Enigmatical

Boys

I married Peter when I was 20, 2 months after my eldest daughter was born.

It was the result of an ongoing train-wreck that started when I was still in high school.

There was a fellow in my class that I was seriously keen on. Every time I was around him, I had butterflies in my stomach and was speechless. That was the unfortunate part – I could never bring myself to speak to him at all.

My friend was going out with his friend, so the four of us would go to different places together. We went to the park to watch the boys flying their model air planes. We also went to soccer matches. Soccer, or any team sport, didn’t interest me at all, but I was organised into going, and assigned a “favourite player”.

Then we decided to all go to the Brisbane Exhibition together – the Ekka. The chap I fancied came to my home to ask permission to ask me out (not sure why really, as we had already been going to other places as a group). My mother sat in the lounge and spoke to him for half an hour. I was quite jealous, as I had never had such a long conversation with him myself, but my mother didn’t know that.

If only I had not been so damnably shy! I was a VERY “late bloomer”.

For some time, I had been thinking that the best way to meet a guy would be in a mixed group of friends who hung out together. That would give us an opportunity to get to know each other, without the pressure of “dating”. Why did I not recognise that I had exactly what I wanted right there? Only God knows. I suppose it was because the combined pressure of problems at home and not fitting in at school had become so great that I couldn’t seem to think at all, let alone think straight.

The night before we went to Exhibition, I hardly slept a wink, out of anxiety that he would probably want to hold my hand, and I had not yet got to know him. It makes me cringe now to think how pathetically naive I was; all I needed was someone I could confide in, and they would quickly have noticed the craziness of not seeing that I actually had exactly the situation I’d been wanting, so why was I not embracing it?

So … I blush to admit it, but I wouldn’t let him hold my hand until some time later in the day. We all went to a movie afterwards. And the next day he wouldn’t speak to me – at all – from that time onwards. I was wracking my brains to think why he was behaving like that. I asked my friend, and she said I should ask him. Considering how chronically shy I was at the best of times, I was even less likely to approach him now, so the question never got answered.

My mind, which was constantly turning over some problem or another, now set itself the task of pondering this situation. My friend had often teased me about being “pure, sweet, naive, backward, and far too logical for a girl” – it was almost like a mantra. I finally decided that the reason he had dumped me was because I was naive and backward, and decided that from then on I would prove myself to be quite willing. ::Sigh:: From one extreme to the other.

At university I had a short relationship with a very strange person who stole from me, took keen delight in crashing the department computer (singular – there was only one in the early 70s), especially just before an assignment was due in, and brought cereal packets to uni, eating directly out of them. I don’t count him as a boyfriend, as I consider myself to have been literally a little crazy at the time. Once I recovered my senses, I cast him off.

Then, in the middle of my second year, I was at a meeting of the computer club. Attendance was compulsory if you wanted to continue as a member. They were having an election of board members. Some clown nominated me for treasurer or secretary. I looked around to see who it was, and since I didn’t recognise him I asked my friends if they knew him. Oh, they said, that’s Peter Kuskopf; he’s really smart. Well, I just thought he was an irritating fool, nominating me when he had never met me. So I ignored him, and declined the position.

Some time later, I had arrived at  lecture and was sitting with my friends. My friends were at the end of a row, and I was the last person on the inner end, with several empty seats between me and the next person along. Peter Kuskopf turns up, and walks along our row; I cringed inside. Discretion says he should have sat in the middle of the group of empty seats, as we had never met, but no, the arrogant fellow sat beside me. I studiously ignored him throughout the lecture.

At the end, my friends stood up to leave. I had missed a previous lecture, so was still copying a friend’s notes, and did not leave with them – wish I had, although it may have made no difference. Everyone else left, and still Peter sat there; I was getting really annoyed. Finally I finished and stood up – so did he – God! what an irritating man he was!

As we walked out, he finally started to speak – his opening gambit? something about cricket!! He finally starts talking to a girl he’s apparently interested in, and he chooses cricket. I hate team sports of any kind, but cricket was invented because they didn’t yet have sleeping tablets. Poor polite fool that I was, I did my best to answer him. Wish I’d told him to shove off!

So he started to ask me to join his group for card games. Our group played card games quite often at lunch time, and I suppose he must have come to those sessions sometimes, but as I recall, he often asked me to be the fourth hand for 500 with his friends. I didn’t want to, as I liked to study throughout the semester, and keep up to date with homework, assignments, reading through my notes, etc. He insisted, and I was hopeless at protecting my boundaries and asserting myself.

Finally, he asked if he could take me to a party many of us were going to at the end of the year. I kept saying no, as I already had a lift with some friends, but he kept asking, so I finally agreed to let him take me home (stupid, STUPID idea!). When we got home that night, I kissed him, as properly as I knew how (remember, I had decided to be willing – somehow I forgot that should also like the guy).

So one thing led to another and within two months I was pregnant – so began the nightmare slide into marrying a man I seriously wanted nothing to do with, and who clearly hated me, because within six months of marriage, when I listed all the things he had criticised about me, I realised there was not one single thing he actually liked about me.

So whose fault was it that all this happened? Mine, because I was so unbearably naive and incapable of being assertive?  My friend’s for teasing me so much, and not helping me sort out the original problem? The boy I was keen on, because he dumped me with no explanation?

I blame my mother – she was so constantly critical and forever reminding me of my long history (in her eyes) of being a hateful child, so that any kind of rejection sent me into a panic, and then I massively over-corrected. If there’d been just one sensible person I could talk to. I don’t blame my friend.

In my first year of high school, I had told a girl in my class about my father bullying my brother and hitting him. One day a teacher or staff member had called me out of class, to say that my younger brother (still at primary school) had had an accident, so could I come up to the office to give them my parents’ contact information.

Afterwards, other girls in my class had said I’d gone white a a sheet when I was told my brother had been injured. Perhaps that was why I also mentioned the bullying – I can’t remember. The point is, that the next day, this girl, Judy, approached me and taunted me (!?) asking whether my father was still hitting my brother, biff! biff! biff! I just looked at her in shock, that anyone would disbelieve me, or find it amusing.

So I don’t blame my friend that I had no-one to confide in, because after that girl spoke like that, I did not trust anyone else for several years.

As for the fellow who dumped me, I was in my 50s when it finally dawned on me that perhaps he just though I wasn’t interested, because I’d been reluctant to hold hands – again a stunningly obvious explanation, but I’ve had a very stressful life, and understanding interactions is something I’ve been woefully poor at.

December 12, 2011