You've Made Your Bed

You’ve Made Your Bed

         My father had images of me marrying a doctor. It was a real fixation of his. Apparently, as a child, he had wanted to become a brain surgeon. As he grew older, he realised that it wasn’t financially viable, so instead he became a toolmaker (quite a well paid job) hoping to raise the funds to send his son to medical school.

         Unfortunately, this wasn’t to be. My parents had agreed to have only two children regardless of their gender, and I was the second daughter. I guess you could say I was a disappointment from birth.

         The logical thing for a man like my father to do, was marry the offending daughter to a doctor. At the time he set things up, he had the added incentive of wanting to stay in America after his American wife divorced him too soon and set immigration on him.

         Apparently, he had shown the good doctor my photo, and the doctor (probably as a way to shut my father up), had agreed to date me. After 5 years of not really wanting to know me (one phone call lasting about 5 minutes per month), my father suddenly wanted me to leave England and come to live with him.

         I’d been dreading that particular phone call. While he’d been running from immigration, I’d been running with the local bad boy, and… well, lets just say, I later found out that antibiotics counteract the pill. Some women plan it, some women get drunk, I got a chest infection; funny ole life.

         I didn’t have to explain my situation to him as my Grandma had done it for me. First he tells me about the doctor, then he starts offering me money, to send me to college over in America, and a flash car if I will just go flush the baby out.

         I said, “No.”

         The next phase was threats. If I didn’t have an abortion, he’d give me one with a baseball bat.

         I said, “You’ll have a bloody long way to come.” (I didn’t know about immigration chasing him at the time.)

         He says that I’ve got to take responsibility for my actions, that abortion is the only responsible thing to do, and that if I don’t do it, once I’ve made my bed, I’ll have to lie in it, before he descended into obscenities.

         I placed the phone on the table, and calmly walked away.

         My father was forced to leave America, immigration were just too hot for him. Of course, it was all my fault.

         It might seem that I’ve wandered from my course a little here, but I really thought you needed a little bit of history so you can understand what happened later on. You see, the father of my unborn child, was indeed a bad boy (far better to call him that than a man). He hung around with bikers, to whom he was a walking talking joke, and he craved their respect. Knowing these guys quite well, I really don’t see how he thought he’d gain respect by beating his pregnant girlfriend, but he seemed to think it should work pretty well. (Point of interest, one of them rather ominously offered to make him permanently disappear for me; seems he earned something, but it weren’t respect. I later found out he had some more personal reasons to dislike bad boy.)

         So, the cycle began. The bikers ridiculed bad boy for being ridiculous, he’d come and beat me. They’d see the bruises on me and ridicule him for being pathetic and beating me, so he’d come beat me again.

         Once my beautiful daughter, my angel, and by far the greatest accident (definitely not a mistake!) of my life was born, the beatings had less effect. Knowing he couldn’t damage my daughter while indulging himself in these violent attacks, took a lot of the anxiety out of them.

         Time went on, and then I started noticing something really disturbing. If I ever left my daughter alone in a room with him, she would scream blue murder, but when he wasn’t there, she didn’t seem to mind. I checked her daily, looking for any sign of abuse, but never saw so much as a bruise. It could have been that she disliked him for the things she’d witnessed him doing to me, but I couldn’t be sure, and wasn’t willing to take the risk.

         The disappearance offer was admittedly appealing, but I knew I couldn’t be responsible for something like that happening to another human being, no matter how loosely bad boy fit the description. I turned to my father, the only person I knew to be in a position to really help me.

         I asked him to meet me, and said that I needed to borrow a bit of money to pay the deposit on a rented house or flat. I knew if bad boy knew, he’d take the money off me, so I set the meeting up in secret.

         When the day of the meeting came around, I told bad boy that I was running to the shop. I can’t remember what I said we needed, but the shop was the one place, other than work, that I was allowed to go alone. I guess that something in my manner gave lie to my words, because the beating I got that day, was in a way, worse than any other I’d received.

         Now I didn’t know this, but if you pin the back of someone’s elbow and shoulder down, then using both hands, start yanking back on their wrist throwing all your bodyweight into it, you can actually cause a bruise from wrist to inner elbow, without touching that area at all. I guess the tendon must have bruised me from the inside out; still, you live and learn.

         Eventually, I managed to escape the house, and ran to the car-park I’d arranged to meet my father in. Despite the injury to my arm, (it took me a month to be able to straighten it fully, and more than 6 months before I could hold it straight with, say a 4 pint bottle of milk in my hand, without excruciating pain) I arrived there dry eyed. The adrenaline was pumping, and although it was painful, the pain in my arm was, until then, tolerable.

         It was a mixture of inner and physical pain that made me break down once in the car. My father asked what was wrong, and for a time, I just couldn’t breathe well enough to tell him.

         That’s when he started ridiculing me.

         He starts by telling me what a wimp I am; then starts telling me how I ruined his life. I’m pathetic, I’m a cry baby, I’m an attention seeking, money grabbing little b****, and he wasn’t buying my act for a second. He reiterates, “You’ve made your bed, you’ll have to sleep in it.”

         Still unable to speak, to explain or defend myself, or even to explain my fears; I got out of the car and walked away.

         In the end, I didn’t do it on my own. I had help from one of the bikers whose respect bad boy was so keen for. He’d always been nice to me, and a couple of times, people had hurried over to him and held him back, because he looked ready to charge bad boy for either beating or belittling me. He was sort of a friend, but at the time I didn’t feel that I could really trust him. With no-one else to help me, I took a leap of faith, and stepped into the dark.

         I still don’t know what was said, I can only tell you that my hero spoke very quietly, and bad boy emerged from that room looking very pale. He packed his things and left without any argument, and after another quiet word from my hero over the phone, he even stopped phoning me with threats of death. I don’t know what was said, I don’t care. I made my bed with a mass of creases and jagged bits, and with help from a very special person, I got out and remade it.

         My bed is comfortable now. There is nothing there to cut me or bruise me, and whenever creases appear, me and my hero smooth them out together. Ok, ok, this isn’t a fairy tale. We do play tug of war with the quilt sometimes, but we are very happy together, and while I can’t claim a ‘happy ever after,’ it has definitely been a ‘happy so far,’ at least as far as our relationship goes.

         My daughter knows that her true father is out there somewhere, and knows that he drank more than was good for him, but she doesn’t know any of the details; I really don’t think she needs to. After bad boy went, I found out that while I worked, he left her in her cot, not even taking her out for a drink. I think this explains why she cried when left alone with him; to her it was the same as being left completely alone.

         She loves my hero, the only ‘Dad’ she’s ever known; and he, having known her since she was newborn, loves her just as much as the son we later had together.

         So, it’s moral lesson time. My word to the wise is this - When you’ve made your bed, you need only sleep in it if you’re too scared of the dark to get out and remake it.

Better the Devil you know? Think again.

Extended version. Originally written for Writer’s Cramp