Blogging is still a very new concept to me. Today I spent some time looking up and reading other people's blogs, and I have to admit it has been a revelation in the most pleasant way.
To put you in the picture, I have to tell you first of all about my previous Internet experiences. The very first time that I had access to the Internet on a regular basis was in 1998, just after I arrived in Scotland. I took the first job I could get, which was in a role as a customer service representative in a large international call centre in the heart of Glasgow.
The place stretched out over several floors, where on each floor you would find a number of clusters of desks, each representing and communicating with one or two European countries. Being Belgian, I was hired to represent the Belgian/Dutch team, this meant that I had to deal with customers both in my native Dutch as well as in French. I soon found that it was only going to be a stop-gap, the workplace was far away from where I lived and the actual job bored me to tears. One of the very few exciting sides of the job was "Internet access"!
We were allowed to browse at our peril during breaks and occasionally when there were no phone calls to be answered and all other jobs were done,we would log on to our favourite websites. Most of my Belgian colleagues used the facility to keep up with the Belgian news papers and some of them also kept in touch with people back home via chat rooms and e-mail. This was my very first experience of communicating with people online, and I found a whole new world opening up for me. I soon became quite addicted to the chat room of my favourite Belgian radio station at that time, Studio Brussel.
After a few months I found a new, much more suitable job, close to where I lived. Initially I did not have an Internet connection at home, nor one that could be used for personal use at work, so I had to go cold turkey.
This was the very point where I stopped living in my native country. I had physically been in Scotland for 6 months, but in reality, I still lived with one foot in Belgium, going to a job with Belgian colleagues, speaking my own language all day long, living in the Belgian time zone. On top of that I had found a new cyber-circle of friends on the chat site, once more all of them Belgian. I found myself hankering to go back, missing my country and culture, but stuck in a situation I couldn't get out of.
In 1997 I met a Scotsman (the father-haggis) at my work place in Belgium. We had been together for only a few months, when he decided that he could no longer be away from his own country, and returned to the UK.
In all honesty, had it not been for a series of rather unfortunate events happening to me shortly after he left, I do think the relationship would have died a natural death over the distance between us.
I had been struggling terribly financially and ended up being evicted from my flat, with absolutely nowhere to go. It was initially a combination of my despair and his feeling of guilt, having briefly moved in with me, without contributing anywhere near his spending, that brought me here. There was also still some of the infatuation present, as usually found in an early relationship, which had not yet completely died away.
I soon found myself in a relationship with a completely different person from the one I'd met in Belgium. He had been a fish out of the water back there, unable to communicate effectively, ripped away from the surroundings he had grown up with. On occasions I had seen sides of him that I did not like, glimpses of aggressive and quite selfish behaviour, but I simply put it down to his home sickness, his frustration with a language he was struggling to understand, his inability to find a job that he enjoyed as a direct result of his inadequacy in Dutch.
When we first met, I think he was mainly attracted to me, apart from an immediate physical attraction between us, because I was one of the first people with whom he was able to have a full and meaningful conversation. A lot of Belgians speak the compulsory English learnt at school, but as he was only able to do low-skilled jobs, he did not mix with people who in general had a good knowledge of any language other than their own. My own English was good, having studied it up to quite an advanced level, and also having worked on the ferry between Oostende and Dover for a year or so before getting back to my studies.
Once here, I finally got to see this man in his own comfort zone, put right back in his original background (which couldn't be any further removed from my own). In the beginning of me moving here, I moved in with his parents, the two of us more or less living like sardines in a tin in his childhood bedroom.
Very soon, I slipped into a feeling of being lost and lonely, a stranger in a strange land. He reverted straight back to his old bachelor behaviour, and was much more interested in seeing all his free and single friends, than in spending time with me.
I remember being here the very first weekend, him going out for the night with his friends, me being left, feeling very awkward, with his parents, who I had only just met. He denied me all access to his pre-relationship friends, had no interest in taking me to places and introducing me to his country, and was not open to the idea of maybe meeting some other young couples, beside his single male friends, in an attempt to build up a shared social life.
The relationship did not work well, but once more I made excuses in my head, telling myself that living with his parents wasn't easy, that maybe I was too clingy, that he needed to get used to living with someone. There were many fights, and I often felt totally alone, very much trapped.
At approximately the same time as me finding a new job, due to the fact that my earnings were going to be quite good, we managed to buy our first property together. In the beginning, things looked up. There was the excitement about having our own place, the distraction of re-decorating it all, and for me there was the added challenge of getting to grips with a job in engineering in a language I still had a lot to learn about. After the first rush of activity, when things started to settle down into a more steady pattern, he was increasingly going out with his friends again, sulking and grumpy when his friends were planning a big bachelors' holiday to Turkey which he could not take part in.
Something that I haven't yet mentioned, mainly because I have never quite managed to get over it, and because it still fills me with a terrible feeling of guilt, is that upon coming here I had to leave my little boy behind with his father. I was effectively homeless in my own country, had been given the invitation to leave it all behind and start a new life in Scotland, but the invitation was strictly limited to me, and did not extend to my child.
I felt cornered, both by my little boy's father, who cried at my doorstep, telling me that I could not possibly take his child so far away from him, and by my new partner and his family, who clearly didn't have it in mind to have more than one person to come and move in.
I came to Scotland in late April 1998, and the very first time I got to see my child again was over Christmas of that same year. I had kept in touch as much as possible over the phone, but was often fobbed off with an excuse. He seemed to be in bed as early as 6 in the evening, and often I would be told that he was out with family somewhere.
Over Christmas I found out that I was not the only one feeling utterly miserable about not being together. I had assumed that he would be equally as happy with his dad as he had been with me, but nothing could be further from the truth, he simply had been with me from the first moment that he came into this world.
The split between his father and me had occurred long before he had any recollection of us ever having been together, and so, moving to his dad's home, however much he enjoyed weekends with his dad, was a huge change, and not one he adjusted to very easily. Shortly after New Year, I had to take him back to Belgium, and it took all my strength to go through the ordeal of leaving him with his father once again. As soon as we returned, I started court procedure in order to obtain full custody again. Thankfully this all worked out in the end, and by the beginning of May 1999, I was able to go and pick him up for good.
Shortly after this, the problems with haggis-father, which had steadily made their way back into the relationship, turned really ugly. On more than one occasion was I told to f**k off back to my country. The fact that he saw my young son as an intruder, and some sort of competition for my attention, made things worse. I would find myself going into work, feeling utterly drained, pleased to be away from the environment of the home, which felt like a ticking time bomb most of the time. We very nearly split up, but still, I was hellbent on making this work. I felt especially stubborn about it, because I had already been married at the tender age of 17 to my little boy's father, and this had obviously not worked out. I felt like a woman with a huge stamp on her forehead that read "FAILURE". I was going to make this work, come what may! Combined with that, my expectations had become very low. Whenever there was a fight, I just believed that this was how relationships were, that that was simply as good as it got. I also excused the fact that he could not get used to my son's presence, because of him not being a father himself, and him not being used to living with a young child. It seemed right to me to make many allowances and to simply wait 'til things fell into place in their own time.
It was around this time that I got my first home Internet connection. I gradually went back onto the chat rooms, for old times sake, desperately trying to get some contact back with my roots.
As I found myself alone, many times, while he was out with his friends, I would log on, after my boy was asleep and while away the hours, talking to people that I'd never met. It was all I could do to chase away the feelings of utter loneliness and the lack of friendship and any kind of social life. I was not being secretive about my online contacts, and was absolutely not engaging in any sort of conversation that could be deemed unsuitable for someone who is in a committed relationship. However, I still had accusations of being some sort of a cheat thrown at me.
So eventually, not wanting to compromise my relationship, I stopped communicating with others. Little did I know that all that time, he was using the internet to feed his addiction to porn. I had no idea, it had always been his dirty secret. Don't get me wrong, I am open minded, and I have absolutely no problem with people enjoying porn either on their own, because they are single, or together as part of a relationship, when both partners get a kick out of it.
It was the fact that it was all underhand and secretive that made it so damaging. It made me feel very betrayed and cheated on. It also made him approach me, sexually, in a way that really insulted me, and frankly turned me off completely. He had lost all perspective on a healthy real sexual relationship, through this warped view that often is presented in porn. He was living in a fantasy world, expecting me to act out the scenes in his head, without me even knowing they were there.
He became increasingly impatient and discontented with me, and often blamed the fact that my job absorbed a lot of me. I did work long hours, and found it hard to spend quality time with my boy, as well as believing that if I were to spend more time in the household, my partner might actually be happier and things would finally settle down. This resulted in me giving up my job as an engineer. The plan was that we start on a new slate, I would be at home, and I would attempt to do something meaningful with my paintings and try to get into galleries. The other huge decision was that we planned to try and have a baby. I was hoping this would cement things, it would make him see my son as just the little boy he was, and would allow him to feel first hand the feelings of parenthood, and therefor bring us all closer. I finished my job at the end of June, just in time to be at home for the school summer holidays with my son. By August, I fell pregnant with little haggis. The only big drawback of me stopping work was that we really felt the pinch financially, I had been the main earner, so suddenly we were trying to manage on less than half of our joint income. In theory it was enough, but you sooner get used to a comfortable financial lifestyle, than to reverse it. By October, when the worst of the nausea was over, two big changes took place. I started to do some self employed work from home, doing repairs and alterations for a dry cleaning chain (yes, a huge change from engineering indeed!!). He took on a new job, in the same sector he was already working in, but for a rival company who offered him a considerably better pay package. The result was that soon I had no time to concentrate on painting anymore, and he was more and more away from home to sales conferences, etc. It was at those conferences that he met a female colleague. I had a feeling almost straight away that something was going on, simply by judging how often he would mention her. He also spent long hours on the phone to her, under the guise of it being a business call. It struck me how he seemed to have so much fun, laughing out loud, while he had still very little time for me, and found nothing I ever said funny or amusing. And then... Not long before Chrismas, when I was just about 5 months pregnant, we married. It was all organised rather hastily, but in my stupidity and blindness I felt reassured about the fact that he was willing to tie the knot. For some reason, I thought once more that this would bring about a turning point, and that he would finally settle down, feel happy with me and become more committed. And so I became Mrs Haggis, I confronted him about the long phone calls with his colleague, he assured me that nothing was going on, and the phone calls stopped. We still had an internet connection, he used it mainly for his work (or so I was led to believe) and I would only use it occasionally to play the odd game of Scrabble, maybe to do some online shopping, but never to communicate with people. Little Haggis was Born in April 2001, later that year, in October, we moved to a new house, where there was a lot more space...
T.B.C.
