“I feel I can give you everything without giving myself away, I whispered in your basement bed. If one does one’s solitude right, this is the prize.” – Maggie Nelson
Archive for the ‘separation’ Category
If one does one’s solitude right
Posted in re-partnering, separation, Uncategorized on December 17, 2016 | Leave a Comment »
On ‘financial abortions’
Posted in economics, fatherhood, motherhood, separation, Uncategorized on December 11, 2016 | Leave a Comment »
Good arguments here from Cristy Clark in Overland as a response to Deveny’s ‘financial abortion’ article.
To start with, this argument completely ignores the rights of the child. According to articles 7–9 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, all children have the right to know and have a connection to their parents. Exceptions are provided for situations where ‘separation is necessary for the best interests of the child’, but a man’s desire to avoid child support payments doesn’t qualify. Even in cases when separation is warranted, it is rarely permanent in nature, leaving the door open for personal growth and renewed connection.
But the main problem with Deveny’s argument is that it buys into the neoliberal narrative of individual choice by completely ignoring the broader structural issues that fundamentally constrain women’s choices. The reality is that too many pregnant women already face a stark decision to undergo a medical termination or to risk a life of increased poverty and structural discrimination. While some women will opt to have an abortion (which, by the way, is still a criminal offence in much of Australia), termination should not be the only available option for women to avoid systematic disadvantage.
Just as we should fight for the rights of those women who want access to safe, accessible and affordable abortion, we should also be fighting for the rights of women who instead choose to carry their pregnancies to term. If not, we are punishing women for not having an abortion when a man wanted them to, and that reeks of the kind of coercive control that has no place in the feminist movement.
Me, talking to Centrelink
Posted in motherhood, motherhood sux, politics, separation, Uncategorized on November 15, 2016 | Leave a Comment »
On evil
Posted in feminism, politics, pop culture, separation, Uncategorized on September 29, 2016 | 1 Comment »
JF: I find it interesting you say wild behavior or irrational behavior, but you don’t say things like evil. Do you believe in evil?
HG: Yes, but I think think people have recourse to the word evil much too quickly when they’re talking about terrible behavior. I’ve given this a lot of thought, because when I wrote that book This House of Grief about the man who killed his three children, I was surprised to find how many people would ask me what I was working on. I would say I’m writing about Robert Farquharson, and they would look shocked and disapproving and say, Why? Why are you writing about him? I’d say, Well, there are obvious reasons why you’d want to write about a murderer, and people would get angry with me. They’d say, What sort of bloke was he? How does he strike you? I would start to describe his life and his formation as a person, and at a certain point the person’s face would harden and say, You’re making excuses, with this accusing gesture. I got used to that. It happened to me very often; it was a very frequent thing.
I realized that people protect themselves against thinking about stories like that by saying,This man is evil, therefore I don’t want to think about him, and nothing that he’s done is connected in me in any way. There is no darkness in me that could possibly connect with the darkness in him. People would say to me, Was he mentally ill, or was he just pure evil? There were these simple concepts you could slot into place to make it possible to contemplate such a person. And so I got less and less interested in the term evil as a way of talking about human behavior. Because it’s really a way of blotting it out. Stopping yourself from having to think about it.
From “Helen Garner on Court, Burning Diaries and Violence of Love”, in an interview with John Freeman in LitHub.
Step-parenting/parenting
Posted in fatherhood, motherhood, motherhood bliss, repartnering, school kids, separation, step-parents, Uncategorized on June 22, 2016 | 3 Comments »
Lovely blogging on marriage and being apart
Posted in fatherhood, motherhood, motherhood bliss, motherhood sux, separation, teenagers, Uncategorized on June 5, 2016 | 2 Comments »
Even airports are more relaxed on Sunday mornings. The place is full, but no one is running across from the carpark or pushing their way to the front of the queue.
‘Wish I was getting on a plane and going to Spain,’ I say.
‘Well,’ the mister says, ‘Come through Abu Dhabi on the way and we can go to Spain.’
‘Oh, no, I want to go alone.’
He laughs. It is a proper laugh and I wonder how he does it. How he loves a person who is so often absent, who so often retreats. It seems never to injure his love for me, never to bruise his heart.
Anyway, it isn’t true. I don’t want to go to Spain. The thought of that takes me by surprise, although the truth of it does not. It is time for me to be still. That’s why I’m here, isn’t it? That’s why I’ve moved back to Adelaide. To bury my roots in something more than sand.
From writer, Tracy Crisp in “Sunday” on her blog, naive psychologist.
What was real?
Posted in arguments with your partner, book review, fatherhood, motherhood, separation, single parenthood, Uncategorized on May 28, 2016 | 1 Comment »
It was impossible, I said in response to his question, to give the reasons why the marriage had ended: among other things a marriage is a system of belief a story, and though it manifests itself in things that are real enough, the impulse that drives it is ultimately mysterious. What was real, in the end, was the loss of the house, which had become the geographical location for things that had gone absent and which represented, I supposed, the hope that they might one day return. To move from the house was to declare, in a way, that we had stopped waiting; we could no longer be found at the usual number, the usual address.
And
“I kept waiting for the children to ask to go home,” he said, “but in fact it was I who wanted to go home: I began to realise, in the car, that as far as they were concerned they were home, at least partly, because they were with me.”
That, he said, was the loneliest of realisations…
And
I thought often of the chapter in Wuthering Heights where Heathcliff and Cathy stare from the dark garden through the windows of the Lintons’ drawing room and watch the brightly lit family scene inside. What is fatal in that vision is subjectivity: looking through the window the two of them see different things, Heathcliff what he fears and hates and Cathy what she desires and feels deprived of. But neither of them can see things as they really are. And likewise I was beginning to see my own fears and desires manifested outside myself, was beginning to see in other people’s lives a commentary on my own. When I looked at the family on the boat, I saw a vision of what I no longer had: I saw something, in other words, that wasn’t there. Those people were living in their moment, and though I could see it I could no more return to that moment than I could walk across the water that separated us. And of those two ways of living – living in the moment and living outside it – which was the more real?
From Rachel Cusk’s brilliant novel, Outline.
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