No 9 What went wrong, part two
So what happened next? Life, I suppose. First we had a baby, then another, and between the two, when I was six months pregnant, my mother died, catapulting us into a state of grief and chaos, a tangle of family complications and obligations. Two months after she died, X was forced to accept a job abroad, and when the new baby was a couple of months old and the elder two, we all moved. We ticked off the top three of life's most stressful events in the space of a few months.
It was disastrous. I was alone most of the time with two kids in a notoriously unwelcoming city, holding X responsible for every interminable, lonely afternoon spent grappling with a baby and a bored, unsettled toddler, every trip to the playground where no one spoke to me, every wrenching phone call with my family. I didn't grieve so much as firefight. Money was short, my attempts to find part-time work hopeless, and our new baby turned out to be of the nocturnal variety, repeatedly rousing the neighbours' fury and exhausting us.
After less than a year, with no realistic job prospects and no support network, X sat me down and suggested we cut our losses and move back. It would have to be my decision, he warned. He was not going to take responsibility alone for another massive life choice. While struggling with that dilemma, I discovered we were facing another: I was ? unexpectedly ? pregnant.
I don't remember much of the month that followed, except a lot of silence. We didn't speak much, as I tried to untangle my feelings and decide what to do ? somehow, there didn't seem to be much to say. X wasn't unsympathetic, or unsupportive; anything but. He was solicitous, kind and practical. Even so, it was clear that both decisions were mine alone to make. I was seeing a physiotherapist at the time for a hip problem, and I remember talking more openly to her during my twice-weekly sessions than I did to X. Somewhere around that point, any inclination to confide in X was lost. I withdrew further and further, paralysed with indecision.
Eventually, against the wall of an inflexible deadline, I decided that we would move back to London and I would get a termination. It felt like a double failure. I remember getting up at 5am to go to a clinic on my own (X had to look after the kids). I remember riding through the dawn, on a succession of suburban trains, showering in antibacterial gel, putting on a hairnet and a pair of plastic slippers, sitting alone in my hospital room trying to empty my mind, counting the ceiling tiles. I had the termination (X was there when I came round, with a thoughtful flask of tea and a cake) and a week later we moved back to London. Three weeks after that, I was back at work.
None of this was X's wish, or his doing. He would have happily stayed, moved out to the suburbs, helped me raise three children. He would have been good at it; I wouldn't have coped. Even so, it was much easier for me to hold a tight knot of resentment towards him than to turn towards him for comfort. At this point, working full-time and struggling with two kids, full of anger and anxiety, I stopped talking to him at all. At one point, after a week of barely exchanging a word, X called me at the office to say that if I didn't call back and speak to him, there would be no point in us going on. I didn't call.
We weathered that crisis, somehow, moved abroad again a year later. The move was happier overall, but as a couple, we weren't. X was increasingly irritated by my irresponsibility, I found him joylessly fixated on the tedious minutiae of life. We disagreed and undermined each other with the children. Increasingly, I looked to my friends and not to X for fun, solace, laughter. I allowed myself to wonder for the first time about other lives, other men. In essence, I gave up.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/apr/09/diary-separation-what-went-wrong-part-two
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