Affairs of the heart

Yesterday I spoke to H, my employer, and while she applied green eye shadow to her eye lids, we spoke of our inability to experiment with more daring make up and she said: “ You know…my mother didn’t teach me any life skills, she never taught me too cook, to apply make up and she didn’t teach me seduction…”
I commented that my mother also never taught me seduction, something that I am extremely bad at and which would certainly benefit me now.
“ That is a shame, “ said H, “ she would have been good at it, she married twice.”
This comment perturbed me somewhat…because it showed me how things can always look different from the outside, painted better, constructed differently, the angle of the lighting accentuating the best features…when inside, should one remove the rug, one would find all sorts of things rotting away.

I remember finding three old notebooks in my grandma’s garage once whilst scavenging for vintage clothes worn by my mother and my aunts.
They belonged to my mother when she was around eighteen and dating my father and in it she wrote poetry, which was beautiful and fun. I told her about it, we read them together and I kept the notebooks on the shelf with my books.
It was just after my sister was born that I, wanting to borrow a lipstick and not wanting to climb the stairs to first floor of our house to ask my mother for it, looked into my mother’s bag and found the notebooks. I took them out, not thinking too much about it, along with the lipstick and it was only in my room, when I flicked through them that I noticed she added a poem to it, written in the hospital, when she was recuperating after having my sister.
The poem was addressed to my stepfather and it was so crushingly sad that it literally made me lose my breath. In it, my mother told him that, although she was having a third child by him, she never loved him and he never captured her, never truly saw. This reminded me of how I asked her once why she married my stepfather and she said she married him because she knew that if a child cried in the night, he would get up and tend go to the child.
OK so my father was emotionally ill prepared for a wife and a screaming kid at the time of their marriage, even though he wasn’t that young and they dated for seven years…I am not defending him, but I can see how he was never a person, not unlike most men, that is a natural with babies and very young children. But as soon as I was big enough to have adventures, we did and my brother recalls the same thing. I can also see how things that were put into motion unravelled to the point of self-destruction and I can also see how my mother probably had her illusions shattered in that relationship. I also believe that change is only ever born out of anguish so I always felt very proud that she went against the patriarchal society of that era and she left him, not turning back and perhaps, seeing that at the age of 4 made me more equipped to demand quality of life.

I immediately put the notebooks back into her bag and few days later when she gave them back, the pages that I read were torn out.
At the time I confided only to Ana and my father over this. Ana and I conceded that it was a very tragic affair but my father only berated me for going into her bag. I was 15 at the time and unable to read between the lines of human emotion.
Ten years later, she died. I spent time with her in her last months and she was, as always, taciturn, her inner world enclosed so tightly within her that nothing would ever pervade it. She was always very silent. I cannot remember her ever being truly joyful or silly or humorous, and yet when I look at the early photographs of her, I see a different girl, someone that was capable of fun and frolic and had just as cheeky sense of humour as my father. So what happened? What happened to my mum?

Right after the funeral, I visited my father at his office and we went for a coffee to a small place just opposite his work building. We sat upstairs and since it was mid morning, we were the only two people there, patiently waiting for our drinks, when my father looked at me and suddenly said: “ I miss your mother. I never loved anyone the way I loved her.” And as he said it, his words choked him, he cracked a little…it was one of those moments that happen suddenly, despite the fact you don’t want them to happen, they just spill out. I looked at him visibly pained and we had that split second of something really deep, before he composed himself and I filed that moment so deep inside me that only a very good archaeologist would be able to find it, digging ever so slowly.

I have seen the same defence mechanism in myself also…having been hurt by a particular thing in one relationship, I concentrate so strongly on never repeating it again that I only ever see men that exhibit no such mistakes, but in doing so, I fail to take the whole person in and although I don’t end up with the same thing, I get someone with a whole different set of problems.
Although I sometimes curse the fact that I have effectively been single for over 3 years, I also see that I am not the same person I was 3 years ago and perhaps this time that seems like a waste is sometimes needed in order to truly lose the remains of the previous hurt and be able to really see a new person entering your life for what they truly are.
And this whole concept that we, women, should need to be able to move, dress and act in a particular way to entrap a man to offer us a life we yearn for is, as always, foreign concept to me. Was my mother any happier having the life she wanted with a man she never loved than not having a life she wanted with a man she loved? My bets are on no, she wasn’t. That was clearly visible in her every movement, in the way she never engaged with us, the way she kept herself firmly shut at all times, just offering the veneered surface that looked as if we had a mother…and I often felt, regarding this issue, as if I am one of those women, having broken down on the motorway and waiting on the cold shoulder in the dark for the rescue, feeling vulnerable, who think that buying a life size male doll one can inflate and position in the driver’s seat in order to look they are not alone and available for any psycho to abuse. That is all very well, but it is an illusion and should anyone want to get you, inflatable man will still just sit and smile in the seat next to you. But, like most relationships and things in life… only from the distance it will appear real.