It's an 'end of the rainbow' sort of deal

Tonight is the last night I will spend in my parents house in my old single bed.  I am looking forward to returning to Brighton and escaping my parents' well meaning but overbearing ways ["call us when you arrive, and when you leave" "are you going to be ok driving in the dark?" "why are you smoking?!" "do you know how to work the washing machine?"]

As usual, I am more than a little sad to discover that I simply don't have any sort meaningful relationship with my Mum.  My brother, in a discussion about this very thing, said "the thing you have to remember, is that you and Mum have been at war for years, that's not going to be resolved any time soon".  The biggest block between us remains her inability not to pull a face every time I mention women and my romantic relation to the same.  She won't stand in my way but good god will she disapprove.

Comparatively speaking, I'm lucky, for some people telling their parents they are queer is simply not an option under any circumstances.  My Dad couldn't be more laid back and my brothers never even considered it - it just was.  My Mum, on the other hand, cycles between throwing direct guilt trips on me ("Was I a bad Mother to you? Was I too distant?") and the passive guilt trips (telling me about friends and family who are straight and having kids/getting married and looking incredibly sad when I mention I have met another girl).  She actually said to me yesterday "wait till you have one" as we looked at a tiny baby being taken out of a restaurant by its heterosexual parents.  She simply doesn't believe that there is a 50/50 chance my lifelong relationship will be with a woman, or that children is not necessarily a part of that future.  It's simplifies her position to say she thinks it's a phase, but it's not far off that.

My brothers regard all of this with resigned bemusement.  They tell me to focus on the fact she is my Mother and loves me for that alone, and that at 60, I simply shouldn't expect her to adjust to my 'lifestyle'.  The reason I so desperately want her approval is because she is only 60.  She has a phenomenally healthy lifestyle, along with my Dad, and I fully expect them both to live well into their 90's - my Grandmother is still going strong at 94.

This is where my life is, and how it will continue, and I just want for her to be able to share in my happiness, rather than constantly wishing it was something other than what it is.  Somewhere wrapped up in what she wants my life to turn out like is the motivation for her to encourage me to move from Brighton and back to the East Midlands.  Back to suburbia and mediocrity.  I want excitement, and diversity and opportunities life in the East Midlands simply can't offer me. 

And I simply can't find a way to explain that, and it's importance to me, to my Mother.

Whilst the very worst storms in Brighton see me dig in at home and wedge my windows shut, I do enjoy a saunter out to see Brighton getting ripped to pieces by wind and rain. During the very worst gales Brighton has seen since I have lived down South it was too dangerous to even go near to the seafront as the wind and waves actually lifted pebbles from the beach and moved them over the fences onto the promenade. This was the occasion when many of the beach huts on Hove seafront were completely levelled.

This weekend weather forecasters are promising us gallons of rain and gale force wind. If I listen very carefully I can hear the wind whipping through the trees and the rain lashing against the windows, but I have to listen very carefully through the double glazed windows and the high hedges which protect half of my parents house from the elements. Back home in Brighton my attic bedroom is south facing and exposed to the elements. I have, more than once, been awoken in the middle of the night by gale force winds shaking the entire building and a sound that suggested the most inclement of the elements would be bursting through my ceiling in the immediate future.

There is something deliciously raw about the sound of wind and rain hurling itself destructively at buildings, which, in the face of unbounded nature seem terribly primitive and impermanent. Pulling the duvet over ones head and listening as the wind screams past the window is one of the basest pleasures in life. I often think that the knowledge that we are safe and warm inside, comfortable and dry, is the closest we can come to jouissance after infancy.

The sublime is a fearsome experience but one which not just transports but transforms.  My very worst mood can be complete eradicated (or perhaps I should say 'blown away') by a fearsome storm, to the point that I receive the news of extreme weather warnings with delighted anticipation.  It is in this vein that I lament my current location - some 200 miles from the south coast which has been promised floods and gales whilst the East Midlands braces itself for a bit of rain.

Winter, at least, is decidedly here, and there will be plenty more occasions on which I can shiver with awe as the house shudders beneath the weight of a storm.

It feels a little like cheating to post a NaBloPoMo post which is predominately pictures, but if I'm the one blogging then I should be the one making the rules.

My rat, my other rat,Dangerous Beans, the one who climbed into my hood and licked my hair when I got home in floods of tears at 2am on the morning of the 1st November after making the decision to have her sister, Hampork, put to sleep had to follow Hampork today.

On Thursday night I took her to the vets for what I thought was conjuncitivitus, the vet said it wasn't but that her breathing was raspy and she may have an infection and I took her home with some antibiotics to give twice daily.  On Saturday night I scrutinised her face as in a glance it looked a little swollen, couldn't see anything much so concluded it was just a trick of the light.  Last night she had a very clear and very large swelling on her jaw.  It looked and felt exactly like the abscesses which Hampork had had.

I took her to the vets this morning.  The vet said, given her sister's history and the fact she has got worse since being on antibiotics meant there was nothing to be done.  He proposed she was put to sleep immediately, before she began to suffer.

I have to do the very best for my girls.  Heartbreaking as it is to see her go from healthy to....that in the space of a few days, it was the right decision.

Of course, none of that makes it any easier.  I got home to an empty cage.  I have nobody to cuddle, nobody to give me little rat kisses and chirp in my ear.  I have nobody to grieve with.  I have no warm furry welcome when I get home at night.  Nobody to fall asleep on my tummy as we watch tv and squeak grumpily at me when I move to get a drink or go to the loo.

This has been one of the worst years of my life.  Everything fell apart utterly on November the 28th last year and it's been one thing after another since then.  But through it all I've had the unconditional and absolute love of my two little ratties.  And now they are gone.

I can't imagine how things could get worse.  Form suggests that, somehow, they will.

I spend a surprisingly large amount of my life refuting the labels people place on me. Those labels emerge from conclusions they make based on what they see, sometimes they are tantalisingly close to the truth, sometimes I laugh at how utterly I have been misrepresented.

I have made an academic career out of challenging the labels that have been placed on me.  In doing so I found myself becoming more obsessed with them - more bound by them.

I was a queer person on a queer course, with queer folks.  We talked about queer and queers' place in society exclusively from a queer point of view, whilst living in Britain's number one queer city.  I did an interview for a psychological study at Sussex Uni, they were researching sexuality and social habits.  I had a lovely long chat with the researcher who ended up confessing to me she was horrified at the sexist 'traditional' views of most students she interviewed (questions included "how much do man drink compared to girls" "what do you think of girls who drink as much as men?" etc etc) I concluded "...but I do live in a little queer universe".  And that is true, there is an aspect of living outside the world of labels that hurt which allows me to develop an identity based only on the words I want to use.

But there are a lot of questions which spring from my queer universe.  Living in a 'queer universe' is a label in itself, it exists in contrast to a hetro universe.  Developing an identity which is assured and reinforced by that which it contradicts is a strange identity to posses indeed.

I am, depending on who I talk to, bisexual or pansexual.  I'm a feminist sometimes and a queer activist at other times.  I am extremely femme on occasion and at other times desirous to be entirely without gender.  I'm kinky and vanilla. Straight edge and a junkie.

I pursue academic defences of my choices and compulsions and find many.  I delight in deconstructing society whilst it quietly oppresses us [see the Daily Mail] I reject labels but indulge in them when amongst sympathetic/queer persons.  I propose radical reformations of the basics structures of society [see my M.A. dissertation] but live a life which, whilst verging on the edges of acceptability, is hardly radical.

It often feels as though all my radical politics, all my political affiliation, all my belief actually boil down to is shouting impotently at the world "it's not gay, it's queer! it's not stupid, it's new! it's not bloody women, it's challenging feminists! it's not a mouse, it's a rat!"

The problem, inevitability, is not that I'm wrong, it's that the difference between a rat and a mouse is incidental to most people.

I've decided to blog everyday for a month in celebration of my paid account time here on Dreamwidth.  Given how prolific I have been over the years on LiveJournal and various other sites it seems absurd that I am sitting here, on [my] day 1, completely without inspiration.  Perhaps this is just the reason I need to begin blogging regularly - writing and creating is something that must be done daily lest the intellectual muscles required begin to atrophy.  The fact that sentence took me 15 minutes to write and I'm still not happy with it should serve as evidence enough.

Right now the biggest thing in my life is my rats.  It's hard to imagine a sentence that would make me sound more like a lesbian spinster. Nonetheless, it's the truth.  I've had them since they were 6 weeks old when both of them fit in the palm of my hand - or they would have done if they'd stay still for long enough.  We named them after two male rats from Terry Pratchett's Maurice and His Educated Rodents, a few months later we discovered they were girls but the names fit far better than we could have hoped - Hampork was, like her namesake, fond of running headlong into situations without much thought beforehand which were likely to result in injury .  Dangerous Beans is much more considered, sitting back and planning before acting, fully capable of puzzling out the most complex of barriers between her and chocolate.

These two little rats have been constants in my life her in Brighton through the most life changing of events.  They provide focus and motivation for me even in my blackest depressions and celebrate the energy of my manias with me; running around the flat and playing endless wrestling games.  They are there every day and every night, they welcome me home and sulk when I leave.  They love unconditionally.

For these reasons, and many more which should be obvious to anyone who has ever loved a pet, I spent more than my monthly salary on Hampork's veterinary treatment over the course of 9 weeks or so.  Sadly the infection she had was antibiotic resistant and despite attacking it with a plethora of antibiotics, nothing worked and on Saturday night I had to take her to the emergency vet where we - the vet and I - concluded her suffering had become unbearable and that it was time to euthanise her.  In flood of tears I said goodbye and took a taxi home where I sobbed into Dangerous' fur and told her the news.

What it comes down to is this; these little girls, my little rats - they are my family.  I'm nearly 200 miles away from any blood relatives and after the dissolution of my 5 year romantic relationship last year I am a singleton.  We make families wherever we make our home - I'm never sure of cause and effect in that binary, perhaps we make home wherever we find a family.  Whichever it is, I made one in Brighton - family or home or both - and whilst friends inevitably compose a large part of the connection I have to this city, it is the rats - or, as it stands now, rat - which give me both the responsibility and consistency in my daily life.

It is the minutiae of life which seem to shape us the most - the capacity to keep up with the numerous small but essential requirements, the way we respond to challenges to those well trodden ways, the ability to prioritise essential over every other demand life places at our door. 

Dangerous and I remain a family.  And I remain here for her even if I can't stay for me, or you or anyone else.  It's about more than just owning a rat.