Life as a single mum did not, needless to say, involve a scuzzy high rise with a broken lift. It was fine, really, with equal amounts of benefits and drawbacks like everything else in this world.
Advantages included:
- Autonomy. The children and I could come and go without permission from anyone else. We even chose where to live, and much more.
- I could home educate them without reference to anyone else. (I did try to make reference, but it was ignored except through the courts who supported mine and the children’s choices.)
- This gave them what we nowadays call a ‘low demand environment’. Perfect for what we nowadays call the ‘high functioning neurodivergence’ we all have.
- Extra support from those people who always said helping me was my husband’s job. When he was no longer my husband, they could no longer say it.
Disadvantages included:
- Prejudice. Some people who had, before my divorce, treated me like a decent human being, now treated me like scum.
- Poverty. There was a fair amount of it, but no more than there had been at various times during the marriage. And I was used to it, and I enjoyed the challenge of it.
- Romantic relationships. I had a few over the years, and there was always the problem of not letting this affect the children’s lives in negative ways.
- They actually, after the court hearing, didn’t really see their dad. They were all too annoyed with each other and became entrenched in their positions. I think this was the worst thing of all, because they needed him. In recent years I’ve been reading about the hormonally balancing effects of present fathers and, with hindsight, this makes perfect sense of things for me.
If I could turn the clock back… I wouldn’t. I’m something of a fatalist, so it was all meant to be, for whatever reasons might still be unclear to us. I have often wondered whether we’d have endured another ten, twenty years of marriage to save us all from the conflict and the permanent separation that ensued, but I don’t think that would have been any better for anyone. It would probably have been worse. Bad marriages bring bad atmospheres, tension in the air, unhappy, tense faces and unspoken misery. Everyone feels and is affected by it, especially the children.
And everything worked out okay in the end. Sort of.
We’re probably all where we’re meant to be, anyway.