Family Affairs

NOT SURVIVING DIVORCE AFTER ALL…..

I am feeling a little jumpy. I had an email from my X yesterday simply saying in writing everything that he had said last week. That he didn’t want to pay me any more maintenance. That he thought it was unfair. That I should get a full time job. I’m not sure what happens next. I guess he has a plan. It seems so wrong that after all the initial battles we had, even three years down the line, when he is about to remarry that I am not allowed to feel calm about my future and my security.

But that isn’t even the reason for my anxiety. This morning was a little stressy. At 7am I had to drive teenage son to school. Come back. Get lunch sorted. Usual stuff. Drive daughter to school. Park and do a 20 minute run with 9 year old son (new regime required – further details another time). Get back home. Get him changed. Get him in to school for 8.30am choir. Late.

Then I went to see the school secretary to book a time for his parent/teacher consultations. Two days ago when my X dropped the kids off I discussed the times with him and he said it had to be as late as possible because he was going to be busy at work. He ticked the slot we had agreed on. However, the secretary told me there were no slots left at that time. So we looked for a different time. She then pointed out that my X had made an alternative appointment just yesterday for a much earlier time with the headmaster – “just for him”.

Why would he do that without telling me? We’ve always done the school/children thing together.

What does he want to talk about regarding our son that I should not know about? Because he is moving away (today) I am paranoid that he has plans to take my youngest child with him. That would break my heart. I have immediately leapt to that conclusion. I hope to god I’m wrong. Is he waiting for me to say that nothing has changed regarding our circumstances, that I still have a primary school child to look after and therefore full time work is difficult, so that he can then suggest he lives with them instead? Can he do that?

STEP SIBLINGS

THEN there is the whole other issue of how my children will deal with their three new step-siblings. SO WEIRD for them to suddenly double their numbers. My daughter is going to be the only girl. Good and bad. I suspect.

My nine year old came back from his weekend with his new family wearing a hideous pink and green plastic bracelet. “It’s a shag band” he told me. “My new step brother has told me that I have to keep it on and that if it breaks I have to have sex with someone”.

Bloody hell. It’s this sort of thing that is going to be a nightmare to manage.

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HOW TO SURVIVE DIVORCE

My divine blog friend in Tanzania called Janelle who writes one of the most extraordinarily moving and wonderful blogs I know – no more so than her last entry about gratuitous violence and the loss of a good man sent me an article a while ago written by someone I like the sound of called Anne Hill. It was all about her thoughts and advice on surviving divorce. I hope she won’t mind if I take a little of what she says and adapt it accordingly, because of course every individual situation is different.

Actually, to be honest, I’m really not sure that I am in a position to write a post on “How To Survive Divorce” because I am certainly no expert on the matter. Sometimes, like today, I can still feel fragmented and tearful. My ex husband is moving away on Wednesday. To his new 6 bedroom house with his new family. To his new life. Even after all this time apart from him it feels strange. The children are unsettled. My daughter said her teacher’s are being very sympathetic – which means she’s milking the situation for all it is worth at school. Things will change. I don’t know how yet. I don’t know if the children will want to spend more time with me because his house is too far away from their friends or less time with me because their all year round heated swimming pool is going to prove to be a major trump card.

ANYWAY. BACK TO THE POINT.

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. 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. 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. You will probably be a bit unhinged and angry in the first year and do irrational things and get drunk far too often. You may even have sex with a virtual stranger and then freak out about it and decide that you have caught some hideous sexual disease. In the second year reality bites 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 (sadly not in my case as ex husband started going out with my boyfriend’s ex wife and caused disaster number 2). By Year Four 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, 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 an entirely new trade 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. It doesn’t take long before sharing it again becomes a bit more difficult….

5. Cut the crap. Don’t go to everything. Do some sifting. Do the stuff that makes you enjoy 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.

For the most part things will get better and easier. I still have my moments where I wonder how I got here – my “Je Regrette Everything” moments, but I guess the heavy pit in the bottom of my stomach gets lighter every year and I’m still here. Still breathing. Still laughing. Still hoping.

Sometimes, when you look at what is going on in 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. But it’s springtime in London and even if it weren’t you might find it helpful to remember that “in the kingdom of hope there is no winter”.

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CAN YOU JUST STOP MAINTENANCE PAYMENTS?

I’m pretty sure that if somebody wants to stop paying you maintenance, they can’t just do it without having a written agreement – can they? I guess you can both come to a solution and subsequent arrangement on your own, but the financial settlement that was agreed with my ex husband was settled via lawyers and stamped by a court so presumably we both have to agree to the change before it happens OR go back to court.

Last night It was time for me to pick up my quarterly payment cheque again. This is a constant problem, but I have not done anything about it because actually I have got a good settlement and so if I have to go and pick it up at 10pm at night it’s not the end of the world. However, what goes hand in hand with the picking up of the cheque is the same old quarterly argument. It started by him saying that his circumstances had changed and that I’d had 3 years of a good arrangement and now it was time for me to get a full time job. His situation is about to change massively and he clearly wants to reduce his outgoings. So now my teeny little job as a part-time exercise instructor isn’t going to be quite enough. I am worried again about finances, but what I have to remember is that he threatens to stop paying me every single time I go and collect a cheque and then I fret about it for ages and actually it would be so much better to avoid those meetings altogether OR maybe I should just hurry up and find myself a proper job so that I can avoid any more tension. Anybody want to employ me?

His house smelt of paint and there were boxes everywhere. He’s moving out next week and into his new house with his wife to be and her children. He’s going to be a lot further away. It’s going to change everything regarding how the children get to see him . Actually it felt very strange. In a way it was just as well that our situation is so unusual and that he’s so angry with me and my ex boyfriend because otherwise I would have been feeling really sad about it – it’s most certainly the end of an era. As those boxes get packed up, the lid will be closed and sealed on any last remaining vestige of our life together. He is literally moving on. I told him that I hoped his move would be a happy one and that he had a calm and peaceful and happy life with someone he loves. I’m slightly worried that living two roads away from Builder Bloke is going to make that pretty difficult….but I suppose that is no longer my concern.

I’m exhausted. Our meeting, as usual went from stressy financial conversation to stressy “why did you waste two years with that Builder Bloke arsehole” type conversation. I pointed out that he was about to start living with “that arsehole’s” three children any minute and that he was going to have to find a way to deal with him. We then successfully managed to negotiate ourselves back to the reason our marriage broke down and I did my usual “you had an affair” stuff and he did his usual “but you drove me away by saying things like you wouldn’t be with me if it wasn’t for the children” and whilst I certainly don’t recall saying that I pointed out that if married couples rushed off to shag somebody else everytime somebody said something horrid in the heat of the moment then David Cameron would need more than a tax break to encourage people to stay married.

It is so sad that after all this time we really have not progressed very far with moving on to a better relationship. We did have it a bit in the middle there, before BB and his ex appeared on the scene and everything went wrong. The anger is now there because of the Builder Bloke situation. At one point he said “according to BB – divorcing me was the best thing you ever did” and I sat there with my mouth open (pouring wine in). Not only do I find it astonishing that BB’s ex wife feels the need to tell him things like that even if it were true, but it isn’t true. I don’t think that. Sometimes I’d like to draw his attention to some of my blog archive posts and see some of the things that I’ve written in the past about the demise of our marriage.

I was going to write a post on “How To Survive Divorce” today, but I think I might leave it because it is quite clear that I’m not doing a very good job.

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DIVORCE PARTIES ET AL

There was an article in the Sunday Times yesterday all about an emerging new industry designed to help us celebrate divorce. Whilst I accept that divorce has now become a lot more common, affecting almost 50% of all marriages I really do have a problem with the idea of divorce parties. Ultimately I [...]

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IS SILENCE THE BEST POLICY?

Silence is to be my chosen course of action regarding the latest drama.  Given the circumstances.  Not sure though. Maybe I should be making my stand very clear.
My X rang me at 12.30am last night.  Incensed.  Things are getting out of hand.  No surprises there.
Last week, he asked me if he could take the children [...]

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“FORGIVE AND FORGET”

John Prescott’s wife of 48 years was reported yesterday in the paper saying that she has still not forgiven him for having an affair with his secretary, “because to forgive is to condone”. Well that’s an interesting thought. Forgiving isn’t condoning in my book – she says she can now “get away with [...]

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