Fairytales
It’s a Thursday night and I just printed a map of how to get from the airport to the hotel where I’m going for the bank holiday weekend.
And yes, ya’ll The Man is going with me. It will be our second weekend away and I STILL cannot figure out what is wrong with him….well, ok, if he hasn’t run or biked 10 miles before breakfast he gets a little edgy and he IS Scottish, but it ain’t exactly a nappy fetish is it?!?
Am trying to pack but can’t focus.
Been a helluva few weeks, including a trip to Poedunk to say goodbye to my father.
Days go by when I get the fellas to school and wade through the sticky grey feeling that is loss. Other days I feel great and know how ready he was to leave old age.
If you had known him, you would know old age was just was not his style.
When you can’t play 18 holes of golf and have a nice scotch and soda at the end of the day its time to go he always used to say.
One day when I am feeling stronger I’ll write about him, but not just yet.
So, to say I need to 1) sleep 2) sit by a pool and sleep 3) sit by a pool and drink lovely wine in the sun 4) have lots of sex and not worry about my children, the laundry, the house, the cat, the school run, the school feels or anything at all is a massive understatement.
I think the only reason I can’t focus is cause I am so dog tired. Its not that I am nervous about going away with The Man, although, this weekend away does take the travel test to a new level. We are talking Gatwick, passports, rental cars, maps, a foreign language.
But it should be ok (hell Wednesday nights are fairly out of this world in sleepy old London …) cause our first weekend away was just fine.
We arrived on the Friday night. Went for a big hike on the Saturday morning. Mooched around the local town after lunch, bought little things at the street market, came back to the achingly cosy country house hotel and had a snooze in the late afternoon before opening a bottle of Bolly to drink while we got ready for dinner.
The only hitch the entire weekend was my hair. During our hike, the sea air had blown my hair to hell, so I had no choice except to wash it and start over.
This was not a decision taken lightly.
I have a LOT of hair. It is thick and naturally wavy, almost curly. So to get the screen siren, bouncy shampoo advertisement mane I usually walk around with, you have to section the hair, use multiple hair clips and at least three different brushes and three different types of anti-frizz product just to get set to commence the actual blow dry. All of which I had packed just in case.
A girl has to be prepared you know.
It would scare anyone in their right mind, let alone someone you have known for all of 3 weeks. Naturally gorgeous, er, not really. And its not like you can lock the door to the bathroom in England and plug in your hairdryer! Because of building regulations you gotta plug in the damn thing into the wall, in the middle of your hotel room. Honestly.
God bless him, he did his level best to completely ignore me and the hair and just kept topping up my glass with champagne.
By the time we got down to dinner we had a nice little buzz going on.
He was a little quiet (probably in shock from the blow dry) as we looked at the menus and decided on dinner. We ordered and then when the waitress left, he looks at me with his beautiful blue eyes through the ridiculous candlelight and says, I want the fairytale.
I elegantly choked on my amuse buche and my last sip of champagne and thought to myself, you want what and you are telling me this on our first weekend away?!?
It is crucial, very crucial to note that he did not say he wanted that ‘fairytale’ with me, just that he wanted your standard boy meets girl, falls in love, fancies that pants off her, wants to spend the rest of his life with her fairytale.
I was NOT prepared for that.
I guess it was a window for me to say what I wanted back. But then again, maybe it wasn’t. Who the hell knows! I had absolutely no idea how to respond but I felt I needed to say something, anything.
I said, well, I had the ‘fairytale’ and I’m sitting in the middle of Hampshire having dinner with you in a country house hotel, a divorced mother of two that might just be ready for a little Botox.
Oh dear.
I know, I know, not my best moment. I told The Toyboy about it not so long ago and he was fairly horrified (he does posh horrified so well).
But how the hell was I supposed to know The Man was gonna say something like that that before starters?!?
And the honest to God truth that weekend and even now is this:
I am not sure what I want.
But how to I tell him?
Oooooooooooooooo, maybe I don’t even have to tell him!
Maybe he’s wise enough to know that already and is letting me figure it out in my own time.
See, as much as I loved my husband, and remember that love often when I look at our beautiful children, he was my first fairytale.
I fell in love, not with him, but the fairytale of a man I thought was him and the travel all over the world before we have our kids settle in suburbia fairytale.
I very nearly made that mistake all over again with the T-Rex.
Its so easy to make the same mistakes over and over again. Because you’ve done it before, you know exactly how to make that mistake again and do it well.
Really well.
The two big fairytales in my life have been wildly exciting, terrifying, hedonistic, painful, difficult and fuelled by drama and sleepless nights.
But the life I am living now feels too good to be a fairytale.
Too simple.
Too easy.
Too restorative.
Too happy.
Too real.
When I fall asleep, on my own some nights, next to the Man on others, I am filled with a gratefulness I have never known before.
For being here.
Here, on the other side of all those fairytales, yes, the ones of my own creation, that I just spent the last 3 years slogging my way out of, growing into the woman writing this.
The woman realising ….. that its half past midnight and he hasn’t packed a damn thing!!!!
Well, who knows what’s gonna happen.
I might still not know exactly what I want with The Man, but I think I’m going away this weekend knowing a little bit more than I did that first weekend we went away together.
Knowing that I love the way he takes my body and lets it go at the same time.
Knowing that I don’t want to say so little that he thinks I don’t care.
Wishing like hell he was a post op transvestite with a nappy fetish.
Ms. Magnolia
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