Sage, and other things to add flavour
I've been away a few days now, being more ill than a mother is ever normally allowed to be. Now I'm on multiple medications, including stuff to help me breathe and iron and I ate a meal for the first time in three days, which if it tasted awful wasn't entirely down to the chef and any way he did his best and since he was cooking for the three of us I acquit him of trying to poison me. Its just that he can't cook.
Anyway, another who is further down the path than me and has seen darker places than I have has recently had some wise and interesting things to say (but if you're reading here you've probably already been there).
And I have had time today to ponder hatred and indifference and where I am. About three and a half years ago, when my career was in full throttle, he was in the first throws of this tediously drawn out long-distance love affair that would take him off to his 'better place' and I thought what I could see in the distance was the light at the end of the tunnel (rather than the on-rushing source of the train wreck that is our lives) I was 'indifferent'. Deeply, gleefully so. He could be someone elses problem without me being crippled by guilt that the other person was his mother.
But after all that time, him not going or her not taking him away; which ever the case might be, I'm no longer so sanguine. I'm deeply frustrated and resentful. Here I am still stuck in the mire with this child who refuses to grow up sufficiently to take even the most basic care of himself. My child bearing years have very nearly passed while I wait for him to make up his mind whether to go off on his own or make a go of things with this woman in Philadelphia (or where ever she now lives).
So I tolerate, just, the appalling behaviour, the irresponsibility, the squalor he trails in his wake. And I do this because I seem to be constitutionally incapable of dredging up from within me quite enough, well call it hatred, to turf him out.
He'd go to his mother, who I've heartily disliked at times though I empathise with her in her desperate need to see something other than the unvarnished truth about her only child. Or he'd try to make a go of things on his own.
About eighteen moths ago I was one of any number of unwilling auditory spectators at an almighty marital dispute that went on through a morning and long into the afternoon. From my house I could hear muffled hysteria and breakage, slammed doors and all the other acoustic accompaniments.
She left.
A few weeks ago he died, alone, after making his way through the best part of a dozen cans of lager, on one of the coldest nights of the year. He was a diabetic who refused to acknowledge his condition and eat properly. The verdict of the town's grapevine was that 'K' didn't look after himself.
In the past fortnight the house has gone on the market. The agency carrying the house has put a collection of photographs of the interior up in its window, to the decidedly mixed feelings of those I've spoken with. Words fail me. I simply cannot conceive of any human living in the kind of conditions depicted. And the photographs were taken after the house had largely been cleared of debris.
I know that he's incapable of looking after himself. And I know that's how he'd end up. In some squalid cottage with the ceilings and walls collapsing around him from damp, the carpet mouldering, too poor to pay for heating, too raddled to remember to cook.
My life's quite messed up, yes.
But I've never been an advocate of the death penalty even when it is deployed in its least inhumane forms. This is the problem I've wrestled with for years now. How to come to terms with the choice of condemning him to a protracted death or having him hang around my neck for the rest of mine? Or is there not really any difference?
What I'm struggling with is not an excess of hatred but an excess of responsibility.
Anyway, another who is further down the path than me and has seen darker places than I have has recently had some wise and interesting things to say (but if you're reading here you've probably already been there).
And I have had time today to ponder hatred and indifference and where I am. About three and a half years ago, when my career was in full throttle, he was in the first throws of this tediously drawn out long-distance love affair that would take him off to his 'better place' and I thought what I could see in the distance was the light at the end of the tunnel (rather than the on-rushing source of the train wreck that is our lives) I was 'indifferent'. Deeply, gleefully so. He could be someone elses problem without me being crippled by guilt that the other person was his mother.
But after all that time, him not going or her not taking him away; which ever the case might be, I'm no longer so sanguine. I'm deeply frustrated and resentful. Here I am still stuck in the mire with this child who refuses to grow up sufficiently to take even the most basic care of himself. My child bearing years have very nearly passed while I wait for him to make up his mind whether to go off on his own or make a go of things with this woman in Philadelphia (or where ever she now lives).
So I tolerate, just, the appalling behaviour, the irresponsibility, the squalor he trails in his wake. And I do this because I seem to be constitutionally incapable of dredging up from within me quite enough, well call it hatred, to turf him out.
He'd go to his mother, who I've heartily disliked at times though I empathise with her in her desperate need to see something other than the unvarnished truth about her only child. Or he'd try to make a go of things on his own.
About eighteen moths ago I was one of any number of unwilling auditory spectators at an almighty marital dispute that went on through a morning and long into the afternoon. From my house I could hear muffled hysteria and breakage, slammed doors and all the other acoustic accompaniments.
She left.
A few weeks ago he died, alone, after making his way through the best part of a dozen cans of lager, on one of the coldest nights of the year. He was a diabetic who refused to acknowledge his condition and eat properly. The verdict of the town's grapevine was that 'K' didn't look after himself.
In the past fortnight the house has gone on the market. The agency carrying the house has put a collection of photographs of the interior up in its window, to the decidedly mixed feelings of those I've spoken with. Words fail me. I simply cannot conceive of any human living in the kind of conditions depicted. And the photographs were taken after the house had largely been cleared of debris.
I know that he's incapable of looking after himself. And I know that's how he'd end up. In some squalid cottage with the ceilings and walls collapsing around him from damp, the carpet mouldering, too poor to pay for heating, too raddled to remember to cook.
My life's quite messed up, yes.
But I've never been an advocate of the death penalty even when it is deployed in its least inhumane forms. This is the problem I've wrestled with for years now. How to come to terms with the choice of condemning him to a protracted death or having him hang around my neck for the rest of mine? Or is there not really any difference?
What I'm struggling with is not an excess of hatred but an excess of responsibility.
posted by Enyo @ 9:54 pm
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