A yard inhabited by a blue-tongue lizard probably doesn’t house snakes. Daddy Long Legs spiders eat Red-Back spiders. This may be common knowledge for Australians, but not for people new to this place. No matter how many times a person might be told that the likelihood of encountering a snake is small, and no matter how many times a person is told that no one dies of being bitten by a Red Back (anymore), finding that nasty looking spider with the red splotch on its back, or seeing scales under a log is going to cause a visceral effect of flight, fight or freeze. I still feel that in the bottom of my belly on such occasions, and I’m by no means phobic.
It is not so much that the skip is filled with things I deemed valuable, that are now destined for landfill. It is the utter contempt with which they were thrown into the space behind the shed, to languish and deteriorate beyond any kind of future usefulness to anyone at all.
I come across the body of the blue-tongue lizard whilst clearing the chicken run of the furniture, containers, gardening equipment, collections of rocks and wood, and outdoor toys. It died at right-angles, wrapped around the corner of a small bookshelf. I don’t know, but imagine the small bookshelf being viciously shoved up against the lizard’s body, trapping it in place. It was a good sized adult blue-tongue lizard, with its distinctively broad, flattened shape, clearly (to me at least) not a snake of any kind. This is hard, even for me to forgive.
Empaths pick up on the lingering fragments of other people’s feelings and experiences. I’ve stopped telling myself that it’s imaginary. When we came home, I picked up horror, loneliness, sadness and rage. It takes time to sort out emotions. They need to be sorted before they can be dealt with.
Like everyone, I carry remembered emotions and sensations from my own journey through life, but as an empath I also feel for those around me. It is exhausting dealing with other people’s strong emotions. I have often felt pressured to repress my own feelings, in order to step up and respond to those around me. But my need to express and feel isn’t alleviated through repression. Pretending emotions away leads to mental and emotional distress and disease.
I feel sad. I feel disappointed. I feel uncertain about my future. I feel so much, that dealing with life right now is just about all I am able to manage. I can’t look for work. I can’t plan ahead more than a couple of days at a time. I am floating in an asteroid field, dodging obstacles and desperately clinging to ideas of who I am and who I want to be. I feel I need to be cautious about what I can say to certain people. Self-censorship has always been part of my identity, but never more so than right now. It means I start from a point of defensiveness. I snap before I have a chance to assess the perceived threat that I’m responding to. I do not like the way I’m communicating with Brown Owl. It’s not fair for her to be treading on eggshells around my warped places.
This is an extension of how I felt during 2020. Every plan I made, every intention was tested, tried and mostly found wanting. So much was discarded. My identity felt reduced to that of consumer, mother, wife. Stranger in a strange land.
Of course, there were bright spots of friendship and connection. I don’t want to paint it all black and white. The country itself was incredibly welcoming. The big Alberta skies, the sunshine, mountains, lakes, farmland and even the small gritty suburbs of Red Deer itself invited me in to explore and settle.
It was difficult to settle when my every decision, choice and action as a mother, wife and human being was relentlessly put to the mettle.
Inevitably, Wizard and Jack played, bounced, broke, made, ate, drank, bathed and did all the things that human beings do. The push-pull I felt as an unwelcome alien in that house meant that my maternal instincts were squeezed and twisted into knots. I could not stop my children from living. I could not stop my children from being. I could not manage to reduce their days in that house to sitting in front of the screen and keeping their bodies from moving. I had to remind myself that I didn’t want to do that, either.
For now, I remind myself to breathe. I allow myself space to respond. I try not to jump to conclusions. I pause and ask for time to articulate what’s in my head. I silence the perpetual judgments made about me by myself. I give myself permission to wait for the right time to present itself.
One of the funniest things the day we arrived home from quarantine was opening the pile of mail that had collected. I first sorted it by recipient, and then commenced tearing open envelopes that were addressed to me. Oh – I’m due for a pap smear. Oh – an endoscopy, too. Oh – a home testing kit for bowel cancer. Poo. I know I need to see the dentist, and I have an intention to find myself a GP I can relate to. And – yes, I need another mammogram as well.
It wasn’t so amusing to discover my driver’s license had been revoked. I put that down to inexperience. We would never advise people in our place to assume their snail-mail could wait for their return before being opened. We would arrange for a trusted person to open it for us during our absence.
The image in my mind of the body of the blue tongue lizard surfaces at surprising moments, as flashbacks are wont to do. The small bookshelf where it died was one I bought for LabCat many years ago when we lived in Ways Road in Hampstead Gardens. LabCat went to a birthday party workshop and painted some wooden hibiscus flower shapes. We painted the bookshelf and affixed the flowers. It matched her cobbled-together desk, and it looked pretty.
At this time I was consciously learning how to live in a rental property and assert my sense of style and purpose. My children, Guitar Hero and LabCat were around the same age Jack is now. They wore exclusively op shop clothes, and all of our belongings had previously belonged to other people, including the bookshelf. But it was not beyond our means to make useful things look pretty.
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