Here Be Dragons

I'm in uncharted territory now. Places in a relationship I never thought I'd be. Places for which there is no guidebook.

You'd think asking around might help. After all, I'm hardly the first person to find myself in this situation, any of it.  But when I speak to other people, the best they can offer  -  for all their good intentions  - is something along the lines of: "I was there. It was shit".

What to do for the best depends on your perspective. A kick-ass feminist workbitch like myself wants to be independent, lead a life of integrity, hold out for someone who thinks she's The Very Thing.  A kind concerned loving mum like myself wants to do the best for her children and see if they can make it through childhood with their family life intact, and without too many emotional scars. You see the problem.

I've had my Period of Shittiness. I've resigned myself to the shitness of things, and got through the Period of Resignation. I went through the phoney-separation and the Period of Bridget. And now, well, I don't know what period I'm in.

I think it must be a sort of Captain Cook or Christopher Columbus sort of period. Should I find out more about them before I name my latest life-stage after them? And even then, I'm not sure. I feel they set out with more excitement and optimism than I have.  Maybe I'm more like someone who's forced onto a journey. Convicts condemned to Australia? Irish people sailing to New York during the potato famine? I'd like to think of a journey into the unknown that has a reasonable likelihood of an eventual positive outcome.

I know. I'm going to call it the Period of Map Making. What do you think?

Eat Your Heart Out

Today we said goodbye to my dear friend Barbara. She looked after my first daughter, picked her up from nursery, babysat. Cleaned and ironed for us all. Cheered us up, made us laugh.

Told us all about her problems, of which there were many.

Sometimes when everything is crazy and the world seems to be conspiring against you and everything feels as if its spinning out of control, you have to control the only things you can, I guess.

My daughter's first funeral.

No-one wants to see a mother burying their daughter, on the day after Mother's Day. And she'd have been lost, tiny wisp of her own self, in a coffin that size. At peace at last.

Later I took my mum to a poetry reading and read the poem I'd written to her, for her, about her. On the way back I got lost at Spaghetti Junction. I burst into tears and she didn't really know why.

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.

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.

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?

Status Update

I am not working. That means I must be broken, right?

Mutton

And I said to myself, "Just who are you trying to kid?"

And I bought black trousers, and a minimiser bra, and two plain V neck sweaters.

Prozac or Nozac?

This is the Period of Resignation, and this is all there is.

So one inevitable consequence is that the anti-depressants and the painkillers have to go in the bin. I know my Quiz of Week recommended that I carry on taking the tablets, but I can't think of them as a way to get me through  -  because there is no "through".

Things are as they are, and I need to deal with that, face it head on. It was a coping strategy of sorts to think that the Period of Shittiness might pass in a hazy chemical blur, but now I need to get on with trying to live life as it is. There are to be no perks, or escapes; no magical interludes, or tenderness, or intimacy.

My hugs will be from my kids, and my girlfriends  - that's a lot of warmth and kindness.

And the other stuff? The electric blue of kingfisher and dragonfly are woven into my fabric now.

Resignation

It being the Period of Resignation and all, I didn’t so much as bat an eyelid when my committee friend Issy told me she has been diagnosed with secondary cancer in her lungs, liver and bone. She’s thirty-two.

This ought to jolt me into a sense of proportion about my own whining, but of course it didn’t.

I’m not whining about anything any more: I’m resigned. It’s the realisation that you’ve slipped over the peak of the parabola. Oh, if only you’d known that you were cheering your final hurrah, how much you would have savoured it! How much more carefully you would have cherished those moments where you were cherished, and held much more attentively in your mind’s eye those moments where you were held in someone else’s arms.

It’s a gradual process, like a mist coming in from the sea. Almost imperceptible to begin with. Small things, small steps, small moments. Then before you know it, it doesn’t matter which day you wear your nice bra and which day you don’t. Or your nice pants. And after a few weeks you realise the latest lingerie you bought is never coming out of its package, labels still intact, and you take it back to the shop for a refund, mumbling something about gift, wrong size, and use the money to buy a jumper instead.

And you stop using that nice brand of body lotion, because no one is going to come close enough to smell your skin. And then you stop shaving under your arms as a matter of course, and only bother if you’re wearing a sleeveless top. And then you stop shaving your legs entirely, because heck no one is gonna see them, just wear trousers and boots. Chuck the stockings and wear some winter tights. And you run out of that special conditioner that made your hair silky and scented, because no one will be running their hands through it now except maybe your hairdresser.

And you stop wearing the tits-n-heels outfits that made you, for a ridiculous late-blooming moment, feel sexy; and realise that you are a fool, that you are mutton dressed as mutton. And you go back to wearing black trousers suits. And you see your confident red coat is wearing out and you replace it with a black one. And you jam your flamboyant multicoloured, twisted silk scarves in a cheery carnival knot at the back of the drawer and wonder what the hell you were thinking.

And maybe you will sit in a restaurant with someone who used to pant after you, and beg to fuck your brains out, and realise that you are utterly resistible.

And you will accept the inevitability of this, and the knowledge will sit forever in your chest like a stone, and you will say nothing, and smile and sip your wine, and feel grateful for any small smile or kindness.

For this is the Period of Resignation, and this is all there is.

Capitulation

And so the Period of Shittiness has squished its tentacles right through the centre of the earth and popped out its suckers in Sydney.

For sure we've all laughed about Charlie Sheen, but when he turns out to be your brother-in-law's secret alter ego, it's not quite so funny. I mean, it's all very well living your life as one glorious, heroic shag-marathon, but not if you've got a wife and family who have followed you to the other side of the world to make a fresh sunshiney, family-focused start.

It's a long way away. Too far. You can't hug someone over Skype. Or punch them for that matter.

And yet the Period of Shittiness cannot remain for ever. It's a new month, and lifes moves inexorably on. February is usually my worst time, but January has aced all previous records so I'm alternately fearful, and hopeful, about February now.  And the flow of days and weeks and months insists that we have a direction of travel.

And so the Period of Shittiness is gradually becoming the Period of Resignation.  Give in to it. Let it take you. It has a sort of comforting grey embrace  -  and it might be the only hug a girl can get.