What can a woman who is tired of her own life
'18.02.2018'
Source: Home
A year ago, I caught the eye of a story that struck me. A woman lived in a European city, she was married and raised two daughters ...
On Sundays, they went to church, or maybe not to church, but to the cinema or to the park, as is often the case with good happy families who are used to spending weekends together, says writer Elena Mikhalkova for Home Hearth.
Once she left the house to the store - and did not return.
Relatives phoned friends, acquaintances: to no avail. They suspected that an accident had occurred, but there were neither witnesses nor evidence - nothing that could somehow help in the search. The family promised a reward, the police honestly conducted an investigation, they were joined by volunteers. They searched everything: abandoned houses, forest parks, sewer pipes.
Versions were built the most unexpected, but the foundation for them was precarious: the missing led a law-abiding way of life, did not take drugs, did not receive treatment from a psychiatrist. Many advised to look at her lover, but here's the catch: she didn't have a lover either. Hope to find her alive melted every day. In the end, it was decided that she was the victim of an accident or murder. Someone from the police said in an interview: if we find out the truth, it is only when the guilty person decides to repent before death.
Widowed husband and two children began to live on. Psychotherapists worked with them, and step by step the family experienced their grief.
20 years have passed. The girls grew up, got their own children. Suddenly a man appeared who claimed that he had seen the missing woman safe and sound. When she disappeared, the whole city was plastered with her portraits. It was not difficult for him to remember her face. At first they did not believe the witness. However, he insisted: she lives in a coastal town in southern Spain, in her home, married to a local resident. In the end, his words were checked.
It really turned out to be the same woman. What happened to her 20 years ago?
Everything turned out to be simpler than could have been supposed. She left the house with a small amount of money, caught a passing car and drove away from her home. So - gradually, on traveling - she got to a town in another country, which she liked, and settled in it. She settled in a cafe as a waitress. Invented a story about a stolen passport. Correct new documents. And he lived a completely different life: free from all duties and burdens.
When everything came to light, journalists besieged her house. “What do you say to your husband? They shouted. “Would you like to talk with your children?” No, the woman did not want. She did not look guilty, but it was clear that she was annoyed by everyone’s attention. “I don't care what happens to them,” she admitted. She was not interested in any children or grandchildren, or once abandoned husband.
“I'm tired of my old life,” she said. “It was the easiest way to change everything.”
The simplest and - as we all understand - the cardinal. If a woman wanted a divorce, she would have to pay child support for children (she would hardly have undertaken to raise them), to see them, to take part in their upbringing. She chose to cut all the threads with one stroke.
For all these years, she never wanted to contact them. If it were not for an accident, it would have been considered dead.
Hearing about this story, I thought with a sinful deed: it would be better for her heroine to be dead. Having emerged from the non-existence of 20 years later, she rewrote not only her biography, but also the biography of her own family. Her relatives turned out to be not just victims, but deceived, abandoned, thrown back from her path, like tired toys. In such cases, the interest of another kind is inevitable: perhaps the husband beat her? Cruelly punished children? Tormented kittens? Cheated with a neighbor? The unspoken accusation of the public is: “What was wrong with your family?” However, she dispelled these attacks: “I had a good family. They just bored me. ”
The first natural reaction, which I did not avoid, was to condemn. To call the heroine of this story a soulless, selfish woman who has doomed her relatives to long suffering without any guilt on their part.
However, condemnation gives nothing to the condemning, except for the intoxicating feeling of his own sinlessness; this is just feeding our ego. Then I thought about the reasons. One could write off her unimaginable escape to the thirst for loneliness.
I met people for whom taiga would be an ideal habitat: for a hundred kilometers of a forest there is not a living soul. These restless souls do not live their lives, but imposed by society; driven by the inertia of events, enter into social interactions and on this wave can manifest miracles of mimicry: get married, raise children, visit their parents and friends every weekend. But they do not live, but overcome themselves. Moreover, the level of reflection of these poor people is extremely low - they are unable to explain to themselves why they feel bad.
Фото: Depositphotos
I remember a friend who told me how she used to wander through the woods once - her favorite activity was to pick mushrooms ...
A large family waited at home: parents, brothers, sisters, wives of brothers and husbands of sisters, they had been led to spend their leisure time by a large clan - and she went farther and felt so calm, such a pleasure that she had never experienced with people.
And suddenly it dawned on her. She realized that these are the only moments in her life when she is really happy. After returning home, this woman sold a Moscow apartment and bought a small house on the Curonian Spit. Where dwells ever since, only regretting that she lived for so long without knowing herself. On the eve of that walk through the forest, which eventually turned everything upside down, she turned 55.
Let us admit the obvious: there are innate loners, deep introverts that are sometimes overtaken by enlightenment - and they escape into the life that they are in size.
However, for the heroine of our history, this explanation was no good. If she were single, she would not choose a job as a waitress. Would not marry a second time. The third feeling that I caught myself was understanding. I remembered myself when my child was six months old. The thought of escaping from the house did not occur to me only because I did not attend thoughts at all: I just wanted to sleep and silence. But when the child was seven and we were confronted with an elementary school, which pierced our exhausted brains with an oblique ruler, I thought about going to the village and returning no earlier than the child would go to the first course.
The act of a woman who escaped from her own family still seemed monstrous to me.
No matter how tedious her relatives are, they do not deserve such evil, especially children. But the attractiveness of this thoughtless, shameless freedom has become much clearer to me; I have reached the stage when I blamed this woman not for the escape itself, but only for the fact that she did not bother to scratch at least a note of two words: “I'm tired. I'm leaving. That it was not considered lost.
Reflecting on this story, I always balance on the edge: I want to avoid the romanticization of hopeless egoism and at the same time not fall into the accusatory pathos.
She acted cruelly? Of course. Can it be justified? Hardly. And understand? But you can understand. For those who ask why, I have the answer. We know our loved ones rather badly, but what’s closest to them - we don’t know how to even hear ourselves.
Looking intently at a woman who, without warning, left her home and children, I am not guided by curiosity, but practicality. I have no doubt that you can benefit from the “disappeared case” if you rewind the film and watch the movie from the very beginning. After all, we were shown it from the middle. We do not know what happened to the heroine before she took the grocery bag and said she would be back in a couple of hours.
Фото: Depositphotos
I suppose there were signs of a solution ripening in her, symptoms of the disease that were not interpreted in time by her family.
Having seen them and having examined them once, we will be able to recognize them in other cases. And this is really important. We all get tired even from our relatives, we all sometimes want to be alone, many of us at times try on other lives in which they are free from all ties and obligations.
Between intent and action - the abyss, but most do not even reach the intention, limited to fantasy. But the fact is that fantasy is not born from scratch. Whether it is tired of the family or tired of his own role in the family, be that as it may, the person conceives a mental escape. Almost certainly it will never happen, but to live, dreaming of unattainable freedom, is painful and wrong. No one should be bad among their loved ones.
If it is possible to determine this state by the very signs that I am talking about above, then it is possible to help the failed fugitive.
The woman about whom I speak, without knowing it, brought a lot of benefits. Not close, no. Absolutely strangers. Having read its history, for the first time in all the years of marriage, they suddenly decided to ask their spouses a very banal, but therefore no less true question: “Are you all right?”. Or yourself. With these words, if they are said correctly, one story ends - about escape - and a completely different one begins.
