An interesting idea came up in a book that I just finished reading. It is titled: Meet Me at the Museum by Anne Youngson. A small book, a 5×7 inch format which in itself, drew me to it. It contains the fictional letters that a man and woman, strangers to one another, write over a period of time. In the act of writing, they come to know one another and themselves.
The woman is a farm wife, who has raised three children with her husband. Her sons work on the farm with their father as does the daughter, though after marrying, she leaves with her new husband to try out a different life in the city. The farm wife got pregnant, was married and had her first child by the time she was twenty years old. Her life was set and she did her best to care for her husband’s physical and emotional needs, and aid his devotion to the farm, which was not her love in the same way. It had been the farm he grew up on. She writes, ” I have seen it as my job to do everything possible to make him comfortable and support him in his work. ”
Her life takes an unexpected turn when she returns from a trip to discover their bedroom in the same clean state that she had left it, down to the exact sheets that she had made the bed with. She discovers that her husband has been having an affair with another woman.
The feelings echoed some of the turnings in my own life. To have seen to my husband’s comfort in every way, to have engaged in the daily tasks of raising the children, cooking and cleaning and later, working outside the home while maintaining the same neverending chores, to discover that he had led a secret life. The farm wife knows the new woman, and wonders at this choice as the woman is overweight and dresses terribly, is loud, demanding and critical, not someone whom she enjoys at all. Yet, she sees how her husband fawns over her and cares for her in ways he did not with her. She watches her husband run through the rain to the parking lot to get the car and drive it close to the door so that the new woman would not get wet.
“This was a courtesy I would not have expected him to show me. He would have done. I acknowledge, if I asked. Only, I would never have asked. I would have accepted that the car was over there,that I was not very far from it, and that I had legs. Perhaps Daphne will be better for Edward in some ways than I have been. She will force him to take notice of her. ”
It recalls to my mind, how my former husband’s choice of a partner was someone whom he waited on and spent money on in ways that he had not done for me. Yet, I did not ask nor demand. I felt it was my job to give and give. Perhaps that ends up being an uncomfortable weight on the other person, and so they seek someone who is needier in some ways so that they can be the giver. Interesting thought.
Reading fiction can help us grow. I see how I still have a tendency to overgive with my adult children. I anticipate and offer to fill a need before they have articulated it. Before they have asked for assistance. Reprising that childhood role of being the little mother where from an early age, I learned to sublimate my own needs to fufill those of others. My radar scanning the horizon for a need that I can fill. Wow, that is unsettling to feel remnants still remain of this conditioning.
I took a decade to myself, traveling on my own, discovering who I was. Then the first grandchild was born into a dissolving relationship and I became the second mother to my grandson and support to my daughter. Recently, she has now moved on with a new partner and they are expecting another child. He has a teenage daughter so they are creating a new family. My daughter no longer needs me in the same way. After nine years, there is a shift. A welcome one for us all. I feel a sense of completion as well as a void. A space opening for me to discover new things. There are new pathways of self care for me to find. Reading this book, illumined ways that I can do better towards myself. How to stand back and observe in a more detached manner. I can feel how freeing that will be for everyone. It has been nine years of being the mother with a capital M and it is time to move back and allow Nana to be my role. Still present but more open to time and distance to pursue my own inner world.
Lines that resonated for me: “I thought that at least I understood what that life was. The weft and warp of it. The firm ground and the boggy. I thought I knew where it was roughly darned and where neatly patched, but despite all the flaws in the fabric, I believed in the essential wholeness of it.”
It is time to weave a new fabric, using new materials to see what beauty I can create.