Miss Adventure’s In Love

Last summer, when I was happier and had no idea about how bad life was about to get, The DE saw The Babbitts more frequently meaning that I spent more time in London with friends. I spent a lot of time going up and down escalators on the underground system and I developed a little game where, when I saw a man that I was attracted to, I would smile at him as he passed me by on the escalators.It was brilliant… and I always got a positive result: they always smiled back.

It’s lovely. It’s non-confrontational, it’s not sleazy and it’s safe because you are just passing for a moment, so there’s no danger of being followed by a nutter (this is why it must never be done while you are actually on one of the trains… confined spaces, you see. Not good!)

I think it’s the shock of the unexpected, the shock of smile instead of a sneer. And it always, always made me feel happy. And it’s a fantasist’s dream… in the 5 seconds you have during that shared smile, you can image a whole lifetime with that person, until they disappear up, or down, the stairs, never to be seen again.

Poem for the day: Neil Rollinson - My Wives

I descend on Holborn’s escalator
watching my wives pass by on the opposite side,
smiling, waving at me; they shout in Swedish,
Russian, Urdu, that they’ll always love me.
Even my English wives croon in their dialects.
My Japanese wives bow low, their kimonos
showering the stairs with the scents of Hokkaido
and Kanto. My wives are everywhere;
pacing the corridors, rushing to Kilburn,
Gatwick, Paddington, staring at me as they go.
They have new husbands now, waiting at home,
but I know they miss me. As we tunnel the grim
postcodes of Lambeth, Borough,
the Elephant and Castle, most of my wives have
left to catch connections for Kent or Sussex.
There are just the two of us now,
husband and wife for a couple of stops.
We sit in our seats, rocking in unison.
She fondles her wedding-ring, then starts
to weep. What can I do but join her?
We sob through Waterloo and Kennington,
all the way to Stockwell where she picks up
her bag, and slips through the doors.
I can picture her room in the Walworth Road,
her Joss sticks smouldering, that smell
of patchouli she’s left in the empty carriage.
I go home alone, lie in an empty bed
while all my wives are sleeping with men
who do not love them.

Today, and let’s face it, like every other day, what I find so hard to bear is dealing with the superficiality of my relationship with The Dreaded Ex, and the resulting total lack of hope and faith.

He’s been behaving like a power crazed bastard again  and I can’t work out if I am either not bothered by his ridiculous behaviour and am all nice and grown up and rising above it, or if years of exposure to this nasty man have made me immune to his antics.

Fact is, it’s neither, I’m not rising above it and I’m not immune… despite trying to spend a whole lotta time pulling myself together, I’ve been walking around in a sort of daze, enveloped by a numb sensation that helps me lock out the fact that if I could, I’d scratch his eyes out. The daze is just my brain and body shutting down as a kind of coping mechanism.

I’m not proud of that. I don’t think it’s humorous or justified or anything remotely OK. I despise myself for having these feelings for The DE… and for the fact that the further I move away from being his wife, the more able he seems to reel me in with his bastardly behaviour.

What I’m fighting isn’t The DE, it’s my own fear: My Fear Of Taking Drastic Steps. This weekend, during one of my epic moaning rants to My Partner In Crime (poor, poor woman to have to listen to me like that), she - being only too well aware of what a bastard The DE is - said wasn’t it awful that he didn’t do something so undeniably unforgivable that The Babbitts and I wouldn’t ever have to see him again… like beat me half to death or something.

Now, I know that seems extreme and terrible and ridiculous, but the truth is I’ve often thought that myself, when I’ve had as much as I can take of his shit and have felt like packing The Babbitts up and moving to the other side of the world… But then the sinking realisation sets in that a) it doesn’t solve the problem and b) The Babbitts would no doubt grow up resenting me for moving them so far away from their father.

I used to wish things like that when we were still living together. I use to wish that The DE would do something so incredibly terrible to me that I would be totally justified in never having to see him again… and no-one would judge me for it. In fact they would stand beside me and pat me on the back for having had the courage to leave the bastard. Years later they’d tell my questioning children that there had been no doubt that I had Done The Right Thing.

After a while, well, some years really, I realised that it was insane and moreover cowardly to go through life like that, trying to avoid the reasonability of ending the marriage and that ultimately I had to be man enough (hmmm) to step up and just do it… and so I did.

And the irony is… the terrible, comic irony is… that at the time The DE took me by the hand, looked lovingly into my face, got a bit damp around the eyes and told me that he had never admired me more than at that moment, he recognised too that our maraige had broken down, but that he never would have had the strength of character to make such a decision. He said he was in awe of me.

I am not making this up…

… it just seems like it happened a lifetime ago… and with another man… and, God help me, I believed him… and even still, despite his insane behaviour, I am pathetically naive and I live in hope that one day he might, just might, turn human and treat someone, anyone, with respect.

But I’m an idiot to keep on hoping.

Every now and then I let myself forget how hideous this is, because it’s so much nicer that way. Recently I was browsing through the sale rails in Gap and, just for a moment, habit overcame reality and I found myself picking up a jumper that would have suited The DE very well. I actually picked it up from the shelf and held it up to check if it was a medium or a large and very seriously thought to myself that he would look damn sexy in it. It was this season’s version of a jumper that over the years I had bought for him in a few different colours.

How was that possible? How was it possible that even for a moment I forgot everything that has passed between us and all of the terrible, unforgivable things he has done to me and The Babbitts, and that I was able to instead have an image of him in my head, smiling, looking lovely in a new jumper, while my mind raced through his collection of casual trousers to see if the jumper would go with any of them

It was only a split-second lapse, and when I came to my senses I felt like I’d been stung by a wasp or slapped in the face, as if I had betrayed myself somehoe… and a bit sick as well actually. I dashed from the shop, as if it was Gap’s fault that I’d remembered that I once loved The DE desperately.  

Walking along the high street, I found myself close to tears.

Has it really come to this, DE? Lawyers and mediators and lies and threats and playing parent-tennis with our children? The children we said we’d rather die than expose to any kind of injustice, who we wanted so desperately to protect from the cruel realities of this world?

Whatever happened to love and lust, waking up wrapped around each other every morning and our first Christmas together? Planning holidays and adventures, walks on the beach in winter, being everything to each other… and the feeling that, together, we would take on the world?

What every happened to that, DE?

And whatever happened to acting like you might have a bit of respect for the fact that we did, actually, once feel that way about each other?

I was bad company this weekend and I feel guilty about it toward the friends I stayed with and met up with. Knowing the kids would be away, I’d planned a weekend in London ages ago. There was a sort of second birthday party thing too, which meant that I caught up with some old friends and with My Role Model… something I’d been looking forward to immensely.

But it wasn’t really as much fun as I’d hoped, and I think that was probably my fault. While I had a fantastic time in the bar I like so much and chatting to these lovely friends… things were all a bit out of place.

For one, My Role Model was drunk and morose, something I’d never seen in all of the 13 years since she picked me up out of the gutter, dusted me off, gave me a job, taught me how to cook and installed me firmly under her wing from that moment on… it was uncomfortable and made the world somehow seemed a bit wrong. Nothing like seeing your mentor crumble before your very eyes to make you loose sight of things.

And the world still feels wrong. Things are not going as they should. Everything feels out of control and insane as if I can’t get a handhold anywhere. I had high hopes for this summer. Hey, I was even going to get started on that novel I’ve been planning for a year. But as usual, it seems to be a case of the best laid plans of mice and men, etc, etc… and I’m looking for the good reason behind it. (I can’t find it by the way.)

I’ve grown accustomed to taking life on the chin and have become far better at dealing with what I can and trying to be very Zen about the things outwith my control. Even if I don’t always get it right. And I know fine well that this is One Of Those Times and that It Won’t Always Be This Way. In fact, next week, everything might come up roses… who knows?

But it’s the lack of control I have over these things that I find so difficult. Or more specifically, the unexpected bouts of stress. They say that one of the most dangerous careers a person can have stress-wise is being an airline pilot. Because, while their jobs are generally quite relaxed, the taking off and landing bits put their bodies and minds under extreme stress in those moments…. and it’s the exposure to short periods of extreme stress at regular intervals that does you in apparently, rather than jobs in which people experience much more stress but on a more consistent basis.

And I think that’s what I’m suffering from.

If I am honest, I know that it’s money that worries me the most. And I hate that. I am not a materialistic person by any stretch of the imagination… but this ongoing situation with The DE has left me utterly fucked financially and it’s only getting worse. It’s been a year and a half now. I’m not sure how it’s all going to work out, but I think I might finally have reached the bottom of the pot of gold. If only optimism was a valid currency in this country… but they don’t take that at Sainsburys it seems.

I came home from my weekend in London to find that my landlord has put my rent up again for the third time in less than 18 months (fucking fantastic) and that I haven’t yet been paid for some work I did in July, and which was supposed to see me through August (oh, ain’t freelance work a peach!) And all of this means that September is pretty fucked too… heaven only knows about October, we’ll just have to cross that bridge when we come to it.

I know It Will All Be Alright In The End, especially given the amount of work I’ve been doing recently (even if I haven’t been paid for it yet!)… but It’s very hard to see a happy ending when you are only half way through the story… and I just hate it when I hear myself think or say: If Only Money Wasn’t An Issue.

But, let’s be honest about it kids, we all think that sometimes don’t we? I mean, If Money Wasn’t An Issue, everything would be better in my life: I could send my kids to the same school, I could buy a car to drive them there, I could pay a decent lawyer to get this divorce done, I would probably hate The De far far less than I do for Leaving Us In This Situation, I wouldn’t have to scrabble money together every month from this bank account and that to make sure I could pay the rent… oh, Lord, there would be all kinds of advantages that I can’t even bring myself to think about at the moment, those are just the most basic things… best of all would be the fact that I could sleep easy knowing that It Would All Be Alright In The End.

And maybe I could even be on holiday now, relaxing and actually doing some things that I would like to do, rather than working in to the night to pay for the most basic of things.

Which is what I should be doing now… work beckons… so, excuse me. Goodnight.

I am still finding it impossible to contact my children… and I can only put my sense of deep rage down to some kind of primitive maternal instinct.

The DE finally responded yesterday morning to the countless emails and text messages and phone calls I had made since I spoken to My Girl last week and she told me her grandparents had taken her to hospital.

(Her grandparents are another issue entirely… they have also not responded to my attempts to contact them. I’ve been very polite, almost begging them to email me back and let me know why it was they had to take My Girl to hospital. I don’t understand why they won’t respond. Perhaps it’s down to their claim that they ‘don’t want to get involved.’ Well, folks, sorry to say it, but you are fucking involved, whether you like it or not.

In the words of my good friend The Editor when I bemoaned this lack of communication: “What the fuck is wrong with these people!?”)

Anyway… so, the email from The DE.

He started off by telling me that his parents had taken My Girl to the hospital because they hadn’t been able to get through to a GP. At this point he made some very dramatic statements about how wonderful his parents had been to do that and how it showed their devotion to their grandchildren and The DE hoped I appreciated them as much as I should. (Hmmmmm…)

At the hospital they’d been told that she had a serious throat infection, but The DE told me that My Girl was now fully recovered… well, you’d fucking hope so seeing as it took him almost a week to actually tell me what had been wrong with her… and then, yes then, he told me he’d send me the bill for her medical treatment, which his parents had had to cough up for because My Girl isn’t a registered national Over There .

Again, I think The Editor’s words might come in handy here… What the fuck?!

I’m so enraged by this idea, that I honestly can’t put it into words and so I’ll let you draw your own conclusions. But in the meanwhile I’ll remind you that despite having a very good job and a pretty decent disposable income, The DE has made a total contribution to the welfare of his children over the last 17 months of £200, whereas I… well, I’m not going to list what it takes to support two young children and myself, but needless to say, 200 quid doesn’t cover it. And I’d also like to add that every time out kids needed some Calpol or Calamine Lotion, I didn’t send The DE an invoice.

Perhaps it was the red hot anger pumping through my veins at that moment that prevented me from being able to deal with the last paragraph of The DE’s email in a rational way, you be the judge. But it was just a pack of lies and tauting, it read (and to prevent you from having to read between the lines, I’m going to put the lines in for you in italics) :

‘As for contact with the children, I’ve told you that you can call at any time so I don’t understand why you are making such a fuss. (I’ve said you can call at any time, but that doesn’t mean that I will pick up the phone or let you talk to your children or that I will respond any of your many requests to talk to them. In fact, when I think the lawyers aren’t listening, I’ll tell you that you can’t talk to them.)

We will be staying at my parents’ house this week, just as last week, and you can always call there. (I may be paying lip service to this idea, but in reality I’m not actually going to let you know where the kids and I are, and anytime you try to contact us I will tell you that I am somewhere entirely different… and as for my claim that last week the kids and I were with my parents, well I was in my own place. I lied about that, and I’m actually currently lying about this too… yes, even as the words come out of my mouth, I’m lying… isn’t it great! Oh, and by the way, my parents won’t answer you either.  )

However, unless you re able to remain rational about contact with the children, I think it’s best that your contact with them is restricted to email. (Na na na nah na, I’ve got the ki-ids! You haven’t. Or to quote him directly, ‘This is payback.’)’

What the fuck? How dare he call my behaviour irrational! Well, perhaps it’s because it seems strange to him, being quite the opposite of his habit of not speaking to his children from weeks on end. I hate that he makes me out to be some kind of nutter.

And just how the hell am I supposed to maintain ‘email contact’ with a 6 year old and a 4 year old? And how the hell am I suppose to look his parents in the eye when they bring The Babbitts back to the UK and hand them over to me?

I’ve made a decision. There’s going to be no more ‘keeping the family out of it.’ If they want to be part of The Babbitts life, them they have to accept the consequences and the fucking RESPONSIBILITY of that. Who the hell do they think they are to ignore my requests to speak to my children and to know why they took My Girl to hospital?

I’ve had enough of all of these people, and I desperately miss My Lovely Sister In Law. She’s in Italy for the rest of the month, and I think it’s pretty telling that The DE saved up his crap for when she went away. She would help, see sense, mediate. Although don’t wish it on her.

I can’t continue to play this schizophrenic game I’ve been playing of trying to get along with everyone under difficult circumstances. It’s time for cards on the table. I won’t be treated like this anymore. Because while the most important people in this scenario are The Babbitts- who are getting a pretty fucking raw deal of things as far as I can see - it’s also doing serious damage to my state of mind.

I think it’s pretty clear that The Babbitts are away… look at all this bloggin’ I’m doing.

It’s clear to me anyway, mainly because all I’ve eaten this week is watermelon, asparagus and Marks & Spencer perfectly ripe yellow plums… (and an entire cheese platter last night with my friend, A… yum)

Without The Babbitts here I’ve forgotten about mealtimes, food groups or bedtimes.

I’ve had to make myself leave the house to work and have made Starbucks my office this week. Not so much because I like it there… I don’t… but its the only place that has lots of plug sockets and comfy sofas and the children who work there have started giving mg free drinks.

It’s pretty good.

And on a lighter, more comical note, HHH (Hot Harry From H’eversofaraway) has been in touch again… relentlessly… all week, since my birthday. Good Lord, I wish I could tell you what he has in mind for a birthday present, but it transgresses the boundaries of common decency, it really does and I don’t want this blog to start getting THAT sort of spam commenting.

That boy makes me laugh, he really does… but only because I never really entertain his ideas… then again, the lad has been a constant source of entertainment for over a year now… and I have to wonder why.

I have a lovely, romantic male friend to whom I tell all of the saucy details, and he is convinced that I must have been the only girl that HHH had ever been able to connect with on any kind of level and that he is living out some kind of desperately over romanticised nostalgic fantasy about those few times we spent together 9 years ago.

Bless him!

I know HHH and I know he is wrong. Even though HHH’s texts and email have become increasingly sweet, there is still a hefty heaping of sleaze in there and I suspect that HHH is simply incapable of having any interaction with any woman full stop.

It was always the conversation thing that was so hard with that boy. In my more generous moments, I almost want to describe him as a Daniel Cleaver type figure, but I think that makes him seem a bit too alluring and clever, and I’m not convinced he’s got the charm really. Just the posh accent, lovely shirts and fancy flat… which is something I suppose.

(The DE won’t respond to my requests to speak to The Babbitts tonight…. I’m staying positive and rising above it.)

It’s difficult to explain, but sometimes it feels as if I am watching my life happen around me like a bad movie…  Often, it’s just easier to pretend it’s all happening to someone else. And most of the time, that’s the only way I can stay sane… if you can call how I am ’sane’, these days.

Despite having stayed awake with work and worry far too long into the night, I woke up at a stupidly early hour this morning with the feeling that I had to be somewhere. I looked at the clock and just couldn’t work out where or why I felt that way. With The Babbitts being away and with having a shed load of work to do, my social dairy is achingly empty.

I tried to force myself back to sleep, despite the oh so helpful men digging up the road outside… and, laying there in bed, trying to force myself to relax I suddenly remembered: I had an appointment with the police.

Fuck, shit, bugger! Get dressed, get dressed!

Within five minutes I was dressed, downstairs and had tidied up my living room to receive PC Lovely (a pseudonym, you understand) from my local police station…

And PC Lovely she was indeed. I ‘fessed up to having forgotten about our appointment at my house, given that it had been made a week ago and I’ve been up and down like a tart’s drawers every since.

But she was lovely and we sat down at the table, drank tea and she filled out her forms about The Incident last week when The DE, after not having been allowed into my house, threatened me… again.

PC Lovely remembered the last time.

Inevitably I found myself downplaying everything and talking about people who had it far worse, etc, etc… but she was very firm and told me, as had her sergeant the week before, that The DE was crossing all sorts of lines by behaving in the way he does and that if I was a different kinda gal I could already have had him arrested.

She stayed for an hour, and by God the woman was thorough. At the end of it she gave me a prize… no, not a little gold star and a lollipop for being a good girl, but a risk assessment.

Yes, I am the proud owner of the accolade: DV1 - SR.

Know what that means in real life? Well, I’ll tell you. It means Domestic Violence Category One - Standard Risk.

And that was exactly on of those moments I mean, one where you can’t actually believe that a nice police lady is handing you a piece of paper that says DV1 - SR, and that you are quite sure that it’s happening to someone else, or that you are watching an episode of The Bill instead.

Because, look, don’t get me wrong… while I’m not exactly one to blow my own trumpet, what I do know is that I’m a fairly clever woman, I’m doing well, I went to a good school, to a good university, I have smart friends, I’m pretty together, sensible, savvy… I should not be ranking on any scale of domestic violence… should I?

Or am I just the world’s worst kind of snob? I mean, after all we all know that ‘it happens in the best of families.’ But I suppose I just don’t feel at all comfortable being included in that bracket. I’m not a ‘battered housewife’, me an my kids have not fled to a women’s refuge, I am not stuck in a situation for which there is NO Way Out. Surely that THAT is domestic violence… Whereas I have many, many options and The Bastard In Question lives in another country for god’s sake.  So why did it turn my stomach to be ‘risk assessed’ on that scale?

The fact is that it just smacked of something that I have very consciously disassociated myself from, from a life I knew as a child in a very isolated community with the many women I knew then who were stuck forever in terrible marriages with horribly violent, psychologically abusive men, and who clubbed together in their misery, because it was easier to keep it all behind closed doors and to make it all seem more normal, acceptable and tolerable, because the grim reality was that they had no real way to escape from it.

My mum escaped from it, but it took her 20 years, and her marriage couldn’t hold a candle to some of unspeakably awful tales from back then. In fact I think despite everything she went through with my father and the many, many times she ran away from him and tried to divorce him, he still must have seemed like a pretty good catch in comparison to some of the other husbands. Maybe that’s why she stayed… by God her tolerance levels must have been off centre.

One of her friends escaped from a far worse marriage. Even as a young child it was clear to me just how abused that woman was. Eventually she ran away, even leaving her 3 boys behind once they were old enough to manage on their own, changed her name, moved to the other end of the country, began to build a life for herself.

But her husband found her… And he killed her.

See, to me, THAT is domestic violence. Black eyes, broken ribs, screams and the police coming in the middle of the night. So I feel like a big fat fraud to rank anywhere on the same scale as that, even if I am dangling precariously off of the bottom end of it by one hand, waving a banner that reads ‘Don’t mind me.’  

But as PC Lovely said: they have this DV scale in place for a reason, and it doesn’t matter that he isn’t battering me half to death, it still doesn’t make it OK for The DE to make his threats, even if they are probably all hot air. PC Lovely suggested everso sweetly that my tolerance levels are so low (or high depending on your point of view), that I would rather sweep this all under the carpet and make out that it’s nothing terribly important, than actually admit to myself or anyone else that I married a bully of a man.

And she’s right.

A while ago, My Best Friend, the person who knows me better than anyone on this planet asked me a bit about my childhood in the place I lived before I came here and met her and all of the other people I know. And we laughed to realise that I’d never really spoken about that part of my life and about where I really came from. Which is insane, given that she knows everything about me and I’d never deliberately tried to conceal anything.

And, look, I’m not being very dramatic here. Nothing that awful happened to me back then, but it had been a long time since I’d thought about the characters I knew as a child. But it set a very bloody low standard for what a girl could expect from a relationship.

What I remember most of all was the division of the sexes:

Tagging along with my dad to car auctions as a young kid, keeping my mouth shut while he mixed with brutish thugs of men who had very fucked up ideas about how to treat a woman… or a another man for that matter. Bravado and violence.

Days and nights sitting quietly in the corner of kitchens with the wives, listening out to make sure the men couldn’t hear what they were saying, as they sat smoking, crying and telling each other about the latest saga. And who, when it got bad, would come knocking on our door in the middle of the night, with torn night dresses and kids in town, seeking refuge from the bastard husband who was chasing them down the lane or through the woods, unashamedly shouting his intentions, because he could, because it was such an isolated place and there was no-one to take him on, and no-one would even dream of calling the police.

And I remember how they seemed to draw a funny kind of strength from enduring it all, from the weird kind of sisterhood that existed between all of the women who were in the same boat with their insufferable husbands… but let’s face it, they had to. It was either that or leave. And that rarely ended well.

I just don’t think about those days anymore… not if I can help it. It was all totally unacceptable and even as a child it seemed so incredibly wrong to me. I am glad that we moved away to a much nicer place so that I grew up around nicer people and didn’t find myself slipping into bad habits. Because that could very easily have happened to me if we had stayed, and I suppose to an extent, it did. To a far lesser degree, in my attraction to men, I have repeated a pattern I learned from those women in their kitchens.

I obviously don’t like to think of it that way… that’s just ikky… and I know fine well that The DE is completely incomparable to the rough and violent men I knew as a child. But here comes that snobbery again. Just because he is handsome, middle-class, well-educated, charming and well to do, doesn’t mean he’s not a manipulating bully. And it’s true that I have swept aside any thoughts of the times he has intimidated me because I never really wanted to admit to anyone else, or more importantly to myself, that I was frightened of him or that I had made such a shocking mistake in marrying him.

PC Lovely asked me a bit about Our History and about various ‘incidents’ during out marriage. After a while found myself describing the times that he had threatened me, intimidated me, corned me; the times that he had stalked me around the town, ‘came looking for me’ when I was ten minutes late coming home; and the time last year, in a fit of cruelty and manipulation, The DE had stopped me from leaving my house for two days, not allowed me to sleep and then when he had me right where he wanted me tried to get friendlier than was entirely suitable… PC Lovely raised an eyebrow and I felt a more than a little bit foolish.

She says I can get a restraining order against him, but she understood why I didn’t want to do that at the moment. She’d divorced herself and has a difficult time with her ex husband when it comes to custody of their son.

She was utterly lovely and actually I felt very supported. But still very weird. Here I am making police reports about The DE’s crazy behaviour, and all the while I am trying to thrash out some kind of amicable agreement between he and I about The Babbitts and money and the future. All in the vain hope that we will ‘get through this bit of the divorce’, will eventually be able to ‘work together as parents’ and things will come up roses before long. It’s as if there are two stories happening simultaneously, and I don’t know which one is the truth.

Thing is, I don’t even know what I am trying to be friends with The DE. What has it achieved so far? Maybe this is just another turning point. Maybe I need to start being less of a bloody idealist and more realistic in my expectations from now on. But I keep turning so many bloody corners that I’m pretty sure I’m back at the beginning. 

PC Lovely made me laugh. As she was filling out the forms she took down my details, name, date of birth, address, etc, etc, etc… looking down to check if she had ticked all of the boxes she said, “Oh, I almost forgot. Faith?”

“Sorry?” I replied.

“Are you of any particular faith?” She repeated, with her pen hovering over  the page.

“No, no I’m not.” 

“Sooooo… ” she said, writing it down, “No faith at all.” She looked up and caught my eye, “Ah, well, that’s marriage for ya!”

She grinned a huge great big grin and I snorted tea all over the table and over the biscuits… we giggled for ages about it.

Thank God for PC Lovely.

 I always think The DE has got as low as a man can get, until he surprises me, digs a bit deeper and unearths new layers of wretchedness…. and tonight I feel as if I could put my hands around his throat and gladly squeeze.

I’ve been trying to call The Babbitts for a couple of days now. I’m fairly sure they are at My Soon To Be In Laws house, but I can’t be sure. The DE is playing out his sick little power game once again and being pretty cagey about their whereabouts. Anyway, either way… no one is picking up the phone… or MSN Messenger… or Skpye.

In short: I can’t reach my kids… and it’s killing me.

I texted The DE today asking when I could speak to The Babbitts. He said I couldn’t. Said they were with his parents and he didn’t want me talking to them unless he was present. Needless to say, this was not the arrangement we had made. When I objected he asked me how much I liked a taste of my own medicine, told me it was ‘payback.’

My stomach lurched. What did this mean? I kept on trying to get it out of him… until eventually he called me, told me that he would decide when and where I spoke to my children and, just for good measure, he dropped in the fact that My Boy has been very upset and awake at night… He said he didn’t want me talking to The Babbitts in case I made it worse.

Knowing that I was upset at the thought of My Boy being upset Over There without me, The DE hung up.

I couldn’t get through to anyone Over There, and felt sick at the thought that My Lovely Sister In Law who is the only sane one had just left to go on holiday for the rest of the summer, so there wouldn’t even be anyone to help me reason with The DE.

I couldn’t concentrate on anything, and then about an hour later I got a text message from The DE saying that he had driven all the way to his parents house so that he could be present while the children spoke to me on the phone. And he hoped I was grateful that he was prepared to be so decent in doing this, while I was still behaving like such a bitch to him.

I swept aside thoughts of injustice and murder and tried to call The Babbitts via Skype. I was promptly told that I would only be able to talk to them over the phone line, because he didn’t want them to be able to see me (via the webcam… which was our arrangement.)

After being put on speakerphone, I found out from My Girl, who was in tears that she had in fact been very ill. So ill in fact that she’d been taken to the hospital by My Soon To Be Ex In Laws.

She couldn’t talk for long. She felt ill. Said she missed me. Cried ever such a lot and pretended to believe me when I told her that if she wanted to talk to me all she had to do was to ask her dad or grandparents and hey would let her call me.

I think she both knew that was a lie.

Holding back tears, and not doing a very good job of it, I spoke to My Boy, who seemed well enough, and told me about a very nice ice lolly he’d just been given by his grandmother. Told me he loved me and went back to watching a program about robots.

The DE came on the line. I asked him why I wasn’t allowed to speak to the children via Skype. He said it was because he said so, he thought it best. I disagreed. He said that was my problem. Then I told him that if in future either one of my children needed medical attention that I wanted to be informed of it immediately. That every one Over There had my phone numbers and email address, that I could be contacted in all circumstances. (I was all too well aware of the fact that My Girl may well have been ill for days without me even being told about it, and the thought made me sick.)

The DE laughed, said I was pathetic and hung up the phone.

Needless to say I felt apart… this feels like my kids are being held to ransom by a man who is so obsessed with punishing me that he can’t see what he is doing to these little children.

I am still white with rage and it happened some hours ago. I don’t think I have ever felt such a complex set of emotions as I have experienced tonight. I don’t know what to do. Because my instant maternal instinct is to get on a boat and go and get my kids back.

I’m trying to be as sensible and adult as I can be about this, but I’m furious, panicked, guilty, worried, enraged… and a million more things.

As well as all of this, I am very fucking angry with My Soon To Be Ex In Laws. I don’t give a crap if they feel they have to side with their son, they should have told me that they had taken My Girl to the hospital, that she was ill.

What the hell were they thinking to keep that from me?

I still don’t know what to do. I can’t think clearly at all. Who the hell are these people, The DE and his parents? And what right do they think they have to behave in this way.

I can’t stop thinking about The Babbitts. I’m so worried… especially about My Girl…. and I’m angry with myself for not knowing what to do. If I dash Over There and get them, what does that mean? And what will the consequences be? If I don’t am I setting a precedent that lets them get away with treating The Babbitts and I like this.

Why can’t they just behave like fucking grown ups? 

(Oh, and PS, after the little run in at my front door last week, The DE has cancelled the direct debit he’d set up to pay me the paltry little amount of child maintenance he had begun. Yes, that’s right, he managed to make one pathetic little payment in the space of 16 months before wriggling out of the arrangement… he must see it as another way to punish me… it seems he doesn’t understand that I’m not the person it’s intended for… but there we go, why oh why should I expect him to show any understanding for his children.) 

I need sleep. I can’t think straight.

Happy Birthday to me… I turned 30 on Sunday, and to celebrate this I had an absolutely fabulous party on Saturday night.

Honestly, I did! It was bloody brilliant and I bloody loved it.

The rain cleared up just in time for me and my friends to decorate the garden with brightly coloured streamers and untold amounts of fairy lights. Friends came from far and wide. The music was good, we ate, we drank, we were very merry… I was given some of the best presents I have ever got, I had the chance to wear an excessively frou-frou frock (with petticoat!) and my good friend Funny Girl the stand up comedian even did a turn as a special treat for me. The garden was filled with laughter… and I was almost euphoric with happiness.

In short, even if I should have gone a little easier on the grown up fizzy pop… (Sunday afternoon was unforgiving)… well, I honestly couldn’t have asked for a better birthday party. And I haven’t felt that happy since I can remember.

And it went on well into the next day. Sunday morning I woke up (before the hangover set in) and found myself having breakfast in the garden with a houseful of guests in recovery over coffee and bacon sandwiches, seated around the table chatting… and it was practically like being back at university again. Old flatmates, honorary flatmates, and general lovely types… It was almost as if 10 years hadn’t passed.

I felt so happy… even when later on we all sat ‘round the big table in the local pub going through the Sundays, gently drinking full-fat coke and doing the crossword and as the inevitable hangover set in, I still couldn’t have been happier. Because all of these fabulous friends of mine were in one place at one time, and it was wonderful… many blessings were counted around that table, underneath the Adnams posters, I can tell you.

Unfortunately there was a rather inevitable come down on Monday morning after I had waved off the last of my oldest friends… Briefly put, I hit rock bottom.

I miss The Babbitts…

Actually ‘miss’ doesn’t  quite cover it… and in fact I have been wandering around my empty house at all times of the day and night feeling utterly bereft, without any focus or structure in my life and wondering why the hell I ever agreed to letting them go off for so long…

Christ, I miss them… I miss them so incredibly much.

On good advice I called the police again… my local bobby, not 999… and I told them about The DE’s threats, said I just wanted it logged like last time… but this time they weren’t so friendly… in fact they were downright serious about The DE and have insisted that this is domestic abuse.

I chuckled and said it was just hot air, but that I would prefer a record of it… the very nice policeman at the end of the phone started quoting laws and telling me just what he could have The DE arrested for given his track record… and he insisted on sending someone ’round to see me and for me to fill out the appropriate forms.

I told him I felt it might be going too far.

The Policeman asked me if The DE had threatened me the last time I had seen him, I said yes; he asked me if he had done it the time before that, I said yes… a little more meekly now. He asked me if I could put my hand on my heart and tell him that I didn’t feel scared of The DE… I took a deep breath and said no, as The Policeman reeled off some statistics about domestic abuse and told me about some cases that had started just like mine and had ended very badly because the woman ‘didn’t want to make a fuss.’

In the end he said, “Look, you seem like a sensible woman. Don’t be stupid about this Ok”

I said Ok… and now someone will be ’round to see me later on.

Oh God!

Is this necessary? Or it this all getting completely out of hand?

I emailed him back… I know it’s best not to, but I couldn’t help myeself… wave after wave of crap from The DE… it’s enough to drive me mad and this time I couldn’t rise above it.

I told him I’d hung up on him because I am once again not willing to enter into fruitless arguments and that email is the best way for us to communicate, and the only way to avoid heated emotional confrontations, which in the past we have both agreed was not the way to get things done.

Then I said I wanted to make a few things very clear:

With regard to the fact that My Girl  had asked about him having told the children that he came all the way from Over There to see them on My Boy’s birthday and that I wouldn’t let him into the house to see them, that there was no point dancing around the fact that I am furious that he said this to the children, and I call it emotional blackmail and a very low shot as well as an irresponsible thing to say to his children.

It had obviously been very distressing for them and I wanted to make very clear to him that had he turned up at a reasonable time then he would have been able to see the children. But he turned up at almost 8.30 pm, when - as any parent knows - it was just far too late for him to take them out, as we had previously agreed he would do.

I absolutely resent the fact that he had made our children feel that I was the person responsible for the fact that they didn’t see their father that day. And that if he had any real interest in seeing either of the children that day, but especially his son on his birthday, then perhaps he might have arranged to arrive much earlier in the day so that he could have spent time with them at a time of day appropriate for children of their ages.

And I asked him to please not use the excuse of not being able to take time from work as a reason for not arriving earlier on. Because firstly, we both know that he chooses to use up his annual leave from work in other ways, and secondly because he has known for some time that he’d be arriving on his son’s birthday, and I would have thought that,  that being one of the most important days of the year, he would have deemed an extra day of annual leave to be very important.

And, then I said that it is of course true that I wouldn’t let him in my house. But I would like to remind him of the reason why - which I made very clear to him last week when we were making arrangements for him to see the children.

I said, It is because the last time you came to my house you threatened me.

And you threatened me again on Tuesday evening.

And that he made it impossible for me to let him into my house, and I hope he might  bear that in mind if ever he found himseld trying to explain this situation to the children. In the past I have gone to great lengths to accommodate him and to help him see his children, even leaving my house so that he could stay here with the children. However, it is his behaviour and not mine that has made this impossible.

I told him that I refuse to communicate with him via any other medium than email from now on. I had hoped that we had made a fresh start over the last few weeks, but it is clear that I was wrong about that. 

Yes, I have stooped to his level and I’m not proud… the emailing slanging match I try so hard to avoid… but I just couldn’t let this one go.

It’s my birthday this weekend. I’m going to be 30. I’ve been looking forward to new beginnings, but this is such a knock back. I’ve got a houseful of people arriving in a few hours, old friends, good friends, people who very seriously matter to me… and I’ve been looking forward to it so very much… I’m, going to have to try very hard not to let this scupper it, you know.

It’s taken the fizz out of the excitement.

OK, chin up Miss A! Best foot forward! Time for a deep breath and to remember what the old wives say, “You are only as happy or as unhappy as you imagine yourself to be.”

Never a truer word spoken! And I am imagining my knickers off at the moment… and counting my blessings and the rest… I’m going to have to put all of my energies into very happy thoughts.