Day 0492

I am currently enduring the spectral, wooden cliche that is the Australian soap is Home and Away.
I just happen to be in the room with someone watching the thing and as much as I try, I can’t block it out the freaking melodrama.
After he wafted away from our relationship, Halfman told me the whole thing was like ‘something out of Home and Away. I was mega insulted. I mean, I could see what he was saying but he wasn’t being funny; he was serious – telling me that my months of growing to care for him, of intense emotional sharing and especially my months of being kind and gentle and forgiving of a difficult situation was somehow cliched and embarrassing and torrid in the worst sense of the word.
Now that I’m being forced to encounter this TV show in the flesh I am even more livid. It is a gathering of the Lowest Common Denominator in all forms: culture, fashion, morality, thoughts, story lines, dialogue. If I was really lonely and had a big bowl of buttery popcorn, a red wine and some chocolate, I might be able to indulge.
But otherwise it is just gross.
Kind of like Halfman.
So maybe there is something shared with our story after all?

Day 0491

I was thinking back – not fondly but with a sense of having escaped – at that crushing feeling that used to be my regular companion in my personal life.
That one where I’d be feeling pleased that I’d ‘managed’ some new parent hurdle I related at the success or actions of a friend or family, only to be crushed into the dark, cold earth when I got told how selfish and thoughtless and stupid I was for – well – for not filling my thoughts with Him and His Needs all the time.
It was most definitely a falling sensation: like the one in our early dream sleep where you fall off a cliff and wake with a start. Except this was the falling sensation accompanied by darkness and disappointment. A mire-ing into the mud rather than a bottomlessness.
In fact an image came to mind of the aluminum pop cans the (in)cool dudes in junior high used to flatter under one foot. They would put the weight of one leg on the top of the can and a friend would flick the can’s middle just right … and PHWUMP! The can would be top and bottom with everything crushed I between. It was a satisfying sideshow: the sound, the small disc the can turned into.
That is what that emotional crush felt like – almost exactly.
It even had that sound effect as it pushed my heart outward and emptied me of ego.
PHWUMP.
There’s my wife. In her proper place: crushed into a flat disc and tossed into the recycling bin. They don’t make ’em like they used to.

Day 0451

Of the types of acts that leave indelible warm and fuzzy memories on my rather bedraggled heart, it’s the kind ones I remember most clearly; Not so much the gestures of love. They can often come combined, I suppose, but it’s still the kindness that stands out.
I think that’s because kindness is so simple and generous and, usually, very quietly given.
Love is loud and – sometimes – ugly. It is selfish too in its own undefinable way.
So when I look back on the memories I’ve harvested I am quite sure it’s the kind acts that stand out.

The lady whose name I’ll never know, standing behind the make-up counter in a department store who held my hand and spoke calmly and warmly to me while we waited for the police so I could report a sexual assault. Who whispered into my traumatised brain ‘this was not your fault; it was not about you’.

My child, who at the age of three, watched me trying to put my socks on through the intense, tear-jerking pain of a debilitating back injury and said: Don’t do that, Mum. That’s my job. And proceeded to put my socks on my feet for me punctuated with gentle kisses dropped onto the pads of my toes.

A former co-worker-now-friend who continues to tell me that my presence helps to make the world go around as I pull myself through the black holes of family court.

And so many, many more.

Kindness is the antidote to that dark spot that is sometimes inside me. It stops me from hitting the bottom over and over again.

And so I conclude: While love is amazing; kindness is extraordinary.

Day 0278

We each proved the other person’s point in a chat yesterday. We were talking at odds and yet agreeing. Such a disconcerting thing: takes hours for me head to sort it into sense.
But that old reliable grey matter didn’t let me down and I woke up seeing it clearly.
I said: I don’t want a relationship that is more than friendship.
He said: you can do that and still have sex.
I said: I can’t: not saying people shouldn’t but I can’t.
He said: men are different that way (I groaned and resisted metaphorically belting him).
Then there was a pause and he said:
While sex is nice it’s really the waking up next to you I like most.
I said (to myself): but that’s the bit of sex that I don’t enjoy with you.
So I proved his point: women – or a woman who is me anyway – think of sex as a whole rather than an 11 second act.
And he proved to me that I only want to be friends.

Day 0256

As my kid fell asleep last night he started up one of those conversations that are worth their weight in gold because the honey glow of sleep has relaxed his defenses completely.

He started asking me about one of the most traumatic events in the long, unending saga of his parents’ separation. He wanted me to tell him the story of this event from the beginning to the end. He would stop me and interject but then look over the tightly cuddled head of his favourite stuffed animal and say: ‘Keep going. I want to hear it.’

I didn’t tell him all the grown up details but I thought he was entitled to hear the basics. And I made it clear this was what I experienced and saw and he may have seen and felt it differently.

At several points he started to cry quietly. I could see him putting his eight-year-old heart and soul into not letting the tears out, but luckily he’s not great at that.

I stopped each time the tears came and asked if he was ok and reassured him that people doing unpleasant things to each other doesn’t mean the good things they do no longer exist.

About the third time I did this, he said: ‘Mum, I’m crying because you just look so sad.’

And here I had thought I was holding it back completely and that my face was a marvellous mask of no-big-dealness.

I love my son. And I adore that he can feel the emotions of others. If I thought lighting candles would help him preserve that ability forever, I would buy all the wax in Madame Tussauds’ many museums and spend my life ensuring it never ran out.

Day 0182

I was thinking too much today.

And I got to tossing around the idea that all feelings have a temperature and a texture.

To me, anger is cold and hard.

Sadness is cold and sharp.

Love is light and warm.

Betrayal is chilled and cloaking.r

 

Days 0162 & 0163

Uh oh. I think I have been maligning someone wrongly — or, more accurately, maligning them in the wrong way.

It suddenly occurred to me this morning that the words passive and passion  come from the same place (Word Nerd Alert: The root word for each is the French passif – suffering)

And here I have been referring to someone as passive and interpreting that as them not feeling anything.

I now wish to correct that.

I think Mr Passive Pants actually feels everything. In fact, I think he feels everything so much that he is unable to articulate or even act it out.

He is in fact rendered passive by his overwhelming passion.

Now, where once I felt angry at him for not being able to feel, I now feel utter pathos for him and his inability to do anything about what he feels.

I can be passive too after all, with my bullying sister in particular. But that is really the only place I can be branded fairly with that label. From that experience of tamping down my feelings — of experiencing them but not letting them determine my reactions — I learned that I must must must not be passive in the rest of my life. I feel everything. When someone is angry, my skin tingles; when another person hurts, I feel their pain; when the world makes no sense or I can’t stand what is happening, I get up and DO SOMETHING about it. I’m not saying I’m not quiet or subtle: i think most often I am. And I need to work on expressing anger; I’m not so skilled at that one – it gets stuck in my throat and turns inward.

So what does this revelation reveal? It shows me that Mr PP [Ed note: tee hee, I just said ‘pee pee’] hasn’t reached aplace where he can let his emotions come out of his mouth and his heart and his skin and his brain. He instead does it by proxy, at least when it comes to the injustices of the world; hanging about with those who make a difference and speak up, with those who feel and express; with those who put their senses into action.

Oh, how I hope he hangs about with them so he can learn how rather than to escape learning how. As badly as he can behave, I am certain he would be Extravagantly Beautiful if he could let it all out. Because he is beautiful inside there: I saw that much with accuracy.