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I’m not angry anymore

By Kevin Steel ⋅ December 16, 2006 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

The other night I was at a dinner party when the topic at the table turned to unhealthy relationships and since one of the other guests was a landlord with a few properties in town, the conversation momentarily turned to single mothers since he had quite a few tenants who were mothers and single. Specifically, we spoke about a type of single mother who was struggling to better herself. “But then,” the landlord said (I paraphrase), “they always seem to go off and bring home some guy–I don’t know, from a bar or maybe an old friend–who needs a place to live and doesn’t have a job. He moves in and the rent stops getting paid and everything falls apart.”

An elderly widow sitting across from him, said matter-of-factly, “It’s the mothering instinct.”

I piped in, “Maybe it’s because at the beginning they see it as a relationship where they’re in control.”

“They think they’re in control, but they aren’t,” said the widow, but did not elaborate.

“I suppose so,” the landlord said with an air of resignation. “You know, come to think of it, in all the years I’ve never had a similar situation with a man moving a woman in and that happening.” He had owned property for about 20 years.

Driving home and thinking about this, I recalled reading somewhere that the rescue fantasy was a Freudian concept. At this link it says it began as a way of describing men who dreamt of rescuing fallen women. Interesting that a century later I would be thinking of it in relation to women rescuing men. I also recalled the song “Joey” by Concrete Blonde, a strong emotional musical rendering of the rescue fantasy. I was introduced to “Joey” shortly after I had moved from Montreal to Vancouver. Montreal, at least where I was living on Prince Arthur just off the Main, seemed to me like a city where the night life was positively powered by failed rescue fantasies, and I was sick of them. So the song back then just made me angry. Oh just great, a song about some woman pining for an alcoholic—sorry, seen that a thousand times, don’t need to hear it, that was my attitude. The acoustic version is better than the radio release, but I couldn’t find a full public version of the former. (The acoustic version is on Still in Hollywood, you can listen to a sample of it here on Amazon). It’s a really good song. It doesn’t anger me now, and I’m not sure why.

All is forgiven. listen, listen…