burning bough.

(Reworked. First draft: 11/04/12 @The Priory.)

On a dull October afternoon

Today is one of those grey, dreary days. It's foggy and dark outside and inside my head. I'm that 'patient etherised upon a table'. I'm not really here, not anywhere. Feel little of anything,  maybe a little sad at some things, mostly disconnected from everything. I am exhausted easily by little things - showering, eating,  playing with my son. The effort involved in getting through the day is unreasonably high. I was ready to go back to the unchallenging comfort of bed after making my son breakfast.

Today is also one of those days where I can watch the tide flow and not drown in it. I'm learning to stand by the water, still,  and let the tide wash my feet. I'm learning to not rush into every emotion I feel, flailing in the rising waters and not being able to see past it. (A metaphor I was instructed in at the Priory, where I spent some time recovering from my breakdown.) It has been dark and dreary for a few days but it will pass. I have faith.

Am I happy? I keep asking myself this, as an index to decide which direction I should take, what choices I should make. When I asked myself this over the past few years, the answer was always shaky. I was happy momentarily a lot when I did some things but I always felt fearful of those things ending. I used to fear waking up in the morning to go to work, fear returning home from anywhere, fear looking in the mirror. I used to fear meeting people. I felt afraid and anxious, always. Nowadays when I ask myself 'am I happy?' I notice that the answer is more certainly, more regularly 'yes'. I am more at peace with myself. I am still trying to work out all the tags and labels that make me, but it's a great ride, this exploring of me. I like who I am more now. I have surprised myself. I am not at all unfulfilled as a stay at home mother, in fact I have never felt more creative, more enlightened, more content. I have very little money and I find it liberating. It's so much easier to say no to the pressures of a consumerist culture's recognisable traps when you just don't have the enabling agent! I have freed myself from relationships that were meaningless and bound simply in expectations and pretensions. I have detached myself from relationships which I am still duty bound to, but which provide no joy, no nourishment. I have found poetry in my child's voice. I have found stronger reaffirmation of my faith than in any time spent amongst the loudly faithful.

So today when I'm in that familiar displaced, dislocated fog, I have just stopped struggling and let it have its run. This too shall pass. It will be a brighter day soon. I am this displaced self and much more. I am ok with who I am.

So today I smile at the black dog and tell it to stick around and watch as I make Halloween craft with my son and some cakes for a friend's birthday. The bats, spiders and bugs are really taking shape (note you unforgiving school teachers who wrote off my art skills). The cakes look messy, have to wait to taste them. The black dog is still sulking in the background but I'll probably go for a walk in the awful weather if he gets too unpleasant. My grey fog can meet the grey fog outside; I can stay busy with the special madness that muddy puddles excite in a toddler.

Behind the scenes: Anxiety

I get a little tired of people asking me why I can’t just ‘snap out of it’ or ‘shake it off’ when I feel depressed or anxious. I’m not a dog and depression and anxiety aren’t drops of water. It’s rather difficult to articulate what happens in an anxiety attack, but I’ll attempt it anyway, if nothing else to prove that I do not lack determination or courage!

It feels like there is a trapped, feral animal, pounding on the door to be let out. If I let it out, there will be tears and blood and savagery. Fear and anger. Helplessness and rage. Flashbacks from the past, imagined doom from the future. Sometimes opening the front door, stepping past the threshold and feeling the world on my skin is like exposing my nakedness to the harshness of searing heat and burning cold, all at the same time. My heart beats in a panic rush, trying to lunge into my throat. My chest tightens, my ribs contract. Every breath feels like a crisis, pushing precious air through paths that are collapsing.

The phone rings and my heart drops through the floor of my chest, somewhere into my churning stomach. I want to scream, pee, swallow air through a gasping mouth, all at the same time. My eyes push against my head, the sockets ache. Someone says something to me, asks a question and there are flashes in front of my eyes, like electrical circuits have clashed horribly and I feel blinded temporarily. Hot and cold flashes on my skin. My arms, legs, back, neck feel clammy and scalded, at the same time. My clothes chafe against my skin and the rising heat permeates my skin. I force myself to stay awake, terrified of sleep, of nightmares, of a new day starting at the end of a night.

And while all this is happening, I have to work, live, love, cook, talk, laugh. There are two of me. One that surges with the anxiety, holds it at bay, is soaked in it and fights the battle everyday, sometimes forced to hide behind shut doors. The other does all the other stuff, the normal stuff that people need to see. Sometimes the battling me leaks into the other one and my hands shake, I feel dizzy, my mind struggles with simple thought like a senile mind childishly putting a puzzle together, incorrectly. I get confused by the days of the week, change in my pocket, how to drive a car. I can’t make any decisions, not even what clothes to wear.

So there, that’s what my anxiety looks like.

A difficult Saturday's journey

I found myself fleeing last Saturday. Fleeing from my home and from my own inability to be unflinching and steady. My depression had been building all day, with Malcolm's exhaustion not lifting, Seth rejecting and challenging me, and having to attend a most tedious, middle-class-aspirational gathering where I felt isolated and out of place. By the time I served up dinner, I was barely managing to hold in my tears and failing totally to engage my son’s toddler energies. When we somehow approached bathtime and it looked as if my overtired son’s violent, screaming, physical protestations would cause him to hurt himself in the bath, Malcolm forced himself out of bed and came to my aid, to try and calm Seth down. Seth rushed into his arms like an oppressed being and something in that action snapped my tenuous restraint. I screamed in despair and frustration and rushed out of the room. I had a brief glimpse of Seth’s face as I passed him. There was nothing there but a fearless, uninformed child’s shock, but I imagined much else growing there, over the years to come. I’ve read that this is typical of people who suffer from anxiety – an inability to deal with the limited present and an insistence on imagining a threatening future based on the frightened spectre of past events. I glimpsed things in my son’s face that weren’t there and I was repulsed. So I ran and kept running until I was in the car and drove away, running still.

It’s difficult to describe what I felt while I drove for the first hour. Great waves of earth shaking sobs racked my body. My mind flailed around desperately, looking for refuge. Family, friends – no I couldn’t turn to them, couldn’t let them see me this way.  I thought of the church I take Seth to on Sundays, because I could go and sit in that familiar place and be broken there, and relative strangers would comfort me. Strangers who in their Christian duty would never turn me away, who hadn’t already tired of nursing me, whom I hadn’t bled dry of empathy. Then this vision rapidly turned rank –strangers who would pity me, tell me words that I knew would heal nothing, and then ever more after that, on smiling and sunny days when I would be winning inside, these strangers would come to me, place concerned hands on my arm, pity in their eyes and ask me how I was feeling. They would make my darkness laugh at me, at how helpless I had been. No, I could not turn to these kindly strangers.

St Mary’s appealed next. I have always been able to … well, nod to God there, at the very least. I’ve never been very good at listening to God, but I’ve been able to talk to God, a little bit, at St Mary's. People have worshipped at that place since the 11^th century and I have felt their piety flowing through time towards me, I have felt the distant pulsing of their living faith in the air. I have imagined St Mary’s existing in a different dimension in space, somewhere where the world stills and God holds your hand. You have to step out into that space, leave your world behind and enter God’s world. I have always liked walking into St Mary’s through the narrow, overhung path, through the ancient cemetery, approaching the building from an angle on the side. It’s like seeing the building through a portal and needing to chase it, quietly, meditatively, fixedly, as I walk towards it. Old, old Time rests among the graves. When I get to the door, the building straightens out in front of me, and as I open the ancient door into the church I give up the unwitting struggles I put up against God on most days.

So when my soul was floundering, I wanted to take refuge in St Mary’s. And then this vision too, was cast aside by my breaking mind. I saw myself alone on a dark night in an old, abandoned cemetery instead, where there was no God, no grace. It was as if I had stepped through that portal like countless times before, only to find that my space with God had moved coordinates and I was trapped in an imitation of it, dark and lonely.

So I kept fleeing, my foot firmly down on the pedal. The road signs told me I was heading to Canterbury. The word ‘Canterbury’ gave me a sliver of hope. Why? I didn’t know. But relieved at the idea of having a destination, I kept driving, fleeing to somewhere now, and not just from.

By the time I reached Canterbury, I knew why I’d headed there. Canterbury was the place of promise, of new beginnings, of new love for me. I bought myself a new life in Canterbury years ago. I was running to that promise, to remind me of all the way I had come.

I was now a little less frantic but I was still fleeing. I had no desire to stop anywhere or see anyone, so I kept driving and soon found myself headed back towards London. ‘London’ on the road signs brought on a little twinge of the old anxiety. The bright lights and busy streets of London have always excited me. But I felt old that night and excitement seemed like a thing for the young, I felt drained at the thought of it.

I drove on, managing to calm my soul into a kind of stupor, like when an intemperate animal has been shot with a tranquilising dart. A fallen, unwilling, winded heap of a soul. When I feel this much edge to my depression, I try to achieve an utterly numb state, a state where no sensory information is allowed to register, no thought is allowed to take root, where everything around becomes white space, until I can get myself into bed and seek oblivion in exhausted sleep. Afterwards, I try to deal with the guilt, shame and fear in a rationalised, systematic fashion which would make any therapist proud. But first, the numbness must be brought in, to stop the internal laceration.

So I forced myself into that state of numbness while I drove. I didn’t dwell on the stream of headlights and backlights flowing through the rolling landscape ahead, red on my side and yellow on the facing side. These things normally give me pleasure and I like feeling the motion of the lights. But that night I didn’t let the faintest pleasure in, or the insanity might have forced its way back in. I drove in that white space, trying to see, hear, feel, think nothing until I got home to bed.

After a while, something tiny, like a little germ wriggling its intrepid way through, did force its way into my conscious mind. The ticking of the indicators as I changed lanes. It was indiscernible background noise at first, but it grew clearer and very real, like the insistent rhythm of a beating heart under a suppressing hand on the chest. With each tick, into the white space came a drop of peace – not pleasure, just peace. (Kind of like my friend Kalyani’s pictures that I like very much – drops of vivid blue mixing and swirling frame by frame in a bowl of water.) The ticking walked in on my numb consciousness, politely and sympathetically, speaking in soft tones, until my mind turned to hear and listen.

It told me to remember all those long drives I had shared with Malcolm. He would talk with wonder of Roman engineering that gave us some of the roads we still drive on. He would tell me his fantastical stories, how wizards fought for power and precocious children changed the destiny of worlds. And always, I would fall asleep, his voice wrapped around me like silk and dreaming of slow dances and warm sunlight creeping in on resolutely dark corners. It told me to remember the true nature of the love that awaited me, patiently, in my home.

When I got home that night, a few hours later, I saw Malcolm at the window, waiting for me. I walked in and sat on the couch. He brought me a glass of wine, said not a word and drew me into his arms. Later, we watched some pretentious post modernist twaddle on TV and laughed together. I had stopped fleeing, at least for this night.

A tale of love, healing and a curse

At the age of 33 my husband was diagnosed with ME/CFS. There is apparently no cure, just ‘managing the condition’. I watch my geriatric young husband stumble through his days in a fog of exhaustion and confusion. Every failed attempt at raising a limp arm or formulating a weak thought burns a welt on my consciousness.

Alternately, I rage at the universe, pray fervently and sometimes beg, curl up into a ball of defeat, turn up my chin defiantly and cope.

In my secret reckonings with God I ask why, if he is the loving father that I believe him to be, would our lives be tossed around in a mighty sea in such a careless way. And always the answer comes back: 'ask yourself what you have done, ask that hungry, all-consuming darkness in you what it has done to your love'.

(PS: Thought of e e cummings’ ‘anyone lived in a pretty how town’ today.)

Once upon an indifferent time,

there was a damsel much damaged.

She sat by the wayside and dreamt of a prince

who would kiss her withered lips.

One evening of brew and kindling touch,

the promised prince arrived on a dream.

After much singing and dancing around trees

the damsel and the prince were wedded in bliss.

There followed the interminable middle,

as happy as tale endings are.

Many moons waked and sunsets dawned,

they lived the fairy part of the tale.

The prince couldn’t stop the falling in love

and he fell into magical healing powers.

The damsel’s deadened damaged selves

grew animated languorously.

Many more moons and sunsets passed.

‘Til once, under a suitably stormy sky,

the damsel stared at a terrible truth:

the prince was slowly crumbling away.

The random curse of a careless witch:

at the highest of his helpless falling his

spirit would leave him, and take with it

all his love and youthful years.

On that fateful stormy night

the damsel’s hungry distress rose

and cried out for love’s sustenance,

while the prince crumbled like paper in flames.

Thus was the dismal denouement:

the prince became as dust in the air;

the damsel was left for all her days

with fragments only half alive.

Night Terrors

3 AM. Another night spent awake and alone, shaking in the memory of my child screaming and pushing me away, recoiling from me. Health Visitor  says this is Night Terrors. What has he seen that has blighted his tender mind so? Thought of Sylvia Plath's poem 'Child' and borrowed heavily from it.

Child,
you scream in fear and recoil from me.
Have I unguarded let you look
into my infinite churning despair?
Did I fail to silence an anguished wail?

Once we imagined meandering tales
in bedtime shadows and warm yellow lights,
we flew with dragons of faraway magic
and soared with the moon on the wing of a giggle.

Am I now the ceiling without stars
That haunts your clear eye?

Evenings spent alone indoors

I lie in my tomb, dreading, listening

to half heard conversations and distant footsteps,

I sense living on the other side,

Excluding me, condemning me.

Inside, imprisoned in my mind,

There are eyes, disapproving,

And contorted smiles,

Shadows of utterances,

Unclothing and shaming.

At every scrape at the door,

I perk up hoping for someone to call.

Nobody comes. Nothing happens.

I run from them and long for them.

The failure of anonymity,

The isolation of insanity.

The magic little pills explode in my head

In a ritual of death and resurrection.

Sleep brings on the death fantasy

And the stilling of the cosmic hostility.

But there is always a waking from the death-sleep,

As the chemical fog melts away

And old enemies circle around.

(At University, 2003)