I thought stress was mental, internal, but it has written itself all over my face and it’s making moves to travel further.
There is a rash over my forehead, over my cheeks, inflamed. I get migraines now, which are new. Last month I skipped a period and had what doctors think was an anovulatory cycle. This, too, is new. But the stress, the anxiety, it turns out that it is powerful enough to freeze nature.
And now I am lying here at 2.30 a.m. and Tom isn’t home. He went out for a quick drink after work and last checked in around eleven to say he was having one for the road.
I never want to be that girl – another ‘that girl’ – who nags him about being out drinking, but right now, I need him to be present. I need him focused and available. I need him to reassure me even further than he has done that he isn’t cheating, has never cheated, would never cheat. I need not to be lying awake worrying about him. I also need him not to develop new habits because they are disconcerting. Until a few months ago he hadn’t been out until the early hours in years. He was slowing down like all of us, preferring his alcohol to be slow-cooked with a shoulder of lamb than chucked down his throat like urgent medicine. But then, this.
I start writing him a message but when I’ve rewritten it five times, I stop. This is ridiculous. When did Tom become someone to whom I had to edit my messages? I decided to stay with him and to trust him, didn’t I? Then that applies, still, whether it is 2.30 p.m. or 2.30 a.m. And also I know, of course, that this is Tom’s way of coping. So I try to be patient. And I try even harder to sleep.
But my mind is whirring with the knowledge that he goes to anything these days. We have turned him into that man. He goes to the birthday drinks of someone from work who is twenty-two and whose surname I suspect he doesn’t know. He texts me at 6 p.m. about leaving dos, thirtieths, twenty-ninths, engagement parties, impromptu beers. Sometimes he invites me, but mostly he doesn’t.
He needs to be drunk, alone in a crowd. He needs to throw beer – and Jack Daniels often, which is new – at his insides until he has flushed away any weakness and he can return to me stronger. I know all this, of course, because I know Tom. And because I have done it myself, when work has been hard, or when not being a parent has been hard.
Tom carries the weight of not being able to make me feel better. He carries the pressure of not crying when I am sad, or shouting when he is angry at the world, too. He is heartbroken and grieving, but his heart and his grief are not the priorities. In this situation, he doesn’t know which man he is supposed to be, and so he has reverted to the trope of the man who hides in the pub under a cover of beer and makes sure he gets home too late to talk. That man.