Why am I still here?

Isn't it amazing how sometimes one incident can force you into a situation of questioning whether you are in the right place and have made the correct choices? One unexpected occurrence can shake you into looking at things from a perspective that you've been avoiding for years. Take last Monday... Little haggis and myself were having a fairly leisurely day. I had begun cutting fabric to make her a new top and she was playing with her Lego, when all in a sudden I started to feel very unwell. Pain was gripping me around my chest and ribs, radiating out to my back. I was sweating, shaking and feeling very nauseous. So I lay down for a little while, hoping it would just pass. After about half an hour, the pain was still lingering, but the nausea had subsided, so I decided I was feeling well enough to prepare our dinner. As one who suffers from Fibromyalgia, I'm no stranger to pain, so I decided to dismiss what I was feeling as yet another symptom of said condition. An hour and a half or so later, we had had our dinner and the concert for the queen's diamond jubilee was about to kick off on BBC1, little haggis and I were enjoying a lovely bowl of ice cream (it was a celebratory weekend after all!). Shortly after that I started to feel very clammy and shaky and the pain intensified very rapidly. If I hadn't been 100% certain that it was completely impossible, I would have sworn that I was about to give birth. O.K., the location of the pain wasn't really spot-on, but the intensity was most certainly able to compete with the later stages of labour. It became so bad that nothing in terms of lying down, standing up, stretching out, sitting down in various positions, helped. I've never before had the need to call NHS24 and was a bit wary about doing so, but Little Haggis, who was getting very worried, insisted I call up. To cut a long story short, they decided that my symptoms were too much like those of a cardiac problem and called out an ambulance. Needless to say that I was in shock, upset and panicked. Those sentiments are very contagious, as within minutes Little Haggis was crying, together with me I need to add. Minutes later, the ambulance arrived and before I knew it, I had been linked up to an ECG machine by means of 12 thin cables, connected to the same amount of plasters with "poppers" on them. All the while, my poor Little Haggis was looking more ill and pale than I did myself. They soon established that my heart was fine (which is what I had thought myself to be honest). My temperature had gone up though and the pain was not letting off at all. So, in the ambulance we went, me on the bed and my little girl by my side in a chair, clutching her "Cowie" teddy. She is 11 now, but she looked very small and utterly lost, full of worry. The drive to the hospital took just a little less than an hour and all the while I felt like I was on a magically flying carpet... I felt extremely light-headed, teetering on the edge of consciousness. They wheeled me into A&E, popped me in a bed and not long after that a nurse arrived to attend to me. Blood samples were taken and it was around that time, the pain finally started to ease. Another series of funny little plasters were attached to my chest and nearby areas, more leads were linked up and that verified the fact that my heart was completely fine. By this time it was after 11pm and my poor Little Haggis looked exhausted. The same nurse came back and announced that it was most likely that I'd need to be kept in overnight for observation, but what to do with my little girl? Did I have any family or friends who were able to pick her up and have her for the night? The simple answer: I have no family here at all. My boy is all grown up, lives near Newcastle these days and hasn't got a driving license, so he was definitely not an option. I have lovely neighbours, they are the best, but I just couldn't call them out of their beds, so close to midnight. So, one option remained and it's exactly the one I was dreading, because I knew exactly what reaction to expect. My ex-husband, Little Haggis' father had to be called to collect her. The nurse kindly offered to call him up and after about 5 attempts she finally got him on the line. Of course, as expected, he was questioning the necessity of him coming over to collect his child, seeing as there are always numerous things in his life which seem to be of much higher priority and value, heading the list is himself. Even though it would not take any longer than about 50 minutes to get to the hospital from where he lives (probably less at that time of night, it being a clear, dry night with hardly any traffic on the roads), he eventually arrived about an hour and a half later. In that time, my condition had improved greatly, my temperature had come down to a normal healthy level again, the pain had as good as disappeared, and other than still feeling light-headed and very tired, I felt fairly OK. So he walked in, looked at me in that annoyed "you are such a nuisance!" kind of way and promptly declared that there was nothing wrong with me and "why the hell did he need to come out!?". The nurse pointed out that I had improved now, but I had been all but fine when I'd been brought in. Also, beside that point, he was not there to give his unqualified opinion of my state of health, he was there because his daughter had nowhere to go and couldn't stay with me in hospital. At the same time the doctor who had been in earlier, returned and told me they thought the pain had been caused by a possible gall stone, that this can indeed cause very intense, acute pain, but that I should be fine for now. Upon seeing my ex, she also decided that I was OK to go home. Of course she presumed that the man in my room was my partner or a relative with good intentions, who would take me safely home.... How wrong could she have been? Doctor and nurse out of the room, he turned to me and said: "Well, nothing wrong with you, so you can go home. I'll just be off then, I'm sure you can take a taxi home..." "So are you not going to take us home daddy?" asked Little Haggis, who by that time was utterly exhausted and slumped on a chair, huddled inside my dressing gown and holding on for dear life to her teddy. "No, that would add almost an hour to my journey, surely you can UNDERSTAND that I want to go to my bed and don't want to be driving round by your place. Just get a taxi!" was his reply. And with that, he just turned on his heels and off he went. By that time it was somewhere between half past midnight and 1 in the morning and there we were, one very tired little girl and one equally exhausted big girl who felt so dizzy that the whole world was spinning, left to get a taxi for a fairly long drive in the middle of the night. The nurse came back into the room and asked my little girl where her dad had gone, to which she replied: "home...". To say that she was incredulous would be an understatement. A taxi was ordered and after spending about another 20 minutes in a waiting room with one person who kept being sick and another couple with a small child who seemed to be suffering from croup, we were picked up by said taxi who took us home for the tidy sum of £50... I got a fright when I found myself in pain which I couldn't identify as anything I'd felt before, I got even more of a fright when the nurse on the phone to NHS24 told me there might be a cardiac problem, but none of these things shocked me as badly as the fact that this utterly selfish man, who I very stupidly married all these years ago, just walked out and left his own daughter and her mother who was not well, in a hospital in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night, to wait for a taxi which I could ill afford, not caring whether we got back home OK or not, as long as he was fine and soon back to his own bed. I came to this country for him, left everything behind, family, friends... all that was mine and familiar. I have remained in this country mostly for reasons relating to him, in order to enable him and our daughter to have good and regular contact. Any time I have thought about returning to my own country, I have been filled with guilt at the thought of taking my little girl away from him... yet, when we both are in need, he doesn't even feel the slightest hint of responsibility. And I just can't figure out why I am still here...

concrete setting

So... I've got writer's block...
And, even worse, I've got painter's block!
In fact, I'm stuck.
Not your usual sort of being a little bit stuck in the mud, forget about that. When I say I'm stuck, I'm more thinking along the lines of fast setting concrete being poured around me. Actually, you can add in some steel re-enforcements for good measure there too. That is the kind of stuck I feel like at the moment.

It could have something to do with the Scottish weather getting to me. After all, it has been raining day after day after day. Whilst half of Europe is getting scorched and Greece is going up in flames, I have had feverish dreams of water coming up to my nostrils, whilst the never ending sound of rain lashing down on the domed roof light keeps reverberating in my head all night.
It has been getting so bad, that my friends no longer dare to bring up the subject of weather, unless it's under the guise of a joke along the lines of "Is it true the Scots tow their cars behind their boats?" (hahaha! very funny...)
There have been days when I truly started to believe that the only place wetter than my garden was the bottom of the sea. But when you are stuck in your little bubble, as I have been all summer, all that is outside of it seems to magnify.

Another reason for feeling stuck, a very weather-unrelated reason, is the fact that I'm now fastly approaching my 37th birthday and I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up.
Somehow I'm waiting for something amazing to happen, for all the lights to come on at once, and to finally find clarity in the dark.

I know a few things: I know I want to spend more time being creative, I want to paint... I'd love to write more (and hopefully improve that skill), I also really want to see a lot more of the world. But like someone who has been given a number of unusual ingredients, despite the fact that they can't cook to save their own life, I have no idea of how I should make some sort of a feasible plan out of the given and known factors.

Sometimes, late at night, I lie awake in bed, thinking of that one year road trip I'd like to go on. In my thoughts I'm crossing America coast to coast and up and down in an Airstream that has been kitted out as a mobile art studio. The idea is that I would record my travels, the places and people I meet through sketches and paintings. Of course, at the end of it all, I would rent a great bright and airy studio in one of America's bigger cities for a couple of months, to finish off those pieces which have only had the groundwork done. All the while I'm soaking up the atmosphere, I'm meeting new and interesting people, I see places I never knew existed before... The climax would of course be the exhibition of the work. This exhibition would be a very rich patchwork of portraits and landscapes, all of them with an accompanying story, almost like a richly illustrated travel log...

Ah... one can dream...

Phone Call

"CLICK...."

She sat, holding the receiver, wondering why.

Of course, this was not the first time.

It had been about 3 months since she last heard from her mother. Far too long, but inevitably what happened if she did not make the effort to be the one to get in touch.
She'd considered calling, even writing a letter, but she felt bitter and mostly also very hurt, and thus, she decided to wait. Wait for her mother to call her... for once.

Eventually, the phone call came. What she hoped for was some motherly care, concern, an enquiry about her well being, the well being of her kids. Instead, she was subjected to an avalanche of complaints, self-pity and misery. Again, of course, this also was not the first time.


"The exhibition was a disaster! Five months spent, sitting, painting 17 paintings... and what for? I tell you, it was an utter disaster, never had such poor sales before...."

"Well, what did you expect? We are in the middle of an economic crisis. People are losing jobs, losing their homes. Don't you think it's to be expected that very few people buy luxuries like paintings at this moment in time?"

"Do you have any idea how much work goes into 17 paintings??!! Five months, I tell you, Five months I have been painting for!!!"

"what about all us people who actually have to work in menial jobs for a living? What about those who clean toilets? People who work night shifts? People who have to do things which are a lot less enjoyable than painting, day in day out? Try, for a lifetime? What about them?"

"And anyway, why have you not called me?!?"

"Well, I am always the one who calls, you want to talk for over an hour at a time, and actually, while we are on the subject of the economic crisis, I am all but in a great financial state at this moment. It's an international call for me too. I don't see why I always have to be one shouldering the cost."

"You know my situation! I can't call you. It will cause trouble and fights. You know my husband won't have it."

"You know what? I'm sick of this crap about your husband. What are you? Are you his wife? Do you live in the same house, and aren't you supposed to have the same rights? If you want to call your kids, you should just pick up the phone and do exactly that! I would like to see any man trying to stop me from calling my kids! And you know something else? I have lived here for well over 11 years now, and I have had the honour of your company here at my house for exactly 11 days over those 11 years. Do you think that's normal??? I don't even live that far away. I know people who's kids have moved over to New Zealand and South Africa and they have seen 10 times more of their parents over the time they've been away than I've seen of you! How do you think that feels? Do you really think that inspires me to keep calling you?"

"Well, you know who's fault that is, you know wh..."

"Oh, don't you dare to say another word!! Don't even think of going there!"

"If your father had not le.."

"Oh, get over it will you!! That was 20 years ago! How dare you blame my father for the fact that you can't be bothered to come and see your daughter, he has NOTHING to do with that, NOTHING!! People get divorced en re-marry all the time you know! My dad is not responsible for your choices in life! He hasn't even got any influence over them anymore."

"well, I wanted to call now, and I was going to talk to you, but well, I don't feel like that anymore now!"

"CLICK ..."

purple cat nightmares

"Erratic" is the word I was looking for, but which my scrambled brain failed to remember for at least the last ten minutes. That word is exactly the term I needed to describe my sleeping pattern of late.

Near enough every night I have been up until well past 2 o'clock in the morning, and have then tried to go to bed, feeling sufficiently exhausted, only to just lie there, head buzzing with thoughts and ideas, failing miserably to fall asleep.

Every night, in those early quiet hours, you can find me here at, or not too far away from my trusted laptop. I'm still building my web shop and it's slowly starting to take shape. The shelves still need a lot of filling up, some of the legal nitty gritty, like terms and conditions needs sorting out, but the layout and design are more or less in place.

Normally, I'm mostly typing in values, text, etc.., one eye on the PC, and another on the big fat manual. Last night however, it all got a bit more exciting (you are about to find out how pathetically unexciting my little life really is...). All these products have to be photographed in order to show potential customers what they look like, and that is exactly what I did last night.

You should have seen it! The makeshift photographic studio of the year was constructed : One length of white satin and a few pegs; the satin is to be attached to the extraction fan, using aforementioned pegs, making sure that the top is sufficiently gathered. Drop down length of satin, in front of cooker, where a strategically placed ironing board serves as a shelf. The "shelf", a.k.a. the ironing board, needs to be covered with the satin as it comes down, so to create a continuous flow of fabric, moving from vertical to horizontal position in one flowing sweep. Then you collect the uplighter/reading lamp combo from the sitting room, and places it to the left side in front of the arrangement of shelf and backdrop. It is very important that great care is taken when pointing the "reading lamp" spotlight, at the arrangement. In the depths of my store room I still had a slightly lopsided adjustaform bust. However, she is a rather offensive shade of purple, and her "legs" (metal stand) have been lost a long time ago. All was resolved using a polo neck jumper of Little Haggis and by perching her on the "shelf". As soon as this set-up had been put together, I discovered the next problem: the whole point of dragging the bust out, was that I had scarves to photograph. It turned out though, that the neck on the bust was much too short, in fact it was almost non-existent. After a few moments of rummaging around the storage cupboard, I found just the thing: a white ceramic plant pot, just about "neck-sized", carefully placed upside down on the little stomp of neck of Mrs. Adjustaform. So there we go, the set up completed, I could finally get going.

After lots of clicking and zooming, I finally managed to successfully put about 12 different designs of scarf in the picture!

The results are now available to see at www.purplecatbycindy.com. You don't know how pleased I feel with the progress of my site. All I need now is visitors, and of course for some of them to like the site and its contents enough to become a customer...

Here's hoping.

Drowning in little dresses...

Ok... So, you'll think: "What's this all about?"

Well, it's just that I'm currently drowning in little dresses, as I'm taking pictures to put on my website.

This building of the website turns out to be so very time consuming that I've hardly got any time to actually make more dresses! Help!

I'm posting this to get REACTIONS! So write a comment.. tell me what you think, please?

OK, I'm showing off... but it's all in the interest of market research.

The pictures above show an example of how I'll present them to start off (that is, while I have no suitable little model to pose in them for me).

Any ideas, remaks, constructive critisism? Just fire away!!

Speak again soon!

POC

How to be a millipede.

I have not abandoned this, I have not forgotten this, and like so many other things, this is now another source of guilt. Guilt for not finishing, for not keeping up, for not being able to devote enough time and loving care to it.

Beloved (is he beloved??) and I are going through a very rough patch... It's been almost all-consuming. It's not working well at all, between us just now. I'll leave that story for another time though...

On top of that there is my little business. It desperately needs a boost in these times of downturn and despair, so I've decided to give it another outlet, namely through an Internet shop. Now, THAT... That is not as easy as it seems! In effect it means that I'll be running 2 retail outlets, one virtual one and one actual physical shop. Both will be drawing from the same stock, and so my usually messy book-keeping will now need to be brought up to scratch. I will need to allocate an individual identification code plus description to each article, and that is just the stuff that is working in the background... not a spot of designing has been done to present my online shop in a nice way yet!

It has suddenly made me realise how much is actually already involved in my shop here. When I signed up for the web hosting, I was asked if I wanted the basic package, which allows you to list up to 2000 products on your site, or if I wanted the more extensive package, which supports 10000 items. I laughed, 2000 items?? Haha! Of course that would be more than sufficient!
And then I looked at how everything needs its own identification number, and realised that I probably have around 300 different kinds of ribbon alone!! I don't dare to think of how many different buttons I have.... And those are just little things. Anyway, I've decided to start simple, and the ribbons and buttons might just have to wait for a space on my e-shelves.

And then... on top of that I've been sewing dresses, dresses and more dresses. Most of them not to order, just as one-offs, they are currently gracing the walls, shelves and rails in my little shop, and that, thankfully, has led to an order for 9 dresses! ..... Only snag? They have to be ready in 4 weeks! YIKES!!!

Well, I'll figure out one day how to be a millipede... all those hands would really be what I need.

And then there is one more thing.... I am missing my little Belgium, so so so so very very badly. It has been tearing me into pieces lately, and keep wondering what on earth I'm doing here in this cold country so far away from everything that is part of me...

Well, I'll keep you posted. And you will all be invited to the official opening of my Internet shop... once it is ready to go live. Hope you'll stick with me for now, I promise I'll post more once things calm down, in every possible way.

Love,

POC x

Dark

Everything is dark,
dark and empty.

We fell out this morning, not the first time. It has haunted me all day, filled my head with doubt, left me uncertain.
He's asleep down the stairs, on the sofa, courtesy of his snoring problem which keeps me awake all night long.
It begs the question: "Why does the sound of his (relatively soft) snoring disturb me so much, why can't I find comfort in it, like many others do?"
Lately, I find myself more and more lost a world unknown, filled with very familiar corners.
I'm never far away from a very bright and far too noisy dream. Dreams and reality have begun to melt into one, and I ask my children if they can recall something or other, only just remembering myself, that it only happened in one of my wacky journeys of semi-unconsciousness.

This evening I dozed of, just for a moment, in the sofa. My little girl came through to tell me something... and I asked:"Is het nu al klaar??!" (Is it ready already??! in Dutch). She asked "What??" in a very uncomprehending tone of voice. I just don't know where things keep coming from. My question held no relevance to her message. Increasingly I find so many things that hold no relevance to everything else surrounding it.

Most of all, I wonder if I'm on the path that was cut out for me.
I look around me and sometimes, everything, except my children, seems so alien.
Life feels too heavy to bear, the days too bright, the nights too dark. At the same time, for some strange reason that I can't explain, I somehow seem to skip the daylight. My mind plays tricks on me, locks me in a windowless box, leaves me unaware of the day opening up and closing again.
Nighttime is too dark, and yet, under the blanket of darkness I seem to feel sheltered and desperately lonely all at once. Like swimming in a dark warm womb, and then suddenly realising that the umbilical cord is missing, I'm on my own.
The man on the sofa down the stairs is miles away, he cannot reach inside my shell. He's a good man, and yet at times I don't know who he is, I look at him as he walks through the door, and I wonder: "Who is this familiar stranger?"
Something about him fits me perfectly, like comfortable slippers, a feeling of home... And other things send shivers down my spine, make me want to run. It's nothing he's done wrong, I just can't put my finger on it.

Exhaustion overwhelms me on a daily basis. Is it a result of my insomnia? Could it be that simple? Are all these demanding muddled up thoughts wearing me out?

A fitting answer would be so blissful...

At 16, I was a little bird, not yet ready to fly, I fell out of the nest... somehow I've made it this far, flying and falling along the way, never quite mastered the correct technique of using my wings to their best ability, but I'm still as lost as I was on the day I fell out. I want to be in the egg again, start all over, feel sheltered.