Middle aged or muddle aged

9th January 2005

Middle aged or Muddle Aged?

I was looking in the mirror the other day and was surprised to find
that there was a middle-aged woman looking back at me. I wondered for a
while how she got here and where the young woman that I was went and
how come that I still feel young in my spirit. I am beginning, albeit
slowly to accept that I cannot do the physical things I used to be able
to. But my spirit feels so young and I was shocked to know that there
could be such a dichotomy between the outside and the inside.

It reminded me that I needed to get back to writing some of the stories
down, as the timeline of life keeps moving and I can forget so quickly.
Forget not only the passing of time but also the stories that I have to
tell.

I have been asked to be part of a storytelling guild, which start,
pretty soon, their talking tales meetings in a local pub. I am not able
to attend these meetings as I have a prior commitment to attend my AA
ones and I thought then how ironic that the story tellers tell their
tales in a pub and that this was a place where I drank myself into
feeling "normal" (whatever that is) and then proceeded to behave like a
raving lunatic.
I planned to start off my tale with that irony and tell a little of how
remarkable it is that I can stand in a pub sober and not feel out of
control or out of my mind. That this was not the norm in the days of
the sixties.
Ah! the sixties, the romantic days of music and young people
discovering how great it was to have an opinion at last, how marvellous
to have the freedom of fashion and to be able to take a pill and have
sex safely. To be able to have money in the pocket and spend it on
frippery and silliness knowing that the parents wanted you to "try"
life and not struggle as they did.
I hear this myth perpetuated by my peers and to some extent I have some
memories of this, but in the main the sixties for me were lost in
parenthood, drinking, taking drugs and avoiding growing up if it was
possible. None of this was conscious and I am sure if you have heard my
tales "patchwork" you will know that life was not a bundle of cherries
(can one have a bundle of these I wonder).
Last week, Keith, my fella, and I went to Sussex for a bit of a
reminiscence trip. I took the digital camera and photographed all that
I could, although some of the pictorial data has changed there were
some things that were very much the same and it was good to be able to
remember but not be stuck in the shame.
So a story,
The sixties
Let me start with a little of the background, I married in 1964,
February, a boy that I believed to be a man, we wended our way through
trials and tribulations doing our best, but not doing well, living in
anger and confusion and attempting to escape through drugs, sex and
rock and roll. By 1967 we had two sons and no communisation with each
other. Surprised were we both at how little we liked the other, but we
were going to "put up" and "shut up", in the manner of our parents and
just get on with it. He went to work as a bus conductor and I went
loudly insane with frustration and boredom. I know now that I had a
mind, but at the time I thought that I was stupid and that I was wrong
to not want to be at home being a mum. I certainly had no idea that
women could work and be mums as well. This I saw as "bad". I wanted to
read and stretch my mind; I wanted to study but genuinely believed that
I did not have the intellectual capacity to do so. So I stayed at home,
home being a small terraced house in Middlesex. The house was small and
full of the drinking friends of my husband. (Heh! What happened to
mine)? So I drank with his. They took pills, so I took pills, Almost as
though I was incapable of making a decision for myself. I just looked
after the boys, and even then this was a token, and wandered how did I
get here. At no time did I see that I had taken some actions that had
led me here. I felt like a victim that was powerless and dragged along
as though I had no say. Looking back I can see that to some extent this
was inevitable as I never stopped to look where I was heading as I was
far to busy looking at where I had been and was running from fear into
the future, all this whilst looking over my shoulder. I never made a
plan of what I wanted; I only ever planned to get out of where I
was.
So, Middlesex, small house, then my mother decided she was moving to
Sussex and that it would be a good move for us to move into her house
in Wembley. Husband, two boys and several friends as well as I moved
into a large four bed roomed house, with two lounges and dining room. I
moved into organisation and took over the running of this and then took
a job; my husband took up with the Danish Au pair that we had somehow
acquired. His friends took up eating the meals I cooked, taking lots of
drink and drugs. The boys took up being children. My parents in law
took up worrying about us and appearing at regular times, attempting to
place some sense of stability in our lives. I took up screaming at
them, they took up defensive lines. All of us got taken up by drugs,
sex and rock and roll and the boys lived in this being young
children.
My mother then decided she wanted to sell the house and that there was
a boat for sale next to her and that we should look at this. We did and
the move was on to Sussex. I hardly dare tell you, but I am sure you
have guessed. We took all the same stuff with us to Sussex. We moved
into a 120-foot motor torpedo boat and the confusion came with us, as
did the folks as did the drugs sex and rock and roll.
It rains a lot in Sussex, well perhaps not a lot, but when it did rain,
it came in through the leaking roof and we used to place buckets and
bowls in place and smile benignly at folks, letting them know how laid
back we had become. Somewhere in the transition from Middlesex to
Sussex we had become hippies. I am never sure where we discarded the
skin of being a young married couple, but definitely we had moved into
a hippy culture and had joined a hippy group of boat livers of artists,
writers, journalists and free thinkers. How strange is that I was in a
group of free thinkers and could not think? So we placed buckets to
catch the rain and carried on not talking and caught the pain. I was
pregnant in 1969. I had sex with a friend of my husband, he fell in
love with me, the coil fell out and I fell pregnant. My husband, who by
now was relieved to have someone else to take care of me, did the right
about thing and made it easy for me to leave. I did not know how too.
So for a while I played the elastic band game, I would go for while and
then when I felt the tug too strong would re appear. At no time did I
stop to think that if I stopped drinking I might be able to think
clearly. My daughter was born in Sussex, she arrived on a Sunday
morning, she weighed two bags of sugar and the hospital put her in an
incubator. I left, walked back to the boat, peeled off the stripping on
my leg, I had broken it by falling on the gangplank and went to the
Lady Jane, a pub conveniently nestled at the back of the boat and drank
my way to sobriety. By the 21st February 1970 I knew that alcohol and I
were a lethal combination and that I no longer was free to do as I
liked with it. I saw all sorts of things in a moment of clarity.
The journey for me began there. I was able to move on, albeit very
slowly at times, but at least I had begun.
I left the boat and after a series of moves, found myself living in
Yorkshire/Lincolnshire by 1975. I have never been back to that place
and space that I was in emotionally in Sussex. I have been in a mess,
but never in such fear and confusion. For years I blamed my husband, I
now see that I was alcoholic, that whenever I was having a feeling I
took a drink and that finally that drink took me.
So you can see that to stand in a pub and tell a sober tale, is for me
a cleansing, but strange place to be.

The sixties, AH! Yes, I think that I maybe missed them and have
developed a keen sense of gathered history from the media and from my
age group. I remember little, I remember the Beatles a little and the
Stones a little more, but all the rest, if I tell the truth are but a
blur. The music did not get me, the fashions escaped me and the years
passed, rather in a similar way to finding that there is a middle-aged
woman in my mirror and that she apparently is me. Now how did that
happen?