The Family Home

Prude and Confused wrote about her sadness at seeing her ex at their house with their little dog and I can totally understand her feelings of confused unhappiness.

Nearly two years on, if I go back to what was the family home and see my ex with my son, I come away feeling cheated. I chose to leave because the situation had become impossible to tolerate any further but I was still pretty much forced out of my home by the circumstances of his behaviour.

Even though I am much happier now on my own – but with Ruf in my life – on those days, I feel as if the ex stole my life because he removed me from my children and my domesticity – my ability to be a proper Mum. The instinctive nurturing role that goes back to time immemorial.

I am reminded of this frequently when my son does something untoward and my ex calls me up to demand explanation of why I have done nothing about it. The problem is that his systematic demeaning of my authority over the course of many years means that I can exercise no control in that area. Only advise and chide. In an attempt to do the best for my children, for years I fought to parent effectively against the background of his constant sniping and undermining – to the detriment of my own health – and the point was reached where my only choice was to leave or cause irreparable damage to my relationship with those offspring.

Sadly, he will never see that – he has a tunnel vision that leaves him with the perception that I am not now being fully supportive whereas, in reality, I am doing everything that I can to fight a rearguard action and bring my child back into line.

And it hurts. Seeing them happy in my home. But then salt gets rubbed further into the wound because he stole my domesticity and then he drags me back to rub my nose in it when things don’t go according to his plan – as, invariably, they don’t with teenagers.

I think it takes time for our innate emotional self to learn to accept the situation whether we have someone else in our lives or not. Do you ever stop craving the security blanket of your home? Do you ever stop loving someone you have been that close to – unless that emotion can be turned to hate?

And I dont want that destructiveness in my life either.

But then there is the alternative course of action where women continue to maintain the family home with a spouse who does not fulfil their needs because they cannot leave their kids.

I hear the sadness of a blogging friend whose long-term beau blew the whistle on their relationship just a few weeks before her youngest child was 18 – the timeframe that many unhappy mothers set as the day to do something about a disintegrating marriage. She had set the date in her head and her emotional psyche had accepted that this was how things would happen. This was the moment when she could break out and indulge her own desires over those of her son.

Freedom was within the grasp of her reaching fingertips… and then it was snatched away.

I cannot begin to plumb the depths of the despair that she must have endured over that deprivation… coupled with the loss of her baby becoming a man and starting the journey into an independent life.

I know many women who go to pieces when their children leave the family home. Suddenly they have no purpose in life – even with a loving husband to support them and fill that gap.

For those whose lives are devoid of such intimacy, the chasm must loom even deeper unless an external interest can be found to fill it.