Granny's advice

I'm not an angry person. I'm more of the "Keep calm and carry on" persuasion. I believe that anger is pointless and usually self-defeating.

Some of you may remember from earlier posts that at the age of ten my grandma urged me not to be like my father - habitually bad-tempered and out of control. I took her advice and I've been remarkably even-tempered ever since.

On the rare occasion that something riles me enough to make me angry, other people are taken by surprise. They're so used to me having a cool and measured approach to whatever situation I'm confronted with that they wonder what on earth's going on.

Of course some people say that anger is one of our basic emotions, the emotion that brings us to life, and that never being angry is a bit abnormal. On the contrary, I think anger is as negative as guilt or jealousy or bitterness. Someone who is regularly angry just makes other people wary and defensive.

Anger is very fashionable at the moment. Look at a newspaper or go online and there are any number of people getting furiously angry about something or other. Where they get the energy from I can't imagine.

I also resist anger because it so often leads to violence, especially misogynistic violence. Once you allow anger to flow freely, it easily morphs into something much more dangerous. Keep a lid on it, I say.

PS: Several blogmates have suggested I'm bottling up my emotions and that expressing anger is a normal human trait that I'm lacking. Well, expressing anger may be the psychological norm but norms don't apply to everyone and to my mind it's also normal to be an un-angry outlier. I've never felt that I'm bottling up my emotions, I just hardly ever feel angry.

To stay or to go?

It's conven-tional wisdom that divorce has a very bad effect on children, that it can seriously traumatise them and damage their self-confidence and sense of security. But can a failing marriage be just as damaging?

Keeping a crumbling marriage going "for the sake of the children" isn't necessarily the right thing to do. Ending the marital tension and bitterness and making a new start might actually be the better choice.

I wonder about all this because staying together "for the sake of the children" is probably what my parents did, except that they never said much about their relationship so it was never made explicit.

However, I do vividly remember that at one point my mother was planning to move out and took me and my sister to see several flats she might have moved into. As it turned out, things were patched up, the marriage continued, and the divorce never happened.

But there was always tension and bitterness in the marriage, which didn't do my emotional health any good. My father was bad-tempered and prone to verbally abusing my mother, as well as demanding she be the traditional housewife, cooking his meals and doing the cleaning.

Would it have been better if they had divorced, put an end to the constant tension and abrasiveness, and provided my sister and I with a calmer and happier household? I suspect the answer is yes and we kids would have benefited. But who can say? It's one of those nebulous what-if scenarios.

I've certainly seen what look like very fraught marriages and very emotionally troubled children, but who knows what the children need? And for that matter, what the parents need? Feeling more and more ground-down by a frustrating marriage is itself emotionally destructive.

Whatever the decision, it's a tough one.