“I wonder if it’s possible to have a love affair that lasts forever?”
Andy Warhol

“I have just come back from the most amazing trip to France. Having recently separated from my husband and it being ‘his weekend’ with my children, I decided to go and see an old friend from University. Whilst sitting by her gorgeous pool, chilled rose in hand and a much needed awful trashy novel that I couldn’t put down, her husband’s brother popped by to borrow her laptop. I’d met him before, years ago. Had always fancied him. In fact we had a bit of a fling way back then. Rather like a scene from “Desperate Housewives”, (although sadly I look nothing like any of them except perhaps the old lady) my book was put down, body covered up and I had eyes or thoughts for no one else. We chatted, we laughed, we drank wine, it got dark, he wrapped his jumper around me, he cooked, we danced, we sang and we went to bed. I can honestly say that I have never had an experience like it. I felt so free. Such passion, so right, so amazing. Even the way he held my hand made me want to kiss him even more. The feel of his skin on mine, the loss of inhibitions, feeling like you fitted in someone’s arms and that the roof could cave in and as long as your hands didn’t separate then you could deal with anything.

Sadly, I am now home. Every time he texts me, my stomach falls to the floor. I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, I can barely even breathe and when I try and close my eyes I run through each delicious moment with him. I feel more alive than I have ever felt, I can’t stop smiling (is this why the crinkliest, prettiest old ladies are so happy? Did they find a passion that lasted their lifetime and the lines on their faces are from pure blissful happiness?)

In my heart, I know it was a holiday thing and that I’m behaving like a lovesick teenager and yes, I know I’ve only just separated, but tell me someone please, can this passion, the way someone makes you feel last forever? Or do I have to settle for companionship the next time around?”

I wasn’t sure how to reply. I’m not sure myself. How many people in life manage to maintain the passion? Surely it doesn’t take long before you move on to a different level. A calmer level. A level that can be maintained through the years. If you have extreme passion, won’t you blow up? Be unable to function in the wider world. If you find your soulmate, somebody who makes you laugh, understands you, thinks you are beautiful then maybe, just maybe, you can maintain the passion. But I’m not sure I can think of many long term couples who still kiss passionately. It’s what we all want but life very often gets in the way. Children are the biggest passion killers in my experience. So maybe, if you meet after you’ve had your children it can be possible, because you go back to being yourself again, to a degree.

OH I DON’T BLOODY KNOW. HELP!

It’s been great coming to the other side of the world and catching up with some old friends and family. My uncle and aunt came for lunch over the Easter weekend, with their daughter, my cousin. We used to spend a lot of time together when I lived here last.

Last night we had dinner with an old friend at her new house. I hadn’t even met all her children, let alone seen her new house or caught up properly on the last 10 years of news. It was just great. Again, I thought it might be hard because when I lived here, in what seemed like another life, with my husband, she and I spent a lot of time together. In fact, there was a group of us. About 5 couples and for a time we all did stuff together. We were very close during that time and being away from family meant that everybody put themselves out much more for each other and we relied heavily on each other.

Instead, last night, she made me laugh. She admitted to finding it strange to see me back on my own, that she couldn’t quite believe that it had all happened. That she found it extraordinary that our marriage had broken down, “I mean after that HUGE favour you did him, I can’t believe that he had an affair”, she said. “What favour?” I asked her. “MARRYING HIM of course” she exclaimed. “you were SO much cooler than he was, working for a record company and all that stuff, I mean the Pet Shop Boys even bought you a wedding present”….

It made me feel a little better for a minute, even if it wasn’t true.

She talked about the dementia her mother in law had. Apparently the frontal lobe of her brain has been affected and it makes her behave a bit like a teenager…..quite worryingly, by the end of her list of symptoms, which included strange sleep patterns and odd behaviour, I decided that I may have the same form of dementia.

I do struggle with the concept of forgiveness – I wrote a post on it once quite a long time ago – in response to a request from another blogger. More to do with whether it’s possible to forgive and forget but here it is again in case anybody is interested in letting me have their views on what it means to forgive…..

“A fellow blogger “MOB” has asked me to write about whether or not I believe in the concept of “Forgive and Forget”.

I used to think that forgiveness was a lovely idea until I had something to forgive, then it became a lot more difficult. It puzzles me slightly – the whole idea of forgiveness. Once you have forgiven somebody for whatever wrongdoing they have done, are you supposed to feel better? Or are they the ones who are supposed to benefit? Or is it a symbiotic relationship? It has that element, for me anyway, of the “forgiver” being allowed to feel slightly more superior than the “forgivee” – to forgive somebody you are almost rising above and looking down….perhaps that’s why, for me, it works best as a religious concept.

To forget? Not sure. I forget lots of things these days because I’m getting old and alcohol is slowly blurring my memory cells. But important things? Even things that really really hurt…why would you forget them? Deal with them, yes. Box them, yes. Learn from them, yes. Move on from them, yes. But being aware of them and even remembering them from time to time seems to me like progress. You learn from experience. To block out those experiences seems pointless to me. You need to confront them and try to understand them, live with them and grow from them.

ANYWAY….the point was that MOB wants to know why the concept of “forgive and forget” was so huge and difficult for me….I won’t bore you with ALL the details (check out my post called “Marriage and Motherhood” if you want to know more) , but I will have to briefly explain the situation so that you can see why our mutual lack of forgiveness was so damaging.

“It is easier to forgive an Enemy than to forgive a Friend”.
William Blake

He was my best friend. When best friends do something really bad it is very hard to forgive them because you feel so unbelievably let down and betrayed. I had thought we had the perfect life. Three beautiful, healthy children and a lovely home. My husband had a good job and I therefore had the luxury of being able to give up my job to stay at home to bring up the children. That isn’t to say that I was deliriously happy all the time…I had my low grade resentments – sometimes I found being at home all day immensely dull, sometimes I wished I could just walk out of the door in the morning without a backward glance. Sometimes I just felt bored and cross. Sometimes I was angry with him because his life with children was remarkably similar to his life without children -his life changed very little. Whereas mine changed dramatically.

Apparently, around the 14 years of marriage mark, I failed to pay due attention to the fact that he felt trapped and unhappy. He didn’t love his job and he felt pressured by having a large mortgage. I didn’t know (until it came out in counselling) that “what time will you be home?” had become a question he had grown to hate. There was a problem with a client at work and then his father died, both these things deeply affected him, understandably. I tried to be supportive but he grew distant and disinterested. I couldn’t reach him and we began to argue.

When I found out that he was having an affair, his distance and his urge to create arguments all made sense. That’s what I believe happens if you’re in an affair – you convince yourself that what you are doing is acceptable because your partner “doesn’t understand you”.

I plummeted from a great height into a very big black hole. I didn’t recognise myself anymore, let alone him. I lost the plot far more than he will ever understand. My entire life unravelled before my eyes. At first I was numb and then I was angry and then I was deeply deeply hurt (and if I’m honest, humiliated too). It is easy to drift apart in a marriage. To lose sight of each other and yourself. Especially when you have three young children to look after. The hard bit is keeping it together when the going gets tough. I felt he had given up too early and taken the easy option out. When it all fell apart I panicked. Being on my own was not an option. I wouldn’t be able to cope. My children wouldn’t be able to cope. He stayed in the house and in our bed. I tried everything. Counselling. Endless drinks and dinner together to talk on neutral territory, away from the children. Weekends away. I tried desperately to make sense of it all, to understand, to forgive him. But he had become a stranger to me and I began not only to hate him, but to hate myself. I was alarmed by the constant ugly roar of noise in my head – the sound of my pure unadulterated rage.

There was no way, in the early stages, I could forgive him for what he had done. He wasn’t sorry enough. He didn’t lie down and say “run me over” (”twice or three times if you want”). He didn’t insist we flew off to a desert island to sort things out. He didn’t put his wedding ring back on when I asked him to. He didn’t buy me the biggest diamond in the world (yes, shallow I know, but I’m a girl…it might have helped a bit). He didn’t go and talk to my parents (yes, a bit weird, but for some reason I wanted him to do that). He didn’t even stay at home with me the day I found out and couldn’t stop crying. He went to work.

I wish I had been able to forgive him. Things would have been so much easier in many ways, expecially for the children. But. I couldn’t. In order to forgive you need to be able to understand their side of the story and I didn’t. After two years of trying to work it out I filed for divorce. Much against his will. He was furious. In fact, he still hasn’t forgiven me.

Mark Twain said something beautiful about forgiveness:

“Forgiveness is the fragrance the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it”.

How lovely is that? But unfortunately, if you want an analogy here, I felt like dog shit on the heel of his shoe and dog shit, when crushed still smells like dog shit (only worse). Is it any wonder that I’m not a poet?

So. We’ve now been divorced a year almost to the day. There’s nothing much more to say. It is an enormous shame. Life is very different now. For all of us. I have forgiven him because I’m calm and peaceful again and I really believe that life is too short to hold grudges forever. But what is the point of forgiveness now? It’s too late and not really the relevant emotion anymore. He isn’t remotely interested in the fact that I can now deal with his betrayal. He now can’t forgive me.

He is still very angry and hurt by the way I reacted. He felt he did “a bad thing” but that my reaction was extreme. He is still furious that when I asked him to leave the house I didn’t ever, in the two years that he was renting a flat about 5 miles away go and see him there. Why would I? I wanted to run him over, not go and have a bloody cup of tea in his new depressingly childless flat. He told me once that he would never forgive me for depriving him of his children and he still feels that way.

It is all so desperately sad. How easily lives can be changed forever by the actions of others. Cause and effect. I’m not bitter anymore. “Shit happens” is my new philosophy in life and I’ve grown and learnt from my experience. However, it doesn’t help that he is still so angry. I think it’s a shame that we haven’t moved on to a better acceptance of what went wrong. He actually said to me just before we divorced that he hoped, one day that I would do something I needed forgiveness for and not get it and then understand how awful it was not to be forgiven….

So have I forgiven him? Yes (sort of). Have I forgotten? No I haven’t and I never will.

He is feeling a little sad at school. Sometimes he decides that nobody likes him or wants to come back to his house for a play after school and then suddenly the whole world seems to be against him and he drags himself up the road to school and other times he positively bounces. This was not helped yesterday by being asked by his teacher to talk to another little girl in the class about how it feels to have separated parents. I think it’s a good thing that the teacher has asked him to talk about it, I hope he did manage to make her feel a little less isolated, but I’m not sure.

“Mum, she’s really sad. The teacher asked me to talk to her because her parents are just splitting up and he said that because my parents have already split up maybe I could help her. I didn’t know what to say to her. I told her that she had to just try not to think about it too much. To just get on with other things. She said did she just have to stick her chin out and I’m not sure what she meant, but I told her that it’s not easy and that sometimes I’m still sad about it”.
“That was really lovely of you to talk to her” I told him “and did you tell her that sometimes it’s not all bad? That you get to have two houses and more holidays and sometimes even new families to play with?”
“Well, no mum, I didn’t, because that is just not true. It’s not better to have any of those things. It’s worse. It wouldn’t have made her feel better”.

…and then my heart just breaks a little bit more for him.

However, things will change again when my ex moves next month into his six bedroom house about 45 minutes away by car – initially I guess it’s going to go back to a more rigid routine as they will have to be driven to his new house and can’t then get themselves back.  Once he’s married, I’m not sure how it will work.  I wonder how my children will feel going to their “other” house and sharing their space with three more children and a new “stepmother”.  At what age are they allowed to put their foot down and say they don’t want to go?  At what point do I relent and find myself with absolutely no time off from my kids because they’d rather stay closer to where their friends are (I am under no illusions that it will have anything to do with wanting to stay with me).

My ex has told my teenage son that when he has passed his driving test he will pay for the insurance of the car so that he can drive my other two children up and down the motorway to his new house.  Over my dead body.  I can’t think of anything worse than letting my 17 year old newly qualified with no experience risk an accident with my two other children in the car. What a nightmare.   I need to quickly arrange some new government legislation – like they have in the US that a new driver can’t drive any passengers until they’ve been driving for a year.  Much better.

I have the kids for the next three weekends, but this weekend they’ve all been busy doing stuff.  My ex took the boys to the Sunderland Vs Chelsea football match yesterday.   I wasn’t expecting, when he picked them up to see Builder Bloke’s ex sitting in the car with her children outside my house – studiously looking in the other direction.  Obviously I know the children well – it’s a shame – they clearly weren’t allowed to get out to come and say hello and I certainly wasn’t going to go out and greet them.  I had a pang of …what?  Not jealousy, but something….perhaps it’s just because it’s all still so raw and new.

I had to turn it round and look at it from another perspective.  Did I want to be going to a football match in the rain with six children?  No bloody way.  Did I want to be sitting in the Sunderland stand with my ex watching the team get slaughtered  7-2?  No bloody way.  Anyway, my teenage son said it was the worst experience of his entire life.

I went to a lovely 40th birthday party last night.  I sort of got invited as my friend’s plus 1, but knew lots of people and was very pleased to have been there…I like knowing people who are only just 40 – even if the gorgeous, very young looking party girl kept complaining about all the new wrinkles she has acquired.

In my case, I divorced my husband because I found out he was having an affair.  I found out he was having an affair because I asked him.  I asked him because during our oldest son’s birthday party for 20 he was upstairs doing sit-ups and it finally dawned on me that he was no longer very focused on our family life and something had gone horribly wrong.

Somebody I know divorced his wife when he found two sets of footprints on his car windscreen and she admitted to having an affair with their tiler.

So my first question to anyone who wants to answer it is “how did you find out your partner was having an affair?”

a) Thank god my kids missed that.
b) What are the government going to do about childcare facilities for working parents?

Anyway, what a difference a year has made…. his teacher didn’t say that we needed family counselling to help him learn strategies for anger management. Or that he has no concentration. Or that he can’t read. Or that he can’t write. Or that he has no idea what he is doing in maths (sorry, numeracy).

It was all good. Happy, well liked, focused, interested, bla bla. It was like he was talking about a different child.

In fact, now I come to think about it; given the teacher didn’t recognise me and had never met his dad, he may have indeed been talking about a different child.

It is odd having to sit at things like that with my ex-husband and talk to the teacher about our child. He talked to us as if we both still lived in the same house and I kept glancing over and thinking, how strange that we were married for so long….sometimes it seems like yesterday, other times I can’t even remember what it was like.

An interesting thing happens when you don’t know somebody anymore – their smell is no longer a comfort. Suddenly they smell different. Unfamiliar. He was wearing the aftershave he’s always worn and I found it difficult to breathe. Smell is such a basic instinct – probably one of the most important senses when looking for a suitable mate. If you don’t like the smell of somebody’s breath when you meet them then forget it (unless you can give them the benefit of the doubt owing to smelly curry the night before).

So. I must remember that if the gag reflex comes into play in future, it will probably be a non-starter.

I keep leaving messages for friends and then messages on top of messages because they are not phoning me back. Which immediately leads me to assume that they must be dead. Or badly injured. So I carry on leaving messages until I have become a stalker. Then they phone back and explain that they have a life to lead and all is fine. THEY”RE JUST A BIT BUSY GETTING ON WITH THEIR OWN LIVES. “Oh. Sorry”. I say. “It’s just I’ve got all this extra space in my life and I need to fill it – do you want to play with me?”….and I can hear them wanting to say “well amuse your bloody self then. Go and learn how to be on your own”.

I do try. A bit.

Honest.

It’s just that I really don’t like solitude very much. Probably it’s a bit like being a child in bed and wanting the door to remain slightly open with the hall light on. I blame my father for waving cigarettes about in my room. I bet I’m damaged because of that.

Even my children think I’m being pathetic. Yesterday, when I had inadvertently left my blog open for them to see he said to me “mum you are such a sad LOSER – I can’t believe you’ve been begging for comments. YOU ARE PATHETIC”.

He’s right. Sorry. I won’t do it again.

I’ll have to think of somebody else to annoy.

Anybody want to come speed dating with me?

“Good word” I said, “what’s the problem – what are you upset about?”

“Nothing” he replied, “I was just checking out the word”.

He was a little upset last night. When he’s tired and he’s been with his father, he really struggles with the whole separation thing. Big fat tears rolled down his cheeks in bed last night as he said that he missed his dad and that he was disappointed because he hadn’t seen much of him at the wedding. This aspect of divorce is so hard – he hates the fact that we live apart. His sadness is a constant reminder of the ongoing pain of separation. He is perhaps a little more intense than most, he has always had a far greater awareness and sensitivity in what he hears and sees in the world compared to his siblings, but nevertheless it is so sad to see.

I told him I’d ring his father and tell him how he was feeling and try and get him to spend some time with him just on his own this week…

He’s happy now. His dad has just picked him up – it’s 8.30pm but never mind. They’ll walk back home to his house together and he can have a story and a chat and just spend some time together and hopefully he’ll feel better and a little more secure about his place in our lives.

Blimey. I thought to myself. In the Top 63! That is quite an achievement – and thank you very much to whoever put the list together (why 63?).

Anyway I popped over to have a look at the site. The blogs have been divided into different categories, like “Working Through Divorce” and “Advice On Divorce and Relationships” and “Life After Divorce” and so on and I was thinking OMG – which category are they going to have put me in that some poor traumatised person is going to come over to my blog for and expect proper advice!

So, grateful as I am for the award, let me make the following clear to poor traumatised person before you start delving back through my archives for any sensible advice:-

I haven’t been divorced very long and I don’t seem to be doing a very good job of making it look easy/the best thing since sliced bread/vaguely appealing/like you wouldn’t prefer to pull all your toenails out.

This is where I stand today:-

1. Father in hospital
2. Kids away for a wedding with ex husband and ex husband’s new girlfriend
3. I no longer have a boyfriend because ex husband is going out with boyfriend’s ex wife
4. I have a swarm of flies in my kitchen that are all doing little breakdancing impressions thanks to evil spray
5. I am struggling to think of new and interesting ways to fill my time and wondering whether trombone good option
6. AND to top it all I have now had possibly the worst haircut EVER with a fringe (or bangs as they for some bizarre reason call them in the US) that makes me look as if I think I’m 5 -but in reality makes me look 58. Very short and heavy (thats my fringe, not me).

So. Now I can’t go out for months.

Thanks for listening, newly traumatised person, hope you find somebody more useful. GOOD LUCK