Sweet Surrender

by Mary Moody

  Sweeping the fact of my affairs under the carpet felt to me like denial. I needed to write the whole story down, to get it out there in the open. Documenting the many things that happened to me after I turned fifty was a form of therapy, especially when I tried to explain my feelings to myself, and to reflect on how they affected my other relationships. The writing process helped me to reach some sort of understanding of why this period of tumult had ever happened.

  At first, David was opposed to the idea of my writing about our life together, and while I was working on my second memoir, Last Tango in Toulouse, he fought against it. However, by the time I came to write The Long Hot Summer he was totally onside. He believed it was a story worth telling, and he supported me through the writing and the subsequent harrowing publicity. The tricky part has always been living life while writing about it almost at the same time. It’s like walking a tightrope, balancing the feelings of close family members while being as candid as possible at the same time.

  By the time The Long Hot Summer was published in mid-2005, David and I were both exhausted by the entire process. We had decided not to separate, but we had good patches and bad patches, days and weeks when we got along extremely well, followed by periods when I privately believed that our reconciliation was a mistake, a waste of time. I don’t know why I imagined that our new life together would simply go along without a hitch. I should have realised that the healing process and the readjustment would take a long, long time and that there would always be moments when bad memories would come flooding back. Some things simply could never be forgiven and some aspects of our relationship would never be the same again.

  David’s trust in me had been badly shaken. He knew that I wanted to keep going back to France, and he simply didn’t feel confident that I wouldn’t slip back in to my old love affairs or even initiate new ones once I was out of sight and such a long way from home (and his watchful eye). Nothing I could say or do reassured him; with a sinking heart, I gradually realised that his trust in me might never be fully restored. Some people would say that a marriage without trust can’t survive, but we have managed to deal with it by being very open. David lets me know how he’s feeling. I listen. We talk some more. Keeping the lines of communication open is our greatest priority.

  When I think about it I am aware that more women than men have been in the same position as David, dealing with a partner who has strayed. Most men would be inclined to end a marriage if they discovered a straying wife, but women are generally more conciliatory and prepared to forgive their husbands and move forward. David has been remarkable in his ability to deal with it all, although at times – even now – he will suddenly get angry or upset remembering something that happened during those dark few years, and the pain will bubble up to the surface again. I find this very difficult and confronting but I know only too well that it’s a healthy release for him. A normal reaction.

  The curious thing is that he doesn’t get angry with me about the events of the past. He’s inclined to blame other people and sometimes even himself for the situation that developed. While he doesn’t imagine I was an innocent bystander, he certainly believes I was caught up in the heat of the moment and was not deliberately setting out to destroy our marriage.

  We both work on the theory that negotiation and renegotiation are what it’s all about. We can’t just stagnate and expect our marriage to survive. We must recognise and acknowledge each other’s changing needs and desires and try to meet them as much as possible. It’s been a wake-up call and we have responded, I hope, by becoming more aware of each other. More tuned in to each other. In many ways, our relationship is now much better than it ever has been. It has evolved through pain and difficulty.

  Our children have been very loyal and supportive to us both, given that it must have been stressful for them when it looked as though their parents might go their separate ways. Now it’s a subject never discussed at family gatherings, and I don’t believe that’s because it’s become ‘taboo’ – it’s just that they’re thoroughly bored by the whole business. They have their own busy, demanding lives and any problems that we are having are now for us to solve alone. As a family we have also moved along.

  On a day-to-day basis nothing much has changed. Our roles have remained the same although, to his credit, David has taken on a lot of the domestic aspects of living at the farm, probably because I have been away so much over the last few years. It’s quite a convivial life we lead here at Yetholme. He brings me tea in bed every morning – proper leaf tea, brewed in a pot, never a teabag. Strained and stirred in a china cup and accompanied by a thin slice of homemade bread and butter.

  Getting him onto the tractor can sometimes be a bit of a struggle. He’s totally unmechanically minded, and refuses to even try to learn the basics of tractor maintenance, so it’s up to me to get the large machine out of the shed, check the diesel, oil, water, hydraulics and air filter, and make sure the height and speed settings are appropriate. I do a quick run around checking for obstacles – fallen branches or large dog bones – and pack away any hoses that might get tangled in the mower’s blades. When it’s all set to go, David strides out in his protective gear and proceeds with the task at hand. He is meticulous and does a wonderful job but it’s all a bit of a gala performance. When he’s finished, I clean the tractor down, blowing the loose grass away with a compressor, then park it back in the shed until next time.

  But to be completely fair to him, David has embraced a lot of the chores I used to do when the children were growing up. Shopping is just one example. He seems to love cruising the supermarket aisles looking for bargains, comparing weights and prices and brands. I have always shopped on the run, without a list and throwing items into the trolley at whim. He loves being in charge of an orderly, planned shopping trip, and carefully unpacks everything when he gets it home. The pantry is always well-stocked.

  I divide my day between gardening, cooking and writing. David does all his emails and work phone calls in the morning and then spends the afternoon in Bathurst doing the shopping and going to the gym. He has type 2 diabetes and needs to exercise frequently to keep his condition under control. When he returns home from town he tends to wander back to his office and his computer, and he gets so caught up that I sometimes feel he’s forgotten I’m there at all. I send an email from my computer to his: Do you remember me? I’m that red-headed woman on the other side of the house and I feel like a gin and tonic. He emerges, smiling, and we share a drink before dinner and the evening news.

  I try my best to introduce a little fun into our quiet life. I insist that we have a meal out from time to time, although it’s a struggle because he claims to prefer home-cooked meals to those served in restaurants. Luckily, we both love the local Chinese restaurant and there are also a few interesting cafes in town where we can take a bottle of wine. I keep my eye out for good movies coming to our local cinema, and for the plays and concerts that often tour up from Sydney to Bathurst’s excellent entertainment centre. I have to push for these outings because, like a lot of men in his age group, David has become more of a homebody in his later years. He’d rather sit near the fire watching his favourite television series than make the effort to go out. I tend to force him.

  I expect our life together and our relationship is not that different from those of other couples who have been together for more than thirty-five years. We are both still working and active, and we travel a lot – usually going our own separate ways – but our lifestyle at home is very settled, and to others it may even appear rather boring at times. In essence, we are trying to get on with enjoying life, even though we have had our difficulties and sadnesses. The same as most people.

  5

  ‘I want to grow old without facelifts . . . I want to have the courage to be loyal to the face I’ve made.’

  —Marilyn Monroe

  These words – so bravely spoken, but so sad to read now – sum up how most younger women feel about cosmetic surgery. When yo
ur face is still smooth and line-free, you have absolutely no idea how you will feel when the first major signs of ageing appear. Poor Marilyn never had the chance to live to a ripe old age, and we will never know how she would have looked at sixty or seventy had she stuck to her guns and resisted plastic surgery.

  When I was younger I felt exactly the same way as she did. I was critical of women who felt so insecure about themselves that they would submit to the surgeon’s knife in order to cling to their fading youth and beauty. I had read Germaine Greer and was a big fan of her take on how women had been manipulated by the male-dominated medical profession and the pharmaceutical and cosmetic industries. My views were political as well as emotional. I didn’t like the idea of being swept up in a tide of vain women incapable of accepting the natural results of living their lives, who allowed themselves to be ‘got at’ by the media and the advertising industry. I continued to feel this way very strongly – until I hit fifty! It’s easy to be judgemental about all sorts of things until you find yourself affected by them.

  Genetics has a lot to do with how our faces age. Those of us with Celtic complexions who grew up as beach babes in the fifties and sixties have paid the price in later life. At menopause, our skin also starts to deteriorate rapidly as our hormonal levels drop. The combination of the two effects can be truly disturbing.

  For me, this sudden facial ageing really started in my early fifties, and accelerated at such a rate that I became alarmed. Until then my face had been comparatively unlined and my jawline smooth, but it seemed as though overnight I developed pouchy jowls, and my face began to look worn and weather-beaten. No amount of cosmetic creams or make-up could cover what I feared was rapidly advancing old age.

  Out of curiosity, I experimented with a Botox treatment, enduring a series of injections to smooth the lines on my forehead between my eyebrows. Although it wasn’t painful, it was expensive, and I didn’t like the sensation of numbness that accompanied the effect. I decided I would rather have a few frown lines than an expressionless forehead.

  But my anxiety about my face falling apart returned with full force when the daytime television show was proposed, and I saw some of the pilot footage. While I was more than prepared to acknowledge I was at least fifteen years older than any of the other women in the auditions, I felt miserable that in the close-ups I often looked saggy and tired – not so much when I was talking and animated, but when I was in repose.

  Like so many women of my age I stood in front of the mirror in the bathroom, and pulled back the skin on either side of my face to try to imagine how it would look if I had a facelift. I liked the ‘tightened up’ me and started to make tentative enquiries about plastic surgeons and the various procedures that were available.

  David disagreed entirely with my perception of what was happening to my face, but then again he rarely notices if I put an auburn rinse in my hair or buy a new dress. He was quite horrified when I first suggested I might do something ‘surgical’ to pull my face back into line. But in November 2004 after some research, I decided on a cosmetic surgeon and booked an appointment anyway. I wasn’t prepared for the clandestine nature of the industry. Apparently people having ‘work done’ insist upon total discretion and often husbands and boyfriends are kept in the dark completely. When the receptionist phoned the day before to confirm my appointment – I wasn’t at home at the time – she refused to say who she was or why she was calling to David, who became irritated by all the secrecy. When I arrived at the doctor’s rooms I was ushered into a private waiting room just in case someone who knew me arrived at the same time. I found this cloak and dagger approach quite hilarious.

  The surgeon took some ‘before’ photos and we discussed the various options. I didn’t want a full facelift – I dislike that artificial, stretched look that I have seen on other women. I was a fifty-five-year-old grandmother and I was happy to look my age. I just wanted my ragged edges tidied up – the good old euphemism ‘nip and tuck’ was all that I desired. He recommended an ‘S-Lift’, which concentrates on the lower half of the face, mainly the jawline. It was proper surgery, requiring an overnight stay in hospital and an anaesthetic. It amazed me how quickly the whole thing was organised – almost before I had time for a moment’s reflection I was getting ready to trot off to hospital.

  I was told to buy some concentrated spray-on arnica, to squirt under my tongue several times a day in the weeks leading up to the surgery. Arnica is a fantastic natural antidote to bruising and my doctor believed that having a good dose of it in your system before the operation would help prevent any massive swelling as a reaction afterwards. I dutifully squirted the arnica in my mouth and cut back on my drinking, again to prevent a post-operative reaction.

  As I lay in pre-op a few weeks later, I reminded the surgeon that I didn’t want radical surgery, just a subtle effect – the bare minimum. He was drawing lines on my skin to follow with a scalpel. David had opposed my decision. A hospital phobic, he had nightmares about me having an anaesthetic and the possible complications that could arise. And what if I ended up looking like a gargoyle? Despite my growing reservations, it was far too late to change my mind.

  When I woke, I felt fine, although I was told that I had suffered a minor reaction to the anaesthetic during the operation. I had a strap around my face but didn’t feel any pain or even much discomfort. It seemed like a doddle. Although I was still a bit groggy, I got chatting to the woman in the next bed. She was recovering from a lumpectomy for breast cancer, and was visibly distressed and quite fearful about her outcome. She didn’t ask the reason for my surgery, and I didn’t volunteer it. By now I was on a fully fledged guilt trip. Here I was feeling comparatively bright and breezy after what had been an elective procedure based on vanity. There she was struggling to come to terms with the possibility that her operation may not have succeeded in ridding her body of cancer cells. She was facing both chemo and radiotherapy. I was going home to rest for a couple of days until the swelling went down, then to go merrily on with my life. It felt very wrong.

  I was also keenly aware of the shortage of hospital beds for much more valid elective procedures. Lack of theatre time and post-operative beds is a major cause of our medical system’s long waiting lists, and I couldn’t help but wonder just how many plastic surgery procedures were clogging up the system. My surgery day had been booked within weeks of my initial consultation. It was a private hospital, but the theatre and my bed could have been put to better use. I wondered how the nursing staff felt about this situation, and that made me squirm even more. I was very keen to get home.

  True to his word, the surgeon had gone gently with the knife and two weeks after the surgery it was virtually impossible to detect that anything very much had been done. I noticed a much smoother jawline – those little pouchy bits on my chin, directly below my mouth, had vanished, but otherwise I looked very much the same, perhaps just a little less haggard. I told quite a few friends but then stopped mentioning it, and nobody commented. Nobody said ‘Gosh, you look fantastic’, or ‘Have you been on a holiday? You look so relaxed’, or ‘How do you keep yourself looking so young?’. I certainly didn’t look thirty-five, or even forty-five. I still looked like a woman in her fifties, and for that I was grateful.

  What I didn’t realise then is that if you seriously want to intervene in the ageing process, it’s like being on a treadmill – very hard to get off. During my six-week post-op visit, the receptionists and assistants in the surgeon’s glamorous rooms were effusive about the results – that’s their job. They immediately suggested that I should get some Botox and Restylane fillers to ‘go with’ the S-Lift. They talked about me coming back regularly for more treatments – suggesting the area under my eyes could do with some work and that I could also have work done on my neck and chest area. There’s the rub. If you have a facelift you have to be prepared for the fact that it won’t match the age of the rest of your body – your neck and your décolletage and your arms and your hands. Since my
nip and tuck all those other parts of me have started to crumble, and quite frankly I no longer care. Well, I do care because I wish my skin was young and smooth and firm again. But I am finally reconciled to the inevitability of my physical decline.

  6

  The happiest time of my life was when my children were growing up. I loved every aspect of motherhood and from the age of twenty-two defined myself by that role. Looking back, I probably wasn’t the best mother in the world, but at the time I certainly felt very much in control. I loved being the mistress of my home, organising the kids, cooking the meals and beavering away in my garden. I always worked in paid employment as well, but that too was a pleasurable experience. I was young and energetic and full of the joy of life.

  It surprised me when our four children, as teenagers, opted for serious relationships rather than flitting from boyfriend to girlfriend. They all had a couple of minor flings during the experimental stages that young people go through when they first discover the opposite sex, but within a few years appeared to settle into relationships with one ‘special’ person. They wanted commitment and permanency. Some parents might have discouraged this trend. I could have pushed them to concentrate on their careers and play the field rather than sliding so comfortably into domesticity, but I didn’t.

  Nevertheless, living in the Blue Mountains meant that once they finished high school they needed to leave home to pursue further educational and career opportunities. Tony went to an apprenticeship in Sydney, Miriam moved to Canberra to study at university, Aaron travelled north to Lismore to study horticulture, and eventually our youngest son, Ethan, did the same.

  Tony was the last to fall in love, the first to marry. He and his beautiful girlfriend Simone had a fairytale wedding in the garden. They lived and worked in Sydney, both had successful and well-paid careers and were planning to save for their first home. The future was rosy.