EASTER BLESSINGS

EASTER BLESSINGS

 

We had a lovely family Easter.   Two grandparents (dwedfully old, as Dana says), three ‘children’ (in the prime of life), their charming spouses, and four grandchildren (dwedfully young, I might say), and a passing-through dog.   It was noisy, chaotic and fun.

 

 I heard that my children had had a discussion about the religious significance of Easter and realised that because I was so profoundly irritated by my father’s wish to impose his religious views (which were decidedly eccentric) on us, while I had certainly not troubled my children with  my views (or indeed any creeds) I had, in my silence on the  subject, left them woefully uneducated on these matters.   Yet another failure in parenting…

 

Elisabeth and Robert w ere our hosts (how nice for it no longer to be always us) in their newly refurbished house, and we had all brought contributions to the feast.

 

At family gatherings there is  always a complicated mixture of feelings:  love and irritation;   pride and worry;  pleasure and fatigue.   But when you come away, back to the peaceful oasis of your own chamber, and discuss events with your own partner, with all his good sense and sound judgement, who also uniquely, loves everyone that you love, you realise how blessed you are.   Your children are the  real riches of your life, and are making their own way;  their chosen partners bring into your life the different habits of their family’s lifestyle;  and that great promise for the future, your beloved grandchildren, each so very different, grow and prosper.

There’s the stylish Alexandra with her various artistic and musical talents;  the beautiful Erin, so practical and competent;  and the unique and fascinating Dana with her lovely eyes, her astonishing memory and her penetrating intellect.

 

Then there’s The Boy, who was proudly wearing a lovely Postman Pat jumper knitted by his other grandma.    He found himself in possession of a small, silver-paper wrapped, chocolate egg.   I watched him assess and consider the people around him to whom he could apply for assistance, and whether they could be trusted to remove the paper but not eat the egg.   Other children he rejected out of hand.    His grandfather he considered for longer, but obviously regarded the risk of him eating the egg was too great.   Finally, he entrusted the egg to me, but stood with his nose about 2 inches away from it, anxiously supervising my efforts.   I handed him the egg, and then pointing to his mother, said, Ask Mummy if you can have it now.    Ewan is a smart boy.   He knew his mother would be concerned about his diet; whether he would eat his dinner;  other tiresome Mummyish issues.   He popped the whole egg in his mouth and munched on it with great satisfaction before I could even turn him in the direction of his mother.   Oh the pleasures of being young!

 

I’m (I imagine) a logic and order kind of person.   I don’t really want to care strongly about people because each person you love you offer as a hostage to fortune.   You can see so much about them of which you can never speak, yet at the same time much is hidden from you,  for who can truly understand the heart or desire of another?   When you love someone, you are forever vulnerable.

 

Yet what is life without love?   Love is the blood that fires the body.   Love is the water that makes the dessert bloom.   Without love, there is only desolation.

 

May the blessings of Easter, with its great themes of love, redemption and new beginnings, encompass and comfort every one of you.     And may your supplies of chocolate never run out!

SURVIVING MARRIAGES

I’ve watched one or two marriages, lately, fall apart on the couple’s approaching  retirement, which seems even sadder than an earlier disintegration would have been.   It seems very unfortunate that couples who have stayed together through the hard working years of life, reared their families, and have arrived at a stage when they might have hoped for a more peaceful time together, should discover when they turn to one another that they no longer have anything in common.

When you look at the marriages of those around you, there is a tendency to flag some up as more problematic than others, but when people have been together for over thirty years, you tend to assume they they’ve resolved the difficulties to their mutual satisfaction.  There are NO marriages without tensions within them – a complete absence of tension would be a problem anyway – and all successful marriages go through some periods of difficulty.

There are many elements to a successful marriage.   The first one, obviously, is love.  By this I do not mean the heat of physical desire (though I would have thought that too was a necessity), but the unselfish love that puts the other person’s interests before your own.  However, both parties must possess this quality.   If only one person truly loves, the selfishness or indifference of the other  will eventually erode that love.

But there are more mundane things that help, such as sharing common interests, or at any rate a willingness to enter into another’s interests.   I have often been surprised how women can enjoy the benefits of their husband’s work and career – they have a large house, nice holidays, the luxury of bringing up their own children, yet they have little understanding of the pressures or demands of the job.   In a household with two careers, each partner must be willing to make sacrifices on his or her work front from time to time, to support their partner’s ambitions;  this support must not be a one way traffic.

Sharing a leisure interest helps too.  If one of you likes horse racing, riding and hunting and the other is terrified being on horseback, while this is not insurmountable, it is a definite handicap.

Willingness to establish the dominant family unit as being you, your partner and your children, and while hopefully retaining warm relations with the family units you both came from, recognising that you are now primarily  spouse and parent, and not child or sibling is important.   Your spouse should not just become a new member of your existing family but an equal partner in your own household.

Sometimes when you look at a marriage with pronounced tensions, you can see that one of the partners is very stable and steady;  that whatever happens they are going to stand in their place, and these marriages, while not indissoluble, are less likely to fall apart.

Persons having limited pre-marital experience of other partners can sometimes be a problem.   As people feel themselves getting older and their sexual powers waning, they may be overwhelmed with a sense that they did not experience enough;  that they wanted more variety or passion or excitement.   Wild oats however should definitely be sewn in one’s youth, when one can afford the  risk or endure the pain.   Wild oats are meant to be spent swiftly;  not conserved.

In later years, family life is a great pleasure.   Seeing and helping one’s children and their spouses set up home together, helping with their families, receiving their help and support in turn, doing these things the two of you together – these things are among the great pleasures of growing old.       The grown up children of marriages have pleasure in bringing their children into the family circle, and in being recognised as Mummy and Daddy in their turn.    Although the eventual death of a grandparent is a great loss, it is as nothing compared to the sorrows, anger and bitterness when one partner  abandons their spouse for  some unknown other and tramples upon and destroys the family citadel which the children of the marriage experienced as a protection for them, and assumed would be available as a place of comfort and safety for their children.   It’s difficult to understand why people fall apart at such a time.   There’s everything to lose and little to gain.   It’s rarely by mutual consent.  One party abandons the marriage and the other is devastated.

And there’s no magic answer either.   There’s no charm or talisman you can hold that will guarantee the survival of your marriage.   It is a dynamic exchange and it is forever vulnerable, even in its strength.

A good marriage is a bulwark against misfortune.   But it can never be taken for granted.   I’d like to close by saying, all you need is love, and certainly you cannot have a successful marriage without it.     But you need more than that.   You need to have an instinctive awareness of what you NEED – as opposed to what you think you want – when you make your choice.   You need the faith to wait until you meet the one for you, and not settle for a substitute.    You must also be able to see both the ordinary man with his hurts and his needs and his human limitations who will need your help; and that he is also the prince who comes riding (or that she is the queen of your heart.)   You need to be able to tolerate his faults.  (There’s no-one who doesn’t have some.)   When, occasionally, the going gets tough, you need generosity of spirit, to be able to forgive and set aside your hurts and count it all as nothing.   You need to appreciate his virtues and strengths and not take him for granted.    You must have the strength to stand your ground and the courage to advise him what he will not willingly hear.   You will need the flexibility to know when he is right and you are wrong and change your position gracefully.  You must remember that for everything you give to him, he gives to you in equal measure.    You should remember him as one of your blessings, every day.

When you reflect on all these things, it is amazing that so many marriages do survive.                                                                                                                                      

Finally, you need a little bit of luck.

STOMACH RULES

I had a snooze on the sofa the other afternoon, and when I woke, I saw that someone had sneaked in and left on the little table beside me, a peppermint chocolate.    Encased in its silver paper, it glowed in the dimness of the late afternoon.    I am very fond of peppermint chocolates but I just looked at it for a moment, reflecting that I knew there was only one left, so John had come across it, refrained from eating it, and left it for me.    Then my stomach asserted itself and dismissed the heart and its preoccupation with love.   This is a chocolate, it said.   Eat it.

So I did.   Chocolate is good but love makes it better.

And yes, I always know exactly how many chocolates there are in the house!

WHAT IS LOVE?

WHAT IS LOVE?

What is it that makes you select, out of all the candidates available, a single person, and decide, sometimes in the first moment that your eye lights upon them, that this is the one with whom you would like to spend your whole life?      I agreed to marry John on the night we first went out, (we had been colleagues for some months) and I do not regret it, but I certainly could not recommend this as a general course of action.  Getting married is the greatest gamble of your life, and there is no sense in doing anything which increases the odds against you.   I am an older woman, not in the least likely to fall in love with anyone new, or indeed inspire such emotion in any one else.   Yet I can still remember, cavalier though I was in my attitude to men in my youth, looking at John and thinking, (for the first time in my life with an element of caution,) I will only get one pass at this.   There is a magic in one’s choice, and a mystery that we do not understand.

Many of us appear to have a ‘type’ – so if there is more than one partner, they may all look much the same.   Although I am a small woman, to match my blue print it appears a man has to be fairly tall.    Walking out of a shop in Antwerp once, I saw what I thought was a very attractive man on the pavement.    When he stepped off the bollard he was standing on and proved to be about 6 inches shorter – although still taller than me, and clearly still had as good looking a face as he had done a few minutes before – I suddenly found him perfectly ordinary.   I could see that this was ridiculous and silly, yet still I had that reaction.

Some people fall in love with what appears to be clones of themselves.   They look alike, share the same background, have similar desires, come from the same family or town.   If they marry, their marriage has fewer tensions than other couple’s, but it may lack the breadth of skills and experience that very unalike people can contribute to their union.

Other people seem to choose with no consideration for harmony.   They row frequently – but perhaps they enjoy the excitement and drama – and then there is the pleasure of making up.   This is all perfectly fine, if a little tiring to those around them – unless one day one of the parties wakes up and thinks he  wants to live a quieter life.

Some people marry friends.   These marriages can be completely successful, but the danger is that their fires may never have been lit.     One day a Fire God or Goddess may chance across the path of one of them, and all is in danger of being consumed in the ensuing conflagration.

Nowadays to have a single, enduring marriage is sadly becoming increasingly rare.

What is the secret of a successful marriage?  I don’t really know – every marriage is different;  and every marriage is continually at risk.    Marriage doesn’t come with a guarantee.   Love, obviously – which means you have to care about the partner as an individual in his own right, separate from you.    He or she is not owned by you.   Tolerance.    We all have annoying habits.   Respect for one another.   Your partner puts their skill and talents at your disposal, for your protection and comfort.   We should endeavour not to take this support for granted.  They gift it to us;  we do not own their personal assets nor can we command them.    Think of the horror of discovering that suddenly the wind has changed, and all their skills, plus their intimate knowledge of you, is lined up against you.     So each should remember that the spouse has chosen – indeed promised – to share your destiny, but is not forced to do so.   Shared desires.   It’s no good if one of you really wants a country farmhouse with chickens and goats and wellingtons, and the other wants a riverside city flat and no kitchen.

I think successful marriages contain all of the above.   They should have enough differences to make life interesting, but I think it helps to have a common base line of belief.    Long ago, I had a boyfriend – a perfectly good and fine fellow – yet on every issue of the day, we stood on different sides of the river.   He was a Tory;  I was not.     At first I thought this difference did not matter.   But eventually I thought it did.   If we ever came to civil war – God forfend – I knew he would have been for the King and I for the Commonwealth.   He was not happy when I left him, but it was the right decision for both of us.   Some marriages very successfully bridge widely differing cultures, and this is laudable and praiseworthy – good luck to them all – but I feel it is a great strength to share a common cultural upbringing.

Finally, I think we should be grateful that we have found someone who meets the desires of our heart.   We are blessed;   some people never have this good fortune.   Nor do I think we should expect too much of love or marriage.    It cannot answer ALL our needs, assuage all our longings.    Everyone to some extent, but some more than others, has an intrinsic loneliness.   This is not, I believe, due to lack of companionship – though a life’s companion certainly is a comfort.   I think that isolation is part of being human, for in the end, you walk alone.

I have considered love within marriage but of course there are other forms of love.   With marriage, I think it is best to keep your feet firmly on the ground.     Marriage is a contract – public and private – between two people.    If the terms of the agreement are not fulfilled, the contract is broken.   The party who has broken the contract cannot automatically expect his or her partner to honour the agreement when he himself has effectively ended it.   Personally I do not think there is anything binding in the words of the vows themselves nor that vows are necessary.    Many of these were drawn up in times past and were principally concerned with property rights.     So I do not see that any form of marriage – church say – is any more binding than any other.    And who are the church, or indeed the state, to say that marriage should last until death do us part?    They’re not in the relationship.     How can a marriage be valid, if one party no longer wishes to be married to the other?   In any relationship, should you look at the other person and think with real distaste, what did I ever see in him or her, then that affair, whatever it was called, is effectively over.   Sometimes you observe something dramatic – woman leaves man on a street corner – but probably she has been in the process of leaving for a long time.    I know there are great cruelties and broken promises in many separations, but marriage is a dynamic partnership.   It can never really be a guaranteed place of safety because external circumstances will affect it, and this may be outwith the control of the parties.    However, to be within a happy marriage is a good place to be, and whatever the difficulties – and there is no-one who will not have some –  if there is still love, all things are possible.

Love is not easy to define.   St Paul did it better than I can.

Love suffereth long and is kind;  love envieth not;  love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,  doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;  rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;  beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.   Love never faileth…   …And now abideth faith, hope, love, these three;  but the greatest of these is love.