Days of yore

Yesterday I relived a favourite childhood activity. I dug in the beach for white mussels. For years, I've been unable to find them, but today we found 4 little ones. I'm hopeful that this signals a return in biodiversity to the beaches.

(I see that chameleons are returning to the city's gardens after years of absence, and flamingos have returned to the Black River. All round it seems that biodiversity is on the increase again. Yay!)

It makes me hanker for my childhood and things like sailing at Hout Bay or Fish Hoek every weekend.

Yet, those times are tinged in grief for me, because the best times of my childhood were also the worst, as my parents were fighting and eventually divorced.

The effects of a divorce are long lasting, particularly for the children involved. I genuinely don't think anyone understand unless they've been through it themselves. This morning, 27 years after my folks split up, the grief was raw again. It will never be over for me. The grief of having my parents stop loving each other, of having to share them with their new partners, and those partners' children, will always be there. 

This chasm, this heart break, can be papered over most of the time, but that's all it ever is - a pretense that I don't mind, that I am okay with it. 27 years later, and I'm still not okay with it. 27 years later, as a grown woman with children of my own, I still hate it.

But with the realisation that my family life will never be what I long for, I found myself realising that my family now is my husband and my kids. My extended family is my church community and friends, and Graeme's family. I'd love to say I no longer care about what my step-parents do or don't think/ feel/ say, but I do care. Deeply. 

I care because their decisions affect my parents, and that affects me. Their decisions put my parents in some very awkward situations, which I don't think is fair on them. I can see their pain at having to choose, sometimes, between me & my kids, and their partner.

But then, as I told my own daughter this evening: Life is not fair. The sooner she accepts that, the easier her life will be.

Family and relationships are so complex. Things are never as cut and dried as we'd like them to be. So now I am faced with a decision to make, in which I must weigh up a multitude of effects, and try to determine which set of effects will be the least damaging to my own heart, to my kids' hearts, to my parents' hearts, and find the decision and action that will create it. 

And of course, try not to let my emotions get the better of me while I'm trying to make that decision.

Things really were so much simpler when I was little! Right was right, and wrong was wrong, and things were always black and white, not shades of grey. But would I really want to go back to that time? I don't know. I didn't have an easy childhood, but before my folks got divorced, at least I didn't have that complication to deal with. At least that portion of my life was simpler to deal with.

And right now, I long for that simplicity again.