A book. The "womens Syndrome", referring to my previous post, a brief family history (on my mothers side), and letting go.

Hi again, I have had one of those days when I can just roll up in bed and read. This is not an everyday occurrence, it is a special , a one off, and definitely off the Radar, a hidden extravagance that only those who don't often get the chance, will understand it's importance.

The book I chose to read is, "The Woman Who went To Bed For A Year", by Sue Townsend. I don't often choose to read popular, mainstream, fictional stuff, but a friend gave me the book and usually, when this happens there is something that is going alongside my experience, or helpful insight into what's happening for me at the time.

This was uncanny because the book feeds into the current insight I am having, regarding myself and life, and the "Womens syndrome" that I spoke of in my previous post.

The Book. It begins with a woman who within the second page decides to recline to her bed, and stay there. The story continues with the episodes of life that have led to her exhaustion. I empathise with this and have got to the part where she has someone to come in and dismantle a vast wardrobe and remove it and its contents.....I will tell you more when I know more, as I continue with story. I have a feeling it is not going to end well....

Lately, if you follow my posts , you will know, that I am exploring the space outside that which currently defines me. In other words questioning what it's all about. Health issues that have kicked me in the gut. All stuff preceding a "what if..... I just let go".


Anyway back to the book, I have been thinking about doing the same, dismantling my bedroom and turning it into a sanctuary, a place of blessing, where I can write and meditate, freed from past entanglements, struggles and clutter that no longer serves, etc.  I am far too exhausted to do this myself,  so I am only at the "if only" stage. My plan is to replace and redecorate with Solar Plexus enhancing colours... ok so you get the picture.

And so, in the book....The woman is exhausted with life and it's striving. She is exhausted with conforming to what "needs doing", who needs looking after, the continuous needs of others. I get the feeling that she has "health Issues" that are waiting to be revealed.

Her life within her extended and her own family has been truly exhausting and generally has been a thankless task, there has been no validation and you never know if what you are doing is "Right". Sue Townsend has the gift of  writing gentle, humor which makes it an absolutely engaging read.


I had been so consumed by the story today that when I went into my kitchen, "the heart of my home", the cluttered place, where cooking and providing food for others goes on, I was exhausted with the actual physical effort of clearing it first, (remember I had been reading all day and so my daily duty of cleaning, clearing and general maintenance of the home and family needs had NOT been done.)

I found my thoughts wondering to my grandmother, my mother's mother, Maureen. In her later days, not yet 76, she succumbed to what we would call, dementia.

I didn't see it like that, I was young, still had jet black hair and VaVoom in me. I was in my "roaring" twenties. To me, at that time she had decided enough was enough. She lived quite a few years in a "home" for such elderly people. But she was not old, she had just had enough of "SAME OLD, SAME OLD." That will never happen to me, says I, still black of hair and drinking pints of Guinness, still clubbing and full of the old Irish Craic.

It was with gentleness that she was buried. We had been without her participation for a few years but we were all very upset. I learned about her story from my mother. ##She was born into poor blood, into tenement living in poor Ireland, a family story , typical of Ireland at the time. The mother died when she was young, and she was raised by her father, an alcoholic, we don't know much else about him. I think an aunt may have helped but she, Maureen had to raise herself.

She was beautiful, we have some photos, a haunting beauty, a treasure in the tenements of Ireland at that time. She was by accounts vivacious and vibrant. She became a great swimmer and was able to swim currents that most local people shunned. This was in coastal town, and where she met my grandfather, married young, and had her children.

A vibrant beauty soon became beset with raising her own children in a rented tenement. Her husband, soft by nature and had just lost out of inheriting a family farm because he was a second born son, was able to provide for his family with hard work and long hours in a local grocers business. So the years moved on. Her Children were a blessing. Maureen was still only a young when my mother, the eldest, was born in 1932, then she had another girl, my aunt, Mary, a third daughter died by epileptic fit and falling down the tenement stairs when she was two years old. The family was able to move to a another rented home after the death of the child. Then there were two more girls, Kitty and Ann, followed by a boy, my uncle John.

Life was hard, as was typical at the time, poor income, and Ireland was in a bad place in those days, but the family endured. Maureen had little experience of holding a family together but she did it, as best she could. While still young and vulnerable, my uncle John, gentle and soft by nature, became very ill, brought on by traumatic stress when he joined the army.

My mother had left for England to train to be nurse when she was 16. She was  followed by my aunt Kitty when she was 16, a few years later. My mother always sent money home from her pay packet.

All the daughters had inherited a degree of their mothers beauty, they were a good looking family. My mother was shy and often blushed, she enjoyed the local amateur dramatic society and was very a very different character to the women of the seaside town. She was teetotal, and loved to dance, she  was sweet and angelic, not fitting with the hardiness and harshness one needed to survive in a poverty stricken coastal town in Ireland at the time.

In England, my mother met and fell in love with my father, a deep, dark, intellectual, from an Irish speaking family that had an intense and intriguing history.  This was the beginning of the track I was to become woven into.

The other daughters of Maureen, each met and fell for their own "heroes", some were rogues, like Leo, who married Kitty, who I became close to as a child.  Each married a person who would take them from this place, to another.

Maureen had a hard life from early years. Her Husband, my grandfather, a soft and gentle man, died in his sixties. By the time it was just her and her son, my Uncle John ( who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia as opposed to post traumatic shock, and treated with harshness (electric shock and then medication) until he was so out of reach from all of us), she was to go on for a few years (with her hair turned white in her thirties) and dependant on what she received from her daughters in England and with support from daughters remaining locally, but she gradually opted out of participating.

While she was still alive, I saw her a few summers.  Moved out from her home and into a welfare care home, but still in the town where she was born,  she had dementia. She didn't know anybody, anything, or seemed to care. She really had let go. 

I think that "Something snaps" and you say 'Enough Is Enough, I can't go on with this'.  In this way, You get to Participate out of life.

If we take this one step forward, letting go, really letting go,  maybe there is a parachute that catches us and raises us up to someplace that others, in this dimension, cannot see.