MEGAN NICOL REED
on taking too much responsibility
On responsibility
If I remember rightly, for my second column of 2018 I wrote about being away with others, all bunking down together in some sandy bach, about the communality a summer holiday affords compared to the rest of the seasons. I wrote that summer exposes our barely-clothed selves, both literally and figuratively. How we get to know one another in ways only possible because we see our friend stumble, unspeaking, from bed to coffee machine each morning, how we come to recognise the signs when our brother-in-law hits the wall at day’s end. Just returned, apart from a day or two in the middle, from several weeks surrounded by friends and family, my head is again full with the ups and downs of a shared pause. This time, though, the constant and close proximity to dear ones made me reflect not so much on the ways in which I got to know them, but more in which I came to know myself.
On Boxing Day my husband and I had a wicked fight. My friend had made an idle remark about how much he had been sleeping which I took to mean she saw him as lazy. Rather than shrugging it off or leaping to his defence, I shook him awake. Get up, I hissed. Your endless napping is embarrassing me. He swore. Back at the table, while everyone blithely chatted on, we seethed. A walk to talk it out ended tearfully.
A week later I found myself weeping again, a different table, different (as my daughter has learnt to call it at school) friendship group. My daughter has found herself an in-betweener this summer. Neither here nor there. Several of her favourite friends are a year older than her and with the finish of primary school under their belts they suddenly carry a new maturity, holders of a sophisticated secret she wouldn’t get, even if they were to divulge. So I was thankful for the little girls, a year or two younger, who happily gathered her into their world of make-believe and water play. When I saw her, though, leave out the one who had most willingly included her, I could not cope. Stop it, I hissed. Your behaviour is embarrassing me. And then, when I asked my friend for advice, and she suggested, kindly, that perhaps I was over-engaged, I couldn’t help it, I cried.
Much of our time away I felt a nagging low-level anxiety and I realised that when around others I am always on alert, not just to my own actions, my own words, but to those of my husband, my children. That they feel like an extension of me and thereby my responsibility.
What a huge burden, said a friend, when I tried to explain. I guess, I said, but it’s just normal, isn’t it? I don’t know, she said, but if I’m in a social situation and my husband or kids are being annoying, I ignore them. Hope they’ll make themselves scarce. And if they don’t, I asked. Then I’d probably take myself off, she said. And I was filled with such a terrible envy that anyone could be that untroubled, that free.
FOLLOWING ON
Think not less of me, however, in order to extend the deliciousness of no deadlines from two weeks to three, I actually wrote last week’s column just before Christmas. Anyway, as luck would have it, the lag between filing and publication rendered one of my recommended resolutions an impossibility. All year I have been happily squishing my washed and dried plastic packaging into the recycling station at the supermarket, but when I dashed into Countdown between Christmas and New Year with a bag extra full, I was dismayed to find the drop-off point was no more. I tried other supermarkets to no avail. Pia on the North Shore, Martine in East Auckland, Allan in Greenlane: all report the same thing. I spurn extra packaging, try to make what I can from scratch, reuse everything I can as dog poo bags, but still I cannot fully staunch the flow of plastic into our house. What to do with one’s good intentions? Bryan wishes I would shove them. “What gives you the right, or in what way are you qualified to give advice to anyone and everyone on how to live their lives? You can dismiss this question relatively easily by knowing that I am a male pensioner, variously described by my children as irascible. Still, I think it’s a fair question.” Quite.
I felt a nagging, lowlevel anxiety and I realised that when around others I am always on alert.