Fed up

 

Fed up

It’s a funny expression, fed up. At first sight or sound it seems to imply ‘an ample sufficiency’ as my father used to say – replete, satisfied, sated, satiated, or, more prosaically, stuffed, full to bursting, glutted.

My application of ‘fed up’ has no relation to appetite or food – it describes my state of mind. I am fed up, distressed, depressed, pessimistic, unable to see the silver lining in the black cloud. It will pass, I know that, but I’m no company for anyone. Well, that’s just as well, since the only person who has to put up with me is my long-suffering husband, the source to whom I inevitably turn for understanding and support.

Unlike so many, as I understand it, I have no ‘supportive network of friends’ with whom to share my woes. No hope for me, then, since all ‘advice’ insists that everyone needs ‘a social network.’ Not me. Like my mother, I do not relish constant company. I used to worry, particularly after my father died, that she had ‘no friends’. She didn’t need them – she was self-sufficient, with many interests. Her friends were from her youth and life as a wife and mother, and those years passed as readily as children grow and move on. She had, I believe, a rich, interior life that sustained her.

My father used to say that he had few enemies and fewer friends and he was quite a sociable chap! He and my mother were a tight unit – he would have climbed up to get the top brick of the chimney, had she wanted it.

Whatever has brought on this current state of ‘Woe is me’ is of no interest to anyone who has survived this monologue thus far. It will be resolved, or not, and life will continue, perhaps in slightly altered form – well, definitely in another form – until something more gripping happens.

Thank goodness for a loving husband and a bevy of uncomplicated cats and dogs. They don’t ask questions or demand answers – and I include Barry in that. Why can’t people be more like dogs (and cats)?