AN IRRESISTIBLE FORCE MEETS AN IMMOVABLE OBJECT
My dear aunt Ill call her Beatrice got married not out of love, but because she was pressed into it. Her older sisters kept on at her, and her parents urged her on as well.
Their reasoning was as tough as old boots:
There comes a time when every filly must don the harness, Bea Or do you want to live to see your hair go grey and end up a spinster? No unmarried women in our family! Wholl bring you a cup of tea when you’re feeble?
But Beatrice grew up watching her own father, a miserable drunk, and long ago promised herself shed never marry. She poured herself into her career instead. Yet on her twenty-eighth birthday, after an endless stream of pointed wishes and advice from relatives, she finally gave in and decided to start a family.
A fiancé Andrew was found swiftly. Clearly, the family had been working on him for some time. Two weeks after they met, Andrew popped the question. Beatrice simply shrugged and nodded, something like, Alright, why not. She thought to herself, Maybe Ill grow to love him one day.
Andrew was thirty-three and solidly set in his ways. The wedding was hastily thrown together. One thing Beatrice recalls clearly: the master of ceremonies raising a toast, If youre happy, marry with joy; if youre not, better go back to your dad!
In the end, Beatrice came to see the wisdom in those old sayings. The honeymoon felt more like grim reality. Within a month, she wanted a divorce. Nothing brought her joy, and disappointment settled in her soul. Her husband was annoyingly stubborn, endlessly nitpicking, and utterly uncompromising.
Andrew refused to bend on anything and never intended to change. Beatrice was equally set in her ways. This marriage was, well and truly, an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object.
A year later the family grew: the stork brought a son, Nicholas. Beatrice dived into motherhood, all but forgetting about her husband. At night, shed make up a bed for him on the spare cot, using exhaustion as her excuse. Im shattered, always tired, and what do you do to help?
Come summer, Beatrice took Nicholas to the countryside to stay with her parents. She broke down to her mother about married life:
Mum, I want a divorce. Ill raise my son on my own. I just cant bear marriage! Sometimes I want to close my eyes and just slip away. I cant make myself fit into this life. I cant stand Andrew anymore. Whats the point?
Her mum replied, Stay with me and your father for a while. Maybe youll start missing your husband? Dont you dare get divorced! Stick with it! A husband and wife are like tea and milk you can mix them up perfectly, but once theyre together, you cant separate them again.
It was exactly the advice shed expected.
Yet, Beatrice couldnt see what there was to endure. Nicholas saw how cold things were between his parents. Hed grow up and realise there was no love at all. Why make him soak up all that negativity? What lesson would he learn from such a so-called family?
Beatrices mother suffered a lifetime of enduring. Her father drank himself silly, rarely left the sofa, and moaned about everything. Meanwhile, her mum was up at the crack of dawn, milking the cow, boiling up a mash for the piglets, scything hay, weeding the veg patch, and later off to work at the farm. Only in winter, after feeding the animals and baking bread, cooking up dinner, and tending to the ever-hungry rabbits, could she steal a moments rest. The countryside is unforgiving work never ends
All three daughters eventually ran away to the city to escape the charmed rural life. Beatrices brother stayed to look after their parents, despite his simple-mindedness. Beatrice never understood why her mother, fully aware shed married a chronic drunk, went on to have a fourth child! Why? When she asked, her mother would just say, Your father wanted a son. There were enough girls in the house
Their parents looked after the youngest until their dying days. Not long after their passing, Beatrices brother followed them at age sixty, never able or willing to take care of himself.
After a lot of soul-searching, Beatrice decided not to disappoint her mother further and went back to her husband.
Two years later, she had another son, William.
In truth, Beatrice had hoped that the arrival of a second boy would bring her family together. But she was bitterly mistaken. Andrew completely ignored William. In his eyes, the child was the spitting image of his drunk granddad.
Beatrice swallowed her hurt, but she never regretted having two sons. She resolved, Ill pour all my love into the children. Not a drop left for my husband. And so life went on
When Nicholas and William became teenagers, things went downhill fast drinking, smoking, talking back. Worse still, the boys and their father ganged up on Beatrice. Shed hoped for obedience and cooperation, but got the opposite.
Andrew began drinking with his sons. The family was crumbling before her eyes. It was a dreadful time in Beatrices life; she was powerless against her three menfolk.
Finally, Beatrices patience gave out, and she went back to live with her elderly parents.
Of course, they welcomed her without question. Her mother even tried to comfort her:
Bea, you look older than I do now. Lifes given you a rough ride, love. Oh, men
Beatrice reproached her mother for babying her brother:
Mum, why do you treat him like an infant? Put your foot down or hell walk all over you!
But her mum was always protective:
Oh Bea, you know his minds not quite right, but hes blood! You cant just turn your back on your own. Ill stay by him till my last breath!
Beatrice didnt warm to her brother, but she did realise none of it was really his fault. How could a healthy child have been born to a chronic drinker? She and her sisters were luckier their father didnt drink so much when they were born.
A year later, William came to the village and told her Andrew had died drank himself to the grave.
Beatrice didnt shed a single tear, only sighed heavily:
It was only a matter of time. We plan a long life together, but sometimes its short indeed. Let Andrew rest in peace
Back in the city, after a spell living alongside her grown sons, she bought herself a little cottage on the outskirts. She wanted to spend her old age quietly, with no more drama. Nicholas and William stayed in the family flat.
By then, Nicholas had married. When his son was born, Beatrice became a grandmother. But then something went wrong, and Nicholas was divorced within a year.
After a dreadful row between the brothers, William moved in with Beatrice. Turns out William drank often, which Nicholas loathed. Nicholas lost patience, beat him, and threw him out. And so William ended up staying with his mum.
Life rolled on…
Nicholas married again. Five years passed, and then he was once more left alone in the flat his wife ran away. I married like Id slipped on ice and crashed, he told her.
His third marriage didnt last either, though for once there was love and passion. Tragically, his wife suddenly died of a blood clot at forty. Death comes as quietly as smoke, through any crack. Nicholas mourned. Later, he told his mother, No more marriages, no more divorces. Im tired of these constant changes. Ill live alone now.
Now, Beatrice goes round to Nicholass to tidy up and cook for him.
William remained single. He drank whatever he could find, and sometimes wandered off without a word. At seventy-five, Beatrice could still be seen hurrying about locally with a photo of William, quizzing everyone:
Anyone seen my boy?
By now, the locals knew the routine by heart. After a month or two, her wayward son would mysteriously reappear, unharmed. Beatrice would clean him up, patch his worn-out boots, and wash his tattered clothes. Pants usually had to be thrown away. If she asked, Where have you been? hed just mumble something nobody could understand. But Beatrice, it seemed, could rest easy just seeing him alive.
Everyone else knew William spent his days with a particular woman, who drank liquor and ladies drinks just as heavily as any man. She always took him in and theyd wallow in their intoxicating love until a new admirer came along, and William was cast off for a time.
Beatrice supported her son on her meagre pension. Attempts at finding him steady work all failed; the moment William got any advance wages, hed vanish along with the money, only to reappear three days later with his hand out: Feed me, mum.
She often remembered her own mother, forced to struggle with her son the same way, and now she fully understood that pain. History repeats itself: Blood is blood you cant erase your kin.
Well, theres not enough happiness to go round
After all life had put her through, Beatrice realised that her rushed marriage had proved of little worth in the endSometimes, as the evening fog thickened and the citys lights sparkled far away, Beatrice would step outside her little cottage and gaze up at the pale moon, her heart a tangled mass of heartache and fondness. The old ache of unfinished dreams returned, but so did a quiet pride: she, Beatrice, had survived them allparents, husbands, hard years, difficult children, every storm the world could throw.
In the morning, she baked bread for Nicholas and boiled porridge against Williams next return. She hummed tunes from girlhood and dusted faded photographs, each frame a memorypainful and precious alike. Shed long ago given up on neat endings. Instead, she learned to cherish every ordinary day: a kettle boiling, the warm bread, the uncertain knock at the door that might mean William was home again.
Sometimes her sons came together, sitting at her table. They might fall silent, stare at the worn floorboards, or even bicker quietly. But in their own battered ways, they watched out for each otherand for her. There was no grand reconciliation or shining family portrait, but love still grew, stubborn as weeds, in the cracks.
Beatrice knew no force could change what had been, nor any power prevent the old patterns from finding new shape in those she loved. Yet, each morning, she rose and tended to her small world, undaunted. Some battles could not be won, nor griefs outrunyet she found a kind of gentle victory in tending, in forgiving, in loving come what may.
One day, after a long walk, she paused at the gate and laughed at herself. She had become, she realized, exactly like her mother at the end: bone-tired but unbroken, keeping watch over wayward souls. Her greatest triumph, perhaps, was this: she had become the force that would not pass away, the warmth that never left.
So if you wander past Beatrices cottage at sunset, you might see her in the golden window-light, setting the table for any who come home, heart full of a quiet, stubborn hope that neither time nor sorrow could ever quite extinguish.
