The Spoons go Back in The Drawer

I would be the first to admit that I am not myself every third weekend. I suspect that, like almost all parents of a severely disabled child, guilt rears its head at every turn. If you feel impatient you feel guilty. If you wish you could escape some aspect of it all you feel guilty. You patch it up and muddle along and get by but you feel you could do more, or do it better. My way of coping usually involves being bad tempered with everyone else in the house, unfortunately. I can hear myself doing it but I can't stop myself.

I walk round saying terrible things, because I know if I say them I won't actually do them. When the screaming gets intolerable I say "Sorry but now I am going to have to remove your tonsils with this spoon!". Probably the only reason I haven't removed his tonsils with a spoon is that I gave myself away within earshot of the rest of my family in advance. The other children think this is dreadful. I feel guilty of course.

The bits in between the three-weekly onslaught of the over-active tonsils is "normal". All the spoons stay in the drawer. I used to think that we had to go out and do things in these two intervening weeks. It got to be a struggle to find things to do that didn't involve going shopping with the attendant threat of spending money accidentally. In the end I realised that being normal (a new concept to us) actually meant that you could decide to stay IN and do nothing much. This is an option that normal people have apparently and they don't feel any compulsion to go out simply because nothing is stopping them from doing it. Now that I have learned this, things are much nicer in weeks one and two. I no longer feel guilty about wasting time. One less thing to feel guilty about.

The Guilt Trip - My only outing so far this weekend!

I can't believe I have let this happen again! Just because I had a whole day off to myself (apart from the fact that teenager number 1 was at home instead of college, teenager number 2 was coming home from boarding school in the afternoon and teenager number 3 was at home sick not at school), I have allowed my guilt to make me accede to cancelling a day's training course that I was really looking forward to. My business partner announced that he was feeling overooked! An all day meeting, a training course in London and my paltry day off consumed the latter end of last week. He has not had enough of my attention and is feeling ignored. My guilty conscience tells me I cannot have another day out of the office.

Don't bother asking me if I think he would do the same for me! Of course you must remember that his kids are more important to him than an ordinary person's children would be to an ordinary person. This is because he is divorced and only has them on alternate days. This means that when it is a kids day, absolutely nothing must come in the way. Remember that issue that was so desperate and required you to drop everything and concentrate on it? Well, offer to have a meeting about it on a kids evening of the week and of course this is a no/no. Explain that when it is convenient to him you have to take your teenager number 3 to a music lesson, well there you go again, letting family get in the way of business!

The kill option remains of course. I do think about that one sometimes.

Jumping out of the 'plane..

This first entry is like stepping out of a plane without a parachute...I shall have to retire to think about it a bit more before I have the courage to say much. It is very odd to think that people you don't know are possibly looking through the window into your soul, but on the other hand they might not be and it could be quite safe...! Also a bit like trying to decide whether to take your kit off on the beach when it looks as if there is no-one about. But actually, when I had the chance to do that I didn't do it. My friend did, and went swimming in the nippy waters off the Eastern coast of Scotland in late September: I guess the chances of running into anyone else there were genuinely not great.

QED, when we invited anyone who happened to pass along that stretch of the beach to attend a party back at our place, by writing the address and time in four foot letters in the sand. No-one came.