Tag: middleage

Peace

I noticed today that I started this blog on 19th February 2018.  By sheer coincidence this was the 10th anniversary of the day that I found out about E’s first affair.  I didn’t deliberately choose the date, but it now seems strangely serendipitous that the date that everything started to fall apart ten years ago, […]

Bar

Today I’m handing part of the blog over to one of Oldest Daughter’s best friends – C.  They have been friends for most of their lives and C is one of the friends that has been by Oldest Daughter’s side throughout everything she’s been though as a result of E’s leaving.  C, along with a […]

Photograph

On the morning of our first full day in Singapore, I made E and I a cup of coffee each.  We had no cups and no milk, just wine glasses and a couple of half-pint tankard-style glasses (coffee, wine and beer – I always have been all about the priorities).  I poured our coffee into […]

First Christmas

If I’d struggled during Christmas 2016, because I knew about E’s affairs and I knew that we would have to split up, I was equally challenged, although for completely different reasons, by Christmas 2017. We’d faced down a whole year of ‘firsts’ as a family of five, not six, but Christmas was the big one.  […]

Drill

This weekend was yet another one that was good for the soul.  I spent it gardening, baking with Oldest Son and reading.  It was also one, where, thanks largely to my garden, I began to reconsider what I was ‘good’ at and what I could and couldn’t do. I spent Saturday morning weeding, mowing the […]

Help

At the beginning of November, following numerous, increasingly distressed, emails from me, E had paid off the big loan I’d taken out for us the previous year and cleared most of the other debts (caused by the cost of the Singapore holiday and various things I’d had to pay out for on for the house […]

Rose Petal Perfume

When my sister and I were little we used to make perfume out of rose petals. We’d carefully pick the petals and mix them with cold water in plastic teacups.  In my head, we’d made a beautiful thing, although in actuality, our perfume was just muddy water with slimy bits of rose petal gloomily sinking […]

Softer

be softer with you you are a breathing thing a memory to someone a home to a life Nayyirah Waheed Never one to do things by halves, at the end of October 2017 I made the dramatic (and what now seems completely bloody mad) decision to give up alcohol for a whole year.  The possibility […]

Happy

This year’s May Bank Holiday weekend marked something very special for me. In terms of what I did, there wasn’t anything particularly new, but in terms of how it felt, it was completely different.  For the first time since E left, I felt that my family was entirely complete and very happy without him. E […]

Fallout

The fallout from Oldest Daughter’s discovery of P’s surname change was swift and emotional.After eight months of E-generated WTF moments, this was definitely the WTF-iest so far.  Given E’s reticence on the matter, we just couldn’t fathom why P would change her name in such a public way.  She must have known that E hadn’t […]