A Room of One’s Own

Detox Monday, my friends! As you may remember, I decided to make Mondays detox day this year (we shall see how long that lasts...), meaning only juices and smoothies all day. Above juice made of kale, green apples, and a lemon.

A friend of mine told me about this man she knows, whose wife left him and their three children. No violence, drugs, illness, or alcohol were reported and it doesn’t appear as if there was another man (or woman) waiting in the wings either. The wife simply up and left a few years ago, and rented a room in the same city. My friend told me she sometimes sees her children, but not very often. Her now ex-husband still loves her, and very much wants her to come back.

I thought about this woman. I wondered what her rented room looked like; I wondered what she looked like, and – most of all – what she was doing there all by herself. Did she wish her children were with her? What prompted her to make that move? “Her husband is very nice,” my friend said. “Even she, the now ex-wife, never denied that.” Then why leave?

Perhaps the question ought to be: Why are we together in the first place? Why glue ourselves to a spouse? Because of love? Tradition? Religious beliefs? Societal pressure? Loneliness? Because we want to have children and have read that children need two parents under the same roof or all hell will break loose? Are these reasons valid enough to last a lifetime? What seems clear is, that most marriages or partnerships today are faulty vessels that sink relatively quickly, not much of a storm is needed.

The more I thought about this woman, the more suspicious I got at the word “nice” in “Mr. Nice”.

“He’s even picking up food from her favorite restaurant, bringing it to her when he brings the kids over,” my friend said. “She can’t afford that stuff anymore. He can’t believe she wants to sit in that rat hole all by herself, when they have such a beautiful home.”

I can hear choirs of women in my town oohing and aahing at this man now, but not so fast ladies. There must be a reason a person leaves a beautiful house for a rat hole. Let’s take a closer look. Isn’t “niceness” of this type, in reality a singularly patronizing gesture, conducted to make the weaker feel weaker and the stronger stronger? And though usually concealed as gifts or favors, isn’t it a threat that spells out: “I am the one with the power/money so you better love me/come back to me/do as I say/be a good girl”? And what is that if not mental or emotional abuse? Though not physical violent, that is for certain a violation.

What about the man then? I feel sorry for him. There he is, probably believing himself to be innocent, waiting for his love to come back, and there are the children, cheered on by their dad’s “niceness” and commitment. “Such a great guy!” “Always helping out!” And there’s love itself – poof! – gone off like a galloping horse. We have all known the horrid feeling when love leaves the building. We have all fallen for the temptation to beg our lover to come back, and we all know the futility of it. There’s probably nothing much for this man to do but bow to the higher order of things, and back off. Or, like Sting used to croon: “If You Love Somebody Set Them Free”. Sometimes showing compassion is to leave a person alone. Give them some room. Room to grow, room to breathe, room to be. And for that at times even a rat hole will do.

In 1929 Virginia Woolf wrote about female authors needing money and a room of their own in order to write. In 2015 that is still true, and we all – women and men, authors and non-authors – need space to be alone to think and create. Woolf’s essay is well worth reading and can be found here.