This statement is something of a cliche in AA meetings; it is often described as the state which precedes the push to get clean and sober. Twenty five years clean and sober, however, I can tell you that this is the state that can happen under many different circumstances.
I received an email on Friday morning from the solicitors who represent the people who want to buy Mum’s house. Mum can’t sell her house at the moment because she has nowhere to go, and we don’t know when she will have somewhere to move to. In the meantime, we have tried searching for other properties, meeting with the people who own the property we want to buy and finding that their house-hunting hasn’t come to anything since the death of the woman whose house they were about to buy put a stop to that, at least for the present time. We have sought rental options, I have moved furniture around in my house in order to make a space in the spare room for my mother and her dog; this had at first provided a distraction from the existing stress of trying to get the local authority to find a school or alternative provision for my autistic teenage son. However, as time wore on, and I entered into correspondence with someone senior in the special educational needs team of the local authority, and as his reply generated more queries and complaint by me as it became clear that educational scrutiny is partial or non-existent; I felt increasingly tired and fraught.
Having found an online educational provider that the local authority panel has refused to fund, and desperate to ‘bookmark’ the resource for my son, who is taking time to come around to the idea, I sat on the online meeting while tutors talked about timetables and teaching resources, with another screen open, clicking through pictures of tens of properties for sale in the local area, and took in not a thing. I felt grudging towards my mother’s stress manifestations as they continued to arise: her executive functions diminished, she drove distractedly and scraped her car on another person’s at a roundabout, then freaked out about driving altogether, and I added walking her dog to the list of grocery shopping, cooking, vacuuming et cetera – meaning that, on the way to the usual walkie place with my dog, I would stop the car and leave my son and my dog momentarily while I went in and grabbed my dog’s twin brother, and then took us all for a walk. I am now the person who does all the cooking, even when Mum is more ‘switched on’ and buys groceries from the supermarket – odd, random things that might simply go off on the worktop or in the fridge as the weeks pass.
I recognise the neurological executive deficits, as they give me more insight into how my own brain injury manifested sixteen years ago; I also realise that the residual effects are, by now, hard to disentangle from the general ageing process (I am fifty now), and I chastise myself and push myself harder until … I burn out.
I am coming out of a lower ebb at present. It has taught me much: that I am capable of everything I set my mind to, but that if I don not prioritise myself and my needs, I crash and burn, ending up sick and suicidal as I listen to yet another local authority ‘resource’ that cannot help me, or being told by the Head of Middle School and my son’s Mentor that he really has got to engage with the provision. I know this. You can’t gaze at your wounds forever. Perhaps it takes this to push me to the realisation that I’ve been giving my power away in bewailing the failures of local government, specialist independent schools and so on. The image of Sisyphus endlessly pushing the boulder up the hill appeals to my macho side; but forces me to confront my humanity, my smallness and imperfection which – in the end – brings some relief.
The phrase “it’s not my job” is the truth which sets me free. Burned out by the Estate Agent – impersonating, I have a conversation with my mother in which, for the first time in a while, I do not apologise for the way I’m wired. I say that I recognise that her reaction to stress has changed as she gest older, and that mine has changed over the years, and that I am not on medication for a laugh. I need to pay attention to my energy levels, or I am, in the “Whack-A-Mole” process of trying to get everything done, popping my own head above the parapet merely to bash it down again to the point of exhaustion.
So, it’s not my job to sweat everything: lawyers can fight out the minutiae of house-purchase futility; my son has engaged with some of the online learning and I am delighted; my mother does not expect me to run the world after all. It is therefore with a sigh of relief that I refrain from posting in the EHCP or EOTAS FaceBook groups, and put my ‘phone down, as the heightened pulse rate and the cortisol are only going to erode my energy further.
Fascinating Purgatory - A Guided Tour 