Running from love

‘Human behaviour is dictated by need not logic,’ writes Clare Kilroy in her novel Soldier Sailor while, her chief character’s observation as she coaxes her toddler into taking medication against pain. 

I’d add, not only by logic, but also by desire. 

Need might come first but how close on its heels, trots our wish for comfort, for pleasure, for relief.  Our desire. 

I do not need that glass of wine I enjoy each evening with my meals. A glass that might rise to two. I do not need it, but I want it. Pleasure and relief follow the taste and the lifting of spirits that comes with every sip, predicated not so much on need as desire. 

But need can couch desire and the other way around. Even as logic tells me the wine is not good for me, something else drives me to pursue the comfort of my desire. And so, it is for so many things in life, not all of them malignant.

Take my desire to write. It can also feel like a deep need emerging from some habit formed long ago when I first found comfort in expressing myself on the page. This comfort helped me gain some deeper equilibrium. Without it I find myself feeling slightly unhinged, as if I’ve forgotten to brush my teeth, or left home without my wallet or these days my phone. 

I do not need my telephone. I can survive without it but the impulse to carry it everywhere becomes so great because I have formed another habit of attachment whereby without my phone nearby I feel a great hole.

And an absence, at least of the deepest type, as Winnicott tells us, becomes a malignant presence. Not just a void but the presence of something so painful we will do anything to avoid it.

Too much absence in infancy can lead a person to breakdown in later life when triggered to madness as a defence against the breakdown that never happened. This breakdown could not have happened when we were tiny and helpless hell-bent on survival but as we grow, we find ways of the great antidote to all this pain of loss and absence is love. 

And love can be so hard won, so hard to come by that when we feel a snippet of it we can suffer extraordinary pain. The painful thawing from a frozen or paralysed state. It hurts to come back to life. The opposite of Jonie Mitcell’s words in her song Big Yellow Taxi,

‘Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.’ 

It’s opposite when you know what you’ve got, for the first time a taste of real love and care it can feel so excruciating given its past long absence for the best part of your life that all you want to do is run away from it.

Many a damaged soul has pushed away the warm care and love of another because it feels too much. Too much because like a person deprived of food for far too long, we need to reintroduce food slowly otherwise their gut will seize up in pain.

In running from love, as in running from pain we get locked inside the pain of the non-requited.

But let me lighten the mood here. My words feel heavy and do not reflect the state of mid I’m in retesting new gasses that unfortunately slip too easily off my nose and need adjustment.

My husband reads the newspaper each morning, the old-fashioned way in full spreadsheet form. He reads from start to finish, bypassing only the advertisements and some of the sporting results. He reads with the intensity of a person determined to understand better what goes on in the world. Unlike me, who tends to skim world events online and only when a subject holds my interest do I read the entire article.

Yesterday onto his second cup of tea, he looked up briefly chuckling. And read out loud to me from Monty Python’s Holy Grail. King Arthur approaching the castle of a French man and asking for food and shelter in their search for the holy grail. 

The French knight argues he already has a grail withno need of another. Then show it to us. The Frenchman refuses Arthur’s threats, ‘You don’t frighten us you English pig dog… I fart on your general direction. Your mother was a hamster. Your father smelt of elderberries.’

A term of delightful derision that makes my heart sing.

Such clunky words put together to enlist outrage in the other while we the audience laugh our hearts out at the ludicrousness of it all.

Love and loss, life and death. You can’t have one without the other writes Julia Samuels and if you block out he pain you also block out the joy. You lose your sense of humour as you squash your desires, but if you refuse to recognise your actual needs and replace them only with whims and desires then you also get into reverse trouble. 

Like a junkie hooked on heroin. Your own natural capacity to find joy in life is slowly eroded and you find you need more of whatever it is you’re addicted to as a replacement for the stuff that lubricates your body and mind. 

So again, the philosophers are right when they espouse moderation in all things, with occasional outbursts to spice up the flavour of our lives, like salt on a hard-boiled egg, strangely one of my favourite foods. 

Must be a throw back to childhood when eggs were such a novelty we were only allowed one each Sunday for breakfast.

Wowserism is as dangerous as excess. Let’s hear it for the boring middle road with occasional digressions into glorious lookouts over great joy and love notwithstanding the inevitable ruts in the road and moments when the firm ground turns to mud or sand. 

Life is never even but it can be manageable if we share the load with others. Seek out their help when needed and offer it back at other times when other folks’ needs might supersede our own. 

Magpies, thirst and feminism

‘Women’s suffering is so normalised that people call it “drama” instead of “damage” …For generations Women’s suffering has been minimalised, re-written and weaponised. Bruises become “over reaction”. Trauma becomes “attention seeking”. Borders become “attitude” But naming it matters.’ Zadie Smith

The older I get the more I try to imagine myself in my mother’s mind. The things that made her tick. Not just her words and actions, but her inner workings, hidden from view but cloaked in religious philosophising and doctrine that served as a lock on her innermost qualities such she herself might not have known much about what went on inside of her.

Psychological insight was not high on her agenda of good qualities. Religious dedication and adherence to the word of God was. 

As a therapist it seems a significant thing to do. Interrogate our relationship with our parents, especially our mothers as the first port of call to human connection. 

I worried for the birds in the extreme heat. On the last day of extreme heat, I found three magpies in my back yard near the outside table squawking, the young one, the one with grey flecked feathers and slightly smaller than the black and white birds I assumed were parents. I offered them water in a low lidded bowl on the table and moved away. 

The little one was the first to drink.

Magpies are familial creatures I understand, and they have the capacity to remember those who are helpful and those not. Last night over dinner my husband aimed to leave the few scraps of our meal, potato, carrot and some cooked fish on the table as an offering. 

I once worried about magpies in the spring. Hanging out washing I feared they might swoop, particularly after bulldozers had moved into their territories nearby and mowed down trees to make way for a retirement complex. To make way for the rich elderly in my community. This is one of those super-duper complexes that looks like a hotel with downstairs dining rather than a home.

‘We think back through our mothers if we are women,’ Writes Michelle de Kretser in her book Theory and Practice.

Her mother in the book comes across as demanding but concerned. With high expectations for her daughter. Academic achievement and a good husband. As if such can co-exist.

When my first-born daughter was sixteen years old she took part in a Rotary public speaking event in which she talked eloquently about her take on feminism.

She was convinced then she could have it all. Motherhood and career and in some way thirty years later she has it all, in terms of academic achievement, career and family but at what cost?

It is never easy to manage the two, career and mothering. The two roles scream at one another. You should be doing more.

When she was around the age I am now, my mother wrote her autobiography. I’ve read it twice now and each time I can hear her voice through the editorial offerings from one of my sisters-in -law who tidied up some of the grammar.

My mother writes well but she surprises me in her limited understanding of events. As she once told me when I was beginning my writing career, ‘don’t write the grotty bits’.

In response to a paper I published on childhood abuse when the editor of the collection described my story in the back blurb as one of ‘horror’, my mother questioned this choice of words.

She did not like to think of childhood sexual abuse as horror.

What could he have been thinking?

My mother admired her father, my Opa. She was his first born and a daughter ahead of four sons before a second daughter was born as one of twins followed by yet another boy.

My mother saw herself as both princess and housemaid for the family. Her mother who had once been a teacher married my grandfather late for the period in her mid-thirties and seven children followed in close succession.

It must have been tough. She had the help of a maid and woman who my mother referred to as char lady. The women who did the heavy cleaning.

The irony then, in her fifties my mother took on a cleaning job at the convent attached to my school in a bid to earn extra money to help support her large family of none.

My father earned good money as an accountant, but he drank heavily and was not good at sharing his earnings. She often had no money in her purse to manage the small extras we needed as a burgeoning family.

When I was young my parents kept accounts at the various shops near our home, the milk bar, grocers, green grocers and stationers. The chemist.  Everywhere my mother shopped locally offered credit, but when the bills came in at the end of each month there was darkness and fury as my father needed to cover the expenses. He saw no need to offer my mother anything extra to put in her purse. We cost him so much money just to love.

My mother was desperate to pay the modest school fees required at our Catholic convents for girls and colleges for the boys, but there was never enough left over. Hence her decision to work to pay the school fees.

Her valuing of education is one of the things I appreciate about my mother, and my father, too. Maybe it’s typical of migrants. They see the only way ahead through education. To get ahead in the world. They encouraged us with our studies in a way my husband’s family did not.

Last night he told me the story of his arrival at secondary school when he first picked up his algebraic textbook, and learned that A plus B equals C. It dawned on him at this moment that A and B could be of any value you chose, and they would then determine the outcome of C together. C depended on A plus B.

This was a revelation to a small boy of twelve so much so he went home and told his mother the good news.

‘It’s all gibberish,’ she scoffed as if to say, rot and nonsense. Don’t waste your time here. In much the same way she once burned his books for their salacious content. 

My husband calls it bog Irish Catholicism. Unlike my mother, who read her bible in childhood and studied it closely in her later years. ‘The Irish don’t read the bible,’ my husband said. ‘They just do as the priest and bishops tell them. They don’t have minds of their own.’

Many an Irish person might challenge this and I think back to the great writers of our time and before, to James Joyce and today’s Colm Toibin and Niall Williams among others. And the women, Anne Enight, Clare Keegan, Maeve Binchy. All those wonderful writers whose lyrics spring from the page like music.

And as ever my mind wanders all over my life and as far as I am in awe of the breadth of my experience I still find it hard to reign in my thoughts. 

To think back to women’s suffering where I began and shift to the suffering of humankind, but I’m in danger of doing the very thing I rail against: the minimisation of what it’s like to be a woman, today and in the past. As distinct from the struggles men might encounter.

This polarisation which makes it even harder to think about the way that like equations A and B equals C, even if A has a high value and B a low value, they even out at C.

Imagine what might be the score if they were of equal value. If we rated all genders as worthy of respect, and here I include the entire LGBTQIA+ community. And this is not to minimise the suffering of women because I suspect these things all piggyback on one another.