Permission to Visit

Permission to Visit

There was a time when Josephine didn’t need to ask.

She had a key to my home. A key to William’s home. She came and went without question, trusted and welcomed. Her visits were part of our rhythm — Monday in Bray, Tuesday in Dublin, and so on. She was reliable, confident, and familiar. She didn’t need instructions or reminders. She just... arrived.

That all changed after she joined the club in 2008.

Suddenly, she was texting first. “Is it okay if I come up today?”
At first, it seemed thoughtful. Polite. But then it became the rule.
If I didn’t reply, she wouldn’t come. Not because she didn’t want to — but because someone had told her not to.

Even more than that, she started asking me to meet her off the 133 bus in town. Josephine, who used to make that journey without a second thought, now wouldn’t travel unless she had someone waiting on the other end.

She never asked for that before the club.

It was subtle at first. Easy to miss. But when I look back, it was the start of something much bigger — a shift from independence to dependence. From freedom to quiet control.

The club called it structure. Support.
But what kind of support makes someone second-guess her own movements? What kind of system tells her that she must text first, wait for approval, and cancel the visit entirely if she doesn’t get a response?

My locks never changed. My door was still open.
But Josephine, after everything, was made to believe she couldn’t walk through it unless the club allowed it.

They called it the power of membership.
But what I saw was membership with power over people — their time, their routines, their relationships.

And somewhere along the line, they stopped just managing sports and started managing lives.

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