I have been happily married to Alex for 32 years and in that
time as a family, we have had many adventures. I was reminded yesterday that the
choices we have made collectively and individually to sometimes swim against
the tide and do our own thing is of great offence to some. When I have been
treated with suspicion and cynicism because I am not bound by the restraints
people often imagine are binding them, my ‘go to’ was immediately to accuse
them of being jealous, but as I reflected on this I realised that it’s
not always the case. Sometimes people
simply despise you for not wanting what they have. It's as though they view you as somehow dismissing their life because you choose not to emulate it but seek out your own path.
When Alex and I got married I was sixteen and he was
nineteen. We were madly in love and upset everyone we knew with our obsession with
one another. When we decided to get engaged we thought we’d probably wait a
year before we married to give people a chance to get used to the idea, but with
all the sensitivity of teenagers, we then decided that actually there really
was no pleasing people so we were married in three months. Immediately we were
a statistic. Living in a council flat, Alex was made redundant within weeks of
our wedding and by that point I was pregnant. You’d think wouldn’t you that the
rest would be easy enough to predict, but the fact that we were so young and
full of naïve determination and passion for life meant that our eternal and
youthful optimism carried us to wonderful places. Many were in our dreams, in
our long discussions as we walked miles with our baby girl in her pram. We talked
and we planned and we sang Beatles songs and knew that the adventures were out
there, just waiting to be had. And have them we did.
Talking at an interview yesterday, one man asked what I made
of it all, what I thought it had all been about; this life that I live. He
asked me this question several times, in several different ways. It got
awkward, I winced. He really struggled to understand what was glaringly obvious
to me. It is and always has been about love. Because when you love, life is an
adventure. I left the meeting saddened, feeling like my life had somehow been
dismissed as chaotic, a nonsense. I came home to Alex. He held me, we drank
wine, listened to jazz and laughed.
