Again i return to my blog after a long break, well it is the place where i give myself witness when the world i'm in becomes to much for me to hold within. Words are not my medium but i have a basic grasp of my mother tongue & that has to do, it would have to do even if all i could utter was garble, mutter, screech or other formless sound, our voices are a deep power, to silence another is dark magic. 

This year my mother's health has gone downhill & she is currently in hospital being rehabilitated after a fall. This necessitates contact with my family which is discomforting because my family is not a safe family but we are having to find a way together to hold her space so that whether she has weeks or years to live she can be as comfortable & happy as her age & abilities allow. I love my mum. But. I love my mum but our relationship is complicated. I love her but it is not the beatific mother daughter relationship that we are taught we ought to have. And i am completely estranged from oldest sister, and pretty much completely estranged from my other sister tho we are just about able to communicate constructively if need forces us to. 

Perhaps that needs a little bit of background & what i think i will be blogging over the next few weeks or months is my family's history. My oldest sister is currently researching our family's history but travelling further back in time to people long dead. I am not privy to this history but she sends it to my sons i believe, & my mother, & my mother passes me scraps. Here is a scrap, my family on my mother's mother's side have circus roots & on Thursday when visiting mum in hospital she told me that my sister has discovered that they used to keep a macaque, i believe that their part in the circus was the chimpanzees tea party but as i haven't done my own research & my estranged sister does not share her research with me I know that as hearsay not fact. 

Recent family history is easier tho possibly more messy to annotate. A living witness may tell a story that a family will close up around so that it isn't seen by the outside who may view the family differently if ugly secrets are no longer secret. Narratives may find themselves in conflict, it happened, it didn't happen, the story is a corpse still stinking not yet reduced to clean white bones. 

I thought i would write my family history because i do not think that i will figure in my sister's because she has played a role in my life that cannot be dressed up to look good. I would erase her from my life too perhaps except that she persists in invading my space by pushing in to the family that i grew, my sons' & my daughter's lives, & so she is perpetually present tho i'd prefer her to not be. She leaves her mark like a cat pissing in another cat's territory, i do not go into her territory except perhaps this is me laying my trace, raising my tail to leave my scent. Is that the nature of autobiography, a telling of tale. I leave my story so that if in time to come my grandchildren's children are writing their family history they will have my words as reference. 

So here i begin ...