This doesn't mean I've been a weeping mess of helplessness, I've been quite the opposite, but the circumstances of my life and the needs of my children have meant I've had very little time to process or even comprehend how my life has changed. I'm not talking day to day, I'm talking on the scale of the bigger picture, the long-term effects of the end of a marriage, the end of all future hopes, dreams and plans that I've been making sine the day we first got together. Half my lifetime ago when I was nineteen. NINETEEN. Sigh...
Here I am staring down the barrel of forty and while ageing itself doesn't bother me, the number 40 kind of does. Forty? Forty? When the fuck did I get near forty and all I can keep thinking is..."WHO is going to want me now? I'm near forty years old with two children, no house that I own, a car that is dinted and still financed, a business that makes hardly any profit and.....I'm fat."
Then I have conflicted thoughts about the whole process where the developing ball breaker within says, "Who the fuck cares? Men are pricks. You know it."
But are they? I never used to think so but now I join the ranks of my sister, my mother, my grandmother and countless aunties, friends and many other women who have reached almost middle age, and the man they thought was their life partner is suddenly no more and they find themselves suddenly alone with an inexplicable bewilderment and entry into single motherhood while their ex-partners leave to live an alternate life leaving them behind to pick up the pieces of their shattered existence and not a say in the choices of any of it.
Sure, my husband would argue that none of what happened with us was like that at all but from where I stand, that is EXACTLY the case. Yes he had demons haunt him but HAVEN'T WE ALL? The thing is that I know of no women who have been a tad unhappy and up and left their home and children in pursuit of an alternate life yet I could rattle off the names of plenty of men who have done so. Affairs, mid-life crisis's, alcoholism, excessive gambling, they do it. Yes so do women. But how many LEAVE THEIR FAMILIES?
I don't get it. I can't comprehend any of it. I can't get my head around how the man who looked at me once so adoringly just changed and in a single text message could tell me he fell out of love with me.
After a barrage of vile abuse and venomous accusations that left the normally well-composed me a bundle of tears on the doorstep of friends, I received this. The admittance. HE FELL OUT OF LOVE WITH ME.
Who the fuck gets to fall out of love with me? And why? What did I do?
That single line has broken my heart more than anything else that has happened between us. Was I perfect? No. But I tried, and it still wasn't enough.
Will I ever know why?
