SQUARE ONE

I guess that I really ought to have known, I suppose, not to count my chickens, but, when I arrived at work on that brisk Tuesday morning and found the woman from the end office waiting for me to unlock the building, my harmless-seeming enquiry as to why she was in so early got me the answer that she was making up time because her mother was in hospital, and I, quite innocently, made the comment that I’d had a couple of months of that myself recently and that I understood how exhausting it could be.

You’ll already have noticed the mistake I was making there…

That’s right, I foolishly used the past tense, assuming that the worst was over, and yet, as the clock ticked around towards nine o’clock, my phone rang and it was my sister on the line, which is fairly unusual in itself, and it had already given me a rather familiar slight sense of foreboding and familiar dread as I had spotted her name on the display screen.

And so it came to pass that, as of that very morning, when I was obliviously driving my way into work, there had been another night-time panic, another ambulance called, and yet another admission into hospital for my mother, and, whilst I know that means a certain amount of unpleasantness for her, I can’t help but feel despondent as yet another round of life becoming a right royal pain-in-the-arse for me begins all over again.

What did we get…? An entire fortnight of life getting back to “normal” for a while…?

Woo, as they say, hoo…

ARSE! ARSE! ARSE!!! (As I put it to the empty office as I threw the phone down onto my desk once the – admittedly quite ranty - call was over). Afterwards, I rang the beloved to spread the “joyful news” around so at least I didn’t have to suffer alone, unlike my mother, I suppose…

You see, this period of relative calm had made us over-confident. That very evening, for example, I had arranged for the builder to come and discuss “phase two” of the work which our dilapidated little house has been crying out for which we have kept putting off for years because “there’s never a good time…”

Hey, guess what…? There’s NEVER a good time, so you might as well just bite the bullet and get on with it…

That clashed with any possibility of hospital visiting for the first day and, despite the fact that there is no-one else, was already, I felt, dragging me back heavily into the “bad son” column before we’d even got started….

I’d also made the cardinal mistake the day before of booking a weekend away for the beloved’s birthday gift, now that we’re trying to get away from the accumulation of “stuff” and replace it with the notion of “stuff we’ve done”, which was another idea born out of having relaxed again as our lives seemed to have got back on track…

We’d even booked cinema tickets for another evening of theatre in the cinema, which meant another evening where hospital visiting would have to be forgotten about, and I can’t help but feel that it’s almost as if the fates wait for me to plan something and then arse it all up for me deliberately, just to stop me from getting too confident or cocky.

Because we now know the routine so well; They take her in because of one thing, bugger about with her drugs so that her system goes out of whack, and then decide that they can’t send her home until that new problem (which is the old problem) is sorted out, and, before you know it, a couple of days stretches out to a few weeks, and then becomes a month or more and, some days, I just can’t ever see an end to our lives being like this.

I now realise that it could happen every few weeks for the foreseeable future, and that really depresses me. I’m already believing that our plans for Easter – not much, but just trying to get the garden tidy after three soggy years of neglect – are now gone, and very thing else will have to be shifted around to accommodate those oh-too-familiar visiting times and journeys through traffic to get to them.

Oh, I know that one day I’ll get a phone call telling me the very worst of news, just as I also know that will be a devastating time (although I can’t discount the possibility that, if things go on like this, she’ll manage to outlast the lot of us…) and that I should count myself relatively lucky that my mother tries her best to remain as independent as she can, but my first reaction to these telephone calls is one of anger and disappointment, and that really can’t be healthy, can it…?