PART 6. 1 My Speech

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. For more information, see right.



1992

‘What I’m talking about is what happened before I got married and the letters you wrote to me. Because of the pain it is not a subject I have been able even to think about let alone speak about for fourteen years. But I think it’s vital that we now clear the air. I feel that we are drifting further and further apart and I’m finding it more and more of a farce to come home. It has not been easy coming to see you all these years knowing what you think of me and what you think of John. Please believe that I’ve done it out of love, not duty and if I didn’t love you I wouldn’t be here today.’

My hands were shaking as I read from my sheaf of papers.
    Love wasn’t a word we ever used in my family except at the end of letters. I wondered if this was already the end of my attempt to make a speech and whether my parents were about to hoot in derision since that was what usually happened when I expressed things close to my heart. How did I ever get to be a daughter of theirs?
    Frog and I were on a high upright sofa against the wall with my parents opposite us, lower down in squishy armchairs.
    We were in the ‘blue room’, the small sitting-room in which my parents usually spent their evenings when they were on their own. It was cosy and a little dark with a wall of shelves crammed with books. I was glad we were there as it was more informal than the big ‘yellow room’ with its two large sofas at right angles to each other, its three sides of windows and its doors leading on to a terrace.
    It was after supper on the first evening of our visit to my parents and I’d plunged straight in to my talk. My parents had looked surprised when I’d asked them to sit down but had done so without complaint.
    The room was still silent so I carried on.

‘I can’t brush all those events under the carpet and pretend that nothing happened when I’m boiling over with anger and unhappiness – still, even though it was fourteen years ago. You had your say, but I never have. And I’d like to have it now. I must have it now if we are to repair things between us.’

My words had started to sound melodramatic and clichéd, and my throat was locking, but I couldn’t stop now. That would make me look even more of an idiot, and I’d never have the courage to reach this stage again.

‘First I’ll read out a few of the accusations you levelled against me – and I’m quoting from the letters.

    Irresponsible
    Drifting from whim to whim
    Inclined to ‘frivvle’ money
    Anticipating money
    Immature and not sensible
    Impulsive
    Acting with unseemly haste
    Inconsiderate
    Acting in an unsavoury manner
    Acting unfairly
    Likely to let people down
    Acting abruptly
    Not respecting other people’s point of view
    Discourteous
    Unkind
    Thoughtless
    Bigoted
    Dishonest

‘And now some of the judgements you passed on John – again from the letters.

    No brains or charm
    Unable to provide properly
    Not settled in a reasonable career
    Irresponsible
    Unlikeable
    Difficult to talk to
    Naïve
    Prejudiced
    Cliché-ridden
    Uneducated
    Ill-mannered

‘It was devastating to hear this from you. I can’t express how sad it made me to feel you misunderstood me so much and had such a low opinion of me and everything I’d been doing while growing up.
    ‘It also made me very angry that you felt you had a right to inflict your opinions on me. You’ve never asked me what my views on life are. You’ve always tried to mould me in your image. You’ve implied that it was my duty to behave like you. And that if I didn’t I was being ungrateful or naughty or stupid or something.
    ‘I have to follow my own conscience, wherever it takes me. It’s not right that anyone should be dominated by someone else. I’m different from you. I’m a different generation, a different person. You’ve never realised this and never given me the freedom to be myself.
    ‘Of course I want you to be happy, but I can’t betray myself to make you happy. You’d no right to use emotional blackmail on me and I think this is what angers me more than anything else.
    ‘Not so much you Dad as I realise a lot of what you said was said from genuine concern but perhaps over-protectiveness. It is statements like the following (and I’m quoting here from two of Mum’s letters).

 
    “It was difficult to say that it was lovely to see you last weekend. I think it was almost the saddest few days of my life,”
   and
    “I’m not sending you conventional phrases of good wishes. They would stick in my throat.”

 
‘Those are terrible things to say.
    ‘I blame myself for never having stood up to you properly before. In fact I’ve always tried to please you. Everything I did was to please you. But nothing has ever been good enough. And I realise now that I was a fool and very wrong to let it go on for so long. If you really find me so objectionable and such a disappointment to you there’s no earthly reason why we should ever see each other again.’

I sounded screechy and childish and I was beginning to see that I was forgetting everything Pat had taught us about speaking from the heart and not accusing, but it was too late now to change my words.
    I’d written the speech almost automatically and not edited it, knowing that, if I did try to do so, it would fall apart.
    I’d never spoken to my parents like this before and I knew I still had a lot to learn.

‘But if we do continue to see each other it is essential that you respect and listen to me and my views. You have to let me be free. Anything else is very destructive. I can’t see you on any other terms.
    ‘We must be able to disagree with each other without you taking it personally. If I disagree with you I’m not criticising you or dismissing your way of life. It’s just a sign that I’m alive. I’m not just a copy of you. I’m a person in my own right.
    ‘You may say that all these events I’m talking about happened fourteen years ago and what on earth’s the point of bringing them up now. They’re over and done with. But they’re not and I can’t forget them.
    ‘If I’ve upset you I’m sorry. I’m trying to repair things between us and help things develop. They have been stuck at a very bad patch for a long time. However if you can’t put up with me any more I don’t have to stay a moment longer. I’ve made alternative arrangements for tonight should it be necessary.
    ‘But if we can clear the air and move forward together with honesty and tolerance I shall be overjoyed.’

To be continued . . .

5.8 Sex etc

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series (unnamed as yet). For more about it, see right.

So then we tackled the thorny subject of sex.

Pat gave us a book to read. It was a collection of people’s sexual fantasies, possibly only those of women, but I can’t remember. I can’t remember the title either.
    It helped up to a point, but I didn’t like using fantasy – whether my own or other people’s. My fantasies were unpleasant, about being degraded and coerced, and I didn’t want to encourage them.
    Fantasy didn’t solve my fundamental blockages; it simply bypassed them. It wasn’t a long-term solution.
    Nor did using fantasy seem fair to Frog. It took me away from him.
    And I don’t think Frog ever used fantasy, not that we talked about it. It wasn’t in his nature. He was far too pragmatic.

Classic sexual therapy was next on the agenda. This involved taking things slowly – going to a certain point, as directed by Pat in her session with us that week, and then stopping. And then, all being well, going a little bit further the following week. Again, as directed by Pat.
    This didn’t work for me either as I switched off before we even started. In other words, I would do what I always did at the prospect of sex. I would stop breathing, my stomach would clench, my whole body would lock and my brain would fuse.
    We had a holiday booked during this part of our time with Pat and while on holiday we fell straight back into our old patterns.

We started to see her separately.

In Frog’s case, I suspected this meant him being able to give full rein to his grievances, his complaints about me. We didn’t talk about his sessions though. I think we felt that we’d already done enough talking – and shouting - with each other. We were so tired of it.
    In my case, seeing Pat alone meant talking about my parents, and in particular what I called The Letters – the letters my parents had written to me when Frog and I wanted to marry.
    I’d kept the letters in a file in the bottom of a drawer hoping to forget about them but not wanting to destroy them because I had an inkling that they might one day be important. They were evidence. I hadn’t forgotten about them however. In fact I thought about them every day.
    ‘During Sam’, as Frog and I now called the year when he was seeing her and I knew about it, I’d shown them to two people. To Di, the friend I met every week for lunch. She’d laughed and I’d wished I could too. And to Sam. As she finished reading them, she’d nodded.
    ‘I see,’ she said. ‘These make a lot of things much clearer.’
    I was grateful for her understanding.
    I brought them in to show Pat and she read through the file in silence while I waited.
    Up until then Pat had not expressed an opinion about anything, which was another of my surprises about counselling. I’d expected – from the name of the therapy – that being told what to do was its primary function. On the contrary. Its primary function, as far as I could see, was for us to find solutions for ourselves, through Pat’s questioning.
    I didn’t therefore expect her to pass any comment on the letters. I was simply showing them to her to give her the background.
    When she’d finished reading however, she looked up at me, her eyes shiny behind her serious black glasses.
    ‘Oh dear, Belinda,’ she said. ‘These are terrible.’

I would visit my parents, Pat and I decided, and talk to them about the effect of the letters on me. I wrote out what I was going to say, knowing that I would be incapable of saying anything otherwise. I read my speech out to Pat and she nodded her approval.
    ‘Why don’t you give your parents some spontaneous gestures of affection when you’re there,’ she said.
    I looked at her in horror. I’d never done such a thing. We didn’t do things like that in our family.
    ‘And when you’ve finished speaking,’ she said, ‘give them the letters back.’
    Frog was going to say something too but, in true Frog fashion, he didn’t prepare anything. He preferred speaking off the cuff. He did it all the time on the radio and he loved the adrenalin rush it gave him. I hated adrenalin. It gave me migraines.
    I made a date with my parents for Frog and me to visit, without telling them why. I wanted it to be a normal visit, as far they were concerned. I didn’t want to put any pressure on the situation. As far as I was concerned, it had more than enough already.
    The visit loomed over me like the entrance to a dark tunnel. It was the most frightening thing I’d ever done.

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5.7 Conflict

This is part of an autobiographical series. For more information, see right.

It took me a few weeks to relax. I thought Pat was going to diagnose me, stick a label on me, pack me up and send me off home with a treatment plan, like doctors did. It was the label I dreaded most. My ailments were mine. They were particular to me. No one else suffered in the way I did. I wanted to be treated like an individual.
    And that was exactly what Pat did. She asked question after question, probing ever deeper. She listened without comment. To both of us, both Frog and me, and to each of us in turn. And when one of us was speaking, the other wasn’t allowed to interrupt.
    It was the first time in my life I’d ever been able to speak about myself freely. Indeed, it was the first time in my life I’d ever been allowed to have thoughts and feelings. And I think it was the same for Frog.

I learnt a lot about him. I knew the facts but he’d never properly talked to me about the attached feelings. Perhaps he thought I’d understand automatically.
    I learnt that when he was a young child (six years old?) and fell off the desk and broke his nose and was sent to hospital for plastic surgery – which I already knew about - he only saw his parents once a week. The rest of the time they waved at him through a glass door. This was terrifying and devastating for him.
    I learnt that when Fran left it was a complete shock. They’d been together for nearly five years – since she was sixteen and he was twenty-one – and she was his first serious girlfriend. They’d met at a folk club and he’d followed her down to Exeter when she started at the university. He’d had no idea she was carrying on with one of their housemates.
    I began to understand that he feared abandonment. He feared rejection. He didn’t trust his own instincts. He couldn't trust that I really loved him, that I wouldn't suddenly go. He needed from me more reassurance than I could give him, because of course I had my own troubles.
    As a child he’d been traumatised by listening to his parents argue. Then, when he was a teenager and started to help his mother, he had to be strong. He couldn’t burden her with his own problems because she had enough of her own. He had to try and sort his problems out by himself. He still thought this was how he had to behave.
    Not only was it a revelation to me that he had these feelings, but it was a revelation to me that he had feelings at all. I’d always thought of men as creatures from another planet. They didn’t understand very much at all. They didn’t speak the same language as women. In fact, they hated women and did their best to imprison them. I didn’t trust them and I’m not sure I even particularly liked them, except for my two brothers.
    This conclusion was partly as a result of my experience and partly due to the way my mother treated my father – with disdain but from a position of servitude, servitude being the default position for women of her generation (but that's another story).

I was surprised about myself too. I was surprised by how much I cried and what I cried about. The tears arrived without warning. They rose from somewhere deep inside and shook my whole body.
    I was surprised by the fact that Pat let me cry. She didn’t offer comfort. She didn’t say anything. She just handed me tissues and waited while the spasm passed.

The sessions exhausted us both and we went home raw, wondering if we could survive another week, just the two of us together. Pat must have known this as she always sent us off with a hug and something positive to take away, some new way to behave, some new idea, and she always rang halfway through the week to check on us.

Then the sessions moved on and we began to talk about our feelings for each other – our grievances – and again we weren’t allowed to interrupt each other. These too were a revelation. Why had Frog never told me all this before? Why had he flown into a rage instead and punched the wall? Why had I never taken my own grievances seriously? Why had I always dismissed them and blamed myself?
    Pat was the referee we so desperately needed, but sometimes she lost control too and Frog and I began hurling complaints at each other as we had at home, without the violence but worse in other ways as we didn’t hold back.
    Slowly, slowly though, we began to understand the fundamental principle of conflict. It was OK. In fact it was inevitable. Grievances mattered but you had to be constructive otherwise you made the situation worse. And to be constructive you restricted yourself to talking about your own feelings rather than blaming the other person. You had to confess. You had to be vulnerable. ‘I’ not ‘you’.
    For instance, when Frog began laying into me about refusing his sexual advances, saying ‘We’re married. I’m allowed to touch you whenever I want,’ Pat would stop him and say, ‘But how did you feel when Belinda refused you?’
    And Frog would start crying and it would all come out all over again about being separated from his parents, about Fran leaving without warning. He couldn’t read me – or at least he didn’t trust what he read. He was afraid of losing me.
    And then she would turn to me and say, ‘And how did you feel when Frog reacted to you like this?’
    ‘I felt angry.’ I said. ‘But I didn’t feel I had a right to be angry. I felt upset that Frog didn’t understand my point of view. I didn’t know how to express my point of view. It was so outlandish, so unlike what other people said that I wondered if there was something wrong with me. I felt like I didn’t matter. I was just a piece of meat. A possession. I was disgusted.’
    And then I would start crying too.

What a quagmire. No wonder we’d struggled. And loving each other as much as we did made it worse. We loved each other with our souls as well as every other part of ourselves. To lose each other, we would lose everything.

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5.6 Pat

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. See right for more information.

The room, on the top floor of a three-storey terraced house, was cosy – more like a bedroom than a consulting room. A blue carpet and colourful rugs covered the floor. Books and knick-knacks filled shelves either side of a small grated fireplace. Out of the window I could see the roofs of Exeter. We sat in armchairs.
    Pat herself was of indeterminate age – older than us perhaps but only by ten years or so. She had fluffy brown hair and wore a light-pink cardigan, both offset by strong black-framed glasses.
    ‘So tell me why you’re here to see me,’ she said.
    Frog and I looked at each other.
    ‘Come on, come on,’ she said gently.

The previous year was a blur. Frog had been in mourning for Sam and, while I’d occasionally tried to comfort him, I hadn’t felt that that was really my role. It stuck in my throat (as my mother would say) to have to do it. It was a step too far.
    Whether we’d argued and fought as we had before Sam and what had eventually brought us to see Pat - a counsellor trained by the marriage-guidance charity Relate, now working independently in a complementary health centre - I can’t remember.
    It was my idea, I know, and me who’d done the research, but Frog hadn’t demurred. He’d come along with me in everything without saying a word.
    I’d spoken to Pat on the phone and she’d offered us a free fifteen-minute try-out session.
    As we climbed the second flight of steep wooden stairs however, I wondered whether we really needed this. Surely we could manage on our own. I felt OK now. Completely calm.

I told Pat this and she laughed.
    ‘Let’s see, shall we,’ she said.
    So I began trying to explain – about Brian in London, my parents, Sam – and the more I spoke, the more spilled out.
    Pat held up her hand. ‘Stop, stop. You don’t need to say any more. I can see now that this is going to take some time. Are you all right with that?’
    I nodded vehemently.

    I already trusted her. I already liked her. I knew she could help us.

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5.5 Waiting

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. See right for more information.

Wait. That was all I could do. Wait.
    I had an idea that a year was all it would take, that at the end of the year Sam would move on. After all, what was in it for her?
    But as the year wore on, I started to lose hope. The situation was almost more than I could bear. Not only did I have to share Frog with Sam one night a week, but the three of us went out together – to concerts, parties, pubs, on day trips - and Sam came on holiday with us for a week.

I found Sam difficult to get on with, not because she was a difficult person but because we were so different. We had no crossover points except for Frog. And I was wary of her too because of what I saw as my frivolity and lack of intelligence compared with her. I was always trying not to say something stupid.
    She was thoughtful though.

    I knew she'd had an AIDS test before taking up with Frog, which was not an easy thing to do, and I greatly appreciated it.  
    One Thursday night as Frog made ready to leave, wind began to shake the house. Sam rang and told Frog that because of the weather he ought to stay with me and make sure I was OK. So he did.
    Another time the three of us went to a concert and I was in the bar talking to a friend when Frog came out of the concert hall and dragged me off by the arm saying that the music was about to begin. Sam restrained him.
    ‘Oy,’ she said. ‘She was talking.’
    Frog looked slightly shamefaced.
    Sometimes I went over to Sam’s house on my own but that was uncomfortable because I presumed her housemates knew about Frog and her and me and I didn’t want their pity.

Frog and I smoked cannabis in the evenings – with Sam and her connections we had plenty of access to the stuff. We thought it would calm us down, lift some of my inhibitions. Which it did up to a point.
    But one night, when Frog was with Sam and I was in bed on my own, I woke to a vision of two men in the corner of the bedroom. They were plotting something very evil.

    I imagined it was some sort of crossed line (like you used to get with landlines and found you were listening in to a conversation that was nothing to do with you) and knew I had to stay very still and not be afraid because if they sensed my presence I would be in grave danger.

    So that’s what I did and they went away.

I was proud of myself.

Often I couldn’t eat, and weight fell off me.
    Even the postman noticed. He stopped as he passed me in his van one day when I was out walking in the lane and asked me if I was all right.
    ‘You look ghastly,’ said my mother. ‘You really ought to wear more makeup.’
    Frog brought me regular packets of Cadbury’s chocolate eggs to keep my strength up.

I fell in love with someone else and had feverish daydreams about our possible relationship - which of course came to nothing as I didn’t actually want it to.

Frog didn’t tell anyone what was going on, as far as I was aware, and the only people I told were my two sisters and a friend whom I used to meet for lunch once a week in Exeter. She listened to my outpourings with sympathy and kept them to herself. I don’t think she even told her husband.
    The story was complicated and people were so quick to lay blame. They thought in stereotypes, in tabloid headlines: one was the guilty party and one was the victim. But it wasn’t like that at all. I didn’t want people to think badly of Frog and I was ashamed of my failings which, in my opinion, had led to the situation. That was why I kept quiet.

I thought about leaving Frog, but again it was only a dream. Where would I go? What would I do? This was my life. I couldn’t envisage any other. And what about the blue-sky voice – the one that said Frog would interest me for the rest of my life?

One evening after Christmas, Frog arrived home in a whirl. Sam had taken up with one of her housemates and wanted to end her relationship with Frog. Without saying much to me he raced over to her house to persuade her differently.
    I knew I was in trouble. Was Sam laying down a challenge? Could I end up losing Frog completely?
    I abandoned all my scruples and rang Sam’s house at frequent intervals throughout the evening. Sometimes I managed to speak to Frog, sometimes I didn’t.
    I needed to make my feelings absolutely clear. I mattered. I didn’t want to lose him.
    He crawled back in the early hours of the morning.

    He’d lost. Sam was gone.

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