Space To Breathe

I’m back in the Green County for a bit. As is the norm when staying with my parents I seem to have been drinking solidly for about five hours. This afternoon I drove them around garden centres and B&Q in preparation for the masterpiece they want me to create on the garage and the shed…ie. I’m painting Green Men!

I’m struggling to breathe, there is something in the air of the Green County, gods knows what, but it means that my asthma is a hell of a lot worse than almost anywhere else I’ve lived (and that goes double for abroad – how I miss the crisp, clean air of Japan!) However, this struggle has take four hours and a good deal of alcohol (wine, pastis and whiskey) to kick in, this means I’m doing rather better than usual as normally I pass a certain point in the Pennines (usually just over Saddleworth Moor) and I’m sneezing fit to burst which, whilst driving, can be terribly amusing in a not sort of a way.

I often say I get on very well with my parents when we’re on opposite coasts. So far this afternoon has been very pleasant. We haven’t yet got onto the fact that I’m an unemployed woman who is dependent upon the finances of her partner, given my own guilt over that particular fact of my life this will be an unpleasant topic when it is reached. At the moment we’ve been discussing art, at the moment implied criticisms and disagreements have been minimal and limited in their sphere. As such it’s been very easy to imagine myself, as an adult, to be immune from feeling the way I did for large swathes of my adolescence because I have my own house, their criticism does not imply any sort of control over me or my actions as it did back then.

We will wait until Friday to see if this lasts but currently I believe that I am able to view my parents as an adult, I have my life, they have theirs. I can happily imagine that all disagreements in the past have been because I, as a child, had to submit myself – often unwillingly to their control and that whilst they were doing what they believed to be best for me I was suffering with the impotency of being powerless, in the knowledge that whatever they did I had to live with.

I hate being out of control, I hate being dependent, I recognise intellectually the need for compromise and the fact that one cannot live entirely and solely according to one’s wishes, there needs to be accommodation for other people in there. However, it doesn’t make the actual acceptance of this fact any easier…so, lets wait and see when they bring up the Jellicle Cat’s good natured patronage of my art.

Two days…and I have my own wheels to get out.

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