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Well I am quite exhausted after yesterday helping my sister clear my Mum’s bedroom.  It took several hours to go through the huge amount of clothing, scarves and shoes my Mum accumulated and last night I could not help think about how when my sis was so unwell after Mum’s death and had been readmitted for more psychiatric help she was complaining of having nothing to wear.  My sis was truly shocked at the amount of clothing and it only made me feel quiet sad for my Mum because after Dad died I guess shopping became one of her major outlets.  As a child of a single parent who struggled during the depression years and got no government assistance she had so little.  There must have been about 50 pairs of shoes, some of them never worn as Mum developed problems with her feet in later years and obviously coveted designer shoes which proved to be too painful to wear.

The shoes were all in their original boxes which my sister crushed down while I continued on sorting out things for charity and at one point just being so over come with sadness I thought I was going to burst.    And my breast was also burning a lot during the entire process right near the place where I was cut into for surgery and around the site of my stolen lymph nodes.  We took a break for lunch about 2 hours in and I broke down with my sis and said I am scared I wont make it past 64 which is the age Dad was when he lost his battle with cancer.   If I am honest it was a lot to do yesterday and its only just 4 years ago it was Mum and I alone with no other family members cleaning our my sister’s room at the care home after she died in 2014.  I felt the same feeling of total combustion and overwhelm then.  My other sister had been admitted to psychiatric care on the day of Judith’s funeral.

Its a painful legacy of emotional neglect our family carries for the women.  My older brother is married but its not an intimate relationship.  My sister’s husband left her a few years ago to marry a Vietnamese girl under half his age.   My husband as everyone knows left 14 years ago pretty much to the date of now.  The man I have started to have feelings for is overseas fighting in the military and as been AWOL while I have had to deal with all of this.  I don’t know if he is dead or alive.  I felt death and doom and destruction all around me this morning.  It was a feat to get out for an icy walk at 10 degree temperatures with Jasper.  I then took myself to the shops where I am now typing this at the library.  Its hard to be at home as the minute I get through the door of my house the critic hammers me telling me how I have stuffed my entire life by staying so enmeshed with my family for years but the truth is it took courage to come back and be part of it again.  It cost me my marriage but it was love for my suffering family that made me abort my new life in the UK just over 17 years ago.  The eclipse on Saturday hits my North Node in Leo and these series of eclipses around a specific chart point happen every 17-19 years.

I don’t know if Scott is going to make it home at this stage.   I don’t know if I will be spending the rest of my life alone with my dog and my blog.   Its not a bad life but its a bit empty at times with no special someone to share it.  And then I just think in a way I have never risen above the pain of a past too where I seemed to be thwarted at every turn spending months captured in a bed in skeletal traction.  Today I felt the swirling n my spine as my left leg tries to spin free.   I would at the times manage to get out of the bed sideways in hospital and stand on one foot.

It may seems strange to non sufferers of PTSD that such an injury and trauma could have affected me so deeply for so many years.  At times my critic tells me I am a failure in life, a great underachiever, his taunts at times reduce me to tears when I see with compassion how I struggled ever to get close to anyone and so often pushed love away and yet as my therapist reminds me those other partners never really showed me empathy or were willing to understand the effect of a past I laboured to over come.

Am I a failure or a heroine for having managed this far and to stay sober for just under 25 years now?  I will let others be my judge but one thing that warms my heart is what Mum often said to me in the years before she died.  “Of all my children its you I am most proud of, your sobriety is a great achievement”  So maybe just for today, I will let my mother have the final word and shed tears of gratitude that her voice of love and affirmation can for at least a while overcome the unrelenting punishing voice of my inner critic.