The Separation

So he's gone.

4th January 2010. Twelve years, two children of ours, together with four from my former marriage, the home we created: the family we made. All gone.

Everyone copes differently with the end of a relationship, and there's no right or wrong way. For me, on that day, it was a kind of mourning, a loss, something tangible ending - an emotional ruination. Not for a second would I change his going, our ending, because it had to stop. Because the happiness had ended and the love had gone away and all they left behind was a residue of something once good, turned bad, and the stench of it had become unbearable.

He seemed euphoric on that day though, and actually it helped. Happily and systematically packing up his boxes, his now-decisive mind, locked on to his future without me. I'd heard him days beforehand, preparing. Purposeful footsteps up and down the stairs, over and over, carrying books and paintings and sculptures. Clothes - fine suits, pressed shirts, jumpers, socks. The boxes of shoes. The toolkit, that wood saw, those Georgian chairs. He was tireless, reclaiming all that was his, placing it all in order, with labels: 'Storage' or 'Home'.

I'd been ill in those preceeding days, I'd had a toothache which had reduced me to tears, blubbing incoherently, and uselessly, as it turned out, into the National Health Service Helpline in the early hours. I'd felt like I was being punished. I'd been sleeping in the children's beds over the entire christmas period. One bed one night, one bed another, according to whoever was on a sleepover - so as not to disrupt their lives. Each sleep-starved day, doing what needed to be done and buying presents and doing all the things that make Christmas special and happy, when everyone in the house knew that this Christmas was anything but. And eventually, my body said Stop. I think that was the lowest point. That final night, the last night that we would ever sleep under the same roof - it was profound and poignant and intensely painful. My children's father.

I'd found all our old love letters, quite by chance, while clearing out my things from a console table in our bedroom that he would be taking with him. The handles had come off years ago so I'd stopped using it - I had to ease the drawers open with a pair of pliers, and the discovery of the letters was like finding a perfectly preserved glimpse of the past. There were photographs too. That first summer together, our happy, reckless thirty year old faces, full of life and hope. Both of us, totally unrecognisable. And the letters - the abandon of them all. The love and the lust. The playful teasing of one another, for the very same qualities that we now mutually despise.

Then I found a snapshot of my children from my first marriage, taken during that time. A snap of their excited faces - just babies really. My son still in nappies, my third daughter, a chubby faced three year old, my bigger girls in pony tails with second teeth still too big for their mouths. They were so happy and had been so generously welcoming and accepting of him - their new daddy, the man I loved. Yet now, those same children, now fully-fledged adults and teenagers, had given him a book for christmas and I'd found the page they all signed, torn off and screwed up. I can only guess at the emotions that drove that - rage, despair, sadness. What I do know is that he had kept the book and had been reading it because I found it next to his bed with a book mark. So he kept the bit that he valued, and the keeping of it, and any pain or anger that he felt for the givers of it, did not impair his enjoyment of it. And when I saw that, even amid all the love letters, photographs and agonising nostalgia of those hours, I remembered afresh, everything that I hated him for.

It all comes down to this: He didn't love my children the way that they deserved to be loved. Looking back, everything had been fine until he had children of his own, but their arrival altered everything. He worked hard at first, not to show how his feelings must have changed. But as the years went by, little by little, he stopped trying. Little things, like the way he would make his son a special breakfast, but not mine - his spoiling of his daughter, his siding with his children in any argument between the siblings, his thin-lipped, sneering disapproval of innocuous and ordinary things that my children would do.

He'd never stopped loving me though. I would want for and need nothing. He would spoil me with gifts, with attention, mix me cocktails, entertain my friends - everything in fact but the one thing that mattered to me most. And without that one thing, the gifts, the attention, and even the love, came to mean nothing to me.

The day he left, he had walked our daughter to school. Our son had walked with them too. He'd sent me a text while he was out 'the removal men will be here in 35 minutes'. So when they returned, I took my son away from our home, to the sanctuary of a friend's house.

I've been through this all once before, and some things, important things, need to be done right. My eldest daughter, now a woman of 23, told me in the past that the one thing she remembers most about her parents' divorce, is her father leaving. That last sight of him leaving the house, walking down the path, opening the gate, a second of indecision, then walking left, down the street, her Daddy - that moment, stored away forever. She told me in the kitchen, we were just chatting away happily one day last summer and her life was in a really good place - full of graduation and travels and the kind of hopeful certaintity that you only really have when you're young. But somehow we got talking about the past and she told me, her kind and beautiful eyes shining with tears. Her sadness, her guilt, her then unbearable wretchedness for a terrible moment in her life that was not of her making and over which she had no control.

I'd made a mistake back then and clearly I've made hundreds more since. God knows where I had been when she needed me to protect her, I can't even remember. But I could protect my boy, who ironically, is almost the same age as she had been then. I didn't want him to go through that, to see the removal men arrive, boxes being loaded, each one taking his Daddy irreversibly away from him, then that final moment, the sound of a car door closing, an engine starting, that final look, the last wave. So we said goodbye by the front door. Son and Daddy hugging one another, then my turn - a quick hug - I had to dig my fingernails hard into the palms of my hands not to cry.

My boy and I walked across the common together to our friends' house. It was bitterly cold, but he seemed not to notice - breezily chatting about something or other while I was hoping I was making the right sort of replies, but actually I was struggling not to break down. And this is where I owe so much to my friend. If you're there J, and you ever read this, know that you took some of the worst hours of my life and made them better.

J's son and mine played happily together on the xbox for hours. J gave them lunch, a proper one, I remember the smell of sausages cooking and clanking of saucepans. She fetched me a duvet and let me wallow on the sofa in her warm kitchen for hours. She gave me trashy magazines and colour supplements. She put on a film for me at one stage, but all I can remember of it was Kristen Scott Thomas in a big country house, sometime in the 1940's. She made me endless cups of coffee and untouched plates of toast and asked nothing of me, while I smoked endless cigarettes and tore at my grief.

I stayed at J's that day until it was time to pick up my daughter from school. It took me that length of time, from the morning until school pick-up, to pull myself together. The older kids, my kids, back at the house, not yet back to school or work after the Christmas holidays, had been texting me during the day, urging me not to worry, that they were making American pancakes, that everyone was fine.

Everyone was fine and incredibly, we continue to be. There are spaces in the house, on the walls - obscure and dust-free gaps on shelves and in cupboards where things used to be, but bizarrely, I'm finding it hard to remember what they were. Our financial future is horribly precarious and the future on our life in this house is uncertain. But I don't regret that he has gone and I no longer feel sad. All the tension has gone - the unbearable misery of living with someone that you no longer love or even like; my children's unease, their faces, according to age and temperament - wounded, guarded, resentful, irate - now all that has gone. The in-fighting between all the children, fuelled and loaded with my ex-partner's bias, has just stopped. I'm not going to pretend that life is easy - my children have been damaged, my former life has gone, and the future is daunting.

So now it's just us. Now We Are Seven. And I'm full of hope.

23rd January 2010