Fine Lines, Chapter Eight

Fine Lines is a fictional series charting the implosion of 45-year old Tara Hewson’s world, and the curious bird that flaps up from the ashes…

Chapter One // Chapter Two // Chapter Three // Chapter Four // Chapter Five // Chapter Six // Chapter Seven

Fine Lines: Chapter 8

Sessions with Barbara had become a lot more intense since she’d discovered my father had died when I was twelve. She wondered why I hadn’t mentioned it until our sixth meeting.

‘Because it happened when I was a child and I’m fine about it now.’ I’d said, defensively.

It wasn’t long before Barbara started naming the issues - ‘emotional neglect,’ childhood trauma’ - that contributed to my dysfunctional way of being.

I hated thinking of Mum as neglectful in any way as she has only ever been excellent. But with just the two of us, and Dad sick for two years before he died, Barbara suggested that I started to internalise my feelings around that time to make life easier for everyone. I placed my mother’s emotional wellbeing above my own and never properly grieved for my father.

It was all very confronting.

Barbara explained that we have multiple parts of our ‘self’ and that psychotherapy is about trying to explore and reconcile the parts of our self that are more vulnerable, parts that we might have pushed away or hidden, parts that we may not even be aware exist.

I would be talking about something – an incident with one of the girls, my frustrations with M – and she would stop me and ask me what I was feeling at that moment. If I couldn’t name the feeling, she would ask me to close my eyes, place my hand on my heart and dig deeper. When I sometimes managed to label the feeling, surprising myself, she would ask me if I could trace the first time I was aware of feeling that feeling.

And so Little Tara emerged, the strange, dark child-me I was just getting to know; the little girl that seemed so grown-up but so hollow inside.

Barbara always rewound to a point in my ramblings that I never wanted to dig into. Often I had a path in mind, a scenario I was looking forward to airing but she would back it up to a throwaway comment, strap her goggles on and fire up the pneumatic drill.

Which is how I always ended up hollering into the darkness for my forgotten parts, trudging through an endless system of barely connected, sodden caves to find Little Tara at various ages or life stages. She was invariably unmoved, calm, emotionless. Then Barbara would ask me to strike up a conversation with her.

‘What would you like to tell her?’ Barbara would say.

‘What the fuck are you doing down here!, LT?’ I might joke.

And Barbara – who had already told me that humour was most often used to mask difficult emotions – would run with the narrative.

‘Why are you surprised that she’s there, Tara?’ She would say.

And, miraculously, the conversation would flow and there I would be, having a virtual chat with so many iterations of my little self.

I was afraid that it was too late, all this learning about myself; that I would never reconcile the real me with the street character I had created; that my friends, the people who loved me, wouldn’t recognise this new earnest, feel-y person that was slowly emerging.

‘What is stopping you from doing the things you know you should be doing?’ Barbara asked one day.

‘I don’t know.’ I said, too tired to drill.

When I wasn’t potholing for pieces of the puzzle, I was making lists. Barbara – I was referencing her a lot around that time – had asked me to think about what I wanted my new life to look like.

She said that I had been passenger so far, that I had allowed ‘fate’ and other people decide my course; that the time to proactively take control had arrived.

I found the idea of engineering a future overwhelming. It went against my every natural instinct, which was to stand still and field the punches as they struck. Planning = disappointment ahead, the opportunity to definitely fail at something.

Although I didn’t know what I wanted, I knew what I didn’t want, which Barbara said was an excellent start.

‘Don’t want?’ Flavia said, excited for me to kick off the list that might determine the rest of my life.

‘To be married to someone I’m not in love with.’ I wrote.

‘Want?’ She said.

‘That’s not how it works.’ I said. ‘This is a list of ‘don’t wants.’’

‘But if you know what you don’t want, then you know what you want? Just try it.’ She said.

‘Okay. I want to be free of someone else’s hopes and expectations.’

‘Gooood!’ She said. ‘You see, it’s easy! Next one, rapid-fire, don’t want?’

‘To work for Susan!’ I said.

‘Yes!’ She said. ‘Want?’

‘For the work I do to make a difference to someone.’

‘Okay, a little vague but get it down. Don’t want?’

‘My kids to blame me for failing them.’

‘Children always blame their parents, Tara. Want?’

‘To know that I’ve done a good enough job.’ That was hard to say.

‘They know that, you’re a great Mum.’ Flavia threw her arm around my shoulders. ‘What about sex and love and fun?’

‘Don’t want sex.’ I said.

‘Even with Alex?’

‘I’m starting to think I might be asexual.’

‘Oh, come on, just because you don’t fancy one guy, it doesn’t mean you’re asexual, Tara!’ She laughed.

But isn’t he the ‘dream man’ that everyone our age wants?’

‘No! We all have our different preferences. You might have a dream woman, have you ever thought about that?’

I had in fact thought about that because I was compulsively deconstructing every mindless, default decision I had made throughout my life. It was almost as if I was programmed to stay the course, a dodgy Tesla prototype bound to crash and burn.

I was thinking about why I wore the clothes I wore, why I chose the college degree I chose, why I married M when I knew it wasn’t the right thing to do, why I never valued my own happiness, why I hated taking risks. My life was small and safe and boring. If I died tomorrow, what would they say about me?

‘I’m going to set you up with a woman next.’ Flavia said, scrolling through her phone contacts.

‘No more dates, I need to figure myself out first.’

‘Come on! You should do that thing where you say ‘yes’ to everything that you’re asked for the next month so that you challenge your habits.’

‘I don’t think Barbara would approve.’

‘What’s Barbara got to do with it?’

‘She said I need to take everything slow at the moment, not to make any drastic changes that might overwhelm me when I’m processing so much.’

‘Ugh! Does Barbara know that’s how you’ve lived your whole life?’ She said.

‘I think she might be right. The split is huge already and it hasn’t even happened yet.’

‘I’m just talking about a little distraction, something different.’

‘No.’ It was hard to be firm with Flavia.

‘We’ll see.’ She said.

Suzy wouldn’t let us see her OnlyFans profile, which was fair. What kind of creeps would we be to push it? So I just supervised the deactivation of her account and changed the associated email to my personal Gmail.

True to form, M didn’t want to get involved; he just wanted the account gone and the drama forgotten about. It was a reminder of all of the sticky, uncomfortable issues we never faced over the years because he would pretend they never happened. And I was his hapless accomplice.

I was curious about OnlyFans as a platform for ‘tease’ content though. I wondered how far people really had to go to engage their audience. Not that I was seriously considering hosting my own channel, it just seemed to be a space for women to create their own boundaries.

‘Why were you looking at MILF accounts on OnlyFans?’ Suzy was standing at my bedroom door, where I was still scrolling MamaMILF79’s feed.

‘What do you mean?’ I said.

‘It’s in my search history, Mum, I’m not stupid.’

‘I just heard someone I used to work with was on OnlyFans so I thought I’d look her up.’ I lied.

‘Not plausible, mother. It’s not a social network, She probably has a completely different name.’

‘What would you think if I hosted my own channel anyway?’

‘Oh god, that is just too disturbing to even imagine.’ She shut the door and bounded back up to her room.

Lucky for Suzy, my research had concluded. Women over forty, it seemed, did not get away with the subtle art of seduction. MILF punters wanted full-frontal, pro penetration or nothing. I tapped out, not even sure why I was there in the first place.

Alex had stopped texting, which was a relief. I don’t think he really cared but he seemed to be confused by my lack of interest.

Men are gas.

Summer was closing in and I was enjoying the last few evening sunsets on the strand. I managed to drag one of the girls with me for a bit most nights and basked in our aimless chats. Who knew that when you stopped asking direct questions, the revelations just flowed and flowed?

We talked about the months ahead, and the physical shape of our split, which was still uncertain, so much depending on money and where we could afford to live, separately.

M was barely communicating with me but negotiations to reach a Separation Agreement had begun via our solicitors. My solicitor thought that there was a case for me to remain in the family home until Myrna was 18. I was hoping for that grace to work on reinventing myself as a self-assured, risk-taking squillionaire. But nothing was guaranteed.

One of those evenings, siting alone on my bench, a new mum sat down beside me, a birdie baby snuggled in the pram she was lulling back and forth.

‘Girl or boy?’ I said, peeking into the pram.

‘Girl.’ She said, smiling.

‘She’s beautiful.’

‘She is.’ She said.

‘Are you getting any sleep?’ I asked.

‘Surprisingly, I am.’ She said. ‘I’m giving her formula, which is supposed to knock them out for longer It’s working.’

‘That’s brilliant.’

‘I’m telling everyone my boobs are like Eddie Rocket’s jukeboxes.’ She said.

‘Why?’

‘Just for show. I can’t breastfeed.’

‘Well, at least your partner can help with bottles in the middle of the night.’

‘He would but we separated before the birth.’ She said.

‘I’m sorry, that’s tough.’

‘Yeah but it’s better. He’s back in his mam’s now, I’m with my mam for a while. After four years together we get on way better now than we ever have. Living together wasn’t good for us. Too much negative energy, you know?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I know he’ll be a great dad but we’re much happier apart and it means Asha will be too. Plus, when she’s older, I’ll have a couple of nights off a week.’

‘You have it all sorted.’

‘Can you tell my mam that please?’ She laughed.

I walked back to the house thinking about how easy it would have been for that woman to stay with her partner until the baby was born; how many people she had ‘disappointed’ with her decision and how strong she was in her conviction that she had done the right thing, for all of them. Mam or no mam, that was an emotionally wrenching call to make at such a vulnerable time. But she made it.

I found M in the kitchen swigging out of a carton of oat milk.

‘I think we should all move on sooner rather than later.’ I said.

‘What are you talking about?’ He looked at me as if I’d finally lost it.

‘It will be better for the girls if we just make a clean break. Organise 50/50 custody, I stay in the house until Myrna turns 18, then we sell…’

He was leaning against the cupboard, smirking at me, making no attempt to speak.

‘What?’ I said.

‘I’m not leaving this house, Tara and you, or the courts, can’t make me.’ He was so smug with himself.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that I’ve paid the majority of the mortgage for the last twenty years, we’ve always co-parented and I’m going nowhere. Wake up and smell the feminist, girl. You can’t pull the vulnerable woman card now when it suits you. I’m as entitled to stay in this house for the next four years as you are.’

My phone vibrated in the back pocket of my jeans and I grabbed it instinctively, so grateful for the distraction, my hands shaking with rage.

I’m booking two tickets to Berlin, Friday week, just you and me. And maybe a surprise. Say YES. It was Flavia.

YES. I texted back, closing my car door behind me and screaming at the windscreen with all the puff in my lungs until my throat crackled hoarse.

What is stopping you from doing the things you know you should be doing? Barbara’s question had been on my mind all week.

Absolutely nothing, it struck me. That’s what.

End of Part 1.

Rhona McAuliffe, August 2020.