STABLE

The situation with my mother is always a matter of dealing with both the unknowable and the great unknown. It remains complicated despite being very simple; At some point she will be required to return home and she will expect that I will be the person who is able to deliver her there. Meanwhile, lengthy lists of things that she thinks ought to be done are being composed in her mind alongside the huge disappointment of the fact that I don't spontaneously think of doing them myself. There's also the tricky little matter of the slight chance that she may have some kind of relapse, or be unable to cope, or have a thousand and one little reasons to contact me at precisely the wrong moment, expect me to drop anything and everything that I am doing, no matter how important that might happen to be, and come running.

This means that I am constantly on alert, constantly on edge, and seldom in a position to completely relax or try to plan to do anything. Sometimes, when things have been calm for a while, we foolishly try and take a moment to think about doing something, anything, that will help us to escape from the rut, but that's usually when, as the saying goes, all hell breaks loose...

Meanwhile, the builder rang...

We had a quote to have some work done way back in the relatively quiet month of March and then, of course, life did indeed let loose hell and here we find ourselves in August with none of it done, and living out of bags because we let the old furniture go in anticipation of this work sometime in April.

Anyway, he had, apparently, been "trying to contact me" and left "loads of messages" and wondered whether we still wanted the job actually done. Now I do work in an area where the internet and telephone connections are basically what can only be described as  "rubbish" but this seemed unlikely.

Anyway, he wondered if he could start the job imminently in the sense of "the day after tomorrow" which, quite naturally meant that we had to face the fact that our little house was suddenly going to be in for some little upheaval, especially as the "one room at a time" option we had hoped for had evolved into "both rooms at once" leaving us nowhere to shift the clutter of the one into the other for the duration...

When the builder came round on the Tuesday evening to make plans, it became abundantly clear that the short notice meant that there was little chance of us being ready for them in time and we were able to get a delay to beyond the weekend before spending the rest of our free time for the foreseeable clearing rooms and churning the junk around and finding that we were forming great big piles of stuff that would not have looked out of place on one of those "Hoarder" programmes which have become so popular lately.

Well, at least it's not just us, then...

So, we are now in a state of chaotic preparation and not exactly looking forward to living in rather bizarre circumstances for the foreseeable future, which is making us generally stroppy and stressful and full of fear and trepidation and wondering if we should just book into a B & B for the duration.

Given my mum's almost uncanny ability to exocet any of my plans whenever I have anything that needs to be done to any particular given schedule, I have taken to trying to get everything done now, which has not really helped with anyone's stress levels recently and probably doesn't help to get anything achieved any faster if I'm being perfectly honest.

All I can see, though, is time being chewed up and the fact that I've got far, far too much that still needs doing and fewer and fewer hours in which to get it all done and that, dear reader, is likely to cause the things that lurk in the dark corners of my mind to get more confident and come out of the shadows all guns blazing, so things around her could get very "interesting" for a while.

What I need, what I really, really need right now is for something to be stable, something to be dependable, something to be reliable. I need something in my life to be a calm void, to be somewhere I can escape to in my mind and get a moment of peace as the hurricane whips all around me...

But, at the moment, I really can't see that happening...

Can you...?