To say nothing of other people

The part of the note I remember was, Ask nan what happened when I was nine. I was nine as I read it, and my mother, the note's author, had just left my father for another man. She had left me, too. She wasn’t gone for long, but my trust took a walk that day.

When I was 27, I read How to Paint a Dead Man. Sarah Hall’s four-stranded narrative was the opposite of resolved by its end. The point was not how these four characters were entangled, nor how their lives and stories mattered to one another’s. The novel is comprised of a series of ‘glancing-offs’—moments of interaction between characters that spiral out in unexpected ways—deep experiences held lightly and tiny moments causing interior avalanches. I rejoiced in the refusal of the neat and the simple.

In one of the storylines, a grieving Suzie betrays her doting partner in a grizzly act of sexual abandon. I found the scene neither abhorrent nor delinquent—instead, it was deeply resonant. This woman, surrendering to the wildness inside her, was claiming herself out of the wreckage of pain and loss. It was an act not weighed down in morality, but borne in the body. I could see this woman—her body, her desire—outside of the context of the world she inhabited, released from social strictures and expected behaviours. It was thrilling. It was monumental. It helped me remove ‘marital’ from the bed of my mother’s transgression; revealed to me the despair lacing all her actions after her father died. It was the start of both a strengthening resolve—as a woman, honouring my body and my knowledge—and a ‘gentling’—conceding that we can’t know what motivates others, not really, but we can choose to honour them with the benefit of the doubt. We can recognise that observing another’s behaviour offers only the slimmest sense of them—neither rooting us in the whys of their actions, nor allowing us to predict the fallout, the impact. This story dropped me right into the current of the colossal effort involved in dealing with our very selves—to say nothing of other people.

My mum’s affair wasn’t about me, nor was it about the way she mothered. Suzie helped me understand that. It didn’t heal the rift between me and my mum swiftly, nor did it undo the years of betrayal I felt. But it did help me let go of my harsh judgement, the kind that stays with the person casting judgement far longer than the person judged. Now I walk through the world with a softer gait, sensitive to the unknown depths of each human I glance at.