Tuesday 23 November 2010

A Blog With Questions About Love In It (And Two Brief Mentions Of The Manford Scandal For Those Who Like The Tabloids)

Hello. I thought I'd do a blog. I accidentally called it How To Be Ideal because I made a mistake with the keyboard while I was trying out possible titles and now I can't change it. If anyone knows how to change it, please let me know. To clarify, I definitely don't think I know how to be ideal. It was only one of the possible options. I don't really have any idea how to be ideal at all.

I began this year having been recently utterly and completely shafted by someone I really loved. Not my husband.  He’s not that kind of husband.  Or the story’s yet to break.  In fact his agent called and asked him to clandestinely reveal any ‘Manford-style’ stories he might have stuffed down the back of his Twitter account – ‘just so they could be prepared’.  If that’s what we’re all up to, it would also be great if he could tell me. I also like being prepared. 

I’ve spent a large part of 2010 (as well as giving birth to and caring for a human, working, and watching Don Draper screwing around) thinking on and off about the particular person who left me so upset, and what happened, and trying to deal with the moral and philosophical repercussions.

Without going into details, one of my colleagues and best friends let me down in quite spectacular style, leaving me massively in the lurch in a very vulnerable situation, when I was quite heavily pregnant.

 The particulars of what happened are not really very interesting. I’m more fascinated by the question, to misquote Charles before he really cocked things up, of what love is. Love should, really, be unconditional.  Real love that’s actually worth anything.  If love is conditional, doesn’t that mean we’re all walking around trying to protect ourselves, get shit for ourselves, and generally are all ready to leave the moment we don’t feel like we’re getting what we want?

Predictably, becoming a mother has been massive shock in the unconditional love department. I thought I was loving.  I am definitely loving.  I hug people, defend people, and make people birthday cakes. Fine.  But the sort of love that is demanded of you by a rage-filled, shit-filled, pained human who can’t focus their own eyes is unlike anything I have ever known.  

In case you hadn’t already realised, sometimes it’s absolutely dreadful to be a parent.  You are there to be chucked up on, to comfort, to be woken every three hours or more around the clock for months on end while recovering from major surgery.  You are busting a gut, 24 hours a day, for someone who really doesn’t understand why or how.  It’s a relationship you cannot leave.  And regardless of how desperately your body craves sleep, or what you personally feel able to offer emotionally and physically, it is your responsibility and your duty to get out of bed, whip your tits out, and get on with it. And if I’m deeply honest, from the bottom of my soul, I have had private moments, hobbling around with a big surgical scar through my stomach holding a breast pump and a screaming, tragic baby human, where I’ve wondered what on earth I’ve done to myself.

We have been a little bit unlucky (and also of course massively lucky to have such a beautiful, healthy although utterly grumpy sort of person). He’s been ill a couple of times, in hospital for a few nights each time with a pitiful drip in his tiny foot.  His illness was initially misdiagnosed, and for several weeks we endured dreadful woes, almost tearing each other up, with no clue as to why the baby was so desperately unhappy.  But babies get more ill than ours. People cope with much worse than we did. And there is no point at which you can say, ‘Well. I didn’t expect to be treated like THIS.’

I’m sure many mothers will claim this has no bearing on their personal experience, and I am very, very happy and fairly jealous that your experience of motherhood was so unconditionally blissful. I certainly would never deny how extraordinary and mind-bending and utterly phenomenal my experience has been, and still is. It’s very, very exciting. But that’s not the point.

In the past I have had such a strong sense of right and wrong that I’ve ended up cutting people out of my life when I felt they’d done something ‘wrong’.  A few years later, I’ve realised I’ve lost a friend over something that was never so clear cut. Both my and Mark’s families have feuds that look set to last until death, and some which already have. I stopped all contact with the friend who screwed me over so handsomely because I felt the stress of the relationship was affecting my health and also that of my unborn baby. But ironically the unborn baby has gone on to cause me about thirty times as much stress as she ever did, and in the end the love I have for him will be one of the strongest and most intense forms of love I’ll ever experience.

Does that mean it’s worth staying in every relationship we have, regardless of how punishing it might be on us personally, because that’s ultimately what it means to be someone who truly loves? I mean, that sounds awful.  And as a cheerful atheist, without a religious framework of eventual reward for that sort of love, I’m not sure I can face it.

For the time being I’ll keep on hoping that Watson doesn’t wank off to any photographs of breasts.  That would be ideal.  But if he does, would even that relationship, which is really the bedrock of my life as I know it, end? And would that be the right thing to do? Watson. Get off Twitter until I’ve made up my mind.

5 comments:

  1. I'm not sure if it is always the best thing but I tend to see things in black and white so if someone does something wrong, thats it. Maybe I'm niave but I really don't understand how some people manage to forgive.

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  2. I am writing this as a twenty year old boy who is not a parent and is about to leave a rather detailed and pensive comment on a stranger's blog, nonetheless:
    We are wrong, we will always be wrong. Whether it is in how we treat someone else, how we react to someone else or even in our very notions of right and wrong. Things always change, our perceptions change and the foundations of those perceptions. You may have felt at the time you cut this person out that it was the right thing to do, maybe now you feel it is the wrong thing to have done. Nothing is concrete.
    However that is not an ideal way to live your life, its a pretty shit one, I know, I've tried. You have to go on what you feel at the time, and ignore objectivity. Objectivity no matter how rational, logical or beautiful it may be is flawed as we as people are not objective, we are not rational and we are not logical. And the prime example of this is love.
    We can like people for many reasons, strong genetics, intelligence, wit, charm, beauty, we can even love them for those reasons. But more often than not we cannot define why it is we love someone or something, there will be something about them that escapes our use of language and our power for reasoning, be it the way they tilt their head whilst they speak, or the way they curl their toes when they're nervous, or one of the infinite other unfathomable reasons why we love. From everything you (and countless other parents) say about child rearing, it is a nightmare, and they don't understand, but you love them nonetheless. It's wild, unpredictable, awful and euphoric.
    Whilst embracing pure objectivity is no way to live your life, nor is living consequencelessly on the whims of emotion. You need to find a balance between the two, not tear apart every moment looking for meaning but also not acting on the first impulse you have.
    It's the same line we must walk in relationships, you cannot pick at everything and try and work out every possible thing that may occurr, as human beings we just don't have the capacity for this. But they do take work, and the willingness to reasses what you thought, to apologise, to change.
    In no way is this how to be ideal, but that's because there is no ideal, as I said at the start perceptions change. And with love, love is forever, but our perceptions of what that love is or what form it takes changes. You may still love this person, but maybe they aren't that person anymore so the process of loving them becomes past tense.
    And one final comment on this now rather long but hopefully sensical comment, with regards Watson and Twitter I think it very much depends on whose breasts he's got pictures of.
    Sam Schafer

    ReplyDelete
  3. I am writing this as a twenty year old boy who is not a parent and is about to leave a rather detailed and pensive comment on a stranger's blog, nonetheless:
    We are wrong, we will always be wrong. Whether it is in how we treat someone else, how we react to someone else or even in our very notions of right and wrong. Things always change, our perceptions change and the foundations of those perceptions. You may have felt at the time you cut this person out that it was the right thing to do, maybe now you feel it is the wrong thing to have done. Nothing is concrete.
    However that is not an ideal way to live your life, its a pretty shit one, I know, I've tried. You have to go on what you feel at the time, and ignore objectivity. Objectivity no matter how rational, logical or beautiful it may be is flawed as we as people are not objective, we are not rational and we are not logical. And the prime example of this is love.
    We can like people for many reasons, strong genetics, intelligence, wit, charm, beauty, we can even love them for those reasons. But more often than not we cannot define why it is we love someone or something, there will be something about them that escapes our use of language and our power for reasoning, be it the way they tilt their head whilst they speak, or the way they curl their toes when they're nervous, or one of the infinite other unfathomable reasons why we love. From everything you (and countless other parents) say about child rearing, it is a nightmare, and they don't understand, but you love them nonetheless. It's wild, unpredictable, awful and euphoric.
    Whilst embracing pure objectivity is no way to live your life, nor is living consequencelessly on the whims of emotion. You need to find a balance between the two, not tear apart every moment looking for meaning but also not acting on the first impulse you have.
    It's the same line we must walk in relationships, you cannot pick at everything and try and work out every possible thing that may occurr, as human beings we just don't have the capacity for this. But they do take work, and the willingness to reasses what you thought, to apologise, to change.
    In no way is this how to be ideal, but that's because there is no ideal, as I said at the start perceptions change. And with love, love is forever, but our perceptions of what that love is or what form it takes changes. You may still love this person, but maybe they aren't that person anymore so the process of loving them becomes past tense.
    And one final comment on this now rather long but hopefully sensical comment, with regards Watson and Twitter I think it very much depends on whose breasts he's got pictures of.
    Sam Schafer

    ReplyDelete
  4. Welcome to the blogosphere Emily!

    I really relate to your article.
    The mixed feelings about parenting : the perfect cocktail of Inextinguishable Love, Exhaustion, Pain and Anguish.
    The strong sense of right and wrong, the views on betrayal(by close friends too) and the natural 'cutting-bridges' reaction... even the family feuds, everything.
    Except for the "whipping of the tits out" bit, that I generally leave to my wife.

    I'm just debating with myself about your conclusion.
    Is there the same sense of betrayal towards porn ?
    In the highly unlikely hypothesis that your husband might indulged, sometime, in some sort of solitary relaxation, with the help, or not, of pictures of breasts ; is the offence as great than if you had a relationship - or some prior communication/knowledge with/of the owner of the aforementioned breasts ? Manford's problem was closer to web-adultery than sheer used of pornography.
    Would you forbid Mark the use of the entire internet(well... probably just 90% of it) ? Or the furtive look towards the top-shelf for the thrill of the disapproving looks of an over-50 news-agent ? Or, against all sense of Britishness, forbid him the read of The Sun ?!
    Over all, I wouldn't think it would be enough to end a relationship on the matter... even if forbidding one to buy the Sun is a very tempting argument... not that I'm implying that Mark is a Sun reader, I wouldn't thing so but I don't know.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I don't think all love has to be unconditional to be worth anything - suspect that road leads to martrydom and a pretty miserable time. On the basis of no personal experience, it seems the way we love our children is unique; I don't think partners, friends or even siblings/parents get love quite that intense or unrelated to their behaviour. We choose everyone in our lives to some degree, except our families, and children are the only people we not only love but are responsible for.
    While unconditional love sounds like something to aspire to, wouldn't that mean that no matter how much friends let you down, undermine you, lie to you or make you unhappy, you stick with them anyway? While we can all cut people off for relatively minor offenses or let feuds fester for no good reason, I'm not sure that giving seventh, eighth and ninety second chances to, say a cheating partner or chronically lazy colleague, is necessarily good for either of you. If someone brings more bad than good into your life, I think it's completely sane and reasonable to assess whether you still want them around.
    With romantic love, I think everyone has their own personal definition of what betrayal means and where they draw the line of what's acceptable. I know a (very happy) couple who had an open marriage for 20+ years and several others who don't consider a casual shag they never hear about to be a deal-breaker. Both of you knowing where the line is - porn, internet flirtation, long intense dinners with attractive friends - and the consequences of crossing it, that's more important then where you choose to draw your personal line.

    ReplyDelete