ImAgE: The Sirens Song ArTiST aS beFoRE: copyright TheNebulousKingdom's wonderful mermaid, Anne-Julie Aubry
So the past rose up to meet me and something I've been longing for, and dreading, for a few years now has crept up to engulf the toes that I've been dandling in the babbling and burbling stream of life since my father's death...
After my Mutti died. Almost two years had passed. His work colleagues, friends really, arranged a blind date for him with a lady who ran a private drinking club in his town...
He fell for her. And she him. Well, who wouldn't?
After a time they moved in together. She kept her old flat which had been her mother's. She sold her club, which had been making big losses for a long time. Her adult children, who were older than me, were very funny about things. They've never been MY family... I've never felt like one of them...
They thought he was after her money. My father was a far more wonderful man than that, to stoop so low... In fact I know he was putting his money in to her club. I know that he continued to support her heavily, as any loving partner would...
They took holidays together. She re-modelled the house. He bought her a car. He never took his driver's test, so all his life he had the pleasure of women driving him about! In time the family softened. My friends wondered how I could be so understanding about all of this, after my Mutti's traumatic and early death.
And I chanted my mantra, "This is his life. If he's happy, I'm happy." This concerned his happiness, his sometimes fickle fate. I couldn't be awful to him. I wouldn't...
She continued to niggle away, particularly at me... She'd been bombed in Plymouth as a child in in war-time. Somehow I was responsible, as I'd studied German (and French, and English Literature for Goddess Wiki's sake!), at University.
She even had the nerve to gift me a postcard of the bombed city. I've seen the same postcards of Dresden. She continued to rant. Our politics were wholly opposed. She'd stood as a councillor for that party. And lost her deposit. She'd been a well-off business-woman and I don't think she ever really recovered from stepping down from that, from losing what she felt she'd once had.
She continued to complain. ...My son (my father's only grand-child...) was 'setting himself above her large clutch of grand-children by having the nerve to call his beloved grand-father the special name, the different name, that he'd always called his grandfathers' from the moment he began to speak...
I continued to endure her god-awful behaviour for seven years. I bit my tongue. I still have those scars... She began to avoid me in time, and I got to spend some quality time with my dad once again. Rarely.
I loved my father until earth's end, as far as the heavens and back.
I tolerated his "wife". More of that laters, mes bloggy amis... Merci for listening to me splurging this out in this safe space. I am in need of this outlet at present. Merci mille.
