Just three days ago, I watched two women demonstrate an ancient and intimate ritual. They entwined and moved their limbs and bodies in rhythm, coiling masculine and feminine energy, breathing as one, becoming one.
Eyes half closed as I watch, I am in this world and another, enthralled by the rhythm. Bronzed skin and white move across each other. A fold of cerulean blue trouser falls aside to reveal a perfect knee, which rises and falls against a purple satin cushion, raised on a leopard-print bolster. The many-limbed creature that the women have become is framed by purple chiffon and cherry pink silk.
The women’s breaths and breasts rise and fall in divine asymmetry. The sun sends a shard of golden light across the room, setting aflame a supernova of orange blouse that radiates between them. I am awash with colour. It is the colour of breath and touch. It is a glimpse of samadhi.
* * *
Three days later, I am in a café in Hackney answering emails and organising Zoom calls to talk about climate change, a new government who give not two hoots about food poverty, and the impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on the availability of wheat for starving Yemen. The wifi password is MakeLoveNotWar. I order a Palestinian breakfast. I hear the café owner tell the chef, “Make it a nice one.”
When breakfast arrives, I sit awhile to do honour to the daily miracle of food, the privileged bounty and kindness of this plate in a world gone otherwise mad. The twisted bagel loaf has a bronze glaze encrusted with sesame seeds. Tahini butter bobs on an ocean of amber honey. Fingers of halloumi and feta tantalisingly caress the muhammara.
And oh, oh, those eggs. Two perky and perfect yolks nestle like cheeky breasts between the bread and olives. They are glossy and glorious. It looks like they might rise and fall in divine asymmetry. A shaft of Hackney sunlight sets their orange aflame. I am flooded again by the experience of colour and touch. With it comes the voice of a friend. And with it, a revelation.
Two days ago, my friend drove me to the train station. We talked about Nina Simone and the lyrics of a song.
I wish I knew how it would feel to be free
I wish I could break all the chains holding me
I wish I could say all the things that I should say
Say ’em loud, say ’em clear
For the whole round world to hear
I say to my friend, “I felt that you were withheld. What holds you back?” She says, “Misguided loyalty.”
I ask, “Misguided loyalty to what?” She says, “Misguided loyalty to joylessness.”
Misguided loyalty, it transpires, to a mother’s investment in joylessness, so deep that it would be a betrayal for the daughter to claim pleasure.
The concept is so shocking, so terrible, so true, so rooted in tough noticing, that we laugh aloud, though we don’t know what magic could break such chains.
I wish I could give all I’m longing to give
I wish I could live like I’m longing to live
I wish I could do all the things that I can do
Though I’m way overdue, I’d be starting anew
Here in the café, looking at the perky breast eggs, glistening so gorgeously orange in the light, I ask myself, where is my own misguided loyalty? And in the vibrancy of the sunlit moment, a voice says it loud, says it clear, so that I can truly hear:
“Misguided loyalty to sacrifice”
My mother built her whole moral edifice on sacrifice. She was literally wedded to it. She stuck with a relentlessly angry marriage for over 50 years because – as she told her sister – she had made a promise to god. It cost her the opportunity to dance, to travel alone, to have friends over for dinner, to see her sister, stay with her mother, and have contact with two sons and two of her beloved grandchildren. When I was about eight years old, she got cancer and had her bowel removed to be replaced by a stoma bag, and I remember thinking with childish certainty that her cancer had been caused by suppressing what she really wanted to say.
She came to my home only twice after I had my miracle baby, because she always needed to be back to make him his dinner. She took sacrifice to a fractal level of Christian commitment, always taking the smallest piece of food (she would never have ordered two eggs, and certainly not ones that looked like orange breasts, oh no), the black-and-white television in the cold back room, the least comfortable chair, the shortest straw.
I must have breathed in this maternal instruction manual through my skin. It wrapped itself around my heart, folded in neatly with hospital corners, with the clear edict that if something isn’t working, the thing to do is try harder, work harder, give more, sacrifice more, never complain, never reach out for help. Sacrifice everything, right down to the fractal bones. Never betray the loyalty. And if you must, then die of it.
In a sexless marriage for over 30 years, I sacrificed touch, intimacy, sexual energy and dance. I lived without physical compliments or an appreciative gaze. We watched movies without eroticism, to avoid the awkwardness. When we first got together, he held my hand and said in a tiny voice that begged for forgiveness and acceptance, “Do you mind if I love my father more than I love you?” I felt dismayed, but accepted the sacrificial mantle as my destiny, to say yes, that’s ok, of course, I understand. I had found my sacrificial purpose. I recently found a letter that I had sent him over 30 years ago, saying, “I do understand that being physical makes you worried. Let’s slow down, that’s OK, we have all the time in the world.”
I moved to London from Devon, leaving a job, a landscape and an adopted family that I loved because he could not even countenance discussing any other way. I threw myself into the urban world of policy and politics to make the best of it. I worked hard, harder and harder still. I could never talk about the grade I got at university or celebrate the success because his was lower and might hurt his male pride. I could do craft and patchwork and precision pencil drawings, but not colourful art because he is the artist. He is a very good painter with an innate sense of colour. He owned colour, I let him have it. I did not write (in the way that I now feel compelled to write), because his father was a very good journalist, and that inheritance mattered so much to him. I did not want to be a threat. When I did sometimes write something deep and personal, he did not want to read it. Perhaps if I sacrificed that too, then I would become less of a threat and more attractive.
I did not tell him about awards I’d won, because he might feel upset about his own progress at work. They could not be celebrated. As my career progressed to becoming a CEO, for years, I reduced my own salary by thousands of pounds to just under the level of his, with the misguided idea that I should not threaten his masculinity by earning more. And then if his masculinity would do OK through my sacrifice, then he might eventually notice that I am a woman.
I very nearly – oh so nearly – sacrificed the ability to become a mother. Thank science, the heavens, my brutal inner determination, and the energy of singing opera on my bicycle going the weekly eight miles to-and-fro between sex therapy and the fertility clinic, for the success of IVF.
Let me go full fractal sacrifice here. The orange egg bosom is wobbling and chuckling at the ludicrous extent of its hold on me. “Misguided loyalty to sacrifice” goes bone-marrow deep. For three decades, I hung on until the last minute to organise holidays, Christmas or social gatherings, to avoid putting on pressure, but sacrificing being able to look forward to the fun, and having to accept that everything last-minute costs more. When we did cryptic crosswords together, and especially when we did them with his competitive mother, I would pretend not to have got the answer so that I would not appear to have a quick brain, a good memory and a wealth of literary and cultural references to draw upon. I wanted them to feel good and for the game to go well. I deliberately made myself look slower and more stupid than I am.
Did he want me to do this? Of course not. This is my shit, not his. Did it work? Of course it bloody didn’t. Sacrifice is a ludicrous way to seek validation, touch and intimacy or to overcome loneliness. After the first 20 years, I was ravaged by it. I broke. I rang the doorbell on the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships. I told my mother that we were going to marriage guidance counselling (white lie, we were going to sex therapy, it didn’t work, but that’s another story), her only response – her single mention of it, never to be discussed again – was, “Think how much worse it would be if you left him.”
* * *
A flood of revelation has washed through me, and here I am in a café, looking at a bountiful plate of food. There is one more understanding to come, the last drop of amber honey. I realise for the first time, in the grace of Hackney sunlight and the kindness of breakfast, that in my misguided loyalty to sacrifice, I even sacrificed the experience of colour. For years, I stepped aside to let him have that experience, not me.
I take a breath. I reach for my fork. I set my intention. Here, today, I will eat two eggs whose yolks will burst in my mouth. Hang the messy consequences. And I will reclaim the full-body and full-spirit experience of supernova orange.