A Life is a Life

Whether you are an average joe struck down with Cancer, or run over by a bus, a 'hero' soldier shot down in conflict, or a drug addict jazz singer who takes one too many drugs and doesn't make it - a life is a life. It is not clever or witty to compare someone who has died at the hands of a soldier's gun, or at the mercy of a dreadful disease.

No matter how your life is taken, it has been taken.

The family you leave behind will be mortified by your death, however it has occurred. Sayings such as 'they had a good innings' does not begin to heal the wound of a life now gone.

Addiction is a disease, it is easy to look down your nose at someone afflicted with addiction and make the assumption they have chosen their path - but I can guarantee that people who are addicted to anything, be it drink, drugs or tobacco, would wish everything they have not to be afflicted with that addiction.

As Russell Brand has said before me, it is something we all need to live with. The fear of addiction, and well done to every person who has not become addicted to something, well done on having that strength, not everyone has that, and those of us who are addicted to something need help not your scorn.

To compare people's lives and deaths is not big and its not clever, every life is worth living, rich or poor, famous or alone. No one person deserves any more accolade than anyone else. At the same time, the fact that addiction related deaths in celebrity circles makes big news can only be a good thing - it might just save someone else life, one of the little people who are just as likely to become addicted to a street drug, or alcohol as the next person, nobody is free of that.

Mine all Mine

My lounge looks like a playground with toys scattered everywhere,
Where once were neutral colours lay brightly coloured bears,
I sit down on the sofa and a small squeak from my rear,
No not noxious gas but a plastic toy with squeaker landed here.

My fluffy throws are matted now and tatted on the floor,
Stickers now cover my once beautifully stained wooden door,
Be careful where you step now for bare feet often find,
a misplaced toy or worse than that old food an orange rind.

I wanted children so much I knew I would love them dear,
But sometimes I do wonder if I was right now they are here,
Then I look into their faces and see the wonder in their eyes,
The pure love they have for me and more for them have I.

One day they will be gone from here with lives all of their own,
So I shall enjoy the colourful world they have created in my home,
The neutral colours I held so dear now seem boring and bland,
I dread the day when colours no longer stream from little hands.

I'll come down in the morning and silence will prevail,
Breakfast crumbs will no longer lay like freshly fallen hail,
I'll sit and drink my coffee and look back to a time,
When my babies were just that – mine all mine.

Anger Management

I have started taking an interest in Anger Management to try and control my own anger issues. I have discovered that really I do not have Anger Management issues, and more irritablity issues. In other words I get irritated and show it a little more readily than most people.

I am attempting to understand the reasons behind other peoples actions and words, this is because the world does NOT revolve around me and my feelings, and although someone may have said something hurtful to me, that does not mean they are meaning to be hurtful. Also the actions of others will rarely have started with the initial thought to upset me. So now I am looking extra hard at what people are doing and why it irritates me - once I have worked out that my son not picking his shoes up is not a direct result of him ignoring me, but more that he is a six year old and forgetful, and sometimes his shoes are the last thing on his mind, this makes me take a deep breath and move them to a safe place away from the puppy, and allow my irritation to dissipate - this should be like a slowly leaking bucket.

I have to say though, this is all very simple and easy and nice when its written in black and white in a nice neat little book, while I am laying in bed with a cup of tea and irritation is the last thing on my mind. However, the practice of it, when my son has left his shoes in the middle of the hallway, and the puppy is happily chomping on them because someone else has left the door guard open, and so she has come through when she wasn't supposed to, and the dinner is burning while I wrestle the shoes of the puppy, and my son and my daughter are in the lounge fighting over who's turn it is to choose what channel they watch, and the phone rings and its my husband not thinking about what time it is, and wanting a chat, and then the washing machine dings to let me know that its contents are now fully washed and needing to be hung out or up to dry, and the baby cries because he is really hungry and wants his dinner ten minutes ago, and the dog starts growling at the puppy because she is now fussing round him because I've taken the shoes of her, and then the children come through for dinner with arms full of toys wanting them to sit with them while they eat their dinner, so I have to find somewhere for the toys to go in between shoving spoons of mushed up food into the baby, and finishing serving up the dinner, then the dinner goes in front of the children, and my daughter gives me that look to say she doesn't like spaghetti even though it was her absolute favourite last time I cooked it, and she flicks a mushroom off her plate because she has now decided she hates mushrooms (I hate mushrooms so I don't blame her but at the same time, last time I made dinner with mushrooms, and painstakingly picked all the mushrooms out of her dinner and mine, she whined all through dinner because she didn't have any and she LOVES them, and because I don't have any in my dinner to share with her, and getting mushrooms from her brother of father would be like stealing honey from a bear....) then someone knocks a drink over, and I have to mop it up, then the baby manages to get hold of a loaded spoon and flicks it all over me and him - its amazing how much food one of those baby spoons can hold when it comes to flicking them, then my son sits with his arms crossed chatting about his day while his dinner goes cold, and I smile and nod and encourage him to please eat his dinner, all the time seeing in the corner of my eye my daughter flicking various other bits out of her dinner that today she does not like, then when the baby has finished his dinner, and I have had a chance to eat my dinner, I start to clear away, and THEN my son starts to eat his dinner, and so I load the dishwasher up with pots and pans, and wipe round the kitchen surfaces, I clean the high chair and the baby, and wipe round the rest of the dinner table, I get the dogs food ready, and slowly but surely my son may have taken three bites of food by then - again I encourage him to eat more quickly, and he takes that to mean shove as much food in his mouth as possible....eventually the hell that is meal times is over and we retreat to the lounge where a bomb has gone off amongst the toys, but nobody knows how it happened and even more so they don't wish to be involved in the clear up that is required, eventually I give up and we retreat upstairs where I discover my son who has spent all of three minutes upstairs since being home from school has managed to drape dirty and not so dirty clothes all around his bedroom, the bathroom and the hallway, there are toys everywhere, drawers open, teddy bears have sprung forth from their places, the curtains have been tweaked, and the tap has been left running, and of course the toilet has not been flushed. So after tackling most of this, I then attempt to run a bath for the children. While I wait for the bath to run, I undress the baby ready for his dunk, and then I ask the children to undress ready for theirs. Of course my daughter either has a t-shirt that has no wish to travel back over her head, or a pair of trousers that do not wish to come free from her legs. After she cries about it, I help her, and then have two children with not a stitch on running around, while I check the bath. The bath almost always runs far too hot - and so I then have to wait for the cold water to top it up and cool it down. After the baby has had his dunk, the other two can get in, while I dry and dress the baby, the other two usually end up having a row, and covering the bathroom (and sometimes the hall carpet outside the bathroom) in bath water. Then I have to evacuate the bath and wait while they dry and get their pjs on.
Then comes my long drawn out attempt to get them all to bed. The baby usually requires a feed before sleep, and so I try and get the other children into their beds and on their way to the land of nod as quickly as possible - however they then take to shouting through with various demands, usually something I have forgotten to do bad Mother that I am. This will often wake the almost sleeping baby, and my anger or irritation bucket, by now is so overflowing there may as well not be a bloody bucket........

As you can see, in real life irritation is at every corner, nook and crany and is more than ready to pounce and wrestle you to the floor.

Anyway, I have been doing what I can to deal better with my anger and irritation, and amazingly even after an afternoon as I have described above, I have managed not to shout and not to get too angry, so I must be doing something right........mustn't I?

I Love you, I'm sorry and Help me

A recent 'chain post' on Facebook had the above as the three hardest things to say.

I Love you

Never really had a problem with this - always been able to say I love you, and I say it often, and always mean it.

I'm Sorry

A toughie, I am really bad at saying I am sorry - I often know I've gone to far and need to retract, but find it very hard to do. I have stopped saying a lot of things, so I can avoid saying I am sorry!

Help Me!

Yes another toughie, I will ask for help sometimes but only if I really really need it. I see it as a sign of weakness. I know people who ask for help over every little thing - they would rather ask for help than have a go at doing something for themselves, and it annoys me. It especially annoys me that I am often too stubborn to ask for help, even when I really really do need it, I would rather struggle than let anyone else know what a tough time I am having.

I guess people see different things as weakness - there are probably people out there who see saying 'I love you' as weak, or 'I am Sorry'

I guess the real weakness is not seeing that you can't do everything, you wont be the perfect Wife or Mother, you wont be the best at work, or have the cleanest house. Sometimes you are just an average person with average ability, and your weakness is not seeing that being average is ok.

Sniffs and Sounds

There are so many little things that can make you happy or sad, the slightest thing can evoke a memory, and make us smile while doing something mundane or close to tears at an inappropriate moment.

The smell of honeysuckle always takes me back with a whoosh to being woken up in the middle of the night in the summer when I was a child, and the whole house had been woken up by a storm. It wasn't raining, just lots of big flashes of lightening followed by huge cracks of thunder. It was so warm, we sat with the patio doors open and watched the storm as it went past. There was a huge honeysuckle bush right by the doors, and the smell was so strong during that storm, I remember almost feeling dizzy from the smell.

Hospital food always takes me back, not to the three years I spent working in a hospital laboratory, but instead to when my Grandmother was very sick in hospital. She died after about three weeks of being in hospital. Because I worked there I would pop down in some of my breaks and lunch hours, to see her and whoever was at her bedside, usually my Mum or her sister. We didn't really get on with her sister, and so polite conversation was what I was often faced with when she was there. Whenever I left her hospital room I would have a huge surge in my stomach, I felt sick and my breath would be hard and difficult. I was usually crying by the time I got back up to work, so I had to leave time to sort myself out before I went back to sorting out blood samples, and typing up patient details. I never much liked working in the hospital, the people I worked with were often difficult, and just seeing patients reduced to a couple of symptoms on a piece of paper was hard.
Others were often reminded that there was a person behind each blood sample, but I like to think I always paid special attention to each blood sample that passed through my hands. I used to feel upset on the patients behalf when a blood taker hadn't taken enough blood to be able to do the test, or if a student Doctor appeared with a blood sample wanting blood for a transfusion and they hadn't filled the patients details in properly. Sounds petty now, but if you are going to be transfusing 2 pints of blood into a person, you really need to know that the blood you are cross matching belongs to the patient!! It was always the urgent ones that had the Doctors eyes rolling into the backs of their heads, at the same time as everyone else was tutting and shaking their heads and telling them to do it properly.

There are always reasons for rules and regulations, I hate it when people go into overdrive moaning about having to tick boxes or sign here, here and here - a procedure will only be there because a mistake was made in the past.

Anyway, off on a tangent as usual!

Smells I find are the biggest trigger of memories, and maybe music, sometimes a song will come on the radio - or a music channel, and you will be able to close your eyes and be transported back. Michael Jackson's Billy Jean always transports me back to our old family house, in the summer, into my bedroom which I shared with my little brother. I can see a clock on the wall I think it may have been a cat shape, and its tail moved and also made its eyes move from side to side. I'm not really sure if its real or in my head, but I think the curtains in my room were quite thin, because the sun was still shinning, and it was making the room glow through the curtains.....but that might not be a proper memory - the mind does funny things!

Billy Joel's Uptown Girl always transports me back to the Autumn/Winter time being all dressed ready for school in our then new house. I had a packed lunch ready, but decided as we were getting ready to go that I didn't want to stay for packed lunch, and my Dad was a bit cross with me because I had messed everyone about. I was scared off from packed lunches, when I dropped some yogurt down my school tie, and the boys I was sitting with (I didn't have any female friends then) all called me a baby and laughed at me. I don't think I ever took a yogurt to school again!! I still am a bit nervous of eating yogurts in front of people, and recently splatted myself with yogurt at work, I laughed it off and made a joke about it, but I remembered that little girl with her yellow Muppets packed lunch box who everyone had laughed at all those years ago.

I hated going to school, I was lonely and sad, and when my son started at school just under two years ago all I could remember was being so confused all the time, not really understanding what we were doing or why. I tried to fill my little boy with as much information as possible, but I don't know if it worked. His first year at school was hard work, and he was upset a lot. He seems happier this year, but still has trouble fitting in with the children in his class. From what little he tells us, he plays with the older children more than those in his class. I was the same when I first started at school. If I could I wouldn't send them to school, such a hateful place, full of social ideals and guidelines which each child is measured against. There is always children full of hate ready to spread their poison in order to relieve their own pain from their own situations.

Every parent teacher meeting, or review of his work reminds me of how I was at school, I started off fairly confident, top of my class for reading, being sent to older classes to keep me challenged at the level I was at. I was terrible at Math, and fell behind the other children by a good couple of books. I begged the teacher to let me take the books home with me so I could be on the same book as everyone else, but she wouldn't let me. I was five.

It all seems so silly now, but I never really caught up with Math, so when I took my GCSE and managed to get a C grade I was overjoyed. I now work in an accounts department giving new customers their credit limits after reviewing their yearly accounts - work that one out, because I certainly can't!

All this from a couple of sniffs and sounds.......