The spaces between us

Thoughts on a 25 year relationship

Yesterday was a happy milestone of sorts. 25 years ago to the day, I saw this man in a large boucle knit teal, green jumper. Skin pink, with a rather long brown-blond quiff in a small sitting room in Oxford. There were two other people in that room, three of us were carrying a white handkerchief brought as an offering. Pleasant incense and quiet excitement filled our space. We were all there to begin the three-day process of learning transcendental meditation (TM) with John Thompson, our teacher.

That wintry evening, the pink man in the boucle jumper walked me back to my college. He seemed very intense, and as interesting as he was interested in me. We quickly got into a heated conversation about God and Neale Donald Walsh (!), which continued over the next two evenings.

I had arrived two months ago at Oxford, and signed up to learn meditation because that was the one commitment my father had insisted I make before I left India. Seven Years later when I married the man with the quiff, and my father refused to come to the wedding or permit us to get married in India, I never doubted once that the path we had chosen was right for us. Partly because my father had inexorably set me on that path. In my world-view (and later, in my husband’s) we could scarcely have planned a more auspicious way to meet.

Our relationship in the early years was tumultuous - un-understandings abounded, cultural differences put us in mad and painful situations, we did not even have a shared notion of what it meant to be in a relationship. His love such as it was, and my infatuation, pretzled me into a lover, a wife and a mother.

At a particularly difficult phase of our relationship, unable to keep away from each other, we gave ourselves a four-hour rule. Anything beyond four-hours to hang out was a no-no. The rule worked well for us, until the children arrived and the spaces between us collapsed.

Tonight I am not with my husband. I am away, on a two-week family pass to salvage some writing time, to bank hours on my academic work before the chaos of the Christmas holidays set in. The family unit gives me time away from them and the paraphernalia of our life together every now and then. I start by taking 2-3 days to detox and clear my mind, they eat a lot of pizza.

Being a mother, and what’sapp groups’ first responder, is to experience a constant dissolving of one-self, much like when you experience the kind of love that captures you and won’t let you go without pummelling and transforming you. In this maelstrom, the spaces between us define our relationship.

These spaces and time away allow me to remember who I am when I am not with the people who live under my skin, to think, perhaps even write a little. It’s the spaces between us that make being together bearable, and for those spaces I am eternally grateful.

A favourite bench where I took a few moments yesterday to be thankful.