awakenings

I am told – by the few I know who have been through this – that there will come a moment when I will know. No amount of soul-bearing, heart-rending self-analysis will bring that moment closer. I can fret and flap until I am blue in the face, and I can argue with myself until the cows come home – but none of it matters, in the end. I will be ready when I’m ready. I will know when I know.

It’s coming. The knowledge of this rolls over and through me, like the shadow before the crest of a wave. There are flickers of fear, of eagerness, of love and pain and wonder and awe – but mostly, I’m still. It will be here soon. There is nothing I can do to change that. And most of the time, I’m okay.

I think he feels it too, though of course I don’t ask. Despite our heart-wrenching talk, he has said nothing on the subject of separation. Instead, he clings tighter to our life, talking about our future as if it’s concrete and grabbing at me like a greedy child. This infuriated me at first, but I eventually made a decision: he can keep his fragile peace for now. It is the holidays, after all.

In the moments between tinsel and candlelight, between crumpled paper and piles of gifts, I have been quietly preparing myself. The practical details of my exit once filled me with abject terror – the vast nothingness where my future used to be was too dizzying to look at, let alone plan for – but now I realise: the blank space only remains so because I have not yet made a mark on it.

And so I worry less and less about the uncertainty of student loans and finances and housing, instead focusing on the solid facts of our situation: there is money, even if it’s not mine. If worse comes to worst, D. and his family will not see us out on the streets. I would rather buy my own way to autonomy, but the truth of the matter is, I am simply not financially able. To reject all offers of help would be martyrdom for its own sake. If it were only me leaving this home, I would happily move back in with my mother – who, I know, would welcome me with open arms – until I finished my schooling and got a job. But it’s not only me: I have a son to think about, one whose needs must come before my inflated sense of pride. As much as it galls to have to depend upon someone for independence, it may be a necessity I cannot avoid.

I know that D. will do all he can to actively co-parent our son, but circumstances alone dictate that I will be the primary caregiver. I have to think about where I want us both to be living. I do not want our son growing up in the red-brick gloom of the city, where the children are wild and the streets are riddled with crime. If there is a way I can live close to this village, to his sweet father, to his friends, and to the school we’ve chosen – even if it means swallowing my guilt and being humble enough to ask for money that is not mine – I will try my best.

There is a gulf between the life that is ours and the one that will be mine; I inch closer to it with every passing day. When I feel strong, I curl my toes at its jagged, fractured edge. It pierces my skin, and I let myself bleed. I hurt. I weep. I fear. I am.

I hope.

My first lesson in femininity came at the age of eleven, when I was on holiday in Zakynthos with my family. It was early evening, and my parents always liked to get a few drinks at the bar before we went out for something to eat. Jumping up onto a stool, I asked my dad for a Coke and sat back. My older sister looked across at me, stricken.

‘For God’s sake, Bee, put your bloody knees together,’ she said. She looked up and away from my legs, but her arm flapped in the general direction of my crotch like a flag in the wind.

I looked down at myself, confused. ‘I’m not wearing a skirt. You can’t see owt.’

‘You sit like a man,’ she said, as if that should explain it. Her face twisted in distaste.

Earlier that day, we had scuffled barefoot over our balcony railing to put our Lilos and beach towels out by the pool. Dad said the Germans would be up early trying to nick all the loungers, so we got there first. We played tig between the trees, looked for lizards, dangled our toes in the cool water and splashed each other. When the sunlight spread like butter across our cheeks, we ran to get our breakfast and put our swimming cozzies on, just like we’d always done.

I looked at this stranger with my sister’s face and wondered where she’d come from. I watched her swing one slender leg over the other, toes pointed, spine straight. She was wearing a mini skirt that clung to her like a skin, and her gaze kept flicking towards the barman, a swarthy Greek with long black eyelashes. Leaning an elbow against the bar, with her palm cupping her face and one shoulder thrust forward, she didn’t look twelve. She looked sort of beautiful. Like a dancer, or a model. Like a woman.

I wasn’t sure what the fuss was all about – even if the barman was sort of nice-looking, he was far too old and he smelled like sweat – but I gathered from my sister that we were supposed to be getting him to look at us. I tried to copy her, but in my crinkled orange shorts and tatty trainers, I didn’t look graceful or girly. I looked like what I was: a kid trying to play grown-up. My hair was threaded into a French plait; I’d asked Mum to do it earlier because I liked the feel of her gentle fingers combing my wet scalp. Now, I scowled at my braid and angrily tugged the bobble out.

‘Where you goin’?’ The question followed me as I slithered down from my stool and stomped across the sun-warmed tiles. I glanced back, but her attention had returned to the barman.

‘To change,’ I said.

Lately, I have been spending an inordinate amount of time on the internet. Though I am aware that it has spiralled from a hobby to a near-addiction, I simply cannot seem to stop. I am known to waste 7 or 8 hours video-hopping on YouTube; I spend entire days doing Google searches for articles, forums, and websites that will help me make sense of how I’m feeling. My grades are slipping, the house is a mess, I’ve put on weight, and I have a constant low-level throbbing in my temples from too much exposure to LED backlight.

When the truth comes tumbling out, it is more by accident than design. D. and I put the little one to bed and begin our usual nightly routine of sitting at opposite ends of the couch. I curl with my back to the armrest and open my laptop, using the screen to shield me from view. He flicks through the channels, coming to rest on a cooking programme, and absent-mindedly rubs my socked feet. The silence yawns uneasily between us.

I am watching Ellen and Portia’s wedding video, on mute, for what must be the hundredth time this week. Seeing their happiness, so pure and free and unsullied by doubt or fear or shame, fills me with a hunger that is bone-deep. I have never dared to watch it with D. in the house before, and it is a mistake. The grief in my face is naked and raw, impossible to miss, and it gives him pause. He asks, not really expecting or wanting an honest answer –

‘Are you okay?’

– and without warning, I snap. Sobs roll up my spine and burst out of my
chest, animal sounds that echo against the silent wall of his surprise. He gently disentangles my fingers from the computer and sets it aside; tugging me into his lap, he rocks me as though I am a child.

We talk for hours. The hope in his eyes is sweet and brittle as glass; it fractures with every word I utter, and I watch him fold at the waist with the agony of it. I tell him that I am unhappy, but I do not tell him why. I tell him I know that I am not in love with him, but I do not tell him how. I tell him I am sorry, over and over and over, until the syllables taste strange and foreign and my lips are numb with regret.

He begs. Oh, god, he begs, and it is all I can do not to just give him what he wants. To let him have me, no matter what the cost. He tells me he still loves me, and though I knew this, hearing it and not being able to say it back is the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. I tell him he deserves better, and he tells me he does not want better – he wants me.

We can make it work. Please, I’ll do anything, anything you want. There has to be something left.

I say it, not just once but over and over, because he does not believe me. No. No. It’s not going to work. I can’t do this. There is nothing left in me to give. Self-hatred rises like bile in my throat, and I want him to slap me, to kick me or bite me, so that I bruise in places he can see.

The silence, afterwards, is almost worse than the tears. The air is open and raw as a wound. I rest my forehead against his arm and quietly fiddle with the seam of his t-shirt.

‘There’s a hole,’ I say. ‘You have a hole here.’

He looks down. A baby-blue cellular blanket is crumpled on the floor by his feet. It is the same blanket, I realise, that we brought our son home in from the hospital, and I wonder what it is doing down here. He picks it up and gently folds it into a square, and then he presses it to his chest.

‘Sounds about right,’ he replies, and I know I have broken him.

Dear Moonchild,

It seemed inadequate simply to leave you a passing ‘thanks’ after that beautiful letter. And so I sit in my study, drinking green tea with agave nectar, and offer up my own words in return for yours.

I won’t lie: your truth damn near broke me. I read it this morning while I was cleaning the kitchen, my forearms immersed in a sink full of bubbles. I read it once through, and again once more, and then I bent double over the counter and wept until I could not see.

You are right: truth has its own gravitational pull. In the carrying of it, you can scramble for a foothold or shift your position – and sometimes that works. Sometimes it does. But inevitably, your bones begin to shake with the weight of it, until letting go becomes less of a choice and more of a necessity. I am at that point, I think, or near it. As your body fought against your husband’s, so mine does with D. Each time he tries to kiss me, I slip through his fingers like air and I am gone before he has chance to voice a protest. I feel the full force of his sorrow at my retreating back and it brings me to my knees. But still my body will not – cannot – let him in.

The inevitability of this is what left me sobbing this morning in the butterscotch light of the kitchen. It is happening, it is coming, and I don’t know when, but I know it is soon. I can only sit and wait and watch for that moment of heartbreaking clarity – that moment you talked about, the one where you just know – and let it knock the air from my lungs. I can only hope that once it does, I will have the strength to get back on my feet and learn how to breathe again.

You are right, also, in that our communication has been ‘buried’. The sad thing is, it has always been this way. I am a talker: I talk to heal, to resolve, to reach out and comfort; I talk for honesty, for fun, for a challenge. D., on the other hand, has been taught that problems go away when you pretend they don’t exist. I often wonder if things would have turned out this way if I had succeeded in my attempts to open him up. But I am beginning to realise, just as you did, that it is not my job to fix him.

Sometimes I wish that I, like you, had a ‘catalyst’ – a woman whose eyes and mouth and voice gave me reason to doubt the life I was living. Then, at least, I could seek solace and affirmation in her arms, and know that my sacrifice was for her and not just myself. But then that’s not really the point, is it? The whole reason this began was because I wanted to find out who I was. I need to learn the rhythms of my own body before I can explore someone else’s.

And so – to my other questions. ‘I feared for our kids.’ How did they cope? Did they understand? Were they angry? My sweet boy is sleeping off a fever in the room directly above my head. He already knows that something is amiss, and he has been following me endlessly around the house like a wounded puppy. I am not the best mother in the world – I am honest enough with myself to know that – but I adore him. I could not live with myself if I made him hate me.

‘Choosing your own presence and wholeness will only bring more love into the world.’ Oh, Moonchild, I hope more than anything that this is true.

With much love and gratitude,
Bee
xox

When my mother left, she promised that it wouldn’t be long before she came back for us. I don’t remember whether it was days or weeks or months, in the end – all I remember is the thick heat of my dad’s rage, boiling through the house and scalding everything it touched.

Outside of work hours, he spent most of his time drinking himself into a stupor at the local. When eventually he stumbled home, a scowl scrawled across his face like a warning, we prepared ourselves for the inevitable tirade about how our mother was a bitch, a whore, a dyke, or all three.

He was relentless, a zealot utterly devoted to his cause. Blaming everybody from our mother to our aunt to our next-door neighbour, he would sprawl on the sofa, pathetically brandishing the remote control as though it was a weapon. He reeked of beer and self-pity.

Meanwhile, an unwilling audience, my own anger was stirring restlessly in the pit of my belly. With every syllable he flung at me like a punch, it gained roots and grew. I both hated and feared him in equal measure.

One night, he came home in a foul temper, and immediately began to bellow at my sister and me for not cleaning the dog’s muddy paw prints off the laminate floor. My sister sat quietly, as she always did, looking deferentially at her feet. She knew that he was trembling on the edge of losing control. She could see in him a telltale darkness that promised violence; it lingered behind his eyes like a bruise.

Whether I was unaware of it or whether I simply chose to ignore it, I do not know. What I do know is that the words slipped from my lips like the snarl of a dog, even as my spine convulsed with fear.

‘If you’re going to come home in a mood like that, you might as well have stayed at the fucking pub.’

I did not finish the entire sentence; the resultant roar swallowed it whole. In a heartbeat, his face was centimetres from my own. I felt spittle fleck my skin. His cheeks were raw and red, like wounds.

‘I’M ALWAYS IN A FUCKING MOOD!’

I had seen him fight before, testosterone-fuelled scraps with his mates, and I knew that one punch was strong enough to break a grown man’s nose. The thought came unbidden, a survival instinct long forgotten:

Distract him.

I raised my arm a millisecond before he raised his. In my fist, I held the phone and the remote control; I hurled them at the wall with a strength I didn’t know I had. They shattered like bone, scattering pieces of plastic and metal across the living room. He moved back, momentarily stunned, and I leapt from my chair and ran.

My sister told me later that he chased me to the back door, screaming obscenities that slapped at my back. I don’t remember. I don’t remember where I went or how far I got, barefoot and wearing nothing but pyjamas and a dressing gown. Despite being his biggest champion, even my sister admits the truth: had he caught me that night, he would have beaten me black and blue. The only reason he didn’t – the only reason he has never laid a finger on me – is because I have always been fast enough to outrun him.

I see him in myself now. Filaments of his rage have threaded themselves unalterably into my DNA; I am angry all the time these days. The knowledge of that terrifies me. I wake night after night drenched in sweat, after nightmares in which I’ve slapped my son right across the face or gripped him so hard that his sweet white skin became mottled with shadows. I have dreamt of screaming in his face until he was catatonic with fear, of snarling abuse at him until his spirit folded like tissue paper. Each time, my conscience was begging somewhere in the back of my brain: Let go! Leave him! For god’s sake, he is just a baby! And each time, I let my fury take over. I watched him flinch as I approached. I watched his eyes dart in search of escape. I watched…and I hurt him anyway.

Outside of my dreams, I have never touched my son. I have never screamed in his face. Why would I, when the sound of raised voices makes me shake from the inside out? But there is the anger. Always there, just waiting for my guard to slip. And if my guard does slip, it will ignite and it will spread and it will not let me go until everything around me is on fire.

I am a control freak only because losing control will make me dangerous. I will never let that happen. I will never allow myself to watch while someone who wears my face snaps my beautiful boy into unrecognisable pieces.

I’m always in a fucking mood. I feel trapped here, living this life that is not meant for me. And like an animal cornered, my instinct is to turn and fight. But nobody is holding me against my will; no-one here is my enemy. I have only myself to blame. Whether I like it or not, I have to make a choice: do I sit here and pretend until I implode? Or do I get out before that’s even an option?

I already know what the answer is. Maybe I just needed to hear that there was a question.

I am drifting further away with every breath. He senses it, I think – my movements, however small, vibrate along the ghost of a chord that once held him fast to my insides. When I take a few steps away, even just to pick something up or go to the bathroom, he is instantly vigilant.

Where are you going?

Mummy, come back and play with me.

NO, Mummy. Stay here.

It is simultaneously heartbreaking and suffocating. I cannot go anywhere without being followed by the patter of his footsteps, the impatient tap of his hand. Self-reflection requires solitude – at least for me – but he allows me none. The anxious rope of his voice repeatedly tugs me backwards; I am not sure whether I resent this or am grateful for it. Often, it is a mixture of both.

He is not quite three years old, yet he is more attuned to me than D. is. Sweet and exquisitely sensitive, he mimics my moods so accurately it hurts me to watch him: for weeks now, he has been weepy and bad-tempered without ever seeming to know why. As he lacks the all-too-adult capacity for denial, his face crumples in the most innocuous of moments and he gravitates instantly towards me, crawling up my torso like a kitten. It is all I can do not to weep along with him, but instead I do what I know I must: I rock and stroke, whisper and soothe. I rub slow circles on the small of his back. I kiss him.

I lie.

I have learnt that skill all too well from his father. The man worships denial as though it’s his life source. Never in my life have I met someone so capable of ignoring the elephant in the room; it could be trampling over the furniture, crushing everything in sight, and still he would deftly step around it and paste on a smile. I used to find it astonishing, and would try poking him into an argument just for the fun of it – after all, nobody’s that perfect. I used to joke that his loudest expression of anger was a sigh. After growing up with a volatile father whose temper was fierce and unpredictable, it didn’t exactly seem like a problem.

Now, however, I just find it exhausting. I cannot fix anything if he will not admit that it’s broken. My once unwavering sense of honesty has all but been strangled into silence; it takes me months if not years to work up the courage to talk about our problems, and within minutes he has changed the subject.

I’m so tired. I’m so unbearably tired. I need to be strong for my son’s sake; I need to somehow find the courage to confront this before it gets too big. But years of crushing who I am for the sake of everybody else has taken its toll: there is nothing left in me to give. I am finding it difficult to care about anything but getting the hell out of here. My job, my degree, my house, my future – what does it matter, really? What does it matter when I don’t even want to get out of bed in the morning?

I’m sorry. I’ll try to be a better mother, a better girlfriend, a better daughter. I’m sorry. I never meant to hurt anybody. I’m sorry. I tried my best to make you all happy. I’m sorry. I’m gay.

I’m sorry I’m gay.

I’m not sure exactly what started it. I have been creeping towards this conclusion with my eyes squeezed shut – sightlessly groping the dark for some answers, even as I refuse to admit asking the questions.

The books, I think, were a large part of it. It’s hard to read with your eyes closed, but I managed it. Sugar Rush. The Price of Salt. Pages for You. All of them were beautiful, but none contained whatever it was I was searching for. Until then, at last – Dear John, I Love Jane.

Ah, so that’s it. It is possible to – ? Oh, okay. But it doesn’t apply to me, not really. No, no. I’m sure their husbands were lovely, but they’re not D. He can, even now, pull me back from this. He will see the book and its title and he will ask me what’s wrong. We will talk until our voices are sandpaper-dry and then go to a relationship counsellor, who’ll show us spider diagrams about communication and give us ‘intimacy homework’. In six months we’ll be back to normal, and I’ll fall for him even harder than I did when we first met. In six months I will have forgotten.

But. But –

I finished reading a book about ‘ex-gay’ Christians last week. It was rather formal in description, with most of the emotion buried beneath academic lingo – but still, it tugged something loose inside my head. The self-loathing, the fear, the seemingly endless struggle to redirect desire – ah, yes. I know this. And now, whether I want to or not, I am unravelling at a vertiginous speed.

Our son slept over at my mother’s yesterday, and I spent the evening soundlessly begging D. not to touch me. Put simply, I am running out of excuses. Perhaps he sensed my stiffening reluctance, or perhaps he was too tired – either way, he did not try. The only contact we had was when he laid his palm on my right knee, gently rubbing away the residual ache of past injury. I let him, needing the platonic relief of his warmly circling hand.

I read parts of Dear John again, only this time the stories had an echo – the eerie resonance of my own truth, bounced back at me in the words of another. I tried to sleep but could not shift the disquiet that pulsed in me like a second heartbeat; dread formed a cold, hard ball in the base of my throat. Eventually I switched off the bedside lamp, letting the darkness cocoon me from the question of his eyes.

This morning I pressed the imprint of my palms into the steam of the shower screen. I allowed myself to cry, my hot tears indistinguishable from the water that sluiced over my face. I said the words – only in my head, but god help me, I said them – and found myself shaking fiercely, unable to stop. I felt naked in a way that had nothing to do with bare skin, and everything to do with exposing myself to the purest truth.

I am coming undone.

There once was a time when I could forget the small details. The colour of his eyes mattered less, somehow, than the look in them when our skin connected. The shape of his mouth was never as important as the texture of his kiss; it was the direction, not the form, of his hands that I followed. For a little while, I felt far more than I saw.

Now that I see him with clear eyes, I remember everything: his palms are square and callused, and my fingers are longer than his. His lips are a plump blush of surprise in the angular planes of his face. His eyes are the softest kind of green, like spring lime. I remember what he looks like when he wakes up (sulky-eyed and bushy, with hot red cheeks), and how he likes his coffee (one sugar, a generous splash of milk). I remember how long his hair has to grow before it starts to curl, and what his favourite dish is when we order Indian food. So how is it, with all these details, I have never known him less?

I collect the memories like valuable coins, displaying them in frames and on shelves; they are the glittering punctuation in my family stories. Look, I say, holding them aloft in my outstretched palms. Look at how well we fit.

I am trying to convince myself more than them, I think. Besides, they already believe it’s true – and there is a small part of me that grieves over that. Because even as I fight to prove the perfection of our union, I am thrashing for release. I am praying that someone will know me well enough to look past the colourful blanket of my words and see the dropped stitches, the threadbare wool, the gaping holes that I seem to be carrying everywhere with me now. I have pretended so hard for so long that I cannot remember what is real any more. And I wish more than anything that someone would show me. That I would not have to make this decision alone; that in finding answers from a third party, I would be absolved of guilt. That I alone would not be responsible for tearing my family apart at the seams.

That wish will never come true. I am honest enough with myself to know this, even as I hope otherwise. I allowed myself to get to this point and only I can choose where I go from here. Whether or not I will ever have the courage to say the words out loud is still a question mark at this point; even thinking them threatens to snap me in two. I have to wrestle with my conscience in silence, until I figure out whether I can handle the weight of one essential truth: I cannot heal myself without breaking somebody else.

I remember when I first got here. Doe-eyed and swollen-bellied, I shuffled from room to room; my fingers hovered and fluttered, birdlike, from surface to surface. Having been brought up in narrow, poky terraced houses, I could not get used to the sheer amount of space. Not just one bathroom, but two; not just two bedrooms, but four. A garden, with raised vegetable beds and fruit trees, offered up bright splashes of colour: crisp orange peppers, glossy red apples, the speckled yellow-green skin of under-ripe pears. High up, poking out from beneath the leaves, fat purple plums clustered like bruises.

My previous misgivings, and the shapeless terror that had tugged me from sleep at the thought of moving in with D., surrendered in the wake of my awe. Somehow, miraculously, this was ours. With all this at our fingertips, how could our family do anything but thrive?

In my state of wide-eyed ignorance, I failed to grasp one essential truth: that space is created through distance. The two are intrinsically linked; as one grows, so the other swells in its path. Sure, we have space. But sometimes all it does is allow us to get lost.

Not long after we moved in, the baby exploded into our lives like a cannonball. My reaction was not what I expected. Instead of slipping comfortably into my new roles as housewife and mother, I felt as though I was in fancy dress. I shuffled through my days in a mass-produced, ill-fitting costume that tripped me up at every turn. No matter how hard I tried, everything felt far too big for me. The person I had once been disappeared into the cracks of the floorboards. I did not have the energy to search for her alone.

My son was a difficult baby, and his near-constant cries tore into me until there was nothing left but holes. Each day, I put him down for a nap and then walked to the other end of the house, putting enough distance between us that I could not hear his shrieks. I tried desperately to keep on top of the housework – dusting, mopping, ironing, vacuuming – but there was so much of it that I eventually gave up trying. Every room I entered was littered with toys, paperwork, clothes, plates, cups, bottles. Just looking at it made me want to scream. But in the end, I had nowhere else to go.

D., having been raised in a house three times the size of ours, was accustomed to space. He used it as a shield. When he came home from work at the end of the day, I would pepper him endlessly with questions. I hoped that he would share some of his life with me, since I no longer had one of my own. He never did. I could not reach him no matter how hard I tried – and I did try, every chance I got – so eventually, I gave up on that too. I retreated inside myself, seeking solace on the internet and in books, not listening to him even when he did speak. Most of the time, he barely even noticed.

This house – our house – was a curse as much as it was a blessing. When my heart hurts so much that my body wants to jackknife with grief, I can drift out of sight before D. notices I’m gone. I can slip into another room, shutting the door, shutting my eyes. I can pretend that my son and I live somewhere small, a place where my outstretched arms will touch him no matter where we are standing. I can pretend I am in a relationship where I am not always alone. I can pretend I am somewhere I don’t need to pretend. I can pretend I am elsewhere, everywhere…anywhere but here.

I was nineteen when D. found me – I always think of it that way, as if he rescued me (poor, straggled waif) from the side of the road – and I had such faith in us, the blind kind of faith possessed only by the very young. I had my doubts, of course, but my feelings for him were centre stage; anything else was simply a shapeless murmur that I could tuck discreetly behind the curtains. I turned down the nagging soundtrack of my doubt in favour of a softer melody, one which he and I could move to.

And we did move. Oh, did we ever move. We had a peculiar sort of rhythm – lilting, hasty, charmingly uneven – but we made it our own. We were reckless and stupid and utterly beautiful. We spun so fast it was dizzying, straight into parenthood and village life, with three cars and a business and a four-bedroom detached. Often, I would put a foot out of place just to slow us down, but his gentle brand of confidence was infectious and he coaxed me back into the circle of his arms with little effort. Young, clumsy, overeager, I wanted so badly to know, to learn. Again and again, I begged him: Show me. Tell me. Teach me to dance.

Ever the patient instructor, he did as I asked. In return, I threw myself into us heart and soul – and I believed. I believed in him, and in me, and in us. I believed in our family, and in our home. Most of all, I believed I would never again experience a love so unshakably fierce. Even as the music began to skip, and our steps began to falter, I thought for sure that we would dance together forever.

I tell you this for one reason: so that you know what I felt for him was real. I could not lie about that even if I had wanted to; I am just not that good an actress. When the shit hits the fan – and I know now that it will; I can feel it coming – I want everyone to know that. I want him to know that.

I didn’t lie. I didn’t know.