New blog. I have words battering up against the side of my head and they have to come out or else i'll go mad so here goes again. There are two chapters in the story of my love affair with Jon that  i need/want to write before i go to Gozo so expect another one to follow this shortly. I do not know which one I will write at this moment. This is the moment i make that decision. And that decision is ...
2009
2009 was the year i look back on as the year Jon's recovery broke and our relationship began to break down. When i met Jon in 2007 he was in recovery, he had just bought a house, he was working in a workplace that supported him where he had friends and most importantly a boss who knew about his drinking and took care of him, way over and above the care that most bosses would. We met just as his mother had fallen ill, his father had died the year before and his mother died six months after we began seeing each other. That is another story and one i will save for a later date because this blog is about 2009.
In 2009 events in both my life and Jon's meant that both of us lost stability. In truth that stability was wavering as we ended 2009. In the autumn i had begun an art course that would take me to university and to where i am now. I give credit to the teacher for the skills i learned from her. But that teacher was a bitch. I am not a confident person and she razed my confidence to the ground in the two years i spent learning from her. Thankfully i met with two other art teachers within that time who were more flexible and open to forms of creativity that deviated from their own and it is they that kept me afloat creatively during that two year course. But suffice to say my confidence was on it's back foot. Add to this a momentous change. My middle child, Richard, decided to move to China. I baulked and that caused a row between us, thankfully now mended, but at the beginning of 2009 he left for China for eight months and tho' we maintained contact our relationship had hit a serious wobble. On top of that over the christmas of 2008 i experienced flashbacks to the violation perpetrated on me by my first sexual partner (i won't call him my lover tho' he was my boyfriend for about two years). Jon was amazing while i was struggling with these flashbacks, his sympathy and kindness went far beyond anything i'd experienced before. He responded with care that was healing and generous. 
But in 2009 the fates threw their lot at us and both of us being fragile and tender we were unable to hold our ground. It began early. Maybe new years day, i think it was new years day or maybe the 2nd or 3rd of January but i couldn't vouch for the date tho' it will be on record somewhere. It will be on record somewhere because the day that i speak of marks a death. First thing that morning Jon decided to walk to the supermarket to pick up a newspaper, i think, and maybe some breakfast things. That wasn't our normal pattern, normally we'd go together but he took that decision and i stayed in bed waiting for him to come home. I waited, and waited, he took a long time. When he came home he was in shock. This is the story he told me and as i can remember
As he had been walking he passed an old lady who was sat on a stone looking frail, he spoke to her and asked her if she was ok at which point she keeled over. He began to practice CPR on her and i think some other passerby or maybe two came soon after but he was the one who saw her die and tried to save her. I assume ambulances were called and after she was passed to their care he came home. An experience like this would knock anyone off their stride but bear in mind Jon was a recovering alcoholic. And also someone who was aware that as an alcoholic and someone with a prison record he was vulnerable to accusation. Actually the family of the woman were grateful to him and sent him a letter thanking him for the help he had given their mother but i know that he felt his position in life was precarious because he had spoken about it before. 
He did not speak much. Jon was not a talker but that his boat was rocked was clear. Later that day we went for a walk as was our wont most days when we were together. I said that i had a feeling 2009 would be a difficult year and that we should book a holiday to keep our spirits up. When we returned my daughter called to tell me that i was going to be a granny. 
I love my grandson, but i was overwhelmed at the thought of being a granny at 42. Actually being a granny is completely amazing but at that moment it made me feel older than my years. I was worried she would find herself alone as i had done. And i was not sure at all about this new role that sat on my shoulders. To say that i felt my life had spun out of my control is putting it mildly. 
So we booked a holiday and i got used to the idea of being a granny, it took a week or so, but when my daughter came over, not long after she had told me, i put my hand on her tummy and felt my grandson flutter under my hand and loved him and i have loved him ever since. In fact my love for him saved my life. And he and my granddaughter who followed not long after are bright lights in my life. What nobody tells you about being a granny is how much you will love your grandchildren, how incredibly great it is being a grandparent. 
But, so, back to the year as it happened to me and Jon. Me, reeling with the huge concrete changes in my life. And Jon drawn in after his brush with death. To add to it my mother, bless her also reeling with the changes happening in my family, threw weight at me and that further unbalanced me. 
I knew that i needed a job and an ad for a part time shop assistant in the local whole food shop came up in the window and i applied. I  got an interview, but was not their first choice and did not get the job, but then after the owner called me to tell me my application was unsuccessful he rang me again and offered me a job covering someone's maternity leave which i gladly accepted. I was green going into that job. I have spoken to people less green than me and they too have struggled with it as a workplace but with no work-skin on me at all, my work had mostly been self-employed or childminding prior to that so i was not prepared for workplace politics. To say it threw me is an understatement, it sucked the life out of me, and i didn't feel able to quit, as a job is a job is a job and i thought the problem was me. Thinking the problem is me was then my default position. You can see now how helpful Jon's statement "no one cares what you think, want, need or feel" was. Poisonous yes, and not said kindly. But it kind of takes away a person's self importance which whilst deflating is also blame-defeating because your lack of worth makes your being mean less, for good or for ill. 
But that's that, let's go to March 2009. Before i got the job as a shop worker Jon and I had booked a holiday in Cornwall. I had always wanted to go to Cornwall, it was where i hoped to escape to, had built up as an elysian paradise where i could run away from all my troubles. Jon and I had played the right-move game of looking at houses in Cornwall, in France, all over the place, it was part of our relationship this plan to move elsewhere, to go journeying. 
Our holiday in Cornwall was incredible, we did what we did, made love, ate and walked, all week the sun shone and we were both wildly in love, it was the sweetest, easiest, happiest holiday i have had to date. We were as one with each other, no-one can take that feeling from me, the memories i have of that week are beautiful. I loved Cornwall it was much as i had imagined but going there also made me appreciate the seas i'd grown up with, the big norfolk skies and expanses of sand. Cornwall was wonderful, Norfolk was wonderful, anywhere could be wonderful in the right company. And for me that right company was Jon. I adored him and would have done anything for him he made me feel like anything was possible. Driving home, he was thoughtful. It's a long drive to Cornwall. He had started to see his daughter one to one over the past year for the first time (i think) since he and her mother had broken up, and he was enjoying getting to know her. After a while maybe halfway through our journey home, he said "i can't move to Cornwall, i need to be close to ********* (his  daughter)". Now, i love my children and his needing to be close to his daughter was an eminently reasonable need that needed to be met. It clipped the wings of my dreams but was a need that had to over-ride all other needs. A parent's bond is special and incontrovertible. And so our lives as a couple changed. They changed to revolve around his family life. The day that he was given every six weeks or so to spend with his little girl. I will say at this point that having altered course and accepted a confinement it was somewhat bitter pill when he upped and left for Gozo. But that is a different story. The reality is that he stayed true to ********* up to the point when her mother told him that she and her partner was planning to move to Orkney for a job taking ********* with them, thus rendering him once again powerless. At that point his resolution to stay was made irrelevant. In fact they did not move but the die was cast. 
Aagh, and so it goes on. Long blogs. Lots of words, are you still with me ? We come back home after a blissful holiday, life continues i start work, it's new learning and all the while i'm doing my art course and my son has moved to China and my daughter is getting more pregnant and Jon is working and seeing his daughter. He starts to complain that i'm working on Saturdays, our weekends are more broken up because my older son is not about to look after my cats and so we spend time hithering and thithering a bit and i'll confess sometimes Jon feels like a burden and i get tired of watching the same t.v programmes and never going out, and Jon starts to place new rules on us, he doesn't want to drive on Sundays because he drives every other day, again not unreasonable but another curb on our freedom, and when we go walking he tells me, as we wander under great skies bathed in skylark song, catching sight of hares and other creatures, that there is no god, i think "this is my god, please don't destroy it" but he is determined.
Life begins to get grimmer. Jon starts sniping at me. Our relationship which had been about 90% good drops to maybe 70% but 70% is still good isn't it and everybody has grumpy days and you work round them, no relationship is perfect, i commit to staying with it, i know Jon is worth it, I have known the best of him and the best of him is brilliant.
But I begin to get unhappy. I am studying under a teacher who is unable to veil her dislike for me. I am working in a workplace where the backbiting comes down from the top and is non-stop, i am always anxious, i stop sleeping. My son, who is my funny guy, is away and we are still not communicating well. I am beginning to lose the plot. I have no sanctuary, I didn't know then as i do now, that i need time alone, all my time was being eaten up by other people and I had no time to myself to rest and recharge. I was pouring out energy to other people. Haemorrhaging happiness and getting not much that was good back.
In June there is another major hiccup. My three month probationary period at work comes up, i am kept on but i wasn't sure of being kept on, my grandson is due. And simultaneously an issue arises with Jon's family. Over the months that Jon had been seeing his daughter he'd started to take her swimming, this was one of my suggestions to him when he first started seeing her, that and canoeing. Initially he'd been scared of the time he would spend with her asking me for advice but by 2009 they had got their groove on. Her birthday was coming up in June and he was looking forward to taking her swimming in Woodbridge where she lived and buying her cakes as he had done before. But his ex-wife and sister in law decided to use that day for a family get together. I remember him telling me how he had picked up the email from his brother informing him and how he'd been watching the Chelsea flower show and when the music came up at the end he had burst into tears. I think he knew that he had lost control. Up to then he was doing it, he was sober, he felt loved, lovable and loving, he was proud of himself for his degree which was going well and his relationship with his daughter was going well too, he would say "I wish my mum and dad and nan could see me now, happy in love and doing well". 
The family get together not only broke him (i believe) it also broke me. At this point Jon and I had been together for over two years. I had yet to meet his daughter which i was sad about but understood that he was building his relationship with her and also as he said building trust with his ex-wife who had reason to feel guarded and mean after his years of drinking and more than one infidelity when their daughter was small. I was shocked not to be invited. I know, maybe that is silly, i took it initially. It hurt and it resonated with a wound in me that came from my family, a deep feeling of being left out, it triggered my outsider complex if you will. Perhaps it did not help that instead of holding me softly and saying that he understood that my lack of invite might be uncomfortable he started to take out his temper on me, began picking at me and belittling me. 
After he told me of the re-arrangement we went to see a plot of land he was thinking of buying. This was his latest whim, he thought he might buy a plot of land or tract of woodland, we looked at loads, it never happened. As we were coming home we passed the Bathstore near Sainsbury's and he seemed to be about to say something, i asked what he was going to say and ... wait for it, it's another Jon gem .. he said "i was wondering which of your friends i would fuck in the shower" .. it was not the moment to pull that line out of the bag, I was feeling snubbed and humiliated, he had form with infidelity, and his family had not invited me to a family gathering which made me feel like a cheap slapper rather than Jon's fairly longterm partner. The irony is that i was working the day they'd arranged i'd already changed my work days with another woman at her request knowing that Jon was seeing his daughter. And even if i'd been free I'd have asked if he wanted me to come, and he'd have said no it's not worth it and would have regained some control. I wanted him to speak out for me but he didn't and in hindsight i can see that he didn't want to make waves with his ex-wife in case she stopped him seeing their daughter. But the whole matter escalated, both of us had been triggered, and it was really the beginning of the end of his recovery and our relationship. All for the want of a horse-shoe nail. 
And tho' that seems like a little thing, sometimes it's the little things that set the ball rolling. We never really recovered. I nagged because i needed him to make good and he couldn't. And he withdrew because I was nagging. We did have happy times after but they got further apart and we'd eaten the apple from the tree of knowledge and our time in the garden of eden was over. 
And so there is more. We did make up, we still did beautiful things, skinny-dipping at Thornham sticks out, he had never swum naked before he said. But in the autumn of 2009 he developed a back, or shoulder, ache (i forget which) and unknown to me began self medicating with the morphine based medication his mother had been given when she was dying at the beginning of our days together. The upshot of which was that he landed up in hospital after taking an accidental overdose. He had driven to work in a bit of a haze and then driven back home and i think then called an ambulance. I am so glad he survived but i knew from that moment that he was not well, that his alcoholism was not licked, I knew i could not safely tie my lot to his, particularly as he refused to talk. I was isolated with this information because his family had, i thought, made it clear that they did not want to know me and i had no contact numbers for them anyway. I still loved him but from then i guess i was aware that he was unreliable. I realise as i write that I have blocked out this episode, likely because it was so out of my normal i couldn't take it in, so it has floated around like plastic in the sea of me, alien information that is not of me, or part of me, and yet belongs in me. 
Is that the end of 2009 ? Not quite. The sequence of events as i've relayed them is pretty much accurate as i recall, but it's all a long time ago, and mostly held in until now, the year whilst dotted with specific dateable events also has a moving felt layer. Now Jon is dead i need to release some of my story of Jon into the world so the world can take back what once was ours but now is just one more soon to be forgotten history, to tell that part of my history so that it is out of me, out of my body, returned to the ether from where it was begat. I think if i had companionship in my grief, my grief would be contained within that companion group but i don't so the page is my witness.
Is that the end of 2009, it isn't, i neglected to speak of my beautiful grandson who was born on June 12th after a long labour (three, maybe four days, it was worrying but he came out alright and my daughter too), my grandson was the light in the darkness in 2009 always bright and happy, his star kept me alive as i suspect Jon's daughter kept him going. And because of Jon's overdose i realised that i needed to give up my job in the whole food shop because it was making me unhappy and i wanted to give Jon more of my time and attention. Actually the shop pipped me to the post and got rid of me first which stung and left me smarting and ended up being another hiccup, rejection sucks, but that belongs to 2010. I also put in my university application which i'd been umm-ing and aah-ing over, it is sweet sad thing perhaps that i only recall now as i write, such is the grace of putting words down, Jon said to me that he wanted to support me through university, he didn't really, but i think the intention was there in him, his darkness took him over i think, but for those wondering why i stuck by a man who really wasn't treating me right and why i am grieving now, it is because i knew him as someone extraordinary, someone of rare and wonderful beauty, and i feel honoured to have shared some part of my life with him, and broken hearted that the beauty of him is no longer a part of the living world except in those who knew him.