Family Affairs and other matters

HOW TO SURVIVE DIVORCE

I wrote this post some time ago, but I’ve been asked to provide an update. As per usual, I am so definitely not in a position to write a post on “How To Survive Divorce” because I am certainly no expert on the matter. Sometimes, even quite far down the line you wonder how you could have got to this position and why certain things still seem so huge. Dividing the sum of your marriage, kids and all is spectacularly painful. Children will always make things seem a million times worse. There are times when you feel you want to climb back into your nuclear family marriage just to make your children’s life feel easier. Of course it helps if you get on. If the financial situation is sorted out so that you are both happy (which is very rare) it helps hugely but the usual default setting is that both the finances and the children are used as weapons of mass destruction and therefore just when you think all is calm something else gets hurled your way. It’s an ongoing battle in our case. Lets hope that doesn’t apply in yours.

ANYWAY. BACK TO THE POINT.

I have my annual advice for those of you considering this daunting prospect. It’s Blue Monday week – the most depressing time of the year so here are some pointers to help you on your way:-

HOW TO SURVIVE DIVORCE (hopefully)

1. Your friends (and family if you’re lucky) will get you through it more than you will ever know. Don’t ever take them for granted but make sure you surround yourself with them wherever possible. They will be there with you on your long journey back out of the black hole.

2. Be prepared. You are in for a long hard slog. Get a good lawyer. Rumour has it that it takes half the time you were married to begin to get over your marriage. If that is too awful a prospect then bank on it taking AT LEAST four years. The first year is almost better than the next one because you will no doubt be a little unhinged and angry in the first year – so try not to behave too irrationally. The second year can be your reality check and it’s all highly depressing because not only are things just as hard but you’re exhausted from Year One. If you’re lucky, by Year Three the drama has died down a bit and hopefully by year 4 you are able to see the wood for the trees and can finally start reassessing your life.

3. In the early days make sure you get out of bed every day. Sometimes your body feels so heavy it won’t move. It would have been so much easier to curl up into a ball, ignore the kids and have a quiet nervous breakdown in a corner somewhere. But it doesn’t work like that. You have to “face the dragon”. Deal with the shit. Go to the meetings. Brush your hair. Remember to eat. Remember to breathe. Pick your kids up from school. Put your make-up on. Fill out that complicated form. Go to that party on your own. Do the stuff you dread. You have to. It will make you stronger and consequently it will all get easier. You will do most of it on automatic pilot and then be amazed with yourself that you got through it. I managed to learn how to be a fitness instructor on autopilot, during my most traumatised time. It saved me from myself.

4. Be kind to yourself. My old school friend wrote to me at the beginning of the whole process. She told me to do just that. To treat myself as if I was going on a date with myself (which frankly had no appeal whatsoever – I hated my own company – thankfully she invited herself along on most occasions which helped hugely). Have a massage, or go to an exhibition or a film on your own.  Put yourself higher up your list of priorities.  Sometimes it pays to be selfish.  Try not to feel sad that you have no one to do things with or to buy you presents, buy yourself some stuff. Treat yourself to things. It’s important. Do the things that give you pleasure and forget the rest. Go on a cooking course, a knitting course, ride wolves, sail, play poker, write a book. Whatever. It. Takes.  Buy a big comfortable bed and spread out in it by yourself.  Learn to enjoy the solitude for a minute.

5. Cut the crap. Don’t go to everything. Do some sifting. Do the stuff that makes you happy for whatever reason. Let go of the social events that no longer work for you and of the friends that take more than they give. Drop the stuff that’s taking up too much time and getting you nowhere.

6. Most importantly keep your sense of humour. You will find that different friends are there at different times and for different reasons. Some can take you out and make you laugh and push you in at the deep end of your new scary life. Others are there for when you find your feet again and want some semblance of normality. It won’t always be funny, but there is always a funny side to be found. A different perspective to look at.

Sometimes, when you look at what is going on in the rest of the world and what other people are going through, having the time and space to mourn for your marriage is almost an indulgence. I am still a very lucky person who has three lovely children and a roof over my head and lots of fantastic friends and lots of lovely stuff to do and, and, and, and another year has gone by in a flash. It’s cold in London at the moment but maybe just try to remember that “in the kingdom of hope there is no winter”.

DIVORCE AND CHRISTMAS

Normally I like to consider myself a feminist. Somebody who is quite capable of doing most things by myself. I try and engender that sentiment into my children at all times and presumably something must be going in. I live with my three children on my own for goodness sake. They know what goes on. I’m not massively good at the tidying up thing or the homework thing. If I had to spend too long doing their homework there wouldn’t be time for anything else. Oh, and I’m pretty crap at the cooking too. I recently discovered that my daughter had sent Builder Bloke a text some time ago saying “please come back, the food is shit!”.

In many ways, life really isn’t too bad without a man. There is no arguing – apart from directly with the children. There is mostly a lot of laughter. My children have had to grow up quickly in lots of ways. They are pretty mature on the whole and very good company. I am definitely closer to them because of my divorce – I guess that’s inevitable when there isn’t a partner you feel you should stand by during an issue with the children.

Anyway, Christmas turned me into a little bit of a sexist I hate to admit and it made me feel a little grumpy here and there. There was no division of girly/blokey labour to be had. It started with the refusing to go and chop myself down a big old tree, carry it home, hack it about and hurl it into a stand and then decorate it. This year I simply put my foot down and went for the black Emo tree (as my kids described it) which my children turned their nose up on every passing I’m afraid to say. My daughter has subsequently provided me with a list of people who have told her they don’t like it. BUT I DON’T CARE. It was easy and I can bring it out next year and have the same argument all over again.

Then the next issue was simply cooking the Christmas meal on my own with no one to carve the turkey or the ham or make the gravy or do the washing up. Or get pissed and fall asleep on the sofa. Or drive us to different venues to see friends later in the day. Or buy all the booze. Or talk to my mother after too many whiskeys. Or wrap all the presents or (most importantly) buy me a present. I had to do it all on my own.

I DON’T WANT TO DO IT ALL ON MY OWN.

Is your Christmas divided along male/female lines or am I being ridiculous here?

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THE BEST LAID PLANS…

Oh. Well that was embarrassing. I’ve just taught a class where I managed somehow to get one of the football sized exercise balls stuck in my hoodie as I was demonstrating a spine stretch. Then I also nearly choked on my chewing gum, stumbled over a few words and quite possibly even killed a few of them with my breath. All because a brief early evening business meeting with my ex husband went a little awry.

Firstly our early evening meeting had to be delayed until we’d taken our daughter to A & E after a series of unfortunate incidents. Just as we arrived at my brother’s house for my children and my mother to meet the latest gorgeous edition to the family, my daughter managed to fall down some stairs (texting and walking at the same time is never a good idea). She was in agony having twisted her ankle. So instead of a peaceful arrival my brother had to come running out, give her a piggy back to the house, find ice, drugs, gel, cut her tights off, get a sick bowl, catch her as she fainted to the floor……all the while my poor sister in law was complaining that even having just had a baby we had STILL somehow managed to trump her on the drama scale. SORRY!! Wasn’t my intention at all.

So then once she’d stopped feeling sick I had to take her to casualty. The first minor incidents hospital we got to had closed one minute before and refused to see her. Next hospital took all her details and sent us round to the children’s ward. “Just to warn you there is at least a 3 hour wait….there are 40 children ahead of you”. FORTY????? How does that happen? Is that normal? Is there a plague? Good grief. “Bollocks to that” I thought, it would have probably been more like a six hour wait so we persuaded her that “RICE” at home (rest, ice, compression & elevation), ibuprofen and lots of attention would be infinitely better than catching a lurgy in Paediatrics. So home we went. Then I left her in the care of her grandmother and went out for what was meant to be a very brief aforementioned business meeting with my ex husband.

Two bottles of wine later I think we reached a some sort of financial agreement and mutual understanding on where the children all are.

It’s just that I can’t quite remember what it exactly we agreed on.

Perhaps this is the way forward.

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MID-LIFE CRISIS? DOES IT EXIST?

I am concerned about a number of my friends at the moment. There appears to be a huge tidal wave of misery coming from all different directions, for lots of different reasons and it’s made me begin to wonder about this stage of our lives.

We are nearly all in our forties. With children growing up. Suddenly things are going a little bit wrong. Our parents are getting sick, our children are less needy and more willful thus generously bestowing on us a vague feeling that we are losing control of our lives and what is more we haven’t really given much thought to how to deal with this stage – the bit in the middle before retirement, old age, slippers and death (hopefully in that order). It is at this crucial stage that many previously happy marriages go a little awry and from my personal experience everything can be blown out of the water and your life can dramatically change…or…..you somehow get through it and come out the other side pretty much intact if a little bruised and a little wiser.

Is this what is known as the classic mid-life crisis? Most of us got married a long time ago now. We met somebody we loved and wanted to spend the rest of our life with and merged and accepted our differences even if we had to compromise massively for the sake of that love. Then we had our children, got on with our jobs and now that we have (mostly) stopped making babies we have more time to look at the bigger picture. Generally speaking we have much to be thankful for – our health, our children’s health, more money, more confidence, less anxiety and so on, but we also have fewer choices because we are tied into marriage and children and responsibility and mortgages and all things grown up and consequently decisions to change our life at this stage may cause pain to many people. Many of us are looking now at what we’ve got and what we’ve achieved with a more critical eye. Is this what we really wanted? Is this really it? Was my ladder of life actually leaning up against the wrong wall? Or have we got to the top and realised we don’t like the view after all or discovered that it is a little lonely and empty up there.

I think what generally happens at this stage is that men and women return to type in middle age. I have two sons and one daughter. They have vastly different interests. My oldest son has a girlfriend and they get on very well but their interests are vastly different – they put up with that of course for lots of reasons. We’ve all been there, done that and it’s perfectly fine until we have stopped feeling the need to procreate the species. Once that period of time is over we can start enjoying the things we enjoyed before we united as a team and it can divide us. We say things like “we aren’t getting any younger”, “you’ve only got one life”, “this isn’t a dress rehearsal” and all those cliches that I hear almost daily these days that are only cliches because they were once “truths”. We are getting closer to death. Becoming more aware of the time we have left. Our hair is falling out or growing in all the wrong places. We don’t have the opportunities we had before. We are more cynical. Less romantic. Grumpy. Middle age is something we come to unwillingly – it’s not a place any of us would necessarily choose to be – it’s not like being 18 or 21 or at university and it is perceived more than slightly negatively. I think it creeps up on us. Then many of us fight against it. Buy inappropriate cars, clothes, some people choose to suddenly live inappropriate deceitful lives.

I have been analysing this stage for some time. This new “phase”. It seems to me that most people look at it with gloom rather than excitement. They feel trapped and consequently start examining the reasons for suddenly losing their way. My husband and I did that and examined and analysed each other and our marriage to death. Initially he said he was depressed about his life – but I question whether it was more to do with the horror of accepting he wanted to change his life. Stir it up a little. The feelings of misery are surely massively tied up with feelings of guilt about not being sure about wanting everything you’ve spent years working towards and building together.

Why do so many of us want to behave like teenagers again? Almost as if we have been cryogenically frozen for the last two decades and then allowed to re-emerge with serious arrested development problems. It was therefore with huge interest that I read an article about David Bainbridge yesterday, who is a clinical veterinary anatomist at Cambridge University and the author of “Middle Age – A Natural History”. He says “men’s interests do not change fundamentally between the ages of eight and 60 – with the exceptions of romance and sex. Instead, all that happens in middle age is that we become once again free to indulge ourselves. We have more money, some time and less fear of ridicule by others”.

He also says “all I know is that when I play Lego with my son I am not enjoying it in some ironic, post-modern way, I am enjoying it in exactly the same way I did when I was 10. So, these pastimes and preferences of middle age are not new found, they are our same old pastimes and preferences” and that to be honest is why I bloody hated playing Lego with my children. I thought it was a rubbish, boring waste of time as a child and I still do.

He believes in middle age as a definite stage of our lives, but he does not believe in the mid-life crisis – “middle age – those two healthy decades after the babies stop – is very real. Only humans have it, we evolved it, and we have enjoyed it for much of our species’ history. And why? We evolved middle age because we have always lived more complex lives than other animals – in the ways we acquire resources, socially and technologically. Unlike most animal parents, we don’t just give our children genes and calories, we give them our culture. That takes time, and quality time, too, which we cannot dilute by churning out yet more babies. We humans are an “information economy” and middle age is the time when we pass on most of that information – this is why middle-aged people like being listened to. So middle age is a very real and distinctive phenomenon, one central to the success of our species – which places it in stark contrast to the mid-life crisis, which turns out not to exist at all”.

I’m not sure I agree with that. The mid-life crisis may not be “a very real and distinctive phemonenon” but there are very real and distinctive triggers that set off a relatively stereotypical crisis amongst both men and women at this time of our lives:- mortality, desire for love, passion, kids leaving home, fear of change, fear of stagnation, money issues, elderly parents issues, boredom and so on and so on…..

It’s just all so sad and predictable. It happened to me. It’s happening to others. Everybody deals with it in different ways and of course because you have to consider your partner – it doesn’t always work out like you want it to. I don’t have any answers or any advice. Maybe if we were all more aware of the stage and better equipped to deal with it then perhaps the ripple effects wouldn’t be so great. Or perhaps we’d learn how to avoid the pitfalls. My life as a single parent is as a direct result of my husband’s actions and the consequences as I saw them. We could have both done things differently. I could have clung onto the sides of our little tin boat in the storm we had created for ourselves, instead of trying to tip it over and drown him whilst throwing lifejackets to my children. Or could I? At the time, I don’t remember his hand being there for me to hold on to. He was too busy holding on to someone else the other side. So. I. Let. Go.

Right or wrong?

I guess we will never really know.

But there is no point in mulling over the “what if’s??”. “It is what it is” (I hate that phrase) as we say and “it isn’t what it isn’t” for a lot of friends of mine at the moment. They have to work it all out. Slowly and painfully. Believe me, I don’t envy them. I wish I could help. But I can’t. I’m here though. For them and for anyone else who wants to drop in and leave a comment. Let me know what you think…..maybe we can make a better plan.

BTW – any of you out there who think I’m talking about you…..I’m not…..it’s somebody else….honest.

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REASONS TO BLOG

SOMETIMES my life goes OFF SCALE mad. It has not been easy of late. I have split up with Builder Bloke but of course because his children and my children are step brothers and sisters there will continue to be a link. I keep hearing things. There is no escape. I have had various child [...]

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11/11/11

Armistice day AND my birthday. WOOHOO. What an exceptionally cool date this year and apparently in India there is a massive rush on for caesarians to be done today so that their babies can be born on what they consider to be the most auspicious date of the century. Not such a massively cool start [...]

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IT’S ALL ABOUT THE CHILDREN

The worst thing for a friend to say to me when I’m having a bit of a shit time is “I know you’re having a bit of a shit time – how are you?” because it totally disarms me. It is usually because I have persuaded myself that I’m not having nearly as shit a time as lots of other people and even the slightest whiff of sympathy is an absolute disaster for me. A friend has just done that – “I’m fine” I told her with an increasingly wobbly voice (Fucked Up, Insecure, Neurotic and Emotional). “The kids are fine. My job is fine. I’m fine on my own, I just don’t feel like going out tonight”. She is understandably worried – not wanting to go out is a total first for me so it’s either a sign that I am suicidally depressed or a sign that I am finally growing up and not feeling the need to run after (or away from) my life.

Yes, of course I’m missing Builder Bloke and I’m having to come to terms with being single again, but there are upsides to not being with him. Most importantly, because of the complicated “wife swap” scenario we were in, it is good to have less stress between my ex husband and me. Conversations and arguments aren’t swooping round and round in four different directions like Chinese Whispers and he has been sympathetic to the situation I have found myself in. So much so that when I had to go and collect my daughter’s art book from his house the other evening his new wife – my children’s stepmother invited me in! It was the first time that I’d stepped over the threshold of the house where my children spend every other weekend and I was very nervous about it. Then she asked me if I wanted a drink. After a slight pause in which I am quite sure she could see me thinking “shit, f*ck, yes, no, HELP!!” I said “yes, why not” and so I sat with her and my ex husband in their kitchen, drinking wine and talking. The situation was strange but surprisingly fine. In fact it was more than fine it was a good thing to do and a major step forward in developing our grown up working relationship on behalf of the six children we have between us. It is obvious that our common bond means that we both want the best for our children and will do all that we can to make sure that happens. We all know that the kids (especially the younger ones) would find it a lot easier if we had a better relationship and certainly down the line there will be events – significant birthdays, graduations, maybe even weddings that we will all need to be at. How much better it will be for all concerned if everyone can be in the same room together being civil. We both know how much stress it will alleviate for our children in the years to come.

I am feeling very grown up and think we all deserve a gold star (presented to us by our children). Although tomorrow’s post will probably be called “It’s All About Me”…

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