Gathering storm

I have gone dark, despite the sunshine. There are things about which I must write, but cannot speak so apologies for the private posts. Some things are too dangerous to say out loud, so I’ve whispered them to myself so I do not forget. Although in the end, I must. Forgive and forget. That is the only way to move on.

But my body has gone into shutdown despite efforts to keep my chin up. Saturday threatened to go into freefall after waking at 5.15. Tom and I began to bicker, although not at each other, so in an effort to turn the day around, I grabbed both kids and took them to the lido for a fresh, brisk swim in the burgeoning sun. We skirted Broadway market afterwards, although in truth the place has become too much for me, and I sat with sunglasses on to hide my spontaneous eruptions into tears while the kids ate eyewateringly expensive buttermilk chicken and played in London Fields School playground, which has become a weekend extension of the market, complete with the jolly looking but aggressively commercial be-turbened bubble man, handmade and found accessories and overpriced gourmandise.

Later on, I was persuaded out of my misery to attend a long standing invitation to a private members’ club, to meet my uni friends who are going about life in a rather more prescribed form than me, a strategy that is now paying dividends. Their masters degrees and doctorates are beginning to bear fruit. Their late entry into the property market is propped up by secure jobs and one by one they have married and or are sprogging. Cue another eruption into tears, this time, luckily in the ladies loos. That looming question, at least for now, appear to have be settled by health concerns. In public, I was unnaturally bright but my puffy eyes were a dead giveaway that all was not well with me. After a bottle of white, I confessed all.

We ate and drank and I winced at the bill. I woke again at 4, but this time I kept my angst on the downlow, and to distract me from myself we took the kids to the Alderbrook riding stables in Wanstead – something I have been meaning to do for Ava for a while – for a parent-led session overseen by a cheery round horsewoman, followed up with a round of cheese and cucumber sandwiches on white by Wanstead Park’s charmingly old fashioned kiosk. It was briefly idyllic.

On my return I sweated out stress and bile in the sun, my over sensitive body fizzing and spitting and healing while Tom painted the fence. He later cooked roast chicken. We watched a film with the kids and I fell asleep on the sofa. I have given up cleaning my teeth at night. It is a sign of how little I can manage right now.

But my sister Katie has obviously been on the phone to Dad. He texted – as is his wont in times of crisis – to ask if he could do anything, concerned, at long last, for my health and for our finances. After a couple of days mulling it over, I found something that he could do, and for the first time since I was 15, I asked to borrow enough money that I could go to Katie’s hen do without worrying about the cost. He put the money in my account and I wept tears of gratitude and something else, borne of years of animosity between us ending, just like that.

Today, bank holiday and I’m fending off the kids who want the computer to fight googlies on Minecraft and dig for emeralds, but I am gathering an arsenal of my own, a painful process of dredging and sifting for a fight I’m probably too defeated to win.