Sweet Surrender

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT PAGE

FOREWORD

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

AFTERWORD

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

MARY MOODY has been a prolific gardening author and a former presenter on ABC-TV's
Gardening Australia
. Her books include
The Good Life
(1981),
Au Revoir
(2001),
Last Tango in Toulouse
(2003) and
The Long Hot Summer
(2005). Mary divides her year between her farm near Bathurst in New South Wales and her house in south-west France.

Sweet
Surrender

This is the book I was never going to write. After the turbulent publication of
The Long Hot Summer
I was determined not to pen another memoir about the trials and tribulations of a certain middle-aged woman who happens to be me. During the book's marketing campaign and the author tour that accompanied it, I repeatedly declared that it would be the very last in the series. Inevitably, at every event where readers came to buy books for me to sign, they would ask, ‘Will there be another book?' My emphatic ‘no' seemed to cause dismay.

I tried to stick to my resolve. I worked on a daytime television program and a national evening radio show. I wrote a book about a restaurant that I love in France, and made a documentary about it. I followed that by writing and publishing an illustrated family cookbook. I was kept busy, as I had been for several years, leading Australians on treks in the Himalayas, and conducting walking tours through villages in southwest France. I spent months at a time with my ailing sister in Canada, and made the most of opportunities to be with my grandchildren, now scattered far and wide.

Then I attempted to write a book about my generation of women, the baby boomers, and how they were coping with ageing. I failed miserably. The analytical approach I had adopted seemed to me to lack real impact. At the end of the day, I decided, there's nothing more powerful than a personal story, told from the heart.

So here I am again, describing the vicissitudes of my life in these last four years. It's a painful and exhausting process writing such personal stories, yet also strangely cathartic and, in the end, satisfying. We all deal with the hiccups in our lives in different ways. I seem to deal with them by writing them down. Getting them onto paper always helps me come to terms with whatever it is that may be troubling me. Eventually, of course, I'll run out of subject matter, but in the meantime I'll just continue to live, and hopefully love, this strange journey called life.

Mary Moody
Yetholme, near Bathurst
December 2008

Among the many friends I've accumulated since my school days, only a few are still in their original unions. Several have been married and divorced more than once, and many now live alone, some more happily than others. Their experiences are no doubt a reflection of the wider community. More than forty percent of marriages end in divorce; second marriages are even more likely to finish that way.

My friends' marriages have ended for all the typical reasons. Sexual incompatibility, disputes about parenting styles and values, infidelity, drug and/or alcohol abuse, domestic violence, workaholism, financial troubles, and just plain ‘falling out of love'. The children of these broken unions seem to have survived into adulthood with no more than the usual problems, and in my circle there is a generally accepting attitude towards the whole business of divorce. It happens, get on with it.

People are often surprised to discover that I am still with my husband, David – and not just because they've read my memoirs, and know that I ran away to France when I was in my early fifties and that the saga of my subsequent infidelities was played out in the public arena. No, it's the fact of our thirty-seven years of being together that shocks
them, especially given the difference in our ages and characters. Within the space of one generation, the situation appears to have reversed. Divorce seems a more likely outcome than a ruby wedding anniversary, especially if a marriage has encountered rocky periods.

But what marriage doesn't encounter rocky periods? I know of no relationship that hasn't been through dismal patches. At some stage, most of my friends have considered separation or divorce. Indeed I have several friends, claiming to be happily married, who laughingly confess that if they owned a handgun they would have cheerfully taken aim at their partner on more than one occasion. As individuals we change so much over the years that it's not realistic to expect we will relate to a partner the same way in our fifties as we did in our twenties. Thank heavens for that.

What interests me at this stage of my life is not so much why people separate and divorce, but why they stay together. Why some relationships endure against the odds and others, which on the surface may have appeared to be perfect partnerships, fall by the wayside. People remain in long-term marriages for all sorts of reasons. There's a certain comfort and security in a relationship that has lasted twenty years or more. Your partnership becomes like an old pair of slippers, familiar, homely and reassuring. You don't have to make an effort to keep up a conversation, to impress or to find favour. You can be bad-tempered, irrational or hungover, and your partner will either take it in their stride or just ignore you. More than likely your partner has seen you give birth, throw up, fall on your bum, shake with rage, cry like a baby and scream like a banshee. You can burn the dinner, reverse the car into a wall, donate a large sum of money to charity without consultation, and your mate will probably accept that this is just part of the rich tapestry of living under the same roof as you.

Sexually, a long-term partner can be many things. Comfortable and familiar, then surprisingly passionate and spontaneous. Some long-term relationships allow sex to vanish altogether without it being a worry to
either partner (this would not work for me); but most, I suspect, allow their sexuality to ebb and flow according to life circumstances. I find there is nothing like a few weeks or months of separation to awaken my desire for sex!

Sharing the marital bed is a very cosy arrangement. Even if there's not a lot of sex going on, the closeness of another human body is to my mind reassuring and soothing. When David is away from home I often half-wake in the middle of the night and put my arm out to him – then feel disappointed when I remember he isn't there.

Fear of being alone is undoubtedly one of the main reasons why couples remain together even when their relationship is less than perfect. Strong attachments to extended family and to mutual friends can make the thought of separation and divorce unbearable. People who have been close to you both for decades perceive you as a couple, and even though it's unlikely you will lose their friendship if you are no longer married, you know that somehow the relationship will change. And change, for many, is frightening. I know the thoughts that went through my mind when David and I came close to parting after more than thirty years. Frankly, I was terrified.

I remember having lunch with a very dear friend who had known us since the genesis of our relationship, and I felt an overwhelming sense of sadness that it would never be quite the same again if David and I split. My bond with my children, their partners and my grandchildren also played an important part in my final decision to remain in the relationship. I felt that somehow my marriage to David symbolised the family unit; as the patriarch and matriarch living in the comfortable old family home we were at the very core, the very heart of the family. I know this is a surprisingly conservative, old-fashioned notion, especially for someone who thinks of herself as anti-conservative. It startles me that I felt this so deeply, because I have never cared greatly about the institution of marriage – indeed David and I lived together for more than twenty years before we wed, and all our children were born during our de facto years.

I can only conclude that I have always felt a deep and abiding attachment to the whole notion of family – no doubt as a reaction to my turbulent childhood. There is an element of romanticism in this. As a young woman I nurtured a burning desire to create a perfect family to compensate for the fact that my childhood was troubled. I clung to this notion all my adult life and when it came to the crunch – to the point of separation – I simply couldn't let go of that attachment. Of course, there are no perfect families, so this ideal was a nonsense, yet it was a major consideration when I was facing the possibility of losing my marriage. My sense at the time was that if
we
were no longer together then the family was no longer a solid unit and I would have somehow failed in my resolve.

Failure: that's the crux of the matter. The expression
failed marriage
is no longer in common use but its underlying connotation remains. If your marriage doesn't endure then you have somehow failed: that's the perception. I am an independent and adventurous woman who enjoys living alone in France for part of each year. So fear of failing in my marriage feels like a contradiction. But the fact is that both aspects of my self are authentic. I don't want my marriage to fail, or my family to fall apart, but like many other women in their fifties, I need to live my life on my own terms.

This book is about doing that
without
trying to escape from married life. It's about finding meaning in the good things: work and family, food and wine, travel and meeting new people. It's about living through the troubles which occasionally assail us and our loved ones at certain stages of our lives. It's about facing the inevitability of the ageing process and, ultimately, death. About negotiating new relationships with adult children and letting go of attachments and unrealistic expectations. It's also about gaining some insight into who I am at this age and stage of my life, based on my myriad experiences along the way and, importantly, it is about understanding where I came from in the first place. And about accepting how that has profoundly
impacted my decisions, even though my life has been very different to my mother's.

She was born in Sydney in the early hours of April Fool's Day, 1920. It was a homebirth, even though my grandmother was well into her forties and not in particularly good health. I was born on the day the Korean War broke out in June 1950. A large, healthy post-war baby.

My mother Muriel's generation survived the Great Depression and then World War II, and Muriel became a war bride on a ship to America. Not in the usual sense, since my father, Theo Moody, saw no military action and his equipment was a notebook and pencil: he was an Australian foreign correspondent in Washington and New York, and covered the war for the Sydney
Daily Telegraph
from the fireside press conferences of President Franklin D Roosevelt.

My childhood was an era of optimism and prosperity. There was plenty of food on the table and as a generation we enjoyed a sense of security and identity not experienced by our parents. We children of the fifties were generally well loved and well educated and this was the basis of our feelings of self confidence; our assurance of our place in the world. We were baby boomers, after all.

As a young woman my mother was a great beauty, but over the years her pride in her appearance seemed to slip. The sixties rolled around, and then the seventies. Muriel, by now aged in her fifties, allowed her raven hair to go grey. She stopped wearing make-up and swapped her smart working clothes for casual slacks and hand-knitted jumpers. She relaxed. Let go. Surrendered to the process of growing old without putting up a fight.

With hindsight, I believe she threw away her youth long before it was necessary. That typified her generation. She grew up in an era when the term ‘teenager' hadn't even been coined. Girls of her age went from wearing short socks and court shoes to stockings and high heels overnight. The leap from childhood to womanhood was arbitrary and instantaneous.

At the other end of her life the same rule seemed to apply. She went from a well-groomed businesswoman to a greying grandmother in the blink of an eye.

It wasn't going to happen to me.