twangypearl the elastic girl

It's 12 months

since KDid died, that quiet, good-hearted man.

When I was young I thought when you grew up somehow you'd be invested with powers that would make you strong. You'd be able to cope, you'd be adult, capable. Sure, things might make you sad, but not too much, you'd manage. You'd put on your suit and good shoes and go to the funeral. You wouldn't cry. You'd know things that would comfort you. You'd know that lives were long, fair, logical. You'd have made a leap, somewhere along the way, and become life-confident. You'd be in control.

Now I realise that was mostly the work of my protective parents and that living is a continuum, rather than a series of separate experiences. This isn't a rehearsal, I have painfully realised, there will not be a montage sequence, there are no shortcuts, you do have to learn the hard way, and it can indeed be too late. It is later than you think. Success is a matter of luck and privilege, not just working hard and making good decisions. Life will crack you open. You can only hope this makes you a better person, more alive, more present. More appreciative, more understanding.

Now I understand that the big whopper of a lesson of my middle years is that joy can co-exist with sadness, and this finally really does have the truthful ring of adulthood. For the good times are painfully precious. Any moment you have to sit in the sun with your friends, or banter with a stranger on the bus, any chance to watch a vast golden moon rise, sing rousing South African anthems in a choir or have the cat on your knee vibrating with purrs, is achingly beautiful.

So we remember him, and try to enjoy our many good memories of him.

Kindly readers, I hope you're well, and to have happier things to talk about soon.
I have missed this. More soon.
xx
T

 

Mr Blue Sky

Most improbably, I have finished my cone project in plenty of time for hand-off this evening, an event which will require me to walk for 10 mins, take a bus, walk for another 20mins, (or MAYBE, I'll just take a taxi, though that kind of thing makes me as nervous as W4I. Apparently I believe a taxi is the thin end of the wedge that will inevitably lead to a online gambling addiction, thousands of euros of debt and end with my living under a bridge) knock on a door I have never seen before, go: Martin? in hopeful tones if a man answers or: Hi! Is Martin there? if a woman answers. Then I will dump deliver the Big Black Portfolio and SKIP SKIP SKIP away feeling OH-SO-LIGHT and who even cares what it looks like anymore? I've got rid, as they say on Corrie.

I've been having a bit of a time of it. Do you remember this, kindly readers?

This is what it's been like, for months, but with extra juggling and exhaustion-induced despair/irrational thoughts. I am so burned out I am actually a Walkers crisp, and those illustrations still need to be done by end of month. (Those fecking things - it's like trying to outrun your own shadow. It's getting mystical, as this point.) While this is just feasible, I am reminded of that saying about people who have been made partner in a law practice: It's like winning a pie-eating contest. And your prize is more pie.

Next week, my students have exams, an event that involves a vast amount of forms called (things like) Learner's Assessment F11-R456. On the other hand, there is light at the end of the tunnel. Only! 6! weeks! to! the! end! of term! Holiers needed URGENTLY.

Other things I have noticed of late:

• The JB has been away for the last week, at a conference. In his absence I have been shocked to discover my breakfast dishes are still there, lying around in grey water, when I get home after school. Proof he does do dishes. Huh! I thought I did Everything Around Here. That's the thing about housework, isn't it? It's only noticed if it's not done.
  
  
• Also. Yes. What was the other thing.
  
  
• Ah. Our floor in The Hotel Tallafornia now hosts a weekly vist from Slimming World. A whole world of slimming - imagine! Continents of svelteness and seas of self-confidence! I am reassured by its logo every morning: Slimming World: Because [I am] amazing. Huh, ta, Slimming World.
  
  
• I think, anyway.
  
  
• It seems that the Authority may be sorting something out with regard to India opening - soon-ish. Also hopeful signs float over Florida. Too tired to be excited, but I presume I am, really.
  
  
• Alrighty then. I am going to go and do the drop-off, I reckon.

Be well, friends.

xx

T

 

 

 

thinking

Hello!

Here I am.

By rights I should have nearly finished that project from hell, that suffocating paper avalanche, but, most confusingly, the deadline has been moved to an as yet unknown date in the next (up to) four weeks. The goalposts not so much moved, that is disorientating enough, this time, they have dashed off into the mist, most likely to pop up and gurn in my face in a few days. It's really odd, what this GO GO, NO, STOP, HURRY and WAIT does to a person. And re-GO GO GO. Me adrenals are knackered. Awkwarder yet is the fact that the old friend who got me this job thinks he is doing me a massive favour, which of course he is, but you know, Too Much of a Good Thing. It's like being asked to sit down at a magnificent banquet and eat it all in 10 minutes. Also, I don't know how to tell him not to pile another one on top of this without seeming horribly ungrateful.

In the meantime, I somehow defaulted my way into a show with some intimidatingly well-known artists in mid-April and also somehow must wearily regird my loins in time for that. Oh holiday, wherefore art thou? I keep thinking of a wonderful day when I can.. not work! You know! Sort of just.. be!

Not to moan incessantly about my charmed life. Ehem.

Apropos of nothing, I enjoyed Spike's birthday party enormously. I know one is supposed to be shocked at the speed at Which They Grow, but for whatever reason I am surprised that he is still only seven. He's been around forever! Shouldn't he be in college by now? And Dazzle is still only three. Three! Anyway, be that as it may, his grandmother's cousin was there, a woman reputed to be a blurter, shall we say. (Read: MAD AS A HATTER.) Famously she once observed, on seeing her niece's husband: A poor specimen.  And about my brother she declared: An ADONIS!
HAHAHA. An Adonis!

Oh! A news item! I went to see that counsellor. He turned out to be a twinkly older man who effortlessly sprang up the six floors of the tall Georgian building in which he "sees" people. He picked up The Whole Sorry Tale and the dynamic very quickly and it was strangely comforting to hear that All This Is Actually Not My Fault from an objective and professionally wise person. He had some enlightening things to say on the subject of how I am prone to carrying the can and trying to make All The Things Nice for everyone. (Sorry about the caps. I can't help it! I Have Caps Disorder!) which I now see as something I learned from my mother in the face of my father, he of the hothead. One hates to be a Walking Cliché, but there you have it. I try to manage, to calm, to smooth. What a pain in the arse. He concluded that in his opinion we were not in crisis, per se, but that he'd always make time for us if we should need to see him. This is a big comfort. Also, as I suspected, the JB, seeing I came back feeling better, has asked for Twinkly's details. I will do what I can (without being a total pain, one hopes) to encourage him to follow through, because my poor JB does seem by turns depressed and giddy. (Must not make self responsible! Must not manage! Must not take all worries on self!)

[If I had a penny for every time I've been asked the dreaded question "what are you thinking about?" (guaranteed to make my mind go blank) in my life, I'd have a euro at least. I must have a thoughtful aspect, sadly an illusion, for I am usually thinking about marmalade, or the contents of my fridge if, indeed, anything at all. Quite a bit of the time, I'm just coasting mindlessly. Twinkly observed at one point: I can see your mind going, there. What are you thinking? And I was wondering how they got that sidetable with a marble base up all those stairs.]

What are you thinking, readers? Heh.

I have been visiting you, hastily, but I've really missed cheering myself up with your company, continuing our conversation, and staring out the window, thinking about very little.

 Soon, friends, soon.

xx
T

 

For upcoming show.

matching

Breaking news:

• My poor, forlorn, lonelyheart socks have progressed as far as a detention centre on the top of a bench, where they await their fate. Shall their One True Partner come and bail them out, miraculously? Shall they? Or shall they be imprisoned in a plastic bag in the middle of the spare room, to be thrown out into the actual bin, in as soon as - oh! - anytime in the next year or two.
  
  Edge-of-your-seat stuff, I am sure you'll agree.

• In other news, and speaking of The Spare Room: we did finally get our declaration from the Adoption Authority. It came on paper headed solemnly with the harp symbol that signifies officialdom in Ireland. (If it's got a harp on it, it's serious and may be even worth something. DON'TFECKINGLOSEITYOUBIGEEJIT, MammyIreland might be presumed to be telling us with it. ) Some people have described this as an empowering moment, akin to being pregnant, but I just thought: Oh, there you go when the JB opened it. Since then, though, there has been a general glow of satisfaction, interpersed with the odd chilly moment of GAAHJAYSTHISISREALLYREALLYREAL.


• Since that day, we have been up to our elbows in paperwork. EVERYTHING has to be negotiated for, awaited, copied, scanned, signed, notarised, apostilled. It's like the Bureaucracy Olympics. We are getting more and more friendly with our solicitor, a floppy-haired, good-hearted fusspot of a young fellow who hangs out in Dublin 1.
  
  
• I admit the JB has done A Large Part of This Mental Power-lifting/Bureaucratising. Good husband! He is coming up in the polls, as I regularly tell him.
  
  
• It does seem wrong that we are required to survive this long battle of wits, which seems more like the psychological equivalent of an IronMan competition, and less like anything remotely to do with parenting, and must surely mean less bloody-minded people - who none the less might be really good parents - fall by the wayside and give up?


• Life continues to be packed to bursting. Whywhywhy is that, tell me? Don't you remember the hours and hours in your youth, where there was nothing to do, only loll around and watch The Multicoloured Swapshop? And it was good? Why is life so franticfranticfrantic? I am that harrassed state of mind where you miss your stop on the Luas, and only raise your head when the name Fortunestown is called out. Fortunestown? You've never even heard of such a place. Or where you say to yourself: Ooh, look, if the knife slips now, it could easily (but keep cutting) - OW! Or narrowly avoid being run over by another bus not the one you really wanted to catch, or sundry other unforced errors, as they say in tennis. The poor kitty nearly got an iron in the head this morning. I could have killed the kitty! With a flying iron! That fell as I was foolishly moving the board without removing it first!

I need to take a sabbatical from my own life. How about you? Tell me the secret of calmness. Kittalo will thank you for it.

T

 
I WILL. I'LL THANK YOU.

adhoc

Love my magnets! LOVE. HFF sent me these, you know.

Well, my darlings! I'm in that awkward state of mind for which there should be a long composite German word - I have left it so long, that I don't know where to start, and the longer I leave it, the more I feel I have omitted Vital Stuff, and go into a further state of avoidance. And yet, I sincerely love my long-cherished blog-comrades and miss the interaction I find through this blog. I feel like the lovely Belgian Waffle, whose first paragraph here says it so much better than I could. That happens to me a lot. People expressing my thoughts better than I can. Thank Gawd for 'em.

Let's barge ahead, here. Nothing else for it:

• I've been singing, in the choir. Every night this goes on, for the season, including one bizzarro combo performance with Another Choir, composed of undergraduates, this time. On one occasion, I was late. I disapprove greatly of myself for this, not least because I had missed by minutes the meeting at the gate, where we were to be ushered to the appropriate room in the college to rehearse, and had a frantic Indiana Jones-like run-and-search down long lino-ed corridors, under arches, through courtyards, trying doors and stopping to listen intently for choir sounds. I needn't have worried, when I finally burst in to the room, there was a kindly Robert Hardy-look-a-like banging away at the piano, and the room was filled with The Young People all whispering, giggling, and singing, just a little. Robert Hardy looked at me over his glasses and said "Welcome" and the whole thing was like a three way cross between a seminary musical, a boarding school and a Harry Potter book, all set in the 1960's.


• I've teaching unemployed people with the State Training Body. This happens, weirdly, in a hotel in a peripheral suburb of west Dublin. It's all very Sign of the Times. I sit for an hour on a tram to be launched into this alternative reality, where you must travel on lifts and know codes and finally be delivered into an abandoned office building, where we occupy the one heated room on the fifth floor, to light a fire under the unemployed people, or at least offer them some hope, or so I hope. They are, so far, a dream to teach, getting on with their work, and only stopping to ask me intelligent questions.


• Also, steady money! Hurray.


• Which reminds me, I made a wonderful discovery out there yesterday. Near the hotel, there is a large 1990's style shopping centre, through which one can take a shortcut on the way back to the tram. There was a line of unlikely looking wooden huts in a line at the back of the centre, full of Christmas gift "ideas", personalised mouse pads and slippers, each presided over by a frozen but hopeful retail hutter, the type you feel sorry for. But then! A hut of The Most Beautiful Etchings, like a gleaming jewel amongst the dross. Like this! My eyes nearly fell out of my head:
  
  
  
  As thus it was that the problem of five Christmas gifts was solved on the spot. Well, I thought to myself, Suchandsuch should like this, and frankly, if he/she doesn't, I have no truck with him/her!
  (This is the artist/hut retailer: Jan Goede.)


• Ermmmm.
  
  
• Oh. Yes. Many applications for Art Stuff have been made, including a frightening one, which (life being like that) I might get. The application process is itself an art, I am realising. If I get that one, it'll be shown for an entire month in a public place on a huge wall. No pressure then. Gulp.
  
  
• I have been making art with a group of Other Young People, this time ones affected to varying degrees by cerebral palsy. They are great fun. I have discovered exactly how bad I am (appallingly) at boccia with them, and made some stop-motion animation with them as actors. It's cool.


• Kittaloo, who has been living here for what seems like a century, continues to hold us in her thrall, stroll inconveniently on my keyboard and hog the nearest source of heat. She is exactly as clever as she needs to be, the little maggot. When she feels slightly peckish/bored/cold, her latest thing is to sit beside me and put her heavy paw coercively on my arm, as if to whisper, threateningly: I will not allow you to forget me. Feline mafia tactics! Chilling.
  
  
• The spa was salutary, mostly because of the redemptive presence of my dear friend R, with whom I had a long debriefing session on the subject of the JB. She recommended counselling, and is going to get me the name of Someone. At least I can go, and the JB may feel encouraged to go at a later stage if I break the ice, so to speak.
  Other than that, the spa was as if conceived by the people who made those Philadelphia ads set in Heaven, all muted colours and nice candles - deliberately unstimulating and cocoon-like. Which was lovely for a day. After that, it started to feel a tiny bit like a psychiatric hospital, what with everyone being reduced to a white uniform and floating about. Just a bit edgeless and suffocating. However, no doubt this is me, and my Methodist background, again, making me uncomfortable with .. er.. comfort.
  
  

I've gone on, haven't I? Better stop now, before you lose the will to live entirely.

I have missed this.

Back soon.

xx
T

big picture

Dear all,

Oh my. Busy again, I was.

Thank you for your comments on my last post. You need never worry about giving me what they call "assvice". You are too kind and experienced to be judgemental or miss the point. If any advice did not seem relevant, I would just put it aside for another situation which it might fit. So that is all good. 

While it is true that I suffer at times from what my lovely American flatmate used to call Big Picture Disease (taking the long view to the point where it becomes hard to have an appropriate response in the moment), a marriage is a long, awful, beautiful stream of experience, where you run into all kinds of unexpected limitations - many of which you have to recognise as your own. You know how it is. So, as you can imagine, the JB and I have had every kind of conversation about our future, from the tearful to the comic. Our style is fairly frank when we argue, but that is only a tiny percent of the time. The rest is really good and the last week or two have been in that mode. We're fine, at least for the moment.

ANYWAY. This was just to let you know I am aok, and not living in a damp bedsit in Mountjoy Sq with an angry cat pissing on my single bed. In fact, I am off to a spa tonight, no less. Oh yes, it's a high-octane, devil-may-care life I lead, you know!

Talk soon.
xx
T

on being loved

[Apologies in advance for the gloom-laden, whiny quality of the below.]

P-kit has almost earned the right to drop the Psycho from her name, I do believe. I know cats are reputed to have little in the way of an emotional life, but I would swear she loves me with all her little feline heart. She follows me around, like a dog, purring extravagantly. She lies on my chest and pats my face with her carefully sheathed paw. And since yesterday I drank the water that she had ever so delicately lapped earlier, and wasn't even much bothered, I think it's official. I am, in fact, a cat lady.

How did that happen?

Ah. What it is to be loved. I suspect I'll always be at sea with this thing you humans call love. I never know what it is that is required of me. Am I responsible for the other's happiness? How is that? And how responsible is he?

For the JB continues to trudge through the mire. It's not altogether easy being beside him through it, either. He is so focussed on being a parent, at times I am at risk of feeling like a conduit to his target/like a failure, depending on the mood. It takes some effort to keep it straight in my head: he is choosing to be with me, and I must not second-guess him, or throw myself on my sword. (We are far into the adoption process, after all! He just needs to have a bit of patience. Gah.) All potentially terribly regrettable options. Last night there came about an unhappy confluence of tiredness, sickness (My ear. It feels broken. Uff. Why is my body so weird?) sadness and sensory overload that ended with my telling him he knew where the door was, if he wanted to go. Oh, sigh. It's never a good idea to act rashly on your hurt feelings like that, is it? He did apologise, but he is miserable, and that makes him dramatic and catastrophic. And I was too tired to talk him round.

Maybe I am mistaken, but I believe his starting point is wrong. I feel that you have to start with you two, that that is a great piece of good fortune, to build on, if you are lucky. If it is children you really want from the relationship, you need to be clear. (The JB discovered his desire to be a parent after we were married, a thing that has caused us no end of angst. I had all sorts of issues about it, physical and emotional.) Where does that leave us? We are all out of step with each other. It's not good.

Points of view most welcome. Also kicks in arse, advice, or whatever is required here. You'll know.

xx
T

Drawing from hotel room recently, in [London]Derry. Vurry naice ut twas, toy.

you will comfort me

Back again, my friends. Life has been full on. It used to be that feast and famine was the rule, but now, I am always dementedly busy, and yet persist in not being any more solvent. What is this strange new world? I don't know if I like it.

I joined a choir, did I say? It's been absorbing to be a part of something bigger than me, something I know so little about. Humbling. I keep having these light bulb moments: OH! That's a chord! That's a quaver! Seriously, I am that - what would it be? Immusicate?

We performed, in a kind of flash-mob way, in a busy lunch venue earlier in the week, wearing, per instructions, "black trousers and a top in a solid colour". I didn't think I possessed any black trousers, (an extraordinary factoid, I know) but lo! A pair dated circa 2000 skulked in the back of the wardrobe, made of a millenial fabric that seems to be .. vinyl?

Vinyl, I swear. Maybe it's recycled records. If only I still had a turntable, I could listen to them. I wonder what they'd sound like. Pants? (Groan. Stopping now.)

It was satisfying to hear all our voices turn into one. I could see the familiar figure of the JB, my only only, on the other side of the atrium, and my very stalwarty friend, Sister2. (Stalwarty doesn't sound as flattering as I intend it to be. I am going to trust you know what I mean.)

You are with me, [we sang], you will comfort me.

I think the JB is going through some stuff. He's sleeping much more than usual, and though he has not abandoned his papers, (that would surely be a sign of impending death) he is not his usual ebullient self. He's one of those people that is always on, you know? Even if you wake him up in the middle of the night, he's like a good photograph of himself. Not so now.

Really, I do think All This has been harder for him than for me. Not that it's a quantifiable thing, or a race to be the most hurt, indeed, but he's such a hard worker, he's used to barriers giving way under the weight of his effort, and he is baffled and deeply offended that those rules don't apply here. Of course, it's true that he is also grieving for his father, but somehow the frustration he feels about our efforts to have/be a family has become the focus of that pain too. It comes and goes, of course. Any progress - any tick on our adoption list - rallies the spirits. Any delay or problem brings on the feelings of disappointment and aggrievement.

Lest anyone think the IF shitstorm spares the partners.

So that is where I am. Wearing recycled LPs, and being very busy having no money coming in.
How about you? What's in the back of your wardrobe?

T

Actual news I can actually report

I am half-daunted, half-thrilled. (Is there a single word for that? There should be.) On Tuesday I received a phone call from the by now much-beloved Detective, our social worker, to tell us that we have passed the board, and are deemed suitable to be adoptive parents.

(!!!)

It is big and somewhat odd to be declared (apparently) sane by your government. Something to celebrate! I feel all government-sanctioned! All I need is an APPROVED stamp on my forehead to complete the look.

Then on Wednesday, more life-changing events: we took the train to another town for a meeting in The Hotel of the Swirly Carpet. It was extraordinarily informative, dispelling many myths, and covering all sorts of important stuff on Bulgaria and India, as sending countries. India probably has over 10 million children without families. OVER TEN MILLION. There are any amount of impromptu and unlicensed orphanages that spring up to care for them, but many of the children inevitably do not even have that much luck. It is utterly heart-breaking and overwhelming, isn't it? Words fail. We fail. All those children, all their needs, all their talents, in need of so much nurturing, of so many hours of hugs and stories, so much encouragement, so many peeled potatoes, and slices of toast, so many pairs of pyjamas, so much effort, patience, understanding and love.

So walking back to the train station, the next morning, the JB and I, down the steep steps, with the fog lifting, we made up our minds that India is it.

It seems this is how you make decisions that change your life, while you hurry to catch a train. You've arrived at a fork in the road, and you've run out of time, standing still is not possible, you just have to move one way or the other. So you just take your life in your hands, and go, and try not to be haunted by the ghost of other path, the way unchosen.

So we sent an email to the detective to ask her to change our country to India. The USA was our previous choice, but it seems that there is an uncompatibility between the Irish interpretation of Hague and the American one, which means that private adoption is looking rather uncertain for the time being. We could adopt out of the state system, however. Frustratingly, the JB does continue to waver on this. Yesterday he sent me the link to an (of course) utterly adorable one-year-old on a state website. Now, I do understand that as a purely pragmatic tool, these sites do work in placing children, but it makes me oh-so-uncomfortable to look at the children's profiles. I mean, apart from the awful, awful heart-rending God-is-that-my-kid? That-could-be-my-kid! confusion, it just feels wrong to me. I do believe that it is getting the cart before the horse. There is a reason for the agency being the one that matches parents with children, and doing the referral. They know things.
(What do you think? Maybe it is simply that we are not ready for that yet.)

So.

That was the news from Dublin.

[Insert single word that conveys both the excitement and fear of this moment.]

Yaaaay! Eeek!
T

report

Oh dear. I seem to have dropped the blogging ball, so to speak. I have left you with The Question for an age. (Thank you for your consoling answers. I am Not Taking It Personally. You know, the fact my beloved niece acted like I might stick her with a fork and toast her on the fire, and ran away from me, screaming. Hah! I forgot to report her charming question: You not my mummy. What are you?
Me: WHAT AM I? Just a child-toaster!
Not. Taking. It. Personally.)

It's back to school-ish, cover your books-ish weather here. Time for new shoes, and a new geometry set. Sharpen your pencils! Lay out your uniform! The air has had that delicious autumn chill (I like the Irish Winter. I readily accept that this makes me Odd.) the leaves are turning, there's that wonderfully gloomy smell of decay in the air, with all its intimation of mortality. Ah, yes! Mortality! Don't you just love it?

Ha.

So, yes. I have been busy with these and other preoccupations. I have been drawing a lot. I have been to lots of meetings, and been doing lots of planning. I made a cognitive leap or two.

And today we finally saw our social worker, the dear Detective, who handed over our report to read, and left the room - surely the closest I'll ever get to the red book moment in This is Your Life. Other people from my group have reported finding it tough to read their life story, but I just, for whatever reason, didn't. I mean, it's not like you don't know. None of my life events are a no-go area to me; I've taken the sting out of them by processing them here (And I thank you for reading. That's so important.) or in my work. I don't think anyone could accuse me of living a life unexamined - probably, like all of you too, of the online writing persuasion, I have had ample opportunity to think about My Stuff. We do that, don't we? And, it turns out, that is good for you. Like Guinness.

However. It is very interesting how much of a story resides in the manner of its telling. There are so many ways to spin a life; the details you select are so telling. My mother, the home-maker, the baker of cakes - well, all that is true. There's so much more, though. My mother, defender of the proper use of the apostrophe, arthritis sufferer, stalwart, stoic, charitable figure, nice person, repressed, passive, defensive person, with the sardonic sense of humour. You know? And the fact my father's rather florid temper becomes "a more old-fashioned parenting style". Dramaboy was characterised as "moody and dramatic". Also, to be fair, a massive over-simplication. So where is the truth, exactly?

All that said, our detective friend did a beautiful job for us, in distilling the reams of material to a coherent, credible account of us. A great relief. Now to wait a couple of weeks before the next Adoption Council meeting, where she will go before the board. She doesn't foresee any problems.

Progress, then! Good!

And now, for a picture. I find myself drawing and redrawing this view, it's endlessly interesting to me: