The Things I Had Never Done Before
At fifty three I had to learn how to run a life on my own, starting with a car I did not know how to get tested.
The first thing that was scary was the contrôle technique.
That is the French version of an MOT, and the one on our car had run out, which meant it was not a decision I had to think about. I had to do it straight away. I sat in the car outside the test centre with the paperwork on the passenger seat and realised I did not know how any of it worked.
Not in France. Not in the UK either.
I was fifty three years old. I had been with the same man since I was nineteen, married for thirty two of those years, and in all that time I had never once taken a car to be tested or to a garage. It had simply never been my job. Someone else did it, all I did was drive it.
So there I was, working out what to say to the man at the reception desk, in French, using words I had to look up because I'd never had to talk to anyone about car stuff before, especially in France, and for a process I had no clue about. Oh, and the car also needed its headlights changed because French law requires the beam to point a different way.
I did it though. It failed at first, and I sat in the car park and cried, feeling totally out of my depth and lost. When it passed the second time after a small fix that was needed, I felt like I'd won the lottery. Like I'd climbed to the top of Everest all by myself.
The bit nobody prepares you for
I came back to France in the October. It was my first winter here in years, because for years we had wintered in Thailand, and I had forgotten how cold the house could be.
The things I found hard were not always big things. It was the accumulation.
Locking up the house at night, for instance. He had always done that. Every evening for decades, without either of us thinking about it, he checked the doors and closed the shutters, and I did not. And now I did, and every single night I went outside around ten o'clock to close the shutters, come back in and lock the front door, then check the windows and make sure the back door was locked.
Driving back from my daughter's, thirty minutes away, in the dark. I had done that drive a hundred times. It was different alone at night, I just never drove anywhere by myself at night, he always did.
Underneath all of it was one fact that took me a while to say out loud.
Everything now landed on me. Every decision, every bill, every noise in the night, every thing that broke. There was no second person to hand it to and nobody to check it with. If I got it wrong, I got it wrong on my own.
That is the part people mean when they say it is hard, and it is not what they think they mean. They think they are talking about loneliness. This is something else. This is the weight of being the only one.
I did make a list, because I am a list person and it helped.
But in reality those first weeks, the list was not what drove anything. What drove it was necessity. The contrôle technique had run out. The headlights were a legal requirement. I had to get the house ready for winter, that was survival.
Anything that wasn't absolutely essential had to wait.
At the time it always felt like I should be doing more, figuring things out quicker. Adapting to this new and strange life I found myself in. Looking back it was the only way through, because I had a very small amount of capacity and spending it on optional things would have meant not having it for the compulsory ones.
If you are in that stage now, I would say this. Sort what has a date on it, what's essential. Leave the rest. The rest will still be there in the spring, and you will be a different man or woman by then.
Where it went wrong
It went wrong in a specific and predictable way, and I want to be honest about it and because I do not see it written down often enough.
I was a woman on my own with a house that needed work, and I was a target.
There was an electrician who charged me for a full day and left at three o'clock, having made a mess I then cleared up myself. There was a man who did tree work and charged me close to double what he had quoted. There was a handyman who took my money and never came back at all.
And then there was the old Land Rover, which had been my ex husband's project. I had never sold a car in my life. I did not know what paperwork was involved, so I did not do it properly, and I spent a long time afterwards untangling something that would have taken ten minutes to get right at the time.
I was angry about the money. I was more angry about what it revealed, which was that these men had looked at me and made a calculation.
Here is the thing though. Not one of those situations happened because I was stupid. They happened because I did not yet know what I did not know, and the only way to stop being in that position is to go through it.
Now I can see it was a learning curve and it had to happen that way. The alternative was not doing anything.
What I know now that I did not know then
Some of this is practical and dull. The dull parts are the ones that would have saved me the most.
Get the quote in writing, and get it to say what is included and what happens if it takes longer. Every one of the people who overcharged me did it verbally, and I had nothing to point at afterwards.
Do not pay in full before the work is done. The handyman who vanished had all of it up front. I gave it to him because he asked and because I did not want to seem difficult, which is a habit worth noticing in yourself.
What I've learned since is that a reputable company or person won't ask for payment up front. They may ask for a deposit, which is reasonable, but not full payment.
Ask what the process is before you agree to anything. I was so worried about looking ignorant that I would nod along and work it out afterwards. Saying I have not done this before, could you talk me through it, would have cost me nothing and saved me a great deal.
Find one person locally who knows how things work and is not selling you anything. A neighbour, someone at the mairie, another woman who has done it. Once I swallowed my pride and asked for help, I was able to learn from others.
And keep every piece of paper, in one place, even when you cannot face reading it.
The windows
The windows were different, and they were my first big win.
I started planning for them in those first few months, and the work was not finished until the following winter. So it was a long slow thing rather than a moment.
I chose them. I got the quotes and compared them and decided which ones I wanted, and I paid for them out of my own money.
And when the last man drove away and the house went quiet, I stood in the middle of the room and looked at them.
I had done that. Nobody had helped me. Nobody had checked it or approved it or told me it was a good idea. I had wanted something, worked out how to get it, and got it, and now it was in the wall and it would be there long after I stopped noticing.
At that moment I felt more proud of those windows than of almost anything else I had done.
Which sounds ridiculous written down. And since then I have published books. I have built a life. But the windows are still up there near the top, because they came first, and because at the time I genuinely did not know whether I was capable of any of it.
The line keeps moving
In a relatively short time, many of those things had become nothing.
The contrôle technique is now something I've done a few times and is no longer stressful. Locking up at night is something my hands do whilst my mind is elsewhere. Getting quotes and comparing them is admin, and I discovered I am rather good at it.
That is what happens, and it is worth understanding.
When something stops being difficult, your mind reclassifies it as normal, and normal does not count. So you clear the bar, and then the bar quietly moves, and sometimes you can go back to feeling as though you are not managing very well. Meanwhile you are doing, on an ordinary day, six things that would have frightened you eighteen months ago.
The trick I have found is to write things down when they still feel enormous. A note from the week the windows went in, written by a woman for whom that was a mountain, is worth more to you two years later than any amount of trying to remember. It's one of the reasons I journal every single day.
The one I still have not done
I would like to end this by telling you I have worked through the whole list.
I have not. I'm not sure the list will ever end. But that doesn't stress me anymore, it's just life, my life.
There is one thing I keep not doing, which is seeing my former parents in law. We always got on well. When the marriage ended they did not handle it, and a good deal of it became about them, and my daughters think I should stay away.
They are probably right. And something in me still says it is unfinished.
They are in the UK. Their only son is in Thailand. I do not know how much he is in touch, and it is not my business now anyway, but I think about them being on their own over there and I feel something I would not call obligation and cannot quite call anything else.
I have not decided. I may not decide for a while.
I mention it because I do not want to write a piece about doing hard things on your own and imply that it ends. It does not end. You get better at it, and the list gets less frightening, and there is still always one thing on it you keep moving to next week.
That seems to me a reasonable way to live. Better, certainly, than a woman sitting in a car park with the paperwork on the passenger seat, wondering whether she is capable of booking an appointment.
She was, as it turned out. She just did not know it yet.
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