Adri Woehler’s Reviews > Coventry: Essays > Status Update

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.

“Lions on leashes”: When my two daughters became teenagers, something happened that was unique in my experience of parenting so far: other people began to warn me how awful it would be.

Making home: “Another friend of mine runs her house with admirable laxity, governing her large family by a set of principles that have tidiness as a footnote or a distant goal, something it would be nice to achieve one day, like retirement. In the kitchen, you frequently feel a distinct crunching sensation from the debris underfoot;

“My mother's death threats undoubtedly arose from her frustration with my own use of language. What I did not take into account when 1 spoke to her was the difference in our social positions. She was a housewife with little education and a rapidly retreating beauty, for whom life was a process of discovering that no greatness had been held in store for her.

Coventry: the silent treatment has a name.
Is silence between two people problematic or can it be a way of life?

“Knowledge is so slender and hard-won, and ignorance so vast and dangerous.”