In many ways a crisis in a marriage is a great way to shake things up. To open up wide-ranging discussion and to face some of the demons of our past life. When David and I talk about everything we have been through we have to be careful not to go over and over and over the same issues because eventually we’d find ourselves just talking in circles and getting nowhere. But our hope is that through all this pain a clearer picture has emerged of who we really are. There’s no time now for anything but total honesty, and some of our conversations are quite brutal as we confront each other and try to make a way ahead.
David says he doesn’t recognise me any more. That I am simply not the woman he thought he was living with for all those years. He’s pretty straightforward in admitting that he preferred the old me. But that’s only natural. The old me was a known quantity. Steady, reliable, faithful, loyal and loving. The mother of his children. The grandmother of his grandchildren. His partner, both in business and in life.
David has been forced to acknowledge some unpalatable home truths about himself and about our relationship. He looks back at the years when our children were growing up, when he was so often absent because of his career. He admits now that he was unaware of how unhappy I was with that situation. It’s partly my fault. I should have been more forceful and insistent. But David is a very stubborn man. Inflexible. Almost impossible to shift once he has determined that things have to be done in a certain way. Single-minded. Blinkered. Intractable.
Not that I am without myriad faults. I am impulsive, impatient and wilful. A spendthrift who is irresponsibly generous when we can least afford it. I overcommit myself and I am constantly trying to accomplish more in a day than is humanly possible. I rush at things like a bull at a gate. I often don’t think things through clearly, preferring to leap into action rather than pause for reflection. If something is worrying me, I do my best to ignore it. Hope that it will simply go away. I hide bills I don’t want to pay and ‘forget’ to return phone calls if I know I have to let someone down. I become irrationally emotional about political and social injustice. I feel things too deeply and allow myself to be badly hurt by events that are out of my control. I don’t necessarily make that vital connection between cause and effect.
David has therefore been a good balance for me. I try to help lighten him up and he tries to help rein me in a little. My flamboyance is tempered by his more staid perspective. His ability to manage finances has saved us from bankruptcy on more than one occasion. If left to me, we would be perpetually penniless. Opposites attract, or so they say. Perhaps that’s why we have remained together for so long.
During our lengthy conversations I try to give him an understanding of just how much I have changed. Why I must have this time and space to sort out who I am and where I am going. As a way of further illustrating how the last few years have been just as harrowing for me as they have been for him, I tell him about the attack. The night the Englishman hid in the house and then tried to rape me.
He sits in his chair and eyeballs me with a look of utter horror on his face. ‘Why didn’t you tell me about this before?’ he asks. ‘How could you not phone me when it happened? You told other people. You didn’t tell me. You didn’t tell me.’
I lamely give my reasons.
‘I thought you would feel helpless being so far away. I didn’t want to worry or upset you. I thought you’d think I was incapable of looking after myself. I thought it would be better if I just dealt with it myself and didn’t burden you.’
‘You didn’t tell me. You didn’t tell me.’
Not one thing that has happened until now has disturbed David as much as this. Immediately I wish I hadn’t told him. He is distraught. Angry with me, really angry for the first time.
‘Don’t you see,’ he shouts at me. ‘This means you think so little of me and so little of our relationship that you didn’t even tell me that you had been viciously sexually assaulted. You hid from me something that was fundamental to the validity of our relationship. I can’t believe you didn’t tell me.’
I suppose this means I just don’t understand men and the workings of their minds. I try to fathom why David has been so deeply upset by this latest revelation. Surely my infidelities have been more damaging to the trust in our relationship than the fact that I protected him from knowing something that would cause him pain.
I seem to be making a total mess of my entire life. I have no one to blame but myself.
Just when things between us are as bad as they could possibly be we get a phone call from Australia, from our son Ethan who normally doesn’t phone because of the cost. He and Lynne are living on a pretty tight budget. My first reaction is to imagine there’s a problem, perhaps with little Isabella, so I am immediately anxious. But Ethan sounds bright and bubbly and asks lots of questions about our friends and neighbours in the village, where they lived for six months when Lynne was pregnant. He then tells us the real reason for the call.
‘I have some exciting news,’ he says. ‘Lynne’s pregnant. We’re having another baby.’
The reaction he gets from me is so emotional that I simply can’t speak because I’m overcome. I have to hand the phone over to David to finish the conversation. Nothing in the world could have made us happier than this. We have been frightened that Ethan and Lynne would not be brave enough to attempt having another child, given the severity of Isabella’s condition. I feared that they would never experience the joy of being the parents of a healthy, problem-free child. A child who sits up at six months and walks at twelve months and is talking non-stop by the age of two. Although Isabella’s condition is undoubtedly genetic, the thought of the new baby being affected isn’t an issue for us, or for them either, it seems. The likelihood of two children with the same rare set of symptoms is highly, highly unlikely.
An hour after the call I am still very teary. It has brought me back to earth with a big jolt because it’s so obvious to me that this is far, far more important than any of the argy-bargy that’s been going on between David and me. Our troubles are trivial compared to those confronting Ethan and Lynne and their children. It puts the whole thing into perspective and serves to remind me that my family is, after all, the most precious thing in my life.