Читать книгу The Gap Year(s) - Nathy Gaffney - Страница 9

Detachment – Stage 1 Houston, we have a problem.

Let’s say you need to launch something big. And you need it to travel far. And you need this big thing to not run out of fuel before it’s reached its destination and successfully completed its mission.

You’re thinking of a rocket launch, aren’t you?

Well, if you aren’t, think about it now. It’s a useful image to have in your mind when you think of the energy required to end a marriage and not have the whole thing explode in your face before it gets off the launch pad.

I reckon one of the reasons people put off/delay/avoid ending marriages, even when they’re ship-wreckingly on the rocks, is that it’s so time consuming (and expensive). It requires superhuman efforts to deal with the decision itself, the fallout (yes, it will be nuclear – complete with destruction, carnage, and the winter that follows), and then survival and rebuilding your life. Even if you have had the foresight to build yourself a bunker, the catastrophic changes that have befallen your world will ripple onward and outward for years to come. It’s exhausting and terrifying, and you have no clue as to how it will really all play out.

But hang on a minute… Hollywood will show us the way.

When Hollywood A-Lister Gwyneth Paltrow and her then husband Coldplay’s Chris Martin announced that they were ending their eleven-year marriage through ‘conscious uncoupling’, they gave ‘separating with dignity’ a sexy new name.

But as evolved as Gwynny and Chris may be, they did not invent this approach. The idea of ‘uncoupling’ as an alternative to an acrimonious divorce has been around since the 70s. Out of the 60s decade of peace and love came a ‘peace and love’ approach to dissolving a legal institution in which the ‘love’ was gone, but ‘peace’ was still desired.

In short, the concept revolves around both parties reaching a point where they agree (together) that their marriage is kaput. They then set about crafting and executing a separation of lives, homes, cars, kids, pets, friends, and finances that avoids the nuclear codes being activated and a domestic playing out of World War 3 happening, that being where everyone gets dragged through the courts, misery and mayhem ensues, and lots of lawyers get very rich.

Andy and I separated (the second time and for good) in 2011, and to the best of our intentions and abilities, we tried to ‘uncouple consciously’ in Gwynnyand Chrisstyle (but without the millions, the entourage, the nannies, and the publicity). How that was to look – for us going into it – was with the goal of mak ing as little negative impact on Leo as was possible under the circumstances.

While we decided in April of 2011 to end our marriage – quietly informing family and friends of our intentions – it was June before we told Leo. By that time, we had a plan for how it would unfold. (Thank God we did, because nothing could have prepared either of us for the look of sheer terror that grabbed his little face from the inside-out on the day we told him.)

We were sitting in our sunroom. Leo was on the day bed, me sitting next to him and Andy on a chair close by. He was sitting in between the two of us. In a second, I saw his safe and unified (albeit rocky and unhappy much of the time) world unravel in his mind and cast adrift. He swivelled his head wildly between the two of us, like someone watching the nail-biting end of a Wimbledon Final. No sooner did he shift his eyes to one of us than he had to swing back to the other – it was as if, if he took his eyes off either of us for a second, we would evaporate.

“What will happen to me?” was all he got out before the tears came.

In hindsight, the time invested in formulating a ‘separation plan’ was one of the best moves we made (in a veritable ocean of bad ones). The capacity to be able to answer all the questions that inevitably came gave us the small comfort that we could, at the very least, remove some of the anxiety that comes with the sheer tsunami of uncertainty for children when they realize that their worlds are about to change forever, and that they have absolutely no control over what is happening.

It is only the degree to which parents can successfully navigate and chart a course through the shit storm of separation that can, in some measure, redress the balance of trauma children face (no matter what the circumstances).

Of course, for many people (who may be victims of abuse and are in danger), circumstances are often dictated to you, and I do not share the above as a benchmark, but merely to say that I’m glad we did (without knowing how important it was), and so if you have the luxury of planning time, please use it wisely.

Our plan was that Andy would remain living with us (in our rented apartment) for a period. Once we’d told Leo, Andy moved into the spare room, creating the first ‘separation’.

What we attempted to do throughout the process was to minimize any risk that Leo would feel like it was his fault or like he was in any way responsible for our separating. We did things ‘as a family’, including meals and school functions, and we behaved (for him) like his Mummy and Daddy which we are.

Meanwhile, we worked out Andy’s living arrangements. He would eventually move to an apartment in Bondi, which we had both looked at and jointly decided would be a good place for Leo also. Leo got to check out his new room and have a say in how it would be decorated. We divided the furniture, art, and mutual collected possessions of a life together, with a minimum of fuss. The allocation of who got what really was the least of it. We were both generous – whatever was needed to ease the pain and burden of what we were really doing, we tried to make allowances for. He got the TV and stereo (and bought me a new one of each); I got the lounge suite. We divided the rugs (not with scissors). We shopped for kitchen appliances for his new place. A toaster here, a kettle there. Ooh, look at those great Global Knives… and… you’ll definitely need a garlic press… It was all so weirdly domestic.

Andy’s apartment block had a pool, so it already had that in its favour from Leo’s perspective. It was a gradual teasing apart of one home to create two whilst maintaining a definite thread weaving them together.

He finally relocated in September. Our privately and mutually agreed upon custody arrangement was that Leo would stay with his dad four nights out of every two weeks. At the time, this was one of the easiest separation decisions to make because Andy’s work schedule was more pressing and less flexible than mine, so it made sense that I be the primary caregiver and that was definitely what I wanted. To further ease the separation for Leo, we agreed to continue having weekly family dinners – who Leo was with at the time would determine where. That Christmas, we spent the day together. We cooked and had X-mas lunch at Leo’s dad’s new place. We all swam in the pool. Leo was the happiest I’d seen him in ages. (Let’s face it, when your mum and dad aren’t actually screaming at each other, or you, it’s pretty easy to be happy if you’re a kid.)

Andy and I were happy, too – certainly for appearance’s sake if not on the inside – but it mattered not, as we were doing this for Leo, and from all the signs, we were managing it well, so that gave us cause to feel good about at least that. Unlike many families that have extended family close by, we were on our own in Sydney. My extended family lives inter-state and Andy’s overseas, so navigating that part of the situation was simple. For us, it didn’t exist. The bitter irony is, of course, that with the trauma of the separation behind us, Andy and I actually enjoyed each other’s company. But we’d been down this road before, and we both knew that this time there was no turning back.

Spoils of War.

Neither Andy nor I had been particularly great with money during our marriage. With both of us having worked in the arts, our income structure was definitely of the ‘feast or famine’ variety. We were either planning grand adventures and enjoying life or scratching the rent together and bickering.

We had attempted to harness the power of the good times by getting into the property market – doing the right thing, getting a mortgage to get ahead. But we always seemed to buy at the wrong time, and sell at an even worse one. Our final disastrous push to get into the Sydney property market took six months for us to get the finance finalized. As a result of the delay, prices had gone through the roof by the time we bought. We were presented with a tiny 2-bedroom apartment (too small to live in with a child) attached to a mortgage repayment of $3,700 per month! This led to more bickering and recriminations. All around me, my friends seemed to have done everything right. They were buying houses, renovating them, selling them on, making money, and moving up in the world. I felt like we were spiralling in exactly the opposite direction.

In the end, I walked away with a miniscule pool (puddle) of cash, the lease on our rented apartment, some furniture and appliances, and little prospects of a regular income. The grossly overpriced investment-property apartment we had purchased was sold off in a fire sale, barely covering the loan we had managed to take out for it. So, we carved up our money, assets, and interests, of which there was precious little. A small apartment, bank accounts, cars, and debt (along with the human capital of family and friends).

My strategy to avoid a tough, painful fight after the tough, painful decision to separate was simple: if I demanded nothing, there’d simply be nothing to fight over.