Rebuild the Boundaries!

Amazingly, it’s a full seven years since Carly told me she was dying of leukaemia, a belief she now says came from a wrongly-addressed letter from the hospital. Since then, she’s been in and out of prison, has orbited around Swanvale Halt but never resettled here, and eventually was offered a place in a shared house managed by an alcohol recovery charity. We (the church) took her for her interview and I’d arranged moving her stuff there before she said she’d found someone else to help with it. Her troubles carried on, however. She maintained she’d had her food and money stolen, and yet again I was drawn into sending her a sub – at first, a one-off as she was moving in to the new house, then another one-off because it was Christmas, and then … A couple of days after Christmas I gave her a lift from the house to the village because she’d been beaten up there and her money taken, and was going to stay with a friend and see her family; on New Year’s Eve, before zooming to London, I took her back to the house after a row with her family and, supposedly, the ‘friend’ again beating her up and taking her money. Now she has to leave the house having broken its rules, not, her social worker who has again made contact with me, for the first time.

This is wearyingly familiar stuff and tracking back in the blog you can piece together similar stories. What made it slightly different this time was that Carly was in a meeting at the probation office yesterday and asked me if I could send her the fare home. The problem was that I was, at that moment, in Reading seeing a friend and not just in Reading but temporarily stranded in Reading. On Tuesday I’d been marooned in Portsmouth due to the storm closing down the rail network, and finally boarded a bus that took me to Victoria Coach Station from where, via train and taxi, I made it home; Thursday’s problem was rain flooding the line to Guildford, and while I did get home it required another diversion to the capital to take a different route. Carly proved very unwilling to accept this, asking me repeatedly why I couldn’t send her the money and then why I was away from home for a second time in a week. As soon as I got back at 10.30 I did, and even offered to give her yet another lift, but heard nothing. I still had to clear away the Christmas decorations in the church and set up for the Toddler Group in the morning (our churchwardens are both indisposed).

I couldn’t send her the money because I am old-fashioned and use a physical key to access my bank account. I don’t see why I should order my financial arrangements around the possibility that someone else may want an emergency transfer while I’m out. Also, I was absent for more than a day in a week because I was on leave. I had explained this already, but Carly couldn’t grasp the relevance of it. I thought of saying ‘What the hell business is it of yours to dictate what I do?’ During an earlier episode of the same sort of thing Ms Formerly Aldgate once fumed ‘These people seem to think they’ve got an absolute right to your money’, and Carly appeared to believe I should put myself in a position always to meet her potential needs, as well. In fact I’m afraid I got very annoyed about it, albeit only to myself.

I know maintaining boundaries is important, but here I am in the same kind of situation as so many times before, with (unlike the Lord) an account of what it is I’m supposed to do or not do that’s so fuzzy it’s barely workable. At least I didn’t have a chance to tell Carly just what I thought, as I would have spoken out of tiredness and bitterness that was nothing to do with her at all.