Fathers Day

I've had an enjoyable day - I took the girls up to the newly re-opened Histon playground, and they made me lovely cards. This afternoon I managed to go out on the bike for a ride out on the towpath up to Baits Bite lock and back via Milton country park (and the Old Spring pub).

Yesterday we went to a party for some friends of ours who are going back to the USA soon. And earlier in the week I met up with a former colleague for an evening out in London, so it's been a pretty good week altogether.

I'm in a strange state at the moment though. I recently re-read Franzen's The Corrections (which I read last year when I was feeling pretty down) and it seemed even more full of correspondences to my own life than it did last time. It's difficult to explain without explaining the whole book, but it's fair to say that the elderly, ill parents, and the children with various forms and manifestations of sadness and anxiety struck a chord in me. And that's why I wanted to read it - I wanted to have something outside myself that would put words onto the grief so I could maybe explain it to myself a bit more. I'd read it again, except I know it will say the same things.

I'm trying to be kind to myself, but I'm not very good at being patient while I go up and down emotionally. I get through a trough and I think it ought to be the last one, like throwing up the last of something that makes you sick, but it doesn't seem to be like that. It's unpredictable - I feel fine one day, and then I'm crying in the car the next. Also, I'm not sure where to draw the line between being kind to myself and indulging myself. I'm tempted to distract myself from grief with treats and that doesn't really seem healthy either.

And I'm impatient to do... something. I'm not sure what, but I feel like I have to make the most of what time I have (the finiteness seems much more immediate now), and here I am just struggling to get through a week or a weekend.

Fortunately it's a short week at work this week and then we're off on holiday. A week away from home will no doubt do me good, and I'm looking forward to seeing Cornwall again.