2006-12-19
I’m tired.Ever since just before she came back it feels as though Jo has been testing and complaining about her work status. We seem unable to go more than a couple of weeks without her making a complaint about the way she is being treated, about her status here, about ‘being undermined’. As far as I see it nothing changed while she was away – she just seems to continually need me to say that, prove it, and to challenge me. I keep giving the reassurance, making the moves, but they’re never enough and often there is a form of threat behind the anger. Even when she was telling me she had another job lined up the stance was ‘you’re really going to have to do something now if you want to keep me’.
And of course I really do. And I will do all I can to stop her taking this ultimate step but as some of you have said, I’m getting to the point where I think maybe it really would be for the better if she carried out her threat and made a move. But deep down I know she doesn’t really want to move from under my protection, that she knows she has the certainty of someone who cares about her, who will understand her predicament and always make allowances for her. Go somewhere else, and she’s vulnerable – she really is on her own in the big bad world.
And as someone suggested privately I do think there is an element of asking me continually to prove how much I care about her, given that I fell down at the prospect of the ultimate gesture of giving everything I have up for her. Test my love. Test my commitment by making more and more difficult demands to stop her running away. Long ago, when we were really happy, she talked about the urge always to run away and hope to have someone wrap their arms around her to prevent her getting away. But I’m tired of holding on so hard. I still don’t feel able to say I’ll just watch her go, but I am at the point of asking is this really what she wants to do. But that may not be her decision once she’s reached that point - Dave’s attitude to her still being here is always a factor. I guess in some strange way he feels he has to tolerate what ought to be an intolerable position of having his wife work with her ‘former’ lover. But he’ll have encouraged her to apply for other jobs and I’m sure he’ll be thinking it’s a no-brainer she should take this one if the money is so much better. I wonder whether she’s told him how much it is yet.
He was out for his Christmas party on Friday night, as were we. Jo hasn’t been to any parties for the last four years. He hasn’t allowed her. But because he was out, and because he wanted her to pick him up from the centre of town when he was done, and because her boys were staying with their grandparents she managed to come along for an hour or so.
Of course after the revelation on Friday afternoon there’s tension between us, but for that hour we were our old selves, dancing, drinking chatting mostly happily together oblivious to anyone around us. She said it was just good to be a person with no other role to play – not somebody’s mother, not somebody’s mother, not a work function. Just her – next to me. And that felt like the right place to be.
‘I would have done anything for you. If I had what I wanted I would be Mrs. Jo Samuel by now.’