Lucy's wise words re Helen

[Anonymous]

Still thinking about Lucy’s words about Helen. I agree with her completely. I think Helen knows, deep down, exactly what Rob is. She’s just so desperate to have a ‘happy’, ‘normal’ family life – and to be loved – that she’s turning a blind eye to what we can see so clearly.

To love and be loved successfully you have to make yourself vulnerable, and that’s a huge investment she’s made in this relationship with Rob. To admit that your investment was that badly misplaced is a huge thing to come to terms with and accept. I don’t think she’s stupid, not at all. And that’s why I think those of us with (thankfully) no experience of domestic violence have still found it so troubling. You feel for her not only as a human being going through a hideous experience, but there surely can be few of us who HAVEN’T placed our faith and love in the hands of someone who didn’t deserve it, to a greater or lesser extent. And you keep hoping that there’s something you can do to turn it around and make it better and, by the time you realise there isn’t, there’s not much of you left. It takes a lot of self-belief to fast-track that process and I’m not sure she had that much in the first place.

For that reason I don’t think her confiding in someone else will necessarily help. I think she has to come to that conclusion herself. That’s either going to take a very long time or something will happen with Henry to bring her face-to-face with it sooner.

Hers is clearly a very extreme example, but it happens everywhere, doesn’t it? I can’t shake the last two lines of Yeats’ ‘He Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven’ from my mind.

[Sarah CM]

So THAT’s where that comes from. It was quoted by Peter Wimsey to Harriet Vane (in, I think, Busman’s Honeymoon).

[Goddess Deeva]

Frost’s The Woods would fit too.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
And miles to go before I sleep.

[Author]

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