‘What’s wrong with you?’ my husband says with frustration a couple of weeks after my return. I had pushed him out of the bedroom again.
‘I want her to come back, I just want her to come back,’ I cry like a child. My sadness is engulfing me. An old panic has settled in, the one I lived with as a child when my adoptive mother ever ventured away. I’m having the same feeling of separation anxiety. How could that be? I was an adult; this was ridiculous.
‘Are you going to let me back in? Tell me what’s going on,’ Kevin asks stiffly. ‘It’s endless, it’s too much. You’re an adult. When is this going to stop? You have to move on, Zara – people die all the time. I know she was your mother, but you’re not a child.’ He reaches out to hug me and I find myself stiffening at his touch. It confuses me. It has surprised me also, the depth of emotion I have reached: he’s right, it’s too much.
‘It’s not my fault,’ I scream at him. ‘Do you think anyone wants to feel this way? But I keep seeing her dying over and over.’
‘You have to try and stop going there, focus on the children.’ He’s trying, but he’s frustrated with me and I can’t blame him. My mother used to feel the same way.
But I can’t stop myself from sinking and isolating myself. I’m lost in grief. I hug her memory to me. All I know is not to drink or take a drug. I’m trying to do normal things, but I have no focus. Everything feels different now my mother has gone. Kevin and I have stopped laughing together; we bicker all the time. It is not fun for any of us. And then there was Simon.
He was a band photographer I had met when I first became a backing singer, many years ago. I had fallen for him so easily. I’d looked up to him. He made me laugh and he taught me things about art and photography. The chemistry between us consumed me. When I became sober, I moved away from that crowd. I knew that I felt a weakness around him. I was never going to be his girlfriend, that much was apparent. I also knew that if one day I wanted to have a family of my own, I needed to stay away. Yet I’d thought about him over the years, hearing snippets about his life.
A mutual friend contacted me, saying she had bumped into him. I asked her to give him my number and he called. He made me laugh the moment we spoke. He seemed happy, he was in a long-term relationship. We begin to text, sporadically at first. We make plans that the next time I was in London we would meet for coffee. I’m cautious, but enjoying the flirtation. It stops me focusing on what I need to do.
‘Who are you texting?’ my husband asks suspiciously as I walk into the bedroom.
‘Cassie,’ I lie, too quickly.
Kevin wants to hold me the moment I lay on the bed. He needs reassurance, but I can’t seem to give him any. I manage for a moment to relax into his arms. Taking that as me wanting more, he begins to kiss me slowly. I respond for a brief moment before pulling away, unable to bear the look of sadness on my husband’s face. He rolls over silently and falls asleep. I lie in the dark hating myself, until sleep takes over.
I dream that my mother is standing on a beach with the whitest sand, just like in Africa. Her hair is blowing in the breeze, the ocean behind her. She is wearing a white nightdress and she looks young again. I stand opposite her and I begin to cry, tears trickling down my face.
Taking my hand, she whispers to me, but I can barely hear her over the roar of the ocean. She leads me along the beach to a small hut, where some people have gathered outside. As we walk past, I see them looking at me, but I don’t recognise anyone. She points to a small door. As I open it, she says, ‘This is your father, and these ladies are his sisters, your aunts. They want so much to meet you.’
It dawns on me what she really means. Stepping into the doorway I see the shadow of a man. I’m exhilarated. He starts to turn his face towards me, but then the darkness envelopes us. Realising I’m alone, I walk slowly towards him. My eyes now strain in the dark, searching. I want to see his face, just a glimpse, but the shadows will not leave him. I must have been talking in my sleep.
Sitting bolt upright in bed, I turn to my husband in the dark and wake him up.
‘I need to find my father to complete my circle. Meeting my mother just wasn’t enough. I know my life will change if I can just meet him. Every night since Mum died, I dream about her one night and him the next. And now both of them together. I don’t understand it, I haven’t thought about him for ages. Maybe it’s a sign?’
I feel my husband lie back down.
‘You said that about meeting your mother, you thought that might fix you too. And I’m sure in some ways it did, but you say you don’t always feel fully part of her family because too many years went by. It’s not about meeting your parents, it’s about accepting that you have parents you didn’t grow up with. Maybe finding him will help, but it isn’t the whole answer,’ he tells me.
‘How can you say that, after you’ve learnt so much about adoption and helped me with this? You know meeting Pat made a tremendous difference to my life. I know it’s hard for people to understand. I haven’t forgotten your kindness and your patience. It’s not been easy, but look at what I’ve learnt about myself.’
Touching his back gently for the first time in a long while, I let out a heavy sigh. Now it’s him who pulls away.
‘What did you learn? Did you learn how to love me? I don’t think you did.’ His voice is full of hurt. He can no longer contain his resentment. ‘It’s still all about you, isn’t it? It always has been.’
‘You know, the way you go on is so unattractive. You always blame me for everything, like it’s my fault I have these unknown parents,’ I reply, feeling the anger. ‘It doesn’t make me want to fuck you, if that’s what you’re getting at.’
‘Zara,’ he says sharply, ‘it’s not the way I act that makes you not want to have sex with me. It’s because knowing you, you’re probably flirting with someone else. You don’t know how to maintain intimacy.’ He turns away from me. ‘I need to sleep. Do what you want, but don’t expect me to keep supporting you. I don’t have the energy anymore.’
I’m silent, his words left stinging in the air. ‘How are we going to fix this?’ I murmur. But he doesn’t respond.
‘It takes two people to fix a marriage,’ a therapist had told us months before. My husband had agreed that he wanted to work things out, that I was the one for him. I knew, though, years ago he had been maintaining a very close relationship with his new boss, although he denied it. I couldn’t blame him – he was a man that needed attention and he wasn’t getting it from me. I found it irritating anyway.
‘I mean, really? You’re fucking your boss? You’re so obvious.’ I had confronted him after our third child was born, exhausted from being home alone all day. I felt unattractive. Like most mothers at that stage, I believed I would never be back to my normal self.
‘I am not having an affair with my boss,’ he stated again and again.
‘But why do you talk about her all the time? I’m so sick of hearing about her – Lisa this and Lisa that. It’s fucking weird, she’s your boss.’
But he had denied anything else was going on.
‘It’s my fault,’ I said to my girlfriend while I nursed my little one. ‘I’ve been so exhausted with these babies I haven’t wanted sex with him.’ I pause for a moment. ‘To be honest, I haven’t wanted sex with him because I don’t feel connected to him anymore. I’m never good enough for him, but I’m going to try and be more accepting.’
Therapy didn’t work. I knew I didn’t feel the same way as him. I wanted to, but I couldn’t seem to muster up the feelings: I had lost the will to make it work. We had both become so critical of each other, taking every word as hateful. It was as though we were speaking in different languages.
‘You call yourself a therapist?’ I said in anger one afternoon. Nothing had changed in my marriage. She had just nodded, smiling at me in that superior way. ‘What makes you think you can help us? Are you married?’
‘Well, I’ve been doing this for twenty years and had a lot of successes,’ she answers, her manicured hands are folded in her lap.
‘I need to ask you a question…’ I continue. I feel my husband stiffen. ‘Is therapy supposed to help you accept yourself? Does it allow you to make changes?’
She nods smugly. How much money did she make from this? Three hundred dollars for two people, for fifty minutes. I start calculating her day’s wages, feeling my anger rise.
‘We’ve come to you three times already, and all you do is ask us how we feel. We’ve told you how we feel, over and over. And then you have the nerve to tell me to hug him? I don’t want to hug him, do you understand? I’ve told you that he demands it at home. It’s not natural to be told when to show affection, even I know that. And now you tell me I have to hug him here, in your office. Well, I don’t want to.’
I stand up and put on my coat. Kevin follows me to the car.
‘Why has she had so much Botox on her face? I can’t read her expression. Maybe she should go to therapy and figure out why ageing terrifies her so much. Stupid marriage counselling!’
I stumble out of the office as if I’m drunk, laughing out loud. This was not like me; the guilt was beginning to rise. Maybe Kevin was right. Maybe I really did have irreparable issues. I wasn’t sure what to believe anymore.
I decided I couldn’t be that woman anymore. I was going to step back into my past, right or wrong. No matter how much I told myself that I was just going to meet up for old times’ sake, I was as powerless over Simon as I had been the day we first met. My mother had been right: time had softened the raw edges of my memories, leaving only the good times. It had been a long time since I had done anything like this.
After I’d met Kevin and had my beautiful babies, I felt healed in a way I had never known before. I believed nothing could ever touch me again. Yet here I was, years later, standing at the doorway, about to cross back into my past.
Simon had been married while I was seeing him all those years ago. I was so young I didn’t understand what it meant to be involved in such betrayal – I was caught up in the excitement of the secret looks, holding hands under the table. Was I willing to start all that again? It had taken so much strength of character for me to walk away the first time, almost as hard as giving up drugs.
Wake up, Zara, I tell myself. You’re married to a decent man, you can still make it work. You have three beautiful children. My inner monologue wouldn’t stop. Would you sacrifice all of that just to prove that a man still finds you attractive? Go back, and make your marriage work.
But I no longer knew how. It seemed impossible to bridge the gap between us. A fierce pull had taken hold of me; I needed to reconnect with my past.