PART FOUR. 6 Parents

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. See right for a link to the full list of instalments.

Mollie, John’s lovely mother, wasn’t well. She’d had a stroke in her thirties, a victim of the early contraceptive pill, which contained high doses of hormones. (These were reduced to a fifth of the original levels once the link with strokes was discovered.) She recovered from the stroke but was left with permanently high blood pressure. The only time this dropped was when she came to stay with us, and her doctor prescribed frequent visits.
    We weren't complaining. She was such an easy guest. In the mornings while we were out at work she would bicycle to the village and buy herself a little treat – a bun, a packet of sweets – and in the afternoon would busy herself tidying our neglected garden.
    Thankfully, she wasn’t the sort of mother-in-law to criticise my housekeeping. Far from it. She was on my side and we’d gossip together about John’s merits and failings - until he got cross and asked us to stop. We'd acquired an infestation of mice and one of them would hide under Kitten’s food bowl and in the evenings run across the sitting-room floor. Mollie laughed.
    She’d welcomed me from the start. She’d never judged me. Her visits were the only time I could look at myself in the mirror and like what I saw. It seemed as if my face was transformed.

She also transformed our fractious love life.
    This had never picked up. What we’d called ‘teething troubles’ had persisted.
    I became either like stone or I wanted to bite and scratch. I understood two things at this stage. I couldn’t trust that John’s feelings were love not lust, however much he protested, and lust disgusted me. I’d been on the receiving end of too much of it. On the other hand, I couldn’t risk losing him. He was everything to me. What if I gave everything to him and he let me down? I would be destroyed. This, I presumed, was an echo of Brian in London.
    I called Mollie my safety net as I knew that, whatever happened, she would be there. With her nearby, I could relax.

I was still ‘flipping’ – my view of John alternating between that of my parents and my own.

    My own was the one that hit me when John and I first spoke, when I had the revelation that I already knew everything about him and that we’d been together in many previous lives. Our relationship was sanctified by what I called ‘the blue-sky voice’, the one that had told me John would interest me for the rest of my life and I would marry him.
    My parents’ view was the one they expressed in their letters – that he was useless, rude, uncharming etc etc.
    I couldn’t understand how people could see things so differently. Who was right? For me it was impossible dilemma. I couldn’t solve it. My head spun with the conflict and I started to acquire regular right-sided headaches.
    But with Mollie staying the flipping stopped. John blossomed in her presence, becoming grown-up and confident, his true self, instead of hurt and angry as he so often was when he and I were alone. I too could be myself with her and, what's more, she was like a double dose of John. 

My relationship with my own parents however was a different matter.
    Through friends, who’d heard via their mothers, I discovered that my mother had come to the conclusion that she and my father had been ‘too hard’ on John and me. She’d found our wedding ‘one of the nicest she’d been to’ and liked Mollie. After the wedding she’d decided that there was hope for our marriage after all.
    Well, bully for her. Nothing was said directly to me, so all I could do was carry on thinking that my parents still had the same devastatingly low opinions of John and me as the ones they’d expressed in their letters. The pain of those letters had imprinted itself too deeply inside me to be dislodged by third-hand news.
    I was too terrified of my parents to bring the subject up with them but continued to visit them both out of duty and because I couldn’t bear to lose touch with my family as a whole. My family and my upbringing were a huge part of me, and my childhood had been a happy one on the surface - stability, fun, lots of muddy time outside with my siblings and friends.
    I never went to see them without John however and when there I couldn’t meet their eyes. Our conversations were stilted and I tried not to be alone with either of them.

To be continued . . .