Broken

Regardless of the fact that I was the one who chose divorce, and the fact that it had been building up for years, I was devastated when it became a reality. I didn’t have much in my petty little life but I had a tiny family unit and we were part of his wonderful large family. I had three sisters in law, old, middle and young. Now ‘Young’ was a scatty but extremely kind lady, with a few issues and a growing family and career. We didn’t see much of her because ‘He’ wasn’t a fan. ‘Middle’ seemed to have it all, switched on with two children and a husband whose career was going places. She was the one we saw the most of, I loved that family unit, they were fun and open, and yet they could offer advice and support in equal measure. ‘Old’ was a cow bag, an Ex GP with the bedside manner of a sergeant major who got away with being rude, with people just saying that’s just the way she is. ‘Old’ lives in a very posh house, in a very posh place, with membership to rather nice clubs and plenty of name dropping. She had a well to do husband and two older boys who were just about to settle down and get married when I got divorced.

We were all visiting the ‘Middle’ household on New Year’s eve 2011 when I got the call to say that my Father had died. There were tears and hugs, and she and her family looked after my daughter while I tried to sort myself out. As with so much of what happened/happens with me, I had too much on my plate to lick my wounds and have a proper weep. I needed to care for a child under 5, stay sober, drive home, work out how to get to my Mum and what to do next. My parents had moved to France while I was still pregnant so my non-french speaking Mum now needed rescuing and bringing back home. Complicated by the fact that she was on 24/7 oxygen and couldn’t be driven the whole way due to medication and nausea. Yet again my wonderful sister and her husband took the brunt of the hard work and helped to rehome the pets, pack up the house and drive it all back to the UK. In the meantime I worked on portable air supplies and flights. My Dad’s funeral was dreadful, the French cemetery was grim, the crematorium was bare and unwelcoming, and we were given 30 minutes to go through the motions. We didn’t pay a fortune so I should have expected very little, but to see his coffin coming out of a blue transit van that looked like one a plasterer had been using was a shock. On the amusing side, as they lifted him to shoulder height and we slowly fell in to walk behind, one the pall bearers phones went off with a blast of the Benny Hill theme tune. Honestly this is sitcom level trolling.

Meanwhile in the background I was going through the divorce proceedings, to save money I was using an online tool and writing all of the forms myself. I was also still working full time, never had a day off, dropping my daughter off at childcare at 07:45 and collecting her again at 17:45, if I was travelling I had a childminder collecting her and staying with her until I could get home. Her Dad was already doing very little to assist on a day to day basis even though we still had to share the same house until we could sell it. My mother absolutely hated ‘Him’ by this point and yet the only people with a house large enough to accommodate her while she found somewhere to settle in the UK, was our house. 6 weeks after my Dad’s death we moved her into the downstairs spare bedroom of our house. I always knew that my mother was pessimistic but until those 10 weeks when she lived with me I had no idea how hard it was to live with a truly negative person. Every silver cloud had a grey lining, blue skies were too warm and dark ones too depressing. I couldn’t help breathing a sigh of relief when she decided to settle near my sister. Sorry Sis.

The week after my daughter’s 5th birthday we moved to a new house, a very old property in a complex of converted stables. It was one of only 4 which were available within catchment of the school she had started only 9 months before, so choices were limited, and I know I probably should have moved and settled somewhere else but I had a childminder and she had friends she’d been at nursery with, so where would I go? Move back to where we used to live? not when he was moving there to live with his latest girlfriend. The entire ground floor of the latest house could have fit into the kitchen of the old family home, it was small, dark, with looming trees from next door (and he refused to cut them down), it also turned out that it needed a great deal of work that I didn’t have the money to do, so all in all it wasn’t the best move I ever made.

Let’s just pause and check the drivers of stress shall we…. Death of a loved one? Yep, Divorce? Yep, Increase in Financial obligations? yep, Moving home? yep. I wasn’t missing much.

Side story – May 2012 ‘He’ met a new woman. I was still in contact with his family who said they would always stay in touch because I had been part of their group for 14 years, and they wanted to keep my daughter close. My daughter was asked to be the flower girl at the wedding of one of ‘Old’s’ boys in September 2013. Of course we said yes, it was to be in the centre of London and the reception at their ‘club’ afterwards. I was asked to buy her dress and we would need to stay over night, so as normal, desperate to please, I paid out to travel, stay and wear the right clothes. Since the divorce I had tried to stay in touch with ‘Middle’ and ‘Young’ but this was getting less and less frequent, ‘Young’ lived far away and ‘Middle’ just always seemed to be busy. In the spring of 2013 I was invited by ‘Old’ to meet her and ‘Young’ at Legoland for a kids day out, so I jumped at the chance thinking it would be lovely to actually see these people who I used to see so regularly. It was a nice day until I was taken to one side and told that I was no longer invited to the wedding reception because it wasn’t fair to ‘Him’ and his girlfriend who had now been together for over a year, so I could still bring my daughter and stay for the service “to look after her when she gets bored” and then she would go with her Dad to the reception because “she is family” I am such a stupid twat, because I took it, I took all of it. I took my child to London, and acted as childminder during the service, sitting well away from the family. Then I allowed them to take her to the Reception while I went back to the hotel to wait for her to come back. On the bright side she played up so much she was delivered back within a couple of hours and we had a lovely evening on the Embankment, but why did I allow myself to go through that. After all of that, I don’t think I have spoken to anyone in that family since, which is a genuine loss.

Back to the main part…. The house turned out to be a complete money pit, and in the whole 4 years we lived there only one of my old friends and colleagues came to visit me there. I avoided contact with the outside world as much as possible, I could no longer function where small talk was expected, I either said nothing or spilled everything that was pent up to complete strangers. I was able to cope with my child, work and that was about it. I was in a spiral of eating myself to death, comfort food sneakily eaten when she was in bed, throwing up when it all became too much. Crying myself to sleep then getting up and carrying on with the circus routine the next day. I was travelling between 600 and 900 miles a week, working all hours, either out all day while she was covered by childminders, or coming home at a reasonable hour and working all night when she was in bed. ‘He’ was supposed to have her every other weekend but he constantly cancelled and rearranged things, even when she went across to him and his girlfriend they booked baby sitters and went out. His girlfriend’s two sons were unkind to my baby, she didn’t have her own room and she hated going over there. There were times when she would literally hang off the doorframe to not have to go, and he always made it about me, what had I been saying, what had I done to twist her, honest to God I tried my absolute hardest to be polite and not badmouth him in front of her. The same could not be said for him and his girlfriend who told her I was miserable, anti social and should just get over it. I would drag my baby girl out to his car, they would drive off with tears pouring down her face, and I would just sit on the kitchen floor and cry.

In 2016 I couldn’t take living there any more, it was dark, depressing and the neighbour with the trees was making life miserable, so I sold up and bought a new build house. I was so lucky that they let me have the Help to Buy scheme, I love my house, it needs nothing doing to it, stress free. There are always niggles but nothing like the old place. I may have previously said I worked for an American company, I can’t talk about what happened but I think I can say this. I loved that job, it was hard work and I’d got sucked in to working stupid hours but myself and my wonderful boss had grown it from nothing to being in 3 countries over 8 years. One day they just told him they didn’t want him any more and that was it, he was gone, same day. Stupidly he and I had employed a person about 18 months prior to that, and they had wormed their way into the hearts and minds of the leadership team, they leapfrogged succession and took over. I’m not sure quite what I did apart from be loyal to the old boss and continue to do my job, but by March 2017 I too was surplus to requirements. The day before my 50th birthday.

I broke.

There were only two things that had got me through to this point, I lived for my little girl, and my job enabled me to support her and was the only other thing that I poured everything into so that I could continue to care for her and provide a roof over our heads. I went through the motions of sending her to school, I searched for jobs, I got more and more desperate. Just before Christmas 2017 I recorded a video of me signing my Will, because I had no-one I could go to, to witness it. My plan was to sell the house to release equity, give my daughter to her Dad along with enough money to cope with childcare while he sorted something out, and I would take a walk into the sunset, (or a very deep cold lake after a long drink and some pills). I won’t be too specific about the plans but they would culminate on my birthday, because people would have to remember me on that day anyway so why lumber them with any other day to worry about. I wrote a long letter for my child and told ‘Him’ I needed to have a conversation.