Fay Weldon - What Makes Women Happy

And then there are the great big destructive acts, like bringing your family toppling down like a house of cards. It’s quite easy to do and you will always find allies.

Daughter: ‘You were a terrible mother. That’s why I’m such a mess. My therapist says so. I hate you. I’m not letting you see your grandchildren any more – you’re such a monster you might do the same to them as you did to me.’

Mother: ‘But I did the best I could. You are the meaning of my life. I love you the way you love your own children.’

Daughter: ‘Daddy, you must have abused me when I was a little girl. My therapist says there’s no other explanation for my feelings of hostility and depression.’

Father: ‘Perhaps you were just born that way. Perhaps you should go to church and not a therapist. Meanwhile, thanks a million for breaking up the family. I’m off.’

One day you come to your senses and wonder what it was all about, and you can remember everything, but there’s no one to tell, no family shoulders left to cry on, and your own children don’t seem to seek your company.

Conclusion

There are some truly bad therapists out

there as well as some very good ones.

You can take the proud and defiant path through life, of course. Some do and get away with it. You can decide you have problems because you let yourself be trampled on and go to assertiveness classes.

It has never seemed to me, however, that assertiveness classes have done anyone any good. My friend Valerie went to one, complaining that other people walked all over her. My own feeling was that she was the one who normally did the trampling, while worrying about her self-esteem and tendency to self-effacement. When she returned after her two-week course she bullied more, smiled less and her self-esteem was sky-high. It’s true she got a rise, but she lost her boyfriend. Justice was on her side, but life wasn’t.

The fewer the mini-nastinesses we do – and we all do them – the better able we will be to deal with the real, great, imponderable areas of unhappiness when they come along. Which they do, unasked, in everyone’s life.

Moral

If you haven’t anything nice to say, don’t

say anything at all. Smile though you want

to spit. When in doubt, do nothing.

This flies in the face of contemporary wisdom, I know. Valerie was told to give voice to her anger ( or she’d get cancer ), speak emotional truths ( it was only fair to herself ), claim the authenticity of her feelings ( ‘I feel, therefore I’m right’ ) never fake orgasm ( it’s a lie, an indignity ) and in general claim her rights and seek justice in the home and at work. Above all she must never be persuaded into making the office coffee, because she was worth more than that.

Valerie sounded off at her boss when he said it would be nice to have a cup of coffee, and he said that was the last straw, he was tired of being bullied, and he fired her. She told her mother she’d rather she didn’t phone the office because of her Birmingham accent and her mother spent her savings – those that hadn’t gone on Valerie’s expensive education – on a little cottage in France and wouldn’t be there to babysit when she was needed – not that there was much question of babies any more, since Valerie was 41 and her boyfriend got so nervous in the end about not ‘giving’ her an orgasm (which didn’t seem in his power to give anyway) that the sex dried up altogether and he left. And she had to make her own coffee in her lonely home, while trying to find a lawyer willing to accept her unfair dismissal case, and these days caffeine gave her palpitations, and her mother was out of even mobile range.

Suffer a pang of remorse when in bed with your best friend’s boyfriend and act upon it by getting out of the bed, and you will have less sensual pleasure in the short term, but it is amazing how gratifying doing the right thing is. Your best friend may not see it quite like that, of course, concentrating only on the fact that you were in the bed in the first place.

But pray God she will never find out.

I mean that. Actually pray. Gather a few forces around you. The way to be happy, to forestall anxiety and guilt, is to be good.

The world being what it is, you may not know what praying is. (Look it up on the Internet and you can’t find a definition.) But this is how it goes. You sit down. You create a mental space around you. Shutting your eyes helps. Hands steepled together helps: you’re enclosing yourself within yourself, making a separation between yourself and what’s outside you. Which, you will find, if you develop the antennae, is a kind of breathing presence, the majesty of existence itself. You are part of it.

Pray for others, not yourself. (Praying for yourself is vulgar.) Hold your friends in your mind, household by household. Direct your thoughts towards them, wish them well, enfold them and surround them with goodwill. Family too, of course, but anxieties and practicalities are more likely to break through here. Attention wanders.

You can link what you’re doing with a known religion, the Father ( ‘Dear Holy Father’ ), the Son ( ‘Dear Lord Jesus’ ) or Holy Ghost (though very few pray to him because he is so hard to envisage), or any of the saints ( ‘Dear St Anthony, help me find my lost sentence’ ), or Pan, I suppose, if you’re a pantheist ( ‘Dear Lord Pan, help me find my lost virility’ ), or Mother Mary ( ‘Help me get pregnant’ ), but with all these what you are doing is using an intermediary to connect you. Prayer is easier than meditation, which encourages self-centredness and too great a sense of ‘Look at me, meditating!’ You seldom fall asleep when praying for others, as you do when meditating. You just stop when concentration fails.

Perfection is impossible to achieve, of course. But we can try, and angels will attend us, and we can take pleasure from the gentle air of their beating wings.

A Joke: Man Prays to God

‘Dear God, let me win the lottery!’ The voice is piercing, shrill and desperate, amongst all the others pleading to God for help. It goes on for week after week, Wednesday after Saturday after Wednesday: ‘Let me win the lottery!’

The Almighty does his best to ignore the voice, but finally he can’t stand it any more. He speaks like thunder from the clouds. ‘Okay,’ says God, ‘tell you what, I’ll meet you halfway. Buy a ticket.’

Forget guilt, forget anxiety. There are real enemies of happiness out there, real tribulations, which are powerful and not self-inflicted. Things that just happen.

Difficulties Along the Way

Old age

Illness

Bereavement

Isolation

Debt

Bitterness

Make no mistake about it, money helps. It makes most troubles easier, while not necessarily solving problems.

Failing money, friends help – as does a long record of good behaviour and kindness to others. The comfort of strangers, if sought, is often there. What you put into life at the beginning you can take out with dividends at the end.

Old age seen from the outside can look horrific. But if you’re in there in that derelict body it’s still you; there are still pleasures and ambitions left to you. You are Ivan in the Russian story by Solzhenitsyn, the man in the prison camp who guarded his piece of dry bread successfully all day, and when he finally ate it, enjoyed incomparable pleasure. Seen from the outside, it was dreadful; from the inside, triumphant. May it be like that for you.