Tuesday, November 10, 2009

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Taking Flight

I won't bore you with the legal wrangles, but it seems I am in a corner where I have to give up home (the beloved first home I ever owned) to my ex, and sell it at a loss, since the cost of recouping my investment is greater than the investment itself.

It occurs to me that this is the first time in my life I have voluntarily given up something I love. I mean I, as and adult, have personally taken this decision to give it away.

I searched for analogies of where this happens to people

  • A teenage mother giving up her baby in the 1960s
  • A woman having her breasts removed because she is at risk of breast cancer though she does not already have it
  • prosperous Jews, Palestinians, Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Hootus and Tutsis, who fled their homes and businesses
  • Young people in love who are separated when their parents move cities
  • A couple deciding to abort a much wanted but fatally flawed unborn baby

These are all more severe than my situation, but the thing they have in common is that the alternative is worse. Human nature being what it is though, in about half the cases it is because of aggression, intolerance, or disrespect that the alternative is worse.

In my case the alternative is to have a protracted battle with an abusive, disrespectful, manipulative ex partner.

Friday, November 06, 2009

An ironic poem that comforts me

One Art
By Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

---Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident

the art of losing's not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Hoist with my own petard

Following on from my woman's work post. An irony. The departure of my SA "partner", who I'm rapidly realising was everything but, has left a power vacuum into which comes simon...

He calls me in the morning to micro-manage me, and remind me of the things I have not done or more particularly paid for for our son and of late he has begun what appears to be a campaign to get full custody. All this timed perfectly for when I'm in the middle of a property settlement, moving house and major surgery.

So now I am cast in the role of absentee father, because I work and he does not, because I have to travel for my work, and have no "partner" to look after Connor. It now appears he wants Connor to live with him, and me to pay. All this from someone who was too mentally ill to even have the boy for a weekend for the first six months of this year, someone who didn't want fathehood in the first place.

Life truly has turned into a bad joke.

Motherhood is the thing I cherish more than anything in the world. I fought for it. I am not a man, and whilst I strive, my woman-like outlook and concerns do not allow me to thrive in a man's world. I receive prejudice at that side too.

If I was a man I would climb the corporate ladder treading on everyone in my path to get what I wanted. Wash my hands of all this, and go out and score me a younger woman. But that option is not open to me either.

A rock and a hard place.