Last night, I couldn’t sleep which is unusual for me. Husband was back at the nursing lodge and Son had gone (first time since surgery), to a friend’s place for the night. He took Husband’s 18th birthday present with him – a bottle of Bacardi – but we won’t go there!
I wasn’t lonely, because I love being alone; and I wasn’t scared of the dark or the wind, but I just couldn’t stop my mind galloping. So I turned the light on and finished reading a book called Waterlemon (no, that’s not a typo) by Ruth Ritchie in which she describes her journey through the ordeal of her husband’s bicycle accident, subsequent brain injury and recovery.
What struck me most about this story was not her courage in dealing with the events (with two small children and two ‘step-children’), or her courage in supporting her lovely husband throughout the long days, weeks and months of his convalescence and homecoming, but her courage in actually naming the family members who were unsupportive. I mean she actually named these people, all of whom were from her husband’s family.
As I was reading, I started to get a bit worried about how open she was in her slicingly angry, but accurate, descriptions of these people. I wondered if they might be hurt to read about themselves portrayed in such a manner. After all, all stories have two or more sides, don’t they?
But, because Ruth used transcripts from real telephone conversation and emails, I realized her story was legitimate; not only that, once her husband recovered enought to come home again, he obviously didn’t object to the book being submitted for publication, despite his ‘family’ being so exposed.
So, yeah, this has really got me thinking about how, despite my honesty in this blog, I have been, unlike Ruth, pretty lax in mentioning the amazing 99.9% of Husband’s family, and his fantastic old and new friends, and my own family, who have given him/us support, love, assistance and so on. But I have also been pretty wimpy in not mentioning the 0.1% of his family who have, over many years now, broken his heart over and over again in ways that I cannot even bear to express.
The beautiful thing is this: I finally unwimped myself and banished that 0.1% from our lives and wondered why on earth I hadn’t done this earlier, years ago. It’s actually not that hard to say “go away!” Godfrey does it all the time!
jmgoyder 