Christmas in the rainy season

The images from home are full of snow and here we are in the rainy season. A huge contrast and reminded me of the contrast in my Christmas last year too.
The darkness of life a year ago was not being covered with a layer of snow. It was cold and grim.
It's not perfect here but it is so much better. It's brighter and we're all happier.
I've made a couple of real friends here already. Proper ones who are mine now. They are on my list.
One of them just gets me and last night gave me just what I needed. A shoulder and a stern reality check. She gave me the strength to get up and get on.
I'm so lucky. To travel this far away from home is a risk and I miss my friends so much at times. To have made a new one here that I know will help me and I'll help her is wonderful.
Phew.

Last Christmas I gave you my heart...

What a year, as always... many people write something in your Christmas card along the lines of have a great 2000 and, the next year hoping to be better than the last. They used to, quite a few of my family and friends gave up saying anything like that a long time ago. I only got one 'let's hope 2016 is better than 2015' And I do I really do, it was a shocker of a year and at times one of my happiest.
But Christmas, again one that could be the last, my dad again. Spinal surgery, again, risk of... the usual and the high risk.

I've had one last Christmas in 1999 when I had my brain surgery booked for January 2000. The bringing in of the millennium was the grimmest I'd ever faced. My sister and I sat on the sofa in my mum and dad's front room and tried not to say the things we were thinking. I said after the successful surgery that I wouldn't do that again, last Christmases are rubbish, everyone tries too hard, they are tense and it just makes you sad. I wish I'd been there (at the meeting) to tell them that when they were given the possibility of an operation date of 23rd December, they went for 13th January.

This Christmas proved to be all of the parts I hoped it wouldn't be. Of course the bits I did want were there too -  Initially I had that brilliant feeling of a proper pile of presents under the tree, I had two stockings! My absolute favourite bit. My daughter had a great time and I went to church and sang the descant to O Come all ye faithful. We ate too much food and I was recovered enough to drink and get a bit tipsy. But along with those bits, there was a huge amount of tension, short sharp responses, snapping and criticism galore. I was no longer the flavour of the month, I could do no right and my sister seemed to fluctuate between joy and irritation. There was of course moments of fun and joy, laughter but t didn't last long and when you can't even lay a table without getting something wrong the days are like walking on egg shells. Who'd have thought that less than two months ago I was a darling daughter, incapacitated and in fear of what miserable life might await me. My mother holding vigil at my bedside. Now I am the same old pain in the arse I was before.

My mother is always one for the drama and looks for the absolute worst possible outcome. It comes in handy sometimes, when I need to feel miserable, when I need a good cry. Why is this relevant? Well because now she doesn't know what the worst or best could possibly be, there are no good outcomes for my dad any more. The best is simply that things aren't more shit! And this is what partly made this last Christmas so miserable, so mixed so odd and so oddly familiar.