The Good Friday Thought for Today

I wasn’t sure the the piece that follows this introductory blurb would be appropriate for the blog, it’s a very personal piece I wrote early on when I was trying to grapple with the pain of living without The Absent Father.  If you’re a regular on the blog you’ll know this is a recurrent, if not dominant, theme.  The great news to report is it is getting easier.  Whether this is the passing of time, or the amount of times I’ve regurgitated this pain I don’t know, but it is getting easier.  This was about the first time I found my way into any form of peace and although I lost that peace relatively quickly, it is interesting for me to read now, mark the changes in perception, see more clearly where I’ve come from and who I am now.

I’ve had a few self imposed rules when writing this blog, and one of them is never to describe my characters, just me.  It is really up to you what you think The Absent Father looks like, or His Woman.  My daughters are truly beautiful young women, but their privacy is important, so I try not to be too explicit.  However this piece does describe what happened when I met His Woman for the first time.  I hope you can forgive the less than flattering descriptions, although I have tried to be a vague as possible.  The piece has a dreamlike quality now I return to it, and I believe you can see I was really very mad all through 2008, which is when I think this was written, although I can’t find a date for the original.  The idea for the piece came from an email my dear and wonderful father sent to me, as he was grappling with his grief at losing my mother, and his own fading mortality.  He found a peace and a way of dealing with the cards life had dealt him that even now I can only glimpse at.  Father Paul, my mother’s Priest who took very seriously his duty of taking care of the bereaved family of one of his flock, much admired my father.  They met for lunch quite frequently, enjoying each other's company, talking of much, including spirituality.  My father acquired a strong faith in the last months of his life, a deep and abiding understanding of the nature of the divine.  He said it wasn’t a faith that needed a church, but just it all made sense.  I wasn’t  aware of what he meant at the time, my own faith having been devastated by the life events that had come my way.  But after my father’s death, Father Paul said that he wished even one of his regular church goers had the understanding that my father had achieved in such a short time.  I acquired a faith in teenage, and tried at that time to explain it to my interested father.  He could not see why I had faith, how I could know.  In those last few months he said simply ‘I didn’t realise to have faith you still have doubt’  My faith sustained me through three decades before it was demolished.  I  do, at times, feel shameful for parading my lack of faith almost as a trophy, it seems inexplicable that all that once was so clear is now murky and incomprehensible.  I’m not proud of my lack of faith, unlike my radical atheist brother, I don’t have the certainty of belief or unbelief.  I’m still questioning the ‘why’ in my life and fearful that anything I have will be taken from me when I least expect or deserve it.  Perhaps I am still very mad, or maybe very, very sane.

The London Bridge Moment

Sarah

  

I have an idea in my head which is going to test my ability of the English language to the full in trying to express something which is largely conceptual. Let me try.

There are many things in life that I don't understand, things that matter I mean, but as I'm getting older I have a way to way to park the incomprehensible and just leave these 'things' as a set of loose ends until something happens to change it. You know when it happens, as it's like a switch being thrown in your head. You can't indeed, mustn't, rush it; it'll only happen when you are ready. And be wary of the psychotherapist who tries to push you too quickly.

What's difficult, getting on for impossible, is to put this 'bleak problem' into its own compartment (or better in the plural...) when it's just a bundle of loose ends with no linking connectors to anything else. Meanwhile you just have to walk around this problem and try your best to stop it interfering with everything else in your life. Also, the answer to your question 'why?' is the most difficult of all to answer.

                                                                                                                 

Text Message to Daddy 2 18 Oct 2008 15:55             

Suddenly it becomes clear.  The Absent Father has cracked up.  There is no why.  He’s gone mad.  On London Bridge Station a great calmness came upon me.  My non answer.

I suppose it was coming, but of course I didn’t see it.  The non answer.  The endless torture of 'why' my straying husband stopped loving me and committed adultery with a woman he met on the train, leaving me and the children, and the dog and everything, except his racing car, for her.  Now as if I’ve come up for clear delicious air from a terribly murky pond, it doesn’t matter.  How has this happened, how have I jumped out of those chains I found myself in.  I blame my psychotherapist.  Well, maybe, but once again it is the support of others that has given me my first taste of freedom for years.

When you are dominated, fascinated, obsessed by something, you absorb the information about it quickly, you search out everything you can find about the thing, so you can feed on the nuggets to satisfy your obsession.  Therefore I think it’s time to admit I know quite a lot about my husband’s girlfriend.  I think she knows quite a lot about me, and none of it good I should imagine, but let’s draw a veil over that, this is about me coming to terms, and she is at the centre of all this.

Once we had that fateful conversation when my beloved husband, my reason for being, told me that he loved someone else it was like a dam had opened and he kept talking.  Except for one thing, he didn’t want to tell me her name.  I found that out searching through his things and found a nauseating little credit card sized poem with the words ‘you’re the sweetest most important thing to me’ on it, and she signed it.  So now she had a name, but for me not a face.  I could not bear the thought of seeing her.  He’d told me she was beautiful ‘a real Shilpa Shetty type’ and she had beautiful skin which as you can imagine, didn’t do the balance of my mind much good.  I’m fair and have somewhat battered skin.  Several years ago I had successful red vein treatment on my thighs, and had always rather been ashamed of my body.  Funny writing it now, me, ashamed.  True I have moments of self doubt, I’m not delusional, but now I can look in the mirror and think to myself ‘Sarah, you aren’t half bad’ and really mean it.  The excess weight that pushed my straying husband into the arms of another, was the thing that got me down most of all.  But he couldn’t say how much he hated the way I looked, I was defensive, politicised about weight, depressed at feeling outside the real world.  I would have conversations with myself that I would have to admit that I was too fat for ordinary clothes and go and shop at Evans.  I really didn’t believe I could lose the weight, thought in moments of lonely desperation that I was invisible and lost.  With the girls maturing into beautiful young women I felt superfluous, my job done as a sexual being, and now time to step back, sit at the back of the room in black, my bloom lost forever in the march of time.

What a load of old nonsense!  Really it didn’t take much to change all that.  Ok it did, it took him going, but the changing of myself, well it was possible, all it took was love and time and care: acknowledgement that I am worth it and I am beautiful.  Odd that I have to be grateful to His Woman who is so convinced of her own beauty, and so, so wrong.  First of all I set to work on my skin.  I’d always been to the beauty therapist for ‘the basics’ and it was a source of enormous frustration that I responded so badly to waxing, coming up in a horrid rash.  Well of course I understand now, my skin was so dry and so poorly exfoliated that the delicate English skin I possess was shocked to its core to have hot wax poured on it and understandably spent weeks in red rashes as a protest.  So I listened to my friend and beauty therapist, Mandy, and really asked her what I should do.  She has been gently trying to get me to do more with myself for years, but always I stood back as it would be spending money on me, and that seemed pointless, the first thing to give up when the bank statement took a dive.  I also come from a background which encouraged ‘natural beauty’ completing missing the point that anything ‘natural’ takes a lot of work, ‘artificial’ is a lot easier.  So Mandy gave me some tips and I started putting moisturiser on my body every day, exfoliating every week and the results were astounding.  Then my wonderful Aunt told me about Silky Mitts, and my skin improved beyond recognition.  Gone were the lumpy upper arms, gone were the dry knees, there I was, looking more feminine that I’d done in years.  The horrific once-a-year-because-I have-to bikini wax for the beach holiday has been replaced by a monthly regime augmented with strong painkillers and I’ve left the sisterhood forever.  I never joined a Women’s Group, but I realise I absorbed an awful lot of their beliefs with my contact with intelligent, active women in my young days, taken on values that have not served me well, making me strident and intolerant, but at the same time insecure, frightened and ignorant.  I didn’t do all those things they achieved, but stood and watched and listened, but went back to ‘my man’, with a veneer of independence, a very thin veneer.

The exercise class was also wonderful.  Jazzercise is a general fitness class where you do cardio-vascular and stretching routines to music.  Elements from other fitness disciplines are included, and I always found great satisfaction in the boxercise routines.  My bingo wings vanished, my waist reappeared, my tummy flattened and all the time I punched my aggression into the face of this unknown woman, this superior being, the young beauty that had so beguiled my straying husband that he could not help himself.

Since those early days many people have seen His Woman and reported back to me on their experiences.  My lovely hairdresser was so sweet.  Ian is, unusually, a straight man who works as a woman’s, and occasionally men’s hairdresser, married to a nice woman and I’ve known him for years.  He used to do The Absent Father’s hair before getting into Colchester for a hairdo became too complicated, and it was cheaper and quicker for The Absent Father to have his hair done in London.  It’s a false economy, because, now he looks utterly dreadful, it’s very short, and quite aging, but that was his decision, made some time ago now.  Ian cycles down the road where my straying husband now lives with His Woman, and many, many months ago as I was sitting in the chair in his salon gazing at myself in the mirror he came to me serious faced and worried. 

‘I’ve got something to tell you Sarah’ he said looking into my eyes looking at his from the mirror.

‘Yes’ I said smiling encouragingly

‘I hope you won’t be cross, or upset’

Goodness, what has he done? I thought to myself.

‘No, go on’

‘Well I cycle past where The Absent Father is now, and I’ve seen them, quite close up’

‘Oh yes’ I say, interested, as I always wanted all the information on the lovely couple.

‘And, she’s nothing to look at’

Relief, and I smile at his kind worried face

‘Yes, I know, I have been told’

‘You’re not cross are you’

‘Why should I be?’

‘Well I thought you might be, she really isn’t anything special’

And then he babbled on, pleased that I was ok with knowing that he regarded my husband’s girlfriend in such a way.  I could understand his guilt, he loves women, and can see beauty in all types of women of all ages, it’s what makes him such a good hairdresser for women, and makes his statement so surprising.  But he wasn’t alone and over the months the increasing number of people who have seen or met His Woman remain unimpressed by my straying husband’s choice of companion.

Of course I did tell myself that people do tell you things they think you want to hear, and so I did take every damming statement with a pinch of salt, I was so much the loser that it would take a very hard hearted soul to be absolutely truthful.  A couple of male friends were more basic in their description of what charms His Woman was using to delight the straying husband, and that was hard to take.  Admittedly these were men who hadn’t seen her, but still I found it hard to think that people were telling me the truth about her.

The straying husband continues to make bad decisions, especially where the children are concerned.  He was terribly keen that they should meet His Woman more or less as soon as possible.  I don’t know exactly when he started asking them, but within a few months the pressure had built up, and DN1 wanted to meet the woman, wanted to put a face to that name.  The meeting past agreeably and DN1 was not altogether condemning the woman.  Of course then DN2 was under even more pressure to meet her, and it was really too soon for DN2.  The whole thing went spectacularly pear shaped, with DN2 not speaking to her father for several weeks.  These muck ups have continued to occur with The Absent Father seemingly try to talk DN2 round as it would make his life easier if she was civil to His Woman, and His Woman cannot, apparently, understand DN2’s aggression to her.  I suppose I should have realised there and then what she is, it is incomprehensible that anyone in His Woman’s position cannot see that ‘his’ children might not be thrilled by her presence.  But it appears, so I have been told, that she seems to think that we should have the bunting out for the life choice The Absent Father has made.

It has been very strange living with the grief of a bereavement of this sort.  And make no mistake, it is a bereavement.  Ok, he still walks round, but seeing him is like watching a phantom, a hallucination that reality can’t support.  The man I loved is lost, the man who cared and was solid and reliable.  All he asks now is ‘What do you want me to do’ in response to any kind of emotional problem, I tell him, he does what he’s told.  An automaton, who apparently sees worth and value in a woman who continued to pursue him when he was back with me, after my father’s diagnosis of terminal cancer, after telling me he didn’t want to lose his life, there was too much at stake.  Or is that the version I’ve been told to make him seem more innocent.  It was easier to see him as this victim of passion, powerless in the face of extreme beauty, but more and more people have given me their descriptions of this woman – ‘very ordinary with misplaced vanity’, ‘Shilpa Shetty she is not’, ‘brassy’ ‘crass’, so that doesn’t quite hold up.  She became bigger in my mind, and I began to worry about meeting ‘them’.  DN1 had already done it, by the woman’s changing room in TK Maxx, and others had seen them on their run, crossing the road together (“and I said to Alex, ‘look at the state of that, oh my God that’s The Absent Father with her’”, to quote the wonderful Eunice), in Asda (he pushes the trolley, says it all really) and on and on, so I began to feel anxious about how I would react, whether I would feel intimidated, how it would feel.  This I told no-one, but I think anyone with an ounce of emotional sophistication would realise this.

Enter my psychotherapist.  Interestingly it was the counsellor we tried together, and should have returned to, that had it right.  She described The Absent Father as being a small dog with two leads, an image he confirmed as a good description of his problems in those early days when the news first broke of his infidelity.  But the counsellor is no more, and my solitary journey through the brambles of my mind is supported by my psychotherapist.  He seems very perceptive, sometimes enormously challenging, sometimes surprisingly comforting.  I know many people view talking cures as little more than time to talk about yourself to someone who is paid to smile at you, but in reality it is a more challenging process.  And a private one, so you’ll forgive me if I only pick out the details of my sessions that I want to use for this exploration of the other woman. 

I’ve been getting very angry recently, and even more irritated when someone will say, in a very well meaning way ‘oh you’re in the angry phase’.  There is nothing more exasperating than well meaning people telling you your journey into the unknown horrors of grief and rejection is a tried and tested path and press the buttons and you’re onto the next part.  It feels that the whole thing could be understood by the rest of the world, and the fact that you seem utterly at sea further undermines your sense of belonging to that world.   And thus the anger boils.  Then other things happen, apparently unconnected to the destruction of the marriage, slow cars, broken photocopiers, another voice on the radio saying ‘different to’ rather than ‘different from’ and you feel the rage scorching your soul, which how I’ve been for the last two or three weeks.  So I get to my psychotherapist and he asks how I am and I tell him, angry.  So he then gives me what feels like a command.  ‘You need to go and see His Woman, knock on her door and say ‘I’m Sarah’.  My first thought was mixture of ‘Yes, and NO’, maybe it wasn’t a thought, maybe it was a feeling.  This woman who has dominated my life for the last 18 months, actually nearly two years now.  Why would I want to, this is just gratuitous, grown up people don’t need this. I can be dignified and mature.  Or was I frightened?  Bullied by an image in my head by someone who I feel has triumphed over me.  I didn’t want to lose my straying husband, and cannot understand what can be so overpowering that there was nothing I could do to stop him.  Everything I thought would tie him here apart from me he has rejected.  Such must the power of this woman that he’s left everything for her.  It is bewildering.  So to go and say ‘I’m Sarah’, my heart raced.  But my psychotherapist told me he couldn’t make me, and wouldn’t think less of me if I didn’t as it was my choice.  But the decision had already been made.  I had a strategy.

I’m not sure if it’s cowardice, good manners, or maturity, but I’ve always, up to now, tried to be kind through this whole business.   When dealing with The Absent Father, I’ve tried to be straight forward, have chosen to be honest, trustworthy and reliable.  This is sometimes at odds with the crippling pain I have endured since he finally left, but I feel more at peace with myself if I am not succumbing to the spitefulness that boils as the injustice of my lot.  When I had a coherent moral structure and faith, I would explain this outlook as my choice for life: to be kind, not think bad things about people and try as far possible to do everything with the welfare of others as paramount.  A veritable living saint, but what they never tell you, that saints are hard to live with if they don’t love themselves.  And the ‘new’ commandment is to love the Lord you God with all your soul, with all your strength, with all your might, and love your neighbour as yourself’, not more than yourself, so maybe i wasn’t saintly, just playing an emotional pass the parcel, if I love you, you will love me, because I cannot love myself, or at least couldn’t do it very well.

The practical upshot of this rather distorted philosophical outlook is that I do kind things, thoughtful things, helpful things, which in themselves are not bad, far from it, but when they are viewed from the position of a doormat take on rather a different interpretation.  Still, it’s a set of behaviours I’ve had for years, and as a way of being, not bad really, if I value myself.  If.  One of these things is I drop the straying husband’s post off at his love nest when I pass the door, about once a week.  Yes, it does seem unnecessarily doormat-ish, but to be honest, when I first started I could feel my heart race, just walking up the ugly concrete steps to that overbright white plastic door with it’s inappropriate neo-Georgian modelling.  Taking in the purple-grey slate chippings that just don’t go with the dark orange and lavender.  The utterly tasteless hanging basket with its selection of annuals by the door in colours that neither go with each other or the yellow pebble dash that covers the front of this little end of terrace love nest.  To stand and look at the window with muslin where the net would be and breathe deeply.  It is the antithesis of everything my straying husband held good about a home, and this has for many, many months eaten into me as more evidence of  how terrible it must have been in the idyl that is mud and Labradors, marmalade and stockpots that characterised our middle-aged existence.  But by repeating this behaviour, sitting in the car, looking at the house and first thinking ‘why’, then ‘well’ has been useful.  It has become easier, less emotional, more a sensible thing to do to keep the goodwill flowing, as much as it can, at this terrible time of destruction that is divorce.  The time before this I actually put the letters through the letter box with them at home.  It wasn’t planned, just I was in town and it seemed silly to avoid this act just because ‘they’ were behind the closed doors.  I sat in my car and watched the outline of a woman I didn’t know being followed round by a shape I knew so well, attributing characteristics to the poses, her walking ahead, him following rather round shouldered.  She seemed bigger than him, or was that what I wanted to see.  On that occasion I was going to see my psychotherapist , and so I got to him, my heart pounding and talked it all through, how it felt, why I did it until my heart calmed.

So this time, I could take the post round, but not for any other reason than to see her.  Put a face to the name.  My psychotherapist and I discussed the idea, and he assured me that it didn’t matter what the outcome was, I could burst into tears, run away, it didn’t matter, just doing it would be important.  And it was, so very, very important.

I parked the car in another road and walked round.  Oddly it was just as I had done when he wanted to leave that first time and she wouldn’t let him.  Whatever went on between them I’ll never know, but what I do know is she never gave up, and when faced with a real crisis, she rises to it, redoubling her efforts to reinforce  my husband’s need to be with her.  Whenever I face her, it seems I lose.  Is this because I am the wrong woman in my husband’s life? What on earth can he see in this hard faced, ordinary woman with stretch marks, appalling taste in make-up and a sense of her own beauty that borders on delusional.  Sorry, you’ve been waiting for this bit and I’ve skipped on.  Well I took a deep breath, walked up those hideous concrete steps and knocked on the door. A tall, rather unimpressive, hard faced young woman faced me.

 ‘I’m Sarah, we need to talk’

At this point she tried to close the door on me,

‘I have nothing to say to you’

Nothing.  Nothing.  Of all the things she could have said, nothing was the worst thing.  My foot went in the door.  We scuffled.  My rage boiled.  Oddly, I didn’t feel I wanted to hit her.

I’m sorry I only have vague memories of the shouting and insults I hurled at this appalling woman.  She is unrepentant, smug even.  And completely convinced of her absolute beauty, and more importantly, her supremacy.  The Absent Father chose her, and me, getting cross at her, and then him the following day when he dropped DN2 off and didn’t check she could get in and DN2 spent 2 hours sitting alone in the dark waiting for me to return, have reinforced in him the relief he has at leaving me and my rages.  Has my London Bridge moment faded into the mists with all the other false dawns of recovery.  I hope not.

DN2 and I were travelling up to London on the Saturday after she was abandoned by her father and I really lost the plot with him.  Wine fuelled rage stormed at him, and DN2 tried to stop me, but I was absolutely incandescent.  Of course, this is one of the reasons he left.  Sober, I am kind, understanding and generous.  But once I found out about the affair, the control that was so automatic that I didn’t even need to think about it left me, and the hurt buried under the layers of respectability bubbled up in uncomfortable wine fuelled outbursts.  And he couldn’t and wouldn’t deal with it.  Alcohol had played a big part in our lives, with The Absent Father always thinking we drank ‘too much’.  Maybe, but maybe if he’d loved me more we wouldn’t have been dulling the pain of our lives with nice bottles of wine and good glasses of sherry.  The endless rejection by him of me that built up over the years and so characterised our relationship was hard to take.  Odd when others were around he always seemed more privately keen on me, and it seems strange since it appears that he is a laughing stock with a self-obsessed, painted frump and more than content to break all the rules of public displays of affection that would have so appalled him.  But then he is having a mid life crisis and I suppose trying to be logical is never going to bring understanding to this situation.

So, yes, what happened at London Bridge Station.  Nothing really.  I hadn’t really thought about what had happened over the last 48 hours.  I was still pleased I screamed into His Woman’s face, told her she had taken the man I loved and trusted more than anything in the world, and she said I needed to talk to The Absent Father.  Entirely secure in her world.  Well, time will tell, but does it now matter to me.

There I was, on London Bridge Station and a calmness descended.  My mind felt like it opened and things I had struggled with sort of slotted in.  She is utterly dreadful.  She lives in a ghastly little house decorated with appalling taste.  She is not exactly plain, but not a show stopper.  Dreadful taste in clothes, a dumpy figure and dyed looking hair with thinning bits that amazing skin I was told about, frankly nothing to write home about.  There is no earthly reason what a sane man is doing with this woman.  Except he’d had enough of me, and needed a change.    She is remorseless and he is weak.  I am too good to spend my life thinking I am second class to a woman when faced with a nice man talking about the problems with his marriage, doesn’t say ‘you must talk to your wife’.

So I don’t know why.  But I know I’m worth more.  Yes it hurts when he says he’s absolutely fine, because he shouldn’t be.  A good and kind and loving woman has been kicked all round the field for no other reason than she could be.  I’m better looking than she is, always was, always will be.   I’m kind, and clever and loving.  I like a drink and have a fearful temper.  I’m brave and strong and have opinions .   Sometimes the world bears heavily on my shoulders, sometimes I don’t understand what people really want, or really mean, but do you know what, I want to listen and learn.   I cry, I laugh. I have opinions I can’t justify, and those I can.  I’m going to hell in a handcart, but fortunately it’s a big handcart so there are rather a gang of us with corkscrews and hankies.  And maybe we’ll turn left and avoid the journey downwards.  I think so.