Mothers Day

I had an empty house this weekend. Batman was away since Friday at a stag in the UK and I had all sorts of great plans. I even made a list. I love lists! I love ticking things off lists. But this weekend I didn't manage to tick a single thing off the list i wrote before he left.
Instead I found a new TV show to binge (The Night Shift if you're curious) and I made a bigger mess than was here when he left. Just don't tell him that!

I've been trying to de-clutter my house on an ongoing basis, and all that ever seems to happen is I get rid of some of the clutter and manage to fill the space with some new or different clutter. I've been spending more time on pinterest finding advice and pictures and reading 'How To Tidy Your House In 907 Quick Easy Steps' and other such ridiculous blogs. All it's doing is giving me ideas for a house that isn't mine, instead of how to fix this one I'm currently living in. I am always looking to the next thing, whats next on the list, and how to move forward, but in my rush to move forward I tend to miss whats going on around me.

We have had a tough few years in my family and it has culminated in a very hard, emotional, exhausting couple of months since the beginning of this year. I find it's teaching me a lot about myself. I love my family, and we are close and if anything the last few years have brought us closer. But I find I tend to stick my head in the sand a bit, ignore the darker parts of our family reality. I go to my Mom's once a week for dinner and I do my best to keep the conversation chatty, light hearted, easy. Because I know how awful things have been for her so I want to give her a bit of respite, even if its just for a couple of hours a week. But because of that I don't tend to find out the grittier details of whats going on. My sisters get the brunt of it and I feel left out, out of the loop. I know its of my own doing and I know it is up to me to change it, but I'm never entirely sure if I want to.

You know when you zone out of a conversation, and then you zone back in you're not entirely sure what was said so you just keep nodding and smiling and agreeing with the other person hoping they don't notice you have no idea whats going on? I feel like that every time one of my sisters or my mum talk about the details of my mum's treatment, or what's going on with my aunts and uncles. I find it hard to keep tabs and keep track of all the treatments that all my relatives are going through. We're Irish, its a big family. And we're all getting older, its only to be expected that there are going to be hospital visits and dreaded phone calls and dare I say it, hospice care down the road. One sister lives at home and the other picks her kids up there every weekday, so they get the day to day updates. I might talk to Mum twice a week, our weekly dinner and I might remember to ring her at the weekend and our conversations are fluffy. She has never been one for giving up information freely and I don't go looking for bad news. I suppose I'm trying to protect myself from the inevitable. Does that make me a bad person, or just selfish?


Maybe I'm focusing on things like de-cluttering my house and moving on and my next step because I don't want to be focusing on what's going on right now.