Archie, Darling. A Queer Romance

Archie, Darling. Part 8

20

3/3/23

When I broke up with Jay three years ago, it was the result of a combination of horrible events that my family had been going through. In the space of two months, my Grady passed away and my dad returned from the US, trying to reinsert himself into our lives. The first event wasn't unexpected but was incredibly difficult nonetheless. Grady had been having more health problems in recent years and he was starting to slow down. While it was heartbreaking to lose him, it was also a good time for him to go and I think he passed the way he wanted. He was still "all there" and quick witted. Right up until the end he was cracking jokes and smiling.

The second event was as expected as the Spanish inquisition. Dad visited Dani first, he showed up at her house one Saturday morning and tried to invite himself in. Dani doesn't process surprises well and she slammed the door in his face (understandably). She told me, after this, she walked into the bedroom where Lea was, and just said "My...Dad's here." Dani is the bulldog of the family; she can pack a punch and she sticks up for her own. I have seen Dani take down a man twice her size. Lea is a lover not a fighter, she is warm and caring and never says a cross word, but apparently in this case it was her who kicked off. She told Dani to wait in the bedroom, opened the door and launched into a barrage of verbal attacks. She barked him down the driveway and into his car where he sped off back to where ever he was staying. She called mum after to warn her, they'd been divorced for years and Mum had built a new life for herself but she was still, rightfully, afraid of dad. We had a friend of hers, Louise, stay with us for a week- just so there was always someone around when we were home. Jay came over more frequently for the three weeks that dad was in the country. I didn't ask her to, but she wanted to be there to support me; at the time, I appreciated it. Though I found myself getting irritated by how she would always discuss how my dad was affecting her, rather than how it was affecting the whole family.

The big issue arose when Ollie came over for dinner and casually told us he'd caught up with dad. It wasn't exactly welcomed news, the rest of the family had long since cut dad out of their lives and we assumed Ollie had done the same. We were all already strained to the enth degree, grieving Grady and trying to process dad being in town. Jay was there and she got into it with Ollie in a big way. She called him selfish and arrogant and everything under the sun and I agreed with most of what she said. The problem was, she didn't fully understand the context of it all. In the end, Ollie and I ended up in a massive argument about Jay and the resulting explosion made things sort of irreconcilable between them.

I spoke to Jay about it at length. I tried to explain that, while I agreed with her, she shouldn't have gone about it that way. I tried to explain that Ollie doesn't respond to front on arguments; he takes a while to come round and you have to take things slower with him. She told me that I was wrong, that Ollie was a wanker, that the family gave him too much slack, and that I was weak for not standing up to him. I wanted her to understand that I wasn't excusing the way that Ollie treated us, I just needed her to trust me to talk to him about it, and to set boundaries.

Ollie, for his part, was almost as hard to talk to. He told me that Jay was a bitch, that she didn't understand how our family worked and that she was controlling me. They both refused to be at events together until the other apologized. It made life incredibly hard. I managed to sit down with Ollie, with Dani present, and talk to him about how his way of handling things affected the rest of us. I have to say, I was surprised. He still didn't like Jay and still believed all the things he said about her, but he understood that I needed to be able to talk with her about it and I needed him to trust me to work through it with her. He even agreed to keep talking to me about the way he treats me, though that was short lived. He admitted he can be headstrong and even admitted he hadn't thought about how I was feeling in the whole mess. In the end, he agreed to be polite to Jay at family events and to leave it with me.