BAD HAIR DAY, REMOVAL VANS AND BROKEN HEARTS
Our marriage didn’t end in a single dramatic moment: there was not a huge fight with one of us storming out, or the revelation of someone else; it just faded until removal vans arrived and we went our separate ways.
When a marriage ends this way, it’s like a tree in autumn. There is a moment when you almost believe the leaves will not fall. Yes, they have changed colour and the tree no longer looks as healthy as it did, but it doesn’t look damaged – it just looks changed, and you can believe that this is how it will continue, changed but together. Then, one day, when you’re not looking, the leaves fall, and when you look at the tree again it’s bare, its imperfections no longer concealed by the foliage. We were among many marriages that withered and died, a gradual, painful death that the rest of the world never really noticed.
In the vortex of a marriage breakdown, the things that you do as a matter of course – doing the weekly shop, putting the bins out, walking the dog, dealing with the kids, sitting in the same room to watch the telly – all become areas of tension, and are reminders that the person you wanted to share your life with no longer wants to be with you, and you don’t want to be with them. All the natural movements of family life feel like walking with drawing pins in your shoes. You can do it, but it doesn’t stop hurting.
I wanted to try to work things out; I wanted to try to fix it, because that is what I thought I should be able to do, to fix it. Work harder and fix it, isn’t that what a man ought to be capable of? But you can’t be married to yourself, so if the marriage is dead for one person, it is effectively dead for you both.
Melanie had grown so cold towards me, to the extent that, one night, I sat in the bath and decided to shave off all my hair to see if she would notice. I am sure some would say it was a desperate cry for help; others that I was being a bloody idiot. Looking back now, I am not sure what camp I fell into, but I would not recommend it as a way of working things out in your relationship. For a start, you look terrible. Instead of the smooth, skin-covered scalp I was expecting, I climbed out of the bath and looked in the mirror to see myself wearing what appeared to be the worst swimming cap in the world. I’d always had my hair short, which I now know never really suited me, but when it was down to the skin I looked terrible: somewhere between a right-wing thug and someone who people run marathons for.
The following day I had to fly from Manchester to the office in London. When I boarded the plane I could see people looking at me with expressions that suggested they assumed this was part of the trip of a lifetime to Disneyland whilst there was still time. When the air hostess asked if I was OK as I lifted my bag into the overhead locker, I just said, as a joke, ‘Yes, thanks, every day’s a bonus,’ and I swear she almost burst into tears. When I realised she thought I meant it for real, I said, ‘It’s OK, I’m not dying. I just shaved my hair off in the bath to wind my wife up, but she never really noticed.’ Which probably made me look even sadder than someone on treatment. When the same members of staff saw me on the shuttle flight back that evening, they seemed slightly less supportive.
Although I never wanted us to split up, it had reached a point of no return, so we put the house up for sale and proceeded to look for separate places to live. It was such a civilised split that we both went to look at each other’s new places, and engaged in conversations about décor and kitchens for homes that we would both visit to collect our children from the person we had once loved, but would never now live with.
I was determined not to be a distant father: seeing the kids on a Sunday afternoon and sitting in McDonalds, trying to replace a stable family unit with a Happy Meal. The boys were aged one, three and five, and I couldn’t imagine not seeing them every morning and every evening. The reality was, however, that I didn’t see them every morning or every evening anyway, because I was busy working to make our life better; and, by doing so, I had played a part in making it worse. I had become boring, remote and preoccupied, and had failed to see the signs that leaving Melanie at home facing endless days of child-centric activities was driving her mad. I was just working hard believing that was my role. I thought if I did that, wouldn’t everything else just fall into place?
Due to my work commitments, I couldn’t say what days I could have the boys in the week, so I said that I would have them every weekend. That meant collecting them from school and nursery on Friday afternoon and taking them back on Monday morning.
I bought a nice, small, three-bed semi 15 minutes from Melanie’s house. I was in one room, the boys’ room had bunk beds and a cot, and the third room had just enough space for me to have a desk.
Whoever thought of the phrase ‘box room’ got it right in my new home, as the third bedroom made you feel you were inside a shoe box. I think there should be a rule that if you open the door of a room and the width of the door is longer that the rest of the room, it should not be called a ‘box room’ but a ‘box with a door’.
When we sold our marital home, Melanie’s house purchase was delayed for the first few weeks, so the boys came to live with me full time. It was only then that I realised I didn’t have a clue what I was doing: I burnt nearly everything I cooked, clothes came out of the washing machine the wrong size, or pink – regardless of what colour they went in. When a child needed attention, I was on the phone to work or dealing with another child. That meant they went unattended or, more usually, just increased their volume so that they could not be ignored any more.
It wasn’t that I was incapable; it was just that, within the preceding years, we had fallen into a very traditional marriage. Melanie had given up work to look after the kids, and I had become the company-car-driving bread-winner. I still retained the ability to cook vegetarian stir fry in a wok, which had been one of my staple diets as a student, but it’s surprisingly unappetising for boys aged one, three and five to be faced with a plate of crisp vegetables soaked in soya sauce.
For Joe’s fifth birthday, he asked me for a Manchester United kit, which was understandable. He was living in Manchester and, as a five year old, had no concept that such a decision changes the whole course of your life – particularly if your dad is a Liverpool supporter and will never speak to you again. As a compromise, I bought him an Inter Milan kit which was blue with black stripes, and which allowed me time to get him to Anfield before he made a final decision.
I remember washing the kit for the first time and reading on the label that dark colours had to be washed separately, which completely threw me: if something had black stripes in it, how could you wash the stripes separately? What was worse was that I was so incapable, I had to phone my mum for advice. It is no surprise that for the first six months or so after we separated I never even went on a date. A man in his thirties working in middle management, with three kids and a failed marriage, who has to phone his mum about how to wash a football kit, is not a great catch.
Life had not turned out the way I would have liked, but I just had to get on with it.
Once we got into the weekend routines I started to enjoy my time with the boys. I began to call them my three amigos, which is why I gave the production company I set up years later the same name. For months I would work in the week and if the opportunity presented itself to stay at a hotel I would take it – anything to avoid returning home to an empty house. But on Fridays I would always make sure I was there to pick up ‘the amigos’ and take them home for our time together.
I got to know them and they began to know me. I am not pretending it was all easy, but we had a garden and lived close to a park, and I ensured I had no distractions from the moment I collected them to when I took them back. Girlfriends was not something I was interested in, and though after a few months I did see one or two really nice girls, nobody ever met the boys or saw me of a weekend – those days were sacrosanct. It was our time and, after long Saturdays playing, I would love nothing better than to sit on the couch with the boys in pyjamas, gradually falling asleep on me whilst watching the telly.
I would hate the arrival of Monday, knowing that I would not see them again during the week. I won’t be the only father who has sat in his car outside the house where his kids are being put to bed by his ex-wife, not knowing why he is there but knowing he just wants to be close, even if the rules of divorce mean he can’t simply knock on the door to kiss them goodnight because it’s not his time of the week. Melanie and I were pursuing the divorce through solicitors, and had little reason to see each other. Within a short space of time we had become the ‘ex’ to each other, even if the legal matters were not finalised.
One Saturday morning Melanie came around to the house to drop off some of the boys’ things that I needed. It was a very rare thing for all of us to be in the same room together – the boys were watching Saturday morning TV as I struggled to get them ready to go out.
Our relations had been cordial and, by this stage, we had been living apart for nearly six months, and so in many ways the rawness of the separation had just been replaced by a dull sadness.
‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ I asked her.
‘No, thanks. Are you boys going out?’ The boys cheered in the excited way children do when there is no reason in life not to be excited.
‘Yes. I know it’s a bit wet underfoot, but I thought we would go to the park.’
‘Sounds nice.’ There was a moment, a pause when she looked at the boys in various stages of readiness, and I could see the regret in her eyes.
‘Why don’t you come?’
‘Yes, Mum, why don’t you come to the park?’
‘It would be nice … for all of us.’
Melanie looked at me, and her eyes had changed. Sometimes, when things hurt too much you have to protect yourself first: if you let your guard down, there is every chance you will get hurt more. We both knew this, and I had let my guard down by inviting her out as if we were still a family. It was clear she was not ready to lower her protection.
‘I can’t … I have stuff to do. You boys have a good time.’
When she left, I tried to carry on with the normal day I had planned with the boys, but suddenly emotion overwhelmed me. It was well and truly over. One day she would meet someone, and I would have to accept another man having a role to play in the boys’ lives. That realisation cut me in half. I just slumped on the stairs and couldn’t stop the tears from falling as I tried to get Daniel into his wellington boots to go out to the park.
No man wants to cry in front of his sons, but it’s even worse when you don’t know you’re doing it. Daniel was nearly two, so his experience of people crying was vast. He was in nursery full time, where crying was something that all his peers engaged in with varying degrees of frequency during the day, and he had developed a wonderful skill of being able to help. He just put his hands on my wet cheeks and said, ‘I’m your friend.’
He must have been surprised to find that what worked in the nursery with two year olds only served to turn his 34-year-old dad into a blubbering, heartbroken wreck. But at least he tried.
• • •
Dropping the boys off on Mondays became the hardest thing in the world. At the time, I was the sales manager for Fujisawa, a company specialising in immunosuppression with a product that helped prevent people from rejecting their organs after transplantation.
I had a small sales team and I organised my week so that I would always have a telephone conference on a Monday morning after I dropped the kids off at school and nursery. The teleconference was usually over by 10.30 a.m., which meant I then had the rest of Monday to do what is euphemistically called a ‘working from home day’, but what should really be called a ‘doing very little but being near a phone’ day.
It was one of these days that changed my life. Had I gone into the office on Mondays and been surrounded by people, or gone to the gym to let off some steam, I would have perhaps never been in the position to write this book, as I would never have fallen into the depression that led to me sitting at home on a Monday drinking a bottle of wine while watching daytime TV.
If you were depressed, the daytime TV of the late 1990s was not going to help, particularly Richard and Judy, who seemed to be a constant reminder of what the world looked like if you were not getting divorced and your life was not in bits. They even read the same books, for God’s sake!
The rest of the week I functioned normally, but Mondays were a wipe-out. One week, when I was particularly depressed after dropping the boys off, I opened the first bottle of wine during the telephone conference. It was 10 a.m., and I was already looking forward to the numbness inside that the alcohol would induce as I swallowed it. I was drowning out the pain of the only person I really loved not wanting me any more, and washing away the agony of knowing that my sons would be sleeping in a bed 15 minutes’ walk away and I would not be able to see them.
One of the sales team was talking about a clinical study and, as I held the phone to my ear, I looked at the open bottle of wine. The bottle just seemed to stand there, challenging me: ‘Take a drink. Go on, if you’re man enough, pick me up and take a drink.’
The voices on the other end of the call seemed to fade away. In that moment, the only things that existed in the world were me and that bottle. With startling clarity, I realised I had a choice: to pour a glass of wine, numb the pain and descend on a slippery, downward spiral, or rise to the challenge and try to be a better man.
Whilst the teleconference was still going on, I picked the bottle up, walked to the sink and poured the wine away. I made an arrangement to meet one of the sales team locally, and within 20 minutes I was showered, shaved, in a suit and out of the house.
Little did I know that within 24 hours the way I saw the world would be changed for ever.