by Eleanor Wood
A few months in, I started to worry that I was just talking a big game – as I always do – but not actually making a change. I was recognising the things that were not OK, but still chasing after indifferent boys, still saying yes to things I didn’t want to. Just like how I like to shout loudly and publicly about feminism and fuck the patriarchy, but then I shocked myself by being unable to speak up when Bad Boyfriend liked to choke me and threatened to ‘beat the shit’ out of me.
Deeds not words, was what I kept telling myself. But it was hard. Kathleen kept reassuring me that it takes some time and effort to break lifelong patterns, and that I was doing pretty well in taking the first steps. I was trying. But it never felt like enough.
Then, something shifted. Kathleen said my intuition about people actually seemed to be pretty good, but I didn’t always like to acknowledge my own gut feelings. I would notice the red flags but ignore them, as if pretending they weren’t there would make them go away. I would make excuses for people and impose my own fictional narrative that would make it all OK.
With her help, I’m starting to see things more clearly. The passive aggression of The Lecturer seems so obvious now, I can’t stop noticing it. For a while, he would still send me the odd plaintive text message from amid his ‘wanderings’.
‘I miss our pointless idle chats,’ he says. I am furious. He can’t even say he misses me without belittling our entire relationship. To me, it was never pointless. For a while, it was everything.
‘I don’t understand what you get out of this relationship,’ Kathleen said to me once. ‘Do you think you can try to explain?’
I couldn’t.
But slowly, I feel like my decision-making is getting better. I think about things before I automatically say yes – some of the time, at least – which is a huge breakthrough for me. I am still working towards being one of those self-possessed people who is able to say ‘no’ really firmly yet gracefully – like my nan, Rose and Ann, basically. I might never quite achieve that, but at least I am trying. I truly believe I am becoming more staunch, and will continue to do so. Staunch wasn’t built in a day but I’m getting there.
I don’t fall to pieces when The Lecturer and I are finally over. I don’t spontaneously fuck someone else unsuitable in some sort of obscure ‘revenge’ that he will never even know about. This might not sound like a huge triumph, but it actually is.
I only got together with Bad Boyfriend in the first place because I’d been unceremoniously rejected by The Lecturer the first time. Then after Bad Boyfriend, I had this sudden feeling that I didn’t want him to be the last person I had slept with – so I went out and slept with a grubby sort-of ex at the soonest possible opportunity, his one major selling point being that at least I knew he wasn’t actively scary.
I don’t suppose that means I can blame The Lecturer for what transpired between me and Bad Boyfriend, but he certainly didn’t help. In fact, when we started seeing each other again, I told The Lecturer eventually (a bit of) what had happened in the interim. At first, he made all the right noises and I was touched.
‘I had no idea. I … I can’t believe it. I always assumed you could look after yourself, you seem so strong. I would never have guessed I could feel so … protective towards you. I want to kill him.’
He hugged me and I leant against his chest feeling mildly guilty and unfeminist for rather enjoying this uncharacteristic little outpouring.
Then, later in the evening, after a few cocktails: ‘But you have to admit, you are pretty damaged. I guess I’m not totally surprised. Oh, don’t look at me like that – we’re both fucking damaged. It’s why we get on.’
I think I was supposed to find this funny.
Anyway, I don’t do anything terribly self-destructive in the wake of The Lecturer. I miss him horribly. It leaves a hole in my life, of text messages and company and attention and in-jokes, if not the proper relationship I thought it was, and I don’t rush to fill it with the first thing that comes along, just for the sake of it, which is a first.
I hang out with my brilliant girlfriends as much as possible. I work hard. I throw myself into writing. It feels good.
‘You get a therapeutic gold star,’ Kathleen tells me.
I try just to stick with it – hold steady, stay staunch – and for the first time I succeed. I have lived alone for over two years now. At first I hated being single and now I like it. I can live with myself quite happily, for the first time ever. I have been stable for a while now.
I guess at some point I might not need her any more, but I’m not sure. I’m not thinking that far ahead, yet.
Present Day
Of all the incredible women I am blessed with in my life, of which I am lucky enough to have many, my stepmother Fiona is up there as one of the best.
When I come back from my trip, she calls me with an idea. She and my dad (well, it was all her idea; with the best will in the world, and my dad is wonderful, these sorts of things are rarely Dad’s ideas) would like to put some money into helping me fix my crumbling house. I could cry with relief, and I do.
Dad and Fiona offer to come and stay while the work is done, and we can do some of the other jobs I’ve been putting off while we’re at it. It is like a huge boulder has been lifted from my mind. I know how lucky I am, and having a parent who can offer to do this for you at the age of thirty-six is a ridiculous spoiled privilege, but this is the kindest and most helpful thing anybody could possibly have done for my mental health.
I’ve been losing a lot of sleep over the past few years over the damp problem in my kitchen. I think water is coming in from outside, but I can’t figure out how or from where. A couple of years ago, a guy came and looked at it and charged me a few hundred quid to be rude to me and staple a bit of something over the outside wall. Unsurprisingly, it seems to have made no difference. I have been at a total loss as to what else I can do about it, so have just been feeling quietly overwhelmed ever since.
One of the kitchen walls is slowly crumbling before my eyes. It’s started to turn black with mould, which is more than a little worrying. I’ve covered up the worst of it with a poster of Mexrrissey (Mexico’s premium Morrissey tribute band), which I nicked off a wall on a night out. But the wall is so damp it can’t even hold the weight of this cheap bit of A2 paper. It’s forever falling down in the night, waking me up and giving me a fright with its weird swishy noise, and every time bringing another clump of plaster with it.
I haven’t been sleeping well at night since the Bad Boyfriend, anyway. After he disappeared, I started noticing things that were missing from my house, or had been moved into strange places. It’s all unsettling enough that I haven’t been feeling safe in my own home, yet have also felt paralysed about what I can do to fix it.
The kitchen floor is the main problem. It is covered with nasty grey Seventies lino, which was there when I moved in and I have never taken it up for fear of what is underneath. The floor feels very uneven underfoot, and there is a whole section by the back door where it feels as though there is nothing underneath the lino. I tried taking that corner up once, just to have a peek, but it was rotten and smelled like death so I just pretended it had never happened and vowed not to think about it again (good Nan skills, there). When I have parties I have to ask people not to stand by the door. I’m convinced that either I or someone else is going to fall through the floor and break an ankle, although that is a small fear compared to the one about how my house is probably falling down on its foundations with every passing minute.
My friend Jem lives two doors down from me and had a similar problem. When they looked under her floor, there turned out to be a rancid black lagoon and some deadly fungus under there. They had to take up the entire floor and rebuild the joists. She and her husband had to move out for two weeks while they got industrial dryers down there.
I ought to get mine looked at, she said. I can’t afford that kind of shit, so I just continued to catastrophize and would wake up in the ni
ght, dreaming the house was falling down around me.
My dad and Fiona drive down from North Wales on a Sunday afternoon. They bring their own bedding, a lot of gardening tools and cleaning products, a couple of bottles of wine and a cheese board. Fiona has also brought some of her old Seventies records that she thought I might like.
We have booked in a nice man called Martin, a damp specialist who sorted out my friend Ari’s flat when actual rainwater started running down her sitting room wall. Indoors. Compared to that, he says, this will be a piece of cake. He tells me not to look so worried, this house has been standing for well over a hundred years and it’s not about to fall down now.
I start to feel better immediately.
Over the next two weeks, Martin and various members of his family – a couple of sons, a stepson, and most delightfully, his brother who is a dead ringer for Ronnie Wood – take up residence in my kitchen. They pull up the floorboards and do all sorts of other things. In the evenings, Dad and Fiona and I sit in the middle of the building site, drinking red wine and trying to come up with the ultimate Rock ’n’ Roll supergroup (cue much discussion of Keith Moon versus John Bonham as drummer – I favour the former, although I do acknowledge the ‘style over substance’ argument here). I have to do the washing up in the bath. I’m so happy.
During the day, we take loads of old crap to the tip. We do three runs to the tip. I love the tip. We paint all of the outside walls and window frames. We plant spring flowers in pots. We hang up pictures that I’ve been meaning to hang up for months. I get paint on my jeans and haul bags of compost around and feel like a real person.
‘I’ve had an idea,’ Fiona says one evening, as we drink red wine and move onto bass players (Kim Deal or Kim Gordon, surely – all bass players should be called Kim).
Fiona’s ideas are the best ideas. She recalls that, for as long as I’ve lived in the house, I’ve said I don’t particularly like the front door. It’s clunky and painted a kind of dull burgundy colour. While the builders are here, she reckons it wouldn’t cost too much more to get them to stick in a new front door.
So after they’ve replaced twelve floorboards, installed new gutters and rebuilt the walls, Martin and his mates put in a new front door. It’s the perfect symbolic gesture. This is my house now. A new threshold.
‘You’re a lucky girl,’ Martin says, on his last day. ‘You’ve got a really lovely dad and stepmum.’
I get quite emotional when he leaves. I’m not sure whether he realizes what a huge thing he’s done for me. I’ve grown very fond of Martin and his family and I’ll miss having them around. I’ve spoken on the phone to his wife Wendy so often, she’s bought a copy of my most recent YA novel and gives me updates on her progress.
After my dad and Fiona and the builders have gone, I get to do the fun stuff that’s left. I paint the kitchen pink and put up new fairy lights. My mum says she’ll chip in as an early birthday present and springs for some handmade Mexican tiles with stars on them. I put a brightly coloured Moroccan rug down over the new wooden floor.
‘This is the happiest kitchen I’ve ever seen,’ Alice says when I have friends round to christen it.
Best of all, I paint the new front door a bright turquoise that makes me feel jolly every time I come home. I get to use the Greek door-knocker I bought in Hydra all those years ago, which has been languishing in a drawer ever since – the same door-knocker Leonard Cohen had on his Greek house. Well, pretty much.
Fiona buys me a new keyring with an ‘E’ on it to mark this auspicious new beginning. I now have a kitchen that none of my previous boyfriends would recognize. I have a floor that Bad Boyfriend has never, ever walked on.
I burn some sage for good measure and close the new door on the world. I decide that I’m not going to let anyone in for a while.
Present Day
You will remember that when I was thirty, I decided I wanted to have a baby – exactly like every basic bitch in town does when she turns thirty. Now I’m nearly thirty-seven and I still do not have a baby.
When I told my friend Ari that K and I had essentially broken up because I suddenly wanted to have a baby, she said: ‘If I were you, I might have had some sort of fertility test first. It would be ironic – after all this – if it turned out you were barren.’ I burst out laughing and didn’t stop for about ten minutes.
Although I now believe that things between me and K worked out the way they were always supposed to – we just weren’t as happy or as well suited as I had once thought – I couldn’t help but admit that she made a very good point.
The funny thing is, that crazed impulse to have a baby as soon as possible has gone away. I still think it would be nice, if it happened one day, but that horrible feeling of abject panic, of time slipping through my fingers, has receded. In some ways, I feel younger now than I did then – I don’t feel frightened that my life is over any more.
If I really wanted to have a baby by any means possible, I could have done it by now. It’s not that hard. I probably could have got accidentally-on-purpose knocked up by Ravi on the beach if I were really that desperate for a baby.
Back when K and I were in the midst of the painful, drawn-out process of deciding whether we should stay together or not, I decided that I never wanted to make any decisions based on fear. I can’t think of anything more depressing. Surely nothing good can come of it. If I am to be remembered for one thing in this life, I want it to be for living bravely. I want to be brave, always. It’s hard sometimes, but it is the most important thing to me.
I still feel that way, fortunately. It’s something for me to hold onto, these days. Because the older I get, the more tempting it would be to make decisions driven by fear. The older I get, quite frankly, the scarier life is, in many ways.
The great hope I’ve got from hanging out with the older generation is that maybe the fear won’t last. Hopefully it will come full circle. We can afford to be fearless in our youth, then obstacles come up and doubts set in – and then hopefully we get more staunch and overcome them.
It would be so easy to panic at this point. To think I had to find the first willing dude, get myself knocked up, stat. In short, to settle for less. But I’m not ready to do that and I never will be. I am incapable of settling. Sometimes that’s far from being an admirable quality, but in this case I think it serves me well. However it works out, I am OK with it.
I have been madly in love in my life, and I have been loved. I have always had an army of family and friends around me. I am passionate about my work. I am excited about life.
Looking at the women around me, of every age, nobody’s life has turned out exactly the way they expected it to, one way or the other. But it’s always ended up being OK, somehow. You adjust. You get on with it. You get bloody staunch.
When you’re going through a hard time, being told to keep things in perspective is not helpful. It’s just really, really annoying. It’s like someone in the street telling you to smile, or saying ‘cheer up’ as if that has ever actually made anyone cheer up.
But perspective was exactly what I needed and it was what hanging out with older women taught me. We all know it’s too easy to look at everybody else and think they have their shit together and we don’t; that rule applies even more when we compare ourselves to older women – especially if they have children and grandchildren, we assume their lives have always taken the conventional path, that their lives were so different from ours.
And in some ways, they were. Their lives were so different from mine that I can scarcely believe we have all existed within the same lifetime. But we are all the same. We have all had our hearts broken. We have all swallowed disappointments, big and small. And we have all experienced deep joy for no good reason and laughed in the face of it all.
Yes, our lives are all so different. Yes, sometimes I look at myself in the mirror and remember I’m in my late thirties and I look like a mum, yet somehow I am not one. That’s a lot of good motherhood going to
waste right there, I think.
I spend a lot of time these days reading articles about women who have ‘failed’ at many desperate years of IVF and who have now made their peace with being child-free. I like to listen to stories of fabulous older women saying they had a brief period of baby madness in their thirties, but it faded into a distant memory along with their hormones, and now they never give their life decisions a second’s regret.
Maybe I will have a baby one day. I might have a life with a wonderful husband and happy children, and the noisy messy home I used to dream of, where I am a fun, sexy mum and we run around on the beach together and take it in turns to pick a record to listen to with dinner and go around the table telling each other one thing we learned that day.
Or maybe I will have a life of passionate love and exciting travel and loads of sex in European hotel rooms. It might be art and writing and cocktails and fascinating women. Maybe I’ll live with my mum in her old age and we will get a lot of cats, which actually sounds very appealing.
It is all brilliant. None of it is perfect.
I mean, I love Sylvia Plath as much as the next overprivileged, mentally unstable white girl – but what I refuse to do is live my life according to that stupid, overused Bell Jar quote. The one where she pictures herself at the foot of the beautiful fig tree, paralysed by indecision and unable to choose just one fig, so she has to sit there and watch them all drop and go rotten at her feet. I’m sorry, Sylvia – but fuck that!
I’m becoming staunch. I’m getting stronger all the time. I hope soon I will catch up to my mum in the staunch stakes. One day I might even grow up to be as hard as nails as Ann, Rose and Nan. As wise, optimistic, fun, enthusiastic and bloody hilarious as those brilliant women I have had the privilege of spending time with. If I grow older with a fraction of their grace, humour and positivity, I will be very lucky.
So, in the meantime, whatever happens, I refuse to panic. I refuse to hurry. I refuse to be scared. What I needed to do was stop worrying and beating myself up over everything that had ever happened, and instead accept and fall in love with my destiny. I have come back from my trip to India with a bit of perspective on it all, and so that is exactly what I do. Whatever happens next, I am OK with it. Whatever it is, whatever it turns out to be, I choose to be madly in love with it.