Oscillate wildly

Recently, this describes what I seem to be doing, oscillating wildly.

From sad
to mad
(occasionally even bad once in a while)
to numb
to ambivalence
to acceptance (or acceptance of the fact that I can't truly seem to accept any of this)
to almost, nearly peacefulness
to strange, irrepresible, unsquashable hope, one with a different texture to the hope I had before
to happiness

Return to start. Repeat. Faster and faster.

I still have trouble sleeping in the early morning.
I used to think that 'tossing and turning' in your bed at night was just a handy phrase to describe the difficulty of finding rest some nights. But now I find that I do literally toss and turn. I find it all so very unbearable, what happened to my daughters, that it feels like I need to physically shake it away or as if I am writhing with the desperation of it all. This situation that I cannot begin to remedy, I cannot bring her back, I have to let her go. It feels like a snare, the terrible inevitability of the facts as they close in on me.

Sometimes the bare, stark facts of Georgina's death hit me. Without the little accompanying web of thoughts I spin to try and make it more palatable. They can smash that little fragile structure up with a flick of their fingers, these crushing facts.

That she will never live, never breathe, never again.
That her existence outside of me was one that was so brief, full of so much pain and distress.
That the only tangible evidence I have left of my eldest daughter's existence is crammed into a box in my wardrobe, ashes, stained hats, an incubator label, some badly printed photographs.
That I will never hold her again.
That she never had a chance to feel the sun on her skin, or the breeze, or to hug her sister. She never even ate or drank anything. I find the latter particularly painful because I take so much pleasure in food.
None of the many, many things that I hoped that she would do. That I complacently assumed that she would have the chance to experience.
Of all the pleasures that this life has to offer us, she will experience a very few. I can only hope she knew what it felt like to be loved.

But I don't stay this way for long.

Yesterday, I was shopping in town. Looking for yet more clothes for Jess who already has an outfit for every single day of the next three months but still . . you can never have too many choices. Especially in the unpredictable weather of England.

I was walking out of the shop and a little girl of maybe two or three came running past, giggling. Her daddy was chasing her. I thought it was a game and smiled to myself. One of those wry smiles that resolves itself into a sigh, imagining Jessica doing the same in a year or so, knowing that Georgina will never be the running, giggling girl.

But I had misinterpreted the situation. The daddy stormed up behind her, swept her up and yelled in her face 'why are you such a little shit?' Ach, it made me feel so sad.

I don't have a problem with swearing. I don't swear much myself but my father has always turned the air blue. Seriously, my mother was summoned into playgroup because I dropped my cup of milk and said fuck. She must have been mortified. But he never, ever swore AT us. Those words were never directed at his own children, particularly not as a descriptor.

This world is very strange. A world where we have invented such viciousness to throw at one another, words specifically designed to wound one another. A world where a father would shout at his own child or at any little girl with words that I would not consider acceptable to use to ANYONE. Why do people not accord their own children the respect that they would give to a stranger? Is it because there is no chance that she will hit him? Why couldn't he just say pickle instead of shit? Why did he have to shout with the full force of an adult male voice into the face of such a small child?

This isn't really a judgement of him, of how much or how little he deserves to have a living, breathing daughter. It might sound like one but it is more just an observation. I don't know this man. I don't know what circumstances brought him to shouting in a small child's face in the doorway of a shop yesterday morning. Who knows, perhaps in a year or so I might be swearing at Jessica? I hope not but you never know.

What I had read to be a touching little scene of father-daughter bonding had actually gone kind of sour. As I turned away, I smiled again. But this time, I was thinking of that other girl. My tiny sweet girl. I thought to myself, nobody is ever, ever going to call you a shit. Nobody is ever going to shout in your face like that. It's not much consolation but at least death has some protective side effects. I felt as though I had tucked her back into my heart and smoothed the coverlet over her. She might never get to experience the beauty of life but she will never experience its ugliness either.

It has taken me an awfully long time to accept the fact that life is not always pleasant, people aren't kind to one another, feelings get hurt, hearts get smashed, people trample on other people heedlessly (myself included no doubt). I'm still struggling with this after over thirty years of having evidence shoved in my face everyday. Some would call this stupidity, I prefer to think of it as a peculiar brand of naive, wide-eyed optimism.

The first dance at my wedding was a song called Rose Garden sung by Lynne Anderson. I guess it summed up my feelings about marriage, 'I never promised you a rose garden . . '

There it is, in a country song. Perhaps that is the truth that I am too dense to recognise or too pig-headed to accept.
Life isn't a rose garden. It could actually be that simple.
I can't make it a rose garden for Jessica. I can try my best to smooth it for her but I can't make any promises.
I can't make it a rose garden for Georgina. I can try my best to remember her and to love her but I can't make any promises.
I can't make it a rose garden for anyone, not for anyone here, not even for myself. As much as I would love to. As much as I wish I could fix everything and everyone. But that is not the nature of life. It's amazing and it sucks and it's painful and it's generous and it does all these things, to everyone, all at once, all the time. Life just merrily goes around handing out the good stuff and the shitty stuff entirely randomly. Here have a candy, here have a dead child, here have a sunny day, here have a miraculous recovery, here have a car accident, here have a messy divorce, here have your first love's kiss, here's a pile of dog poo, here's the tenner that you had forgotten about in your back pocket. More and more of it, faster and faster, relentlessly on and on until we bow out of this maelstrom. Whether we are better off in here or out of here I honestly couldn't say.

A little later in the day, I was still walking around and I saw a single sunflower leaning over a wall. It looked like it had just that moment popped its head over the wall to see who was walking by, to look at me and Jessica.
And I thought of this.
And by extension I thought of sweetsalty Kate's post that it refers back to.

Somehow, in this strange jumble of thoughts and references, I felt just fine. At that particular moment. With the sunflower looking at us. Just fine.

I haven't felt 'just fine' for over a year. It is nice to remember how it feels, it's good to know that I can still feel that way. Just fine.

What a mess of a post. But that just reflects how I feel at the moment I suppose.