A Brief Life Story
Why a marriage fails even with children
Life is better being alone than with a partner you no longer Love
My Children are Brats
Freedom.
Freedom is living in my house alone.
I am free.
Free to mourn what I have lost. Yet I have not lost anything. I have gained.
Walking out of the family home was a big step. Like walking on another planet, it took time and energy to take that first step. Once made, the air tasted divine.
Freedom means being lonely. My father felt it after mum died. He mooched around his house just lost. I was an only child. I lived with my parents until I was seventeen and left home to start my life with my twenty-year-old boyfriend. When I caught up to his age, I had two boys.
I started to hate my husband. Two babies, under two were noise and demand. And he responded to every demand. We would have that alone time after he put them to bed. As soon as one of them started the noise, up he would go. And every time he showed his priority, my detest for him grew. Stay with me, I told him, let them cry – they will stop. He thought me nothing and went to accede to their demand.
My husband worked hard, spoilt the three of us and himself.
I overcompensate for bad motherhood. Always running around after them, resenting every little thing they made me do for them. Inside this mist, I lived lies. Hording my home truth like pirate treasure.
My eyes opened a little. My boys were already in double figures, and they were little shits. It is hard to see those lives you grew, that drained your body, go so bad. They were not evil; they did what they liked and had no regard for how others’ felt. Genes and nurture combined, shielding them from knowledge that others had an equal worth as them.
You never stop loving them, they told me, but you can. Watching their sense of entitlement explode as they became teenagers, I stopped liking them. Every effort I made to curb their behaviour failed through their belligerence and their father’s ‘nothing wrong’ attitude.
Freedom is only found in death.
My mum went from being sprightly, through feeling lethargic, to told you have three months to live. Horrific how life can slip away.
Five years after my mother, my father gave up. He just stopped. No food, no drink, never getting out of bed, till the morning he took his last breath. I found him on my daily visits.
The weeks following were the most desperate and ecstatic of my life. Devastated at becoming an orphan, I spent time in my parents’ house. Remembering how happy the three of us were. That sense of what it was like to be me. Recovering Pheobe.
We think we want family. We exist in that state. It consumes us before we even know it sniffs us for freshness.
At the funeral I knew. I saw my husband. The man had changed from this exciting, wide shouldered, firm body to a flabby bouncy castle more obsessed with his Volvo and the rises in the house value than the breath of living.
And the two sons were a carbon copy. They were not Irving, they were Broads.
I was pure Irving. I sold my home, packed a suitcase, and sued for divorce.
The three hated me. The boys refused to see me.
Fuck ‘em. Fuck ‘em all.
I moved far away from them all. With the divorce settlement on the house and the sale of my family home, I escaped to a small town on the edge of the peak district. Working in a supermarket suited me, paid the bills, gave me a life.
My house might only be a two up, two down in the middle of a terrace, but it is mine.
I am free.
Yes, sometimes I rage.
But I am free.
I am Phoebe Irving.
I belong to ME.
I am English, white skinned, independent, freedom loving lady.
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