Читать книгу The Gap Year(s) - Nathy Gaffney - Страница 7

Jump forward four years: Leo was eight and cognizant of all that was going on in his world, and it wasn’t pretty. For the first two years since our reconciliation, we had kept up the work. But that’s the word here – work. Not the sort of work that people expect to put into relationships (whatever that is), this was back (and spirit) breaking work. A harshly forced discipline of compromising so much of our authentic selves, just to ‘stick it out’. It felt to me like I was putting on an act, us constantly needing to check in with each other, to see if our ‘performance’ was up to par.

It was exhausting.

The last two years in particular were a daily grind. We were worn down to the bone. We were miserable and it showed. On our faces, in our voices, in the palpable energy between us. It was heavy, toxic, filled with dread – like the dementors from Harry Potter had entered our home and were sucking the joy out of our very souls. Disagreements, arguments, and seething resentment hid behind every door and would pounce at a minute’s notice.

Leo would plead with us to stop fighting. And as much as we tried to shield him from the war between us towards the end, too, we became less and less guarded in protecting him from the shrapnel that exploded from our battles. He ended up on the frontline, directly in the line of fire.

At times, he would try to intervene, telling us to stop fighting. “Please, Mummy and Daddy!” his little voice would entreat us. “Please stop fighting!”

With us in full flight, he would inevitably be snapped at, told to go to his room. I die a little death thinking of his little face in such distress, pleading with us. Parental guilt seems to have no statutes of limitation when it comes to the times that we served up shit on the parenting plate – especially when I know we could have, should have, done better.

On one such afternoon, he had gone to his room, but clearly could still hear us.

Money and what to do with it was at the core of many of our arguments, and this one was no different. We’d not long before sold our souls to get into the Sydney property market and had purchased a flat. It was tiny, but it was a start. Now, Andy was putting his case forward for a trip to New York to purchase some camera equipment.

I was like, “What the fuck??!!”

Neither of us would budge an inch. Me accusing him of being irresponsible and selfish, and him accusing me of forcing us to financially extend ourselves beyond our means.

It went on for over half an hour, escalating from terse disagreement and debate to full-scale screaming, our faces twisted in rage and spitting vitriol at each other.

“New York? New Fucking York?! To buy a camera? Are you kidding? Haven’t you heard of Ebay?!”

“Well, I’d rather be putting my money there than chasing around on your friends’ coattails, trying to buy shitty Sydney property we can’t afford!”

We might as well have been speaking completely different languages for all the understanding of each other’s viewpoints that wasn’t going on.

It was all I could do to not slam doors, throw things, and smash things. I left the lounge room, stifling sobs, and walked down the hallway towards our bedroom. Crying was the only outlet that was safe and acceptable, the only way I could express my emotion. As I passed Leo’s room, he came out from behind his door and followed me down the hall, whispering:

“Divorce, Mumma, get divorce.”

Not “get divorced,” or “get a divorce, Mumma,” but simply “get divorce”. Here was my eight-year-old, not old enough to use the word correctly, and yet in his distress at seeing me so bereft, once again, he was offering me counsel in the only way he knew how. At his tender age, he knew the way out.

I hushed him back into his room and gave him a cuddle. As I knelt on the floor and hugged him close to me, he whispered the words again as his little face pressed into my neck.

“Divorce, Mumma, get divorce.”

I’ve had a few lightbulb moments in my life, where the darkness I’ve been stumbling around in suddenly lifts and I can see clearly. This was one of those moments. A massive flash of ‘wake the fuck up, Nathy!’ Whatever Andy and I were doing to each other was nothing compared to the damage we were doing to this little person. It was wrong, and something had to change.

“I promise I’ll make it better, baby,” I told him.

I retreated to the bathroom to gather my thoughts. Sliding my back down the wall, I leaned against the bathtub. The cool of the tiles sharp against the heat of my body. The crumpled, red-faced mess of me against the bright white of the bathroom, reminiscent of a movie where the heroine is wrongly locked up in a loony bin. I looked at myself in the full-length mirror opposite me. Bedraggled and beaten. What a cliché. Not an ounce of fight left for myself. At 46 years of age and after fifteen years of marriage, I was spent. The loony bin had won.

What had I become? I kept staring and staring, trying to find Nathy. But a Nathy who wasn’t actually me. A Nathy who was stronger than the one I was looking at. A Nathy who would do what needed to be done. My eight-year-old had told me what to do. Was I woman enough to do it?

I needed courageous heroic Nathy. The superhero version of myself. Cape, undies on the outside, a snazzy emblem, knee-high boots, and definitely some sort of mask. I needed a Marvel makeover. Yes, that Nathy could get this shit done!

What exactly was holding me back? What was getting in the way of stating that I’d had enough, that I wanted to separate?

When I looked at my reflection, it was right there in my eyes.

Fear.

I was terrified.

Terrified of so many things, and yet they could all be rolled up under one big subtitle: ‘The Great Unknown’.

But there was the headline – fear. Fear that I couldn’t survive on my own. Fear I would end up homeless, jobless, penniless, and worthless. Fear that, somehow, my sadness and our collective dysfunction would be turned against me: that if I instigated a separation, Leo would be fed the story that it was his mother who had torn apart our ‘happy family’. Fear that sadness and resentment might escalate into anger and bitterness, which could catapult us into custody battles and any or all of the other horrors that befall many who depart unhappy marriages. Fear that battles would beget battles, which would further damage and distress Leo. Fear that I was just flat-out making the wrong decision. Fear that, by leaving, I would make things worse, not better.

I pleaded with strong Nathy. “What should I do?” I whispered. “Please, please, please, tell me what to do? I don’t know what to do.”

The truth is, I did know what had to be done, and I had known for quite some time. I wanted out. I wanted out so badly, but I didn’t know how to do it, or if I could do it.

I pleaded with her for an hour until I was exhausted and could plead no more.

I had worn out the last of my what-ifs, including my worries about hurting Leo by splitting up his parents and my worries about what others would think of me. Resistance erased, I knew what I needed to do. And for the first time, I could. I had my own permission.

I had to ‘get divorce’.

We invest so heavily in love, in people, in partnerships, in intimacy, in vulnerability, and we expect those investments to prosper. I had made so many sacrifices (or at least compromises) to incorporate love into my life (and into Leo’s life) and to accommodate the presence of another... even if he was not perfect. I’d hoped that these sacrifices and compromises would turn out to be well worth the effort, repaid by years and years of love, devotion, loyalty, laughter, children, friendship, and support.

But it didn’t turn out that way. My sacrifices and compromises only seemed to create restriction, resentment, and regret. Hoping to fix that, further sacrifice led to sadness, anger, isolation, unfulfilled promises and dreams, more resentment, and so on, until something finally gave. The unit of “us” broke apart and we were forced to navigate our way through separation – a strange process, in itself – and sail off into the long uncharted sea of being… once again alone.

I’d like to say that, after my bathroom epiphany, I marched boldly out of said bathroom and stated my intentions loud and clear, but if you’ve lived through the death throes of a marriage (or any form of deeply committed relationship), you’ll know it didn’t happen that way.

It felt like we were standing at the bedside of a loved one on life support. We both knew there was no hope they were coming back to us. They would never laugh with or love us again. We would never again feel their warm embrace, or hear their sweet words whispered in our ears.

Standing there, we both knew it was too late.

Our marriage was all but dead. The only life running through its veins was being artificially pumped through it with Herculean effort and at great expense.

Yet, we struggled with the decision to end it, to ‘pull the plug’. It was, in fact, several months after the ‘Get divorce, Mumma’ moment that the opportunity presented itself, and I jumped at it.

Andy and I had been out for breakfast, which had turned from a stilted, lifeless encounter to one of simmering, festering annoyance. By the time we got back to our car, we’d exchanged barbs about everything from the waitress’ attitude to the (over/under) scrambled eggs. As we sat in the car…

“Nathy, I can’t do this anymore.”

This was the moment I’d been waiting (hoping and praying) for.

He’d said it. He’d finally said it.

I let the words sink in for a moment.

Why had I waited for him to call the end? Why had I not done it all those weeks, months before? Was I weak? Was I gutless?

Rightly or wrongly, I needed to control the narrative. I knew Andy’s stance had long been for us to stick it out according to our vows, ‘for better or for worse’. He’d told me that on more than one occasion. I knew that if I’d called it, if I’d walked away, then the story that Leo would have been told is that “Your mother tore our family apart.” And from Andy’s perspective, that certainly would have been the truth. But I was thinking about this strategically. I was playing the long game. I was thinking about the story that my son would have to grow up with. And the story I wanted him to understand was this:

“Your dad and I tried really hard, but in the end, we just couldn’t make it work. So, we decided that it would be best for everyone that we separate.”

Does that make me manipulative? I’d like to think it demonstrates my empathy and emotional intelligence, and the capacity to think clearly in times of extreme emotional duress. Either way, I did what I did. You can make up your own mind.

It was time to think of the life we needed to live, the life we owed it to our young son to create. In order to do that, we had to lay a life (in this case our marriage) to rest.