As May and June headed towards July, I began to feel that life was calming down and brightening up a bit – albeit with the odd cloud darkening our days every now and then. At the end of May, after I’d spent the best part of five months asking E to tell his parents what had […]
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A foreign country
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” – L P Hartley, The Go Between Yesterday I finally did something that I haven’t been able to face doing since E left. I started re-reading the letters and emails that I had found (and I had written myself) when I discovered E’s first […]
Facebook Fail
After Spanx Night, I steered clear of the booze for a few weeks. I also avoided going out, in fact, I don’t think I left the house in the evening until we went on holiday in July. To be honest, I was (still am) finding being in company quite difficult, so I retreated behind my […]
Broken?
Kintsugi – the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. It treats breakage and repair as part of an object, rather than something to disguise, hide or dispose of. I was recently watching a presentation about the dangers of radicalisation by extremists in schools, colleges and universities. The presenter […]
Blithbury
Blithbury (n.) A look someone gives you by which you become aware that they’re much too drunk to have understood anything you’ve said to them in the last twenty minutes.” – Douglas Adams and John Lloyd: The Deeper Meaning of Liff – After my sober March, I was now drinking again, but I was much […]
Stories
When we moved to Singapore the first proper storm we experienced – at 3am – resulted in a Sound of Music-esque scene, where, with each fresh crash of thunder, a different child ran barefoot into my room and threw themselves under my duvet. For those first few months my bed became a place of sanctuary […]
Grenades
I’m breaking with this blog’s usual ‘timeline’ to interject with something that happened today. I wanted to mark it, diarise it, write about it whilst it was fresh. So far, this blog has been retrospective, and I’ve had months to calm down and try to put things in perspective before writing, but today provided an […]
In Shock
“He’s moved in with P.” I had already learned to dread Saturdays. All four kids would be over-emotional and highly strung before E arrived and after the boys had gone the house felt resentfully quiet. Then, when they got home, not only would Youngest Son be unsettled and prone to tears but the inevitable comments […]
Aftershocks
If E leaving and all the stuff surrounding it, was the initial earthquake, then I suppose I should have expected some aftershocks. One of the things that constantly surprises about this whole thing has been how long it is taking me to ‘get over it’, and how hurt I have been by it. I know […]
First Day
In what would be a year of Firsts after E left, I think my first day at work in 19 years was one of the most daunting. I had literally been at home since September 1998. I was used to my own company, my own rules. I was used to silence and my own space. […]
He-total: Life without Ex 