No 8 Telling people
Now that the children know, we can tell everyone else. Some are easier than others, some know already, some would like to think they did.
"I'm not surprised," says my father sagely, nodding with a look of Zen wisdom, a fact that makes X laugh and roll his eyes when we discuss it. My father's very kind and supportive; he takes me out to a nice Chinese restaurant and reminisces about his marital travails. It would be uncomfortable if I was sober, but I make sure I'm not. I never used to drink at all, really, but it seems necessary at the moment. Sometimes you just need time to pass quicker, and drinking helps. I find myself saying over and over to friends, "I just want to be a year down the line now." I'd like to fast-forward through this ugly, painful thing I have created, gloss over it.
X tells his parents. I make sure I'm out of the house, out of the country even, when he does it. It's what he wants, but I'm relieved: people don't split up in X's family, not ever. His mother and father are inseparable, a single entity, after nearly 40 years of marriage. They still hold hands in the street. Even when they come to stay with us, where everything is familiar, his mother won't leave the house without his father for reassurance.
"They were OK," he tells me on the phone afterwards, with some surprise. "They were ? they said if either of us needed anything, they were there."
I'm not really surprised. They have always been very kind. They look after the kids regularly, whisk them away to the seaside in their tiny caravan. When they come to stay, his mother takes up residence in the spare room, furiously ironing everything she can lay her hands on. We sit in silence for a moment.
"Oh," says X. "My dad asked whose idea it was. I wouldn't tell him."
X goes off and spends the weekend with my stepfather. In a fairly pathetic act of cowardice, I haven't told him. God knows why: he's the least judgmental man I have ever met. Even so, I wait for X to go and tell him, hiding behind X, making him do the hard things, as I always have. Back at home with the kids I find myself imagining what they are doing ? it's not hard. They'll be out in my stepfather's back yard, smoking and drinking and talking. My stepfather is almost certainly reading X poetry, philosophising gently, but relentlessly. X is only listening to about a quarter of it, talking over him, and they are both perfectly content with this arrangement. However you define family, whatever it is, those two are family. It's a comfort to know they have a relationship entirely independent of me.
We tell the kids' teachers together, perched on the tiny chairs. It must be a bit odd for them because we are warm, smiling and calm, as if we're on day release from some kind of cult. "We're splitting up, but everything," we say, with both our words and our body language "is absolutely fine." I'm so desperate to make everything civilised.
Only one friend takes me to task. Most people are awkward, or sympathetic, or a combination of the two, but she seems genuinely appalled.
"What if you're wrong?" she asks. "What if you really regret it? What if there isn't anything 'better'?" She spits inverted commas around the word.
I try to answer. "I just have to," I say, inadequately. "I know I could be wrong, I really do. And it's better now than in five or 10 years' time."
It's all completely exhausting. In the evenings, X and I sit side by side on the uncomfortable leather sofa that I won't miss, taking time off from splitting up to watch TV in silence and drink wine. One evening he reaches across to me, squeezes my arm. "You're really good at this," he says. "You're excellent."
"Oh, you are too. Really. You're amazing." I pat his arm. I say it with great sadness.
"I think we both are."
It seems the coldest of cold comforts.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/apr/02/diary-of-a-separation-telling-people
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