Broken open but still alive : today’s reflections

I faced up to painful dentistry yesterday. It took about 2 hours as they had to remove a crown off a tooth with decay and there was so much sawing and the needles. It triggered me so much that at times I was over come with images from the past 2 years of my mother throughout her various hospitalisations I tried to support her through over many years before she died. In one she was cut down one leg from thigh to knee and knee to ankle after a knee replacement op went horribly wrong.

I went through all of that, then my sister tried to take her life. That was horrible to witness as well as to see all the medications she was on for supposed ‘bi polar’. It drove me almost demented and throughout this I went through a tooth extraction, and two painful bouts of root canal, one of which I had to make them stop as the dentist I used then did not give me any breaks or pace it like the dentist yesterday who is much younger and more sensitive. I then had to face that my bridge could not be saved and I would have to wear a denture permanently a few years after my breast cancer treatment.

My body went haywire over the past 24 hours but I have managed it. I got into bed about 9 oclock and I was nearly blown apart with it. I took one magnesium tissue salt which helped and focused on my breathing. The issue with Scott too is causing so much pain. I lay in bed just listening to old songs from the 70s and crying my eyes out. I thought of my Dad and prayed to him and Mum, both their death anniversaries are close now. Mums is in a month’s time just 8 days after my sobriety birthday.

My sister and I are taking my Mum’s good friend out for her 80th today. This is the lady who tells me I am ‘too emotional’. But I have to take the good with the bad because at other times she has been there for me and she is the one who continued to go see my sister up to two times a week while she underwent the past 3 psychiatric hospitalisations following my mother’s death in 2017. I understand how much of her own pain she had to suppress when her parents whipped her out of her life to leave Scotland in the 1960s and brought her so far away to an alien hot dry place where she knew no one.

I went out today to get her some flowers. Instead of a professional bouquet I got three bunches, one of roses, one of pink stocks and another of gelsenium. I brought them home and assembled them into a haphazard bunch of blooms for her, they won’t be perfect but I put my love into the bunch of flowers. Together with her and my sister I guess not much emotion will be spoken of.

I have been crying myself this morning over so many things, about how ugly things have got between ‘Scott’ and I and how I still don’t know if I am being played. That said I feel strong inside myself most especially because over the past few months I have been able to feel my vulnerability while taking as many steps as I can to protect myself in positive ways.

Today I really feel the power of that Mercury station on 11 degrees Scorpio as I remember over the past 24 hours the Moon in Leo squared it. Leo falls in my first house (at least half of it) so today I feel my energy rising despite the battering about my head and teeth got yesterday at the hands of the dentist. I know I am moving forward as even a year ago this kind of dental trauma may have rocked me too much and I may have felt the need to cancel lunch today. Today I will go because so much of me wants to be in life, messy as it is, imperfect as it is, invalidating as it is, maybe finally I am finding a solid core inside myself that can withstand what ever life throws at me and my capacity to self soothe rather than self negate is growing slowly and incrementally. I believe there is a time to rest but there is also a time to engage and I really really want to keep living much and all as when I go through such pain as yesterday I feel I do not have the strength or will to last another day on earth.