the school of wife

It’s a crisp autumn morning, not a time of day I’d even consider doing what I’m about to admit to.

Overall, think I’m fairly mature. So far, at least, I’ve been able to deal with what life has meted out to me. I try not to take it personally when things take an unexpected turn. I live up to my responsibilities and shrug things off, looking the other way or right ahead.

But just as I only eat the Lindt chocolate I was given late at night, when my defences are worn thin and I’ve stopped caring that it makes my skin break out, I only use the computer as a babysitter when my battery is low and I feel caught like a rabbit in its headlights.

Parenting adult kids became a strain, for me, when my kids discovered that my maturity didn’t go all the way down. While its surface layer is pretty solid, there are fault lines that my kids have learnt how to play on when they so choose. When I admitted to my daughter, a few mornings ago, that I’d wasted time on the computer the night before trying to find out what her father was up to, her instant response was, ‘You idiot, don’t do that’. For a second, I felt like one of her friends at work, caught checking up on an ex-boyfriend. My daughter, of coruse, drawing on her wealth of inexperience, was right. But it was too late. I’d already spent time tracking down my ex on the internet. And not for the first time either. I’ve probably looked him up three or four times in the three years since he left Australia (which come to think of it, isn’t such a bad score).

My ex doesn’t make it easy to find out what he’s up to. Even though we’re in intermittent contact, he never tells me what I sometimes really want to know, which is what his new life feels like. As far as I know, he doesn’t do social media. Or at least, he didn’t use to and, if he’s taken to it since he left, I haven’t looked him up. Even late at night, sitting glazed in front of the computer, glancing at the news headlines and checking the weather, too tired to finish cleaning up the kitchen before heading to bed, I refuse to cross that line and lose my self-respect with it.

When my marriage ended, the best advice I was given was to draw a line and step over it. I liked the formality of this, its utter simplicity. It wasn’t personal. It told me to take a deep breath and to put all my energy into the next thing, without looking back or down. And to do that again and again. Mostly I have done this. These days I feel liberated into life far more than I feel rejected by my ex. I now view my life as falling into different series, rather than, as before, interconnected chapters. While my life story is unlikely to reach a pleasing climax, a summit from which I can look down and see everything falling into place, I feel okay with this.

Except that, as I say, I’m not mature all the way down. Deep down inside, I have what I’ve come to think of as an inner 9-year-old to take care of. My inner 9-year-old is no feminist. She believes in long-term love and happy endings and feels fobbed off when the director takes them off the table. She sees other people with these things and wants them for herself. Anything else on offer is, well, not it.

A few years before my father died of a heart attack on a Good Friday, decades ago now, he told me quietly that he couldn’t promise to be around forever. Clearly a marital separation is not the same as a death. Although, in some ways I find it emotionally simpler to see it in this light, as dead love. Not least, my inner 9-year-old seems better able to accept the finality of it when I do.

I want to be careful here. I don’t want to fall into the trap of the hindsight bias. I don’t want to look back, in a ruminative way, and light up a trail of clues leading up to my ex’s decision to end things between us, that just weren’t there in the months prior to it. Because the reality is that even if he did leave a trail, I was too busy living to notice it. At the time, I thought the kinks in our marriage were the result of two people who still cared about each other pushing in slightly but not wildly different directions. I didn’t know what was brewing, because it wasn’t shared with me. And I’ll always be glad that I didn’t know, that I wasn’t clairvoyant. Just as, when I was a teenager, I didn’t think ahead of time that my father would die young. (Sometimes it’s best to be surprised.)

Even my casual sticky-beak on the internet turned up nothing much. But for one thing. It confirmed to me that my ex has a beard, something that my married self never encouraged and that my separated self feels wonder at. How could a face I knew so well and so long have a beard on purpose, and not because the razor got lost? I know this sounds ridiculous for me to say. But my inner 9-year-old knows exactly what I mean, because her response was to gasp when my scrolling turned up a graphic of my ex’s face, in a link related to his work, in which the artist had drawn a beard on a photo of his face. Somehow this beard, this choice, has had more impact on me than knowing that my ex lives in London and travels for work.

This time of year always shakes me up. Other people buy a few chocolate eggs, count up the public holidays, and take off somewhere. But not me. Even though I don’t believe in Jesus’s resurrection as a literal event, I do believe in what it symbolises. I even plan to attend church on Sunday, to an early service without the hoo-hah, in the hope that the priest will give a sermon on a big human theme, rather than gently haranging half the congregation for only attending on religious festivals.

Each time Easter comes around, more quickly each year, I go through a decluttering of my soul. During this fallow time, this reflective time, I get to choose, to some degree, what to keep and what to let go of. Mostly this isn’t conscious. It’s not something that I actively or knowingly choose to do. It’s something I can feel happening inside of me. It has nothing to do with lists or planning. And although it isn’t about doing, I do tend to throw myself about the garden at some point.

Somehow this process has become more necessary as I get older. I can only suppose this is because I have a lot of experience behind me, and it takes time to sift through it, and to clear away what lies strewn across my path. So that when it’s done, I get to sit back and watch what happens in the space that has been cleared.

And those red autumn leaves, they keep on falling.