Ignorance is not bliss…

Posted on April 21, 2008 by borysSNORC

Spent the day sewing with my Mum today. I’ve been so busy going slowly round the twist with back pain and associated psycho-babble nonsense that I didn’t realise how much I missed her while she was away. We sewed, did lunch and chatted. Spent a lot of time talking about my Dad and for the first time in about 4 years I felt like she was ‘back’. She was so very wrapped up in looking after my father that I think a large chunk of her disappeared for a while there and it seems the travel has restored some of her confidence and somehow she’s given herself permission to laugh again.

I told her about Angel’s experiences in his new school and what he’d been learning in art class. And I took the opportunity to express my thanks to her for sending us girls to a good private school though I know it must have been a considerable investment as my father’s income was fairly modest when I was young. She told me that when we were very little kids (around 3 and 4) she had suggested to my father that they needed to start saving for ‘the girs’ education’ and his response was “What for? They’re girls, they’ll go to school until Year 10 then get a little job until they get married.”

Well apparently he couldn’t have said anything worse as Mum herself had been made to abandon her education by her step-mother at barely 14 years of age and sent out to work as a seamstress. So Mum drummed him about the importance of giving us a good education and luckily she won the day and we went to good schools and two of us have completed university degrees to boot. I never knew my Dad was so old fashioned in his thinking as he always seems so proud of his girls. 🙂

Thanks Mum!

Mine! Mine! Mine! Mine!

Posted on March 6, 2008 by borysSNORC

Hmmm… Iced VoVos. I have a packet of Iced VoVos in the cupboard…. and I wanna open ’em, but I know the minute I do, the boys are gonna scoff the entire packet in a day or two… tops. My old boss, Guz used to buy Iced VoVos special for me at work but whenever I opened up a packet, I’d have one biscuit and then when I came into work the next day there’d be a brand new packet on my desk cos the guys would have eaten the entire packet after I left for the day.

Why do guys go for the Iced VoVos?? They’re such a granny sort of biscuit all pink and fluffy… so why do they seem such favourite with the men? I remember once when I was little, my father was home for the day because his work had gone on stike…. and he was pissed off about having to stay home when he had so much work to do and was also pissed off about losing a days wages while the Union made their point. And what exactly were they on strike for? Goliath (the same Goliath telco that I ended up working for last year) used to have tea ladies that came around their offices each day with cups of tea and bikkies for all the guys and it seemed that ‘management’ had recently decided to ditch the tea ladies and their bikkies which mean no more Iced VoVos for the boys. My Dad spent that day thumping around in his bloke cave being pissed off about having to go on “strike over Iced bloody VoVos”.

So now I’d love an Iced VoVo with my cuppa, but if I open ze packet, I pwredict zere vould be nune leff in ze morning!
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Snake oil anyone?

Posted on February 27, 2008 by borysSNORC

There’s something very very wrong with me…. other than the obvious that is. Yesterday then psych at the Pain Clinic had a go at trying to help me with the traffic phobia/PSTD resultant from my recent accident. The technique is called EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) and from what I understand it is a process/treatment intended to help you reprocess traumatic events into your logical memory somehow and allow you to no longer respond to them emotively or physiologically. Sounded pretty good in theory, but the psych I’ve been seeing had ruled it out for me as she ‘felt that someone of my personality was unlikely to respond to EMDR’… whatever that means.

So I spent an hour with the Pain Clinic psych and she had me concentrate on each of my car accidents several times over while having me watch her move her hand rapidly left to right in front of my eyes. Firstly I had to ‘play them through in my mind’ and ‘access the memory’, then again to try recall further details, and again to try to recall and relive the feelings, emotions and even physical sensations of those accidents. Apparently most people experience very distressing reactions to this…. but not me.

I could remember all the accidents perfectly, and recalled tiny details I’d forgotten, but when asked to convey what I felt throughout the process, I was calm, articulate and perfectly rational. I didn’t have any reaction to ‘reliving’ the accidents and certainly no emotional distress or physiological responses. The psych seemed sort of disappointed that I didn’t react like I was supposed to.

During one of the replaying efforts of my second accident, I even caught myself smiling as I remembered that my Dad had arrived before the ambulance and found me laying on the road, badly winded and not in a good way… and I was swearing like a trooper about the complete ineptitude of the prick that had run into us. But my Dad for the first time ever didn’t reprimand his daughter for using foul language – Dad liked his daughters to conduct themselves like dignified young ladies – which caused me to smile a little wryly at the recollection of his being rather more understanding and rather less remonstrative than normal.

Judging by the psych’s reaction – that isn’t supposed to happen. She seems to think that I’ve developed some sort of defensive dis-associative tendency that doesn’t allow me to access the emotions and physical reactions that the accidents should cause. Shrug…. Personally I think that maybe I’m just ordinarily too pragmatic and grounded to be freaking out in her safe little office and am therefore recalling the episodes factually rather than emotionally.

Who knows? Either way it didn’t work… and I’ve still been unable to drive and having issues with traffic.
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The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.

Posted on January 21, 2008 by borysSNORC

It’s been a year today since my father passed away and in hindsight, I don’t think I’ve ever been affected by something quite so much and yet quite so little at the same time. His passing filled me conflicting feelings from grief, sorrow, sadness and loss to relief… and guilt for feeling so relieved that it was over for him… but also for us. Dad had MND (Lou Gehrig’s disease) and it was a desperate thing to watch him slowly deteriorate and ultimately die from it. People who’ve suffered this particular indignity describe it like being buried alive in your own body, and my father went from being a strong fit man who hiked the Himalayas and white water rafted the Zambezi to being a wizened shell of his former self and totally dependent everyday on my mother to bathe him… dress him… feed him…

My Dad was the strongest amongst us throughout the entire ordeal – he displayed a quiet internal strength in the face of this insidious disease that you couldn’t help but admire his unwavering fortitude. He was always one to accept what life dealt up and handled everything in his life with dignity and aplomb. He was the insightful, sensible and calming influence on all of us… always the peace broker in a house full of women 🙂 Even right up to the end, his primary concern seemed to be for how we were all coping with his condition, and never once did he seem to concede even an iota of self pity. I wish I could have been there more for him – and more for my Mum – but to be honest… I felt so helpless that I often just tried not to get in the way.

I miss his ridiculous inability to tell a joke without cracking up before getting out the punchline. I miss seeing him up a ladder or under the car being all masculine and useful and hitting things with a hammer. I miss him sending us off to ‘stick your head in a bucket and make yourself presentable before coming to the breakfast table’. I miss his lopsided smile and his inexplicable enjoyment of crap British comedies like The Two Ronnies, Auntie Jack and Benny Hill. I miss the way he always tried to temper or softly interpret my often vociferously stated opinions over the dinner table. I even miss his disapproving looks at our pathetic efforts during the ritualized anal retentive Saturday morning clean ups that we all abhorred and tried to skive out on at any opportunity.

I never told him often enough how much I loved him, and how lucky I felt to have a father like him.

Happy Birthday Dad… where ever you are.

Posted on December 19, 2007 by borysSNORC

Today was my father’s birthday, or at least it would have been….. now the truth here is that I rarely think about my father now he’s gone, and when I do, I’m momentarily sad about the way in which he died and the fact that my Mum is now on her own, but for the most part his absence doesn’t affect me that much on a day to day basis (which in itself is really sad). Whereas my Mum is understandably depressed. All the time. Still. She seems okay most of the time, but you barely have to scratch the surface and the tears come rather quickly. I’ve never been considered overly sentimental in general, but I had fully expected that I should have been more affected by my own father’s death than I actually have been. :S

Anyway, I’m off topic (as per usual)… in an effort to keep Mum’s mind off the fact that it was Dad’s birthday and to ensure she didn’t spend the day moping around feeling depressed, BigSal and I arranged to take her out to lunch and then dragged her off to a silly movie. Which seems to have done the trick. She was a little quiet this morning when I first went round to pick her up, but by tonight she seemed calmer and happier… in part I think because it’s hard to remain maudlin with Angel jumping all over you demanding cuddles and slurping icecream all over the place and doing all sorts of normal hyper six year old things.

Now just Christmas to navigate…
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