Family Affairs and other matters

THE BLAME GAME

Is “blame” as a concept ever a good thing?

I am the first to admit that blame has featured widely in the breakdown of my marriage and subsequent divorce. It is easy to blame somebody else for your position in life and presumably you can only move forward and away from blame once you have found a way to take responsibility for your own life back into your own hands. I still love blaming my parent for f*cking me up. Everything was their fault. Still is. I even have a badge that says “It’s All My Parent’s Fault”. But really is “blame” in itself of any use at all in life? It’s so easy to find somebody other than yourself to blame in life but is it right?

“A man can fail many times, but he isn’t a failure until he begins to blame someone else”.
William Burroughs

and as Arnold Bennet says:

“There can be no doubt that the average man blames much more than he praises. His instinct is to blame. If he is satisfied, he says nothing, if he is not, he most illogically kicks up a row”.

I feel really upset today. I am missing my youngest son hugely now who I haven’t seen for over a week and haven’t really been sleeping for the last few nights as a direct consequence of the frustrations surrounding my teenage son’s future (oh and having to sleep in a double bed with my mother for two nights hasn’t helped either). My head and heart are pounding constantly as a mass of thoughts about what, if anything can be done swirl around my head. It really is very unhelpful that he’s gone away. We sort of need him here to do a teeny little bit of sorting out the rest of his life. I really wasn’t expecting it to be so stressful, but perhaps that was because we all thought he’d get the grades he the university he wanted.

After being two marks away from the required grade we decided to have the maths and biology re-marked. In maths, instead of choosing one of the cores, we went for all four in a panic because of the time restraints. But we heard on Friday that one core went up two marks, another went down two marks. So no difference. AAAAGHHHH. How frustrating.

It now looks highly unlikely that he will get his place. There is a brief glimmer of hope left but not much. I am doing all i can but the deadline is Wednesday and today is a bank holiday. So not much time to do anything.

Of course with life disappointments such as these we have all regretted not having worked harder, not having read the question better, not allowing so many distractions, not playing so much sport, whatever it may be. I have asked myself the inevitable questions about how much of it was my fault? Should I have made him work harder? Made him go to bed earlier? Made him stay in more? Fed him more brain food? Perhaps that would have made all the difference. But I doubt it. I am not a Tiger Mother. It’s his life, not mine. I did as much as I thought I should. I was supportive and present. I’m sure I could have done it differently, but I didn’t. So what is the point of dwelling on that? He is the one kicking himself now and having to make some other decisions about what to do next.

What I am most upset about though was a conversation with his father last night about how he thinks it is my fault that I didn’t help him manage his time better. Aren’t we supposed to stand together at times like these? I pointed out that blame, at this stage was pointless. “We are where we are and we have to deal with it”. But, of course I then got defensive and pointed out that in my opinion he’d had an incredibly difficult year personally for a number of reasons, including not only his father getting remarried and moving further away right in the middle of his A levels, but the death of his Grandfather – had he not considered what effect those extenuating circumstances might have had on our son and his focus? How much more blame-slinging years do we have in us? Isn’t it time to stop??? Work together? Communicate better?

All I know, is that if he had got the grades he’d needed I would have got no credit at all – it would have been entirely down to him – which is absolutely as it should be – and I must try and remember that (once I have stopped panicking about what to do next).

SO SHOULD YOU PUT YOUR MAN FIRST?

Last week TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp controversially stated that always putting your man first was the key to a successful relationship. She said “if you do what your partner prefers, he is happy and the children have a great time too”.

Do you agree with that?

I don’t. This makes me angry – comments like this. I am all for accepting the wonderful world of gender differences, but frankly this sort of statement takes us right back to the last century. Surely most relationships are now based on mutual respect and equality? If not then on a compromise agreeable to both? Why should one partner expect or deserve to be happier than the other? Is it right that children learn that imbalance from an early age even if outwardly calm and happy?

I did try that approach when I was married – tried to go and watch cricket matches and other sports with the children in tow but it made us all miserable, which admittedly was my fault because I didn’t come from a sporting family and wasn’t used to it. My parents spent every weekend doing stuff together.

Of course, it is quite clear that I am not qualified to comment because I got it all wrong. One writer, in agreement with Kirstie states:-

“I know of couples where the husband commutes to London during the week to work 10 hours per day in order to support the family and then at the weekend gets told by the wife: “No, you’re not going to play golf, it’s your turn to have the kids, I need some “me time”. I am amazed the men stick around to be bossed about. I’m sure most of them are having affairs – in fact, I hope they are poor blighters. If you don’t look after your man, someone else will”.

That really makes me feel sad because that is pretty much what happened to us. I was one of those awful women who when at home with three small children wanted her husband around at the weekends to do family stuff and to spend time together. He did work unbelievably hard and was used to playing lots of sport and needed an outlet. I get that. He did get to do his thing sometimes, but I simmered with resentment because I couldn’t do my thing. It was just a bad time and we didn’t manage to sort it out. Small children make everything go wrong for a minute and to be honest I thought I was working unbelievably hard as well – or at least it felt like that at the time.

I hadn’t realised that there are actually women out there encouraging men to have affairs the minute the going gets tough. Writers like the one above who justify breaking up a marriage at this precarious time, because it’s all the woman’s fault. What about the women who work full time as well?

Where do the same sex partnerships stand on this issue? Is one assigned the job of resident doormat for their relationship to survive? Or is it actually supposed to be just what it says on the packet – a PARTNERSHIP. Where both strive to understand, sympathise, empathise and compromise their way through the messy thing we call life.

Surely it’s all about communication? We are equal partners here trying to find a way to make it work. Women who stay at home to look after the children are more inclined to feel they have to do what their man says, in my limited experience and very often this comes down to who is in financial power – but even then it’s got to be a compromise that works both ways. It is very very difficult. I’m quite sure we weren’t really designed to live together when bringing up kids. Quite frankly most friends I know would have been much happier living in a commune with women and many children all eating and playing together. The men could then have played sport to their hearts content and gone to the pub. We could all have shared babysitting duties and had a sex rota to meet your partner at least twice a week.

It is not easy raising a family and trying to focus on your relationship at the same time. I know that from personal experience. But my advice is that you have to work at it and you have to be honest and talk about it and most importantly of all, make it very clear to “your man” and any of those women apparently waiting in the wings to pounce on “your man” that it would be very very stupid to do anything rash before your youngest child is five. You shouldn’t give up, shouldn’t wander off. If you married for love you should stick with it – because warped as it might be in the middle years of change and nappies, it will get better as the kids get older. Everybody gets their life back and it gets better.

There we are then. That’s my view. Biased as hell. What do you think?

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DIVORCE SUPPORT

I have noticed that there seems to be a distinct lack of relevant support for me online regarding issues relevant to be divorced. It’s not a major problem – I have relied on my friends and family (and of course the expense of a lawyer) but it would be good to know that there are [...]

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MARRIAGE, ADULTERY & DIVORCE

Apparently there are fewer couples divorcing now that at any time since 1974. Why is that? I have read a few theories of late.

One suggested that it was because, for Generation X born between 1965 and 1980 they were so traumatised that many of their own parents got divorced they attempt to avoid doing the same thing themselves. She describes this new breed of “helicopter parents” as those that “having survived the wreckage of split families were determined never to inflict such wounds on our children and the fundamental premise was simple: Kids come first”.

Another theory is that couples simply can’t afford to divorce anymore. Extortionate divorce fees and a difficult housing market means that couples are being forced to live together despite ending their relationship. I know a few couples who are “saving up for divorce” because they can’t afford two houses.

Currently a third of marriages end in divorce. I heard recently that another third stay together happily married and the final third stay together unhappily married. That is a little depressing – only a third of marriages are happy? Really? I suppose expecting to love and cherish your partner and be loved in return is a pretty big ask and bringing up a happy family is not at all easy. Are modern marriages therefore extraordinary in the expectation that to be happy with the same person over an entire lifetime is still entirely possible?

I wonder if both theories apply. Certainly those friend’s I have whose parents divorced work very hard to keep their marriages together – I guess if you went through the trauma as a child you would see divorce from a very different perspective. My parents had a very happy marriage so I wasn’t scarred. Perhaps that did affect my decision making process.

Do you think our expectations for what makes a good marriage are too high? A 2003 study by the psychologist Shirley Glass found that the mores of sexual infidelity are undergoing a profound change. The traditional standard for men – “love is love and sex is sex” is dying out. Increasingly, men and women develop serious emotional attachments with their partners long before they commit adultery. As a result, she found, “infidelity today is much more likely to lead to divorce”.

I am quite surprised about that because although that is exactly what happened to my marriage I know a lot of marriages who seem to get through an affair – not necessarily very successfully, but they are still together.

Hmmm. Interesting food for thought.

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NOT WAVING, DROWNING…..

It’s Friday night. My youngest son is now asleep upstairs. It’s quiet. Unusually so for my house. Teenage son is still away and probably at a tattoo parlour somewhere in the world and my daughter has gone to a party.

I am trying to find a space in my life to think and work some stuff out and make some decisions, but it’s virtually impossible. Nothing feels right at the moment. I am living in a war zone and can’t find any peace. It shouldn’t be like this. Lots of concerned friends have been advising me and trying to help sort out my “plight”. The advise couldn’t be more varied but I can’t seem to find a way to pull together the bits that are going to work for us all so that we can just get on with living.

I’ve had very little sleep this week owing to too much wondering and worrying. Perhaps because my blog voice has gone temporarily quiet and timid I’ve been writing notes through the night when awake. The sort of notes that at the time you think are EXTRAORDINARY. Little golden nuggets of thought. This morning, however, was a different matter.

I had written:

“Big muffs are it, like habitat”.

WTF was I talking about? Complete and utter rubbish.

Anyway, here are the top 10 things I’ve been advised to do this week:-

1. Fictionalise the blog.
2. Name and shame everybody concerned. Myself included.
3. Stand firm and do not lose faith in myself and belief in what I am doing.
4. Don’t lose your nerve, you are bigger than this.
5. You are doing others as well as yourself a service.
6. Split up with Builder Bloke (again).
7. Delete the blog.
8. Sell up and move away from everybody involved except my children.
9. Leave the country.
10.Get drunk.

So apart from Number 10, I don’t know what to do. I really don’t. Number 2, the name and shame option was given to me by a lawyer, but I think that’s silly advise. Extreme and unnecessary and not at all why I am bothering to write a blog in the first place.

I wish my father was still here. He’d tell me what to do.

I mistakenly asked my brother for advise in lieu of my father. He replied “to be honest, I really don’t know what you should do, but you’re right, your blog is really very dull at the moment – sorry”.

FUCK.

HELP.

DROWNING.

It’s not just about the blog. It’s about my situation. The adults are all fighting. Which is SO bad for all the children. It’s not healthy. We should all be able to find peace in our lives without this constant four way drama. To my mind, at the moment it mostly seems to come down to money. Does everything ultimately come down to money?

“If someone says, it’s not the money, it’s the principle, it’s the money” said Kin Hubbard. Is that true? Is money the root of all evil? Or is “the lack of money the root of all evil” as Mark Twain said (didn’t he say a lot of clever things?).

MAINTENANCE.

It is this that appears to be causing the main problem at the moment. I can see both sides. I feel sorry for my ex husband because not only does he have to pay me maintenance for our children but he has to support his new wife and her three children. I also feel sorry for Builder Bloke because he doesn’t have any work. He can’t pay to support his children which is not a good thing. He doesn’t like the fact that his children are supported by my ex husband, but he can’t even pay to keep his phone regularly on at the moment, so there’s not much he can do about it. The extremes in our situation are causing gaskets to blow, left, right and centre. Maintenance is being used as a power tool and it’s a shame.

Are there any solutions I wonder?

Any suggestions gratefully received.

And my thought for the day taken from my Buddhist Offerings book is entirely relevant to all involved:-

“We really don’t want to stay with the nakedness of our present experience.
It goes against the grain to stay present. There are times when only gentleness and a sense of humour can give us the strength to settle down”.

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DIVORCE HOW TO – DO HOLIDAYS

This is proving to be an ongoing nightmare. You would think by now that I’d have got a little more used to the stress of sorting out holidays with and without the children now that I’ve had a few years practice in being divorced.

This year feels almost like the worst so far. I don’t know why that is. I have left it all to the last minute because I didn’t have everybody’s dates available until now. Perhaps its because of all the uncertainty and stress going on around me or perhaps it’s because my oldest child had made lots of plans himself which I have had to take into consideration. OR perhaps it’s just because, like many people this year I don’t seem to have enough money for an overseas holiday with the children. Everything, especially flights are so expensive, which is odd given that Portugal has just been downgraded to “junk status” (which seems just rude to me) and Spain and Italy risk being drawn in to the deepening eurozone crisis if a Greek default does indeed cause a market meltdown. Italy is of major concern at the moment as yields on Italy’s government debt hit their highest levels yesterday for nearly a decade.

So. I still haven’t sorted out my summer plans. Which is frustrating me. Especially given that my kids have already broken up from school and those endless weeks ahead seem to just looooom in a vast empty expanse of mouths saying “I”M BORED!! THERE’S NOTHING TO DO. WHAT ARE WE DOING TODAY?” . I need to make some plans. Various friends have invited us away with them but for the most part the dates sadly haven’t worked – either I’ve been invited to go away without the children when I have them or vice versa.

Builder Bloke always, always goes to Portugal. It’s where he has a family villa. This year for the first time he doesn’t have access to it, which has caused huge problems for him because his children love going there. We were both looking at places nearby to rent but have recently discovered that their father and his new wife have chosen Portugal for their holiday destination so now I don’t want to go. Not because I’m being childish, but because I genuinely don’t think it’s right for the kids to have two weeks with us and a week with them in the same country – it doesn’t make sense. To me it feels like the worst sort of competitive parenting and we’ve been there, done that in the first year of divorce when we both took them away several times.

Also, because they’re having a foreign holiday and then a UK holiday with their father, do they actually need a third big one with me? I don’t think so. I would love to go somewhere where we can have a good time together and get away (as long as it doesn’t involve camping in any way shape or form, unless it’s at a festival), but maybe they’d be just as happy staying at home and having a quiet time. Personally I’d like to take them to an Orangutang sanctuary – shame all the bloody orangutangs live so far away.

THEN I’ve got the dilemma of what to do when I’m on my own for the two separate weeks they are away on holiday. MUCH cheaper to get just myself somewhere, but where? What to do? Again, I will probably go and stay with some friends – it’s important to be busy when the kids are away or I will just mope about wondering if they’re coping without me. I’m on a waiting list for a writing course, but would quite like to go and walk in China or climb a mountain or do something cultural or not do something cultural and lie on a beach for a week – I might even be ready to go and do something by myself as long as it’s in a group of “single” (and I say that in the loosest possible terms – not partnerless necessarily – it would have to include those people who don’t like going on holiday with their partner, have different interests, different holiday times, bla bla)…

Anyone got any bright ideas?

I would also be interested to know if anybody has any useful tips for helping the kids get through the minefield of divorced/separated parents and their holiday plans. Arianna Huffington, for example wrote an article about how she and her ex husband successfully manage to go away together with their children every summer and Christmas. I wonder if that would work in our case. Perhaps I should suggest it. All six kids would be happy, their parents would all be in the same place, albeit with swapped around partners. Hmmm.

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PEDICURES

Phew. My youngest child had his 11th birthday yesterday and I think he had a good day. I worry more about their birthdays since I have been divorced for obvious reasons. It is hard to get it right. To know whether to attempt to all get together or work out a way for him to see both parents separately without feeling anxious. Last year the five of us went out for a meal, this year, I’m not sure we would have managed that.

Apart from anything else, both his older siblings are away on holiday so it was just him and me in the morning and I was really worried he would be upset. His missing brother and sister had gone to great lengths to make him feel special and I was impressed. The 18 year old had actually bought him a card and a present. He’d apologised for being away and offered him 2 x tennis lessons and 2 x personal training sessions in addition which was very sweet. My daughter texted him throughout the day. He’d had his party the week before when we were all together and my mother was here – a movie party with the surprise arrival of the inordinately popular ice cream van, complete with that wonderfully evocative plinky plonky music that immediately makes me salivate. It even brought out neighbours on my street to buy ice creams. As somebody who has managed to get through a lot of children’s parties (43 and counting) I would HIGHLY recommend the Movie Party. All you need is a good DVD, individual bags of popcorn and sweets and somebody to keep popping into the room to calm them down. Then, for the most part you can sit about in another room with your friends and family being smug that you don’t have to do much (apart from hoover up much popcorn at the end). After the film you give them all a hot dog and a piece of cake and send them on their way. Job done. They all loved it.

So. His birthday list went something like this:-

Gun
Money
Exploderz (Watergun)
Phone
Fishy Feet
Boxing lesson (private)
Surprises (lots)
Small presents
Money

He didn’t get a gun. His uncle bought him a fab water gun and he did get his phone. He also got a boxing lesson and a few surprises – I bought him a pack of Arsenal playing cards, although, much to his disgust it turned out to be Liverpool so I must go and sort some glasses out for myself soon.

We went out for breakfast to Giraffe which is a brilliant restaurant with kids for breakfast. We always have the pancakes. Then we went and bought his new phone and after that we had the fishy feet experience he had requested. A pedicure given by loads of tiny little fish. SO WEIRD. The first 30 seconds were slightly horrific. Tickly and unusual. I wasn’t sure, but got used to it. What would happen, I wonder, if you accidentally fell asleep with your feet in the water and woke up the next morning. Would they have carried on eating all your dead skin until you were left with skeleton feet? I was, I have to say slightly worried that they would all float to the top having gorged on all my dead skin, but they seemed to cope admirably. Not sure I liked the idea of another person having to put their feet in that water. Yuk. It worked though. My feet feel very smooth. My son enjoyed it hugely, just for the experience so that was good.

I actually can’t show you a picture of my feet taken from above because they are so revolting, so here is a shot taken of a friend’s feet instead:-

and here is my son’s hand in the water being nibbled:-

After that we went home and set up his phone. His father arrived to collect him at 4pm and off he went to spend the evening with his new family. I think it all worked well for him. He’s come a long way this year. After a dodgy start at his new school it all fell into place and I think he’s feeling pretty happy with life at the moment. He’s managed to lose a lot of weight too. Sheer willpower and some positive reinforcements have helped. He was ready to make it happen, which is half the battle.

Last weekend I had 10 EXTRA people staying overnight – it was a massively busy weekend. But in about an hour his father is going to pick him up for the weekend and I’m going to be on my own. From one extreme to the other. I know which one I prefer, however, I’m exhausted so I might just sleep all weekend.

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