the ugly stepsisters

 

When I was young reading, writing and arithmetic were subjects that I had to work hard at. But they never felt insurmountable. I could grasp them in the classroom. They were as nothing compared with the three “r’s” – resistance, reluctance and resentment – that I would meet later in my life. These ugly stepsisters have proved far harder to understand than learning the alphabet and arithmetic. And yet even as I instinctively avoided them I kept meeting resistance, reluctance and resentment on my meandering path to maturity. Until eventually I realised that although instinctively I avoided their company I needed to hear them out, because they had important things to tell me.

We talk a lot about positive psychology, as if this is all we might need when dealing with the challenges life throws at us. However we don’t talk much about negative psychology – of the way in which, left to our own, our feelings have a way of entering a downward spiral from which they don’t return until our ruminations are over. Then there is resistance, a residual unwillingness to doing something, which is another expression of a negativity that we’d like to wish away – and yet which so often defeats us. Often it isn’t until we have experienced a tidal resistance within ourselves for the simplest of tasks that we acknowledge how strong a force this negativity can take.

Nowhere is our resistance to simple tasks more rife than inside our homes – where we are master of how we spend our time, and where only we can decide whether something is worth doing. This, our resistance to household tasks, can prove so great – for me it arises around the paying of bills – that the energy we spend avoiding a task far outweighs the energy required to complete it.

Whereas resistance provides the motor, the dynamic with which we push against a repugnant task, reluctance brings a whole imaginative world in its wake. Reluctance is the carpet bag of emotions and images that flesh out our resistance to doing whatever it is. For example my reluctance to pay utility bills immediately conjures my history of past earnings, my Protestant family background, my current earnings as a writer and subsequent financial dependence on my husband, and not least my utter inability to organise a sensible routine for administrative tasks.

Lastly there is resentment – perhaps the most poisonous of the ugly stepsisters – which like a snail leaves a trail that attaches to seemingly benign tasks. Resentment puts paid to the common sense idea that daily household tasks are trivial – attached as they are by long threads to tumultuous feelings which prove that the task is anything but trivial. I am not just paying a gas bill – I am caring about the running of our home late at night when my own disorganisation forces me to care about something that no-one else in my household has to worry their pretty head about it.

When I was younger my instinct was to keep these ugly feelings together and to tip-toe around them, for fear of the havoc they might wreak should I awaken them. (I always remember my mother saying that were she ever to go into a psychotherapy session she may never come out again.) However at a certain point in my life this suppression became counter-productive. Because once my life reached a certain level of complexity – roughly when my kids became teenagers – I started needing the energy bound up in my own negativity. I needed some of its strength and verve. And this meant that I needed to hear it out, in all its banal bitterness. Because ultimately my negativity was holding hostage powers deep within myself that, if I wanted to come out on top, I couldn’t do without.

As a younger woman I had no idea how much my experience of grace would depend on my willingness to do things that I don’t like doing – and that the quality of my life is to some extent tied to my attitude to homework.