by Emilie Pine
It was the first referendum I had ever voted in. With the capacious free time of a student, I set the whole day aside. But walking to the polling station took only fifteen minutes, and putting my X next to ‘Yes’, folding my ballot and posting it in the box, took only a few more. I walked out onto the street, unsure of what to do now. The tree-lined road was quiet. Nobody seemed to know, yet, the difference that had been made. I trembled but the world was still.
The next night, for some reason, I ended up at my dad’s house, watching the referendum results with him and his girlfriend (both of them married, of course, to other people). Dad passed out early, but she and I stayed up, getting steadily drunker, yet still alert with the edge of adrenaline as we monitored every nuance of the television coverage. When a recount was ordered by the anti-divorce campaign, resulting in more votes for the Yes side, we crowed with triumph. We were not normally allies – far from it – but on this night we both saw a chance for our lives to change.
The bill to make divorce legal passed by 50.28%. With a turnout of 62.15% this means that the referendum was carried by 9,114 votes. It was a hard and narrowly won victory. The first divorce in Ireland was granted on January 17th, 1997. The new rules stipulated that you had to be separated for three years before you could petition a court for divorce. My parents had been separated since 1982. Fifteen years: five divorces’ of time.
I remember standing in the centre of Dublin one afternoon that spring. I was twenty. I stopped on a busy pavement as people pushed past me. A sign in the window of a travel agent’s had caught my eye: ‘Package Holiday Deal: 1 Parent + 2 Kids’. It’s ridiculous, but I was actually moved by this, an ad for a sun holiday. It was the first time I had ever seen my family reflected publicly. One parent plus two children. That was us. We existed.
WHEN I WAS IN MY MID-TWENTIES, I began to meet my dad for an afternoon pint once a week. We met in the same pub every time, sat at the same place at the bar, exchanged the same words with the barman and, often, each other. Sitting on a bar stool next to my dad, I felt a strange mixture of being both a grown-up and a child. Though he could be sulkily reticent, I usually found a way to draw him out, with talk of books or plays, our common language. Then one afternoon, with a tremor in his voice, my dad asked me if I would ask my mum for a divorce.
Still the go-between, I waited until the weekend to bring it up with Mum. I told her that Dad had a serious question for her. There was no easy way to say it: would she divorce him? My mum was making tea, and paused with the kettle hovering mid-air over the pot. My sister, sitting at the table, froze. Then they both started laughing. After a brief moment, I joined in. It was absurd, after all. That I had been chosen to relay the question, that after two decades of separation my father thought he needed to ask, and, most of all, that he actually thought she might say no. My mother’s laughter subsided. Putting on a grave voice she said, ‘Tell your father I’m still hoping for a reconciliation.’ We laughed so hard, I bent double with the pain. The following week I met Dad. I told him Mum would grant him a divorce. ‘Oh,’ he said.
And then?
Nothing.
My dad had asked for the divorce because he wanted to get remarried. But it was wishful thinking on his part, and he and his girlfriend split up soon after his request to my mum. None of us should have been surprised. Dad had been spending months living by himself, first in the west of Ireland and then in Greece. With the engagement over, he made the move to Greece permanent. The divorce seemed to slip everyone’s mind. Perhaps it’s hard to remember that you’re married when you live in different countries.
My mum’s solicitor got spooked a few years ago. He worried that my dad might still be eligible to make some claim on her property. It fell to me to ask Dad to sign a new separation agreement. He agreed and then asked me to come with him for moral support. In the office, as Dad signed his name with a borrowed pen, the solicitor looked at me and asked, ‘Why can’t they just get divorced like normal people?’
I have no idea, really, why my parents have not got divorced. I doubt there is one, discoverable reason, much like there was no one reason that their marriage broke up. At the time of writing, my parents are still married. And they would now qualify for twelve divorces.
THE STORY OF MY PARENTS changed in January 2013 when they began to speak to each other again. It was grief that finally ended the silence, the grief that poured out when my sister’s baby daughter died. My dad flew to Ireland for the funeral. I told him that if he wanted to attend the wake he would have to acknowledge and speak to my mother. I told him that he would have to be nice. He said, ‘I am partly human you know, Emilie.’
I worried that the reunion between my parents would be both stressful and distracting on the day of the funeral itself, so my sister and I arranged a rehearsal for the night before, in the foyer of Dad’s hotel. It was a brief encounter. Dad looked at the ground as Mum reached out to shake his hand. My sister rolled her eyes as Dad belatedly took Mum’s hand and said, ‘Nice to meet you.’ It was surreally funny and not funny at all. When it was over, I walked Mum to her car. She said she was shocked by how much he’d changed. She said she did not recognise his voice, but then again, it was so long since she had heard it. Later that evening, my sister told me that as Mum and I left the room, Dad had turned to her and asked, ‘Are you sure that was your mother?’
The next day, at my sister’s house, Mum and Dad sat and talked. I think they consoled each other. They were both, after all, not just parents, but grandparents now. Though it was radical for me to see my parents having a conversation after so many years, it was revolutionary for my sister. I watched her as she watched them. She had been a baby when they split. Now she was a mother, standing at her daughter’s wake, seeing her parents talk for the first time in her life. Afterwards, I asked my mum what they had spoken about. She said that Dad had told her about his liver failure, and his feelings about stopping drinking. She said that they had spoken of the death of a mutual friend. And then she said that the day, and the decades apart, had given her a licence to finally talk to him about the miscarriage they had suffered themselves. I couldn’t believe it when she said that they had never spoken of it before. I realised in that moment that there had been layers of silence within their marriage, and not just at its end.
My parents broke their silence because of a family tragedy. To their credit, in the years since then, they have not reverted to muteness. In fact, they speak regularly, by phone and email, and even meet for coffee during Dad’s visits to Ireland. It is good news, good for all of us, their chatting and texting and being able to be in the same room. It makes everything so much easier. But it is not all happy families. Sometimes my mum phones me to tell me about the latest annoying thing my father has done or said. She repeats the phrase ‘your father’ while listing his faults. ‘He’s your husband,’ I angrily remind her.
My anger at having to learn and respond to the new parental status quo takes me by surprise. I realise that I never expected them to speak to each other again, and so I never expected to have to deal with my emotional reaction to them speaking. And the emotions only seem to multiply. I am amazed. I am hopeful. I am relieved. I am confused. I am resentful. I am angry. And I am, unexpectedly, aghast. How is it that all those years of silence can simply end? How is it that all the hurt and pain and bitterness can dissolve away to nothing? How is it that we were made to endure so much acrimony for so long? And how is it, why is it, that no one has ever said sorry to me or my sister? The story may have changed, but part of me is still five years old.
It is embarrassing to admit to my inner child. I feel like a kid throwing a tantrum, stamping my foot and demanding that my parents pay attention. I am especially embarrassed when I look around and realise that other people do not seem as burdened by their upbringing as I am. Having divorced parents has become so normal that it seems overdramatic to label my parents’ estrangement as exceptionally disturbing. In the absence of any particular trauma that I
can point to, I can only suppose that I felt – feel – the minor pains of childhood more than I should.
WHEN I LEFT HOME AT TWENTY, I could sense my life opening, and a new separation beginning. On the shelves of the kitchen in my student flat, I piled up two saucepans and one frying pan. I stacked two plates and two bowls. I laid out four forks and two knives and four spoons. A chopping board and two mugs completed the set-up. I looked at all this equipment and I felt both ready and completely unprepared for what came next. Life beyond my parents. I wanted that life and yet was also terrified of it. I wanted the freedom of feelings that did not involve them, though I was also overwhelmed by the shape and scale of those feelings. Who was I, really, without the defining boundary of my family? What stories would I tell now?
My parents separated when I was five and my sister was a baby. Though I am a long way from the difficulties of my childhood, I still dwell on the stories of those years, hoping that they might explain the troubling residues of so many feelings and thoughts and actions. My parents did not speak. My father suffered from depression. I was a lonesome child. Those facts, and all the accompanying stories, whirl around. I write them down. Perhaps they will be less overbearing that way, pinned in one place.
As I step away from the page, and I look at what I have written about myself and my family, this family, our family, I see that in the end it is always going to be both a complicated and a simple story. In this story, which I may never stop telling, I try to remember what it was like for me as a child, and what I did and what I could have done differently. I try to imagine what it was like for my parents, and what they did and what they could have done differently. I remember us happy, and I remember us sad. I remember us divided and I remember us together. I remember everything, and I remember only fragments of a whole that will always be beyond me.
NOTES ON BLEEDING & OTHER CRIMES
FAMOUSLY, THE TRICK TO GOOD WRITING is bleeding onto the page. I picture the male writer who coined this phrase, sitting at his typewriter, the blank sheet before him. What kind of blood did he imagine? Blood from a vein in his arm? Or a leg? Perhaps a head wound? Presumably it was not blood from a cervix. I have so much of this blood, this period blood, this pregnancy blood, this miscarriage blood, this not-pregnant-again blood, this perimenopausal blood. It just keeps coming and I just keep soaking it up. Stuffing bleached cotton into my vagina to stem the flow, padding my underwear, sticking on the night pads ‘with wings’, hoping not to leak on some man’s sheets, or rip off too much pubic hair with the extra-secure adhesive strips. Covering up with ‘period pants’, those unloved dingy underwear choices pulled out from the back of the drawer every month. And all along, I was wrong, I should have been sitting down at my desk and spilling it across the page, a shocking red to fill the white.
I WAS AT SCHOOL when I got my first period and I was mortified. It was geography class and when we stood up at the bell my friend leaned over and told me that the back of my dress was wet. I looked at him in surprise, assuming he was joking. But when I glanced behind me, I saw that he was right – there was a patch of dark on my skirt, and a small pool of blood on the plastic chair. My classmates, seeing my embarrassment, stood back silently to let me pass. In the girls’ toilets I sat hunched and resentful, wadding toilet roll to protect me for the rest of the day. I did not want it, any of it, this blood. At home I rinsed my knickers at the bathroom sink, hung them to dry at the back of the airing cupboard, and hoped no one would notice. Unable to bring myself to have the dreaded becoming a woman conversation with my mother, I shoplifted tampons and tried not to cry when it burned as I put one in, my whole body clenched against the process. Wipe, insert, pad. At twelve I felt a lifetime of bleeding ahead of me. And I felt my body had let me down.
I had never been good at noticing the passing of time. There were moments I even forgot what day it was, but now I had an internal calendar that I could not ignore. The relentless monthly bleed. Wipe, insert, pad. In my refusal to adjust to this new rhythm, there were times I got caught out. Once I was on holiday and, too late, realised I had packed no sanitary protection. I tightly bunched the hotel’s toilet paper into a rough tampon, winding more again around the gusset of my underpants. I went to the bathroom frequently to check for leaks. When, a few days later, the bleeding stopped, I cried with relief. Other girls seemed equally ignorant about the realities of bleeding. In my school, a myth circulated that your vagina would somehow seal itself upon contact with water, even during your period. I disproved this during the after-school swimming club. Luckily, the pool was crowded with girls so no one could identify me as the culprit who had turned the water cloudy with her blood. On another occasion, my period started one night at a friend’s house. I woke up in her spare bed, hot with cramps, and wet between my legs. When I realised I had stained her sheets, I wished for the earth to open up and swallow me.
I was unbelievably squeamish about blood. Not the sight, or feeling, or smell of it – but the saying of it. ‘I’ve got my period.’ Where did I learn that these were shameful words? I can’t have made this phobia up all by myself. Maybe it was in school when we – the girls, that is – were sent to ‘Education for Living’ classes (the boys simply vanished – to extra sports, it turned out). Though notionally about periods and pregnancy, ‘Education for Living’, we learnt, was about using hand cream (not too much), and wearing the right size bra (not too small), and the right length skirt (not too short). About how to apply foundation, and when to shave your legs. About eating an orange in segments, like a lady. When a girl asked, perfectly reasonably, what we should do if we got our period in the middle of class and had to ask to go to the bathroom, the instructor said, ‘Tell your teacher that you’re menstruating.’ She placed great emphasis on the last word. We stared at her.
Blood is dirt. Isn’t that what the label ‘feminine hygiene’ tells us? Sanitary products for our unsanitary bodies. In fact, period blood is so dirty that it must never be shown. Instead, ads for tampons and towels demonstrate their absorbency with a bright blue liquid, poured cleanly out of a laboratory beaker. As a teenager, I did not recognise this sterile-looking fluid as like anything that had ever come out of my body. But then, I wasn’t meant to – that was the point. My body, and its blood, were taboo. I’m not sure it’s so much better now that tampon and towel companies advertise their products with uplifting rock songs and clear-skinned smiling teenagers. They may look different, with their emphasis on having fun! and celebrating! and adventuring! all while having your period. But whether it’s compact tampons for teens or maxi-pads for grown-ups, somehow the blood is still invisible. And so the message remains the same: blood is unknowable, blood is unshowable.
As an adult I still find it hard to say I have my period. Even within feminist conversations some aspects of bleeding can be taboo. There is a current slogan that makes me laugh: a woman can do anything a man can do, and do it while bleeding. But at the same time as laughing, I’m also wondering – what if I can’t? Sometimes my hormones flood me, then leave me high and, literally, dry. Sometimes I am doubled up in pain. Sometimes even the idea of standing for any length of time leaves me feeling faint. I do not feel like a feminist hero in these moments, I feel like I want to go home and get back into bed. But in a world where women are still over-identified with their bodies, where women have to prove their intellectual ability over and over, what is the threshold for claiming this pain? If you have a headache, it’s strain from too much thinking (I’m so brainy, I’m so busy). If you have a sore back, it’s from over exertion (I’m so fit, I’m so active). A stress attack? (I’m so hard-working, I’m so important.) But a cramped abdomen? (I’m so female.) It’s unspeakable.
Blood is never more taboo than when you’re naked. There are men who are into menstruation, who desire sex with a woman who’s already wet, who want to lose – or is it get? – their ‘red wings’. But I remember only too well the first time a man saw my period blood and it is not a happy memory. We were in our twe
nties, and we liked each other, and he was cool and I wanted him to think I was cool. And we were kissing and then we were fooling around and then we were having sex and then he looked down. Seeing blood, he pulled out of me, and suddenly there was blood everywhere – blood on my inner thighs, blood on the sheets, blood on his penis. And he screamed like he thought he was dying. Actually dying. And I thought that maybe I was also dying. Of shame. That was the first, but not the last time I found that a man could want to share all kinds of bodily fluids with me, but not blood. Another time a man said he was ‘fine with it’ but got me out of bed as soon as he had come so he could wash the sheets. Another time – at the mere mention of my period – my chivalrous date phoned me a taxi to take me home.
In my twenties I liked having sex during my period because I knew I could not get pregnant. In my thirties I stopped liking it for the same reason. Over the years that I was trying to conceive, I became afraid of the appearance of blood. In my new obsession with ‘my menstrual cycle’, which translated month by month into ‘my not-getting-pregnant cycle’, I scanned my body for signs: bloating, a jab of pain at the point of ovulation, the rope of clear cervical mucus that meant I could conceive, the pink smear in my underwear that meant I had not. The blood became a curse, one that I could not shake and, as the months stretched into years, I truly began to hate this blood. No longer just inconvenient, it left a new kind of stain: infertility. People talk about making peace with difficult life events, but what do you do if the event you’re trying to come to terms with is happening inside your own body? I was back to not being able to talk about blood, not being able to say it to my boyfriend, relying on him to intuit it, because to say ‘I’m bleeding’ was beyond me. I went shopping instead, I figured that if I couldn’t have a baby, I could at least have a new dress. And every time I looked at my credit card statement, I would note wryly that here it was at last: my menstrual cycle, written down in numbers if not words.