I had a dream last night which I just can’t shake. I awoke with it viscerally fresh in my veins and it has been haunting me throughout the day, sitting just behind my shoulder calling me.
In the dream I was with an old lover.
A guy I used to hook up with at university and whose daughter now bizarrely sits next to my son at school. Me and the guy don’t talk though, astutely bowing our heads or looking the other way if we pass each other on the school run. Sometimes we might nod and smile, but never when his wife is around. I dream about him quite a lot in the way that I dream about lots of my ex-relationships, good and bad. Often the dreams make me feel uncomfortable or sad, there might be themes of rejection or yearning but not this time.
In the dream we are young again and he wants me. Wants to be with me. Is excited by me. We are laughing and talking and I feel his hunger for me. I notice in the dream that I am more forthright than I used to be, saying things as they are, as I mean them rather than trying to second guess what he might want to hear or feeling ashamed, nervous and primed for rejection. The me in the dream is bold and confident and he is genuine.
I have noticed this in my waking world as well. Suddenly I am speaking aloud what is on my mind, thoughts and comments that I once would have swallowed down are coming out and I am enjoying this new found freedom of speech, enjoying the responses it is eliciting also. Recently I proclaimed at the dark and shockingly painted on eyebrows of a woman I know (I literally couldn’t keep it in) and then shared that some of my own eyebrow hairs are so long they look like greying pubic hairs! Never before would I have been so brazenly honest on either count.
I remember when I met Jake1 for the first time.
It was 1997, Freshers week in my first year at University. I had recently returned from a gap year and months spent in India. I was savagely skinny wearing tight flared navy blue corduroys over my new Buffalo Boots and a tight black vest which wrapped around my pinched waist and peachy bust. I had blonde dreadlocks and a nose-ring and was feeling free and excited about this new period in my life.
I had chosen to go to university in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne eschewing Oxbridge and the London universities as I wanted to get as far away from home and all that came with it, (including, in retrospect, my beloved boyfriend) as possible. This also meant that I knew no one in my year except for some vague acquaintances including two girls I had met in Thailand.
These girls were staying in one of the biggest halls in Campus, a huge concrete block building set in the middle of a field full of cows which separated some of the halls from the learning departments and student union.
Despite my outward appearance I was actually as insecure as they come. Insecure but hyper aware of the power of my body. Me and the girls got into a lift as Jake was passing and I immediately sensed his appraising look and laughed as he made a show to his friends to follow me into the lift before we were swallowed in a sea of noise and vodka shots, excited young people, high on their first nights of freedom.
Jake was tall and skinny and lived in a uniform of baggy blue tracksuit trousers and white Reebok Classics. He had long mid brown hair tucked behind his ears, sparkly eyes and a wide smile. He had the swagger of someone who knew they were attractive and spoke with a slight lisp. I can’t remember the first time we hooked up or the last, no doubt after one of the many house parties or club nights that we attended. I don’t remember huge conversations with him but I do remember chatting quietly in the library, him swinging on his chair and him cooking me egg fried rice one evening before I left his after a debauched night. He never came back to mine.
Jake was part of the ‘posh’ crowd whilst I was a bit of a social chameleon as I always have been, straddling the divide of different friendship groups. Not quite sure where I belonged and enjoying the enigma of being the outsider friend. In the first year he had a long term girlfriend called Sally who followed him everywhere, dark, brooding, with full lips and a forceful presence of clipped vowels and Chanel labels. Their names were always spoken together, ‘Jake and Sally.’ In second year he lived with one of my very best posh university friends, Fi, and there was a difficult moment at the end of the year when I had to decide whether to move in with them or stick with my trusty crew of friends in another part of town. Luckily I was just sensible enough to choose the latter though it did cause me a great deal of anguish at the time. Jake definitely wanted to sleep with me but living with me would have been another thing entirely.
When I look back at those university days, at all the parties and all the men and all the webs that I wove for myself, it is often with a sense of discomfort, hurt or regret. Thinking about it I want to reach out to that younger part of myself and tell her to stand tall and be strong, to say no when she means no and give her the confidence to say yes when she wants to. I remember only too well the hurt and pain of rejection in those days but also the immense pleasure and power I gained from my flirtations and seductions.
Somehow whatever I had with Jake managed to escape the complicated messiness of other relationships. It was always quite clear that we liked each other but it would only ever be a hook up and somehow with him it didn’t hurt as much as with the others. Maybe because I somehow always knew I would be able to lure him in and he was always kind and decent.
The last time I saw Jake (prior to bumping into him on my sons first day of school) I shagged him in the upstairs bedroom of a house party in Clapham whilst our friends banged on the door telling him his girlfriend was looking for him (yes I was that girl).
I was on my way to my new boyfriends birthday party in East London. Both parties were fancy dress and I was dressed as roller girl with a tiny denim skirt, white vest printed with red cherries, red stiletto boots and leg warmers. Gold earrings dangled at my ears. As soon as he walked in the door and despite not having seen each other for at least a year, Jake made a bee-line for me. He was dressed as Pat Cash in tennis shorts and a crazy 80’s wig and somehow we stumbled upstairs together laughing and reveling in the animal magnetism of it all.
And then I was gone, straightening my skirts and tripping out of the party to go and shine at another party on the other side of town, to become embroiled in a relationship which really did cause me a lot of pain.
So it was a huge surprise when dropping my son off for his first day at school in my Somerset hometown, to see Jake there too with his daughter.
The shame I felt on that day still haunts me now.
At that moment in time, I was deep in the trenches of chronic fatigue and the beginnings of strange health issues. I had been fighting against the tides of single parenting and losing. As his eyes swept over me in shock, taking me in, I felt the absolutely horror of a body that had grown unrecognisable in size and shape.
A body that had only just managed to drag itself up and out of the house for that precious first day, thinking only of going straight home to collapse into bed again. This body that had once captivated and burned him, now one to turn away from. As always he was kind. We chatted briefly, both of us slightly stunned at how we had somehow ended up here after all this time, probably a twenty year gap from our last encounter in a place neither of us had a previous connection with.
I’m wondering at my need to write about this today, about the dream and how important it felt, about how it has haunted me but in a good way.
One of those dreams you want to revisit night after night, continuing the story.
A dream I don’t want to wake up from.
There is a part of me that is rousing to be remembered.
Remember the life I once lived, the excitement, the desire, the wanting and being wanted, the joy of being seen. The laughter and dances and friendships. There was a previous incarnation of me that could let go, let her hair down, be wild and I miss her.
I miss the fun that we had. I miss men. I miss being in a relationship.
I have been single now for eight years. In that time I have not been on one date, not signed up properly to one dating app. I fell very deeply for a man I know who I thought felt the same. After one night spent together it was clear that he did not.
The shape of single parenting is very different for every parent.
My ex very quickly moved on and met someone else, he now has three more children in addition to our son. There are single parents who co-parent and divide the time of their children equally. There are single parents who choose to have children using donor eggs and sperm. There are single parents who thrive and single parents who flounder.
I have not found this single parenting journey an easy one. I have spent much of the last 8, nearly 9, years, in survival mode. My son did not sleep and could not be left with strangers. My parents did not live close enough to offer any consistent support, coming for emergencies or ad hoc visits when most needed. I never had a night off or a weekend off or space to do an evening yoga course or even chat to my friends on the phone. My exhaustion and the shrinking of my life was not seen as emergency enough to call in extra help ((it’s just part of mothering right?) Instead I find myself here, feeling on the brink of emergency everyday.
I love my son with all my heart and I cherish the time we had together when he was small. I just wish I had been better equipped to manage it all, had had more of a community around me and the foresight to save a tiny bit of me for me. Maybe if I had been more aware of what I needed, been able to shout that little bit louder, not believed the voices who told me ‘this is motherhood, this is normal.’ Maybe then things would be different but there is no point in looking back now.
This morning ( a few days after I started writing this piece) I was walking back from school drop off. There is a fresh autumn chill in the air and the sun is shining brightly for once. I got caught chatting to a friend and the streets are clear and quiet, the surge of parents dissipated. I am on the phone to my best friend who I was meant to see today. I am crying because I had another bad night and my bones feel heavy, my head is spinning and my legs are wobbly. I have just told my friend that maybe I am holding all the pain of my family in my body.
I just need to get home.
As I walk I see Jake walking towards me, his tiny little dog at his heels. Out of the corner of my eye I see that he is grinning, his coloured cotton coat flapping behind him. The Reebok Classics and long hair are long gone but his essence is the same. I bow my head and look the other way wondering what it means, why am I seeing him again now?
And this is the thing that I find most painful, most devastating, most perplexing. All of these other people happily getting on with their lives. Marching around, walking the dog, going to work, meeting up with friends, earning money, filling up their space in the world whilst I am slowly disintegrating, hanging on by a thread.
Why?
Why?
Why?
All names have been changed