Tonia’s Gift

Recent events in romantic terms have hit a nerve within me; something deep down bleeds a bit, screaming. In my frantic search for a sticking plaster I act rashly, spending money to subscribe to a dating web site. Why? Do I need this? In a bid to escape the rawness my busy, bossy brain gets in on the act: “your abdominal muscles are weak and your belly is flabby; the house is a mess and you need to clean everything; you’re too disorganised as a mother, let alone the mother of a child with special needs …” and the rant goes on and on between my ears.

This is where it has the power to disable me. I go for a jog and I pause every few paces, biting the inside of my cheek to distract me from the pain within my chest, where it feels as though a sheet of skin has been ripped off, leaving veins and capillaries blazing with an ache of fresh-cut pain. I breathe out – “huff!” to expel the negative energy, and carry on, my feet thudding too heavily on the ground. It’s not the physical weight that causes this; it’s the machine between my ears pumping out disparaging messages, which fills my body with an intangible weight, dragging on my bones and filling my legs with heavy jelly.

I can’t outrun it, so I tell myself, “I’ll have to do it with this pain; I have to teach it that it cannot stop me.” But to accomplish that, I must accept the pain, to carry it as though it is a treasured guest, to treat it with respect – which means I must go gently with myself; I’m not a robot.

These points of pain are gifts; I know.

Gardeners understand that manure brings nourishment, stimulates growth. Beautiful plants grow from these conditions. Is it a prerequisite, therefore, for development?

I don’t know why I loved him, but I did. He was geeky, awkward; dapper and yet a little bit unkempt, not in the way that people who don’t look after themselves tend to be, but in that way that tells you they’re preoccupied with other things; things of the mind: higher-consciousness things, if you will. Speech and mannerisms beyond his years, a bit like a middle-aged person who went to grammar school. Brown brogue shoes and cardigans and jeans; tailored coats and comfy plimsolls. When he held me I could have stayed forever, breathing out and sinking deeper into his tall, warm frame, inhaling the scent of cotton and washed skin, and soft, soft hair, warm and smooth beneath my fingertips. The last time he held me I wept, silently, through gritted teeth, holding my breath against the pain and the goodbye that I knew it was.

I had known for some time that it was preposterous; I had said as much one night when, talking about his own romantic past he cited low self-worth and grabbing on to people because, well – what if this was his only chance? He might as well get a budgie, he had said. I remember, through tears (because I wanted to be the one that he grabbed on to), saying, “Have I lost a lover, then, and gained a friend?” I don’t suppose that we were, truly, lovers – we were friends who got on so very well that, even lying naked post-coitally, we continued to chat like old friends. And, at the end of the evening, he would go home. It happened in the quiet times, when there was nothing else: no football or gym or children or work or commitments of another kind. There, in the dim light of the evening growing later, we linked together over cups of tea and, sometimes, our clothes discarded, crumpled on the floor, we tried to fit together but, somehow, without quite the fluency that one – I – might have expected. Preposterous, really.

Although I knew it probably wasn’t going to be me – I have my own goals and commitments – I fantasised about ‘replacing the budgie’. Despite differences in age and life experience, we somehow managed, for a while, to flow together. But perhaps I mistook secrecy for intimacy. It became quite quickly apparent that the challenges I face, I face in myself, as myself. No-one is going to scoop me up and save me from the things that, in all honesty, it is my job to deal with. Having battled for approximately two years with low moods that made a mockery of my depression medication, the culprit – progesterone – was clear, and I took the action that was needed.

Now free of the progesterone, however, the pain remains.

This is something deeper, something fundamental. It has been here for as long as I can remember: low self-esteem. Whichever way I turn, just when I think I have outrun it; swung and hoisted kettle bells in its face; cycled farther than it can follow me; thrust weights into the air to drive it away, wiped it out of me in the sweat of my brow and my back and my hair, it has remained, smiling, at the corner of my eye.

“Ah, there you are again.” Is that me speaking?

“We can’t go over it.

We can’t go under it …

We’ve got to go through it!”        (We’re Going on a Bear Hunt – Rosen and Oxenbury)

Almost overnight, things changed. The text messages weren’t so effusive, or so frequent. Meeting up wasn’t going to happen – he was tired, or cold, or the time of year wasn’t any good. He’d had a long journey, or someone needed his help. My offers to hook up and drink tea were classed as “very sweet” or “very kind”; sometimes, there was simply no reply to a message I had sent. I knew; I have an instinct for these things. Since text message seemed to be the most convenient method of communication, I sent one to the effect that, since we had agreed, face-to-face, at the outset (of whatever it was that we were doing) that, if we never slept together again but remained good friends, then so be it, wasn’t it time to have that conversation now?

The reply was oblique. Oh no, he would love to “hang out”, he had simply been busy, or it was the time of year. I suspected that he had, in fact, got Seasonal Affected Disorder and chided myself for my unkind self-centredness. I sent a text message to offer my support; after all, wasn’t this what friends did? Mine do. My offer of support was “very sweet” or “very kind” but he was fine, thanks anyway. “Hanging out” was mooted a couple of times, but never materialised and, as I had already sensed this, I carried on with my own plans and activities.

The truth came out quite horribly, in a conversation over the attempted suicide of a mutual acquaintance. I’ll call her Tonia, which is an abbreviation of her middle name. This is partly to protect her anonymity and the feelings of her family. A text message arrived from him saying he was crying. I did what people who care do; I picked up the ‘phone. As we spoke, this lady’s life lay suspended in the balance in a hospital bed; she might yet pull through. We hoped she would. He was devastated. “Our friendship was like a scaled-down version of you and me,” he said and, given his avoidance of me for the past month, I wondered what on earth that meant.

“She might pull through,” I said, hoping against hope that her life could be saved. He wanted to get a ‘phone call to say that she had, he said; he would call her, text her, meet her for lunch. Why hadn’t he made more effort? He was going to make it now, if she came through this. As he spoke, I was a friend, and tried to listen and to counsel to the best of my ability; but the contrast between how things had been, and how they were now between he and I, resonated painfully inside me.

Tonia’s suicide sent echoes out across the aether. Desperate and depressed after several years sober, afflicted with anxiety that rendered her too fragile to go in to work, she had taken a drink. In her drunkenness she had transformed a neck-scarf into a noose and had hanged herself. Another friend was on her way around to see her at the time and, confronted with the reality, had cut her down. “Her lips were blue and she was still warm,” said the friend, weeks later, in post-traumatic tears. She had attempted resuscitation and had ‘phoned the paramedics, who had worked on her for an hour, to no avail – and so she was transferred to hospital and life-support. The following day, with no hope, this lady’s family had had to make the heart-breaking decision to switch off the machines that tethered their daughter, and their sister, to this plane of existence.

The news hit me hard for two reasons: hormone-releasing contraception had made life miserable for me so many times in the past two years, to an extent that often seemed to cancel out my mood-stabilising medication; and, in that telephone conversation, on that night, I was cut with the splinters of a shattering dream. This man was not for me.

This was the second time in the space of a year. Twice, I had placed men on a pedestal who had simply stopped making any effort to spend time with me; twice, excuses had been made and communication had diminished to a vanishing point. Twice, I had climbed a little ladder at whose zenith I had placed these men and had pecked hard, hoping for some reaction, some approval. But all I found there was a little mirror, and I had pecked and pecked at my own reflection, blaming myself. After the ‘phone call on that night, I saw what I had to do; I had to fly out of the cage.

The following morning, I cycled to the clinic where the contraception had been installed. I waited, in silence, for my turn, tears streaming down my face. I did what I imagined that this woman had not done: I reached out. I sent text messages to two close female friends, telling them what I was doing. Their responses helped me feel less isolated, less desperate. The nurse who removed the Mirena coil was so concerned by the state that I was in that she “safeguarded” me: she contacted my GP and set up an appointment, and she called me the following day to see how I was feeling. I was in floods of tears, but I was so, so grateful for this woman, who had gone beyond the call of duty to make sure that I was alright. My GP and I agreed that my sensitivity to Progesterone means that I must never have hormone-based contraception again.

This acquaintance whose life-support was switched off on that Tuesday may never know what gift she bestowed. We were never close friends when she lived, we never seemed to have time for one another, nor to want to make it but, in the end, it turns out how similar we were. Her mental chemistry and mine are identical; this was the message that came through loud and clear as soon as I heard what she had done. I knew I had to do the next right thing. The hormone levels now decreasing in my system, I had to face the fact that, in response to men, I had been like a glass-blower, pushing hopes and dreams and expectations into bubbles which were just too fragile, and had smashed.

In the end, he came to see me. It wasn’t a special journey – he was in the area in any case, at the horse-racing. Naturally, he had gone to watch the racing first. I dare say that he wouldn’t otherwise  have visited. He said, “I thought we were just friends who fancied each other.” We had been, but the way that we had been together had seemed so much more: the comfort and easy intimacy, the sense that we ‘got’ one another mentally and emotionally, had been blissful; the text messages in the middle of the night saying how important I was to him, how much he loved having me in his life, how amazing and gutsy I was, had seemed to be a dream come true; when he had held me in his arms on the living room settee and told me I was beautiful, I had loved him.

It was therefore utter bathos when this statement about “just friends who fancied each other” was made; it made a mockery of my feelings, the dissolution of my defences, the hopes and fears and heartache of it all. The bursting of the dream felt like a punch, and a sudden absence inside; an empty birdcage in my chest, its door flapping open.  

I was left with the truth: that, in acting out together sexually, an entire can of worms had opened up on my side, about desirability, about approval, being ‘worthy’; I saw the starkness of the facts: we weren’t even friends now. We had availed ourselves of more than was appropriate, and this was its price.

I am forty-four years old. Much as I have kidded myself, it isn’t a “fuck-buddy” I’ve been after; I’m too old to mess around like that. This is about finding who I am: who I truly am; about accepting myself exactly. And yes, I admit, I would love to meet someone; I would love a partner, a team-mate. I want someone who looks at me and loves what they see; who listens and who laughs with me, to whom I listen and with whom I laugh; with whom all defences can be cast aside.