the neighbour, the child, the search for love
Right away from sex for a while but perhaps not. I’m thinking how I need to disentangle myself just a little from my next door neighbour, good friend and quondam wife. Yesterday, this very very helpful solicitous woman persuaded me to catch a train with her to the city to visit Lincraft for suitable curtains for my lounge and dining areas. She herself was not in the most able of states as she’s a chronic fatigue sufferer lately under pressure through being more or less forced to mind an extremely active and occasionally disturbed two-year-old for at least part of each week. This two-year-old is being ferried about between mother and grandmother as well as to other family members as circumstances permit. This is affecting her behaviour. She’s currently very much into opening what she shouldn’t be opening and spilling the contents (talcum powder, her grandmother’s cosmetics, my osmocote, my sunblock) on the floor, in the bath, into a pot-plant. We’re not sure how much it’s normal terrible twos stuff, how much due to these multiple separations.
So, with this loveable monster-child powdering and rubbling her house and exhausting her to the point where she’s sobbing on the phone to doctor Andrew asking for more or different medication to cope, she’s at a low ebb, and the journey to Lincraft was a kind of retail therapy, but not for me.
I appreciate, I think, what she’s doing for me, enthusing over my décor, getting me enthused, but I also well understand why it is that the vast majority of shoppers are female (as my quondam wife informed me as we waited an age to be served). Whether it’s because they ‘naturally’ have the patience, or they have patience thrust upon them, je ne sais pas, but I felt increasingly resentful (but I can suppress these feelings better nowadays) as I waited while my erstwhile chopped and changed between curtain patterns and argued with me about contrasts and complementarities. Lincraft is going into liquidation, and so everything was marked at half-price, an astonishing bargain as my Erstwhile constantly pointed out, but this also lead to a great crowd of shoppers and extended waiting times. I was the only male present, not even a queer eye to be seen.
One of my frustrations was an age-old one in my relations with my erstwhile. Astonished by the unheard of cheapness of the material, she felt the urge to buy more, and more. Almost more than she could afford. So I began to worry about finances and juggling, unexpectedly. Another frustration was more complex – she wasn’t prepared to accept my decisions on the curtain colours I’d chosen for my own home, generally because she felt, and rightly, that I was just making the easiest decisions to get the hell out of there. So I felt financially imposed upon, interiordecoratively imposed upon and temporally imposed upon. Yet at the end, though I’m so behind with the writing, I must admit it was worth it, just about. I’ll have attractive good quality curtains in my showcase areas (sewn up by my erstwhile, another small prob), all for the price, more or less, of another entry in a blog nobody reads. And so the links with the erstwhile are extended that much further.
Then there’s the child. I see a lot of her, she’s a bright spark, into everything, but responsive all the same to the ‘voice of command’ (a phrase of my erstwhile). Something the erstwhile said recently set me thinking, that it does really seem true that kids need both parents, if at all possible. A big issue in the out there. Anyway the child’s responses to my mild scolding, mixed with play and affection, have been impressive, to my mind, and a part of me wishes I could be her regular male parent – her real father's a junky. Of course much of me wants to be free of the whole thing, selfishly independent, disentangled not only from this child but from the whole family and its cares and woes, its kindnesses and incompetencies, its daily battles and thrills. To escape into bigger issues, global warming, the perils of social evolutionism, the problem of theodicy, but also into the possibility of a new love to point me in new directions. I have someone in mind, but I’m quite possibly being absurd.
So, with this loveable monster-child powdering and rubbling her house and exhausting her to the point where she’s sobbing on the phone to doctor Andrew asking for more or different medication to cope, she’s at a low ebb, and the journey to Lincraft was a kind of retail therapy, but not for me.
I appreciate, I think, what she’s doing for me, enthusing over my décor, getting me enthused, but I also well understand why it is that the vast majority of shoppers are female (as my quondam wife informed me as we waited an age to be served). Whether it’s because they ‘naturally’ have the patience, or they have patience thrust upon them, je ne sais pas, but I felt increasingly resentful (but I can suppress these feelings better nowadays) as I waited while my erstwhile chopped and changed between curtain patterns and argued with me about contrasts and complementarities. Lincraft is going into liquidation, and so everything was marked at half-price, an astonishing bargain as my Erstwhile constantly pointed out, but this also lead to a great crowd of shoppers and extended waiting times. I was the only male present, not even a queer eye to be seen.
One of my frustrations was an age-old one in my relations with my erstwhile. Astonished by the unheard of cheapness of the material, she felt the urge to buy more, and more. Almost more than she could afford. So I began to worry about finances and juggling, unexpectedly. Another frustration was more complex – she wasn’t prepared to accept my decisions on the curtain colours I’d chosen for my own home, generally because she felt, and rightly, that I was just making the easiest decisions to get the hell out of there. So I felt financially imposed upon, interiordecoratively imposed upon and temporally imposed upon. Yet at the end, though I’m so behind with the writing, I must admit it was worth it, just about. I’ll have attractive good quality curtains in my showcase areas (sewn up by my erstwhile, another small prob), all for the price, more or less, of another entry in a blog nobody reads. And so the links with the erstwhile are extended that much further.
Then there’s the child. I see a lot of her, she’s a bright spark, into everything, but responsive all the same to the ‘voice of command’ (a phrase of my erstwhile). Something the erstwhile said recently set me thinking, that it does really seem true that kids need both parents, if at all possible. A big issue in the out there. Anyway the child’s responses to my mild scolding, mixed with play and affection, have been impressive, to my mind, and a part of me wishes I could be her regular male parent – her real father's a junky. Of course much of me wants to be free of the whole thing, selfishly independent, disentangled not only from this child but from the whole family and its cares and woes, its kindnesses and incompetencies, its daily battles and thrills. To escape into bigger issues, global warming, the perils of social evolutionism, the problem of theodicy, but also into the possibility of a new love to point me in new directions. I have someone in mind, but I’m quite possibly being absurd.
posted by Stewart at 10:08 am
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