Lucky Pups

Much as I loathe them, I think in my next life I might return as a dog.

I reckon if I was a dog, it would be easier to please a man  - in fact, I'd get to be his best friend. Then I received an email from my dad, entitled "Why Some Men Prefer Dogs To Wives".  He sent it to my sister too. We're both having Husband Trouble, so it maybe wasn't the most tactful thing... Nonetheless it contained some wisdom I can apply in my next relationship, see if I can keep a man interested. Like a dog, I am eternally optimistic. Maybe that's why I'm drawn to cats: they're naturally cynical.

1. The later a man arrives home, the more excited the dog is to see him.
2. Dogs don't notice if you call them by another dog's name.
3. Dogs like it if you leave a lot of things on the floor.
4. A dog's parents never visit.
5. Dogs agree that you have to raise your voice to get your point across.
6. You never have to wait for a dog: they're ready to go 24 hours a day.
7. Dogs find people amusing when they're drunk.
8. Dogs like fishing, hunting, chasing around after balls.
9. A dog will not wake you up at night to ask "if I died, would you get another dog?"
10. If a dog has babies, you put an ad in the paper and sell them.

No wonder I couldn't keep a man interested. See, my cold wet nose is nuzzling your crotch as you read.

Woof.

Free

I'm beginning to think, yes, I can do this, it can work.

I know it's easier to think that way when I'm away here, in a quiet apartment, by myself, not actually in the house eye to eye, nose to nose.  But the sense of freedom I'm feeling is unfamiliar after so long. It must feel like this to come out of jail after a long sentence.

• I don't have to keep checking in all the time by text to explain where I am, who I'm with, what I'm doing
• I don't have to gain permission to make commitments at weekends
• I don't have to keep endlessly texting so he can triangulate against my original plans
• I don't have to keep explaining, justifying reassuring
• When he starts bullying or shouting or arguing, I can just ignore it

In fact, I can just go about my life like a normal person, and not feel like I'm under some sort of Stasi observation programme. I just hadn't realised how much this was weighing me down. No wonder I was depressed and crushed.

You might wonder why I was allowing that sort of regime to prevail in the first place  -  it's a good question. I'm not sure there's an easy answer other than my desire to make things nice, keep everyone happy, make him happy.

He is the most dissatisfied person I have ever met: I finally realise nothing can please him. And it's a relief, to realise this, and be able to stop thinking there was just that tiny little thing, that bit more that I could do, that might be the bit that made the difference.

He can please himself now.

And if he's going to cherry-pick the bits of our life he fancies, well so am I.

Bermuda

"We should definitely eat more triangular food," she announced with certainty. "Most definitely".

???

"I had some Indian triangles at Alice's house and they were really good. Not the argy-bargies, the other things. The triangles".

Ah. "Would you like us to have samosas?"

"Yes. And other triangle things. I like the taste of triangles, I've been learning about them at school".

Ok. So, since I cannot deliver on any of the main things a mum should provide (calm, happy home for example), I have been giving some thought to triangles. Having applied my brain to this  -  easier to solve than other more intractable problems  - I have developed a theory that all foods can be classified as follows:

MUST be a triangle: this includes not just samosas, but following some brainstorming in the Malvern Hills (multitasking, me) also Laughing Cow, Toblerone, Doritos. Not that many things, as it goes.

OFTEN a triangle: of course, there are many foods that could theoretically be cut into a triangle, but some often or commonly appear in this shape. Examples would be Brie and other cheeses, slices of cake, pizza, and sandwiches. 

RARELY a triangle: In this category fall a lot of soft-ish, round or tubular things that could easily be cut into triangles even though they rarely are (Jaffa cakes, small pieces of things like banana, carrot, cucumber). And finally some foods that, although it would be plain wrong to cut them into triangles, could very easily be. For instance Battenburg cake, McVities Jamaican Ginger cake, hamburgers, marshmallow teacakes.

NEVER a triangle: this is the category I am enjoying thinking about the most. So far I'm thinking Pringles, Twiglets, spring rolls, sausages, hot dogs, Easter eggs, scrambled eggs, chocolate fingers,  broccoli, biscuits, rice krispie cakes, Hula Hoops, calamari.

We have been blind taste testing to see whether food cut into triangles tastes different due to the shape. I'm saying not, Terrible Tweenager 2 (oh god, my Mac doesn't have a hash key?!) is saying it's easy to tell. We are now entering a secondary discussion about fair tests, scientific rigour and objectivity in experiments.


Sometimes it's nice to lose yourself in the Bermuda Triangle of inconsequentiality. Sometimes real life is just too hard to cope with.

Butter Me Up

"I want us to be friends," he said. "I don't want us to fight".

Ok....I thought cautiously..... and went off for a weekend of spa treatments and walking and reading and having a nice time with my best friend. "Have a lovely time", he said, disconcertingly.  So I did. Facial, body-wrap, swim, steam room, magnificent walk in the Malverns, dinners, chats, luxury pedicure, the lot. Hell I felt amazing. Chilled out, pampered, utterly lovely inside and out. And he'd promised to make a family dinner for when I got back, to show the girls what great friends we were.

I got home about 6pm. It ticked around to 7pm, and no sign of any food. "What's for tea, then?" I asked, in a friendly fashion as is our new and unnerving way.  He looked at me in a confusion. "You said you'd make tea....," I reminded him.

"Shall I see if the girls want some toast?" he offered. I rolled my eyes.

"Did you wash the school uniforms?" I wondered.  He did put a dark wash in (school shirts??) but he didn't check first to see if their uniform was in there. A foolish beginner's error.

Didn't I understand how busy he had been? He had looked after the girls all weekend, taken them to Stagecoach, made fajitas, done two loads of washing (although one of them must have comprised 17 shirts, must go down shortly and check how they've come out...) He had been rushing around all weekend and felt like he'd hardly achieved anything, and had work to do and hadn't done it and was exhausted... didn't I understand? Why was I attacking him with my Ridiculous Questions and my Rolling Eyes?

"Welcome," I said, "to my weekend world". Then we had a huge row in which I screamed and raged and yelled and swore and banged about. And he looked at me coldly and said I was bullying him.  And I shouted that he was a total cunt.

And I actually thought for a moment I might kill him. But then suddenly I felt very very tired, tired in my bones, and I just couldn't be arsed. So I made some toast for my terrified, trembling, tearful girls and brushed their hair until their sobs were stilled, and kissed them goodnight and tidied up the kitchen.

I totally suck at being a wife and mother.

Pickle

The Period of Shittiness was followed by the Period of Resignation, and this too passed.

And now I realise I am in a new phase, one which will probably last me for many years, see me through to the time when all I live for is a hot cup of tea up top and a fresh Tena Lady down below. I hereby name this phase the Period of Bridget. 

It mainly involves being by myself a lot, eating meals that consist entirely of custard, or of Branston Pickle directly from the jar, and daydreaming about Colin Firth. It involves drinking every day, and trying not to smoke, and inevitably finding myself wearing the wrong thing at the wrong time (although actually I did that in earlier Periods too). It involves the appalling realisation that all the nice men are married, and intend to stay that way, and will be steering a wide berth away from my confusing new status.

It involves involuntary celibacy and self-hatred and chocolate. It involves binge-drinking sessions with screwed-up female friends which may end in giggles or sobbing or a sccary combination of both.  It involves deep headfuckedness of the worst kind.

And sadly for you, dear reader, it involves writing about it all. Look away now if you don't want to see the final result.

Do It Like A Dodo

"I'm like a bird....", warbled Terrible Tweenager #2, always chirpy.

"How. How are you like a bird? Exactly precisely how?" asked TT#1, sourly. She is still getting to grips with the devils of PMT.

"Well...... I can fly".

"No you can't".

"Ok, I can't, but lots of birds can't fly and they're still birds. Like penguins and emus".

"You don't have any feathers".

"I'm a baby bird. I've only just hatched. But I'm still a bird". Ever the optimist.

"You don't have a beak".

"Some animals have beaks that aren't even birds. Like a platypus or a squid. So having a beak isn't a proof of being a bird".

"You don't lay eggs".

"Yes I do".

They pause for a while, wondering how to proceed. Perhaps a bit of a Mexican stand-off.

"Ok. You're like a bird. What kind of bird are you, then?"

"I'm an iguana".

This is why your brain turns to porridge when you have children. Listening to this drivel. Trying not to scream that AN IGUANA IS NOT A FUCKING BIRD.

Irony

The Shirts section of my super-efficient three-section laundry trolley now holds twelve shirts, and is stuffed to bursting. He's gone away until Thursday night (3 more shirts...maybe 4 if there's a dinner). He's going to run out of shirts.

Hahahahaha....

Irony. Ironic. Ironing.

Torn



They’re struggling.

The thing that hurts me most is that they are not talking. It’s making them grow up quicker than I wanted them to, it’s taking away their innocence. I wanted to give them a stable environment until they finished school, and I’ve let them down, I’ve failed to do that for them. I feel bad that I couldn’t hang it together for all of us until that point.

“Talk to me,” I said.

“I’m fine, Mummy”, said one, eyes heavy with tears. “I wouldn’t know what to say”, shrugged the other one, feigning nonchalance.

“How about writing it down?” I suggested. “Writing it down can help you sort out your feelings, and writing it out sometimes gets things out that are stuck inside you”. One still shrugged, but the other one got out a notepad and pen. She wrote furiously, teeth digging in to her bottom lip until they almost drew blood. Handed it to me and announced she was going to have a bath and didn’t want anyone to disturb her.

Our family is being teared apart. The pictures of us as a family on the wall will be hit by a hammer and smashed to pieces. I thought we were the ice cream that never melted but now the boiling, burning sun has come out. Now I don’t believe in the Tooth Fairy, shooting stars or the Easter Bunny. I will stop believing those things until life makes me smile again.



We had a big cuddle. I said we would be smiling all the time and having a lot of fun, that Daddy and I would be great friends without fighting and everything would be ok.

Different, but still ok.

Jesus I hope I am right. I don’t how much reassurance to offer.

Film Review 2011 #02 and #03

"There are no knights in this at all, except for a toy one right at the start. So it should be called something else. It must be hard to make an action movie when you are old like they are. I expect they get lots of breaks".

"Gosh. I didn't even know Steve Martin was French.

"Why isn't the panther in the actual film? He looked like he would be from the cover of the DVD but he's only in the titles, it's a swindle, actually".

Grit

"It will be alright", I said. "Daddy and I will be good friends. It's a big house, and we can all live here and do the things we enjoy. Probably the only difference you'll notice is that Daddy and I won't be fighting so much now".

"It won't be alright though, will it", she mumbled flatly, eyes downcast.  I felt awful.  "We'll be a fake family. It will be like actors who look just like us, are in our house, pretending to be a family".

I don't know whether it would be better or worse for her to know it was the time before that was fake. That now for the first time in a long time we are having honest conversations, my feelings and views are being taken into account, we are discussing not arguing.

I feel so much better now, and everyone else feels so much worse. So many ways to fail, aren't there?

What News on the Rialto?

One grey and rainy day in Somerset last month, we decided to entertain our large number of small girls by taking them shopping to the Clarks Retail Outlet.  Or, more accurately, to bung them £20 and let them spend it on tawdry last-season garments while we lolled around in Starbucks.  Don't worry, I'm not going to write about that day, it can be imagined all too easily. Too much rain, too little parking, too many children to supervise  -  and the fatal mistake of buying heavy things from the cookshop at start rather than the end of the session. I'm a slow learner.

On the drive across from our cottage, we approached from the west a drab grey town hunched gloomily against the rainy horizon. Where were we? we wondered.  We came closer and a sign informed us that we were arriving at Bridgwater: The Home of Carnival.

Excuse me. The Home of Carnival? Surely there are other places that can lay better claim than that? Rio de Janeiro, Venice, Notting Hill, even? There is obviously some essential truth I've missed about Bridgwater, with its pound-shops and its closed-down pubs and its absence of bypass and its bypassing of quaint charm.

The interweb informs me it was 44th on the list of Britain's Crap Towns, with Hull coming at number 1. This is quite, quite wrong. Hull is chockful of history, and fine buildings, and river front and heritage and white phone boxes - and is soon to have an achingly funky History Centre to prove it. 

So I tried to find out why Bridgwater is the Home of Carnival. It seems the town has a procession on Guy Fawkes evening. This is, according to the website, the largest and best illluminated procession in the world.  That's the whole world, right, not the whole world of Somerset. So it must be better than, say, the Christmas Parade at Disneyland.  This seems rather unlikely but I'm prepared to suspend my belief. In fact I'm making it a Quiz Of The Week. Right hand side, down there.

I know you can't wait to go, so here's the website. Party on, dudes.

Enttauschung

I have my own private things to get angsty about. Don't we all?

I'm hard to categorise, pin down. Even to myself. This means that sometimes I can tear myself up with worry about how to behave. What is authenticity? And how would The Real Me come across (whoever the heck she is?)

Here's an example. I'm at a very informal supper, with a good friend and some arty people I don't really know but seem nice. Peggy Lee comes on the sound system, with her beautiful disillusion (see the link in yesterday's post). We talk a little bit about the song.

I'm getting a bit stressed. I want to say, "Do you know that this song is inspired by a Thomas Mann story?"  But I'm worried. On the one hand, I'm worried that everyone will look at me with indulgent scorn: everyone knows that, of course they do.  How sweet of you to remind us all that coffee comes from a bean.

On the other hand, I'm worried that everyone will look at me as if I am a pretentious Oxbridge arsehole of the first degree (although mine was only a mediocre 2:2). I hummed and hawed inwardly, said nothing, the conversation moved on. Sometimes I am about 15 years old inside my head. Ridiculous.

And so I said nothing. And that was a shame, possibly, because they might have been interested. 

Unleashed

When I got home on Friday night, it was the first time in years that I had come back late without offering an explanation as to where I had been, who I was with, what I was doing, what time I would be back. I don't need to do that now, do I? As long as I have made sure the au pair is going to babysit, it's not his concern now, since we're "not in a couple" any more.

And, boy, does he hate it.

Not the "not in a couple" part of it  - at least I'm assuming not, since it was his idea. It's the loss of control. Not knowing the whereabouts of his chattel. It's only recently I've begun to realise how creepy he can be about this, trying to know absolutely everything I do, who I know, where I am.

Although I think I must have been aware at some level. I've always made sure to have my secrets, to have little corners of time, of life, that were just for me.

When I got in on Friday night, the house was in darkness, although it was before midnight.  I have been sleeping in the Little Un's room, as the two of them like to bunk in together (there is a troll behind the wardrobe, apparently, but I don't let that deter me).  I went in and started getting undressed.  Then he walked in. Walked over. Made a clumsy grab for my breasts. What the hell? I made it clear his sudden advance was most unwelcome.

Saturday morning we had arranged to have a Big Talk while the girls were out doing their thing. However all day long (I'd arranged for them to be out for the afternoon too) he was bustling about, ostentatiously fixing long-overdue problems in the house. Just as an example, the waste disposal in the kitchen has been broken since November. This means I have had to use the sink plunger every time I want to pour water down the sink, drain vegetables, wash things. To say it has been inconvenient would be an understatement.  All this sudden handiwork meant he was too busy to talk. Or too scared.

I saw later that in spite of all that busyness, he'd still found time to go through all the emails in my Personal folder of Outlook. 

Then he announced he would like to come to my poetry reading in the evening. Since he's resolutely refused to go to anything like this before, I was somewhat taken aback, but in our new mode of careful politeness, I didn't feel able to say no.  So along he came, and I did my reading.

It was less awkward in the car than I thought it would be, me, him and the Pet Poet. In fact he seemed to be looking forward to it, in an odd sort of way, and was eerily cheerful. The reading went well. He raved about it afterwards in the car.

"You were really great! Amazing! You sparkled, you came alive. You were funny and clever and full of life. And I thought that's the girl I used to know, where has she gone?"

There was a silence. That stretched and stretched.

The Pet Poet said to me afterwards, marvelling at his behaviour, "But that's the girl we all know. She's been there all the time. Why couldn't he see her?"

The theme for the evening was tigers, and she had penned a Tiger Triolet that was very close to the knuckle in her current personal circumstances. It did not escape his notice that it was close to the bone for me too. Another uncomfortable silence.

I am getting on with getting on with it. I reckon he's been an enemy of promise if ever there was one, far more so than the double buggy in the hall. I went to Homebase this morning and got some bits and pieces that will enable me to move upstairs to what will become my funky writer's lair. I'm looking forward to it.  I already feel like I'm starting to be me again.

And how do I feel? Peggy says it better than I ever could.

 The best way to explain how I feel

Dry Dock

I used this image recently in a Pecha Kucha presentation I was doing (pretentious, moi?) It’s the offices of a computer gaming company, and they describe it as a “steam-punk submarine”. How very timely – I am needing to revamp my submarine as it seems to be headed off on a new and rather exciting journey. This place looks like fun happens in here, doesn’t it?

Are you wondering why I’ll still need a submarine? I thought that would be obvious. I’ll need it to enable me to negotiate the reefs, the shoals, the shark-infested waters. There is some tough territory to get through on this new trip, and there are a number of things I will need.

I will need ports, havens, places of sanctuary. I will need friends to keep me company, give me encouragement and lift my spirits along the way. I will need the correct fuel (can a submarine run on vodka-shots and cheesy pasta? Probably not, I’m thinking). I will need portholes for perspective. I will need a hard outer shell for protection. I will need Polaris missiles, as a deterrent but also as the ultimate sanction if that is required. I will need my own space, my own time, the chance to learn how to please myself again, rather than constantly trying to please someone else.

I need to be brave and I need to be bold. I would also like to become brazen, beautiful and breathtaking. As opposed to becoming bulimic, bitchy, bitter, bedridden, babbling and burnt-out, for example.

I need to keep my spirits up. My plan is to make my newly funked-up sub a party place, selected invitees only. It’s going to be a blast, I’m sure of it.

Glass Houses

When I read and loved this poem a couple of weeks ago, I didn't realise it would turn out to be about me.

Tempered (Jo Bell)

I won't bore you with what happened on the first and second days. You can leave that to your imagination. But I made it through to the end of yesterday, bloody but unbowed, and thought, "You know what? Actually I don't give a fuck. He's been so mean for so long, that not having to try and please him all the time will be a great relief".

And I did what all women do after they've been dumped or duped. I went to London and got my hair done.

Handbook For Husbands

Ok gentlemen, here's the lowdown.

• Select yourself a clever, strong, feisty, hardworking wife.
• Set yourself the life-challenge of beating these qualities out of her through sustained psychological warfare over a number of years.
• Suck up professional, personal, emotional, practical, financial, sexual and domestic support like a sponge until she is bled dry of all life force.
• Tell her repeatedly that she is rubbish at her job, letting everyone down, not keeping the house nice, letting herself go, being boring and all manner of other criticisms until she almost has a nervous breakdown and suffers from clinical depression.
• Completely ignore the fact that she is ill from depression and make no adjustments whatsoever apart from telling her she is acting like a loser.
• Wait impassively until she heaves herself back unaided except by the magical forces of Prozac from the brink of complete collapse and finally feels normal again.
• Then unceremoniously announce you “don’t want to be in a couple any more” and dump her.
• Tell her you don't want anything else about your life to change, though.
• Wonder why everyone thinks you’re a bastard.

Life can be so confusing when you’re a boy, can’t it?