Wednesday 29 June 2011

For a long time, I went to bed early...

Last year at a Christmas party... nearly four years single and not hugely bothered about it at the time... I found myself under interrogation from a new friend... I love her because she is blissfully open and honest about everything... which is why I was suddenly painfully aware of her very loud voice bawling at me:

"Four years? Seriously, you've been single for nearly four years..?"

"Yup, four years," I replied, smiling to myself and swigging on my champagne, because I knew what was coming next.

"Well, what the fuck are you doing about it?" she bellowed, already looking around the packed room for a potential man for me.

There it was... the million dollar question... just what the fuck was I going to do about it?

Well, not a a lot as it happens, and I launched into the standard speech I'd worked up over time for people like her, explaining that I actually quite liked being on my own and that while sometimes it was shit to only have yourself to rely on, actually most of the time it was quite nice and very very liberating. And while everyone around me had come to view me as some crusading, femininsta, selfless single mother doing a brilliant job under trying circumstances... actually... ACTUALLY... what they'd failed to notice was that I'd been leading quite a selfish life.

Yes, there was no one to put up shelves for me or to screw in light bulbs, but then again I'm quite handy with a drill and a stepladder. There was also no one stopping me from doing exactly what I wanted to do. No one to have to compromise with, no one to have to quietly resent for not having done the washing up before he came to bed. It was one less thing to think about, one less responsibility in a life jam-packed full of them.

Despite being slightly hemmed in by my single-motherness, I've never had so much freedom in my life as I've had over these last years. Independence is a wonderful thing and a very enriching thing. So, these days with My Lovely Man on the horizon, I find myself asking whether I am even capable of giving it up?  What will take its place?

I used to always end my little speech about not being at all bothered about being single by saying..."Look, I just honestly don't know how I would fit a relationship into my life." And people would either congratulate me on being so incredibly self-sufficient or nod patronizingly, while I could see them thinking, "Yes, yes... poor thing."

Well, who knows perhaps I was kidding myself, perhaps it was a clever little smoke screen for my concerns about even attempting to get involved with someone again. Perhaps I really did believe it... I think I did.  I know that in the very few dark moments when I wondered if there would ever be anyone else, I did do sums in my head about how many hours I could realistically give over to a man, in the spaces in between work and children and cultivating my own life. And wondered very seriously about what it would cost me... personally.

But until I got together with MLM, and since we have started trying to fit ourselves in around the rest of our lives... between children and jobs and friends and families... well... I don't think I really knew until now how hard it really would be. I asked him recently, what would you be doing differently if we hadn't met. His response? "I'd have been to the gym in the last three months and I might have read a book. I'd definitely have got more sleep."

At the moment MLM is being tugged in all directions by his life and, sympathetic as I am to those demands, I'm quite caught up in the responsibilities of my own... which has  got me wondering what we can really be to each other.  I don't want to be a pessimist, after all, this is a learning curve for us both... Love in a time of parenting is a many splendorous, but a very bloody complicated thing, and looking over at MLM, all tired and worked up, and with no hope of going to bed early like Proust, I find myself asking:

What price love?

Friday 17 June 2011

It is a truth universally acknowledged....

One morning a few years back I found myself slumped at the kitchen table of an old friend, hung-over, knocking back coffee and listening half-heartedly as she read out a newspaper article sent to her that morning by her worried mother.

Mum was trying to make a very clear point to her newly single daughter... (and friend.) And her point was that that we were 29 years old and time was running out... We needed husbands, and we needed them quick!

Oh god... not again, please..! Both my friend and I were bruised, aching and bashed up from recent splits... She from the reasonably amicable but terribly sad end to an eight year relationship, and I from the hideously acrimonious split from my husband of seven years... Neither of us was in the market for fresh heart-ache.

The article didn't make for encouraging reading and the upshot was that girls who didn't marry the bloke they'd spent their twenties with were... not to put too fine a point on it... screwed. It suggested that by the beginning of their thirties decent men were either a.) snapped up or b.) realising that life without wifey and babies had a helluva lot to offer a single chap of independent means.

Apparently all that was left to us two silly girls who'd ditched the blokes we'd snared at 21 was a lifetime of 'enforced independence' or to wait for the first round of divorces... By which time the men available to us would be a.) coping with life alone, b.) embittered c.) broke from child maintenance payments and d.) unwilling to commit to us in the way they had done to their ex wives ten years previously.

Depressing stuff. So much so that my friend and I all these years later still refer to it as 'That Article'... Worst of all, it was written by a man... a man who claimed that he just wanted to clue women into the truth about men.... he said we needed to face facts... We just weren't 'viable' in the way we once had been. According to him there was nothing to be done now that we had missed our window apart from steeling ourselves to become benevolent/ wicked stepmother figures at some indeterminate point in the future.  His line? "See you by the swings in ten years time, ladies."

The idea of it just seemed ghastly... and my friend and I thought of adding a slug of vodka to the morning coffee as she screwed up the article and binned it. Was this really it? Was this as good as it gets? Had we really thrown it all away?

Well, in short, the answer is: No, of course it's bloody not... and of course we bloody haven’t!

Four and half years later and I'm not sure where the time went, but these days I have someone rather wonderful in my life and I often find myself thinking back to that article years ago. I can only assume that despite the fact that My Lovely Man conforms to many of the points made by that angry male journalist in his joyless article back in ‘07... (30-something, separated, single dad, caught up in work, a bit bashed around by life and love)... that he is simply... well, a better sort of man than old journo' gave some men credit for.

MLM and I are not an 'easy option' in each other's lives: we each have kids from a previous relationship; we have demanding jobs; our exes are still complicated factors in our lives; we don't have the time for each other that we'd like to have... it's tough loving someone so much and having to very often come in second, third or fourth place behind all of the other responsibilities in life... hey, we really don't look good on paper... but actually what the angry journalist forgot to mention is just how beautiful the second chance is... 

So this is about that: love the second time around; love in the time of parenthood.