I keep opening this template to write something, but there’s nothing there.
I could tell you I just had the father-in-law and stepmother-in-law round, and a good time was had by all (and he even asked for seconds of my chocolate-raspberry pudding cake.)
I could tell you that Melissa and I hit Tesco yesterday to stock up on wine, and I got carded for the first time in years. Why hello, ego, there you are.
I could tell you that I’ve been having tests done because something’s wrong with my insides, but I have no conclusions yet to share on that one.
I could tell you that Melissa, Jeff and I are headed into London for the day and the two of them are beyond excited about it.
I could tell you that yesterday the babies had corn on the cob for the first time ever.
It was popular.
Even when they did it wrong.
And when it got too heavy to hold other arrangements were made.
I could tell you that we have a stifling heat wave and seriously - I know people think that England is chilly and rainy and, well, yes it is, but it has been roasting hot. So hot that the babies get sunblocked and stripped to their nappies during the day hot.
I could tell you that the babies got their first tricycle and that Jeff lent a helping hand.
I could tell you all of those things, but none of those equal a blog post.
So what I’ll say is this: On Sunday afternoon all 6 of us head to a house we’ve rented in Cornwall for a week. We’re in a tiny fishing village near Penzance (insert Gilbert and Sullivan references as needed) with what is reputed to be the most beautiful harbor in Britain. I will be offline for the week, as we’re unlikely to have wifi or internet access while there. And to be honest, I need a bit of a break anyway. I know that going away with young children inevitably means you’re going to be living the same life you always lead, just with a different location, but maybe that’s what I need. I need a change of scenery for just a little while.
Last night one of my favorite TV programmes, The Supersizers Eat, was delayed by tennis. As in Wimbledon tennis. As in strawberries and cream and champagne and polite applause and all that other ritual stuff. And, naturally, when one of my favorite programmes is on it gets pre-empted by Wimbledon’s latest ever played game in history, and played by a British lad, too.
Here’s something you may or may not know about me: I love TV.
Here’s something else you may or many not know about me: I don’t give a flying fuck about sports.
This is why being with Alastair is good - he’s not into sports either. He’ll watch the European or World Cup football finals, but he’s not really that assed about it.
I see sport as something that robs TV of so many other things it could be showing. Not only will I not watch sports on TV, but I don’t watch sports in real life. My take is simple:
- Tennis. I don’t have a clue how it’s played. It’s all quiet and polite and ball boys and a ref in a lifeguard chair. They throw words around like “deuce” and “love” and the like. I actually watched the end of the Wimbledon because I wanted to watch a grown man cry. I am fairly sure that the “edge of the seat ending” stayed “edge of the seat” for almost an hour. And when he did win I didn’t see any man tears. I felt let down. The premise of the game is two (or four) people smacking a fluorescent thing back and forth over the net. Why not remove the net, it just gets in the way? In fact, why hit a ball back and forth, it could just cause injury? Perhaps skip the rackets? My proposal: stand there and drink gin and tonics. Much more fun.
- Baseball. The longest game in history. I get it, it’s all tradition and hot dogs and peanuts and cracker jacks, it’s stats and America does good and yada yada yada. It’s also hours and hours out of your life. Average game is, what? Five hours? I don’t even want to knock boots for 5 hours straight, why on earth would I want to sit in uncomfortable bleachers shouting at men with tobacco in their mouths?
- Golf. I love it when I hear men say “I play golf to enjoy the scenery.” Right. That’s like “I read Playboy for the articles.” It’s like a chick saying she goes shopping to hear the elevator music. PASS.
- American football. I never really got the game. Sure, I get the premise. I mostly understand. Strap pads on. Get big beefy guys to crash into other big beefy guys. Skinny dude streaks down the side, hoping to avoid big beefy dude attention. One man throws an elliptical ball at him. People shout. There are downs. There are lots of downs. We love this game why exactly?
- Rugby - where brain cells go to die.
- Hockey. Ok, now I’m in. I love ice hockey, but I only ever liked watching the Dallas Stars play. I got the rules, I love the smell of an ice rink, that sharp almost metallic sound, but the truth is American hockey is nowhere near as athletic as European hockey. The ice rinks over here are much larger, meaning the players have to work that much harder. They’re not allowed to fight, they’re not allowed to punch each other, it’s about putting the biscuit in the basket. That, and the players over here don’t suddenly skate to the side while the network has a commercial break which, let’s be real, is kinda fucked up. Too bad the sport’s not more popular.
- Basketball. One of the few games where hey - size does matter! I’ve never enjoyed basketball because if you’re there watching, the court reeks of copper-smelling sweat. There are endless sirens and bells going off. And the constant squeak of the soles of the basketball shoes on the court does my head in.
- Cricket. Stickety wickets, LBWs, rules that you need a degree in physics to understand, and a game that can take 3 days yet have no winner. Don’t even get me started.
See? Sport is pointless. It’s all about chasing random balls around random environments. The point of all that is, what?
I talk about my children a lot, I know (thereby driving away the women undergoing IVF treatment in droves, I worry, and I am honestly sorry if anything I say hurts on this site. Honestly.) But I don’t always do updates on how they are and how we’re progressing, and I think it’s about time for one.
On Friday the babies turn 21 months old. Somehow time has flown by and it’s smacked me in the face but at the same time the babies are (in general) brilliant fun. Spectacular. They’re real little people now, and more has happened with them this past month than ever before.
Let’s start with Nora.
Nora persists at things until she gets them right.
She mimics each and every sound she hears (note to self: seriously must work harder at not swearing). She likes to sing in the car, a high pitched sweet noise that I wish I could bottle. She has a number of words she can use and understand now, and we’re getting tuned in to Nora talk now. “Ush”, for example, is her word for “shoes”.
And this girl, she loves shoes. A lot. Almost as much as her love for having her hair in pigtails and for wearing hats. And if she doesn’t have a hat to hand, she’ll improvise.
Nora is a girly-girl. I didn’t even try with this one, and the truth is - the real, honest truth - is that I so very much wanted a girly-girl and along comes my Nora. Nora likes ruffles. Pink. Dresses. Dolls. Dressing up.
She hosted her own private tea party recently.
But the truth is she also likes trains, which I encourage. She loves books and I bought them an Aquadraw mat which they both love.
She and her brother have been getting on better, which is good as I was contemplating joining a nunnery.
Nick is a ham. He’s cheeky and chirpy and very funny for a babelet.
He’s into everything. His curiosity knows no bounds.
And while it’s lovely that he’s curious, his quest for knowledge is such that he often doesn’t listen to us, and keeps going even when he’s been warned. This means time in the naughty corner.
His other favorite activity is to show people his tummy. Friends, family, random strangers, everyone gets flashed. He loves showing off his stomach and his navel. Say to him “Where’s Nick’s tummy?” and the shirt gets whipped up with abandon. Nora’s a fan of showing off her tummy, too, but not to this extent.
Nora started walking around the 18 month mark. She’s now a 100% walker, and has in fact recently twigged that she doesn’t have to walk the direction you want her to. Nick was not a walker. I’ve said here for a while that we refuse to get worried about his walking, that he will do it when he’s good and ready, that we will not stress and we will not take him for physical therapy at this point in time.
And lo and behold, on Wednesday last week he walked to us when we picked him up at the nursery.
He’s been walking almost exclusively ever since.
I have two toddlers. Real, true, proper toddlers.
This is where people probably want to make jokes and groan and tell me that now I’m in for it.
But I’ll tell you - there’s no need. I’m over the moon that they both walk, and the biggest reason (besides the fact that carrying two 13kg babies was wearing my arms out) is when you go to the nursery and pick them up, they scream with joy and move their little legs as fast as they can so that they can launch themselves into your arms.
And that, my friends, is one of the things that I classify as a Wonderful Thing In My Life.
First off, let me re-iterate what Melissia said here - the skin on my stomach is permanent. EDS has taken the collagen I have and shagged it ruthlessly. I could be wrong, but I think it’s getting worse as well - any and every knock and bump turns into a bruise, every cut turns into a scar. I do up to 100 sit-ups (Marine style) a day, and the stomach muscles under my pocket of flesh are toned, but the pocket remains.
Secondly: The completely incomparable Bou had some advice once which I thought was amazing - she said to not have fashion magazines around the house, and not praise the female form or despair physical appearances around kids because they pick that shit up fast. And I’ve done exactly that - no fashion mags. No talk of weight or beauty or anything like that, only I’ve failed because Jeff is telling me to stop dieting, and I owe him an apology, which I will offer by way of some mac and cheese that I will eat with him because it is our favorite, and because I love him very much.
*****************************
I walked to my Couch Man yesterday.
There, on his couch, on The Couch, we talked.
“I think I have a problem,” I said.
“OK,” he replied kindly.
“I am trying to lose weight again, and it’s consuming me a bit.”
He nods. “Do you know why you’re doing this?”
“I don’t like how I look. People tell me I look fine, I look good, but I don’t believe them. I think they’re just being nice. They don’t see me naked, they don’t see the parts that I’m ashamed of.”
“How do you see yourself?” he asks, looking at me.
“I’m hideous. I’m revolting. People must look at me with utter disgust. I am awful, I don’t see how anyone could want to even debate touching me,” I say softly.
“Do you think that’s true?” he asks.
“Yes. Yes, yes it’s so very true. I’m awful.”
“What would happen if you gained 20 kilos?” he asked gently.
“Everyone would leave,” I reply immediately. “I’d be all alone.”
“Do you really think that?” he asks again.
“Yes. No. Yes. I don’t know.”
“Do people leave just because people gain weight?”
“Yes. No. Yes. Yes, I think so.”
“Have you seen this?”
And then I’m hit with it. I remember photos my mother had up on the fridge of her in thinner times. My mother has stuggled with her weight as long as I’ve known her, she has always been full-figured and I don’t say that to be mean, not in the slightest. My mother’s side of the family are the ones built like peasant stock, we ride the broad-shouldered yoke-bearing line, and I am included in that line. My father was cruel, I know that now and I knew it then. My father would taunt her and tell her she was fat, that no one would ever love her. I remember my mother taking aerobics, belly dancing, dieting, punishing herself, because my father found her lacking. And my father left her, for a thin woman. My mother and I may have our issues, but she never deserved that.
“I had forgotten about that,” I say to my Couch Man after telling him of my memories.
“How do you feel about your mother getting that kind of treatment from your father?”
I love my father. He’s changed so much but even today my father places a high priority on being thing, and I still get it from him even after telling him, finally, that I battled anorexia and bulemia for years. “I think it’s disgraceful. She should never have been spoken to like that. It must have been hell for her, she should have been loved and not ridiculed. He was being an asshole.”
“How do you feel about being a teenager and being told you were too fat?”
“I don’t feel anything.”
“Yes you do.”
“No I don’t.”
“What do you do if your father starts in on you now?” he asks.
“I take it.”
“What happens if he starts in on Nick and Nora?”
“I will fly across the table at him and make him know that he is not ever, never going to have a go at them about their weight, not ever.” I say with a vehemence that surprises me.
My Couch Man smiles. “See? You do feel things.”
“Cycles, man. No cycles around my babies unless they’re the two-wheeled kind.”
“Will Alastair leave you if you get fat?” he asks me.
“No.”
“Do you think people who really love each other leave if the other person gains that much weight?”
“I don’t know,” I say. I feel close to something. I feel there’s something that I can nearly reach.
“Do you think overweight people deserve to be unloved?”
“No, absolutely not! God, no! I would never think that. Everyone deserves love, I don’t view weight as a weakness or a failure in anyone but myself.”
“Do you want to know what I think?” he asks me softly.
“Please.”
“I think you’re so busy trying to not be your mother that you’re letting it run your life. You hear your father tell her that no one will love her unless she’s thin so you subconsciously take it and and try to pre-empt that ever happening. But you’re not her, Shannon. You’re not your mother. You are you, and you need to know that by being aware of characteristics that she had that you don’t want that you are already making a difference.”
And I cry. Long, pathetic, hot tears that fall off my face and onto my chest.
“I can’t tell you to stop dieting and I won’t,” he says softly. “Just be sensible.”
And I am being sensible. I have help in the form of friends (now including Meg and the support of the gorgeous Stella). I do want to lose weight and I will continue with the weight loss commitment. I am eating healthily. I am exercising. But maybe I need to stop beating myself up about it. I am not perfect and I may never be, but the reasons are vast and many.
At the business dinner last night I ate some pizza. It was delicious. I did feel a bit upset about it, but I went with it. Sometimes, we just need to love ourselves in whatever way we can, even if that way includes a lot of cheese and pizza dough.
This morning I weighed myself. I’ve lost half a kilo. I smiled just a bit.
I’ve been getting a lot of flack about my decision to lose weight.
I want to explain some things here about it.
First off, if I post pictures of myself (as my narcissistic leanings have me do) then of course I am going to not show the worst bits of myself. If I hate how sections of my body look then why am I going to show them off? It’s bad enough that I routinely get linked to on Flickr by men who are members of groups called “Muffin tops”, “Big is beautiful”, and “Fat wives”. That’s kind of enough for someone like me, who has a seriously fucked up self-image. It’s like adding fuel to the fire, if I show you the parts of myself that I am not proud of, then it will simply add to the repugnance.
I look in the mirror and am not pleased. I have wobbly bits. A number of them. Love handles, pituitary patch, I have them. And yes, my children are a gift and the reason for the flabby skin on my stomach. I get that. I get that people look at their stomachs post-childbearing and think it’s a badge of honor. I’m awed and humbled by those women. To me, I see imperfection in my stomach (not in theirs). I see reasons why someone won’t want me. I see failure.
My metabolism is changing. Absolutely. Before I got pregnant I weighed about 160 pounds. Yes, really. I now weigh about 145. At various times in my life I have weighed substantially more than 160 pounds. I cannot recall ever weighing less than I do now. My BMI is bang on “perfect weight” in that stupid chart that calculates BMI, a chart which I can’t help but feel means nothing.
Likewise, I can’t recall ever not thinking that hitting 120 pounds would be fantastic. That would be the pinnacle. That would be perfect. And yes, I get it that at my height and body build it would make me look like a lollipop. But for some reason, weighing so little makes me think I would feel so good, even if the truth is I know it wouldn’t.
I’ve been dieting for two weeks - no carbs, no fat, no sugar, no sweets, no dairy, and I lost 2 kg. And that’s it. That’s all of it. I’ve been exercising and dilligently watching what I eat and there’s nothing going on. I even had the flu for 24 hours, wiping everything out of my digestive tract and stomach (I know, the “eww” factor there is high) and still - no further weight loss. I just can’t lose any more weight, and I really want to.
I’ve made no secret of battling anorexia and bulemia in the past. It’s all behind me, even if I do still lean towards wanting to purge, wanting to purge it all out, wanting…just wanting.
Alastair is absolutely not in favor of me losing weight. He is not the instigator of this. He tells me he honestly thinks I look perfect, and I believe that’s how he feels (and hey-flattering!). He tells me that he thinks my body is perfect and that I am dead sexy. Jeff tells me that I’m crazy for wanting to lose weight. I love them both for saying so. I believe that they both feel that way, I just wish I was in agreement. I wish I could grab hold of my handles and stretchy stomach and rejoice in it. I wish I could rejoice in knowing that my man finds me dead sexy.
But I can’t.
I’ve been asked if this weight loss thing is about control. Let me say this now: Of course it’s about control. It’s absolutely about control. I don’t know why I’m doing this, I just know that I am. It’s not because things are bad at home, because we’re doing well. It’s not because Jeff and soon Melissa are here, because I love them. It’s not because of job stress, because I just got promoted and got a project I’m beginning to like.
But I’m trying to do something all control-y and do it healthily. I have people (wonderfulpeople) dieting with me, watching me and helping me. They are helping to keep me from doing stupid things like starving myself. Because I am absolutely aware that I have two fabulous babies and I need to be healthy for them, but I know myself enough to know that food restriction is something that is a trigger for me.
I am eating. I really, really am. Three times a day, with the occasional snack. I have not once starved myself the past few weeks, nor will I.
And I’m not losing any weight.
When the flu subsided on Tuesday night I made myself two pieces of peanut butter toast. I wanted to cry because I was eating them, yet they were the best two pieces of toast in the history of toast. I hurt, yet I love.
I see my Couch Man today. I will talk about it with him. I have a short amount of time after that, during which my camera and I and my London song for tomorrow (Lightning Seed’s “Perfect”) will do some damage. Then I have a meeting and a business dinner, something I haven’t had in ages, and yes - I will be skipping the bread basket.
Look, I’ve always been a dork. A tragic, tragic nerd. If you are reading this site regularly, then you are either:
1) A dork
2) Profoundly interested in the life that dorks lead
3) Writing a paper on how best to abuse dorks
4) A voyeur into how the uncool live their lives.
Let me give you an example.
I just bought that shirt from here. I am going to wear that shirt with relish (as in delight, not as in the piquante green condiment.)
I majored in anthropology with minors in French and English. While it’s true that my French is utter shit these days, and the last time I was in France I tried to speak to a cabbie but wound up blurting some confusing mishmash of French and Swedish, the English has (for the most part) stayed with me. I loved English. And when I say “English”, I of course mean literature because I am a great bit raving nerd whose bookshelves would groan if I didn’t live the sadist dream of making myself clear them out dilligently. But I also loved grammar. Diagramming sentences rocked, big time. And I’m not a purist, because I will start a sentence out with “but” or “and”, rather like I just did (so suck that, my AP English biddie of a teacher!) I will split my infinitives and I do love a good run-on sentence. I’ll abuse commas and accept that the occasional ellipses is a-ok (that would be occasional ellipses. I’m looking at you, popular blogger who hideously overuses them.) I take first, second, and third person and mix them all up, throw them in the air, and confuse them, often in the same post (and in times of caffeine shortage, even in the same sentence). And the word “fuck” is so versatile that it can and will be used in a multitude of ways.
But fuck with grammar and you’ll piss me off. Worse, muck up vocabulary and do it in a way that is not whimsical or tongue in cheek, and I will organize the Word Police and we will come to your home and make you diagram every sentence in War and Peace. I can be hideously intolerant of abusing the English language (the others I can’t speak for and can in fact be condemnded in war crime courts for my own abuse of French, Russian and Swedish, but hey-I was learning.)
Some of my biggest pet peeves:
1) “Irregardless”. There is no such word. If it is regardless, then it must therefore be interpreted as irregardless, yes? When I hear businessmen say “irregardless” in a meeting they have instantly lost my respect, and I silently want to slide a container of pot noodles across the table and tell them to read that, since that’s more on their level.
2) “Ginormous”. Hate, hate, hate. It was added to the dictionary recently as it has become common parlance. This, to me, is Merriam-Webster bending over and taking it up the backside without lube. You do not cave, Merriam-Webster. Ginormous is not a word. You will never, ever hear me use it.
3) “How come”? I don’t know, why? “How come”? What are you, twelve?
4) When I hear singers sing words such as “I want you” I cringe because inevitably it comes out “I wantchoo”. You should not feel compelled to say “gesundheit” to someone singing. There are three words there, none of them involving the -ch consonants. I. Want. You. There are no trains and no sneezing involved.
5) A bit of a regional thing, but I loathe when people say “It cost me 20 pound!” No, darling, see - it might cost you one pound. If there were more than one of those little bugger coins involved, then there’s an -s involved. It cost you “20 poundS.” I hear people say the pound as a singular when it is a plural all the time. I am aware that a pretentious Yank correcting a local someone will equal a big smackdown. I keep my mouth closed, but seriously people you are not helping my ulcer.
6) Also a regional one - “whilst” does my fucking head in. I cannot say it. I will not say it. It’s a purely British thing, I think, but my little American brain screams “Pomposity!” each time it hears the words because Americans do not say “whilst” unless they have a pole up their backside and images of being highfalutin. The British do say it, and I’m having a hard time divorcing my mind from the idea that over here, it’s normal.
7) People need to stop it with the random apostrophes. Seriously. Every time I see a sign saying “DVD’S 3 for £20″ I want to get some white-out and remove the mark. The DVDs do not own anything in that sentence. If you want to say “The DVD’s fucked” then that’s ok because the DVD is something. Likewise “The DVD’s puppy” is ok because the DVD is a canine owner, albeit it’s a little weird that a DVD might have a puppy. If one is trying to indicate pluarlity then just have an S. No need to dress that bad boy up, ok?
8 ) Interwebs/internets. Some humorous individual came up with these two little gems and oh, the laughter! The joviality! The complete whimsy that are those two words! What, add an -s to the end of those to be, what? Cute? Hip? Jaunty? What? The words themselves imply plurality. They represent networks. So by saying “internets” one is saying “communications networks networks. There are fucking loads of them. It’s all networks, all the time.” Leave out the -s. No need to be coy with me, I’ve been here a while.
9) Text speak. People who know me know that there is no chance in hell they’ll be getting a reply from me if their text includes “CUL8R”. Speak English or don’t waste my time. Can’t text very well? Then don’t do it. Jeff was walking around the house the other day saying a completely unintelligable word.
“Dude, what are you saying?” I asked him.
He repeated this sound, something akin to having just had dental surgery and his mouth was still feeling the novocaine love.
“What?”
He said it again. “I got it from the web, but I don’t know what it means,” he said, shrugging.
I realized what he was saying. ” ROFLMAO.” Only he was saying it as a word. See? The world has moved on. The next generation does not know what these words mean. Long may it remain so.
There are probably other examples but I’ve gotten myself worked up here, so I’ll leave my totalitarian behavior behind for a moment. I reserve the right to come back and add one to make the list an even 10, because leaving it at 9 feels wrong (says she, who must have the gas station pump finish in multiples of 5, because she’s a bit ADD like that.)
And, undoubtedly, some sharp crayon is going to pop out of the box and point out a mistake I’ve made somewhere in this post, because that’s inevitable, so let me just say this: Do as I say, not as I do.
Yesterday morning after a Father’s Day celebration
Alastair, Jeff, Nick, Nora, Gorby and I hopped into the car and hopped onto a ferry.
Someone really, really liked the ferry.
We hopped off of the ferry and onto the Isle of Wight. We landed at Cowes
and started driving. I love the Isle of Wight. I’d live there if it weren’t completely and totally impractical from virtually every perspective.
Once there, the day became about family and relaxation.
The boys played in the sea near the duvers.
Someone really, really liked the sea.
Others weren’t so sure.
But someone really, really liked having their feet in the water.
So much so that we compared feet a lot, to endless babble.
We stayed in the water together for a while.
Until my little boy decided to join us. And I really, really liked being there with both of my babies, Alastair and Jeff playing with Gorby in the surf, the sun out, nowhere to go and nothing to do.
And I had a lovely, lovely day.
-S.
PS-kitten has been named. He’s now MacArthur, which we’re all pretty happy with.
I wasn’t looking for a new man. Honest. I never in a million years expected to love again. But when I saw his face I was done.
I’ve seen others, you know. Many of them. None of them had the instant reaction this one did.
And now he’s in my life for good.
We’re all crazy about him. When Jeff saw him in the basket at his soon-to-be-ex-home, he said “Yes. That cat is the one.”
Because he has that effect.
Maggie couldn’t care less about the kitten. The 8 week old little guy hissed, popped Gorby when he came too close, and now Gorby makes a wide berth around something smaller than his head. The new kid has gumption. He brought his own can of spray paint to the graffiti party.
No name as of yet. We have some major contenders, but nothing set.
Almost exactly two years ago today (15 June 2007) Mumin died.
It’s taken a really long time to get past losing her. She was a love. She was Gorby’s patrolling buddy. She was my cat, the happy cat, the frankly fairly stupid cat. We’re left with Maggie, aka The Angry Whore (I love her. But yes-she is an angry whore).
This morning I logged into work emails and there was the usual work email that comes in the form of a bulletin board.
I checked it.
I lost my heart to someone on that board.
That little someone is someone that Jeff and I are arranging to go meet later to see if they want to come home with us (and hopefully no one has beat us to it!)
-S.
UPDATE - kitten’s ours if we like each other! Pickup at 2100 tonight. *swoons*
The bride wore ivory because this was her second marriage. She was kinda’ trailer trash like that.
They got married in a little church in central Stockholm, one that had been around about a thousand years or so. Then they settled in a nice flat, also in central Stockholm.
Before they bought a house that she loved mightily.
It was a funny sort of house. It was, actually, only one bedroom. It needed a massive renovation in the basement. There was never enough hot water. But there was an ancient fireplace in the living room and a pot-bellied stove in the bedroom, and she loved having a fireplace in the bedroom to keep her company on those freezing Swedish nights.
Things were ok.
She was thin.
Very thin.
And life hadn’t taken its toll all over her face yet.
(Sorry. Got a little sidetracked into some self-hatred there. Lemme’ pull this plane back up here.)
But she wasn’t happy. She loved her husband. She loved him a lot. He loved her a lot. But she wasn’t happy.
She couldn’t talk to him.
Then again, she couldn’t talk to him from the beginning. And it wasn’t a language thing. Her Swedish was ok, his English was excellent. It was two people who loved each other but who couldn’t communicate. He would sit on a comfy chair in the living room in the evenings, nursing a glass of whiskey. He would let her curl up on his lap, where sometimes she would fall asleep. It was the one thing they did that made them feel close.
And then there was his temper.
He had one, see. He’d never hit her, luckily. There was no hitting. But he had punched walls. He had jerked the emergency brake on her car up while she was driving down an icy road, nearly causing her to slam into a pole, but he’d never hit her.
Still.
They grew further and further apart.
They were polarized by children (she wanted them, he was on the fence). The future (he wanted to move to China and have her not work, she wasn’t interested in that). And the past (she had one, one that included loving a man named Alastair. He didn’t.) She was broken inside. He didn’t know how to fix her.
Then she lost her job.
He saw that as the chance to take a job in China and bring her with him. She would be a Company Wife. She would live (no shit) on a compound with other Company Wives.
She knew she couldn’t do it.
It ended.
And sometimes she thinks of him. He’s still in China, where he moved when she moved to England. She wishes him all the happiness in the world. She genuinely, honestly, truly hopes that he finds someone to love and who will love him in the way that she never did. She was not the one for him. She hopes he finds her.
She has learned, in life, to not regret some of the things she has done.
She has learned not to regret loving and marrying him.
She does regret ever hurting him.
And she wishes the rest of his life nothing but laughter and light.
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