Looking for Power in Love

When I was sixteen I had a breakdown. For days I walked home from school crying, sobbing, unable to stop. At the time I had done something I realized was very wrong and I couldn't admit it. Not even to myself. So I fell asleep in class, lost interest in studies, no-one talked to me. I talked to no-one. 

I was just a shell. My determination to be a success had dissolved into emptiness. It's not that I was a success before that, it's just I felt I might as well die.

Before I went to that school where teachers and the headmistress were kind, I had been told and was convinced I had to prove myself. Be a success. I was average in most ways but then this school did not work on getting students to compete and prove themselves.

How did it come to pass I felt I had to be a success. My mother and her sisters focused on cleaning, looking beautiful, being perfect, and for my mother - upholding the feminine mystique by not talking about feelings, always looking clean and dressed, and being on top of the housework.

These things are fine, but it appeared that no-one in our family ever failed. They were persecuted but remained strong to the world. However I knew my mother felt betrayed by this world. Her first husband was killed in the war and she had to return to her town with a baby and no father to support the family. So she had to marry again. She found a man who came from a strong family who saw themselves as above the my mother's working class. Then she got pregnant again, so he had to marry her. 

She did her part in being a perfect housewife who couldn't do everything my father wanted her to do. She couldn't make chocolates and look after the house and babies. But my father was raised in a home whose father was absolutely in charge. My father's mother did not appear to like my mother. My French grandmother was an "insult" to my grandfather's family because she was a farmer's daughter.

This was England where commoners had to step off the path to let the aristocracy walk by. 

My mother's first baby was raised by her mother because it was thought my father could not raise a child who was not his own.

This is all my interpretation of how it was. I also believed my mother had so many heartbreaks that I had to make up for it by being a success. It was something I had to do. It was not an option. Mother got pregnant four times and none of them were planned. 

She attracted men like flies to ripe fruit. She was petite and delicate in appearance. She suffered bad nerves and depression. My father's family were strong and tall. They had learned how to work in offices, in business. My father's father was a leader in the masonic temple, and when my father was caught smoking a cigar, his father made him smoke it to the end even though it made him sick. 

This all sounds very cruel, but the British were nothing if not forceful.  The history is full of pomp and circumstance while those at the bottom were whipped for not doing what their masters demanded. It was these absolutes that allowed us to travel the world, taking the land away from the people who were there and calling it "discovery".

The very worst thing an Englishman can do is cry. To torture, beat up, rape is strength.  To give up, is not allowed. Women and children witness cruelty as a mark of strength. No matter how exhausted and stressed a man might be he must be ready to not only fight but win.

That said most people were not this way. Most people I knew were gentle and kind until they were in a position to control.

Back to the new school when I was sixteen, crying on the way home from school. 

The reality was my mind was screwed and I had to learn this the hard way.

Constantly told that I would never get a man, never amount to anything, I was empty of self esteem. I wondered if anyone would love me. At that time I turned my head to see this boy and felt something. What was it? A recognition? Did he look like my brother? Was it love at first sight?

Did he scratch "I love Janet" on his pencil box, or did I just imagine it. I was never top of the class. Never a winner in sports or anything. My mother thought I was gaumless, a dreamer. I wondered how to be a success so someone would love me and was ready to live a life without love but this boy captured something. The thought I could be worthy of love and I was filled with excitement. Suddenly I had a boyfriend.

He would put his arm around my shoulder or hold my hand. One day during lunch we went for a walk to the park. There he kissed me and I fell with him to the ground. He got on top of me. It was stirring and wonderful and I was lost in this bliss.

Then I realized.  This is how a woman gets pregnant, lives in poverty and ridicule and is shunned by her family. (I had a dramatic gene in my blood - everything was wonderful or dreadful). I told him to get off and thought I must be strong, that love was not good for me because I had to be a success or else I would be like all the cast off women in the world.

After that I walked home crying, I couldn't sleep, for days it felt this was the end of my life. Everything was finished for me. There was nothing in the skills I had developed. I was a dreamer. A cry-baby. Somehow I had to be someone else. Yes suicide was a way out but I never had the guts for that either.

How had I been so convinced of worthlessness.  

It took a few years and a move to another country before I realized that this episode shocked me into a realization that love should not be thrown away. This trauma taught me to value love, to be loving and kind, because I  couldn't live without love.

Two years after this I met a boy who would become my husband, and I was grateful I had learned that lesson and now opened for that vulnerable part of me, the part woken and ready for love. To the first boy I am grateful for this lesson. He was a lovely person too.