All of Me E-Book

Ulla Bolinder

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 221

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Kicki and Eva-Lena have been best friends since they were teenagers in the 1960s. They are now in their forties and try to carry on with their lives after many hard experiences. Kicki has two children together with Rune, her ex-husband, who still affects them with his drinking, unreliability and violence. Eva-Lena looks back at the time before she divorced Lasse, when she was taken to the mental hospital. Since then her emotional insights have increased her self-knowledge and independence and made her free from the past. ALL OF ME is the last part of the trilogy about Kicki and Eva-Lena.The first two are Hop in Then! and Somewhere Within Us.

Leseprobe

The neurotic, by definition, must believe either that he is loved or that he will be loved; otherwise he would not continue the struggle.

Arthur Janov

Innehållsförteckning

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Epilogue

1

Rune, my ex-husband, has been missing for ten days, and I don’t know where he is. Our divorce isn’t really finished yet, but we don’t live together any longer and we only meet when he comes to visit the children or to look after them while I work. Last time he was here, it ended with that he became angry and drove away in the car intoxicated, and since then we haven’t heard from him.

I have no idea what he is doing. Either he has continued to drink, or he has committed himself. They don’t call people from the hospital with the message that a family member has been admitted; you have to do that yourself if you want your relatives to know. Last time I was the one who called first, but I’m not going to do that anymore, I feel. It is as if every time he is out raging, it concerns me less and less what he is up to. Now I only worry about what could happen to others in connection with the car. It’s completely insane that he took it when he wasn’t sober! To drive intoxicated some time in youthful ignorance is something I can to a certain extent understand, but if you get a driving licence when you are forty-one and you are still so dumb, there are no extenuating circumstances at all! Shouldn’t he at least be concerned about the driving licence which he had to wait for, for so long? It’s so hard for me to understand that it isn’t possible to depend on him behaving normally.

This autumn when he had moved and started working again and met the children several times a week, I thought that if he came into a detoxification clinic and was there for half a year and then got his own apartment and continued to deal with his problems, it could possibly work for us again in a few years.

But it fell apart on Christmas Eve. We had agreed that he would be with us then, but we started to quarrel almost immediately, and then I felt: Take off! You can get out of here as soon as possible!

But I didn’t say anything, and he stayed overnight. When I was on my way into my room and should pull his door closed, he thought that we should embrace, and that was possibly okay, but then he wanted me to come and lie down with him, and then I didn’t know what to do. I felt weak and could neither say yes nor no. It wasn’t until he showed that he intended that we should be together sexually also, that I finally was able to decide to go away from there. And I was happy, I felt already when I was on my way out. I was happy that I had managed to pull myself together and done the right thing.

On New Year’s Eve, when he was here and looked after the children and I came home from work, he wasn’t sober, and I became angry and said:

“You certainly won’t take the car now?”

Yes, he would, because he wasn’t drunk. He was going to drive the car. Why shouldn’t he? I didn’t need to care about that.

“No, but you should think of others, if something should happen!”

I thought that he acted so dumb.

“If it weren’t for the children, it would be goodbye!” I said.

And he became angry and kicked a hole in the kitchen door and took off. Then I felt that I wanted to call the police and tell them that he had driven off with alcohol in his body. But I didn’t get to the telephone before I became doubtful and thought: What will happen if I call, then? If he is stopped by the police, he will realize that it’s I who have called and may come here and raise the devil and threaten with an axe and God knows what else, so the children will be frightened out of their wits. No, I can’t do it! I felt so strongly that I wanted to, but I didn’t dare to do it because of that fear, which I have felt so many times during the years we have been together. I have never been able to set the police on him. I couldn’t do it when he maltreated me, and I couldn’t do it when he drove the car drunk. But if a similar situation happens again, I have to manage it.

2

When I came home with the children from the childminder, the door was unlocked. I thought that I had forgotten to lock it, but the light was on in the hall, and when I came in, I met Rune. He had come to leave money and take measure of the door. While I looked for the yardstick for him, he helped Stefan take his jacket and pants off. I didn’t ask him anything about what he had been up to, because it’s of no interest to me any longer, but to Ingela, who just stood there, I said:

“Don’t you want to tell dad now, what you have said several times?”

Then she stretched her hand and touched his stomach, but she didn’t say anything.

“She has been thinking about throwing snowballs at you,” I said. “Both have talked about this door and have been sad every day since it happened.”

“Well, you started to yell as soon as I came in!”

“I certainly didn’t,” I said. “It was you who couldn’t stand hearing the truth that you shouldn’t take the car.”

“But I wasn’t drunk.”

“No, but for me there is only one condition that is valid, and that’s zero.”

“Yes, for you maybe, but according to the law so…”

“You wouldn’t have passed through a police control either,” I said. “And if you can’t handle hearing the truth you shouldn’t come here!”

And Stefan said:

“Dad, the door, you kicked the door apart here!”

“Yes, I know,” he said.

But I think it’s good for the children that he came, because it must feel frightening for them that he only disappears and doesn’t stay in touch. Because he was dumb when he left, I couldn’t come up with anything either, about where he was and what he was doing. Last time, this autumn, it was different, because then I just said:

“Dad must travel far away and work now, so he isn’t able to come home.”

Then it wasn’t like this at all, because that time they didn’t see anything he did. He just stayed away, and that’s a lot better, because then it isn’t hard for me to come up with an explanation.

3

I have called to Nybyhemmet, where Rune lives now, and tried to get hold of him, but he wasn’t there. It’s very hard for me to get into my head how someone can first stay away for almost two weeks and then turn up and still not care about the children. If he has laid off drinking now – for the time being – I don’t understand why he hasn’t contacted the children and tried to repair the damage he has done. That’s what I would do anyway, by saying for example: I was tired, and I became angry, but I didn’t mean to be dumb and I’ll fix this now! When I get hold of him, I will ask if he isn’t going to come and talk with them. He doesn’t have to meet me. If he intends to be here, I can go out.

I think it’s so weak of him not to come. If you have children, you must surely tolerate that they become angry and sad! Then you must at least accept the feelings you yourself have caused. I myself have made so many mistakes and done dumb things to the children – I become angry and so on – but I’m here for them to be angry with anyway.

And I notice their frustration in relation to Rune. Several times, every day, they have feelings that I gather they don’t know where to place. It’s I who must deal with it, and I can put up with that, but I have a very hard time to put up with that they must have difficulties because of him. What he does to me, even if it’s tough, I can live with, but I can’t accept that he makes them feel bad. Every time I think of it, I come to the conclusion that it’s my own fault, because I had children with him. All the time before, I had thought that it was impossible because of his drinking, but we didn’t use any prevention at all, because I had begun to suspect that I was sterile. Once when we were out swimming and I saw some women on the beach who were pregnant, I said to Rune:

“I will never look like that.”

I felt strange, and when we came home Rune asked me what was the matter.

“I don’t know, I feel so sad,” I said.

And he wondered if I was sad because I believed that I would never be able to have children.

Yes, I was, I felt and broke out in terrible crying. I would never be able to have children, I realized, and I cried until I had lost all hope.

I didn’t protect myself, and I must take responsibility for that, but at the same time I think that Rune should have told me that it would be difficult for him to have children. But the only thing he said was that it wasn’t as important to him as it was to me, because he already had two kids.

4

Why did I bring children into the world together with Rune? If you have children with exactly the kind of person that you know you should never choose as the father of your children – and I had decided that I would never be together with, much less marry and have children with, a man who drank – it must be for your own sake you do it. You do it because you can’t find any other way to realize that your own papa was of no value whatsoever. You sacrifice your own children in the same way that you sacrificed yourself for your parents’ sake.

I fell for it because I believed that Rune would be a good father. How the hell I could believe that, because he was just like my own papa, who I couldn’t depend on. But I thought it would be different with Rune. I thought that he would be able to do what papa never managed and be like a parent should be. My best friend Eva-Lena says that she would never have been interested in her ex-husband if it hadn’t been for the fact that he under the surface was like her papa. It wasn’t really Lasse but a loving papa she wanted, she says. And in the same way I think it was with me and Rune, that if the subconscious hope for my papa hadn’t made me blind, I would never have chosen him as the father of my children.

But it’s always the unconscious that prevails. To be free you must recognize and reexperience your old needs and finally ask your parents for what you never received. Easier said than done, that is! But Eva-Lena, who could never ask her papa for anything, has asked him – quietly for herself – to listen to her and understand her and love her. At the same time, she realized his inability to do so and felt the pain of not having received what she needed.

That’s how it works, according to Janov’s primal therapy, which both of us believe in. But it requires that something happens, so you come into the feeling. In Eva-Lena’s case it was a workmate who awakened her feelings for her papa. And it’s important that you connect correctly and don’t believe that your feelings are about the present and direct them towards the wrong person.

Eva-Lena

I was fooled by Lasse because I hadn’t unmasked papa. As a child I adapted myself to papa’s limited capacity and denied my deepest need for him. At the same time I denied myself the insight that he was not a suitable example for me and that I didn’t like him. I couldn’t feel that I hated his narrowness and that he deceived me into thinking that I got everything I needed from him.

But he never touched me, didn’t give me any mental space, and never let me come close to him. He didn’t teach me how it is to be aware of your innermost feelings and to be open to yourself so that you can continue to develop.

I have understood why I as a teenager felt totally uninterested in naively foolish types and why I detested craftsmen and workers; it was because I hadn’t felt that I couldn’t tolerate papa, who only worked with practical things to avoid looking into himself and take responsibility for his emotional development.

And there were no other adults who could show me how things should be. I was alone, and that I had to ignore as long as I couldn’t manage on my own. I couldn’t count on mama either, but she was more honest than papa and didn’t lie to herself or to me. She let him support her, but she knew what she felt and didn’t sell her soul.

And I was strengthened by that, because it gradually caused me to feel and dare to believe that there wasn’t anything wrong with me because I couldn’t like my own papa, who, according to others, was so kind. And mama let me be, while for papa I was only there to satisfy his wishes and needs. When I was a teenager I disappointed him by ceasing to behave like a “nice girl” who should please him, and when I discovered his inadequacy I began to despise him, but I never tried to put him up against the wall and force him to admit his shortcomings. I protected him to guard myself against pain. Finally, I broke off relations with him. But that didn’t change anything. My old needs were still denied and unsatisfied, and that’s why I wasn’t able to see through Lasse.

5

At the dinner table Ingela said:

“Dad is dumb!”

“Oh, yes?”

“Yes, he drinks all the time.”

She should throw snowballs at him and hit him and cut his head off, she said. I don’t know where she has gotten that from, because I have never expressed myself in that way. Sometimes she has possibly heard me say that I have wanted to choke him, but I have never said that I would like to cut his head off.

“Are you so angry with him?” I said.

“Yeees!”

Stefan is also angry and sad. At lunch he first spilled one glass of milk and then another one, and I became angry and said that he could be without milk if he didn’t stop, because I felt that it wasn’t a mistake. The first time it perhaps was but not the other. And when I scolded him, he began to cry and stretched out his arms and wanted me to take him, and then I understood that he had been upset even before he spilled the glass.

“Are you sad?” I said.

“Yes.”

“What are you sad about then?”

“About dad.”

“Are you sad that he isn’t here?”

“No, because he broke the door.”

I tried to console him by saying that Rune will put in a new door, and then I asked:

“Does it feel like you want to destroy things when you’re sad?”

“Yes.”

Then I said to him that he can talk with me instead when he is sad, so maybe that helps a little.

6

I needed Rune’s signature on a paper and called to Nybyhemmet and asked for him, but he wasn’t in. I sent word that I was looking for him, and a little later, when I was with my sister, he called there. He hadn’t spoken to anyone at Nybyhemmet beforehand, but he had driven to my house to set in the new kitchen door and had called from my telephone to hear from Anita if she knew where I was. He wanted to ask if I needed the car or if he could have it a little longer. Then he came over, because I had the paper with me to Anita because she should witness the signature.

He had just entered my home, that is, and I thought about the door key and felt that it was probably time to get it back now. I became a little tense, because I didn’t know how he would take it, but it went well.

Before he signed the paper, he asked why it stood on the copy which he had received from his lawyer that the mother – me, that is – would have sole custody of the children.

“Well, you have signed for that,” I said.

“Yes, but weren’t we in agreement that we would have shared custody?”

He became a little upset and thought that I had gone behind his back. But I said:

“You certainly must understand, that as long as you drink” – it isn’t just that, but that’s what I said – “and I have to take full responsibility alone, it’s just as well that we do it this way.”

“Then I’ll just neglect taking care of them when I’ve got my own apartment as well!” he said.

But it’s for the children’s sake he should have them. It doesn’t have anything to do with me, and it’s just a revenge on me if he is going to be so negative.

When he was about to go, I followed him down, and then he turned around in the doorway and hugged me. I didn’t answer his embrace, but with that hug he kind of took back what he had said, I thought. He didn’t really mean that he is going to neglect the children.

7

Rune came and left the car, and he stayed a while to play with Ingela and Stefan while I was in the laundry room. When he was ready to go, and we stood in the entrance and the children sat in the kitchen, I said that I think that he should talk with them about what has happened and help them to express their sadness because of his absence. But then he became angry, because when Ingela had asked him why he had kicked the door apart, he had said that it was because he was mad at me, and that was certainly nothing to badger him about.

But that wasn’t exactly what I meant. I tried to explain that I think that they need an opportunity to express their anger against him.

“Yes, of course they can,” he said.

“But you’re not here.”

“No, how can I be, when I don’t live here?”

I know it was the wrong occasion to bring it up and that it would have been better if we had been alone, because when it becomes charged between us like that I think I must stop for the children’s sake. And he became angry:

“Yes, it is as usual, that you tell me what I should do and shouldn’t do.”

I said that it’s very hard if the person you are angry with just goes away, so you never can get out what you feel, or if it takes a long time before you have the opportunity to do it.

Yes, but it wasn’t directed to them, he meant, but to me, who he was angry with.

And I don’t know if I put too much of myself in it, because I thought it was very difficult when he treated me like that, all the times he had drunk, and we possibly had quarrelled, and he just took off and slammed the door behind him with a bang. First, he was gone for several days, and when he came home again there was no one to talk with, because then he just lay there and slept, and afterwards it wasn’t possible to take up what had happened at once, because he felt so bad. That’s how it was, and it was very hard, because I could only wait and wait. That’s why I think that I possibly put too much of myself in it and believe that it’s worse for the children than it is.

But what he creates, he should also sort out and not just dump it on me. My demand isn’t that he should stop doing dumb things – because I do dumb things myself – but it is that he should be able to take responsibility for it afterwards, and I don’t think you do that if several weeks drag by before you turn up again.

“Yes, but do you think I’ve been in position for that, then?”

No, but I don’t think that you should put yourself into a position that makes it necessary to stay away.

I didn’t say that, but that’s what I think.

8

I don’t know what to make of Ingela’s behaviour just now. No clothes fit, and everything shall be in her own way, and I don’t understand what it is! She pulls up her pants as high as possible, and the suspenders should be short and sit so tightly that you can actually see, yes almost feel, how the pants cut into her buttocks. And if she has a belt it should be drawn in so much that she almost can’t breathe.

“But you can’t breathe,” I say.

“Yes, I can.”

And if she sits at the table, she wants me to push in the chair so that she gets clamped against the edge.

“But you can’t eat when you sit like this.”

“Yes, I can.”

Everything must be so tight. When she gets her overalls on, she lifts her chin and says:

“Pull up now, mom!”

And then I’m supposed to draw the zipper up so high that she almost can’t move her head.

One day I got totally tired of it and told her that she could stay in if she wouldn’t listen to me. Because she stood there stiff as a poker and said that I should draw up.

“You can’t even move,” I said.

“Yes, I can!”

If I just could understand what it is that lies behind her behaviour, I might not be so enormously annoyed at it, but until now I haven’t been able to figure it out. I know that she is sad because her dad doesn’t live here any longer, and it’s possible that it has something to do with that, but I can’t say for sure. I have tried to explain why he can’t live here and said that we quarrel so much if he is constantly here, so it’s better if we live in different places and are friends instead. Now he comes in the evenings again and on the weekends when I work. But that’s not enough for her, because she wants him to be here all the time.

9

Rune is irritated at his social worker because she insists that he should take Antabus, even though he says that he would rather take Dipsan. Dipsan is weaker, but you take it every day instead of every other, so there is approximately the same effect. And he feels so bad on Antabus that he would rather avoid it.

“I can come in and blow twice a day instead or take Dipsan,” he says.

But no, it must be Antabus. And I understand that there must be certain demands. But that he must take Antabus and nothing else seems so unreasonable. She seems to be completely fixed to it. She had even called the doctor at Ulleråker and asked if there were any obstacles for him to take Antabus. No, there wasn’t, the doctor had said. But Rune has never met him, so how could he know? And when he was admitted, he took Dipsan. But if he doesn’t go along with Antabus now, he will not be permitted to stay at Nybyhemmet, they say. I think it seems so crazy. If he offers to take Dip-san every day that ought to go just as well!

“The important thing for them is evidently not that I’m sober, but to work their will,” he said.

And it seems like that. But it isn’t quite clear yet. He has talked with the doctor at work and with the personnel adviser, and they suggested that he should try the Minnesota model. But he doesn’t believe that that method suits him. For a while I thought: Should I call and talk with the social worker? But that’s probably not a good idea, either.

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