Married life was… good; Max was a loving and attentive husband, and almost without thinking about it I fell into his life fantasy of him and me and baby makes three, because sure enough, I caught one. I was in two minds about the whole thing; did I really want to start a family so young? I mean, I wasn’t yet twenty-two, I hadn’t really done anything, been anywhere, and suddenly this little thing inside me was where I was supposed to go and what I was supposed to be; is that really what I wanted? And yet, when I thought about what I was trying my hardest to see as a little interloper in my life and my body, all I felt was a shockingly fierce protectiveness toward the child inside me.
As my pregnancy progressed, Max seemed to be pulling away from me. At first it was small, subtle things; he was working longer hours, he was dealing with more, and bigger projects, and it was true, he was; all I heard from his co-workers was what kind of a workload he and his team were taking on, because with his firm the price of being able to dig the best holes was that they got to dig more, and bigger ones.
Max came home hours after he was supposed to, dog-tired and worn-out after a long day out on the factory floor, making sure his latest baby was coming along to his satisfaction and the way he designed it; all I got from him was a cuddle before he literally dropped off his feet and went out like a light. I left him on the couch most nights, which a throw pulled up over him, because with the best will in the world I couldn’t shift his weight and walk him to bed, not in his exhausted state. So I slept alone most nights, after spending the long day alone, day after day and night after night. The only time I really got any attention from him was at the weekends, and even that was broken up by emergency calls from the fabrication teams on the factory floor because they couldn’t understand something, or they couldn’t make something work, and he’d be off, and I’d be alone again.
This went on, my new normal, until the baby, a boy we named ‘Finn’, was born. He was the apple of Max’s eye, his son, but even then Max had managed to miss his birth, an emergency in Kuwait had him haring off the day before I went into labour, and Finn was born with my mum in attendance, and dad and Mikey pacing around and worrying, not my husband, not the father of my baby. I know now that I would never forgive him for that, and that really was where the end of us began. When he came back he was full of apologies, he really tried, but the fact was, when work called, it was more important than the birth of our first child, and I couldn’t forgive him for that.
The combination of my resentment and his cavalier attitude to what was supposed to be our crowning achievement is where I think the slippery slope began. Max made all the right noises (when he was around, when he could tear himself away from his precious job for the very occasional evening with his family) but I could clearly see, and feel in my heart, that his heart wasn’t in it. Gradually, fighting it all the way, I came to realise I was falling out of love with him, if I was ever really in-love with him in the first place, and that my baby and I just weren’t that important to him, no matter how much he professed otherwise if I pressed him on it. The feeling I’d made a catastrophic cock-up of my life grew stronger with every passing day.
And so we stumbled along, both of us knowing it had all gone so wrong and not knowing how to fix it; we tried to reconnect, but to be honest, half the time I felt like Max was just phoning it in, that whatever interest he’d ever had in me had fizzled out, and now we were just going through the motions. We even tried to reconnect using sex and seduction, but that essential something was missing, and it felt false and ‘play-actey’ and uninvolving. One of our periodic bouts of sexual connection ended up ringing the bell again, because sure enough, I caught. Max tried being happy and thrilled by it, and for a while I really thought this baby would be the catalyst that put us back together, but then we started pulling away again, and I realised this new baby wasn’t going to be the band-aid that papered-over the yawning crack in our marriage, that we were on life-support and there was nowhere to go.
Mikey was a constant source of support and encouragement; there was nothing he could or would do to intervene, he really didn’t want to be the one to come between Max and me; for better or worse this was my marriage to salvage or let sink without trace, and nothing he could say or do could make Max love me again anyway, but I knew that whoever pulled the trigger, Mikey would be there for me, because he truly did love me, and I loved him right back.
I was almost six months along when Max finally decided to have that ‘we have to talk’ moment with me, and it was about as bad as it got; he’d been offered a senior post in the company operations group … in Kuwait, and he’d told them he was taking it; he explained that it was him, not me, that he couldn’t make our marriage work, that he loved me, but he wasn’t in-love with me, but he’d never forget or neglect his children. Big of him. Whatever.
I made the token plea for him to at least stick around long enough to hold his daughter, but he was on a tight deadline (or so he said; I personally thought he was just looking to bug-out ASAP…) but he would set up trusts for my little boy, Finn, who already looked so much like his daddy (and, strangely, like Mikey too) it was scary, and his unborn daughter, Lara; if he couldn’t be there for them, he was at least going to ensure they’d never want for anything; like that made it better…
With that out of the way and his conscience salved there came a whirlwind of packing and then suddenly I was a single mother alone in Ledbury with a toddler and a baby on the way.
Mikey came to my rescue, as I always knew he would; everything Max had neglected or seemed reluctant to do Mikey did without comment; when I needed time to myself with my back pain and aching joints and swollen feet he’d spirit Finn away to playgroup, or the toddler play-park, or just go for a ramble around town in his stroller, never mind he had a business to run; at least Mikey let me know who and what his priorities were. When I was too depressed or tired to cook a meal, Mikey would be there, whipping up something tasty and nutritious, dividing his time between feeding Finn and spoon-feeding and pampering me. Every day I gave thanks for him, and pondered, usually with a startling rush of jealousy, that someday he was going to make some lucky woman the perfect husband.
Mikey was my Lamaze partner when I went into labour, and when Lara was born, he was the first to hold her, not her absentee father; Max had mailed in a divorce application, I’d signed it without hesitation, and received the Decree Nisi from the court, now the Decree Absolute was in the pipeline, I only had to wait six weeks and a day and there was no going back. Not that I wanted to; Max had abandoned us, he’d demonstrated how little his family meant to him, so I felt no pangs of loss when the Decree Nisi came through the door.
I didn’t even shed a tear, I was that unconcerned, I just sent off the application for the Decree Absolute and voila, I was no longer legally married to Max Elliot and he had no more say in my life, or those of my children. I had full and undisputed custody of the children, Max had even very kindly relinquished all parental rights over the children, which gave a big fat clue as to what he was really like; we were a mistake, and now he’d erased us.
With Max now finally and fully departed from our lives I had to give a thought as to what I did next. Max was living abroad, no court in the UK could force him to provide me with spousal support, and I had to hope he didn’t decide one day to stop paying into the trusts he’d set up for the children, because if he did, again, I had no way to penalise him, he was out of reach of the UK Family Court.
Mikey came to my rescue. He grabbed all my bills, utilities, TV license, water, even the mortgage and just set them up for payment from an account he created just for that purpose; he even gave me a debit card so I could shop and not feel threatened when it came to feeding myself or the kids; the trusts Max created were educational only, so they’d only get the money if they went to university, and that would be paid directly to the university, not them; otherwise the money reverted to him, just one more reason Mikey had to kick his arse if he ever showed his face in England again; Max had never really taken care of his children at all. Without Mikey and mum and dad my kids and I would be living in a hostel on benefits; that was the legacy my husband with his six-figure tax-free salary on the other side of the world had left for his children.
Mike:
Max really did a number on my beautiful sister; he dumped her pregnant with a child in arms and never supported his children at all; he ran away to the other side of the world, scuttling like a lizard, tail-high and elbows pumping and abandoned his family in poverty; at least, they would have been except for one thing; I would never let my Rys go without, not like that cowardly bastard who ran the first chance he got. Still, Rys seemed remarkably well-balanced about the whole thing; my take is that she was just glad it was over and he was gone, and she’d bring up her kids according to her lights; from where I stood, that seemed like a good way to be.
We kind of bumbled along, and sometimes it seemed more like a marriage than a big-brother/little sister dynamic; Rys would call me at work to pick up stuff she’d forgotten, or wanted the kids try, and I’d spend the evenings chatting with Rys as she cooked while Lara slept on my chest and Finn clambered around on me. Going home to my lonely bachelor flat over the office after the noise and rumpus of an evening with Rys and the kids was sometimes hard to take, and left a peculiar, hollow ache inside me.