Anniversary

I am about four days out from my 56th birthday today.  I know that in the final weeks leading up to it all kinds of memories arise to consciousness.  I find the few days out from that date very pregnant with light and intimations of new beginnings too this year.  I start to feel a kind of magic in the air.

Today has been no exception although it had some dark moments, they didn’t last.  I had to go today to get my new denture which looks like an instrument of torture.  I really need to take a photo of it to post here but am a little too tired this afternoon, the scaffolding of it is metal rather than plastic.  I know I will adapt to it in time, as old followers know I had to have the half stump of the tooth that supported my three tooth bridge removed last year.  At age 17 I lost two and a half teeth when I had my near death car crash and then had a bridge for many years but over the past two years due to stress of another accident that support tooth deteriorated so it had to come out and I wasn’t up for the stress and invasion of dental implants.

I really struggled with dark feelings when I had the tooth extraction back in July last year but I came through adapting to the temporary denture which was made mainly of plastic.  The new one has three teeth on a scaffolding of metal and it does make my teeth ache on the support teeth that hold it in place.

At the same time today I noticed some growth in me.  I wasn’t as distressed as I know it could be a lot worse, I could be missing a limb or a digit or have some other more acute disability, that said to have that pain your mouth or constant ache is not pleasant and I dont want to minmise it entirely.  Anyway I had a good afternoon, took myself off to town after it, had lunch, bought a sweet novel and came home to potter around.

Sitting outside in the shade of my tulip tree with Jasper at my feet this afternoon, my thoughts were taken back to the darker days of my past when I arrived home from overseas two years out from my father’s death to find my Mum had remarried a stranger and then I moved away from my home town.  I hadn’t yet processed the 8 years of trauma that had begun with my motor vehicle accident in 1979 and oldest sister (surrogate Mum’s) cerebral bleed sixth months later then my father’s death.  I was still using booze and drugs to cope and got myself in trouble with unwanted pregancies, one of the most difficult of which occured in the autumn of 1989 after I had been away from home for two years.

For some reason something in the air around this time of year pulls my energy back to those times, and to all I went through.  This year I feel that I am not being as dragged down by it.  I ended up writing the two poems to express how I was feeling in the lead up to my birthday and this time of year.   I am posting the first one below and will post the second another day.

When a tinge of autumn

Invades the air of summer

I remember how

All those years ago

You picked me up

To let me drop

Into an abyss

Standing on the edge laughing

As I fell and telling lies

To those whose approval you craved

Not caring that I was the sacrifice

I have a scar

Three inches across the skin

That covers my pubic bone

Where the knife went in

It tells the painful tale of

What you left me to deal with

All those years ago alone

I was no stranger to abandonment

And so when you left

And I broke down

You blamed me for expressing

What you  forced me to carry

All alone in silence

Past loss and sorrow

Echoed through the darkest months

That followed your leaving

As I stripped my life back

To bare bones

The aftermath of the agonising years

That followed

Is too long to tell here

But when I feel the tinge of autumn

Invade the afternoons of late sumer

I remember again

What for so many years

Was far too painful to ever forget