Unicycle Emptiness

I have not been on a local train recently.

Normally this blog is about cheaply accessible yet ignored places in the North West, the unshining,  ancient,  unsung, or indeed just anywhere I have actually been in the last month.

A week ago,  I sat and thought of where to go with a zig-zagging Smartie stained toddler, no driving licence and so little money left in the bank, the thought of checking the balance left a sick hollow feeling  more akin to an immediate death in the family.

We went to the Lancaster Maritime Museum. Again. I have already written about the Maritime Museum. Lovely as it is, if I am slightly bored of hurtling around the  Maritime museum led by a hysterical toddler whose main aim in life is to ensure no-one else is sitting in ‘his’ MDF stagecoach.

However, this week  my confidence was shaken to the very core by a particularly  stupid mistake I had made at work and so I shook the demons out by writing about it.

Once I started, the words flowed to the point I had to halt myself as who wants to read about a clumsy stranger being clumsy? And when I say ‘flowed’. I mean clumsily stabbed finger by finger but it still managed to write itself.

My dyspraxia doesn’t define me but I worry about what is me and what is dyspraxia? I get upset about something I have buggered up, the Marble Run falls down, I go the shop to get milk but come back with a kite from the charity shop instead- what is me being me being a normal person making mistakes, forgetting and being rather random in thought and process versus actual dyspraxia?

I am scared I make excuses due to my dyspraxia and thus my innate nervousness  when it might be the actual Me to blame and also vice-versa.

So many times, people have dismissed my almost ‘confession’ of dyspraxia but hey, sometimes I don’t believe in it myself.  So many times at places of work, I have told people, they listen, smile and are quietly sympathetic, understanding until on their bequest I staple up displays of work at a unnatural angle. I try. I step back. I look. It looks just fine to me. It really does. No-one seems to get that though. I try to atone for my sin. I do it again. It looks just fine to me. It really does.

Dyspraxia is exhausting. With a toddler and a job, it is a small  obstacle which leaves you utterly drained.

A stranger will notice your child has the wrong wellies on each foot. The jellyish consistency of wellies leaves me flummoxed. They look the same to me.

I have strategies- I prepare everything the night before but somehow one shoe will always stray during the night. There will be no bras in the house.

And the toddler will want me to help with his marble run.

God help me.

Because EVERYTHING is fucking difficult. A rendition of ‘ 1, 2, 3 4, 5. Once I caught a fish alive’, with the finger movement. I can’t move my fingers to the song. I hear the song, it travels to my fingers and then thirty sad seconds later my fingers start to move.

I am out of sync with the world.

Due to Mumsnet promoting my blog, I have read some lovely understanding comments by people with dyspraxic children. I am so happy they recognise the condition.  Being recognised is the main thing, it has taken a long time for it to happen. No-one understood me when I was forced into Netball, my hands waving desperately before my face far too early or far far too late, my body with its own slow motion footage sadly slowly traversing down my veins,  whilst the event had already happened, I still optimistically held my hands open for the ball that was already in the goal.

It took me three hours to write this despite touch typing lessons from the internet . I still want to write though.

But out of all things I advise getting  a camera or a decent camera phone. It is a quick way of taking control of your surroundings, using your imagination, being the boss of yourself in a split second. I have never used a zoom or any posh camera, never had the confidence.  I got a decent camera phone and now I can go out and take shots and they are generally of utterly mundane things but the fact I , all by myself have worked out an angle to make them interesting pleases me. People rarely feature. Pigeons do.

I  like pigeons.

And I still will write about the unloved and the unrecognised from a position that recognises and appreciates the beauty in the mundane and  the ‘abnormal’

One confusion with the mechanism of a gate on a walk is something most people are used to.

Now make it constant.

Make the familiar the unfamiliar all the time.

I am a human being. I am a mother. I am other.

I shall continue to nervously get on a train, to go places, to seek out standing stones and good charity shops. I prefer to immerse myself in history rather than the present, knowing full well that to the average historical person, the occasional dropping of a cup of Mead was probably  not nearly as agonising a thought as being dead of Syphilis or starvation. The dead don’t judge me though.

My toddler didn’t until I bought him a Marble Run.

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