TAW Thoughts 12 + Layout

Week 3 of the Artist’s Way, now moving into week four. Last week was again a bit rough, from personal reasons again, more than The Artist’s Way. Thursday saw the first Social Worker visit to see us, and I ended up being told that my own background would be the problem area to get through the adoption panel. I was under the mistaken impression that being adopted at birth might help me out in building a case towards understanding some of the emotional needs of any child I might be adopting. Instead, it appears this might be something against me. Combined with the fact my father died when I was four or five, and I took on a carer’s role with my mother once into my teens, then the whole thing appears to be pointing to me wanting to somehow adopt to make up for something missing in my life.

Our social worker has left us with copious homework - to write up our own childhood backgrounds and do a family tree. In an attempt to get this out of the way, I then spent the entire rest of the day - many hours of it - putting together my nine pages of memories and analysis. But it’s emotional going back to your childhood like that, and drawing out all the areas which now lead you to parent in the way you do. And everyone who knows of this just says - show them your daughter, and then they will know what kind of parent you are now, not what you might be because of something so long ago. But it doesn’t work like that.

Thursday also saw my husband and I go to our adoption medicals. Although my husband has a medically broken back from an old injury, his medical went through quite breezily. Mine started off quite well, as my own doctor started working with me to deal with the endometritis chronic problems which I’ve been tackling unsuccessfully for a few years. But she rang me up just as the social worker was arriving, to inform me that a urine sample I’d given came back with blood in it. She put the frights into me for quite a few days - I have to go back in this week to investigate further. But from a realistic viewpoint it will probably turn out to be showing us that the endo has now permeated other parts of my body, which bleed almost daily on the month anyway.

On Friday, I woke feeling it was just all too much. I’d been successful in finding a volunteer job with the kid’s club afterschool once an afternoon each week, and everything just was too too much. I’d also been carrying a cold all week, and Friday saw me miserable, tired and completely confused. I cancelled out of driving out in the dark to see some old work friends that night. I know they can’t at all understand my state at the moment, but with everything happening at once, I need to protect myself from the past intruding at the moment, and concentrate on getting through this new future. I just couldn’t face the drive alone in the dark and galeforce winds on a Friday night, to a place 50 miles away, simply to meet up with people who belong (currently) in a past. And I know I let them down, but that also they don’t have the power to know what this feels like.

Week 3 of The Artist Way was an easy week for me, understanding wise. The section on synchonicity hit home with me. It wasn’t new to me, and is something I already accept in my own world, and have done so for many years. I believe that what is happening at the moment - the writing course, the adoption thing (the most difficult thing I have ever been through before - and this is someone who has moved 12,000 miles away from her home country, grieved the loss of her mother, married and given birth in only a two and a half year period), the new little job with kids and real live people, and everything else taking place here - are happening for a purpose.  

I haven’t been able to write, create or do anything artistic over the last few days as I process these emotions and thoughts through my head. But I have strung together a quick layout - I forced my husband to take a photo of me sitting outside yesterday. I normally spend any free time in the summer on those garden benches in our back yard, paying attention to the wildlife. Winter, I try to do this also, but the photograph is quite forced - we are suffering some 70mile winds and gales through the country lately, and a bitter artic freeze.  East Anglia didn’t get any snow - or even frost however, but it’s been cold enough for my hubbie to get his wish to light the big log-burner in our lounge.

I’m alone this next week. My hubbie is currently flying out for a business trip to India again. My days and nights will be simply to while-away the time and distract my daughter from her tears. My evenings, once she is asleep, and the dog is walked (around the house only, as I can’t leave her alone) will be spent gulping down a frozen meal-for-one, then going up to read and watch T.V. up in bed. I don’t particularly enjoy having the house alone to myself - and will, like the daughter, spend my week simply looking forward to his safe return.