All been pretty samey since my wife and son returned from holiday. We are now in the swing and routine of school and work.
The irritations continue. One Sunday she and the boy were due to leave the house at 10:30/10:45. I woke up, got breakfast, ensure he was showered and ready for a quarter to ten. Then I had to leave for the gym - something I try to do on a regular basis. All she had to to do was get ready herself and they did not leave till 1130.
Suitcases were left all around the sitting room for more than a month after their return from holiday.
Some positive feedback. On the day they went out, I did a bunch of ironing and cooking and was actually thanked.
Then, yesterday, I came home from the gym at 1230 and neither had showered though she had said we would be going out in the afternoon. Homework had been completed, however. She was on the phone ordering some jeans and 1230 turned to 1.
'Shall I get the spaghetti going?'
'No, I will.'
1 turns to 1:15 and she is still in front of the PC.
I finally turn on the water and go to shower and change out of my gym clothes.
I come down and she is still on the effing PC - doing nothing that could not be done in the week. 'Will you do the spaghetti?' she finally says.
Sounds small and petty as I write this but - really - the complete lack of time management is irritating in the extreme. Once more, she took the ironing to my parents' place and I did suggest that she could do that work in the week rather than stressing out on the week-end. 'The week is when I rest,' was the response. Really? When I take almost all the load on the weekends and in the evenings ... and usually do all the ironing anyway because the spaghetti scenario is repeated time and again?
I was reading an article in the newspaper last week-end where a writer called Hanif Khureishi was writing about a film of his called Le Week End. It is about age and marriage.
I can recall a student of mine, a woman in her mid-40s, telling me a long, moving story about being 'awakened' emotionally, sexually and intellectually, when she fell in love with a friend of her husband.
What the adulterer usually wants is better relationships, conversation, support, attention, pleasure. Her question is: how can we get what we want while behaving well, which means, at least, not being asjamed of ourselves?
My student didn't wish for anything like 'total liberation' - a revolution, a new social set-up - just for a satisfying marriage. And it is worth noting about the classic heroines of literature, Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary, or even the characters in the David Lean's Brief Encounter, that they are not compulsive transgressors. They are asking for very little, and for everything, which, for them, is a fuller, more satisfying love. Complete happiness is a fiction, but some happiness is possible; indeed, it is essential. There are some people you can 'realise' yourself in relation to, and they are worth searching out.
The above encapsulates what I tried to describe in one of my earlier posts. Home is where each of us - partner, husband, wife, son and daughter - has the right to find the greatest support; the springboard to deal with the world outside. And yet, too often, home is where we are judged the most and taken most advantage of. When will we grow up?
Of course I have not had an affair but there are friends around me who give me the value and comfort that I need - and I am grateful for that.
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