A Bad Seed
Essay on the Monthly Theme, Sowing Seeds
‘Will you walk into my parlour,’ said a spider, to a fly. (Mary Howitt)
And I did. With my eyes open.
She taught in an Engineering College, and I had met her at the wedding of a colleague. We became acquaintances, and then went on to become ‘friends’. Sort of.
To her, everything was exact. All black, all white. No grey shades. No problems without solutions. She had no tolerance for ‘flights of fancy.’ She hated and feared what she thought of as willful ignorance and ‘vagueness.’ There was a long list of things and people she disliked. Too fat. Too short. Too overdressed. Underdressed.
The cardinal sin, in her eyes, was being unambitious. She hated colleagues whose children didn’t perform well at exams, thinking that they didn’t work hard enough, to make sure their children came first in class.
We were friends for a long time. A very long time. Too long.
Like most woolly-headed people, I admire people who are intelligent and strong-minded and we got along well, together. She saw me as a teacher who was good, someone who cooked the kind of things that she liked to eat, and someone who she could gossip with. But sometimes, her views on things put me off. So did her habit of taking me for granted: when I invited her home for lunch one day, she brought in a mutual friend, because she thought I ‘wouldn’t mind.’ I did, very much, but since it was a Festival, I said nothing, so that I wouldn’t put a spanner in the works, and spoil the day for my family.
If I said I was vague about directions to a place, she took it as a personal slight. I am geographically and directionally challenged: if you spin me around in front of my street, and ask me to go home, I would probably not know the way back. Sometimes, when someone asks me whether something is right or left, I still have to look at my hands for affirmation: right hand, left hand. She found that intolerable.
She demanded unquestioning loyalty: if I went anywhere, she needed to know. If I spoke to anyone, she must be told. If I liked a book, or a person, she went out of her way to tell me why it/he/she was bad.
She took it as a personal affront that I went to a friend’s house, because she felt she was ‘showing off her posh house.’ She was even more annoyed that I didn’t invite her home for lunch at my next festival. She disliked Facebook, and thinks everyone should keep away from it: and hated that I was always on it.
Life went on: and I began edging away, gradually.
I couldn’t take the daily levels of toxicity. I didn’t know it then: but in retrospect, I realise I was planting the first seeds of freedom and liberation, when I began to keep my people, my books and my thoughts to myself. She had people reporting back to her, about where I went, what I did, who I was with. And she would taunt me about it, telling me that I was wasting my time, I should have been doing something else.
I began doing EVERYTHING she disliked, and I liked.
And then, one day I felt that the waters were closing over my bent head: it was then that I decided to go in for a divorce rather than a separation from her. When I told her my father was reluctant to go to the hospital, because he was afraid of the pain of needles, she said that ‘you should have dragged him there.’ I looked at her in shock, and she looked back at me steadily, and defiantly. Did she mean it? Yes, she had. Was she sorry she said it? No, she was not. Was she planning to apologise for those very unfeeling words. No. She never apologised.
I think all parents are special, whoever they are, and must be treated as such. I know that I would never, ever talk about anyone’s parents in that unfeeling way. Would you?
Introspection? That was not for her. That was for ‘weak’ people.
At some point, she felt, probably, that she shouldn’t have said what she did. I don’t know.
Coward that I am, I always avoided unpleasantness and confrontation. But this was the proverbial last straw that broke the camel’s back.
We still stay in touch through two phone calls. She counts the number of days that I haven’t called her, and tells me the exact number. I call her on her birthday to wish her, and so she reciprocates, on mine. If I didn’t call her one year, she doesn’t either. It is taken as a deliberate slight that I didn’t remember.
I am glad we are in different countries now.
But like squid ink, her miasma even colours the atmosphere between us.
And this, this writing this down, getting it off my mind and chest, will, I hope be the final, and most effective stand against this battle of wills, and the final unshackling of this toxic chain.
One bad seed I planted has left me scared.
Scarred.
Thanks, Ravyne Hawke for the monthly theme: