marriage

In which I ponder….Lemonade

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So…it’s finally properly and completely over.

Although we’ve been separated over 5 years and divorced for almost exactly 1 year, I have only just today received our court stamped financial settlement.

I’m neither happy nor sad about it really. It’s good to know that I will no longer be lining the pockets of lawyers, and that I at last know what the future is likely to look like financially. I’m never going to be rich but I’m not going to be poor either, and that’s fine. I won’t have the sort of life I would have had if I had remained in the marriage, but for every material thing I’ll no longer have, I’ll have a ton of happiness to which I previously would not have had access.

There was no fighting about the settlement – I took what I was offered, and I didn’t ask for more. But I was careful to seek legal advice throughout the process so my decisions – although often against the advice of my lawyers – were well informed. The most important thing for me was to maintain my integrity and find a path through what was equitable and fair, and what was enough. In the end I went for enough, because what I was offered was enough. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life feeling that I was lucky that my ex husband was so successful. I want to spend the rest of my life knowing that I’ve worked hard and that with hard work comes rewards.

It would have been easy in some respects to fight – and certainly that was what my lawyers were hoping for, since it would have lined their pockets. But if you should ever find yourself in a similar position, make sure you consider whether the psychological and emotional toll of the process would be worth the potential financial gains. I was constantly aware of the incongruency of feeling envious about the fact that my ex appears to live in such comparative splendor given that I have spent my entire career working to improve the lives of the disadvantaged. Why should I be entitled to anything better than the actually very nice life I already have?

But envy is an insidious thing. It creeps up on you as you scroll through your social media feeds, watching your friends living the life you expected to have post childrearing – exotic travel, holiday property purchases, renovations, rediscovering romance with your loved one. It mixes up with anger and takes you back to a place you thought you had left. Then I realized that my envy was really just a disguise for the grief I was experiencing for the life I had lost, both present and future, that I thought was going to be mine and ended up being one of the casualties of divorce. And I was reminded, again, that nothing is guaranteed, nothing can be promised, and that you have to make your own luck.

Even without fighting though, I found the process draining and demeaning. In addition to my inner turmoil about the above, the system seems to consider that the material assets built up over the course of a 21 year relationship belong to your husband, who may, out of the goodness of his heart, decide to give you some. Then you are supposed to be grateful and consider yourself lucky.

I refuse to be grateful.

I am grateful for my beautiful children, and I am grateful that I have the means to support myself going forwards – but everything I have taken from my marriage is part of what I helped to build up and as such I have taken my share. I am not lucky that my ex husband is successful – we (he and I) are lucky that over the course of our relationship we jointly built up a life and careers from which we will both continue to benefit.

Now I can start the work of really planning how I will protect my financial interest going forwards – something that I should have been doing all along.

I already know that leaving my husband is the best thing I ever did for myself. I’ve never regretted it, although I’ve found it hard to process. But I will no longer torture myself over what was done, or not done, or could have been done. I will not wish for the life I would have had, or mourn the one I’d left. I will race forwards in life, reaching out for all the opportunities I would have missed, all the adventures I would not have had, all the lovers I would not have kissed.

And should I ever find myself in a similar position again – God forbid – I will simply channel Beyoncé…

“This is your final warning…

  You know I give you life

  If you try this shit again

  Gonna lose your wife”

 

 

In which I ponder…being present and finding what you’re looking for

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search

 

Anyone who is dating will know that the question we are asked most often is

“So…what are you looking for?”

In my naivety,  at the beginning of this journey, I thought people were asking me what sort of a man I was looking for – and frankly I had no idea. I’d chosen badly once, but I didn’t want to see all future men through that lens, because it seemed so negative. I found you frequently met people – men and women – who had a long list of things they knew they weren’t looking for, and they were nearly always all the things they had ended up hating about their previous partner.

I say ‘ended up’, as it’s a sad irony that often the very things that we once thought were appealing and attractive about people often end up being the things that in the end we can’t stand. For my own part, for example, I originally loved my ex husband’s lack of emotion, as I came from a family which could fairly be described as being emotionally labile. But after 21 years, I realized that this lack of emotion was not actually a cool, calm and stable disposition, but literally the absence of any sort of emotional landscape – and it’s very hard to have a meaningful and connected relationship with someone like that. Or at least it is for me.

Anyway – I digress.

Later, I came to realize that the ‘what are you looking for?’ enquiry was, in fact, code for ‘are you up for one night stands?’. I suppose it’s helpful to at least ask – and this often happens well before you’ve met I person – and it does mean that no one is wasting their time. But the last couple of times I’ve been asked it, it’s got me thinking.

Once upon a time – long, long ago (i.e the last time I was dating, over 20 years ago), this was not a question people asked. When you were dating, everyone knew what that was – you go out on dates with someone and you see how it goes. If it doesn’t go well, you stop dating and you find someone else to date. Repeat. Simples.

These days it all seems to have all become a bit unnecessarily complicated.

It seems to me that there are now two answers to ‘what are you looking for?’ and they both sit at extremes of the relationship spectrum. On the one end there is just looking for someone for tonight, thanks very much. And at the other end there is the search for ‘the one’ with whom I spend the rest of my life.

Now, it can’t just be me who is thinking that actually there is a lot of space between those two choices.

But more importantly, it occurs to me that whether we decide we are looking for something fleeting or something long term, every time we discard someone because they say they are looking for something different, we miss the opportunity to just let something grow. In the old days, occasionally one night stands led to long and happy marriages – probably because people weren’t obsessing about where this was all going. People didn’t go into relationships with an agenda – or at least I don’t think they did. And sometimes they would be taken by surprise and find themselves falling in love with someone at a time when it hadn’t occurred to them to be thinking about the long term. Certainly that happened to me – I was at University and couldn’t have been less interested in finding a husband, but I met a man and 3 years later we were married. And although it didn’t work out terribly well, we had 21 years and 2 beautiful children to show for it at the end.

But more importantly, while we are fixated on where the relationship might go, right from the beginning, we cannot claim to be being present. And by not being present, we risk enjoying the moments, which might be incremental and which, in fact, we do not know to where they might lead.

I’d like to advocate a dating movement. We could call it ‘Present Dating’. We just forget about our agenda, about finding what we’re looking for. How about we just enjoy the moments? We stop asking about what people are looking for, and we just go on dates and see how it goes. If it’s fun and you enjoy one another’s company, you carry on dating until you don’t feel like that anymore. And that could be tomorrow, next week, next year or never.

Just like the old days.

 

In which I ponder…chemistry

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Chemistry

Before I joined the single hoards, and probably before, I was a great believer in chemistry. You have to have it, I thought. Real love and real, lasting relationships have to start with that special something which hits you like a thunderbolt and tells you, amongst other things, that you need to get this person naked somewhere.

This, of course, entirely ignored the fact that I had married a man who I thought was an arrogant dickhead on our first meeting.

My ex-husband had been at the same school as my sister’s first husband and I met him at their engagement party. I had attended the event with a university friend who had – by really anyone’s standards – exceptionally large breasts. He had spent the evening talking to them and being a bit of an arse and I thought nothing much further of it until shortly before the wedding, when my sister told me he had requested to sit on the same table as me.

On reflection, this may have been in the hope that I would bring my generously endowed friend with me, but the rest, as they say, is history.

So anyway (and somewhat inexplicably), when I first started dating, I was definitely looking for that elusive frisson of excitement, but I can report – having thoroughly researched the strategy – that chemistry can lead you astray.

Or is it biology?

There is not a singleton amongst us who has not embarked on a highly unsuitable, and ultimately doomed relationship based on following what their body, rather than their brain, is telling them. And this is definitely not confined to men, who have been much maligned by the suggestion that thinking with their nether regions is a problem exclusively theirs. The only difference between men and women in terms of letting their carnal desires get the better of them is that women simultaneously also think that these feelings might end with a happy ever after (as opposed to a happy ending…), whereas men are not thinking beyond getting your knickers off, and would probably lose all feeling below the waist if they knew you were hearing the distant sound of wedding bells.

These days, I am prepared to see if those feelings develop over time, even if they are not there on the first couple of dates. My only proviso is that when I look at my date, if I’m thinking that I definitely never want to see him without his shirt on (let alone anything else) there is not much point in going on. If you’re kind of repelled, I’m not sure you can move on from there.

It’s important though to ensure that your date is not aware that they are not doing it for you. I learnt this the hard way, by sending a text message to my date whilst he was in the loo which said that I didn’t find him at all attractive*. The message was meant for one of the Julies and it turns out that no amount of swearing, banging your phone on the table and suppressed shrieking will bring back a text message that is winging its way to the wrong – oh so very wrong – person. I’m sure the people on the next table thought I was having some sort of seizure. And I wasn’t far off to be honest. I briefly considered jumping in a cab and disappearing, but sadly I’m English and I felt that would compound my rudeness, so I stuck it out. He was really very charming about it (although he did later send me a text message asking me rather plaintively whether I liked him, which I thought was a bit awkward under the circumstances).

The example I generally use to other single friends to support my theory that chemistry can grow over time is that the best (physical) relationship I’ve been in post marriage was with someone I didn’t fancy on our first date. When he asked me for a second date, I put him off for a week or so because I thought I had a better prospect, but he turned out to be one I felt much more sure I didn’t ever need to see naked, so I met up with him again. And something happened – we made a connection we hadn’t made before and that was it. On the whole the episode goes in the ‘really not suitable, and definitely not a long term prospect’ bucket, but I let that relationship continue for some time past its sell by date mainly because I was afraid I would never have sex that good again**.

So my advice, not that I think anyone should ever take relationship advice from a nearly 50 year old spinster with a divorce behind her and 5 years of dating, is not to write your dates off too quickly. If you get on, have shared interests, and when you think about the possibility of seeing your date naked you don’t get a little bit of vomit in your mouth, carry on. You never know what might happen.

*in my own defence, I want you to know that this text message also contained a number of complimentary things about this man, but my point was that despite all these positives I still didn’t find him attractive. Which might be worse, I don’t know. Anyway, it wasn’t a horrible or bitchy message – as I’ve said, I’m English. I’m genetically pre-programmed to be nice…

**have I defeated my own message here?

In which I ponder…dating rules

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o-SOCIALLY-AWKWARD-DATING-facebook

Rejected

 

In many ways my experiences with dating have been largely positive.

I’m quite selective about who I will go out on a date with in the first place – not necessarily because I’m overly picky (nearly 50 year olds can’t afford to be super choosy…), but because my time is precious and I don’t want to waste an evening with someone who is a bit of a tosser when I could have spent that time with my children or a friend.

Then generally I won’t go on a date unless said date is prepared to give up his surname so that I can google him before I go. I’m surprised by the number of men who are not prepared – for ‘security reasons’ – to do this, or who are horrified if I reveal I’ve done it (although generally I don’t tell them).* But I don’t suppose any of the men I’ve dated ever find themselves considering whether or not they are organizing to meet up with a murderer or rapist. For the same reason I won’t allow anyone to pick me up from my house until I’ve got to know them well, and I also won’t get in a car with them to go to a second venue. Dating of the type which essentially involves meeting up with strangers is potentially dangerous – even sometimes lethal – for women, and so I take my safety very seriously. If this means I check online to see if you appear to be who you say you are then so be it, and if you are offended by it we probably just shouldn’t go on a date.

So, once I’m on a date, I already usually know that the guy is genuine, as far as I can tell not married, and we’ve done enough chatting to build a bit of a rapport. I’ve been on very few dates which were terrible, and even then they’ve made for amusing anecdotes. I met one guy in a pub and when I arrived he was clearly already drunk. For reasons I can’t now explain – but probably inexperience, as this was early on in my dating adventures – I didn’t immediately leave, agreeing to accompany him to dinner during which he loudly announced to me (and most of the restaurant) that he would like to lick my breasts.

I never expect not to have to pay my share of the bill, and in fact it’s fairly important to me that I do as I don’t want to be beholden in any way. There are still some men who think that if they’ve paid for everything you owe them something – and that something is generally sexual. However, if I sense that the guy is purely being gentlemanly, and our conversation has suggested that it wouldn’t be a financial burden on them to pay for it, I’ll back down and say thank you. I hate to think how poverty stricken I would be after 5 years or so of dating if I’d had to pay for me and my date every time, so I never expect it.

I’ve also learnt interesting things from my dates, even though many of them have come to nothing – things that I probably wouldn’t have learnt if I’d still been married. One date recently showed me a number of interesting works of art that are installed in new office buildings around Sydney and another pointed out the statue of a small cat at the State Library which I’d never noticed before and told me its story.**

I’ve been given wine recommendations which I’ve acted upon, and book recommendations which I’ve subsequently read. I’ve also had the opportunity to have some spirited debates about a range of issues with people who have views diametrically opposed to mine and most of my friends.

So – as I’ve said – generally my dating experiences have been positive. But I would, however, like to start a movement to agree some ground rules to which everyone adheres.

Ghosting

So if you’re not dating, you probably don’t know what this is (lucky you), but it’s when someone you’ve been either chatting with or have been on a date (or two) with suddenly disappears into radio silence. Now, when I’m only at the chatting stage and I haven’t met them in person as yet, I’m fine with this – in fact it’s a ploy I use myself. But I do object to it after a date – or worse – a few dates. I’ll give you an example of how this works. I recently got chatting with a guy on Tinder (yes, Tinder! Gasp! You can read more about my thoughts on Tinder here), and agreed to meet him for a drink. We met in a bar in Darlinghurst and got on famously – to the extent that we moved from drinks straight to dinner. He was formerly in the Navy, so interestingly well travelled, and was now working for the Fire Service of New South Wales in charge of all their mental health programs for staff about which he was clearly very expert and well informed. He also had a Masters in Indigenous Studies, had read many of the same books as me and is a bit of a leftie. Anyone who knows me well would recognize that this sort of man is likely to be of interest to me, so I had a great night.

He walked me to the station, and then when I was on my way home on the train, he sent me a text message to see if I wanted to catch up again for a walk and lunch on Sunday. I definitely did. We met as planned and had another great date – a walk in which we chatted easily, then oysters and champagne at Circular Quay, followed by an exhibition. He walked me to the station and on separating to go our own ways I told him I’d had a great time and would like to do it again, but my parents were arriving in a couple of days for a month and I wouldn’t be as available as usual. He said that was ok, and to just let him when I would next be free.

About a week later, I sent a text message saying I was free in a couple of nights, and would he like to catch up? He never replied. About 5 days later I gave in to the urge to send another message – just in case through some technological glitch he hadn’t received it. Again he didn’t reply, so I think we can surmise that I won’t be seeing him again.

Now, under these circumstances wouldn’t it be so much nicer – not to mention polite – to just send a quick text message in response to say ‘hey, it was great meeting you, but on reflection I can’t really see it going any further so I think I’ll move on’? The reality is that I left a 21 year marriage – I think I’m going to cope if after one or two dates someone tells me they are not interested…

The end of the affair

Ending a relationship, no matter how insignificant, is tricky and awkward for everyone involved, so my suggested rule about this is simple. If you’ve shared my bed, you need to tell me you’ve decided to call it a day non-electronically. So, as the natural progression from ‘if we’ve been on a couple of (non-carnal) dates, you need to at least send me a text to say thanks – but no thanks’, if our relationship has progressed to getting jiggy, you need to either phone me, or tell me in person. If it’s clearly not been super serious let’s not waste each other’s time by meeting in person to end it, but a phone chat seems appropriate. And if it’s been going on for quite a while, in person is definitely the way. A text message just won’t do in either circumstance.

And there you have it. A kind of manifesto for dating. Or is it a rule book? It’s all just about being polite and respectful really isn’t it? After all, dating is hard enough as it is – as my granny used to say…’let’s all be nice to one another’…old fashioned but useful advice I think.

*Just FYI guys – I can pretty much google you without your surname if you give up enough information…so you might as well tell me your surname. I often know who you are within about 10 mins of chatting, and well before I actually ask for your surname…

**The cat is Trim, Matthew Flinders faithful ship cat, who circumnavigated Australia then disappeared, and to whom Flinders wrote a touching epitaph which is on the memorial plaque near the statue. The café in the State Library is also named after the cat.

In which I ponder…rising strong

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perfectprotest-brene-brown-300x200

On Thursday evening I went to see Brene Brown speak at the State Theatre. If you’re not familiar with her, she’s a research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work, who has spent the past thirteen years studying vulnerability, courage, worthiness, and shame. But for most people who’ve heard of her, it’s mainly because she did a TED talk called The Power of Vulnerability, which is one of the top five most viewed TED talks in the world, with over 25 million viewers.

I first saw that talk soon after leaving my husband, and as the wife of an addict, it hit a nerve. It was the first time I had heard someone articulate what I instinctively had known about my husband and I’ve worked hard since to try to ensure that my life is authentic and brave, and that I surround myself with authentic and brave people – because I’ve learnt that is where the joy is.

So on Thursday night, Brene talked about the ‘Shit First Draft’ – or the way our instinctive emotional responses to triggers lead us to make up stories to try to explain our feelings. To illustrate this, she told a highly amusing and rather familiar story about her reaction to her husband once coming home, looking in the fridge and saying ‘we don’t even have lunch meat in this house’.

Now, I know how that would have played out in my house.

But the point she was making was that the stories we make up are all about us and our frailties, and really nothing at all about the person who has triggered us. So she had made up that her husband was shaming her for being a bad wife and mother and for failing at wife-ing and mothering. And further that he wanted to make sure she knew she was being shit at both – when there was really no need to do that because she already knew. When all he was actually doing was saying there was no lunch meat in the fridge, which was disappointing because he was really hungry and he’d been thinking that eating some lunch meat* would be good.

The reason she reacted in the way she did was that, in common with many of us, she has an internal narrative running that says she is not being a good wife or mother and that essentially she is not enough. And now I say – find me a working mother and/or wife who does not have this story running a loop in their head on an almost permanent basis. Or is that just me and Brene?

Anyway, she told us that the way to try to mitigate this type of reaction was to own it, to recognize it, to name it. So in this situation you would say

‘So the story I’m making up here is that you think I’m a terrible wife and mother, and you think that my failure to purchase lunch meat is evidence of this, and you want me to know this so that I can feel terrible and know that I am terrible’

And the idea is that when you say it out loud, the subject of your ire at least has an idea of what is going on for you, and can reassure you that you’ve got that wrong (assuming you’re not married to an asshole). In addition, saying it out loud will sometimes give you access to the absurdity of what you’re thinking, and you can start to recognize patterns.

I thought this was excellent advice. I’d been to the talk with one of the Julie’s and we talked about it over a couple of glasses of nice sav blanc in the bar afterwards, and I thought I was definitely going to implement this in my own life, because I reckoned that sometimes I did this sort of thing. Not often obviously. Just sometimes.

It was therefore rather regrettable that when I got in the following took place…

I walked in the door at 11pm to be greeted by a slightly grumpy teenager who wanted to know if I had printed her textiles project. I had, but it was still in the car – which in my house is 56 steps up a cliff away. Realising you’ve left something in the car is annoying at the best of times here, but if you’re tired I’m not exaggerating if I say it can be traumatizing.

So neither of us wanted to go up to the car, and it turned out that she had been waiting for me to come home because the textiles project wasn’t finished and she needed the printing to complete it. She hadn’t told me this before, but she did now, and she wasn’t that happy about it.

I was immediately pissed off. Properly pissed off. Angry is probably a fairer description of how I felt. And I said a number of things that I won’t repeat here, but did not exactly cover myself in glory. I may have slammed a couple of doors.

Then I realized what I was doing.

The story I was making up was that Anna thinks I’m a terrible parent, and that I’m letting her down, particularly by staying out late with a friend doing something I enjoy when I should be at home being a good parent, and that she wants me know that. She wants me to know that I am not enough. She wants me to feel bad.

I actually have quite a large body of documentary evidence that would suggest that this is not what my daughter thinks. I have cards, little notes, gifts. She actually thinks I’m the best mum anyone could ever have. I think she’s even used the word inspirational**

Of course the reason I think my daughter is thinking that is because that’s what I think. And I acted angry when actually what I was experiencing was shame.

So I went and had a chat with her. I told her that I feel a constant tension between pursuing the things that help me to have a happy life, and being the sort of 100%, 24/7 available parent that deep down I think I ought to be. And I’ve felt like this ever since I had the children, but even more so since I left their father. Because although I’ve never regretted leaving him, I know that the children have not benefitted from the loss of that nuclear family unit, and I very much wish that I had been able to provide it. If I was to have chosen a life for them, it would have been with a mother and a father who loved each other and a family life where I was mainly at home, not working long hours as I do now, and that there was all the stability that life means. It’s what I would want for them now as my children, and later when they might have children.

But that’s not the way things have turned out and I feel bad – guilty – about it.

The thing is that I could have stayed with their dad. I could have carried on living with him – I’d got used to the way our life was. I was unhappy. Very unhappy. There was a big empty hole where the love should have been. There were the women. And the rest. I was on anti depressants to treat the anxiety that is eventually unavoidable when you never feel confident that you are cared for, or enough for 13 years. But I’d lived with this for 21 years. I probably could have carried on living with his behavior.

The problem was that I couldn’t live with myself if I stayed.

I stayed way longer than I should have done, because I wanted to know I’d done all I could – that I would be able to look my children in the eye knowing they were hurting, and say ‘I honestly did my best. I gave it my best shot’.

I think the time has come to let go of that guilt. I may have been the one who ended the marriage, but it wasn’t my fault, and really my ex had left emotionally many years before I watched him walk up the road with a suitcase. If I could have given the children the family they wanted – that indeed I wanted – I would have done…if I could have done that without sacrificing my sanity, my potential for joy and my self esteem.

In the end I decided that I couldn’t, and I’m going to live with that.***

 

 

*what even is ‘lunch meat’?? Wasn’t it Winston Churchill who said that Americans and English people were ‘two nations divided by a common language’?

**this led me to reflect on what an utterly uninspiring life I actually lead. All I’m really hoping is that I might eventually inspire one of my children to remove the collection of damp towels and rotting food from their bedrooms. Then my work will be done.

***which leads me to Brene Brown’s latest book in the title ‘Rising Strong’ and what it means to be brave and brokenhearted.

In which I ponder…being normal

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being-normal

I was recently having a conversation with my ex-husband in which he suggested that the ‘normal’ thing to do in my situation would have been to partner up with someone again by now.

This took place in the context of a discussion about our (as yet undecided) financial settlement, and as a contribution to that discourse especially I think it has little merit. The answer to my concerns about my financial security going forwards is never going to lie in becoming dependent, or even partially dependent, on the income of someone else. I’ve done that once, and to be honest it hasn’t worked out terribly well. If I had one piece of advice for any women embarking on a new romantic partnership, it would be to behave from a financial point of view always as though your loved one might be gone at any time, in the blink of an eye – along with his income, his pension and his superior economic power. No matter how confident you are that it will last, or that even if it didn’t, he would look after your interests financially. I hope that the generation my daughter is growing up in will learn this lesson from their mothers, who are nearly always left financially disadvantaged by having prioritized parenthood over earning and career.

However, I digress…

This talk of ‘normal’ got me thinking. And anyone who knows me, knows that thinking is something I do rather a lot of.

What is ‘normal’ anyway? Being single is becoming more and more common. Does that make it normal? The Australian Bureau of Statistics predicts that the number of single person households in Australia will increase by 4.3m in the next 25 years – an increase of 65% – and that 54% of those households will be single women. Not that abnormal then am I, statistically speaking?

But more than that, I don’t subscribe to the idea that my normality is based upon my relationships with other people, particularly since that can create a veneer of said ‘normality’ which, when you scratch just beneath the surface, reveals something not quite so normal at all. My own marriage was a good example of that.

The thing is that I suspect my ex husband – along with many other people – takes some of his personal validation from the fact that he looks so normal, with an apparently healthy relationship, good job, nice home. Other-esteeming, they call that. Some people are unbalanced by people who refuse to conform to these social norms, or won’t let them define them. To be fair, men haven’t exactly been beating down my door offering to relieve me of my financial burdens, but I’ve not been in any rush to settle down, and these days I wonder if I will. I have a level of freedom that I’ve previously never experienced, and I am defined by no one except myself. I like that. Anyone who joins my life is going to have to deal with that.

My sister once said to me

“The thing about you is that you’ve never needed anyone”

I think I’ve mentioned this before here – but I was quite offended at the time. Now I think I understand better what she meant and I realize that to a certain extent it’s true, and not necessarily a bad thing (although I’m pretty certain her intention was not to flatter).

I don’t need anyone. It’s true. But not needing people means that those I have in my life have been chosen – for themselves and not just because they are able to meet a need in me. In doing so, I give them the freedom to choose me, or not. I think that’s healthy. My people are there because I have an authentic, real connection with them, they know who I am without the veneer of ‘normality’ and we chose one another. And we continue to choose one another every day.

If that’s being abnormal, then so be it. Seriously – who cares?

 

 

In which I ponder…validation and embarrassment

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embarrassment

My previous blog, which had had over 20,000 visitors by the time I stopped posting, was specifically about the experience of emigrating and full of chatty stuff about family life in a new country.

When I started this one, I didn’t have a clear idea of what it would be, except that I wanted to write. It’s simply evolved over time.

I’ve ended up banging on about my marriage and my divorce and indulging in a level of navel gazing that I thought I’d left behind. And although I enjoy writing it and I don’t find it troubling to do so, there is something I’m finding kind of challenging.

It’s a bit awkward really.

Because what I’m struggling with are the comments, particularly those on my Facebook page where I share it.

I’m absolutely fine with the lovely things people have said about the quality of the writing, and how much they enjoy reading it. It’s fabulous to know that people are connecting with it, and – in some cases – looking forward to each instalment. And it’s also great to know that it’s being quite widely read – so far in 31 countries.

However, I do find all the lovely things people say about me personally a bit mortifying. Now, you will have to bear with me on this – because I do tend to over think things a bit. But I’m a bit worried that people might believe that the purpose of the blog is to seek validation about myself and what happened. And it quite emphatically isn’t.

You may or may not know that I did post grad study in psychotherapy, eventually qualifying to practice. As part of my training, I had to take part in group therapy for two years, and through this process I learnt something interesting about myself. Well, actually I learnt a number of interesting (to me anyway!) things about myself, but I’m only going to bore you with one of them.

In group, members had the opportunity to say difficult things to one another in a controlled and safe environment.* And although I didn’t particularly enjoy hearing that sort of thing, I wasn’t massively disturbed by it either. It almost felt comfortable. Conversely, if someone said something really nice to me, I literally wanted the earth to open up and swallow me whole. I never entirely resolved what that was about, but I get the same sort of feelings when I read some of the comments. And today there were so many of them I had to remove the post from my wall.

I know enough to know that this is related to a lack of self worth.

But I’m also a realist.

And the reality is this. I’m really not inspirational or amazing or an especially good single parent, or an especially forgiving person.

In the last few years, there have been days – many of them – when I have definitely won no prizes for my parenting. I am no better at being a single parent than 99.9% of all the rest of them. I do what parents do whether they are single or not – I do the best I can for my children, and some days the best I can do is not that special.

And over this period of rebuilding my life I have been far from inspirational or amazing a great deal of the time. I have said vile things. I have railed against the world. I have been self pitying. I have bored my friends (and myself) with my tale of woe, my ‘why-me’s?’ and my obsessive picking over certain events. I have lost friends and rejected others.

As far as forgiveness is concerned – well that’s a journey I’m still on. I have forgiving moments and they are becoming more and more frequent. But there is still a way to go I think.

I’ve come out the other side of it a more cautious, more independent and more confident person. I’ve gained a level of self knowledge and ability to self reflect that I didn’t have before. And I try hard to understand human behaviour rather than judge it.

But I still don’t really like it when people are nice to me.

I’m a work in progress. I’ll let you know when I’m done…

*in the first week of group, we were invited to say if we thought we were going to have a problem with anyone. One of the members immediately said they thought they were going to have a problem with me – which is funny because I’d also sensed that I would have a problem with her, although, despite having permission to do so, I would never have said. I’m English you see. And here we are 6 years on and she’s one of my closest friends…

In which I ponder…the ties that bind

/ howtobemeagain / 3 Comments

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My ex-husband found out about my blog.

Not a massive surprise really, although I had been blocking key people (our children for example, and his family members) from any posts that I thought were very controversial.

He sent me an email and he was obviously upset and angry. Which I suppose should also not be a surprise. He said I had publicly shamed him.

I felt terrible. I still don’t like upsetting him.

The ties that bind two people who spent 21 years together are very strong, even when things have got seriously messed up.

So I called him – from my new landline, so that he couldn’t ignore my call. He didn’t put the phone down when he knew it was me.

And I told him I was sorry he was upset. That I had not intended to upset or embarrass him, but that I am simply writing about my life. That I own my experiences and that it is not my job to keep his secrets. But that I was sorry I had upset him. And I meant it.

I don’t want to demonise him. He’s just a man who was monumentally bad at being married. He listened to what I said about my writing and at the end when I offered to remove the post that had most bothered him, he said no. I could tell he was upset but it was a good conversation and I think we both felt better about it afterwards.

It’s strange, but when you know someone that well, talking to them is always kind of easy, even though generally we try to avoid it. It’s almost like it all never happened – kind of. There is a weird sort of distance of course, but it’s like everything and nothing has changed at the same time.

The truth is, sometimes people do bad things. And the reasons for them are complex, but rarely evil. My ex husband did many things that hurt me. But he also was a man who cried with laughter with me at a game show called “what’s in the box?“. He was a man who organised a ’30 and 13 days birthday’ party for me – especially allowed by the ‘National Birthday Council’ because my grandmother had died shortly before my actual birthday. The first dance at our wedding was Eric Clapton – Wonderful Tonight. I wouldn’t be surprised it he doesn’t remember that – not because he’s horrible, but because that’s just not the sort of thing he would recall. He used to sit in the cot with our son and read him stories. He always said pizza was ‘a scrotty bit of bread with cheese and tomato on’ and couldn’t understand why they were so expensive. He likes 80s disco music (I hated it) and he properly dances like a dad. He’s a man who can’t stand anyone touching his adam’s apple, which always made me wonder if perhaps he had been hung or strangled in a previous life.

I used to tell him he was the best person I knew. He’s an actual, real person and more than the sum of his actions. I don’t want to spend the rest of our lives hurting one another or picking over past hurts.

It didn’t work out.

C’est la vie…

*he didn’t make me write this

** but I did out of courtesy send it to him before I published

In which I ponder dating…

/ howtobemeagain / 1 Comment

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Over the last few years of singledom, I have learnt a few things about dating. And the lesson that stands out most clearly is this:

There is no group of people less qualified and more willing to give advice on dating than those who have been partnered up for 20+ years. 

There. I said it.

Dating is very different to being in a long term relationship – which is of course a skill and an art in which they have considerable expertise.

Having said that though, I am no slouch when it comes to long term relationships. I might be single now, but I was with someone for 21 years. At one point I was even winning the sibling rivalry contest in my family for who could be married the longest. I still am actually, although I very much hope I am overtaken.

It’s been surprising to me how many people – particularly women – tell me that if something happened to their marriage, they wouldn’t ever bother partnering up again. They believe that my life is full of forbidden pleasures, fun and a level of self determination that they envy. I can almost see the grimaces on the faces of my single friends from here.

Well, the grass is always greener eh? Conversely though, the majority of single people I meet – male and female – would very much like to find that special someone. Personally, I would hope that in any future partnership I would have pleasures, fun and self determination anyway.

This yearning for someone was driven home a couple of weeks ago when I attended a Marianne Williamson workshop. I was surprised by how many audience member questions related to issues around finding the right partner for life. And it was no small workshop – a full house at a large auditorium. People just really want to be with someone – after all, no (wo)man is an island.

But married and partnered people give out such conflicting information and advice – largely because they are not single, have not been single for many, many years and have no idea how dating and being single has changed in the interim*.

Sometimes they tell you that you should not do anything – that someone will come along when you are least expecting it. Ok. Perhaps. But on the other hand they also tell you that you need to get out there and meet people.

But not in bars.

And not on the internet because there are only weirdos there**

Right. So perhaps I will bump into someone at the supermarket, or at work (in an organisation which overwhelmingly employs women. Yay for that, but not a good place to find a man – even if finding a man at work was something that I would ever, EVER do). I must get out there looking for someone, but trying not to look for them. Or something.

What most married/partnered people imagine is that one of your nice friends – and for that you could substitute ‘married/partnered’ friends, as they tend to view your other single friends with a little bit of suspicion – I mean what sort of things do single people get up to together for goodness sake?! – will introduce you to someone. But married/partnered people tend to know other married and partnered people. They know you – who is single. And often that is it.

Additionally you apparently shouldn’t want to find someone – because that could be needy and desperate. At the same time though, you should be clear about what you want – even perhaps make a list (seriously?!). And you shouldn’t compromise, whilst also being careful not to overestimate your worth in the dating market. As one friend said to me – ‘stop going for the attractive men. Just find someone kind’. Hmmm.

Well – ideally I’d like to find someone I was both attracted to and who is kind. And loads of other stuff, but I’m reluctant to make a list. I’m very conscious when dating that there is really no point in continuing if you know that you are never going to want to see that man naked. A lovely single friend sent me a text recently which said ‘is it wrong to date someone I know I’m never going to sleep with?’. My reply – ‘you know the answer to this question…’.

One thing I know is that being in the wrong relationship is way more painful than not being in one at all. It’s why I’m a bit picky. By the same token, being in the right relationship would win hands down over being alone.

For myself, I appreciate all the advice – which is well meant and full of love. But at the same time, I’m just doing my own thing, and I know it’s difficult to accept but I know more about it than they do. I’m mixing it up with the odd foray into internet dating, along with not dating at all, and going out and about with my usual business and leaving it all up to fate.

If no one comes along, that’s fine. I can do this life on my own and it can be wonderful and joyful and exciting. But maybe I’ll meet the perfect man for me and it will be all those things and more. Maybe I already have. You never know…

*To give you an indication, dear Reader, of the extent to which dating changed between 1990 – which was the last time I had been single – and 2011, let me tell you a story…I ventured onto RSVP for the first time and chatted with a lovely man for several days. He was a journalist, interesting, my age and seemed very normal. I eventually felt confident enough to give him my mobile number. And by return he sent me a photograph of his erect penis. Now to be fair, this has never happened again, and I’ve given my number to plenty of people since. But I’m pretty sure this would not have happened in 1990. Partially because smart phones were still just things in sci fi movies. But you know what I’m saying…

**My dad, on discovering that I was using an internet dating site, said incredulously – ‘What sort of weirdos are looking for someone on the internet?! Erm, this sort of weirdo Dad. This sort.

In which I ponder how to let it go…

/ howtobemeagain / 2 Comments

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In the last few weeks, a 21 year relationship which began with love, hope and excitement, produced two beautiful children, and at its ending had spanned half my life, was reduced to a reference number and a one line entry in the Commonwealth Courts Portal.

Divorce, particularly when a marriage has produced children, is never anything to celebrate – even when the end of that marriage was both necessary and desirable. I felt sad, a few tears were shed, and a check in with a friend was required.

It sometimes feels as though some wounds are so big and so wide and so deep that they will never heal. I feel frustrated that when so much in my life is good, and positive and amazing, there is a corner of me that seems to have so successfully imprinted the pain of the experience of my marriage that I am easily plunged back into the moment of it.

I’ve recently felt as if I have unintentionally created a circuit where if any, even minor incident, raises uncomfortable feelings for me, my thought processes are immediately diverted and I am back in the pain, humiliation and devastation that marred my marriage. It’s as if opening the door to sadness and anger for any reason lets these feelings also tumble out, like Pandora’s Box.

However, I realise that those feelings can flood out only if I allow them. My life is not happening to me – I’m creating it every minute of every day. Alfred Adler said that all behaviour is purposeful. So what am I getting out of allowing myself to feel like this?

I was listening to a workshop by Carolyn Myss in the car recently and I think I might have found a clue. She talks about people living through their wounds (she calls this ‘woundology’) in order to protect themselves. And this rang a bell with me. I often feel that I am impervious to further hurt, because I am so hurt already. I’ve told myself that nothing is going to hurt me as much again, so I’ll be ok. But maybe this is only working because I’m holding onto the hurt. Have you ever had a terrible headache, for example, and directed yourself away from it by pinching yourself elsewhere? We find it hard to experience pain in more than one place at once. And if your head already really hurts, then banging it doesn’t really make it much worse – in fact it can serve to distract you a little.

So whilst I still hurt, nothing else can hurt me. If I let go of that hurt, I open myself up to the possibility of being hurt again.

But it occurs to me that pain, upset, wounds and challenges are part of the rich fabric of life. They are a mechanism through which we learn and develop. No one escapes. Everyone has a wound or two. And it might be possible that by holding onto mine I am preventing myself from further personal development. Even more importantly, it’s probably true that by creating mechanisms to prevent the bad stuff coming in, I am also denying myself the opportunity for joy – as they are one side and the other of each other.

So now all I have to do is work out how to let it go…

Postscript – to any previous readers, I seem to have inadvertently deleted my last post on the courage required to be authentic. Sorry about that! Entirely accidental (and a bit annoying to be honest!)

Additional postscript – I worked out how to reinstate posts I’d deleted, so it’s back. Yay!