I shouldn’t be writing a blog, I should be upstairs packing, I’m off to my mother’s again to meet someone from the memory team. They rang on Monday and spoke to my son and didn’t seem happy I had been in the shower washing my hair.
Once all the officials, medical experts and others know you are the responsible adult, your time is no longer your own. If you don’t contact them sufficiently often with questions, they’ll contact you. From their end the frequency may not look all that often; from your end no sooner have you sorted out a financial tangle than the doctor is on the line, swiftly followed by the patient, asking when you are coming for Christmas – next month, when it is – and then the social services, then a family friend worried, then the friends you are putting off for Christmas because a day spent entertaining is too much for the patient, then the patient again, then a doctor, then bed and then get up the next day and go there. In between you try to fit in things like going to the toilet, making meals for the family and cleaning the windows. (I didn’t, I just got as far as taking the cleaning materials up to the landing. Then someone rang.)
I don’t want to do any of this. I want to get on with the doll I am dressing for an order, the the next order and, after I’ve made the cards (60) the thing I really want to do at the moment is do a sculpt for a full size paper relief picture I want to try in a gallery in the town. That’s the thing I go to sleep thinking of, I am bursting to do the relief picture big and detailed. I am sculpting it in my sleep. I feel like the character Jimson in The Horse’s Mouth by Joyce Carey, a novel from the 40s that I read in the 60s, if I don’t get my hands on a canvas soon I’m going to start painting it on the walls.
Unlike Jimson my art cannot obsess me. It wouldn’t be a very thrilling novel either, a woman driven to sculpt but forced to look after everyone else instead. This could well be why great artists of the past were men, you just couldn’t imagine Rembrandt tearing himself away from his latest self portrait to put the kettle on, by the looks of most of the results, he didn’t even stop to wash his clothes.
Nevertheless what I want is not important. It doesn’t count at all. Currently everyone keeps asking me what I’ve arranged for them for Christmas. What I’ve arranged is for the carers to have the day off, with their families. The other half and I will do the holiday for my mother, the S&H will spend time with his girlfriend and when we’ve done it there we three will come back here and I’ll cook a second turkey for us, well them, I’m a vegetarian.
I remember long ago I used to have a Christmas after Christmas. My parents could look after themselves, my father-in-law had remarried and my husband and son had gone back to school and work after the holidays. I had entire days to myself. I wrote a novel, invented dolls, spent days pouring porcelain and many happy hours at the QVC sales, spending my Christmas money. I even had a nearly proper job writing for a magazine and got paid after Christmas, in the traditional manner, so I had money I had earned for me for the sales.
Happy days! I don’t even get to write a quick blog now, I’ve just been told to top up the screen wash, so we can head off into the wild blue yonder to do the chat to the expert, the care for my mother, the try on of the new clothes I’m taking, the return of the ones that are no good coupled with the fifty yard dash through town for the next lot of money for the agency.
The art of living is hard when you are careworn. The art of art will have to wait, even though I can feel the pressure of it building inside me like a dam.
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JaneLaverick.com – itchy fingers.