Tuesday 6 September 2016

The Spinster

This started as something for a character in my soon-to-be-published-online novel Tbe Bright Side O' Life but I think it became something broader. I don't think it really reflects my own personal opinion of spinsterdom, although perhaps some of its fears. It is perhaps a worst-case scenario with a slice of light.

What say you?

*

Spinning, not moving

It comes on gradually until it hits you like a train. Sitting quietly at a family event, watching your loved ones grow and develop, watching them change. Yet you are the same as you always were. You are the same; you are treated as you were five years ago, or ten, or twenty.

To your parents you remain a child; to your contemporaries you are an anomaly - at least until you finally settle down.

Your single income household cannot afford mortgages or flashy foreign holidays, so you listen to the minutiae of property deals and tropical islands with a smile frozen between interest and frustration. You fall behind in ways big and small, obvious and subtle.

You are excluded from topics because you wouldn't understand. Much experience is kept from you, and you have to remind yourself that it's not the 19th Century anymore. Even if it was, you know that Mr Darcy isn't coming for you. The Mr Darcys look through you to prettier girls, to sweeter girls, to girls that know how the game is played.

You are not the romantic lead in the film, after all. An extra, perhaps. Odd, given that this was supposed to be your life. Perhaps the genre is wrong...

People who love you will soon give up asking about finally settling down. Maybe they already have. Curiosity will sour into pity.

'But are you happy?' you are asked repeatedly, but the only acceptable answer is "of course not". Any variety of 'yes' is met with disbelief or suspicion. Nobody believes you can be happy alone.

You are mostly happy. Sometimes you wonder what is 'wrong' with you to have had this life thrust upon you. Can you pinpoint a single moment that sent you into the lonely direction?  Was there a missed opportunity or was fate just that capricious?

Your friends say they envy you the single life, but they are never quite sincere. They mean that their own lives are not quite 100% satisfactory, but nobody's life ever is. They would like a break from their responsibilities from time to time; often it is you who provides the opportunity for that break, and you love how those adored younglings light up at sight of their fun auntie/godmother.

People move away. It is the way of the world now: seemingly casual migration. Life gets in the way. Bonds break, as they sometimes do, and nobody is to blame. Those babies you welcomed into the world have lives of their own and Auntie is low down on the list of priorities. It is as it should be, but the world spins with you still in the middle unchanging.

All is as it should be within the order of life as commonly accepted. Milestones only touch you to make you older. One day, you are essentially invisible.

Strangers address you as 'Mrs', not considering that a woman your age would be anything else. Corrections invite pity.

Despite the effort, you are ever more alone. Everyone has their lives. You take joy from their successes and you are there with comfort in their sorrows, but you are still alone at the end of it.

You are depended on: the universal donor. You have the time, don't you?

You wake up one day and you are eighty-two years old. Your limbs don't work like they ought; your brain is slow and quick to tire. When did you become the old crone you once pitied, when you were a pretty girl with the whole wide world for the taking?

When did life unfold without you? When did you replace one set of dreams with another?

Perhaps those were never really your dreams?