Stella is Starting Over

Stella

The most surprising thing about my husband leaving was how embarrassing I found it.

And listen, I know how that sounds. I’m not saying it was the only hard thing about it – just the one that I was totally, completely unprepared for.

I had genuinely never suspected that we might split up, but I had a sort of abstract idea that if we did it would be some grand, dramatic fight, like something out of a film.

I’d have one tear running down my face, he’d have an old-fashioned suitcase and a sense of dignified resignation.

That sort of thing. So when I came home earlier than expected from the ‘Under Six Plus Boppers and Groovers Mummy and Me Shake It Together!’ class that I thought I’d booked for Wednesday morning but had in fact booked for the previous Monday, and found my husband crouching on the floor going through our travel toiletries, it wasn’t quite the sexy French cinema bombshell I’d imagined.

I asked him what he was doing, he said nothing.

I asked why his suitcase was half packed and he said ‘no reason’ and then I went to feed our daughter for what felt like the fifteenth time that morning.

He came downstairs carrying the suitcase he’d packed ‘for no reason’ and told me that there was, actually, a reason, and that the reason was ‘I’m leaving you’.

Not the easiest statement to respond to, especially while the baby, who was desperately hungry but refusing to consume any milk, was arching her back like a cat who didn’t want to get in the carrier to the vet.

I think I probably laughed. The idea of Gavin leaving me, Gavin who was devoted to me and adored me and continually told me how much more fun I was than any of his friends’ wives – felt implausible.

But then he stood there for a while, in our bedroom, and I realised he was serious.

And I laughed again. And then, before I could say anything devastating, he was gone.

Nothing else had changed. The temperature of the room was the same, the baby was still screaming, my phone was still on the same battery percentage and every world leader was unchanged, but everything about me, and my world, and my life, and the life that I was expecting to build, the family I had been talked into creating, was different.

Mostly destroyed. And even though someone else destroyed it, it’s me who had to do all the rebuilding. Which started with telling people.

I told Louella, my sister, first. She heard the first four seconds of my breathing at the end of the phone and knew what was up – down to the last detail – without needing to be told.

Sort of impressive, but then we have seen each other almost every day since she was born so also maybe just a symptom of overexposure.

She told me she was leaving work, which was kind but less dramatic when you understand that she works for some kind of internet company where she sends five emails a day and they pay her six figures.

‘He’s an evil cunt,’ she said as she used her key to open my front door. ‘How? Why? What did he say? How did he explain it?’

‘Why?’ is a very good question and not one I thought to ask. The sum total of the questions I had asked by this point was, ‘What are you doing with all of the mini L’Occitane shower gels?’ and, ‘Why do you have a suitcase packed?’

Since then (twenty-three weeks ago, not that I’m counting), everyone has been really nice about it.

People sent flowers, came over with wine; my university friends got me a massage voucher that I can’t use because I can’t leave the baby for long enough and various other child-free friends who are frightened of small babies offered to babysit in a generous and completely unrealistic gesture of love.

I’m desperate to leave Rose, gagging for freedom.

Sometimes I imagine closing the front door of my house and walking down a street without a pram or a nappy bag, and it seems more exciting than any fantasy I’ve ever had.

But when the prospect of leaving her becomes real, it’s gut-wrenching.

She’s the only company I have, the constant companion to my life.

Her wants and needs rule my life, and it’s exhausting and draining and overwhelming, and yet, if I actually stopped for a moment, I might have to think about the reality of my situation and I have absolutely no desire to find out what that might feel like.

There’s also something hard to swallow about all the sympathy.

All the COOK ready meals and offers of help were their ticket price to the show.

The lasagnas and bunches of flowers came with messages, and the messages always said the same thing, in slightly different phrasing: ‘What happened?’ They wanted the details, the specifics, the ins and the outs of our horrible life, because there’s nothing more reassuring or validating than someone else’s marriage falling apart.

If you’re a couple, it’s delicious because you’ve outlasted them.

If you’re single then it’s a refreshing reminder that being conventionally alone is much better than being someone who had a baby and a big white wedding, and then ended up alone anyway.

In fairness to these people, I asked for it.

I was the smuggest smug married since Bridget Jones’s dinner party mates.

I married Gavin – handsome, slightly older, successful – aged twenty-five.

A child bride, I joked at drinks with my friends, acting embarrassed to be getting married at an age more commonly seen in a tradwife mommy blogger than a London-based creative who worked as a writer for an interiors magazine.

The first of my friends by about half a decade, being engaged became my entire personality.

And as my friends passed my ring around, putting it on their right hand rather than their left for fear of jinxing themselves, I felt like I’d done the only really important thing I’d ever do.

I liked my job and my gym, and nights out with my girlfriends, but there was a small part of me that had always privately, a bit ashamedly, been waiting for the ‘real’ part to start – the part where I could have a house and babies.

Before we were engaged, I had the good grace to hide those feelings but the second I got a diamond on my hand, my restraint just disappeared.

Because Gavin was five years older than me, and because we were getting married young, we did everything else young too.

I was the first to buy a house, the first to get a big, grown-up car, and eventually, when I turned thirty and decided that I was finally ready, just as my friends were moving in with their partners, I was one of the first to get pregnant – the first who had intentionally got pregnant.

Once again, I floated through life being un-fucking-bearable, telling people we couldn’t believe how easily I’d got pregnant, that we thought we’d have months of trying like all the blogs I read said but, mysteriously, it just happened on our first go.

When Rose was born, almost eight months ago, via an easy and uncomplicated birth, I looked down at her and across at Gavin and thought, I wish everyone could be this lucky.

And then two months later, when Rose was literally eight weeks old, he left and in a matter of minutes I became a single mum to a tiny baby.

When you see it all written down like that, you can’t help thinking that maybe I had it coming to me.

I really wouldn’t blame anyone who thought I’d had more good luck than anyone deserved, and I’d invite that person to take a look at my life today.

There are six drying racks of baby clothes in my house because, in a brief spurt of trying to get my life together, I decided that not having enough drying racks was the organisational issue with my laundry system.

I was wrong. The prospect of putting everything away is too overwhelming and I’ve decided that I’m just going to use things straight off the racks and cut out the middle man of putting them back in Rose’s bedroom.

I’ve told myself it’s basically like having a hanging rail, which is a perfectly respectful and accepted way to store clothes.

The health visitor, the woman who comes to see us intermittently to check that Rose is growing and not being given Red Bull in her bottles, told me that it’s ‘extremely unusual’ for a dad to leave that early.

She said it with total neutrality and I had absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do with that information.

‘They usually wait a while,’ she told me.

‘Until the kids are older.’ I just nodded and then sat in silence while she weighed Rose and then repeated the same facts about breastfeeding I’d been told seven times that month and confirmed that I was on maternity leave and would be going back to work when Rose was one year old.

Anyway. Last night I accidentally went to sleep with damp hair so it’s now a surprising look that’s sort of frizzy on one side and completely lank on the other, which is especially unfair because Rose woke up nine times, so I slept for about ninety minutes total.

I’m also wearing dirty leggings from my ‘back when I had money’ wardrobe that are too small, so there’s a band of fat hanging over the top, and if I were to bend over, which I’m going to avoid, you’d be able to see my underwear, which is thigh to belly button and made of a sort of industrial cotton.

Rose is clean, her toys are clean, the house is sanitary and other than that, everything is a fucking disaster.

And, as if that wasn’t bad enough, I’m about to see my ex-husband (technically, legally, still my husband, in real terms my ex) for the first time in six months.