All of Me

By Ulla Bolinder

Kicki and Eva-Lena have been best friends since
they were teenagers in the 1960s. They are now in
their forties and try to carry on with their lives
after many hard experiences.
Kicki has two children together with Rune, her
ex-husband, who still affects them with his drinking,
unreliability and violence.
Eva-Lena looks back at the time before she divorced
Lasse, when she was taken to the mental
hospital. Since then her emotional insights have
increased her self-knowledge and independence
and made her free from the past.
ALL OF ME is the last part of the trilogy about
Kicki and Eva-Lena.The first two are Hop in Then!
and Somewhere Within Us.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Books on Demand
• Release date: Jun 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9789180071246

Ulla Bolinder

Ulla Bolinder är född och uppvuxen i Uppsala men bor numera i Knivsta, några mil norr om Stockholm. Hon har arbetat på reklambyrå, restaurang, sjukhus, arkiv och bokförlag. Ulla debuterade som författare 1997. I sina böcker tar hon gärna upp samhällsfrågor med betoning på den enskilda individen.

Book preview

The neurotic, by definition, must believe either that he is loved or that he will be loved; otherwise he would not continue the struggle.

Arthur Janov

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Epilogue

1

Rune, my ex-husband, has been missing for ten days, and I don’t know where he is. Our divorce isn’t really finished yet, but we don’t live together any longer and we only meet when he comes to visit the children or to look after them while I work. Last time he was here, it ended with that he became angry and drove away in the car intoxicated, and since then we haven’t heard from him.

I have no idea what he is doing. Either he has continued to drink, or he has committed himself. They don’t call people from the hospital with the message that a family member has been admitted; you have to do that yourself if you want your relatives to know. Last time I was the one who called first, but I’m not going to do that anymore, I feel. It is as if every time he is out raging, it concerns me less and less what he is up to. Now I only worry about what could happen to others in connection with the car. It’s completely insane that he took it when he wasn’t sober! To drive intoxicated some time in youthful ignorance is something I can to a certain extent understand, but if you get a driving licence when you are forty-one and you are still so dumb, there are no extenuating circumstances at all! Shouldn’t he at least be concerned about the driving licence which he had to wait for, for so long? It’s so hard for me to understand that it isn’t possible to depend on him behaving normally.

This autumn when he had moved and started working again and met the children several times a week, I thought that if he came into a detoxification clinic and was there for half a year and then got his own apartment and continued to deal with his problems, it could possibly work for us again in a few years.

But it fell apart on Christmas Eve. We had agreed that he would be with us then, but we started to quarrel almost immediately, and then I felt: Take off! You can get out of here as soon as possible!

But I didn’t say anything, and he stayed overnight. When I was on my way into my room and should pull his door closed, he thought that we should embrace, and that was possibly okay, but then he wanted me to come and lie down with him, and then I didn’t know what to do. I felt weak and could neither say yes nor no. It wasn’t until he showed that he intended that we should be together sexually also, that I finally was able to decide to go away from there. And I was happy, I felt already when I was on my way out. I was happy that I had managed to pull myself together and done the right thing.

On New Year’s Eve, when he was here and looked after the children and I came home from work, he wasn’t sober, and I became angry and said:

You certainly won’t take the car now?

Yes, he would, because he wasn’t drunk. He was going to drive the car. Why shouldn’t he? I didn’t need to care about that.

No, but you should think of others, if something should happen!

I thought that he acted so dumb.

If it weren’t for the children, it would be goodbye! I said.

And he became angry and kicked a hole in the kitchen door and took off. Then I felt that I wanted to call the police and tell them that he had driven off with alcohol in his body. But I didn’t get to the telephone before I became doubtful and thought: What will happen if I call, then? If he is stopped by the police, he will realize that it’s I who have called and may come here and raise the devil and threaten with an axe and God knows what else, so the children will be frightened out of their wits. No, I can’t do it! I felt so strongly that I wanted to, but I didn’t dare to do it because of that fear, which I have felt so many times during the years we have been together. I have never been able to set the police on him. I couldn’t do it when he maltreated me, and I couldn’t do it when he drove the car drunk. But if a similar situation happens again, I have to manage it.

2

When I came home with the children from the childminder, the door was unlocked. I thought that I had forgotten to lock it, but the light was on in the hall, and when I came in, I met Rune. He had come to leave money and take measure of the door. While I looked for the yardstick for him, he helped Stefan take his jacket and pants off. I didn’t ask him anything about what he had been up to, because it’s of no interest to me any longer, but to Ingela, who just stood there, I said:

Don’t you want to tell dad now, what you have said several times?

Then she stretched her hand and touched his stomach, but she didn’t say anything.

She has been thinking about throwing snowballs at you, I said. Both have talked about this door and have been sad every day since it happened.

Well, you started to yell as soon as I came in!

I certainly didn’t, I said. It was you who couldn’t stand hearing the truth that you shouldn’t take the car.

But I wasn’t drunk.

"No, but for me there is only one condition that is valid, and that’s zero."

Yes, for you maybe, but according to the law so…

You wouldn’t have passed through a police control either, I said. And if you can’t handle hearing the truth you shouldn’t come here!

And Stefan said:

Dad, the door, you kicked the door apart here!

Yes, I know, he said.

But I think it’s good for the children that he came, because it must feel frightening for them that he only disappears and doesn’t stay in touch. Because he was dumb when he left, I couldn’t come up with anything either, about where he was and what he was doing. Last time, this autumn, it was different, because then I just said:

Dad must travel far away and work now, so he isn’t able to come home.

Then it wasn’t like this at all, because that time they didn’t see anything he did. He just stayed away, and that’s a lot better, because then it isn’t hard for me to come up with an explanation.

3

I have called to Nybyhemmet, where Rune lives now, and tried to get hold of him, but he wasn’t there. It’s very hard for me to get into my head how someone can first stay away for almost two weeks and then turn up and still not care about the children. If he has laid off drinking now – for the time being – I don’t understand why he hasn’t contacted the children and tried to repair the damage he has done. That’s what I would do anyway, by saying for example: I was tired, and I became angry, but I didn’t mean to be dumb and I’ll fix this now! When I get hold of him, I will ask if he isn’t going to come and talk with them. He doesn’t have to meet me. If he intends to be here, I can go out.

I think it’s so weak of him not to come. If you have children, you must surely tolerate that they become angry and sad! Then you must at least accept the feelings you yourself have caused. I myself have made so many mistakes and done dumb things to the children – I become angry and so on – but I’m here for them to be angry with anyway.

And I notice their frustration in relation to Rune. Several times, every day, they have feelings that I gather they don’t know where to place. It’s I who must deal with it, and I can put up with that, but I have a very hard time to put up with that they must have difficulties because of him. What he does to me, even if it’s tough, I can live with, but I can’t accept that he makes them feel bad. Every time I think of it, I come to the conclusion that it’s my own fault, because I had children with him. All the time before, I had thought that it was impossible because of his drinking, but we didn’t use any prevention at all, because I had begun to suspect that I was sterile. Once when we were out swimming and I saw some women on the beach who were pregnant, I said to Rune:

I will never look like that.

I felt strange, and when we came home Rune asked me what was the matter.

I don’t know, I feel so sad, I said.

And he wondered if I was sad because I believed that I would never be able to have children.

Yes, I was, I felt and broke out in terrible crying. I would never be able to have children, I realized, and I cried until I had lost all hope.

I didn’t protect myself, and I must take responsibility for that, but at the same time I think that Rune should have told me that it would be difficult for him to have children. But the only thing he said was that it wasn’t as important to him as it was to me, because he already had two kids.

4

Why did I bring children into the world together with Rune? If you have children with exactly the kind of person that you know you should never choose as the father of your children – and I had decided that I would never be together with, much less marry and have children with, a man who drank – it must be for your own sake you do it. You do it because you can’t find any other way to realize that your own papa was of no value whatsoever. You sacrifice your own children in the same way that you sacrificed yourself for your parents’ sake.

I fell for it because I believed that Rune would be a good father. How the hell I could believe that, because he was just like my own papa, who I couldn’t depend on. But I thought it would be different with Rune. I thought that he would be able to do what papa never managed and be like a parent should be. My best friend Eva-Lena says that she would never have been interested in her ex-husband if it hadn’t been for the fact that he under the surface was like her papa. It wasn’t really Lasse but a loving papa she wanted, she says. And in the same way I think it was with me and Rune, that if the subconscious hope for my papa hadn’t made me blind, I would never have chosen him as the father of my children.

But it’s always the unconscious that prevails. To be free you must recognize and reexperience your old needs and finally ask your parents for what you never received. Easier said than done, that is! But Eva-Lena, who could never ask her papa for anything, has asked him – quietly for herself – to listen to her and understand her and love her. At the same time, she realized his inability to do so and felt the pain of not having received what she needed.

That’s how it works, according to Janov’s primal therapy, which both of us believe in. But it requires that something happens, so you come into the feeling. In Eva-Lena’s case it was a workmate who awakened her feelings for her papa. And it’s important that you connect correctly and don’t believe that your feelings are about the present and direct them towards the wrong person.

Eva-Lena

I was fooled by Lasse because