Who is Normal?
I am not talking about Normal June who turned into Mary Lynne Manroe on some other planet, I’m talking about us.
To which the response may well be, ‘Of course we’re not normal. we’re miniaturists (or quilters, or railway modellers, or or.)’
Normal is not an absolute, despite what home blood pressure monitor booklets tell you. Normal is a range.
The longer you live the wider you know the range to be.
The normal that gets touted about to children: grow up, work hard, get a job, get a spouse, get a house, get children seems increasingly unlikely. The corollary: do right by the children and get grandchildren doesn’t seem to work either.
I do have grandchildren, two of them. It is an amazement to someone who came from an orphanage to find that inherited traits are not just a chapter in a book about genetics but real. I have genes, apparently.
I also have friends who will not have grandchildren. The number of my friends who belong to this group is growing. In ‘normal’ life a hundred years ago when those who could have children had several because infant mortality was common and antibiotics hadn’t been invented, it didn’t matter if one child turned out to be infertile, gender fluid or career focussed, there were plenty of others to test the genetics theory. This sometimes meant someone saying, ‘And what do you know he turned out like Alfie!’ and everyone else sighing. As there were many grandchildren there were many possibilities.
Another big fat lie is married happily ever after. My adoptive father did break off the relationship with my adoptive mother when they had been going out for some time. He had been brought up in a family where they were given religion rather than love. Given the possibility of actually being able to kiss someone and maybe take things further, he went back.
The rest of your life is such a long time.
Sometimes action to end a situation is not possible. In my case I don’t abandon people because I started my life abandoned. I have friends whose difficult person in their lives is a disabled child. I have friends whose children fell down the potholes of drink and know those whose loved ones stepped on the drugs slide.
It’s a long road that has no turning, though I could do with one at present. I keep walking into comments as hard as the edge of a door, increasing in frequency and very damaging. They might be related to the drinking reaching the brain, they might be related to fear of loss. I have managed since March to lose over half a stone because my intestines have healed and are working. I’ve worked out for quarter of a century but now I’m beginning to look as if I do.
I have written quite a lot of words to help anyone dealing with someone else with dementia but there are many other very difficult situations in life caused by numerous other ailments of the body and brain, from which there seems to be no escape.
There is, of course. Police cold case files in every developed nation in the world are stopped at the bit where the missing person just couldn’t take any more and walked out of their life.
The Internet has given us all access to the biggest library the world has ever known. One of the topics I have followed since about 2004, or 5 is Near Death Experiences. These are the experiences of people who have technically died but been revived. At first on the Internet they were brief written passages. Now there is an institute to study them and numerous video casts and interviewers of those who have experienced the phenomenon. If you are going to search for these take a pinch of salt with you and be prepared for more pop up adverts than you knew existed as people try to make money out of death, previously an occupation only available to funeral directors.
Nevertheless the similarity of the experience in numerous cultures is startling, though the way people interpret their event is certainly culturally biased. One of the common themes drawn from the incident is that we are all here to learn.
How you deal with the difficulty of learning situations caused by those closest to you is quite a question. I might find myself at a loss as to how to answer had I not been answering the question for 35 years without knowing it.
Hobbies, jobs, crafts, pastimes, engaging novels, somewhere else to put your weary head away from the problem not of your making that is going round and round and sending you crazy.
In the absolute thick of it, such as when a demented person is hitting you with their walking stick, or someone in withdrawal is so nasty it makes you gasp, or some actual physical occurrence is an all hands to the pumps situation, except that there is only one pair of hands and they’re yours, you have to stay focussed.
Afterwards when you get the clever reply or the edited highlights in your head, this is the time to scrap bust, miniaturise, upgrade your layout or do the shopping and planning, or, even, just, plan for the shopping.
And to remember you are not living a perfect life, you are not even living a normal life because there is no such thing. Normal is a range not an absolute.
I believe there is a possibility that the harder it gets the more you are learning.
But you are allowed time off, time out, recovery time. The safest way I know of to get your own back, to be yourself, to think of something else, is to ride that hobby horse as hard as you can when you can. This is the mode of transport outta Dodge.
I have a stable of hobby horses. When I’ve finished writing this (writing is one of my favourite ponies, had you guessed?) I’m off to do the garden before the heat gets started. Then I have several wigs to make for dolls and I’m going to fit in a workout somewhere. These are the current runners for today.
I may metaphorically walk into a door in the day, these comments are coming out of left field and thick and fast currently. When I’ve stopped seeing stars I’ll get on with being me.
Being yourself is the best hobby there is, I hope you do it a lot, apart from anything else, it’s normal for you.
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