In the middle of the night

This morning I was folding the thick blanket I
use at night when I skulk off to the spare room to escape my husband’s snoring, when he walked by.  
‘Your swaddling clothes?’ he joked,
an awkward joke because my husband hates that he snores and keeps me awake. 
It troubles him but it seems he can
do little about it. 
In the middle of the night, I’m fit
to throttle him, but by morning I’m sanguine.  It’s okay I reckon.  I can handle it and at least I have another
room to which I can escape. 
Before you go on about the things
my husband should have checked out: sleep apnoea and the like; lying on his
side and not his back; less red wine; I will tell you the point of my telling
you this as it enters my mind. 
The point has to do with love and
hate and how in the middle of the night when my deepest vulnerabilities are
unleashed I can feel murderous towards he who stops me from rolling back into
blissful sleep when in the morning and as the day progresses I feel no such
rage at all. 
Similarly, when I visit my mother
who is back in the Dandenong hospital, her second visit this year, this time
with pancreatitis, I can overlook all the rage I have felt towards her over the
years, especially when I see her shrunken form under a shroud like sheet and she smiles with pleasure to see me.  
She smiles in the same way for all of her
visitors when we arrive but I reckon there is something in that smile that
belongs especially to me, or should I say to all of us who once were her
babies. 
Dandenong hospital is a huge block
like structure that sits square on flat bare land not far from the intersection
of a freeway and a highway on the edge of west Dandenong. 
The section in which they have put
my mother is newly built but there’s an older part where she’s been in the
past that’s less welcoming.  Not that
hospitals are ever welcoming, at least not to me with their machines and
sterilising hand soap dispensers on every corner. 
They remind you of the dangers that
lurk in all the germs that could possibly exist in wait for us as frail human
beings. 
Hospitals are unsafe places as far
as germs are concerned but this time my mother is happy to be there.  Before she arrived she was in such pain and
now at least they have overcome her initial distress and they have offered her
a single room and so she can sleep and open her eyes to the mandatory visits
from nurses and doctors for inspection and procedures, and otherwise she smiles
at her visitors and then sleeps some more.
My own sleep was interrupted so
many times last night that I do not feel well rested.  A crick in my hip after I experimented last night with
sitting in one of our lounge chairs, side on, the way my daughter sometimes
sits.  I’ve pulled a muscle and then a
throbbing in my head in the middle of the night signalled for a few minutes the approach of a brain haemorrhage. 
In the middle of the night it gets hard
to convince myself I am not dying.  I
chide myself for such hypochondriacal delusions.  It is a feature of aging perhaps, but also a
feature of personhood. 
I have held similar fears for as long
as I can remember.  When I was as young as
ten years of age I lay in my bed one night in wait for my older sister to come to bed and felt a strange twinge in my stomach such that by the time my sister
arrived I had convinced myself I had stomach cancer. 
It was no small coincidence perhaps that my
grandmother had died of stomach cancer a few years before and I had heard about
cancer from the television, only the tell take signs, ‘a lump or thickening in
the breast or elsewhere,’ the manly voice-over said as various bits of lumpy
skin appeared on the screen and a woman clutched at her body in search of
signs. 
And later as a twenty something
year old, I left the university one day convinced that I was about to die of
another form of cancer for the lump that appeared on the top of my foot near my big toe.  A ganglion, the doctor soon told me, one we leave alone or in the olden days cured by dropping a bible onto
the lump. 
All these ailments that left me
imagining my death would come soon.  
My
mother’s death still waits for her but she does not want to die yet.  Not till she reaches one hundred.  
This is the third time we have had such a
time as we imagined our mother was about to leave us only to watch her rally again.
A cat with nine lives I wrote in an
email to my several sisters and brothers, the night when I thought her death
might come soon, she had looked so ill that day. 
And every time my mother survives,
despite my mixed feelings towards her I am relieved.  Not simply for her, but for me that I can put
my own death on the back burner while I must still deal with hers. 
All of which is a nonsense.  Children predecease their parents, but not in
my imagination, at least not for me.  My
mother must go first. 
And then I read a comment from
Karen who travels under the name ‘Anonymous’, a name I once assumed belonged to
a famous poet because that fellow Anonymous had written so many poems in my
anthology of poetry. 
Karen talks of sitting at her dying
husband’s bedside and I’m struck by the thought it must be worse by far to lose
your partner than your parent in adulthood, for all the mixed feelings in the
middle of the night when he keeps you awake with his snoring. 
My heart goes out
to Karen. 

Too much excitement

One of my daughters is flying from
Singapore to Melbourne and my
thoughts turn to the idea of her high up in the sky within that metal bird.  
I do not suffer a fear of her flying so much as an uncomfortable awareness that, were
this bird to go wrong, it could all too easily drop from the sky and smash into
a thousand pieces onto the land or water below.  
So perhaps this fear can be linked to a terror of losing control.  I say terror because loss of control can
spell disaster and yet paradoxically it’s the thing we need to
manage more often than only once in our lifetimes.  It’s the thing that can help us scale moments of boredom
I cannot remember real boredom
until I hit adolescence, and then it became so much a part of my life whenever
I was faced with unstructured time, time in which I needed to find something to
do, something that might give me pleasure and make my time seem meaningful, otherwise I might have sunk into a state of inertia from which I could not drag myself. 
Before then, in my early teens
I still had the ability to at least give the illusion of having some purpose.  I wanted to be a poet.  In those days we gendered careers and my
family nickname, at least for a time became, ‘the poetess’.  
On days when my mother was away at work in
the old people’s home nearby I took a pencil and a small notebook in my dress
pocket, scaled the back fence and walked alone to the Farm Road estate. 
It surprises me now to
remember this time when I relished being alone. 
Alone in nature I thought then, alone with the plants and trees.  It took over from any call to the religious
life this call to nature, this call to join the poets.  
Sometimes a rush of feeling comes over me, a
feeling almost impossible to describe but when it comes I know I am in the grip
of the past, a sensation I felt as a child when something was fresh and new and
filled with pleasure. 
Frances Tustin who writes
about autistic states calls it ecstasy, a state of mind that can become a
problem if we cannot learn to deal with it. 
Too much bliss can overwhelm almost as much as too much terror.  Think of it as the sensation of dissolving, of
falling apart, of not having any sense of yourself, anything to which you might keep your
thoughts anchored.
Forgive me these abstractions
but I am trying to find my way though the memory of those long lone walks
through the Farm Road estate when I tried to convince myself that the land
cleared for new housing developments and the old deserted chook shed soon to be
demolished to make way for further housing developments could at the same time
be a source of the beauty of nature.  
I
looked upwards to the tips of the Lombardy poplars that flanked the
once neat market garden in the back streets of Cheltenham and imagined the
grandeur of Italian skies. 
Look to the sky and you can
always find beauty.  We cannot spoil the
sky except perhaps with smoke but even then there is a cloudlike intensity to
the shape of smoke as it billows and furls that can also hold beauty.  
I do not reflect on beauty
these days as I did when a child and I miss it. 
I try to find it in words but words are such tricky beasts.  They will not
be controlled and if they were they would be a bit like dead birds, which
brings me back to the metal bird flying through the sky, hurtling my daughter  home.
May that journey soon be over.