My Year of Binchy – Week 12: Help Me Find This Movie!!!!

Thursday, March 21

• Book: Echoes
• Pages: 304 – 370
• Location: Front Porch / Front Room Combo. 33 degrees outside. 65 degrees inside.
• Smoking: Sour Sleep
• Playlist: For All Mankind – The Complete Soundtrack
• Did I cry? nah.

First off, I have made it three month-ish without this feeling like a demand and me giving up. I gotta say, the work I’ve been doing on my brain has been paying off hardcore.

It ain’t easy, though, because I have to confront (and then hang around with for a bit) the parts of me that I don’t like very much. This is mostly quiet, internal work. This is also mostly work that gets set back significantly when someone points out (casually or non) something that I’m doing/have done that doesn’t align with that work.

I have a tendency to catastrophize in those situations. Like, I’ll be working very hard on being patient and giving others a chance to speak before jumping in, but when I finally do it feels like the wrong time. Like a record screech moment.

I still do not, and doubt I will ever, know when it is okay to jump into a conversation. So I either sit there with one hundred responses in my head that are unrelated to the conversation by the time they make it out of my mouth or I jump in too early and feel rude.

It’s mostly the quiet one because, inevitably, when I speak up during the other option, someone will call it out in a negative way, and it just doesn’t feel worth it.

Yes, I know that is also my brain’s strict black-and-white thinking and the aforementioned catastrophizing.

Let’s get to the book. That’s a way more enjoyable place than my own brain, you know?

Ok, so a lot is happening, and it feels like more and more foreshadowing of the mysterious death at the beginning of this. Ugh, this would honestly make such a good mini-series. Limited series? Wtf ever we’re calling them these days. Well, there is actually one from 1988 that is a two-episode mini-series from the UK and it’s just not available for me to watch.

I wanna watch it so bad, y’all.

Okay, so what I was saying was – there have been two deaths (relative strangers, so no big deal in the story – although Simon the lifeguard lost the light in his eyes forever and never came back to Castlebay) and one broken ankle on the SLIPPERY PATH.

We’re really ramping up to something that’s gonna break the reader’s hearts. I wonder if it’s Clare? Since she seems to be the main character – and Clare is pregnant! But the doctor doesn’t tell anyone because he doesn’t want the town to look down on her.

I’m not sure if this is really good Maeve Binchy pattern recognition or if I may remember the end of this book. We shall see.

Ooh, maybe it is an alternate timeline’s ending to this book!

Friday, March 22

• Book: Echoes
• Pages: 371-426
• Location: Front room in the ‘morning time’. It’s snowing outside. 29 degrees.
• Smoking: Nothing
• Playlist: Nothing
• Did I cry? Nope

Ooh, they put up steps so that the path to the ocean is less slippery and scary. A broken ankle’ll do that, I suppose.

I will say that all of this worrying about what other folks think is raising my stress levels. It’s your wedding, girl (not Clare – she’s too college-y right now)! Do what pleases you, not what’s ‘good for business’!

It is wild how they thought of their daughters back then in Ireland. The stress was ‘getting them married off’ and not ‘make sure they are happy.’ I feel like I felt a similar pressure when I was a younger Jacki. I felt like a problem that was shuffled from person to person. And I had another tiny human of my own to worry about!

I am trying to be nice about this, but it feels like I am just talking in a circle. I felt like I was a thing my mom worked so hard to get off her hands, always pushing me into relationships. Trying to marry me off, if you will.

Eventually, she did, to someone who felt comfortable controlling me in a similar manner. Obviously, that didn’t work out.

I started learning about different ways of living, like, ‘oh hey, yeah, you don’t have an obligation to kiss your grandpa on the mouth when you say goodbye or hello, if it makes you feel uncomfortable’

Before a friend talked to me about that, I didn’t know it was acceptable to even feel uncomfortable about that. That was just the way Papa was, and I was told to accept it. I wasn’t to be RUDE to him, after all.

It was so wet and so gross and so wholly unacceptable. I see that now.

I was sheltered kid. I learned about the outside world from books and movies, but was always told “that’s not the way the world works for people like you.”

But it is. I have figured that out now.

I wonder if I had read Maeve in High School instead of well into my post-high school mothering days. Would I have been softer? More comfortable with myself. Honestly, it probably would have driven home the “Don’t talk about it” attitude I was taught my whole life. The dumbest thing to teach a kid ever.

As I learn more about the world and my place in it, I understand why I was taught that.

Saturday, March 23

• Book: Echoes
• Pages: 427-472
• Location: Front room during sunset, it’s cold out: 33 degrees with the wind making it feel like its 27
• Smoking: Jelly something or other. Bean? Cat? I dunno
• Playlist: For All Mankind – The Complete Soundtrack
• Did I cry?

There is no way they can fit this whole book into two episodes of a mini-series. It would require two seasons, at least.

Twenty episodes, I think’ll do it.

I started Part Three: 1960 and I’m gonna keep going. We just had a mutual confession of love!!!!