Status Updates From Coventry: Essays

“I am nothing, I am everything”: This was how the pill of religion was always forced down, with flavours too bitter and too sweet to mask one another. But I took the statue and the plaque back anyway, feeling that 1 should. When I opened the box again, all those years later, that flavour rose out in all its potency.

Looking at the other families I feel our stigma, our loss of prestige: we are like a Gypsy caravan parked up among the houses, itinerant, temporary.
I see that we have lost a degree of protection, of cer-tainty.

And my husband helped. It was his phrase, and still is: he helped me. I was the compartmentalised modern woman, the woman having it all, and he helped me to be it, to have it. But I didn't want help: I wanted equality. In fact, this idea of help began to annoy me.
Why couldn't we be the same? Why couldn't he be compartmentalised too?

Aftermath: “Our history teacher was a woman of size and grace, a type of elephant-ballerina in whom the principles of bulk and femininity fought a war of escalation.”

Adolescence, it strikes me, shares some of the generic qualities of divorce. The central shock of divorce lies in its bifurcation of the agreed-upon version of life: there are now two versions, mutually hostile, each of whose narrative aim is to discredit the other. Until ado-lescence, parents by and large control the family story.

At such times I learned to recognise the good by its proximity to the bad and vice versa; light and shadow couldn't be separated, for the reason that they defined each other. Yet the public narrative of parenthood denied the light and shadow of reality; it veered insistently, sometimes crazily, towards joy.