It's not an omen

Things are hard. Every time I breathe out and think that it's ok and all the bad stuff is done, some other horror does the 'surprise, motherfucker' meme.



It started in November 2023 with a surprise (motherfucker) appendicectomy. That wiped me out for weeks, with post-op nausea and vomiting and some intermediate level fatigue. And just as it was getting better, the day after I did my last scheduled day of work, the older of our cats died. It was a grim death.

But then there was a trip to India, a return to the family and pre-pandemic loveliness. Except we contracted covid on the way home and were so very, very poorly as a result. It took me three months to escape from the fatigue (advanced intermediate).

At last! The self-indulgent part of my retirement where I get to play while abrinsky keeps working and bringing in the money? Nope, the part of my retirement where abrinsky hands in his notice to retire, because he's so stressed he can't take any more, but they extend his normal notice period from three to four months because the system is broken and processing his pension will take a long time.
And then they increased it by another month, which broke abrinsky too. He – voluntarily - made a doctor's appointment, and less than four hours later had been signed off with stress, for the rest of his working life. Permission to let go, to stop holding it all together meant he need extra care and attention, but he improved gradually, expanded, began to relax.

And then the other cat died. One minute she was fine, got up from a nap, said hello to me, ambled into abrinsky's study. The next minute she was dead. Just keeled over, twitched, left us. It was the best way for Orwell to go; it was the worst shock for us to cope with. We'd buried her in the garden before we began to even realise what had happened. It was only nine months after losing The Princess, a trauma we were still processing, and we couldn't contemplate adopting another cat.

Two months later, however, and twelve months after all this began, Florence and Zebedee came to live with us. In the beginning I was afraid, afraid that they'd leave us, afraid that I'd love them more than is safe. Now Florence disappears for a whole a day at a time, Zebedee is the weirdest alien baby we know, and I love them so much it makes me weep.

Because of our new arrivals, we deferred going to India until March this year. It was hot there. Stupidly hot. But the heat kept us indoors, relaxing, talking, eating, watching movies, and that's what needed. We relaxed, we came home, we drew breathe.

Surprise, motherfucker.

We had long enough to plant vegetables, contemplate days out, imagine a new, carefree retirement, and then my mother was taken to hospital, treated and sent home, then admitted to hospital for a couple of weeks. I don't like my mother. She's damaged, narcissistic, damaging. Being around her is something that drains me, pains me, takes so much armour and ritual to defend against. But staying away isn't an option when my brother and his partner are doing all the heavy lifting. So I've been visiting, almost every week, first in hospital – thinking it would be the last I saw of her – now at home where she is confused and frail, professing competence and independence while exhausting everyone with her need to be cared for.

My brother, meanwhile, is chronically ill, struggling with a life made small and unmanageable by long covid. It breaks my heart. He can't work, he needs to apply for any funding he can possibly get, but he isn't well enough to do that. I'm not ill, so I can do that for him, but oh my god, it is a Sisyphean task, a con, a scam, a war of attrition. I hated having to interview my brother to extract every last detail of The Things He Cannot Do and The Ways In Which He Is Broken. I didn't want to become so intimately aware of that, just the headline was more than enough, and I really didn't want to hold the mirror up and demand that he stare into it until there was nothing new left to see. It's brutal. It took days. We've done one form. There are others still to come, and for him there will be actual interviews and assessments. This cannot – cannot – be a fair, ethical, humane way to protect vulnerable people. (It isn't. I don't believe it's meant to help or protect. I truly believe that failure is the intended outcome.)

Universal basic income is what we need.

Surprise, motherfucker, I'm done in. Drained, diminished, disinclined to talk.