It must be one of the most-repeated phrases offered me over this past six months. Give it time. It takes time. Time heals. Take your time. And here I am, with taking time enforced on me, and no idea of how quickly or slowly it will take to recover from pneumonia. The reason in part is that it is unpredictable and unseen. Had it been flu, symptomatic remedies, a few boxes of tissues, and I would bravely sit at my desk and recover as I worked. Fewer tissues means I would be getting better. But somewhere inside one of my…
Unreasonable behaviour
I have felt so unwell this week I haven’t even been reading books. I am not a lot better now, so no profound reflections this week, just this short piece I prepared earlier.
This is the week in which Vicky Pryce and Chris Huhne were handed custodial sentences for perverting the course of justice. The heart of it seems simply to be that Huhne has a tendency to drive too fast and get caught, and stood to lose his licence, and some mobility as a then Euro MP. It seems reasonable from the evidence that his then wife was under at least strong emotional pressure to dig him out of his hole. The law says it would not have been unreasonable for her to say no, but it was wrong to say yes. Huhne plainly didn’t think it unreasonable to ask. It’s what partnership is about, isn’t it?
Last weekend I encountered a neighbour from the flat below. She clearly suffers with dementia, having let her in several times from outside the front door in cold conditions, not sure what to do. She is vulnerable and I have sometimes felt bad about not taking time to stop and talk because I am on my way somewhere. She seems to have a thing about my flat, and at the weekend was knocking on my door. I let her in, a bit lost, but it happened several times in the afternoon, and whilst I did bring her in and sit her down and offer tea, she did just walk straight in without waiting. And she sees people and things not there and addresses them. Anyhow, the night I went down with flu she was talking to herself on my landing for a while, knocked on my door at 3 am and loitered, talking, in my lobby for hours. I didn’t sleep. Was she being unreasonable? I had two options: call the police (it wasn’t her fault) or wait and call social services. I did the latter, but it doesn’t guarantee anything, and my sleep may again be disturbed all night.
The following morning, with a half-hour walk in snow, not feeling too good, I found myself talking to a solicitor on my own. How, and when, and to what advantage, should we process divorce? There I was, aiming to kick into motion the one thing I never, ever wanted to do. I still don’t want this to have been the only reasonable thing we could have done. But we came soon to grounds for divorce. Either we live apart for two years (what’s this? More ‘real life experience’?) with loose ends on shared assets, or one must petition against the other. How do you dissolve a marriage that one partner does not want to hang onto, and the other cannot afford to? There was no adultery, violence or even what one would term unreasonable behaviour. It isn’t unreasonable to be what you were born, I wasn’t diagnosed until recently. I didn’t ‘turn into anything’, and it isn’t unreasonable to be a woman. More importantly, it isn’t behaviour. But equally, is it unreasonable for a wife to withdraw all emotional and sexual support? It’s in the legal list –, but for a trans partner? So to respond to the finality of my wife’s decision, one of us has to have behaved unreasonably, at the same time as saying we don’t blame each other. Maybe neither of us has. So the law would not allow us to stay married (if I want gender recognition) and has no mechanism to allow us blamelessly to part without simply waiting on a situation that cannot change.
So, back to Pryce and Huhne and justice. If we do a deal, one to petition the other for unreasonable behaviour, when truly we don’t feel that to be true –, would that be to pervert the course of justice? I shall not contest: there is no point. So what do you have to do, to really, really demonstrate that marriage has come to an irretrievable end because one partner has apparently ‘changed sex’? Just wait? I shall be up for my gender recognition certificate before we can do it that way. A one night stand would be so simple by comparison …
So a desperate politician, a loyal or afraid wife, an old lady with dementia, a wife who can’t love a woman and a woman being as reasonable as she can about herself. Maybe justice isn’t always as clear or obtainable as we would like it to be.
Loss and letting go (1)
They aren’t there. The books. There are now only mine, not the ones about attachment and loss. By John Bowlby – who asserted that to deal with these things we had to know and understand our past. How bloody ironic! It’s my discovery that has caused the loss and grief of such a profound attachment.
That sounds bitter. Only sort of; but it is high time I processed this stuff, so I think it will take a few blogs over time to get there. Somehow this week I have been surrounded by people and events and other writings, that are all about why loss and attachment is so difficult, and how it ruins lives that can’t move on.
Last week I watched an old episode of ‘Lewis’ (UK police drama featuring a lot of doing what’s best as much a what’s right). In this one, a father with two young daughters feels his only way out of shame (not his own) is to kill himself and take them with him. Well, jumping out of the top window of the British Museum, wasn’t going to happen really, was it? No. The daughters are saved, he jumps, and is caught by Inspector Lewis’ sidekick, the intellectual Hathaway. He and the man grasp each other’s wrist as the man dangles over the assembled crowd. Hathaway somehow knows the man doesn’t actually want to die. Surely he wouldn’t be hanging on if he did? Stupidly/heroically Hathaway releases his grip to convince the man that he has chosen to hold on and survive. If the man had decided to go, of course, he would have dropped. His choice. Now affirmed in his decision, the man is hauled back to safety.
This is the way we like it to be.
Holding on is instinctive, and letting go is a product of decision. Maybe you have no more strength? Is letting go a sign of weakness, just a giving in? Does holding on hurt? If you are holding onto something hot, sharp, spiky, constrictive, then it would be a relief, and if you fall having lost your fingers, why didn’t you let go sooner? Letting go is a positive act of recognising loss as what it is. So why is that so hard? Maybe you feel that someone is letting you go and they should not: that you are such a benefit to them and they don’t realise it. That’s a hard one, isn’t it? It isn’t our call, truly. Loyalty, commitment, faithfulness are essentials to love and to life itself. But there is a world of difference between the altruistic refusal to leave someone ill or injured or old when they are not wanting to be a burden or even a danger. That is your choice. But just because you love someone who may have loved you even intensely, doesn’t mean you can hang around on their wrist thinking it’s in their best interests. No. It’s about you, isn’t it?
This Christmas I had to conclude that letting go my love is my responsibility. And that means understanding the loss so that I can let go well and with good grace, for my own sake. Am I resisting out of hope that love has not actually gone? That being a man was not really a prerequisite for the eligibility of being kissed? That somehow it may dawn that I really am the same person and all will be forgiven? The loss I resist is the cold hard fact that I am no longer desirable, and whatever I feel, that part is not my call. Yes, right now, there is no-one in my world that actually wants to hold me, comfort me, love me, be intimate with me, and in that way validate and affirm and trust me.
This is what I do not want to know.
And yes, I can believe it all began with my mother, and that from the start, I was a nuisance. A necessary one, a deliberately-generated one, but nonetheless a bit of a burden. I spoilt my mother’s young life as much as I enhanced it. It’s true: as soon as you find love you also find rejection. As a parent, you like the gurgle, but not the poo. That winning smile, but not the tantrum in the wine bottle aisle. The moment they fall sweetly asleep, but not the bawling at 2 am. From the start: will we ever really be able to trust anyone? And can we survive without unconditional love? Even if you find it, you will never really know that is the case. Unconditional love is a hypothesis we spend our lives testing. The science is inconclusive, as they say; more research is needed.
This is the heart of loss: the possibility of replacement. You can never replace a parent or child, so you deal with the loss in an appropriate way. Parents go, a spouse remains, you are protected and loved, it is enough. You can tell yourself that a life was complete, well-lived, fulfilled, and that helps. A young life seems such a waste, and we may rationalise the perfection of their short life. The lost one has gone, and we are safe to gild memories, keep the photos, perfect the shared love, remember and preserve. There is mental replacement in a way unavailable to those with relatives gone missing.
We all had romances when young, and some have had affairs when older, and most of us know what it is to break up at a point that wasn’t just the fading of rose petals. We moved on best when there was another love; another lilypad to jump to. Or at least were happy when we found another after a short cold swim. We sustained our beliefs in ourselves that we were desirable, lovable – and dismissed our loss as ‘it’s their loss’. Even leaving a loving parental home was probably best survived by having a boyfriend or girlfriend, especially if parents were becoming a nuisance who didn’t understand our needs – just like they felt when we were born.
Really dealing with loss, really letting go, means something else. It means when there is no-one to catch you, no replacement or substitute, no affirmation of your desirability or personal value, and you are letting go something you really do still want but that will never be what you want – you are not killing yourself, or even part of yourself.
OK. Shut up Hathaway and stop intellectualising or your wrist will snap. This feels bad, but I am beginning to understand that I really am alone in this world and that I have not lost unconditional love. It was never there. In truth my feet are inches from the grass, and like it or not I have to walk away. It isn’t night, and it isn’t sunset, it’s just grass. There is nowhere greener, but at least I am allowed to walk on it. No-one is holding me, I have to let go. I don’t lose anything by letting go; I lost that some while back.
To be continued …