Wonky Fixings
“Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
My sister tells me that I am a fixer. And she is right. I am the daughter of a fixer and I am pretty sure that one of the nucleotides in the spiral helix of my DNA is named ‘Fixing’.
It is simply that when I feel another person’s suffering then I want to alleviate it, somehow. I experience this as a great surge of empathy with intent. According to my younger (and wiser) sister, it is possible to be aware of unhappiness and to leave it well alone because it almost certainly not within my power, nor is it my responsibility, to heal it. I recognise that she is right. If I did not attempt to fix things then I could economise on time, imagination and energy; I could also keep heartache and occasional controversy at bay. I know that I need to review this fixing instinct (again) because in just forty-eight hours I have managed to undermine my mother-in-law’s sense of independence and get myself thrown off the farm’s lambing team a month before the ewes are even brought into the barn.
Needless to say really but neither of these outcomes were part of my fixing intentions. When I rang the hospital that has been caring for my mother-in-law since early September, my hope was simply to clarify the protocol for returning Covid patients to their regular wards once their 14 days in isolation are over. Over the last five months, Jane - my mother-in-law - has coped with a spinal fracture, 14 weeks of bed rest, an 11 hour surgical procedure, a post operative infection and then a hospital transmitted dose of Covid-19 part way through her rehabilitation. An enforced fortnight of isolation in a lavender painted room just six ceiling tiles wide has stretched Jane’s extraordinary resilience to transparency. Liam and I have tried our best to keep her company on FaceTime and Skype but we have felt the rawness of Jane’s shock, loneliness and despair through the computer screen. So when Jane expressed uncertainty about when and how she would be allowed back to her regular ward, I launched into fixing mode. At super-fast pace, I rang the hospital, asked to speak to Dr Hannah, Jane’s physician. The hospital switchboard paged Dr Hannah and in a few very productive minutes, I was able to clarify the situation and arrange for Jane to be reassured in person.
Except that Jane was furious. She felt that by speaking directly to the hospital, I had undermined her autonomy. We could see Jane’s relief at knowing the post-Covid release protocol but that was not the point: she had not wanted my intervention and so I remonstrated with myself - again - for letting my fixing instinct get the better of me. And I was not brave enough to tell Jane that my call to the hospital had been partly motivated by my own misery at witnessing another phase of her suffering.
Earlier this evening, I walked Bruno through the farmyard in inky twilight. The clouds of Storm Christoph were already gathering and the air felt damp on my face. As I passed the newly mucked out ‘cow hulls’, I stopped to look over the half door and admire my work. It took me a couple of seconds to realise that the patch of brightness just inside the door was the pale fleece of a young sheep lying on her side on the concrete. I recoiled in shock and then looked again. Was she dead? If so then why wasn’t she on the ramp by the far barn called ‘the slats’ where Ian leaves the carcasses for the knacker man to collect?
As I stood frowning in confusion, the small sheep moved one of her front legs and I turned abruptly, heading for the farmhouse. Ian was mid-text message when he answered the doorbell.
“There is a poorly sheep in the cow hulls.”
“Yes. I found her in the field. There’s nothing that I can do for her, I’m afraid. Listeria.”
“But what about palliative sheep care? Candles? Prayers? A warm blanket? Can I hold her hoof?”
“You can do what you like. It’ll be a few hours yet. I don’t think that she’s suffering.”
I pulled a face that I hoped would express my dismay at the unrelenting sadness of the world and Ian shut the farmhouse door, sealing himself back into the warmth of the wood-burning stove. I stepped away from the light of the porch and stomped over to the open barn to drag a few handfuls of straw from the stack of bales. Then I returned to the cow hulls and slid back the bolt of the door as quietly as I could. I knelt on the cold concrete to make a pillow for the dying sheep and then eased her head onto the straw. Her body was cold except for a lukewarm patch on her forehead and I rested my hand there for a minute to say a tiny prayer for her woolly hogget life.
Bruno kept uncharacteristically close to my heels as I trudged up the lane. I sloshed straight through the puddles, my hands shoved deep in my jacket pockets. A tawny owl called from the trees to the east. I pushed open the gate to the first field and made for the beck. Bruno snuffled along the wall chasing rabbit scents and I kept track of his shadowy progress by the occasional clink of his collar. I paused by the pool in the corner of the field and stood still, arms folded. My wellies began to sink into the gloopy cow-trodden edges of the pool and Bruno waded beyond me to slurp water.
My sister’s advice sounded loud and clear in my mind. There have been countless occasions in my life when empathy and the need to ease suffering have got me into bother. Earlier this year, I involved myself in an altercation on a train and when I told Liam the story he raged at me, furious that - as he saw it - I had put myself at risk of being assaulted alongside the original victim. There was the time when I sent my father a wheelchair that he didn’t need or want; one soggy night I returned home from a late dog walk with a distressed woman that I had found sobbing in a park; on another occasion I went into a taxi office to check that the driver wasn’t a murderer before I asked him to return a confused elderly lady to her care home in case she perished in the frost. And - infamously - I gave an ex-colleague my car because he and his family were struggling as a one-vehicle household.
As I sank further into the mud, I reminded myself that psychologists say that it is possible to change one’s behaviour. And I considered the difference between rescuing and helping, a distinction that I have always struggled to navigate. With my feet encased in sogginess, I tilted my head back to look upwards and into the dark. My dad was a doctor; my mum was a social worker; my brother is a director for a national charity; my sister (for all her wisdom) runs an inclusion project that improves access to university for disadvantaged students. Some aspect of my desire to be useful in the face of sadness must be rooted in the curving ladder of my DNA. But I cannot simply blame genetics. The truth is that part of my fixing instinct is generated by a deep anxiety that this world is too mad, bad and dangerous to know. I manage this worry by trying to make clumsy repairs to the snags and tears in other people’s lives.
Despite Bruno’s huffs of impatience as he waited at the gate to the next field, I gave myself another few minutes of brooding. Then I could no longer ignore the fact that one of my wellies was sinking faster than the other. It is difficult to take oneself seriously when lopsided so I squelched out of the mud and paused for another minute. “Bugger it,” I said to the dark. “Bugger it. I suppose that I could try harder to help rather than rescue.” I rested one hand on the stone post with its stubble of lichen as I unhooked the gate to let Bruno scamper ahead of me into the dark.