Going Back In Time

Recently, I've been struggling with low mood. At first I blamed the cold and dreary British weather and the slow start to summer, then I wondered if my vitamin levels were in check and even questioned if I was beginning peri-menopause early. Maybe it's the weight of responsibility: a child with additional needs, an energetic dog, a job to work, a house to run single-handedly.

I've filled my life with so much since he left: book clubs, yoga, meditation, dog walks, nature walks, friends, dancing, music- all the things that make me feel good. Yet, I still haven't felt good and have been too afraid to stop going.

I told my counsellor last week that stopping and slowing down worries me, yet I am exhausted. I don't want to sit in the silence and I'm petrified of returning to the lonely little girl hiding away in her bedroom that I once was. I realised that I am never giving myself the opportunity to sit and take in my surroundings because this isn't the life I'd planned or imagined. A single mum in a large house that I can't afford which is ageing around me and crying out for improvements. All the designs we had planned for our home are out of my financial reach now. It's a shell. A graveyard of dreams that will never be. Family holidays we'll never go on, family togetherness, love and happiness which will never be felt. Ideas of romance, gone.

My counsellor told me that if I don't stop, my body will make me stop. So over the last two weeks I have stopped a little. 

Yesterday, I decided to go back in time. I don't know what I was looking for really, answers maybe about what life had been in the beginning with Peter. 

I drove to our first home together, which had always been his home and never mine because it belonged to him first. I parked near the rear of the house and I could see the driveway and the window of the back bedroom which used to be our eldest child's room. 

The house always felt claustrophobic and oppressive. The windows were small, the house long and narrow, nestled between two other houses on a narrow country lane. 

The memories of that house and the feelings which surfaced made me sad, as I realised I'd never ever been happy there. There was no joy looking up at my child's old bedroom window, just an ache for the lonely woman that I was in that house. Any happiness was always prompted by my hopes for us for the future. I always thought that our future would be better, happier, closer, more intimate somehow. Then I considered that I'd spent the entirety of our relationship in a state of perpetual hope. This was a bit of a revelation. Always thinking that the best was yet to come, but the best had actually been and gone. The best was at the very beginning, when I was unsure of him still and so he showered me with a short-term fixation which felt like love. 

It occurred to me that I can't lose what I have never had in the first place. So what do I grieve?

The house backs on to fields and so I took my dog and retraced my past footsteps over the paths and around the wooden fences which brandish the greenery. The walk took me, mentally, back to my old self, ten years ago, post-birth and suffering post natal depression. How lonely those walks used to feel, how isolated I used to feel; no friends or family close by, just these empty walks over empty spaces with no company. I remember feeling so heavy when I lived there, the pram felt so heavy, the weight of motherhood and the strain of his overbearing family, but I also remember Peter seeming much happier there somehow. I think he loved his life in that house before I arrived; it was his sanctuary, his hideaway on a small country lane, surrounded by fields. 

I think he might have loved it.

Further down the paths, I used to walk past a small cluster of houses on another lane, owned by a housing association which helps find homes for low income families. I remember at the time, thinking that I could apply to move into one of those homes and be free of him and his family. But the prospect of more loneliness a little further down the road from him never appealed to me and so I stayed in the narrow townhouse with him until I managed to convince him to move to the family home I live in now. 

My current home was the house of hope that I used to envision on my walks around those misty fields, a home surrounded by friends, close to my childrens school, near to the local shops. Community and support. This house where there are bigger windows, more light, more space and room to breathe. We had so many plans for it. But he never moved in with us. Not really. His mind was still closed and narrow, isolated and sheltered, so in the home I chose for our family, I outgrew him as I made friends, found new walks and became part of a community. He remained in his own narrow, dark space. 

I've come away from my trip back in time knowing that I am not grieving for anything that we've ever had, but for the hopes which never bloomed. It pains me that they very almost did bloom. We got so close. But in the end, he was never the man I wanted or needed, not even in the beginning, where it all began. I was still hoping back then.

I realise that I have always been on my own, just as much as I am on my own now. I haven't really been in a relationship since being in my early twenties. What I've been in over these last 12 years is a dangerous bubble of hope with a practical companion, a financial provider and an emotional oppressor. He has been unrelatable most of the time. 

However, I find myself thankful that I stayed and didn't move into one of the charity houses on my own with our first child ten years ago. I'm glad that I found my house- our family home. But I feel guilty too. Peter has lost both homes and lives with his parents once again. I know he resents me for that. I think if Peter went back in time for a few hours, I think he'd wish we were still living there in that house. Isolated. 

I felt sad for him on my walk near our old home and I cried for his losses, I'm not sure why I felt that so deeply. The seemingly lovely, lonely man that he was back then, should perhaps have been left alone all along. He has given me the two most precious gifts I'll ever have in my life, so I'm confused by feelings of gratitude and of loss towards him too. 

It's hard to grieve for something that you never really had, but atleast now my future is in my hands. Him leaving has given me real hope for a real love and a real relationship one day. It's actually been a very long time that I've been alone, I was perhaps more lonely in our old life than I am in this one, without him around as much. I grieve for what I thought our lives had been and would be. I grieve for not being loved and for having the love I freely gave rejected over and over again. Mostly though, I grieve for the lonely young woman with the pram who never realised that she was already grieving.

And I can't help but think to myself, it would be nice to be loved at last.