departure

‘Hope and heartbreak live so close – side by side – in real life’.

Kate de Camillo

Eleven years ago, I began this blog as a dare. I dared myself to write about my daily life in a way that might resonate with others. I was in the hurly-burly years of my kids adolescence, and my husband had started travelling for work and increasingly pleasure. I needed somewhere I could hear myself think; a place where I could find out what I thought by writing it down; somewhere that I could see and be seen. Writing a blog post, I soon discovered, wasn’t the same as talking to a friend. It was – still is – a place to be straight with myself.

This may be why I’ve avoided writing this particular post. On several occasions this week, when I might have got my pen out, I didn’t. Even now, it’s easier to watch a young woman’s Tik Tok thread through the cafe window, than to assemble my thoughts on the page in front of me.

I knew that I’d find my ex-husband’s departure for Italy hard. For this reason, I made sure to do all the right things. We had a family dinner that went perfectly well. I set up for the end-of-lease clean of James’ rental; not because I’m a masochist but because the owner is a friend of a friend and I felt sure that I’d do a better job of it than James would. Besides, James still gives me housekeeping money, so it seemed right that I should support him domestically.

Earlier this week, I took James sandwiches after my lunch-time yoga class, for our monthly get-together. This time, the last time, the furniture was gone from his house, so we sat cross-legged on the wooden floor of his sunny back room. Then yesterday, the day of his flight, I dropped in to say goodbye, leaving more sandwiches for him and my son, who’d offered to take James to the airport.

On my way to drop off these last sandwiches, and to pick up the key of James’ house for the clean, I considered the ‘good’ in goodbye. But then, when it actually came time for a last hug, it was ‘good luck’ that came to my lips.

I never really knew what other people thought of my relationship to James until he and I broke up. While most of my friends have been politely guarded, others have not. The main charge made against James is that he’s a narcissist, a charge that sounds as damning and matter of fact as that he has grey hair and wears glasses. Whenever the matter of James’s selfishness comes up (a slightly milder charge than narcissism, but no less damning) I leave the conversation feeling lacking. I feel as if something as obvious as James’ blinding self-interest should have been clear to me when James and I started our relationship all those years ago. Was I so desperate for love, in my 20s, that I failed to notice this fatal flaw? Equally, shouldn’t I have predicted what would happen when we moved, en famille, from London to Melbourne and on to Hobart? Shouldn’t I have known that as James became more driven in his work, that he’d start dreaming about a better life in Europe that he’d be compelled to explore, taste and, ultimately, choose over a life with me?

But I didn’t know how our relationship would unfold, once we had kids and moved continents, any more than James did. Neither of us saw this ending coming. Even in retrospect, I feel that there were certain points in our marriage when things could have gone – am I’m being wishful? – in another direction.

I am not overtly religious. Still, I do find the concepts of grace and humility, before the sheer difficulty of life, helpful. Lately, I’ve fallen back on The Old and New Testaments to help explain my muddled feelings about James’ departure. When I’m feeling what I call Old Testament, I feel openly resentful of James leaving me in the lurch, well into middle age, with less money than I would have had if we’d stayed together. In this mood, I tell myself that James has been beguiled by a life-is-elsewhere, the grass-is-greener mindset. Except, of course, I don’t feel this way all the time. When I’m in what I call a New Testament mood, I feel compassion for James, me and our kids. In this mood, I think that 34 years is a long time to be in a relationship with one person, that no-one is to blame for our breakup, that our good times were real, and that there is no simple solution to a problem that can’t be solved, except perhaps to live the ‘good’ in goodbye.

I’ve never been great at ending relationships. If I loved someone when I was at school with them, I still love them now, even after all these years. Even so, the departure of James to Italy is a more powerful and intimate swerve than separating from a childhood friend. It’s raw and final in a way that I struggle to get my head around. Perhaps, right now, I just can’t.

In a way, separating from James has allowed me to love him more purely, as a person, than I was able to with the baggage of marriage and family life all around us. And I think James would say something similar. Ultimately, and this is the painful part, I think that James had to go through a period of hating me before he was able to leave me. This, for me, was the worst part of our separation. It felt public and shameful. But now that James is actually leaving, now that no-one is stopping him from going, he’s free to love me again. Not as he once did, which I know won’t return. But in another way – annoyingly, just as he said when he separated from me – somewhere between a sister and cousin.

In my Old Testament way of thinking, it seems against nature that James should leave his family to live in Europe, with yearly visits back to see us. How, I ask, can you love your kids and leave them? What an insane idea, I think bitterly. But then the mood passes, I push my cup of poison aside and am able to see James’s leaving with softer eyes. Then I know that he isn’t making this move with the intention of hurting anyone. Just as I know that I don’t want to be responsible for making him live somewhere that he doesn’t feel whole and that, for someone like him, born in Scotland, cultural roots go deep. I also know that life is short, that we only have one of them, and that family life isn’t the absolutely whole story.

So no, I don’t want James to miss his plane to Italy. And I do want him to feel at home when he arrives. I want him to click back in with friends who care about him, and who bring out the best in him. I want to picture him sitting outside at cafés with a laptop, black coffee and ashtray, his fingers tapping the keys.

Last night, after James’ flight left, I watched the last episode of Season 4 of Borgen through James’ Netflix account. Watching this Danish drama, over the last 10 days, has been painful. With each episode, the heroine became increasingly unhappy, to the point that she turned into someone I didn’t recognise, a power-hungry narcissist with little care for her colleagues or family. Thankfully – I won’t spoil it – in the last episode something happens to make the viewer realise that, as in real life, vital elements of the story had been held back, and that Birgitte hadn’t been corrupted by power after all.

Perhaps, I thought, as I clicked shut my laptop, feeling satisfied for the first time during my current viewing of Borgen, my own Season 2 is about to begin.

covid

‘It’s ok to redefine the narrative of your life when the old story no longer serves you. It’s ok to be scared of uncertainty and to keep going anyway’.

Jenny Williams, Insider

Last week I got so close to putting my house on the market that I assumed my tight chest and sore throat were the result of stress and excitement, rather than the first signs of covid. My desire to move on became so great that I could barely hear myself think. Two agents offered me the kind of house price that invited a solution to my every financial bind. All I had to do was say ‘yes’. I could reinvent myself, leave twelve years of memories behind and start afresh in a small house in the same suburb. No more truckloads of leaves to rake up in autumn. No more damp basement full of family member’s stuff.

I was so far down this road that spending an hour in my house with a local architect, just to make sure I wanted to sell, felt like a formality. After a quick chat, he stood in the courtyard and did what he called ‘some depressing arithmetic’ in which he made it clear that even if I sold my house tomorrow, I would be buying into an inflated market with any renovations costing whatever a builder – spoiled for clients – asked me to pay. ‘Oh’, I said. ‘I see’. ‘I don’t think you should sell’, the architect ended by saying. ‘You’ll never get another house like this one. You should stay and develop it. Start by opening up the back and putting in proper heating’.

‘Of course the architect would say that’, wrote my cousin Ted, who advises me financially, in an email the next day. ‘A nice client who might be persuaded to part with some money. Why wouldn’t he suggest making changes to your house?’ Ted went on to spell out my finances going forward, the crux of which is that I have enough money to live modestly but not enough to be as generous as I’d like towards my family. If I’m to live until I’m 90, Ted wrote, there were real limits to my ‘largesse’. Unless, that is, my decline set in earlier, in which case I’d need to pay for ‘the dribble wipers’.

My initial response to Ted’s email was humiliation. Why hadn’t I seen this situation coming 20 years ago? Why had I put my family first, when I should have been building up my super in a university post? Why had I put all my eggs in the wrong basket?

If I hadn’t been stuck at home with covid, staring at the sky through the bathroom window, I could have avoided this reckoning, this catastrophising. If I hadn’t been feeling rubbish I might have been kinder on myself. But I was stuck at home not feeling well and there seemed nowhere there to hide. I didn’t even try. I neither ran nor hid. I let time pass as my situation sank in.

By this point, I’d had two positive covid tests and was trying hard not to count down how many days I had left at home. Day after day, I sat on the carpet in the bathroom upstairs, the warmest and sunniest room in the house, working half-heartedly on a manuscript which illness made seem more lacklustre than it perhaps was. Over seven days, I had a few bouts of leaf raking and twice-daily walks with my dog wearing a mask, but otherwise I sat at home with time on my hands to think.

Over the years, I’ve had two serious bouts of illness, both in London – glandular fever and pneumonia. So when I decided against getting a covid booster, on the advice of a trusted friend I bought Ivermectin on-line – just in case. I stocked up on zinc, vitamins D and C – just in case. Plus a revolting-tasting echinacea mixture. Keen not to spread covid to my kids, and to recover without long covid symptoms, I hit the virus with everything in my medicine chest. I felt unwell, definitely. But I didn’t feel scared. I took each day as it came, baking a tray of vegetables for lunch and lying on the carpet under a rug for an afternoon nap. I didn’t contact friends but after a few days I did post on Instagram, which broke the isolation I’d started to feel. At night, I lit the fire and watched Dickens’ Little Dorrit with my dog warming my toes on the sofa.

Staring into the fire, unable to get up off the sofa, it struck me that at every step in my married life I’d put my family first. I’d done so repeatedly, consciously, instinctively. When my husband started traveling for work, I’d stepped up to fill the gap. When my daughter fell ill in adolescence, I’d nursed her for the third of a year that it took her to recover. When my son went overseas for months that became years, I’d filled in some of the holes he left with a new puppy. And here I was now, contemplating putting the only asset I loved – my house – on to the market to appease the gods. My family weren’t asking me to sell, it was nothing that blunt. I just felt in my heart that all our paths would be eased if I sold while house prices were high and plucked up courage to move on.

Ten years ago, when I became seriously interested in housekeeping – in the process of caring about domestic things that I didn’t care about on behalf of a family that I did care about – I never in my wildest dreams thought that housekeeping would end up meaning anything as literal as keeping my house. And yet this is what has happened. I have lost my marriage, and the hopes and dreams that went with that. But so far, I haven’t lost my house. Instead what was once our house is now my house. It’s still my kids’ childhood home, which my son shares with me, however in the settling of accounts that goes with ending a long marriage it has become my property.

As I sat in my bathroom last weekend, looking out through bare tree tops, the sun turned to rain turned to sun. Sitting there, pretending to work at my computer, I realised that I couldn’t afford to let my one big asset go, however much I wanted my family’s lives to go well and for my husband not to be punished for having the courage to break off with me and to choose to live mainly in Italy.

In my family, I’m known to be bad at games – which we’ve always played a lot of. Early last week, when I so nearly put my house on the property merry-go-round, I felt this keenly. Did I have a duff hand? Was I giving in too soon? Was it an Ace or a King I should be playing? It felt like the point in a game at which, ordinarily, I’d start not to mind that I was losing, in the hope of getting to bed sooner. Only this time, despite illness, I couldn’t afford to give up and retire early.

When we moved into our big old house twelve years ago, we bought it from a divorced couple. The husband, I remember, ended up living mostly in the room that became our kitchen. His cricketing trophies, I remember, sat on the mantlepiece. ‘Ending a marriage’, I remember thinking to myself, feeling sorry for the couple and a tiny bit superior, ‘won’t ever happen to me’.

But life is not a game, foresight isn’t given to any of us, and as I sit with my laptop at a picnic table in the park at the tail end of covid, it isn’t obvious what I should do. To sell my house or not to sell it. To reinvent myself or to continue as I am. To show my hand or to hide the dice.

In the face of this uncertainty, which seems no-one’s fault but part of life itself, there may be wisdom in sitting on my hands and doing nothing for a while. I might let my husband get on a plane to Italy in two weeks’ time, and just accept that I don’t know when he’ll be back. I might let things be hard and unresolved. Yet no less beautiful.