Feeling fed up in The View from the Terrace

I’m feeling a bit fed up and stressed today. I’ve been getting a lot of migraines and also the bad weather gets me down.

I started getting more migraines after our trip to Amsterdam in early May. For years I was having 3/4 a week then last year I started getting runs of several days without them. When we were in Amsterdam I only had one in the 5 days we were there and only one the following week. Then they started increasing, sometimes several days on the go.

When I was staying with Cat they settled into my old pattern of more or less alternate days. Since I got home I have started having runs of 4 or 5 days with them and only maybe 1 or 2 days clear in between. I’m not sure why this is. It was stressful at Cat’s as she has Aspergers and was going through a crisis in her relationship, but I didn’t feel so bad there.

It’s stressful here too but in a different way. Hubby and Tony have ADD and Hubby hoards so the house is always cluttered and messy. Cat is a clean freak and super organised and I got on better with that even though she is rather obsessive, just to give an example she is vegan and no dairy products were allowed to touch any food of hers. But I could cope with that, it’s just a matter of there were rules and I kept to them. Hubby doesn’t have rules he tends to live in the present moment to the extent that he doesn’t put things away he just pushes them out of the way, the place was a tip when I got home after 5 weeks.

I just wish I could have more time for me. At Cat’s, although I helped her with housework and doing dishes and hanging washing and shopping I still seemed to have more time for writing and even started sketching. Here I am always dealing with stuff even though Hubby cooks and helps with hoovering there is always stuff to do. And then there’s the mess which Tony is always on about. The other day he threatened to hire a skip and fill it and it really scared me as Hubby mixes my stuff with his.

It may sound silly but I’m 68 and I worry I might die without ever finishing my autobiography let alone getting it published, and maybe Tony and Chris will just throw my writing away. Cat says she wont let them but she might not be able to stop them. If my stuff doesn’t get published I’d like to think it would be kept and treasured by my children and future grandchildren. I have poems my mum wrote and an autobiography my auntie started.

My whole life seems to be a pattern of never being able to do the things I felt I was meant to do. I wanted to go to drama school when I was young but my mum managed to prevent that. She said she was worried that it wasn’t a secure profession but she also didn’t want to be left alone after my dad died when I was 15. She wanted me to marry a local boy and live round the corner. Then since I married and had children that always gets in the way of my writing. I thought by this age I would be free of all that but Cat has Aspergers and is a constant worry and Hubby is such a drain. Don’t get me wrong, I love my family and wouldn’t be without them, but sometimes I get envious of folk who seem to be doing their own thing in their retirement, while I still seem to be a carer half the time and ill myself the rest of the time.