Fiction and Reality

Okay, I’m supposed to be working on my NaNo novel, but I’d hit a point where I was struggling. The television was been on for background noise, and I got sucked into the movie that was playing.

At first it was the visual, a three story house built right at the edge of the ocean, the waves moving over the sand, the ebb and flow of the tides, the water reaching the house, swirling around the posts that supported the numerous porches.

The appeal struck me on so many fronts. The house, with numerous porch views over the water, the background sound of the wind and the waves, and then the scene in the art studio. What a space to work, I felt such artist envy.

Nights in Rodanthe, made in 2008, starred Richard Gere and Diane Lane. The movie was adapted from yet another Nicholas Sparks’ best selling novel.

Needless to say, I’m sitting here crying, searching my pockets for a tissue.

 

In this movie a woman is taking care of her friend’s bed and breakfast for a week. A timely opportunity as she needed time and space away from her family to think. Her husband had left her, and their two children, for another woman, and now wanted to come back, saying he’d made a mistake, saying he was sorry.

Amazing, because this is just how it happens. A man thinks all he has to do is say he’s sorry, and all is forgiven, life goes on, right? Wrong.

I remember a Doctor Phil show from years ago. His guests were a husband and wife, trying to reconcile after the husband had an affair.

The man was angry because she wasn’t letting him forget what he had done. She wasn’t throwing it in his face, but was holding back, not quite trusting him. “I said I was sorry,” he told Dr. Phil.

He was given one of those looks, that only Dr. Phil can give, and you knew a lecture was coming.

Basically, the good doctor told the man that saying you’re sorry, for breaking such a sacred trust; was not enough. If he was truly sorry it was his duty to prove, every single day, that he loved his wife and that she mattered, more than anything. Anything less was unacceptable.

The situation with the wife in this movie/book is a common one. A woman marries and gives up on her dreams, for the responsibility of being a wife, a mother and a homemaker.

Add in, for most women, the added responsibility of a career outside the home.

The demands on a woman’s time don’t leave her much energy to pursue personal desires or ambitions, not unless she has a husband like the men these fictional characters meet.

In this movie, the woman’s reawakening comes with the new love interest. He encouraged her to go after her dreams, supported her in whatever endeavour she wanted, and gave her unwavering support.

He wanted her to find the ‘her’ she was before all that responsibility changed her.

It was the same theme in the movie “PS, I Love You”.

This time, a woman was worn out with work and the struggle of the day to day, and forgot what had been important to her before she got married. The husband dies; she’s inconsolable, until letters he’d written before his death arrive, one at a time.

In each letter he gives her a task, and each task takes her back, through the memories of their life, until she’s back to when they met. She was full of life, full of colour, wanting to be an artist, wanted to create.

She’d lost that part of herself, and he wanted to show her what she’d lost.

Happy ending, except he was…well, still dead. She found herself and was able to move on, her memory of him, of them, more precious than ever.

I remember the art studio my mother had in any home she lived. She would work in her space when my dad was at work, the kids in school, and often late at night when everyone was asleep in their beds.

She could do this, as she was a stay at home mother, her career was her art.

I wanted to paint, and I learned the basics from her. What I didn’t learn, was to keep at it no matter what. I let it go for all the years my children were small, and picked it up when they were about nine or ten years old.

Things happened and I let it go again, too many demands on my time and energy.

But if you have that need to create, you find a way to satisfy it, even if it’s not exactly the way you want.

Now I’m retired, the kids are gone, and I have the time to do whatever I want, when I want. I can paint, write, sew; whatever my heart desires.

But we all know, life is not that simple.

At any rate, I’ve had a good cry, a needed break from my writing, and got an idea for this week’s blog. Now back to work, I’m at 15,000 words and I’ve fallen behind.