Madeleine McCann: Kate McCann’s Sex Drive And Osama bin Laden’s Death
MADELEINE McCann: Day Three of The Sun’s serialisation of Kate McCann’s Madeleine book. And today we learn of Kate and Gerry’s sex life.
The front-page headline informs us:
“I COULDN’T MAKE LOVE TO GERRY”
But now she can? We presume so, although, as yet, details are thin.
KATE McCann today reveals her struggle to have sex and enjoy life again after daughter Madeleine was abducted on a family holiday in Portugal on May 3, 2007.
This might be the world’s first no-shag ‘n’ tell tabloid shocker.
Says Kate McCann:
After Madeleine was taken from us, my sexual desire plummeted to zero.
Yours might be waning, too:
Our sex life is not something I would normally be inclined to share and yet it is such an integral part of most marriages that it doesn’t feel right not to acknowledge this.
One must do what is right. Although how knowing about the parental sex helps the hunt for the missing child seems moot.
To those viewing the sex as just a chance for voyeurs to gawp and gossip at the peep show, Kate McCann has a word to the wise:
To those fortunate enough not to have encountered such heartache, I hope it gives an insight into just how deep the wounds go.
Maybe. Or maybe it’s just that sex sells and the Sun has slapped “love making” on its front page to add a new element to the story that readers have tired of?
Apart from our general state of shock and distress, and the fact that I couldn’t concentrate on anything but Madeleine, there were two continuing reasons for this, I believe.
Go on:
The first was my inability to permit myself any pleasure, whether it was reading a book or making love with my husband.
The second stemmed from the revulsion stirred up by my fear that Madeleine had suffered the worst fate we could imagine: falling into the hands of a paedophile.
Understandable stuff. Worry and stress can affect the libido.
Gerry never made me feel guilty, he never pushed me and he never got sulky.
What did he do?
In fact, sometimes he would apologise to me. Invariably, he would put a big, reassuring arm around me and tell me that he loved me and not to worry.
He never tried it on? He never sulked? He just cuddled? He is not as other men. What was the remedy?
Deep down, though, I knew there were only two solutions: bringing Madeleine back or conquering my mental block.
Well, Madeleine is still missing. So, the mental block was conquered.
She concedes:
No relationship, however strong, can emerge unscathed from what is probably the most painful and terrifying ordeal any parent could suffer. It would be a lie to claim that everything has been plain sailing.
Gerry was functioning much sooner than I was. I felt a tinge of resentment that he was managing to operate and I wasn’t; sometimes I found it almost offensive, as if somehow he wasn’t grieving enough.
But then:
On other days I would feel I was a failure for not being capable of doing as much for Madeleine as he was. It was equally difficult for Gerry. He needed my help and support and I was so consumed by my own grief that I simply couldn’t give anything.
When I finally reached the next rung of the ‘coping ladder’, I could see that my husband’s ability to drag himself up from the hell into which we’d been catapulted was a godsend.
She goes on to say that returning to the family home was comforting; how she was “afraid that people would judge my children and the way I dealt with their behaviour”; how “it is heartening and comforting when shoppers come up to me in the supermarket and say, ‘How are you, Kate? We’re all behind you’”; and how what “remains is a lasting awareness of the terror she [Madeleine] would’ve felt in the disorientating moment she first opened her eyes to find herself with a stranger. I cannot imagine this will ever fade completely.”
And on it goes. And on we read. And the more we read the more we are just watching the parents, as we always have. The story has not moved on one inch.
The Sun realises this. It places the sex on the cover to try to trigger interest in the single thread story it has paid to feature.
But instead of fact and hard news we get mawkish sentiment:
Sometimes the most innocuous and unexpected triggers can set me off: the smell of newly mown grass, or a song I associate with happier days. The hymn On Eagle’s Wings, which Gerry and I chose for our wedding, gets me every time. It was over two years before I could bring myself to play music again. In the end it was the thought of how unfair it would be to deny Sean and Amelie, who loved singing, that got me over that hurdle.
And then this:
I am often asked, “Has your faith been tested? Do you get angry with God?” I do not blame God for Madeleine’s abduction.
God is in the clear:
The abductor is responsible for that.
Adding:
It is said God only gives you a cross He knows you can bear. Well, I’m afraid this cross has been far too heavy for far too long. For now, though, at least, my anger towards God seems to have subsided. I believe in Him and I still feel His presence.
Adding:
There is one thing of which I am confident: I believe wherever Madeleine is, God is with her.
To help us make sense of this, Sarah Sands writes in the Independent:
Nothing eases a mother’s grief – least of all, more death
In this rambling article loaded with keywords, Sands manages to link the death of Osama bin Laden, the thousands murdered on 9/11 and the 52 murdered on 7/7 with the disappearance of a child in Portugal.
[After the 7/7 inquest] Julie Nicholson, whose 24-year-old daughter, Jenny, died in the Edgware Road explosion, explained that she felt that her daughter could now be returned to her. She had been part of a public event, but now the relationship was personal again. “It is finished,” she said. Jenny was restored her to rightful and proper place…
The armed forces, so familiar with death, understand the solemnity of funeral rites. At a recent funeral at Sandhurst, of a soldier killed in Afghanistan, the ceremonial display honoured his human dignity, affecting even his tearful, bewildered children. The lack of knowledge and absence of a body torture Kate and Gerry McCann four years after the disappearance of their daughter Madeleine. Hope can be a cruel thing.
It can be. So can opening your thoughts to the public at large. They read, but what they think is beyond your control.
Is the measure of how much the public wants to know about Madeleine McCann revealed in sales of the book and the newspaper? Do we buy the book and read the words to help the hunt and the parents? Or do we read and watch because we enjoy playing armchair detective, the mourn porn and other people’s pain..?
Posted: 10th, May 2011 | In: Madeleine McCann Comments (7) | TrackBack | Permalink
