Tuck shops in schools
Hop scotch on the playground and in the streets
Eating space dust
Eating out of polystyrene boxes
Indoors for Saturday night TV
Games in the street with the neighbourhood kids
Helping the elderly across the street
Top of the pops is the bee’s knees!
Infatuations with care bears, my little pony and Teddy Ruxpin
Entertainment in the best decade ever!
Sweets sold by the penny in every high street – that was the eighties!
Written 1:31pm 16th March 2023
Filed under poetry
Today I am going to talk more about my dad.
My dad has hardly had much of a look in regarding my past, but I thought I should share some things about him, because he wasn’t part of the problem when I was growing up – he was like a cushion to the blow I could have had – if that makes sense at all?
My dad was always fighting to get me better things, to get me better socialised, to get me better educated and he was almost always ignored – but my dad did have some small victories now and again in regards to having choices about what happened to his child.
My mum made no secret about why she married my father; she let it be known to both him and I that she married him purely to keep her boys safe in case she died, because she had a health scare about a year before I was born.
Her arrangement was, I shall marry you Tom if you ensure that you will raise my boys as your own if anything happens to me! He agreed and he would have done so too, however my dad said he was sad he would never have children of his own and he sulked about it for a time – my mum was terrified in having another child because the child she had before me was a breach of which she was more or less forcing herself to have naturally and she suffered for three days in labour until she relented to have a caesarean.
However, she told me she felt sorry for my dad and said that she would give him only one child to seal the deal and he was happy with that!
So I was born before they got married, they married in the January after my birth.
My dad was a sheet metal worker shortly after this and remained in that job until I was seven years old. Then stuck to his next job until retirement, pun intended a glue factory foreman – where I got my first job as a labeller at the age of 15.
Before he married my mum he was a chicken farmer and a train driver before he went into the army to get a HGV license, but he stayed in the army longer than he had planned. There is a family rumour that my mum broke my dad’s leg deliberately to prevent him attending his duties in the Falklands, but it was never proven.
My dad was a quiet man, who hardly spoke about himself and so I don’t know much about him in his own words, only the rumours from other relatives who knew him. He kept himself to himself and often shut himself away to play on consoles in other rooms away from family.
Sometimes dad would cook, but mostly I cooked for the family when mum was on nightshifts from the age of 7yrs onwards, dad was a less fussy eater than mum and would be more adventurous in the food he ate – he would have been a healthier person if mum wasn’t so dominant about the kinds of food she bought. He had very little say on what happened to the money he bought into the family and he only ever had £25 a week to himself for betting on horses only. She didn’t like him buy what she called junk to fill the house up with, because my dad was a bit of a retro head.
My dad always wanted to be an entertainer like his sisters, always wanted to do stand-up comedy and play the harmonica in public and create his own funny songs. He liked making people laugh, but mum told he she wouldn’t let him do that as a side hobby, because he embarrasses her and it’s not fair to her that he should do that!
Mum was always telling him she was embarrassed by him and he just took it on the chin and obeyed, he tolerated it because he loved her.
My dad was a Tommy Cooper lookalike and he had his style of humour and my dad often imitated him a lot at family parties and weddings – in fact he looked so much like him and could remember all his jokes that his sisters tried heavens hard for years to make him be a lookalike act at special events where they honoured Tommy Cooper after he died – but mum simply wouldn’t allow it!
My dad would have been very successful doing that! Especially as my dad could also do the special magic tricks that Tommy Cooper could too! My dad was a bit of a magician!
My dad taught me how to act too; he would often play and relive our favourite movies together. As a child I knew the lines to almost every Laurel and Hardy movie there was, because we played it together the most and also Blackbeard the pirate! We also liked Norman Wisdom movies, Carry on movies and George Formby!
I don’t remember too much nowadays as it’s been almost twenty years since I saw a Laurel and Hardy movie last, but I do have recollections now and again.
But my dad and I were definitely entertainers for the family at family events, which is why mum started to refuse a lot of the invitations from the age of ten onwards – because we were both embarrassing her, my dad for simply being who he is and me being a fat funny girl who was too highly influenced in naughty humour bought about by my love for the Carry on team and comedians such as Frankie Howard and Julian Clary.
I like saucy and naughty humour, naughty is nice!
My dad paid for a while for me to have singing lessons (opera to be specific) but mum put a stop to it when they decided I had talent and needed to go to talent contests etc. around the country. Plus she hated the idea of the amount of money she had to lose in order to hone my skills. When I lost the singing lessons dad fought heavens hard to get me tutored in playing the piano, because of my addiction to my grandmother’s piano whenever we visited!
My dad would not compromise on one thing in his life and that was visiting his side of the family, something my mother really loathed bout him. She hated every Sunday, because that would be the chosen day each week my dad would take me visiting his side of the family!
She rarely went with us because most of the family were outside of her 3 mile limit and the anxiety of travelling was just too much for her! My gran lived 25 miles away in Bedfordshire.
Other relatives lived in Berkshire, Luton, Cheshire, Wales, Southend and Canvey Island or West London, far too far for my mum – so she stayed at home most of the time.
My dad and I would often go rowing in the lake at Alexander Palace in the summer with my cousins and have a large picnic, mum hated us doing that because she didn’t like my cousins being called cousins – as despite my mum having a mixed religious and mixed race background herself (third generation), she hated the concept of me calling my mixed race cousins, cousin and was quite racist about it, to the extent my aunt who is very passive was pinned up against the wall by my mother and threatened simply because she felt that she was putting ideas into my head that were against her own!
My dad never tried to control my mum behaviour, never tried to apologise for it or make any comment or even seemed to notice it – sometimes he would sigh and look downwards and wait for her to finish so we can all quietly leave again and hear the rants in the car about how victimised my mother felt for her own actions!
My dad was bullied by my mum and sometimes that did include physically being bullied too, though he’ll deny it, because he loves her. But I remember lots of times where my mum has slapped him, kicked him, pushed him out of the way, called him names and dragged him physically off somewhere!
I do believe that domestic violence can affect both genders; I have witnessed it growing up!
Whenever my dad was pushed to the limits and he would rarely stand up for himself and say something, mum always won because she would say she is going to leave him right then and there and would often storm out of the house and stay with her friends for the night to try and scare him back into submission. I remember those times, she would come back in the house with a smile on her face and carry on like nothing happened and dad would be thankful she is back, but she would pretend she wouldn’t know what he was on about!
Even when someone proved to dad my mum was having an affair with a bouncer at a nightclub my dad’s reaction was a shrug and well she comes home to me doesn’t she? He wouldn’t challenge her on it.
My dad was submissive and unassuming and incredibly patient.
I often questioned his reactions and said you are not often happy dad, why stay? He would make all kinds of excuses, but the one that stood out the most was hearing at the age of nine your dad confessing that if your mother did die of her heart troubles, you’d lose two parents at once, because he told me at the tender age of nine he’d commit suicide if she died. Which shocked me, because he promised my mum he’d look after her sons if she did! His reply is, they are adults now Tina, done my bit. I said to him, well what about me? I was shocked and hurt to hear him reply, the deal didn’t say anything about me!
I told him, I am your daughter, and surely you’d think about me wouldn’t you? What would happen to me then dad?
He said I would be alright with my gran!
It was a scary time for me, because this was the time mum left for two weeks to go on holiday in Great Yarmouth with her sister and friends because of another argument, one of which my dad tried to prepare me to pack to go and live with gran with him. So suicide was lurking around the house for too long, mum came back, no smiles this time and she was asking if he had packed yet and he said no, but Tina has – then that’s when mum sent me off again to another aunt for a while and the whole time I was scared dad would be dead!
Other than gardening and playing darts with me from time to time, there isn’t really much else to say about my dad, other than his addiction to horse racing and online casinos.
He is a teetotaller, a good honest man who works hard and got obese living with my mum on the diet she provided him and he has very little self-esteem.
He is funny, a good entertainer, but she knocked him off his pedestal as much as she did me.
That’s all there is really to my dad.
He tried hard to get me into clubs and learn things – singing lessons, music lessons, pushing me in my sports, but mum always stopped us.
Dad always wanted to take me on holidays, but mum didn’t like it, didn’t like travelling unless she was with her sister and so we never had a family holiday together ever! Not once.
I had no birthday parties after the age of 7yrs, nothing special for my landmark birthdays and that hurts when you see your mother go all out on landmark birthdays for your brothers, 16, 18 and 21. It was always made clear to me, I was not important, I was not really supposed to be part of her family and so I don’t get those things!
That was my life, she lives for her boys, I got the scraps.
My dad never hit me unless he was bullied by her, she would literally lay into him to force him – but outside of her, he never laid a finger on me, even when he was at his most angry!
Thanks for reading!
Filed under Home and Family
I have been thinking about the YouTube channel I am going to set up after Christmas a lot, I have been trying to think about what it should be mostly about. People like themes, they don’t like random people no matter how authentic they are, or do they?
I mean, I like a lot of stuff and I would like to do a lot of stuff – I don’t want to be bored with the same old same old, you know?
I want to sometimes read out my poetry to people, I want to share gardening tips and recipes and my journey through weight loss and other things. I don’t want to just be a gardening vlog, or a beauty and fitness vlog or a writing vlog. I want to do the whole caboodle, now people say, sure you can do this but have multiple channels, but I don’t really want to do that.
If I had multiple channels, then I will need to film and edit every day for a once a week post on each and that is taking up more time than I want to do.
Plus I am none too thrilled about the editing process, I hate doing anything technical for too long.
One of my biggest desires in having a YouTube channel is to visibly show people my weight loss, fitness progresses. But contrary to that there are two things I hate about it… the fame this could give me and the fact I have to show my fat ugly body and face on the camera, or else, what am I showing?
I’m paranoid enough without being famous!
Seriously, you have no idea how paranoid I am when a stranger points and looks like they are talking about me. I mean… I can’t cope now, let alone when I know they know me… you know… at least right now I can put it down to me being a schizoid, of course they aren’t really pointing at me…. Until they then call me fat ass to my face and I am like… ok I guess they were then, rude!
I keep my mouth shut to people who shout that at me, primarily because I want to live. But inside I want to shout out “Like your lip will be if you carry on mate”!
If people knew the attitude that goes on inside my head, I would have been murdered years ago!
I don’t like the idea of going out dressed up in a headscarf and huge sunglasses and learning to turn my head away from anyone as I walk past them like some super international spy!
I just want to dawdle down the street in my scruffs on a lazy day, walking a dog, without it being splashed on the papers “TC bad hair day” or “TC midlife crisis” you know.
But then again, there are days where the attention whore comes out and it’s like “for goodness sake notice me, notice me, stop ignoring me, why am I being ignored when I have just walked down the street looking like a bowl of fruit”?
Thing is, I do like attention if I have to be honest with you. But the problem is, on my terms and the world doesn’t work like that!
Fame scares me because of the stupid lengths some journalists will go to for a good pic and a front page position in their newspaper; it’s disgusting what some people will do to advance themselves.
When I was little I was famous for a few months in North London as being a pageant queen stripped of her rightful prize because of nepotism in the judging panel. I remember someone taking me by the hand to pull me away from my mum so they got a perfect shot of me, The Angel of Burnt Oak!
That scared me, let alone the incidences with a couple of my more famous relatives.
The universe has wanted me to be famous for a long time, but I have always fought it. My grandmother and some of the Romany relatives we have often sat down having fortune telling annuals for the family and from the age of seven they have all been convinced I will be a huge name in the world someday; though they said I will be late in getting that name. I will be in my early forties.
They suggested even back then, that I am destined for greatness, I will find greatness myself, but I will find someone equally great to spend my life with. They warned me I would have a child with a man but then I would leave him to start a second family quite late in life.
Though I would start all this late in life, my legacy would be huge and I would be like Shakespeare or Charles Dickens in how long my fame will last.
Vanity, I know – I know its vanity and I would hold my hands up and say, you think I am bad for this now? You should have seen me when I was thinner and I felt prettier than I do now, then you’d know how vain I really can be!
I even have a playlist called “Vanity” where you will find songs on it such as “keep young and beautiful” by Annie Lennox, “You’re never fully dressed without a smile” by the musical Annie and “beautiful and dirty rich” by Lady Gaga!.
So yes vanity has always been part of what I call “my true” personality, but it has been badly abused and supressed over the years. Make no mistake, I don’t think I am beautiful, but I do know there’s a lot of people who said I am and although I don’t believe them, I take their word for it; as the world isn’t generally nice about that sort of thing, unless it’s true and I know a lot of beautiful people who hate themselves too.
I used to obsess over my looks a lot because I can’t stand it when another woman notices; you forgot to do your eyebrows today, omg you have no lip liner, just lipstick?
I can’t afford to be vain anymore; I don’t have the budget for it. But when I got sick in 2014 I totally let myself go because my illness made me bedbound and for a while we thought I had some type of cancer, but it wasn’t.
I also thought, nobody is interested in me with a child and I am approaching forty, why bother? Especially with my baggage.
But I have been doing a lot of inner child therapies lately and its waking the true me up again – I love it, but I also hate the idea of people seeing my changes and thinking I am trying too hard to impress others or that I am being pretentious, when in fact I am actually becoming my more authentic and very supressed self!
As a child, before my mother started to peel me apart from the age of 7yrs I used to love standing in front of people performing for them, singing, acting, dancing, showing off and being my beautiful self in such cocky little way! This I believe is one of the reasons behind why my grandad called me “cocker” because I was cocky before my mother got her nails into me!
It’s funny but I started to get fat around the time mum started to hate me and supress me, before that, when I had her love and support, I was blooming marvellous and hadn’t a care in the world, I could move mountains with my confidence.
She insisted she needed to hold me down though, or I was going to the devil, she especially freaked out when I got the notion of burlesque – a thing I saw on TV thanks to my grandad and uncle watching it and predicting that will be me when I am older, mark their words!
My grandma said if I turn out like that, I’d definitely be following her mother’s footsteps as she was a cancan dancer and burlesque performer! Imagine that, my great grandma a cancan performer!
As a child my biggest career dream was to be a fashion designer but my mother worked like a woodpecker on my confidence when she found this out and wouldn’t encourage anything that might be connected to fashion and destroyed my sense of self love as much as possible to get this stupid dream out of my head.
Yet, ironically, it was she who’d force me into the pageants until I became embarrassingly fat for her and she told me she was ashamed to be seen in public with me because of it.
So yes, given the right environment, the right sense of self, I am a vain creature and attention whore to boot and my mother did everything possible to knock me off the pedestal I was on, because she felt the way I was going my life would be filled with sin if she didn’t act cruel to be kind.
But I have tried hard not to be vain, narcissistic or to reach too high – because I can’t stand the reactions from people like my mother who are vitriolic and jealous or greedy to try and do something to you to either destroy you or make entertainment out of you.
I have to say it has been a battle that’s been with me my whole life. I want to be this great person that everyone admires and to be beautiful and loved, but I also don’t want the evil that comes with it. You know?
I am on a weight loss journey, so I can be whoever I want to be unashamedly and with a little extra confidence – I will never have oodles of confidence, but I am going to fake it until I make it and I want to be a butterfly or better yet, a peacock!
As I’ve said before, I have had to learn to do everything on an emotional level alone – no support – no friends, nada.
It’s scary to think of what I could be if I am still alone, you know? I need security, I mean emotional security. Yeah sure, physical security, physical assistance is in abundance in the world, but it’s the emotional security that really counts.
I’ve never been taught to cope with grief or have my grief acknowledged by anyone. I was always made to feel bad and selfish when I was sad and grieving a loss.
Told I am a stupid girl who needs to snap out of it, snap out of the idea my grandpa has just died, the same grandpa who I lived with for the last 3 months of his life as he died of cancer right before my eyes!
10yrs old and all I got was a pat on the head from my dad, nothing else from anyone else, when grandpa died, when I was still tearful after three days, people became aggressive with me – get over it you stupid girl stop going on trying to get attention for yourself!
All I wanted was a cuddle, some kind words, but being raised by adults who are all self-absorbed, obviously they don’t think about anyone but themselves. They might have been a close family in that we had a massive family extended for five or even six generations that still maintained contact, but they were not supportive of each other. They were not the kind of family that pulled together to grieve and help each other, they all go off into their own small groups or by themselves and the children usually end up forgotten.
When raised by people like this, is it any wonder then, why I cry when a stranger shows me kindness and goes out of their way to be nice to me and sympathetic?
Because I am genuinely not used to being treated with any kind of humanity!
I was raised like a thing, not a person.
I remember when I was in therapy groups as a teenager, I remember joking with my peers about how I wasn’t raised I was dragged up and spat out, reeled in and clout, clout, clout.
My peers though knowing it to be tragic laughed, the therapists cried and some refused to treat me as my case was so specifically hard, they needed a lot of mental time off from work, as hearing what I went through, broke them.
It happened to a lot of therapists, I often had them in tears when I recalled my normal daily life and they’d have to end sessions early. I tried my best actually to hold back a lot because I needed the therapy, but some of them insisted I didn’t – my mother did.
I remember one therapist in particular was so aggrieved by what I went through, she broke all protocol just to give me a long, long tight hug as she cried and she told me, she so desperately wants to get me away from my parents and adopt me. Then she came to her senses and she couldn’t be in therapy with me alone anymore, she had to have a colleague with her to maintain a professional standard. This woman worked tirelessly to try and have me removed from custody of my parents, but she failed.
I was weirdly happy with quite a bit of my childhood until I realised that my parents weren’t normal, after seeing so many professionals break like that. I really thought it was normal that at 7am you’re kicked out into the garden until lunch time, made to entertain yourself when you’re not at school with only a dog and a rabbit as company or the elderly neighbours talking to you over a fence.
At 12:15pm daddy comes home for lunch, perfectly normal to cook for him and yourself, eat your lunch and get out into the garden by 12:45 again until you’re called in for dinner at 4pm same routine, mums working night shift, you got to cook for everyone – then outside again until 7pm.
I thought it was perfectly normal to only bath once a week and nothing else and that in the summer your bath became the kids paddling pool, but with soap!
Of course it’s not, I know that now, but back then, it’s normal life!
I remember my mum when I was of legal age to drink getting excited that I was of age to become her drinking partner at nightclubs, but I was terrified of going to places like that and refused to go. She was disappointed, but still tried to have drinking nights in with a slap up meal with her mates and tried to make me drink alcohol with her – “here love, drink more of this, you are more human after you’ve got a drink down you, you’re so tight otherwise… go on have another and another”.
She nearly poisoned me one night when I gave in to every temptation. I got so ill I nearly needed the hospital, the hallucinations were really, really bad – she said it was only alcohol, but I never really knew.
Dad was furious.
I still went with mum to her mates, but I started to insist control in my drinks and never trusted anything given to me after that – I wanted to know my orange was just orange and not some exotic new type that mysteriously contained vodka or gin that they didn’t tell me about.
I am not tight; I will drink, but not enough to get drunk.
So yeah, all sorts of things could end up on my vlog, but I won’t make it a sympathise with me vlog. It will all be upbeat or informative, nothing dull, nothing depressing; it will be my happy place.
I was thinking about being 100% authentic on there, no matter how tragic it is. Doing all sorts of things, whether I get laughed at or not, because no doubt I will because I am cheeky – I am self-deprecating and I do stupid things, I am accident prone, I am just not graceful and clueless… it will be hilarious.
I mean the other day, I was putting on something really tight and I struggled and I was hopping around the room like a Chinese vampire, trying to heave these darn pants on and I fell ass over tit on my face!
Don’t be surprised if that happens in the vlogs if I am brave enough to show my face!
Henry forgot his password to his Roblox game review channel he had, where I’d comment from time to time funny little quips now and again, interrupting his shows and he said if it weren’t for me, he wouldn’t have had as many views – because a lot of people loved the mum stuff.
We thought at the time, Henry was a budding “Morgz” because he did a lot of stuff with his mum didn’t he?
Well this post is getting a bit long now, so I think I had better end it here, sorry about that, just so much on my mind tonight.
Thanks for reading!
Filed under About Me
It’s what time of year again, a time I call “Brain Hurricane Season”.
What is Brain Hurricane Season?
Brain hurricane season happens approximately twice a year for three weeks and inundates me with new story ideas that I have to plan out; but they come so fast I often have to pause current projects and oftentimes I never get to write all the stories I dream up!
The catalyst for this brain hurricane season was an idea I had for Marvel, thanks to discussion Henry’s friends had about Iron Man. Can he be saved or not? Is there hope? I did some research but not much, only about four hours and I have got side-tracked by other things. But still, interesting stuff nonetheless. I need to get watching the last two movies though to fully understand what the kids are on about.
Anyway, the kids moved on and now they’re talking about three or four other Marvel movies, such as hearing rumours that Tom Hardy is giving up Venom, is that true? I did some research and it doesn’t appear to be! We’re big Venom fans here in this house, it is a recent movie that made us cry laughing – it was so funny!
So I can blame this little bit of research and playground gossip on being the catalysts for my brain hurricane season.
Turns out some of the new ideas are connecting to a current project; my so-called standalone Christmas novel is now going to be part of a small series, hence why subconsciously I have been holding off it for a while. I thought it was just Christmas music as to why I couldn’t write it.
For some reason or another, the Christmas novel is going to contain poems and songs and is going to be connected to another story about Candyland and The Easter Bunny. This idea was brand new on the 16th October 2022 and will be known as my Easter Project.
I think another catalyst to all this is the fact that Henry and I realised we listen to a lot of songs related to candies and chocolates and so we created a playlist last month called “Candy” on our only luxury, Amazon music. It’s funny what the brain does when you listen to certain types of music!
Henry is excited by my new plans as he loves movies about candies and anything Willy Wonka related, he just loves food that kid! But put it in a dream world where you are having adventures it gets him all excited, but my Henry is ever the businessman – he said to me “ma, think of the merchandise”, oh yes, he is already acting like my manager! I just wish he would let me write!
I have also decided that although I love writing horror, I want to downplay the gore and darkness of it to make them into family friendly Halloween style stories, as I have decided to focus mostly on family entertainment more than just doing whatever I feel like doing at the time.
I sat back and thought the other day about what kinds of responses from fans will I enjoy the most? I thought, I love kids, the kids of the world mean everything to me and I am most likely to respond to a child in full if they ran up to me.
Then I had the idea of, wouldn’t it be cool if I became a bestseller and I had mini merchandise toys in my handbag of the characters I wrote and handed them to a kid who recognised me on an off chance?
Thanks to Henry I am thinking about the other business behind writing, not just the book sales now. Good to think big I suppose?
So I decided, well then, that settles that, I am writing for family entertainment with kids in mind and my inner child has been singing about it all day!
It means I can be more light-hearted and playful and I love seeing kids laugh!
My inner child has also been insisting that I revert back to being a nine year old but I told it, OK, on some conditions… we don’t eat like we did when we were nine years old and we don’t laugh hysterically in people’s faces when we are nervous and put on a show for them and then hide behind the sofa because you forgot your senses and realised what a nitwit you made yourself out to be!
My inner child nearly cried, I was too harsh to it, so that’s why I said sorry to it and gave it 4 individual jelly babies to make up – she wants the whole bag, I said no, she cries and I am trying to ignore it – it’s for her own good!
I am not saying I can give up horror for good though, adult horror that is, because it’s a major part of me – but it’s just not as big as it used to be in my heart anymore as I am healing a lot of my darkness lately.
All I really want in life now onwards is light hearted fun, lots of love, good friends and a comfortable home, health would go a long way too – but hey, I am working on it!
There is a children’s picture book series brewing in my head too, for kindergarten age. It’s about a friendly community of monsters that are friends with each other.
Another story is about an angel who decides to become interviewed by a chat show.
So many new things coming to me and this is only the start of the Brain Hurricane Season, I still have two weeks to ride out, if this is a normal storm!
I wanted to do NaNoWriMo this year, but there are lots of problems in the family right now where I can’t concentrate on more than a paragraph or two per day; so this year I am just not going to bother.
I really wanted a project completed by now, but it wasn’t meant to be, I guess.
To be perfectly honest, I am losing hope to do anything creative these days as I am simply not allowed the time to myself to do anything.
I can’t rely on working on anything whilst Henry is at school, because at any moment Henry is sent home early in the day and I lose my flow. He is being sent home as often as twice a week!
Since Henry overheard the school suggesting he has an autism assessment, Henry seems to have taken it upon himself to emotionally play up all the more, like he enjoys the attention he is getting about it. Henry is really play acting towards the teachers concerns and I have told him, this is a dangerous game for his life long-term, but he thinks it’s all a game!
I suggested to Paul he is only doing this so he can be sent home from school to create his robots all day long and play for twelve hours a day on that darn laptop of his! When he is sent home from school, we should ban him from TV, laptop and his robots until his proper home time comes. But then Henry plays the suicide card and Paul relents and lets him have the things!
Then I hear the arguments and screams between the two of them because they are getting in each other’s way, and Paul can’t move around the house because of the mess Henry is causing! I try my best to help, but every time I open my mouth it just fuels the fire in the both of them!
I tried to take myself upstairs to my bedroom to write upstairs, but they shout so loudly to one another so often, it’s hard to drown them out unless I put earphones on and I don’t like to do that because of increased ear infections.
I am dying of embarrassment because neighbours walk cautiously past the house, staring at it because of the hysterical screaming that goes on consistently. I tell them about it, but Paul and Henry are so self-absorbed, they just don’t really care.
I hate this kind of environment, it doesn’t help my PTSD at all, in fact I am often drained and can’t eat because of the stress of it all, because a lot of the huge arguments are at dinnertime at the dining table and nobody can eat when this goes on!
I don’t wear my hearing aid when Henry is home, because to be perfectly honest I don’t need it – that’s how loud things are here as soon as he gets home. Besides, there are times Henry will randomly screech loudly for the slightest thing and it blooming hurts if I have it in my ear at the time! I even lost hearing a couple of years back where Henry did a screech so loud my ear bled, found out I had a perforation over it! Henry was two feet from me at the time!
This is what I am living with. It’s not excuses to not working, you have to be here to experience it for yourself, because I am telling you, it’s constant!
I do most of my blog posts when they are all in bed at night; this means my sleeping pattern is badly out of sync for a healthy and social lifestyle. My sleeping hours are anything between 3am and 1pm depends on the day! Mostly its 4am to 10am, not enough I know, but what else can I do?
I rarely watch TV as nobody respects the fact I want to watch something, reading is getting less and less for the same reason – practising art is almost non-existent, my meditations are slowly going out of the window… it’s tough to have a decent life here on any level! Even when I am asleep, from 7am until I wake up, someone checks in on me every 45 minutes waking me up, so it’s not even undisturbed sleep.
Lately Henry’s behaviour has been so bad, that I have often forgotten to take my meds because he has been so demanding!
Anyway, just a heads up about why I can’t finish things. Never used to be this way!
Happy reading!
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Dysfunctional Fiction by Mandy White
Ellen Grace Olinger
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A writer’s thoughts
I have read somewhere in the past, that you are what you read and I believe that. The more I read the more defined my tastes have become, my skills, my genre leanings and this influences my writing and art.
With each good book I learn how I want to write and what I want to write about.
With each bad book I read, I learn how I do not want to write and what I dislike.
I do not believe that as a writer you must write things outside of your comfort zone, I believe you should be comfortable with what you are writing – although on an emotional matter, that’s quite different. You must write outside of your emotional comfort zone if you wish to write fear, pain and heartbreak effectively, unfortunately that means opening up your old wounds.
A lot of the time, I like to write about horror, trauma etc. and each time I do, I open up real and old wounds, this is why I often become quiet as a writer and have prolonged periods of not writing, whilst I emotionally recuperate.
I was once told that writers and artists generally go mad after a time and I believe it, we send ourselves mad for our art and stories because we are constantly reliving the horrors of our past for your entertainment and as a collective, we seldom are known or recognized for it.
I am not moaning about my lack of recognition as a writer and artist, because personally I think that’s my own fault. I think I am generally a lazy person and have not bothered to find myself a publisher or to advertise my work very much over the years at all. On the one occasion I did contact a publisher to see whether or not they liked an idea of mine, I was lucky enough to get a letter back within three weeks, but this terrified me, because they loved what I sent them and praised me highly for it; I never contacted them again, I was worried about becoming famous and at the time I was young and didn’t know about pseudonyms.
These days I am more prepared for whatever life throws at me because I will be totally blatant about what I can and cannot do and what I will and will not allow.
Other than twitter, my blog and magazines are there any other steps I should take to get myself known?
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