Jealousy

My first husband left me for a younger woman who he likes to dress in designer clothes and expensive jewellery. He lives abroad in an immaculate, individually designed modern house with a swimming pool, gym and games room. He travels to the most beautiful and exotic places. He has brand new cars and the very latest electronic gadgets. He stays in luxury hotels, dines out at the best restaurants and drinks good wine.

Does any of this make me jealous?

Honestly - no.

I love my make do life style, battered old car, hand me down technology, budget holidays, the odd takeaway and whatever wine happens to be on special offer.

But there is one thing - one thing that stirs the murky depths where the green eyed monster resides.

His garage door.

His garage door is remote controlled and glides effortlessly open as he approaches. It closes with the same satisfying simplicity and for all I know might even pour him a whiskey and bring him his slippers.

If his garage door were a sleek, soft footed cheetah commanding the African plains, mine would be a scabby flea ridden feral cat - all teeth, claws and bad temper.

I was composing this post in my head as I was cleaning the inside of my car. My anxiety about having to close the garage door was growing as I ran out of interior to vacuum and polish. The inevitable battle with the door was becoming increasingly imminent.

The bitter jealousy was getting a grip on my otherwise good mood.

I faced my nemesis armed only with a rough knowledge of the sequence of kicks and shoves to get the door aligned in the frame and the final wiggle with the key that required the concentration and steady hand of a safe breaker.

I honestly don't know what happened next. The door cooperated. It slid into place, I turned the key. Job done.

The jealous rage that had been threatening to explode turned into a happy smile. Life is good.

Wishful thinking

Just after I finished writing my post yesterday and turned off the computer, my upbeat mood that had blossomed from a lovely Easter day and having both babies asleep in bed, suffered something of a
setback. My little Dylan woke up screaming and would not be settled back to sleep. I gulped down the remainder of my sparkling chardonnay getting all the calories and none of the pleasure and resigned myself to another night of bed sharing to the detriment not only of my back but also my time spent with my husband.

Time with husband has been very lacking of late. As well as the disruption to our evenings because of the children's recent illnesses, I also lost him for two days during a well overdue visit with his best friend. And now, I lose him again as he spends the next four days with his daughter from his first marriage. The relationship with his daughter has been strained almost to the point of estrangement but he has never given up hope that his love will find a way to bring her back to his paternal embrace.

Demands on his time are great. Our time is always the first that is sacrificed.

Often I don't even realise how much I desperately need that time. Time to reconnect. Time to restrengthen our bond. Time to re-energise. If I am not careful, I can easily find myself in the position where I am now -feeling low, withdrawn and frankly, not coping all that well. I hate it. Stupidly, it means that I waste the opportunities where I actually could be having the sort of wonderful shared moments that can make a marriage so fulfilling.

I had been looking forward to the Easter holidays not just for our family time but as a chance to get some of the jobs on our ever growing job list crossed off, getting out in the garden for some spring planting and also grabbing with both hands those opportunities for the indulgence of my need for quality time with my husband.

None of the above have really come to fruition...

...yet.

The optimist in me is insisting that it could all still happen.

As I type this, my husband is putting to bed the two little ones (who I know he is going to miss terribly over the next few days when he will be far away and doing his best to cope with an altogether different parenting challenge).

Maybe they will settle quickly and sleep peacefully throughout the night. Maybe then, just maybe we can relax and enjoy our last evening together before he heads off tomorrow with his hastily packed bag and headful of dreams of a happy reunion with an eighteen year old whose life has become so unfamiliar and distant.

And if not... he'll be back on Friday and maybe then, just maybe......

Wedding Rings

February is a lovely, romantic month for me with Valentines Day and my Wedding Anniversary. It has been a very champagne, chocolates and red roses sort of month complete with a home made card (and terrible poetry). It would take a harder heart than mine not to be charmed by it all. It has left me feeling all rather loved up and content.

There has been a lot of sitting opposite each other in a dinner for two fashion with a lot of hand holding. I can't help but feel stupidly happy when I see our matching wedding rings - the symbol of our commitment to each other.

Of course, my life wasn't always this way. There was another marriage before this one. Another wedding ring. That particular symbol of commitment inspired a completely different set of emotions.

I actually had two wedding rings in the duration of my first marriage. The original one had been ripped from my finger that many times in the big I don't love you anymore and I don't want to be with you gesture that it stopped having any of the weight and solemnity that an important symbol should be imbued with. It was just a ring. Sometimes I wore it, sometimes I didn't.

In a rare moment of optimism, we decided to make a fresh start with new matching rings. There was no ceremony to accompany this. I liked my ring very much, Clogau welsh gold in a celtic design, but a ring alone is not enough to save a marriage.

We divorced. The ring came off for good.

A survey has revealed today that Britain has the highest divorce rate in the EU.

There must be an awful lot of obsolete wedding rings .

So the question is, what should one do with a wedding ring that maybe once meant something good but now stirs potentially damaging, negative feelings?

In my life, I enjoy the beauty and magic of ritual and symbolism. I wanted closure on the bad marriage chapter of my life and I am almost too embarrassed to admit that I attempted to wash my lovely wedding ring in my own blood to cleanse it from the bad emotions attached to it. It didn't work and I still have a stupid scar where I cut myself to harvest the blood!

I'm not keen on the idea of giving the jewellery I don't want in my life to my loved ones, which would be an option (although that is exactly what I did with my engagement and eternity rings). A bad ring does not deserve to be given 'family heirloom' status.

A better option perhaps would be the cash for gold route. An indulgent treat could be bought with the proceeds.

My new husband is a good man and he expressed a desire to donate his old wedding ring to a worthy cause. He vaguely remembers handing it to a friend in Switzerland for safe keeping but doesn't know what became of it since.

 My unwanted rings lie mostly forgotten at the back of a drawer.

The ideal solution for me would have involved an epic trek through hostile terrain, the final part of the journey featuring an ascent up the deadly slopes of an active volcano. Upon reaching the summit, the ring would be ceremoniously cast into the fiery molten rock - Tolkien's Mount Doom style. That would certainly have given me the closure, the ritual and the symbolism I desired.

If, perchance, that ring could pass through the all consuming lava and land in a collecting box for a worthy cause to convert to cash, I wouldn't be at all unhappy about that either.

Female Aggression

There were two women shouting and screaming at each other in the street today when I walked to pick up my daughter from nursery. Eyes were bulging, jaws clenched, fingers waving, personal space invaded. It wasn't pretty.

I was on the receiving end of such aggression from my ex mother in law once. I didn't respond with the same aggression. I remember feeling strangely detached, calm and above all, sorry for her. She would not be reasoned with and I think my passivity served to aggravate her anger further. The showdown culminated in her being carried away by her ashen faced husband. She was drooling from the mouth, eyes rolling in her head, incoherent. She was not a mentally stable woman and the outburst was fuelled by alcohol. I will never forget it.

I didn't manage to remain so detached when it came to arguments with my ex husband. He would infuriate me completely to the point that I would shout and scream and I am ashamed to admit, even hit him (although I doubt my blows caused anything resembling actual pain). I hated how it made me feel. So much frustration. So much banging my head against a proverbial brick wall. I hated even more that my children had to witness all this hostility (albeit through walls). I hated the person it made me and how my whole body would shake and the pitch of my voice alter to one I didn't even recognise.

Life is very different for me now. I love my husband deeply and when we have our differences we can work them out through talking and understanding. We both want the same things and we want them together. It makes everything so easy.

Don't get me wrong - I still scream and shout - only now it's with playful exuberance or mock horror at the X Factor! I like it very much better this way.

The Gallery - Week 74 - A Happy Memory

Divorce, as inevitable or ultimately for the best as it might be, is still incredibly hard on the children of the divided family.

My children, especially my oldest daughter, had been through so much with a father who seemed incapable of putting them first, even for a moment, and a paternal grandmother who actually seemed to delight in digging the knife in and twisting it viciously. I never tried to shield them from the reality of the divorce. I felt that the best I could reasonably do would be to reassure them of my love and devotion to them and try to rebuild a strong family unit. I was so impressed by the way they all pulled together and the sacrifices they were prepared to make when our financial future was so uncertain.

When I got together with the man who was destined to become my husband, I wasn't sure what it would mean to my children They were very supportive and happy to see me so happy but would they feel that they would now have to share my time and my love? Would they be resentful or were  their hearts big enough and undamaged enough to let someone else in? As he was living and working in Switzerland at this time I wasn't even sure how our relationship could work in a practical sense and whether he would be up to the challenge of being a father figure to another man's children. I was particularly sensitive to this after their own father had told them that if they could not accept and respect his girlfriend, he wouldn't bother with them.

This man was not a stranger. He was an old friend I had known at University many years before. I showed the children photos of us together. They laughed at my eighties hairstyle and how chubby I was.

They met him briefly when he brought me home from our romantic Paris break, when friendship first blossomed into love. They had some contact on MSN but the first occasion they actually got to spend any time with him was when he booked a short holiday for us all in a Bed and Breakfast in Lancing, near Brighton where his parents live. My girls had no reservations about going on holiday with a man they barely knew. I like to believe it was because they had complete trust in me but it was more likely that the promise that we would be visiting the Dr Who exhibition on Brighton Pier was enough to overcome any objections!

Right from the start it was a wonderfully relaxed holiday that felt very natural. My youngest was won over  immediately by his tireless willingness to play 'thumb wars' with her. The other girls were completely sold when they found out he had bought tickets for us all to see the Rat Pack Show at the Theatre Royal. He took them sailing. We visited his parents who were kind and lovely in the way that you would want grandparents to be.

The slightly eccentric lady running the B&B with her yappy little lapdog, Bijoux, insisted on calling him dad despite our initial attempts to correct her. She couldn't quite get her head round the idea that we were vegetarian so breakfast would consist of her bringing out a huge pan of beans and slopping them on our plates with a bit of toast. It was sitting round that breakfast table with a glorious view of the seagulls on Lancing beach and the waves beyond with our ever attentive host yielding her ladle and asking More beans for dad? that I realised, without any doubt, that we could be a family.

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The Gallery - Week 66 - Travel

Apart from a school cruise on the infamous SS Uganda and a handful of trips across the Channel, I had not  travelled when I met up with my current husband.

He was living in Switzerland and had previously lived in France, Greece and the Caribbean. His passion for sailing had taken him to places I could only dream of.

Did I feel envious or inadequate? Not really. My life was different - more home centred, wrapped up in being a mum to my little brood. I had had opportunities to go abroad with my first husband but the truth was, I didn't enjoy spending time with him so they never happened.

My experience of the wider world was seriously limited.

Getting together with my well travelled husband, it seemed that this might all change. The children from my first marriage were growing up and there was nothing really stopping us. We had a romantic liaison in Barcelona, I visited him in Switzerland and there was the trip to Paris where we first met face to face after our internet and phone exchanges. I was starting to get a taste for it.

We booked a family holiday to Greece so my girls could be included. It was just before we left that I discovered I was pregnant.

Having a baby did change the focus of our relationship. Ideas of exotic travel were put on the back burner. We were more likely to be seen walking out of Mothercare than a Travel Agent and honestly, I wouldn't have it any other way.

We did manage a family holiday in France with my girls, the two children from my husband's first marriage and our new little one but we had to hire a mini bus to achieve it. It does all get quite difficult!

The photograph I have chosen for The Gallery was not from a holiday. My husband had to go to Switzerland to meet with divorce lawyers. It did not cost very much more to take me along so we decided to try and turn a stressful, unpleasant business into something more pleasant.

The baby took air travel all in her stride and we stayed in a lovely hotel with a balcony overlooking Lake Geneva.

Inevitably, the time spent in Court was horrible but what better way to unwind and relax than this?

The Gallery - Week 65 - Grandparents

I know of several sad stories of Grandparents who, through no fault of their own, lose contact with their  grandchildren when families fall apart and marriages end. My heart goes out to them.

This was not exactly the case when my marriage ended.

My mother in law did not like me, she did not like the way I brought up my children and I don't honestly think she liked my children either (on one memorable occasion she did accuse 2 year old Taylor of being spawn of the devil because she was crying - and without a hint of jest).

In her defence, I think there were some mental issues at play coupled with an appetite for alcohol that exceeded normal limits. She was a formidable woman but when she screamed at her own son that he was dead to her and tried to attack my children, my maternal instincts did not allow her to have her way. After this event, my eldest daughter, who was only 8 years old at the time, was terrified of her.

Sometimes she would phone me very late at night, usually waking me up. It was often incoherent with slurred words. It was always angry. One time she was shouting about how she never got to see her grandchildren. I reassured her that she was welcome to visit us and see the children whenever she wanted. She practically spat at me that she didn't mean my children.

I did feel sad for my children that they were missing out on all the wonderfully enriching things that grandparents can contribute, but the blow was softened when they were all 'adopted' by the grandparents of their cousins, my sister's in-laws.

At the time of my divorce, I had neither seen nor spoken to my mother in law for quite some time.

My eldest daughter was about to start University and our uncertain financial future was a cause for concern. I remembered that when she was born, her paternal grandparents had set up a savings account for her into which they had paid a small but regular sum of money for her future. Her future was now and although  I had no idea how much there might be in the account, I couldn't help thinking that it would be a great help for her to have it and possibly even a way to establish an independent connection to 'post-divorce grandparents'. I encouraged her to mention it to her father (by now he refused to speak to me so I could not broach the subject with him). That conversation (conducted by Instant Message on the computer) did not go well but he must have mentioned it to his mum because shortly after, my fragile, damaged little girl received an evil letter from her grandmother accusing her of being 'the daughter of the money grabbing mother' and telling her in no uncertain terms that she did not feature in her life nor would she feature in her death. It was two A4 printed sheets of absolute hatred. Just to be fair, although the letter was addressed to Liberty, she told her that ALL her sisters were included in how she felt.

The man that my children had once called Grandpa was not a blood relation. My mother-in-law was divorced from my husband's biological father and by all accounts he was no good. My husband had had no contact with him since he was a child. I had always been vaguely curious about him. In 2009, I got the chance to meet him.

After the dust had settled on my horrible divorce and my girls and I were happy and settled in our new home with our new family, I re-established contact with my ex-sister-in-law. I was really surprised to find out that she had made peace with her real dad and was working on building a relationship with him.

When I took three of my girls to visit her, he came across to meet us all.

I was quite taken aback by the resemblance between my ex husband and his biological father but this man seemed kind, gentle and meek with a softness to his face that made me warm to him almost instantly. He spoke so fondly of his ex-wife, my evil ex-mother in law, saying that she could light up a room. I wish I could have known that women. I wish that woman could have played a positive role in the lives of my girls.

The girls enjoyed meeting their absent father's father but there is so much more to being a grandparent than biology.

The Gallery - Week 62 - Dads

I love the relationship my husband has with the two children we have together. He is a very 'hands on' sort of dad and spends as much time with them as other commitments permit.  They clearly adore him.

What I value even more than this is the relationship he has built with the four daughters from my first marriage.

When he came into my life, my daughters were fragile and scarred from a horribly messy marriage breakdown and a father who couldn't even comprehend what it meant to put their needs first.

My girls could have been hostile and suspicious but they were accepting and welcoming. As we gelled as a family unit, they understood for the first time how it could be - happiness, love, fun and support rather than arguing, tension and a lot of banging heads against brick walls.

My girls blossomed.

This picture was taken on Ivy's 16th birthday.

Of all my girls, she was the one who was most badly affected by the divorce. It is only now, five years later, that she is sorting it all out in her head. She is still adamant that she does not want to see her father or have any more than the barest minimum of contact. The other girls joke that she is not missing out - they have little more than the barest minimum of contact anyway, despite their willingness for more.

This was not supposed to be a bitter post about inadequate parenting. It is celebration of the fact that a non-biological father can bring so much into the lives of his stepdaughters and show them what it really means to be there for them - to be a dad.

Divorce

I was brought up by my mother to believe that my one goal in life should be to find a man that loves me and who will take care of me and to hold onto that man at any cost. I was never short of boyfriends but for some reason (that might be the subject of a separate post) I was not very good at relationships. I always felt inadequate when my mum compared me with my prettier friends, friends who were dating, friends who had left school at 16 and were now earning a little bit of money, friends who had steady boyfriends.

Luckily for me, I had an inspirational older sister who valued education and defied my parents by having the ambition to do well enough in her A Levels so that she could go on to do a degree.

My parents weren't bad people. Far from it. They just didn't see the point of a University education for us. How was having ideas above our station going to make us attractive to a suitable man?

I was academically gifted. Securing a place at Bristol University posed no problem. However, I lacked the ambition of my older sister who led the way. I drifted into a course which I quickly realised I had no real passion for. I loved living away from home and I made some wonderful friends but it was clear I was never going to make a great success of my course. I doggedly stuck with it and after 3 years I left with a Bachelor of Science (ordinary) degree and not the least clue what I was going to do with the rest of my life.

I had been in a relationship of sorts with one of my housemates. He wasn't a physically attractive man and he wasn't what many would describe as a 'nice' person but he definitely had an arrogance and a confidence that  were completely alien to me. Maybe it is true that opposites attract or maybe it was just because he was there and I was still failing to live up to my mother's life goal. It never occurred to me that our relationship would last beyond the duration of the house lease. We never discussed it.  He, on the other hand, had thought our relationship was solid and when I packed up my things and left to return to the only place I could think of to go - my parents' house - he was devastated.

Returning home was the biggest mistake of my life. I had failed to live up to my mother's expectations. I had failed to achieve anything from my three years of studying. I had no money, I couldn't drive, I had no plan. I felt completely trapped.

I have no idea how long I actually stayed at my parents' home in the thick fog of depression that my hopelessness had generated but one day a light came on. I would hitch hike back to Bristol, back to my former housemate, and see if we could make a go of it. He said he loved me, I knew he would take care of me. Perhaps mum had been right all along.

Positioning myself strategically on the slip road of he M4 motorway with my thumb prominently displayed gave me the most amazing feeling of freedom. Thinking about it now, there were so many different paths I could have chosen but at the time, for me, this was the only option.

It gave me a great sense of achievement to make it all the way to the place of work of my former housemate. I waited in the car park for him to return to his car at close of business.

It wasn't a great romantic re-union. There was never any romance in our relationship. Years later when I came to understand about high functioning Aspergers Syndrome, I strongly suspected that this was the cause of much of his behaviour. There was never an official diagnosis but everything about him screamed Aspergers. The wealth of information that the advent of the internet had made available did help me to cope with him better and feel less isolated. We were married for 20 years.

There were many times I wanted to leave him but fear of failure, fear of being alone, fear of breaking up the marital home, fear of what my parents would think... so much paralysing fear... I couldn't do it.

I never actually thought that he would leave me. But that is what happened. At least that is sort of what happened.

It all started fairly innocently. My husband worked away from home, staying in hotels and coming back for the weekends. He would buy carob raisins for his 'work colleague' when he was home from our local health food shop. He started to spend more time on his own with his computer. He would disappear off for long 'work calls'. And then the 'business trips' started - weekends away to European cities. I could have happily coped with all of this were it not for the LIES and the DECEIT. What is it about men having affairs that makes them turn their guilt onto their poor wives/girlfriends, making them believe they are paranoid and untrusting and ultimately unworthy?

A Cheating Husband

I suffered. I confronted him on a few occasions but he would say she was just a friend, she was like a sister to him, everybody needs friends... WHY do we continue to give them the benefit of the doubt?

We were still sleeping together. She would text him in the night. Did he think I couldn't read the texts over his shoulder? I actually thought her texts were pathetic. It made me smile. It gave me strength - and God knows I needed all the strength I could get. I was hanging by a thread.

I hated what our marriage breakdown was doing to me, but even more what it was doing to our kids. I had a heart to heart conversation with him. I said that whatever happens we MUST put the kids first. His reply, which I will never forget was "How can we put them first?" If there had been a trap door beneath him leading to the darkest, most evil place of Hell's macabre design, that would have been the moment I pulled the handle to watch him tumble helplessly into eternal torment. HOW CAN YOU NOT PUT THE KIDS FIRST YOU SELFISH, CONCEITED, CHEATING, LYING USELESS PIECE OF ****. Well I think you get the picture. That angry outburst only happened in my head, to be unleashed later in an incident involving some sausages!

I wanted the marriage over. He still maintained that he wasn't having an affair. They 'slept' together as friends but there was no sex (oh how the guilty protest their innocence). He wanted to keep the family together and maybe in six months time or so he might be able to rediscover the love he had for me. Does a certain cliche involving having cake and eating it spring to mind?

He spent over £1000 of our money going to the Maldives with his 'friend'. There is only so much one can tolerate. I saw a solicitor who advised me that if he was not prepared to move out then we would need to demonstrate that we were 'living separate households' within the marital home before there was any possibility of petitioning for divorce. This meant that he would have to shop, cook and clean for himself.

I was worried how the 'separate households' regime would impact on the children - they were already suffering enough. I decided to explain it all to them and treat it as a game. They helped me clear cupboard and fridge space for him, set up his own room with his own wash basket. They were proud of what we had achieved.

When he returned from his exotic holiday (with his dirty laundry which he fully expected would be my pleasure to see to) I explained the situation and how I had handled it with the children and almost apologetically asked if he could play along with it. Thinking about it now, that would have been putting the children first, wouldn't it? He'd already made it clear he wouldn't/couldn't do that. I gave up trying to be reasonable and retired to my room.

It was my 14 year old daughter who hit the roof when she saw him completely disrespect me by helping himself to my sausages on my 'separate household freezer shelf' and make himself a big, greedy, overstuffed, sausage sandwich. She stormed up the stairs, burst into my room and with absolute disbelief said "Mum, he's eating your sausages!". The funny side would have been easier to see if she hadn't been so upset - they had invested in making the separate household rule work. My fury was unleashed.

The sausage sandwich remained uneaten.

He filed for divorce on the grounds of irreconcilable differences. He cited as grounds that I would not let him eat his sausages!

It has been most cathartic to write this. At the time it was miserable for me and damaging to the children. It is far enough behind us now to see that my life is infinitely more fulfilling and happy and the children have emerged (mostly) unscathed.

My ex husband refuses to have any contact with me but  I wish he could know that I am happy that he is living the life he wants and that the painful process that we all went through is nothing more than another step on life's journey.