Reasons, Seasons or Lifetime?

I have been considering the relationships I have had - thinking of those people and which of them walk with me in my present-day life. It is not always true that family relationships are the permanent ones.

Many of my relationships one might reasonably have thought to be ‘lifetime-long’ have turned out to be anything but. I mean relationships with one’s siblings for sure, one’s parents for another. Even one’s spouse and perhaps even one’s children.

People who have been extremely important to me at certain times in my life are now remote. Friends more regularly arrive and depart. As the saying goes, people come into your life for a reason, a season or a lifetime. The maths of this is ‘many for a reason, fewer for a season and fewer still for a lifetime’.

I have many acquaintances. I have very few friends. I am possibly strange in this. Perhaps it is my readiness to define friends versus acquaintances that is my strangeness. Perhaps it is my writing it down, speaking it aloud that marks me out as being unusual.

I have family, of course, but all of them are remote from my day-to-day existence. I find it easy to go a year or so without speaking to some of them. More than this in some cases; my twin sister and I have probably spent very little time talking to one another over the passage of twenty years or so – if I had to add up the combined time I would be surprised if it came to more than a single hour.

My parents too have fallen into a remoteness. My father suffers from Parkinsons; this and his natural dislike of the telephone means that proactive conversation from him is very rare. It was always a bit of an in-joke that if Dad was phoning, it meant I was already in trouble or there was trouble heading my way! My mother too does not reach out. She is perhaps in the phase of her life where she feels it is an interruption to my life if she phones. More likely, it is because of the stand I took over a particular piece of behaviour and the hurt we both felt towards one another over that. There is continuing emotional fall out from it which we both appear unable to truly forgive one another for and stop repeating the original harm.

My first husband spent the twenty or so years of our relationship slowly removing himself from what the union was meant to represent. I came to know the true emptiness of our marriage in many ways, but most readily recall the many weekends I had of not saying anything to him at all, even though we were under the same roof, caring for the same young children. Often, this would start as an attempt to ‘punish’ him for a harm he’d done me, a wrong-doing or whatever. Eventually I settled into the greater truth of it; I did not want to speak with him, that I was happier if I just didn’t go there. Sad yeah?

Sadder still was that he, on the other hand, would often get to the end of such a weekend and remark to me in a happy, unaware manner how he thought we’d had a great weekend ‘together’. As I kept score, as perhaps only an invisible wife can do, the tally table showed that if I had attempted to interact with him, the weekend had dissolved into disagreements and grumpiness, whereas if I kept to myself it did not. Eventually, a choice for real happiness presented itself and I took it, leaving the marriage.

More controversial still, I believe even the relationship one has with one’s children is not cast in permanence. Once they are beyond dependency, it is natural they occupy a more distant place. This is true even if they live in the same house as you – that emotional space is a natural and necessary part of becoming an adult. Even so, one might expect the relationship you have with one another to flourish, albeit in a modified manner. But that is not always the case. Sometimes the act of becoming separate from one’s parent has to be a wrench. Perhaps my son’s reasons for remoteness are all due to the separation from his father that I myself chose. People take sides. At my lowest ebbs, I think back to the child he was, the smiles he reserved just for me, and I have to wonder why the price of my choosing personal happiness was the removal of these from me.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect about this tale of singularity is how well I have adapted. If you had asked my fifteen-year-old self if I could see a life where my twin sister would only communicate with me via her husband, I would have been outraged at the thought. But here I am. If you had told me ten years ago that my son would stick to single syllable words when talking to me I would have given you a patient look and politely denied the possibility. But here I am.

I do bear this aloneness – and do so with a sufficiency of operational day to day happiness and contentment, often at a higher ‘running-level’ than those past times of mine. How am I able to do this?

I have a theory – firstly I found somebody who did see me, who currently still does see me. This has been pivotal. The experience of being seen finally allowed me to see me. It was like discovering a mirror. It gave aspects of my understanding about who I am some greater physical form, and therefore a deeper knowing. Certain aspects I previously felt ought to be improved, I was in actual fact really happy with. Other aspects that I struggled with; I finally grasped the fact that they were not inherently ‘me’.

My relationship with myself improved, because of his innate acceptance - it was and is an act of permission. Overall, I got happier with who I am, who I have been and who I will become. I learnt to celebrate my strengths, tolerate my weaknesses and live with the varying bits in between. I still struggle, I still weep. I make many stupid mistakes. I am by no means whole or perfect. But I am much better than I have ever been at finding my way back to my path of grace.

I wish we all could hold such a beautiful feeling in our hearts for ourselves. For this is the only relationship you can ever guarantee is with you your entire life – the one you have with yourself.

Rachel x