“BE TRUE TO YOURSELF”

My son has just started his end of year exams. He has very thoughtfully pre-warned me that when he does really badly it will be all my fault for not forcing him to revise. He had English and Geography today. One of the essays he was asked to write in his English exam was “Do you believe that you should always be yourself no matter what?”. Strange question to ask a 15 year old boy – find me one that is going to write “no, I absolutely think that life is about doing what everybody else wants me to do, regardless of my own needs” or “no, I am really looking forward to growing up and becoming a slave to my job, to my home, to my partner and to my children”.

I asked him if he felt that this should always be the case, for example, did he think that a parent, going through a midlife crisis should be allowed to be “true to themselves” (aka selfish bastard) regardless of the people they may hurt along the way. “Yes. Definitely”, he said. “Oh the luxury and simplicity of youth” I thought to myself. I struggled with this concept for a long time after the breakdown of my marriage. For me the essence of my decision almost boiled down to “I can no longer live a lie” and I didn’t want my children to know me as a bitter and twisted wife and mother for ever, who felt desperately hard done by and would have always assumed she can take the moral high ground because she had agreed to take her husband back. In a way I am pleased that he didn’t say “no I believe that parents should stay together for the sake of the children no matter what”. But every single story is different.

Who knows how your decisions will ultimately affect your children. We’ll no doubt “fuck them up” no matter what. It took me a very long time to be persuaded (after years of counselling) that staying in an unhealthy marriage for the sake of the children wasn’t always for the best. I know a lot of people who don’t respect their parents for staying together when they clearly despised each other.

There are no answers here. All I can say is that I no longer believe that my ex-husband is a bad person who set out to destroy me. Yes, he had an affair that virtually destroyed me but he wasn’t seeing it from my perspective. There is always another side to a story and he was going through a difficult time for lots of different reasons. He is a good, fair, honest person but that doesn’t take away from the fact that he betrayed my trust and the person I deeply loved who I had thought I would be with forever became a complete stranger to me. As a result I lost my self respect, my self esteem and my self confidence. My world came crashing down and I struggled to make sense of anything and everything. I felt raw and terrified. As a result, over a very long slow process I began to totally re-assess my priorities. I didn’t like who I had become and I didn’t want my children to know me as a victim.

Perhaps, if I had been more mature things could have been different. I was so hurt by what he did I couldn’t see my way through the murky depths. So. Here I am. Without a husband. Sometimes I still wonder how I got here. But strangely, although I don’t think “bloody hell, how great is this”, I do feel calm and peaceful and very very lucky to have my three gorgeous children no matter what else happens in life and to also have my parents and my brothers and my fantastic friends and a roof over my head and an outlet for my rants and a diploma that allows me to teach and a sense of humour and a love of wine and a propensity to fuck up from time to time and a willingness to try new things and a new pair of Converse for the summer and Bruce Springsteen tickets for Saturday night and … and … and ….

Life is good.