This Rain Sky post is about a person not there any more, and me over thinking it.
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Full Moon Day and Grieving, 28.10.23
I have a best friend, my eldest son, who doesn’t want to see me at the moment. He is depressed and talked to me of reaching out to people and being ignored. But then he shuts me out. I was willing to be there, but when I offer, I am repeatedly told no. Which I don’t understand. If you are lonely and want companionship and I am your best friend and I offer, but you don’t want me?
That means:
(a) I am the wrong companion – I am now boring, or I make your mood worse (when I thought I did the opposite); you want a girlfriend, not a friend – or a mum.
(b) You are worried you will be unkind – people seem to think depression is just flat or weepy, when in fact it can be very hostile – pushing people away to prove how shit and useless you are to yourself; it’s actually monumentally egotistical (I mean, look at the overthinking I am doing here!)
Either way, it’s like you’re dead, only worse, because you’re choosing to not be with me at all. It was probably a big mistake to be your friend and not your mum, from my perspective. If I was just your mum, I would remember the thing about how the love of a parent is the only love (in Western culture) that is supposed to end with the recipient leaving, not staying – the end goal is separation. And here you are gone, which is good for you as a stage of growing up.
Maybe after all this time, you have realised having your own mum for a best friend isn’t cool, it’s kind of…cheesy, creepy? I don’t know how it looks from the outside, except that people always think it looks weird. I’ve always thought that maybe they’re jealous, not getting on so well with their own mums.
Maybe you’ve realised there’s so much me in your life there’s little room for anyone new to fly in. So time to spring clean me out, as you are seriously thinking you need a new someone. And I can’t complain at all, as this is supposed to be normal.
I didn’t realise, till you were instantaneously gone, that you are such a HUGE part of my life. Quite possible I have been using you to stop me thinking about how stressful the rest of my home life is. My other half's on and off depressions (one of which he is in now – he doesn’t want me either), his cussedness, his inability to just have a fecking conversation without obfuscatory humour slamming me away. How far away I feel from where we once were. Yet how I still so much want the best for him – but I see he is really stuck and not at all of the mind to be told anything about it or to DO anything about it. And My Youngest. He is difficult and tiring as well as loveable. I suspect he always will be. He’s my anti-peace device that I love so much too.
You not being here makes me thrown back on the rest of my life and shows me how much I was hiding from it. Not hiding from dealing with it, as I’m totally unsure how to do anything differently, at all. But how much I was not thinking about it because of you. I would have a bad patch and then go and hang out with you for a bit and just not think about it at all.
I would sit there smoking, watching TV with you, talking our way through films. It was a space where no one expected anything of me. Very freeing.
Maybe for you it wasn’t the same? Maybe you were fed up of being my anchor as well as others anchor. Now you need to anchor yourself, so are ditching the weight of us others, so you can find your own balance. That’s so fair, it’s ok.
I’m just so, lost without you. I miss you like you’re dead. All the stupid texts I would have sent that I’m not sending because I’m giving you space and not being needy (to your face, ha). All our in jokes and references – useless, meaningless now, a language no one else can speak. We practically had a code. I can hear a counsellor saying that sounds a bit claustrophobic, maybe?
Maybe so. So I give you space, for as long as you need. It reminds me though, of my friend Edward so long ago, when he said by email when he hadn’t written for a while and I questioned it, words to the effect of: ‘why are you trying to contact someone who has decided it’s part of their mental health strategy to not contact you?’ It feels just like that. How can I argue with that logic?
He came back, and we sort of acted like nothing had happened, until last year, many years later, when after a bout of very ill health, he disappeared altogether, to the point I think he is really and truly dead now. I stopped mailing after a while. We had been email buddies for more than 25 years.
You may come back. Or this may be the end – you may take the time to think, and decide I’m a problem and part of your growth going forward is to excise me.
I can’t say anything. I don’t know if any of this is true, but if it is, I can’t stop you, because if you love something, you let it go when it wants to go. That’s the crux of it.
So I can and will cry by myself. I can and will let you go if you want. I can and will rededicate myself to me, and to Youngest and OtherHalf. Who may have felt allsorts of excluded from the MerryWeather and Eldest Club.
It does feel horrible knowing you just seemed to cut me out overnight, when we had had no argument. So I don’t get it, and I really need to understand. But it doesn’t matter that I don’t. As a mother – I imagine you need me and I’ll always be there for you. But also – also as a mother: you may not need me at all, I may make things worse for you, and if that’s the case – and I wish I knew if that was it – then I need, urgently, to let you go, as far away from me as you can.
I don’t know what happened. I just know that when I speak to you (rarely now), you aren’t hostile but matter of fact, and you say you feel alright now but don’t want anything to disturb that – I thought I made you feel better, I said, but you say no, you want to be alone. I’m confused; you don’t explain. You never play games with people, and you never lie – so what I am seeing is what I am getting, and I doubt there’s more to it than what you say. But it means I do affect your mood, and maybe in a bad or needy way. And you aren’t texting me with your random observations the way you used to. You said you were going to text me the other day about how my mum (your nan, that you live with) annoys you, but there’s no point, she’ll never change. That wouldn’t be the point of texting – it would be the being seen and not being alone in the observation. But perhaps my validating you makes things worse. Like when I over think things, they swirl in my head. I journal, like I am today and things get bigger for being named and focussed on – not smaller or cleaner; they swamp me more.
So maybe what’s needed is cutting, cleaning by getting rid of. Maybe I’m a thing to be removed. And so you should if what I think is true. I just wish I knew. Or do I? Ha. Which would hurt more, knowing you want rid of me, or misinterpreting and worrying about it, when you might be just having a patch of depression and will be back later after [manfully] dealing with it all by yourself?
And if you came back – can I allow myself to be this close to you again? As when you go it hurts this much? But I would – as I am nothing if not a risk taker when it comes to people. You have to take a risk or you will play it safe and small your whole life and know no love.
No. The cleanest thing here, for me and you, is to love you and let you go. For however long you want. And to recommit to everything else. Like when my ex-hub to be dumped me – all that long time ago, and I was walking under the Westway underpass, pushing you along in your baby buggy, saying to myself ‘I can’t have him, but I can have EVERYTHING ELSE in the world that I see and choose.’ Negation of one thing, is not negation of all things. The loss of one person isn’t the loss of everything. It’s the loss of that person only.
So…are you in trouble, and pushing me away is the solution, part of it? Or are you in trouble and doing the depressive thing of pushing someone away who could’ve helped to prove to yourself you are not right about being shit and useless? And I should push through that and the hurt of it and make myself be with you? That sounds stalkery. I don’t know. But I have tried to be there for you. I can’t make you.
So I have to assume this is what you need, as a grown up and a person totally separate from me. That I don’t get it, but it doesn’t matter, I am to be gone for however long.
In the meantime, I will do Everything Else. Until it means something.
I always feel royally shit myself on a full moon. Apparently it’s partially also a lunar eclipse today. I haven’t looked up what that means, but…I will later. I will try and do a full moon ritual tonight. Make my spirituality mean something. Maybe for too long I have used you – not just been with you and been happy for it, but used you – to camouflage myself in my own life. Now I must be IN it really. Maybe.
We’ll see. But this is how I feel today. It will pass, as all of these states do. Eventually.
But for now? Sad.
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