How do you deal with guilt? I bury it deep, keep kicking dirt on to the box that contains it, keep hoping that it won't escape when a storm comes a-calling. And eventually it will turn to dust. Simple!
If only. My mother still talks about the time she took Frank the family cat to the vet to be put down. Frank was senile and would pee on our beds daily, ruining mattresses and making the air in our house acrid. She still tells me how guilty she feels, how distraught I must have been. I keep reminding her that I never really liked that cat anyway, but she carries the guilt around with her like a heavy handbag.
When I try to suppress guilt, I end up feeling nothing at all. My feelings are too uncomfortable, too much like an itchy shirt that needs to be taken off, and so I do things that distract me – eat, shop, shout or go to sleep.
I've discussed guilt with R, but with my children it's far more complex. I have a fractious relationship with my daughter at the moment, one that's seldom been peaceful but is currently aflame. We can rarely communicate without shouting, and I often behave like more of an adolescent than she does when we're together. Shouting is fine, but shouting at a teenager who is shouting at me is a bit sad really.
It would be great if some of the guilt that I wanted to shake off could be expelled with the shouting. I haven't killed the family cat, but I have done things that are wrong and that my daughter remembers, and we both know this. But it's my guilt, my problem, and the truth is I don't know if I should say sorry, or how.
I keep remembering the nights when she was very young when I speed-read bedtime stories to her, so that I could finish an argument with R downstairs; I look at the times when she should have been my focus (over so many years) and wonder what I was thinking expending energy trying to fix problems that were not my own, but R's. I keep wondering if she would be happier now if I'd gone to bed early and been bright for her in the morning; cried less so I could smile for her more; been a healthy minded, independent role model.
"You really should never have been a mother," she says, mid row. I walk away with an odd sense of emptiness, knowing that I've been a better mother to my sons in so many ways, but also realising that there is hope that things will get better between us if I simply step outside my guilt and start behaving like a person who has made mistakes, but is willing to try harder not to make those mistakes again.
Recently, things are improving. Now that I'm not blindsided by drama, there is something more polished to compare the not-so-good times against, and it shows up every kink, every scratch on the imperfect surface of the past. It makes me wonder how I could have lived with such flawed behaviour (mine, R's), so much chaos for so long. Like an ill-tuned piano, it only takes a tuner to adjust the pins and strings to get the thing playing well again. The music is cleaner, sweeter, and you wonder how you put up with out-of-tune harmonies for so long.
Look forward. Always look forward. This would be my advice to myself, to stop smarting from the past. Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Cat's Cradle: "History! Read it and weep!" Sometimes it's necessary to look back. But often it's far more useful to recognise it, rather than kill yourself with the facts that unfortunately cannot be changed.
The most edifying thing from all of this is that our daughter is getting on really well with R. He simplifies their relationship by making bacon sandwiches in the morning when she doesn't want to go to school. He has an old-fashioned relationship with her, cool exchanges of "How are you?" answered with "Fine thanks." Simplicity for them is working at the moment. The therapy that R and I have had has been brilliant and necessary for us, but I can see that we don't need to therapise the whole of family life and all of its members.
I didn't foresee this blossoming of R and our daughter's relationship at all. My thoughts about how things were going to be, my preemptive ideas about how to stop the things that were inevitably going to be wrong between them are reminders that until things happen, I shouldn't waste time worrying about them. I can't predict the future, but I did contribute to my daughter's past, so the question of what to do with all of the guilt still remains.
