mdm

Once upon a quiet summers evening   - a car drops   me at the glass doors with the tinkling chimes. I carry freshly plucked Marguerite from  furze yellow hedges around  ridged chocolate fields. I'm balancing  ice-cream wrapped in a deli-foil bag to keep cold so I open the door to my Mother’s room with my chin. A   pretty blonde woman in a blue tabard is kneeling on the floor,    both of my Mother’s hands in hers, craning upwards to see the face under the flopping fringe. -           Kin you tell me if there is anythink I can do for you ? She speaks with an accent that I've become familiar with, although one is never sure if it is Croatian, Polish, or Lithuanian. I am at pains to mark my territory, and inform this stranger that my Mother does not, cannot speak. I throw the flowers onto the patchwork quilt and make a production about getting a vase, a saucer and spoon. How very dare...

mdm aged 5  50 years later I get to bring a doll to New York City. Let me walk you back a little ...................... Once upon a time I was a very heavy sad woman. And resembled an egg on legs with enough cheek for a second set of teeth.  After I had made myself as fat as a lark, I threw in Type 2 Diabetes to boot.  May as well go the whole hog says I on Lithium eating the fill of the table and rooting for more.  I had watched my Mother Siobhán die a little every day in her mute locked in body in a gigantic padded chair.  We all die a little every day, just not as harshly.   Siobhán witnessed this with her own Father, whose curled sepia fingernails gripped the white railings of the bed, ferociously shaking them in agitation while his wife, a doctor, a district nurse, a home help, 8 sons and 4 daughters did the caring.  The Dooley Men doing the heavy lifting,  sleepovers and gatching, the women doing the cooking an...

mdm Zzz I saw the word sleep in the ad. And women curled up under grey blankets. Blah blah blah ........ so very what I thought and scrolled on. It came back into my feed repeatedly so I tapped the link. It's a heavy blanket to calm you down is what it is. Calm a scourge? A woman with a racing brain who rarely sleeps ? Go ahead, hit me with your best shot. My amazing Doctor  -  had once issued the immortal line - "We'll have to bring out the big guns " and prescribed a strong sedative that I became immune to as speedily as my head races. Trying to sleep with the mania of a Bi-Polar high means that your brain is fizzing with kaleidoscopic colours and thoughts. Sometimes it hurts more to shut my eyes because of the flickering. On tour with my play I lay on a hotel bed in the last hours of sunlight before showtime and remarked wearily to a woman in the corner that it was easier to stay awake. As a child I had many names. That Divilskin....