on the heart's tender need to be nagged
Why our life partners are so much more than our other halves.
Before my wife flew away for a week to attend her brother's wedding in Bali – leaving me with the kids, rain, housework, unmarked assignments, personal demons and Steam backlog – she observed that I probably wouldn't miss her nagging me about stuff. I replied that I would miss all of it.
We have been a tight family unit for well over a decade, with the collected nights spent away from each other remaining countable with one set of hands. As the days rolled on after our lowkey goodbye at the local train station, my intuition was proved right. A lot of who I am is made of how I interact with other people, and without having Mrs O'Sullivan about to give me a mild rollocking, a little part of my sense of self was shut away from me.
My Granny on my Dad's side always tended to have a bit of a moan at my Grandad. He loved joking about with me and my siblings, calling me Niall of the Nine Sausages whenever I was in his vicinity. My Granny, on the other hand, would talk about how she once went into a MacDonalds and had to walk out again in disgust because everybody was eating with their hands. When they came over from Cork to stay with us for a week, we got a MacDonalds takeaway and I still remember the sight of her carving away at her Quarter Pounder with a knife and fork at our dining table.
Granny O’Sullivan died shortly after Grandad O’Sullivan lost his sight. One of the last times I saw him, lying in a bed in a room above a pub in the Cork village of Inch, he spoke a little bit about how she never believed he had lost his eyesight, telling the nurse that he could see better than she could. I also remember him saying that he kept thinking she was still there in the room with him. This might have been because her presence was a familiar, everyday thing for him. Without the visual awareness of an empty room, there was nothing to contradict that notion and so it continued throughout his final days.
Some of these themes are explored in a poem that I spent a long time writing, called Love Song of a Lapsed Materialist. It was about heading home with my wife (who was my girlfriend at the time) on one of the noisier tube lines. I rested my cheek on the top of her head, and got a sense of a particular throbbing, knocking sound, and how that sound, whether it was from her body or from the carriage's vibrations flowing thought it, seemed to completely belong to a cold material world. I saw myself as a bit of an ultra-rational materialist at the time, but there was something about that sound that I couldn't blend with everything that I felt about the woman I love.
The poem ends with a retelling of a Zen Koan about a young couple that elope without the blessing of the bride's father. Years later, beset by guilt, they return to the wife's old home and the husband chooses to enter first, to take the worst of his father-in-law's wrath. On seeing the husband and becoming bemused by his confession, the father states that this cannot be possible because his daughter had been bed bound the entire time. At this point, two versions of the daughter appear, one from the bedroom and one from outside, and merge together.
The poem returns to the idea of two versions of my wife, the one I know in an emotional sense and the one that coheres with the material world and I conclude that, in contrast to the two versions in the Zen story, I am unable to merge them together.
It's taken me a while to see what doesn't really work about the poem. I laboured away to whittle it down to its current form but ultimately I was trying to cram too much in. The poem became more overwrought and busy the more I sought to condense its meanings and imagery. This is quite ironic and astute in hindsight, as the poem echoes the subject matter in the sense that I'm trying to merge many things that simply do not want to be blended together.
One thing that is missing from the poem (and another lesson from the koan that it cites) is how, when your life is so intertwined with the life of another, it becomes harder to isolate them from other parts of your world, including yourself. You carry a version of them within and many aspects of your own character grow together with these internalised elements of theirs. There was no paradox within that train carriage, I was trying to bring things together that were never really apart.
As I write this, we're all back together in our cramped front room, two adults and two kids, each with our subsequent devices and headphones – an image of a screen addicted dystopia that the currently spate of pop-psyche best sellers are trying to warn us about. We all just looked up at each other at the same time and shared a smile before becoming zombies again. I really believe that, after a strange and dizzy week, I am back to being myself again.
This is the latest in an ongoing series of weekly, shorter posts from Rusty Niall to complement my longer essays that have settled into a monthly delivery pattern. Every week I’ll aim to send something interesting, funny or poetic to your inbox. If you like it then please share it with someone that you think might like it too. You can also support my work through some of the options listed below. Cheers.
Niall