Advertisement
Guest User

Untitled

a guest
Jan 26th, 2020
814
0
Never
Not a member of Pastebin yet? Sign Up, it unlocks many cool features!
text 16.91 KB | None | 0 0
  1. Last Christmas I left my family, my husband and my four children, to be with my lover. It was something I had considered, dreamt about and, finally, acted on. I had envisaged something cinematic, dramatic, high stakes. In the end, it was very small-screen. Almost funny in its middle-class sensibility. Everyone knew what was going on. My now ex-husband cooked everyone a hearty meal. Poached eggs and smashed avocado. The last brunch. Then he lined up the children, our children, so I could say goodbye to them. He stood there while I did this act, tears pouring down my cheeks, unable to speak. He watched silently. Then he took the children off shopping. The door slammed. I watched them walk off in a little group. Then I took out my suitcases and packed my clothes. Dresses, suits, skirts. They looked meaningless to me. I opened the drawers and robotically took out socks, underwear, anything. One of my drawers was, however, achingly resonant. It was full of “special” baby clothes: tiny knitted cardigans, Brownie uniforms, a bridesmaid’s dress, a hand-painted T-shirt. I couldn’t face packing them. Throwing them away was unthinkable. I left them in the drawer and left a note for my husband to keep them safe. Two months later, when I revisited the house, I opened the drawer. It was empty.
  2.  
  3. Once I had packed a few suitcases I looked around the house, in order to keep busy more than anything else, and added a few things to the pathetic pile of belongings in the hall. The odd picture. A plant. No mirrors. My face was so ugly from crying. My bicycle. I only had to go two miles up the road to a house my partner had rented, so I decided to cycle, and called an Uber for my belongings. When the car arrived, I was terrified that the neighbours would see what was going on, so I beckoned the driver into the house and almost threw the cases at him. Eventually, the car was packed up. He looked at his watch. “I’m sorry, madam,” he said. “Packing all this lot up has taken too long. I have been allocated another job. I need to unpack the car.” I stared at him. “What?” I said. “You have to take this stuff,” I hissed at him. “I will give you £50 cash.” He acquiesced. We left my road in funereal fashion, me riding my bike in front of the car, which came purring behind me. What a moment.
  4.  
  5. Since then, I have had a year like no other. My Google search history summarises it. If I tap “How to …” into my phone, the first thing that comes up is: “How do I open a car with the Zipcar app?” The second thing is: “How do I cope with grief after losing my children through divorce?” Because for women there is no pathway.
  6.  
  7. I try to hang on to the trappings of parental normality. At times it’s like trying to inflate bits of a balloon after it has exploded. Today is my daughter’s 14th birthday. At 7am I wished her happy birthday via a phone call. I then wrapped all her presents, and I am about to bake her a cake and decorate it with candles and flowers. My children are all living with my ex-husband.
  8.  
  9. I am one of nearly 20% of women who do not have custody of the children after a divorce. To use a familiar analogy, he is the remainer. I am the leaver. Our children are staying in what the courts refer to as the matrimonial family home (MFH). I come back to the MFH to stay at arranged times, to look after my children. This is a legal arrangement. I visit the MFH at arranged times to cook my children supper. This is also a legal arrangement. Whenever I walk to the MFH, a house I still half own, in order to fulfil these legal arrangements, I hold my mobile to my ear and pretend to be on the phone because I simply cannot bear the looks and gossip from the neighbours. It is clear that leaving a marriage, for a mother, is still frowned upon. Particularly if you have left your husband for another man.
  10.  
  11. Things are not as bad for me as they were for Mrs Caroline Norton, who left her husband in 1836 having had an affair with the then prime minister, Lord Melbourne. “Naughty” Mrs Norton was denied access to her three sons and went on to campaign for the rights of divorced mothers. Thanks to her intense and galvanising pressure, the Custody of Infants Act 1839 was passed, and for the first time gave divorced women in England and Wales the right to see their children. However, nearly 200 years after Mrs Norton demanded fairness, the overarching sensibility is still that, in most instances, for a married woman to leave her husband is abnormal, antisocial and must be punished.
  12.  
  13. “You can see the children any time you like,” says my ex-husband. Yes, but nursing a flat white in Pret a Manger with a sullen teenager is not the same as dealing with a sullen teenager in the kitchen. Or, as Mrs Norton wrote: “Those dear children, the loss of whose pattering steps and sweet occasional voices made the silence of [my] new home intolerable as the anguish of death.”
  14.  
  15. My new home is more than tolerable, but being separated from my children and the social punishment that came with leaving my husband is sometimes overwhelming. One has to look quite carefully into the weekly haul of celebrity interviews to find classy role models of divorced mothers who are not only still coparenting and smiling, but doing so with another man by their side. Gwyneth Paltrow has done it. So has Kate Winslet. Even Baroness Hale, she of the spider brooch (and a lawyer who has done much to get the upcoming “no fault” divorce enshrined in law), has achieved it. Reading their accounts helps me. I don’t care if it’s PR spin. It helps. But other interviews in the papers are not so welcome. I read one by a man who explained his mother killed herself, overcome by grief after leaving her family.
  16.  
  17.  
  18. DANIEL LIEVANO
  19. Culturally we are exposed to countless heartwarming, romantic images of solo dads successfully coparenting outside the family nest; cinema even has a named genre, Divorced Dads, to acknowledge this. Robin Williams’s Mrs Doubtfire is only the most obvious example. Think Manhattan, Definitely, Maybe and, the daddy of them all, Kramer vs Kramer. Isn’t Dustin wonderful? Isn’t Meryl a witch? Even in Avengers Endgame, we see how Ant-Man does it, with smiles and hugs all round and acceptance from his daughter for his new partner (the Wasp). I can’t think of any cultural imagery showing a woman with a new partner successfully looking after her children outside the charmed circle of the MFH. All the films about divorced women, and there aren’t many, seem to be about how a gutsy solo woman copes when a man leaves her for a younger version. Let’s not even think about Hamlet.
  20.  
  21. Aha! You shouldn’t have left the MFH, says my ex, with righteous indignation. “You can’t have it all ways. You are the one who had the affair, you know.” Correct. I left a marriage that had fizzled out in order to be with the love of my life. I swapped sneaking around for a life of integrity. I demanded to be happy and fulfilled. I stopped sleepwalking through a marriage and left my husband. I have, however, not left my children. I love them totally and now I love them from a position of honesty, not from the standpoint of having an affair. I am also obliged to love them from a distance and from a position that is regarded as shameful by many.
  22.  
  23. Change is always tough, but putting social shame into the mix makes it quite a different ball game. Particularly as I am not the person who has custody of our children. Why not? It’s simple. I am the adulterous one. No-fault divorce settlements are on their way, thanks to the work of Baroness Hale, but they haven’t quite yet arrived. So I am carrying the can. The children are not allowed to see my new partner. I am invited to parties on my own. Why? Forty two per cent of marriages end in separation. I am not the first woman to leave a marriage, and I won’t be the last. But the social opprobrium that fell on Mrs Norton for walking out is still in the air, like a bad smell that won’t go away.
  24.  
  25. My old university tutor summarised what I suspect a lot of people think. A month after I left, he sent me a handwritten letter of biblical intensity. “Do you know what you are doing? You will miss out on all the important things of being a parent,” he thundered. “The first boyfriend, the first driving lesson. Homework, anxieties, laughter. Your children will always know you as the mother who walked out on them.” I’m quoting from memory as I have destroyed the letter.
  26.  
  27. “Oh, your poor husband” is basically the summary of it. Friends look at me with sad eyes and tell me they are going to go round to cheer up my ex-husband. They bring food round, as if he is an invalid. They invite him over for Sunday lunches. Female friends cluck round the children, imagining them to now be “motherless” and declaring themselves fit for the job. One of my oldest friends actually lied to me about when she was going on holiday to Italy because she intended to invite my ex and my children to go away with her instead. People envisage him with pity, perhaps cooking with an apron on, sweating over a hot stove, cleaning the bathtub, dealing with homework.
  28.  
  29. Yesterday I stumbled upon a text I sent to my ex in those dark, early days of divorce. I think I had arranged to take the children out and he had forbidden it. “If you don’t allow me to see the children I will die,” I wrote. “I have nothing against you seeing the children,” he replied suavely. “It’s just that they have such a lot of homework and music practice to do.” As if I have never sat helping them with their homework or going through their scales.
  30.  
  31. Hearing a child laughing along the road or seeing a family out shopping together would at first prompt floods of unstoppable tears. Friends came across me in Sainsbury’s, crying in the cereal aisle. “You are in the middle of swimming across the Channel,” said one, finding me wandering around Muji, red-eyed. “You’ve left the beach behind you and you are a long way from the other side. Keep swimming. You’ll get there eventually.” The summer holidays were dreadful: everyone I had ever known was posting idyllic photos of happy family holidays on every single social media platform possible. I gently muted as many as I could and, in the end, left the sites.
  32.  
  33. I have discovered quite a lot of other things, being the leaver. Many, many other women are struggling to do the same thing. Many have done. The Office for National Statistics puts it more baldly: apparently 62% of divorces between heterosexual couples are initiated by women. In America, it’s closer to 80%. Even though they run the gamut of social disapproval by demanding change. As one newspaper article has it: “Women are more likely to have the balls to call time on a failing relationship; men are more likely to simply wait to be told it’s over.”
  34.  
  35. Perhaps encouraged by my actions, girlfriends confide in me that they wish they could act similarly. Many of them envy me having the trigger of falling in love with someone else. Many say they have never been in love with their husband, that he bores them, that they have no sex. Not many people my age are having sex, it seems. I listen, but I don’t encourage them. It’s too much responsibility for me. Leaving a family is such an enormous action that it can only be precipitated by a profound personal choice, one that in my case took years to pluck up the courage to make.
  36.  
  37.  
  38. DANIEL LIEVANO
  39. In the end, it was the juggernaut of Christmas and new year that did it for me. Someone told me all marriages end at Christmas, and I now know why. It’s such a signal mark of time. Every year I would say to myself “next Christmas I will have done it”, and every year I never did. Well, this year it would be different, I thought. I read a poem by Christopher Logue called Come to the Edge, which envisages two people leaping off a cliff. It ends “and they flew”. What happens if we fly, I thought. What happens if doing the unspeakable is actually the best thing, not just for me and my loved one, but for my family, including my ex-husband? What happens if by ending it I start something new, and good? That’s what powered me on.
  40.  
  41. To anyone reading this who fantasises about doing the same thing, I have to warn you. You have to keep your eyes on the distant future, and strongly envisage happiness, because the present day is fearsome. It is worse than leaping off a cliff. It is about as comfortable as having boiling oil thrown over your head, when you are the one doing the throwing. I have a very good imagination, but nothing I could imagine was so horrendous and painful as it was in reality. It is a two-parter of horror. The first hurdle is telling everyone. Telling my husband was easy, a relief even. Telling the children was painful beyond belief. Walking into their rooms and starting to speak, knowing that they would remember the next five minutes for ever. Looking into their beautiful blue eyes and knowing I was hurting them. Knowing that I was about to bring down an iron curtain between then and now. Willingly issuing in irrevocable change. Afterwards, everyone was pretty silent. And tense. The next thing? The next thing was actually physically leaving.
  42.  
  43. Of course, having your children leave you is one of the things that comes to all parents, eventually. In the normal course of things you hope they all will fly the nest. But it takes years and is usually done gradually, not in a moment of agony on the stairs. I know that much of what I am tormented by is nostalgia; my children left primary school years ago and don’t need to be lifted in or out of the bath by me any more. However I am tormented by the fact that I am being wiped from their memory banks because I am not around to remind them I exist. When I do visit the MFH, various photos of me and the children are not on the walls any more. I am being slowly erased from the house, like someone who fell out with Stalin. This makes me unbearably tense and also weirdly insistent on my position as mother, albeit mother without portfolio.
  44.  
  45. Meals out with the children are hard work, both for them and for me, because I want everything to be perfect, maternal and loving. All the time. If I take them on holiday, it has to be ideal. Photographs, all the time. Focus, all the time. It is wearing for me and worrying for them. If anything goes wrong — a restaurant is shut, or a train is late — I behave as if it is my fault. I am riddled with guilt, even guilt about traffic on the M6.
  46.  
  47. Was I always like this? Of course not. I used to hope I was a great feminist role model because I worked full time, often away from home. I was the breadwinner, the high earner, the successful one. As well as the adulterer. Can a woman morally justify occupying two positions at once? Can one be the engaged worker and also be the one having the affair? Does she have to?
  48.  
  49. My husband’s work was no less important, or interesting, but as a university lecturer his was far less frenetic. He was at home more, and usually did all the cooking for the children. He insisted on doing it anyway, at all times. “You are so lucky,” people would say. “He allows you to work.” Quite apart from the shocking sexism of that statement, it wasn’t quite true. If he had not wanted to cook, I would have done so. Or organised something else. In the aftermath of our marriage, this division of duties has been turned into something quite different. What I thought was an inspirational example of a woman working is now seen by my husband as “neglect”. “You spent all your time working and when you weren’t working, you were shagging someone else, neglecting the children,” he told me.
  50.  
  51. And yet. I have jumped the chasm and I am on the other side. I have done what I had to do. I am living with integrity and happiness. I am living with the man I ought to have been with when I first met him. No, I am not going to kiss my children every night as I always did for 20 years. But I am not going to live with aching regret. And I am going to achieve another relationship with them. And here, advice from friends who have divorced parents has been crucial. Do it with love, don’t slag off your ex, be nice about him, don’t throw plates at him, don’t chip away at him, don’t deny him any money, allow him to go on holidays with your relations, don’t mind when your former in-laws never speak to you again. All that. Furthermore, don’t mind when your children are angry with you, don’t rise to it when they tell you they don’t want to see you, that they don’t like you, that they don’t want to eat the birthday cake that you made them, that they hate your new man and that they don’t want to see you at Christmas. “Keep loving them unconditionally,” says a close friend. “Just keep loving them. All the time. Keep the door open. Keep the line unbroken. Always.” I do, I do. It is. Always.
  52.  
  53. THE FACTS
  54. 62% of divorces between heterosexual couples are initiated by the wife
  55. 70% of custody court applications are made by fathers
  56. 42% of marriages end in divorce, half failing within the first 10 years (source for statistics: ONS)
Advertisement
Add Comment
Please, Sign In to add comment
Advertisement