dis·com·bob·u·late
to confuse or disconcert;
The children are gone and I find I cannot settle. Cannot settle so keep moving and flailing. Discombobulated. Disorientated. Dislocated. There was so much movement when they were here: movement and noise and flapjacks for tea. Now there’s just me.
For ten glorious days all three were home. My son turned 20. I don’t feel old enough to have a son that age. Until I regard my reflection in the mirror; she looks old enough to have a son of 20 I think. And scowl. So that she looks even older.
I’m ok though. I’ve done this for a year now: been treading water without 24/7-motherhood as a float. I can keep busy I tell myself. And I do. But not in the directed and driven way I’d like to. Not until I settle. For now I skim the surface and write lists and wander mostly aimlessly between my desk and my workbench. Scratch a few words. Cut a bit of glass. Glower at the filing. Wonder what to cook for lunch, for my girls are not here to appropriate my kitchen, take it over with glorious messy abandon so that the place looks like a bomb has hit it for the ash scattering of icing sugar and flour on table tops and sugar shrapnel on the floor. But oh what delicious smells emanate.
We drove to a beach, as wide and a white as a whale’s skeleton. Two days it took. When the iPods ran flat the conversation took over and we ate yesterday’s egg sandwiches for lunch. My daughter caught a fish – 20 Kgs with teeth like razors – which, she said, for I was not on the boat, cured her sea-sickness, ‘for a bit’, she said.
And Hat played her sax and my son asked ‘how many weeks until Christmas?’
Sixteen I said. Only sixteen.
Reluctant Memsahib 