Here I am

When Meryl Streep as Karen Blixon in ‘Out of Africa’ walks about her farm for the last time, she wonders if Africa will remember her; the colour of the dress she has worn, perhaps.

If I should need to leave, I too wonder if the reader will remember anything of me; not as a submissive girl, the property of her owner, but just me; the girl who came into the world alone with her own individual personality to express to the world.

I think I chose my husband because I saw strength and a sense of adventure in him that I did not have. And, I think he chose me because he saw the softness of his mother and loved the ‘little girl’ sense of me that is still so often present.

To that end, we are good partners for one another. But, the truth is that I have never really fully come to terms with the fact that I have so little say over my own life.

In so many ways, my natural instincts were in accord with his wants and there was nothing to talk about. I quite instinctively put him and the children first and so we never needed to discuss things like the giving up of a career and so forth.

Even at university I quite naturally collected his washing to wash and iron and return. It did not occur to me that this was odd in any way. When we married, the cooking and the cleaning and so on was my responsibility, in spite of the fact that I worked full time, too. Very naturally, the roles were clear and he was boss.

Of course, we are two individuals and so our priorities did not, and still don’t always line up. He comes from a farm where the house was not nearly as important as the farm, and I come from a background where privacy was in short supply and thus a house of my own was very important to me. My need to make a house a comfortable, appealing home was much more important to me than it was to him and this has remained the case. We will renovate this house only when he is motivated to do so.

My husband’s sense of investment is also very different to mine. We approach investment from different places with me having less comfort with risk. At times, we have disagreed completely on a strategy and yet I have yielded to his point of view. I have signed on the dotted line exactly the way he told me to sign, against all my instincts. We invest as my husband decides.

We also approach time differently. I believe in getting up, doing a day’s work and then relaxing. I am a day person. My husband, on the other hand is a night person. He needs less sleep than me and likes to work late at night. I’ve talked to him about the possibility of keeping similar hours to the rest of the family but he has been unable to see things my way.

Accepting myself as a woman with a submissive nature allowed me to find peace with the man I love. I would no longer talk with him and ask if he might come a little more my way with how he saw the world. Rather, I would accept; acquiesce; let go of the thoughts in my own mind and accept that my life was in his hands; come what may. It was a thrill to let it go; to be so happy that I still saw the things I wanted to do with the house, for example, but in my new state of happiness with him, they barely mattered any more.

The saying goes that two heads are better than one. It was fun in those earlier days to share the load, actually. We made decisions together. He brought in the pay check once the children were born but I had made a good investment and felt proud to bring in a not too shabby annual income on my own which went into the mutual account. We renovated a house together and delighted in each new improvement.

It was when he acquired his own business that he acquired all the power. All decision making would fall to him now and whether I approved of a decision, or not, was of no importance. I confess I did not handle at all well the sense of foreboding I felt in the pit of my stomach each day for some time there. I don’t have his specific financial skills but I do have strong instincts about people and I felt great concern.

In one important moment in our lives, it dawned on me that my words expressing concern for a strategy of his would have no impact and it was in this moment that I instantly came to understand that my fate was no longer in my own hands; that my destiny was tied to him in a very new way. I had absolutely no say. I had the eyes to see but no power to act, convince, alter or save.

Time passed. I read and read searching for the light; for that change in my mindset that would allow me to find peace with a life where the giving away of your destiny to another is not only accepted, but right and good.

Here I am.

If I should need to go, I hope you will remember that above all things, I gave it my all.