My View

“It’s discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.”
― Noël Coward

It’s not every day that your daughters sit you down in a local coffee shop and tell you to leave their father. I remember some detail, but not all; it was a bright, sunny Sunday afternoon in November 2014, and I was drinking a large cappuccino without cake because I had been avoiding ingesting unnecessary calories for at least the previous six months. I remember their candid words and the hot, salty tears. The dawning realisation of how much damage had been done. That the cat, Truth, was out of the bag. I knew it, they knew it, and I knew they knew it. I don’t own a Tardis and Superman doesn’t love me like he does Lois, so I had no means of going back in time (dammit). I had to stop hiding, stop making excuses, stop making the best of a bad situation, stop lying to myself, stop lying to others, stop being small. I had to take stock, speak up, put my head above the parapet, blow my whole life as I knew it apart, be big and brave and honest. I had no other option, and I felt sick to my core. I couldn’t do it. But I had to.

I had known their father since we were eleven years old, joining our secondary school at the same time and tumbling through puberty together. Our young adulthood was spent illicitly taping each others albums, trying to keep an entire nights clubbing to under a tenner, cramming like sardines into cars racing to beaches, and playing ‘Appetite for Destruction’ relentlessly turned right up to eleven. We were the best of friends. We hung out with our mates, we laughed, we argued. I had other boyfriends, but it was him that I fell in love with. When we were 19 we kissed at a friend’s party, surprising everyone we knew, and there was no going back. A year later we got engaged because he wanted everyone to know how serious we were, and because I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him.

We had a party to celebrate our engagement, a family-and-friends do at my parents home. Home-prepared grub, mix-tapes of music, yummy fruitcake to cut. One of our male friends stripped to ‘Sweet Transvestite’ under the glare of a pendant light, watched by his astonished parents. We mopped up the debris as the stragglers made their way home, and I dropped cream on the skirt of my dress. I wasn’t bothered about cleaning it, but he was. We argued. He said dreadful things. It was the first time that he physically hit me. I cried, and he said that he was sorry and cleaned my skirt. And we carried on as before.

That was really the start. We married without living together first, bought a house, had two babies, renovated the house, sold it, bought another house, knocked it down, built another house, built a social circle, built up debt, and worked hard. His sisters gave birth to my nephews and nieces who I fully committed myself to, and whom I still love with my whole heart. I had a couple of operations, an aneurysm and a tumour. I gained weight, and lost it all and more on a cyclical rotation. Normal married life, to all intents and purposes, to the outside world. Normal to me too, actually, given that I had no idea what it would be like to be married to someone else.

I tried to leave him a few times, but I just couldn’t go. I loved him. I loved my family unit, my home, my wider family. He used the most hurtful, soul-destroying, hateful words, accusing me of things that I had never done, of being something that I was not, cornering me with numbing, freezing, violent, screaming aggression, and then on the turn of a tuppence he changed tack and in the next breath would ask if I fancied a cup of tea. I was told that it was my fault, that I didn’t understand his pressure of work,  that I was toxic, that he behaved that way because I pushed him to it, that I confused him with my words and he was just so emotional that he couldn’t help but behave in that way. I pleaded with him to stop, to change. I wrote him letters trying to explain how his behaviour impacted upon all of us. I arranged lunchtime appointments with his GP to help with the enormous stress that he said he suffered. There was no longterm change. He humiliated me at the checkout, in cafes, in the bank and occasionally in front of friends. I thought it was my fault. I was small and insignificant. I took my wedding ring off, and didn’t wear it for the final 12 years of our marriage. Very few people asked why.

The girls grew up, grew independent, developed their own ethics and ethos. They defied his control, challenged his views and his behaviour, and refused his demands to be respected, as all young adults do. His behaviour at home escalated, and it was no longer confined to just me.

One morning his behaviour was so aggressive, so violent, and his words so appalling, that I felt the last of my love for him leave me. It just went. I was empty. I spent the hours that day walking, working out how to gather my girls and go, planning, preparing my words, summoning up courage. Late afternoon I returned home to a call from my sister-in-law; her daughter, my niece and god-daughter, was dead; suicide, a week before her sixteenth birthday. Life crumpled in on itself, our hearts were broken, and her death has coloured every day that has since passed. I didn’t gather my girls and go. I stayed. Whatever I was going through at home was incomparable to the grief coursing uncontrollably through those that I loved, including my girls. A few months later, I started a 100happydays blog dedicated to our beautiful angel who lost her life to depression, in an effort to focus on positivity every day, carving a small private space for my voice, my own words and feelings, and inadvertently creating a supportive community that I still lean on.

It was inevitable that one day he would lose control in front of witnesses; a big music band gig one warm July evening, thousands of people, some close friends, all of our young-adult offspring. I am not going to elaborate; it was hours of abject, awful, agonising misery, and the very last time that he hit me. I had my candid coffee with my daughters the following November, and I knew that there was no going back. It took 27 years for me to stand my ground and say ‘no more’. Better late than never, I suppose.

Honesty.

I could never have contemplated how arduous a journey the following two years would be. I eventually told the truth, painfully vomiting it out of my body like putrid pus, and let it gather the speed of a runaway train. I nearly lost myself, and was saved only by those that loyally love me completely, to whom I will forever owe a depth of gratitude that I find eludes expression. They have been rocks, saviours, pillars of strength and brutal honesty, and tender, cradling, soothing hands; I fiercely hold their hearts tightly in mine, and I pray that I will never force them to leave me. Honesty breeds honesty: courageous souls have shared their similar experiences with me in order that I don’t feel so alone, to show how much light they now have in their previously dark life, to lift me from the chasm of abject failure.

Domestic abuse is still a taboo subject; few want to understand it. Although it prevails in a quarter of relationships (a QUARTER!), it quietly sits enslaved in the shackles of shame, invisibly festering and gnawing under the cover of silence. I have been asked ‘have you found out who your true friends are?’ There were friends that just avoided me, didn’t discuss it with me, let my friendship go. There were some that listened to me, but said that they heard such a different story from him that they didn’t know who to believe. I am not invited to their homes any longer, and they too have let me go. There are some who have believed the pernicious lies that they have been told, and have walked to the other side of a road, their faces turned away, in order to completely bypass me. Others have revelled in the pappy gossipy tabloid, flicking through my pages and discussing delicate details widely with anyone, whilst simultaneously treating me like a leper; contaminated and contagious. It’s isolating, and feels like betrayal. Its been a steep learning curve, but I’m better for it; they clearly were not my true friends, and I only have room for honest love in my life now. Blood loyalties and lies banned my family from attending my lovely mother-in-laws funeral, and have distanced me from those that I have seen born, cared for and love; I miss them very much. I hope they know that they will always be welcome in my home.

The sun, however, shines on the faces of those that know that I and my brave, beautiful girls have not lied. That every frank, painful, bitter, rueful, angry, sad, screaming, sickening word has been true, and that absolute honesty can lead to freedom and learning and life and light and love.

I am not going to regurgitate or elaborate any further. In the words of Forrest Gump, ‘that’s all I have to say about that’.

So that is the point of this blog, this new chapter in my life journey. I now have the freedom to express my view, and honesty is it’s solid foundation stone.

I have my life.

I have love.

I have my home on the hill.

I promise to savour each moment, laugh with my belly and love wholeheartedly.

These are my words.

This is my view.