The middle of the bed

Tag: healing

  • Winning

    The internet talks a lot about who ‘wins’ breakups. If you can’t say definitely if you were ‘Team Jennifer’ or ‘Team Angelina’, be real – this isn’t the blog for you. Princess Diana’s ‘Revenge Dress’ remains a sartorial historical moment that must haunt Camilla to this day and I can’t be bothered googling it but I assume the Kardashians have trademarked ‘revenge body’ at this point. My bitchy little instagram algorithm has its own take too; constantly providing me with unsolicited inspiring quotes about what makes a breakup winner; who re-couples first? who ‘glows up’? Who erases the other on social media like they never existed?

    But the truth is that the only person my body is getting revenge on is me, it’s run down, hungry, sleepless and irritated, I have to credit any and all ‘glow’ to liberal usage of elf cosmetics ‘halo-glow’. And the thought of deleting the photos of my little family as it first took shape from instagram sends me right back to the right hand side of the bed for a good cry. 

    In early, hazy, painful days, someone who loves me told me about this concept of ‘winning’ . I could see his pain as he gently broke the truth to me that I needed to win for myself and for my kids, I needed to get up off the floor now…soon…please?

    I don’t know why this surprised me or why I rejected it at first, denial? arrogance? stubbornness? I’ve always ‘run my own race’, much to my parents’ stress and distress I’ve outright rejected the easy paths they lovingly prepared for me in favour of my own special brand of chaos and authenticity. 

    But what I’m slowly learning is that he was right.  My mission to learn to sleep in the middle of the bed was a first step, a nice easy horizontal step, but the truth is I’m in a fight for my life. Not against people’s perceptions, not even against my ex, but against myself. The truth is I have to find a way up off the floor, I have to win my own battle.

    And i could do it the way I’m expected, I could rock a revenge dress, I could rebound with lighting fast toxicity, double down on the halo-glow until you can see me from space, I could maybe even delete the first photo I posted of my baby girl because he’s in it? But that’s not my style. And I mightn’t have much else right now but I sure as hell have my own style.

    So I find my ‘wins’ in small moments and good days. In biting my tongue when I want to unleash, in an evening without tears or a memory without rose coloured glasses. In fighting for truth when it’s hard, In sitting in front of a room full of people and telling them a story of shame with grace, In making hard decisions alone or cooking something new and scary, in the quiet peace of a home without slamming doors, in sitting in this fucking mess in shock and still finding space to laugh and dance and write and try again and love.

    And I find it just laying here on the right hand side of the bed watching my daughter sleeping peacefully on the left, because she just gave me my mothers day card and it turns out… she doesn’t need me to win by anyone else’s rules, because this is all the win we need.

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  • Lasagna

    I once read something that said that the key to divorce was ‘learning to sleep in the middle of the bed’. It was a metaphor that tickled me even when the concept of divorce seemed like an impossibility from the comfort of my very long term relationship. In hindsight, maybe it captured me because subconsciously the thought of centering myself in my own life was incredibly exotic. I started sharing my pocket money and planning life for two at fifteen. I may have been raising my hands like an ‘ independent woman’ on underage nightclub dance floors but I somehow went and lived a life Destinys Child were definitely not singing about.

    Still, I’m a sucker for a shortcut, so in the 10 weeks since my marriage spectacularly and permanently imploded, I have been fixated on learning to sleep in the middle of the bed. I’ve tried just placing one pillow in the middle, I’ve tried trapping myself in with pillows on either side, I’ve meditated with determination on my place and moved myself back into the middle over and over through one sleepless night after another. But still, I wake up, every morning, as I always have, hair as askew as me, on the right hand side of the bed. 

    I’m learning at the moment that there are actually an alarming number of things I assumed I was capable of that it turns out I’m not. It’s quite de-stabilising to learn at 38 that you are in reality only ½ competent, but here I am, learning where the bins go and how to cook rice and where to put water in a car, even though I know how to do our taxes and bake the perfect birthday cake and run a board meeting. 

    The night I realised my relationship was beyond saving I sat alone in an airbnb and ordered lasagna, a desperately needed comfort on the last night of the holiday from hell. In the days after the end a beautiful friend bought a huge lasagna over and it sustained me for days and then weeks as I re-heated tiny frozen portions and felt her care. I haven’t been able to make it though because it turns out, that much like my life, it’s always been a group project. He did the chopping, I made the ragu, he made the bechamel and then I assembled the lasagna we’ve been making side by side for 23 years. It turns out ‘I’ didn’t actually make lasagna ‘We’ did. 

    But it’s rainy today, a dreary flat Saturday at the end of a hard week. My heart is fragile and I’m home on ‘my weekend with the kids’ and my daughter wants lasagna and quite frankly so do I. 

    So, I diced and sauteed and stirred and googled and much like the water and the bins – I figured it out. And now the smell of lasagna is wafting through my home and there’s truffle in the bechamel instead of nutmeg because I love truffle and soon my daughter will decide that actually she doesn’t love lasagna and wants toast, but I don’t care. I’m going to marvel at the lasagna I made by myself and I’m going to share it with my friend who is coming over to check on my heart….

    … and tonight I’m just going to go to sleep on the right hand side of the bed and see where I end up because I mightn’t have the hang of centering myself in my life just yet, but not being able to make a lasagna is not very ‘independent woman’ of me and I’m sure as hell not going to let Beyonce down again.