Gift: A Son's Story (extract) - Reflection

I'm continuing with the final draft of 'Gift' - my memoir/journal based on my time as my mother's full-time carer for the last few months of her life.  It was going to remain a personal document, but I've decided to go ahead and publish it after all.  It should be ready soon.  Here's another very short extract.

        So the days passed and the nights drew in as winter crept towards us.  The days felt short enough, anyway.  The mornings were gone before I knew it.  I was up at seven and straight into it, rarely stopping until lunch was over.  Each day, as soon as mum was settled, I'd nip back to the flat to check the post, then pick up any shopping we needed.  It was the only chance I got for exercise, really.  I'd been a keen runner and cyclist for many years and missed having a good daily sweat-session - but it was enough.

            While I was keeping things very much 'in the day', there was always a part of me that was thinking ahead.  It was like a background program running on a computer - setting things up for future scenarios.  It was only natural, of course.  In spite of what I was there to do, it was also about the transition for myself -  preparing myself for the adjustment when mum was no longer there.  It was a curious situation I was in.  It almost seemed contradictory.  I was preparing myself, mentally and emotionally, for what was to come afterwards - at the same time as trying to push that 'afterwards' further and further away.  Not really denying it or negating it, but not completely acknowledging it either.  Living in the moment - but with one eye to the future.

            When I'd been trying to deal with my depressions a few years earlier, I'd done some 'mindfulness' exercises for a while.  Much of it was about staying in the moment as a way of controlling anxiety.  Not wallowing in the past, nor projecting into a possible future.  I had reasonable expectations of that future - what it might hold - but my tendency had usually been to 'awfulise' it: if the worst is going to happen, it probably will.  Yet despite many difficulties I'd encountered over the years, I'd always found a way through.  Something had come up at the right time, just as I needed it: a new job, a new flat, a new opportunity.  I didn't think it was anything like 'fate' or 'destiny'.  I always firmly believed that we make our own future by the things we put in place today - small and perhaps insignificant-seeming though they might be.  Kind of like the Buddhist idea of 'karma'.  But practical as well as spiritual: putting the bricks in place in a certain way, day by day, so as to ensure the structure would be firm and strong, and wouldn't collapse.

            I'd also gone to AA meetings for a while.  I didn't believe I was an alcoholic - alcohol had never registered much in my life before my late-thirties - but I certainly had a problem with it for a while, and used it for the wrong reasons.  Seeing what it did to dad was another prompt.  Plus, mum had been involved in Al-Anon at the time when dad left, and I'd picked up on things in the programme.  I learned a lot at those meetings.  Some of the little maxims that were used seemed simplistic - but there are often profundities behind simple things.  So 'Keep It Simple, Stupid,' and 'It's okay to look back, but don't stare,' and 'Yesterday's history, tomorrow's a mystery - today is a gift ' were sayings I tried to take to heart.  I had a tendency to complicate things, to over-analyse them - an autistic trait, as I later discovered - and that was a driver for much of my anxiety.  So keeping it simple was a good way to start.  And then there was the Serenity Prayer, which really summed it up for me - and which was particularly pertinent now:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know

the difference.

            I had no religious beliefs, but that didn't matter.  'God', in those terms, could be what you chose it to be.  I used to think of it as the spirit of both of my parents: dad's self-destructive side and mum's self-preservation side in their constant yin-yang opposition to one another in my head.  I knew I couldn't change the past, so I'd learned to let go of my regrets - many though they were.  I couldn't change the fact that my mother was going to be leaving me soon, for good.  I was slowly accepting that. 

            And the things I could change?  Plenty.  And most of them, for me, had to do with choices.  I could choose to sink further, or I could take the path to recovery - tough though that path might be to tread.  One of those choices, too - the most important one in all respects, as far as I was concerned - was to take on this role as mum's carer.  Making things better for her whilst she was still here - and laying that foundation for my own future.  I know I'd never have forgiven myself if she'd had to give up the home she loved.  I know it was important for me to have my own life, but I felt very deeply that I owed her this.  And I owed it to myself.  It was my way of saying to myself 'You're worth saving.  You're worth recovery.  You have much more to give.'

            That sign I'd bought for mum and hung on her vase of twigs by the TV... it was for her.  But each morning, as I awoke, it was one of the first things I saw.

            Believe in yourself.

            Taking on this role needed self-belief to start with.  But I never really had any doubt about it. 

            I knew, then, what I couldn't change.  And I knew what I could change.  So maybe that meant I'd developed some wisdom at last. 

            Not before time.