Thresholds of pain

My mother taught numbness as a way of coping. She called it good immunity. Our bodies were built of sterner stuff. We did not get sick, and if we did it was readily overcome. No need for doctors, even for her and my father unless things were desperate or pregnancy related.

And even then she liked to remind us, in third world countries, places like India women had their babies in the fields on the job and then picked themselves up, hoisted their tiny newborns onto their backs and got back to work.

Remarkable bodies and beings, and we too could be like this of we chose. It was easy. Do not let aches and pains get to you.

So an earache could be managed with a scarf around your head to keep out the cold air. A tooth ache I managed by rubbing toothpaste on the cavernous hole in the back of my molars and clenched down hard before going to sleep on the pain.

This way worked up to a point. It left me with a high pain threshold which my mother argued would be helpful in the making of babies and the living of life.

I once saw a kinesiologist who looked into my eyes.

‘You have a good immune system,’ he declared as if a fortune teller. How could he tell simply by looking into my eyes, and even then not like an ophthalmologist who can track the course of veins running through my eyes. This man saw something that told him about the state of my body, including ‘a tendency towards constipation,’ he said.

I believed him because it was true then. Not now. Not since increasing my intake of water and regularly drinking prune juice. A wonder drink. Not that you need to know this. No one knows to need these things, which is another thing my mother taught us. To be silent. To keep whatever thoughts and feelings we were permitted to ourselves.

And last night in my dreams a familiar dream, one in which I had not attended a single history class all year and the exam was looming. Would I drop out ahead of time and what might this do for my record, or would I flip open books in the nick of time, skim read as much as possible on the big themes and then wing it?

‘You’re good at writing,’ my dream companion said. ‘Better to go this way than to drop out.’

Another of my mother’s teachings. Go through life lightly. Wing it. Don’t ponder too long on the imponderables, except for religion and even then don’t torture belief too much, just live your best and all will be well.

Be adaptive, my mother taught.

Roll with the punches. Behave as though nothing is wrong, and he hurts you only because he loves you. How much these messages have stuck and now on the edge of adjusting to life with a new computer, forced to upgrade given my old computer, which was perfectly serviceable as far as I could tell, could no longer receive updates because it was too out of date. 

How I despise the inbuilt redundancy of physical items. Another of my mother’s messages. Make do with what you have. Recycle and re-use. All good messages, up to a point. 

As a child, same underpants five days in row, same socks could get smelly. A bath once a week. Not her fault of course but circumstances. A lack of amenities. I don’t hold her responsible for the lot.

Still I wonder these days about my own anesthetising sensibilities. My tendency to dissociate when the going gets tough and my readiness to hide from feelings even when my heart is thumping.

Why worry

I worry a lot. When will the drought end. Will the future hold. Her pregnancy go to term. Horrors come in cycles. One fear eclipses another and then it recycles back into causes for optimism though the man on the radio last night said we have only till 2050 to get ourselves back on track before it’s too late for the world.

Too late for future generations. He used the word subsist. He was not suggesting a lush and lovely life but subsistence, survival and perhaps it’s as much as we can hope for.

The dogs are here over night for a visit, the small brown and white Jack Russell, all feisty bark and bravado while the large hairy labradoodle, all anxiety and fear, sits behind me.   The dogs are a comfort, a reminder of what it’s like to care for children.

I’m reading Kate Hamilton’s Mad Wife, and troubled by the extent of her efforts to save her failing marriage by getting into the swinging scene. The stuff of wife swapping and sexual hedonism. 

Anything excessive in the sexual realm troubles me. I recognise my inhibitions given my childhood fears of my father’s excess. My fears I could go mad under the weight of such heady bodily impulses.

I worry about the cracks in the walls of this over one-hundred-years old house, my lack of desire to plaster over them yet again. My acceptance that soon enough the house will be pulled down to make way for multiple apartments along the busy road on which we have lived these past forty-five years. Soon fifty years. 

I worry that the clothes moths invading the carpet in places will attack my jumpers and woollen clothes just as I have needed to throw out my husband’s pullovers. His woollen hat from Scotland, his fisherman’s hat from Italy. 

My husband collects hats and walking sticks and all manner of equipment, the type needed to bake bread the make sausages and salami, the type needed to thread pasta and strain tomatoes ahead of tomato sauce, bookbinding equipment, papers and weights, the knives –  so many knives, the kitchen knives, the oaring knives which he sharpens on stones to a mirror sheen for paring leather. 

His cameras’ high quality to allow for the best photographs only these days they’re too heavy to carry far so he settles, as so many of us do, for his iPhone. He dabbles in calligraphy in art, in writing. He has put his mind to glass blowing and for many years there he produced the most glorious bowls on his lathe. There in the workshop for hour after hour, the various pieces of wood, high quality, Huen pine, camphor wood, iron bark, oak and jarrah, the heavy woods from ancient forests all bought for a price with plans one day to carve them into items of beauty. 

His prize-winning bowl sits on his shelves alongside the pieces he insists are not good enough. He is a perfectionist, a man of many talents, too many talents. He cannot choose one on which to focus, so he flits around from one to another. He has carved spoons out of wood, the hand carved variety, and collects coins. He’d collect more wine if he could, but we invariably wind up drinking it. 

I prefer this use of the objects collected to things hidden away in sock drawers near his hidden artefacts. Why have them if we cannot use them? Why preserve things for an unknown future?

When we were small my mother collected sheets and towels for her future dream home. And when we finally moved into the AV Jennings cream brick veneer in Warrigal Road Cheltenham we used them at last. Their pristine newness lasted only weeks before we kids left them stretched across bathroom floors after use, or they were stained on beds with bedwetting, periods and the other grubbiness of human endeavour that turns once white sheets into those yellowed and streaked.

Life is to be used up. But something must also be reserved. And we must hold back on our consumption ahead of his uncertain future.

I worry a lot. About the point of all the words I have written here today, and everyday whenever I take to the page with my running fingers. These words are a waste of time and energy. But then I read the poets Mary Oliver from whom I borrowed this first sentence. She of the short and pithy honesty that stays with me long after I have read. 

‘You do not have to crawl through the desert on your knees for a hundred miles repenting…’

I take solace from her words. They let me off the proverbial hook. The say, go for it. Allow yourself the indulgence of words. They are cheap. They cost very little beyond the ink and paper, if they see the light of day. Or the wear and tear of a computer screen and its inner workings.

‘Tell me,’ Mary Oliver again, ‘what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?’

She is gone now, leaving behind her legacy of words.

A poet after all his has refined the words to pools of meaning that stay with us in a way prose might not.

I worry a lot. About the blemish on my right hand that came out of nowhere like a strange blister that the hypochondriac in me imagines might morph into a skin cancer. 

I rehearse a visit to my GP to the skin specialist and hope in the meantime it will go away. As so many things do. Even as I read the stories and remember the words on the television when I was a girl of something like ten. 

‘A lump or thickening on the skin or elsewhere could be an early sign of cancer. Remember many early cancers can be cured.’ Or words to this effect. And in my university days when people talked about the big ‘C’, the way it invaded people’s bodies and lives.

More than this I worry for my heart. My overloaded heart. The way the worries load it down and one day, like my mother’s ahead of me, mine will wear out and I will be no more.

It’s not the being no more. It’s the getting there that worries me. The rough road of endings.