The middle of the bed

Tag: relationships

  • Yoga

    I have always had an odd obsession with perfection, with what it would take for me to be the perfect version of myself. As someone chronically desperate to be loved, perfection seems like a great shortcut. Perfect me wouldn’t waste money or upset anyone ever, she would exercise regularly and never let anyone down at work. She would drink less, sleep more, eat right. 

    And I swear I’ve tried, I’ve committed to Saturday morning yoga classes or booze free months and I at least look at how long public transport will take before I call an Uber.  But inevitably (and embarrassingly quickly) there’s a Saturday morning brunch invite from a cousin I haven’t seen in months, a woman in my favourite Whatsapp chat that needs a hand or a new mum desperate for her first post-breastfeeding wine on a Friday night and my rubber arm is ½ way out the door in a leopard print coat with yoga long forgotten. It surprises no one who knows me that I can’t get this balance right and I’ve long suspected if any of my friends eyes get stuck in a rolled position I will be to blame. 

    In the weeks after my lil life implosion I wanted so badly to do the ‘right things’. I wanted to get off the floor (sometimes quite literally) and be the perfect single mum moving forward. ‘you have to look after yourself’ said the person who knows me best. And god have I tried. I set myself morning routines and evening routines, I dragged myself out of bed to ‘take deep breaths of fresh air’ I joined yoga classes where tears would stream down my face during still moments and boxing classes where my anger would bubble to the surface and the poor 55 year old woman I was paired with looked on in horror as I kicked a boxing bag with such force the instructor kindly recommended a private trainer.

    I pivoted between purposeful teary isolation, ‘doing the right things’ and then true to character blow-outs where I’d masquerade as a woman fit for public until two drinks in and one too many head tilted ‘so how are you going’s’ and I’d be spilling my sob story so darkly that more than one bartender overhearing me, refused to let me pay for my drink (cheers to the bartenders of Melbourne you have made me feel both seen and deeply pathetic). I’ve been a chaotic buzz-kill wild-card capable of ruining pretty much any social event for at least one person before disappearing into the night leaving the people who love me both concerned and fairly annoyed. A special level of self absorbed I’m cripplingly ashamed of the next day.

    And yet there they were, week after week, relentlessly there for me… these people I love. They have fed me and listened to me, sat with me and wiped my tears and checked in on dreaded ‘handover days’, they have driven interstate, they have told me to go easier on myself, given tough advice and said the sassy things you’re not supposed to say about someone’s ex that you they really need to hear. 

    And I’d love to say that the moral of this post can be neatly tied up in a bow, something about how choosing people over yoga comes back in some kind of cosmic karma. Realistically though, I should probably get back to Yoga.

    But I have learnt something in the depths of what I keep obnoxiously calling a ‘hard season’. I have been given grace through some truly undignified moments and I have never been further from perfect. But I sure as hell wasn’t perfect before either, and it’s almost like…. maybe, curiously… they might love me anyway.

  • 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.