The wrong guy

She was thirty when they met. A decade and a half of boyfriends behind her. He came along at the right time. He was clever. And funny. The funniest man she had ever met. Together they were funny and shiny and popular and went everywhere and had funny shiny days and nights and weekends in big houses and holidays in the south of France and all was glittery. He didn’t like her family much and none of her friends which really was quite the red light but she was so busy melding herself to him and his shiny funny life that she just shimmied in the red light and ignored its message. And on their wedding day for of course they married, in an abbey in Wiltshire, he declared in his speech Now Everything is going to be Alright! He was there to make her better and smooth over her cracks and everyone whooped. Apart from those who thought it was fucking creepy. But they smiled and clapped because it was a beautiful wedding and she looked so happy. She had married her man.

Sometimes she railed against the smoothing over. He would tell her that if only they were to do things his way they wouldn’t have any problems and she knew that was wrong but still she loved him so very much and she was more messed up than him he said. Often. He wasn’t messed up at all. He said that too. Often. He was just lucky to have been born pretty much the finished product. She needed a lot of help he said and in some ways he was right, although in more he was wrong.

They had a lot of IVF. That was less funny and shiny. But they ended up with the two most wonderful daughters in the world and she was aghast that the world had kept its biggest secret from her for so many years. Why had no one told her? The love overwhelmed her but motherhood came as naturally as dancing. They lived in a big beautiful house with their small beautiful children. She threw endless parties for the girls — for birthdays of course but for summer and for dressing up and Easter and bonfire night and because it’s spring and because we’ve got over chicken pox and because you’re amazing and got ten out of ten in spellings and because you must learn Flamenco and paint the walls and I’ve made sandwiches and jelly in the shape of a rabbit. That was her thing. It just was.

He would sneer at her ‘bourgeois’ ways — why lay the table before the guests arrive …it’s not cool, it’s not breezy. Breezy and its absence was a big theme. He would let the tiny girls sit in the front seat of the car without a seatbelt ‘for a treat’. Putting them in harm’s way and relegating her to boring rule enforcer. The buckler-upper. The dreary one. They had terrible rows about that stuff. The waking up of finally asleep children for kisses upon his return from work. The fun-dad-crazy-making stuff.

Then one day he told her that he was leaving. He gave her a date. It was six weeks hence. The day before her birthday. She didn’t really believe him. They carried on as normal. They went away for shiny weekends with friends and went to a wedding and had supper together every night and slept in the same bed and then on the day before her birthday he left her and their children. And his sister who lived around the corner threw a lunch party for them all to mark this day, and when the other sister got out an Ikea catalogue to choose new beds for his new flat and they sought her opinion she burst into tears and ran out of the house because they were all insane and they told her that she always spoilt things, even this.

She was a husk. She had overturned her life to him. What was she to do without him. He had someone else. Of course he did. She went crazy. That was edge pushing over information. She emailed them constantly — never threatening or violent but incessant, dailily. How could you do this to my family. To our family. How could you. It can’t have been nice for them but that was in part the point. They went to the police within a fortnight… and she was arrested and given a restraining order. They are not hard to get. Two or more pieces of unsolicited correspondence. She had exceeded that.

So now when she contacted them — and she still did — she was crazed with grief and in the middle of what used to be called a nervous breakdown — she was arrested. Now she was a repeat offender. You don’t get released if you’re a repeat offender in case you offend again as is apparently your wont. You stay in the cell overnight and then, the next morning, you get into a metal cell on a Serco lorry in handcuffs and are driven to court and put in another cell and appear in a court with two guards. Each time she was let off. She stood and sobbed and apologised and said she had just sent one email this time. She was desperate. They wondered at her criminalisation. Her palpable grief and overwhelmedness and her middle class tones kept her free. But the degradation and pain were absolute.

As she left the court one evening she was served with papers from her husband, removing her children. The family court case which followed was incomprehensibly sad and destroying. Every day he arrived, calm and charming and shiny whilst she sat, a boiled mess of tears and rage and disbelief and a psychiatrist she had met once for an hour said that he thought she showed ’traits’ of an emotional disorder although he couldn’t really explain what that was and a psychiatrist she saw weeks later said that this had been wholly discredited as a diagnosis on the basis of ‘which of us does not have one?’ and her husband produced her criminal record and her tears suffocated her at the madness of having only a year or so before been the best wife and mother in the land and she railed and railed and he chatted sotto voce to the elderly Sloane who would decide her future and whose own children had been nannied and boarding schooled and thus he had barely met them until they had graduated from Cambridge and followed him to the bar and now he had lunch in town with his grown-up children once a week as fathers and their offspring should. And these two men chatted about Salcombe and Tuscany and the elderly Sloane signed away yet more of her children’s lives — “of course you must be able to take the girls away to Devon for weeks at time — spent much of my own childhood there — wonderful memories” until she was left with a fortnightly visit of four hours, supervised by a stranger. And that is how it goes. ‘Mental health issues’, however explainable plus a criminal record, however explainable, and slam-dunk your children are gone.

And now she was in the wild west of pain. She saw her children every fortnight at most, with a bovine stranger in tow, a soi-disant ‘private social worker’ who charged a fortune and sat confused by the middle class lunches and board games and jokes and reading and cuddles on the sofa that she was paid to witness and write up. And she and her successors told him that there was no point in their being there — but he insisted as he knew how it looked, her requiring supervision. And the girls were now so gas-lit that they too believed their mother required supervision and as such had been taught the worst lesson teachable to girls….not to trust their instincts. And those experts who had warned him that supervision, where not needed, does more harm than good had all been right though there was no comfort in that.

And the years, for it was now years, creaked by in a hellhole of pain and the new solicitor she had employed — the best in the land — called their case ‘the worst miscarriage of family law in this country in a generation’ — and she detested the unwanted fame that came with that garland. She did not want to appear in his papers or his speeches to the Law Society. She wanted her children. And the best solicitor in the land met the now ex-husband and described him as the most controlling and stuck man he had ever encountered. And she discovered that though she could still be (and was) arrested for making a single telephone call to the father of her children asking about their whereabouts, the family court had no teeth whatsoever and he could (and did) ignore every word of the now wildly out of date order so that even the very small concessions it had made to her were entirely ignored by him and he could do as he pleased and what pleased him was to give her nothing, not even the pathetic weekly updates about schools or holidays or their health or well-being. So the only information she could possibly get about her children was that passed on from their own lips and children are unreliable witnesses and unlikely to divulge what their teachers have said at parents’ evening. (Which she couldn’t attend because he would have her arrested).

She craved a return to the family court where justice would surely prevail. And he knew that so he ramped things up. He and his family started accusing her of other crimes for which she would be arrested and tried. She was never found guilty. Her ex brother-in-law, a particularly venal old-Etonian, was desperate to see her imprisoned. Quite why was beyond her -it would have destroyed her daughters. But then none of them ever considered the children or what impact all this was having. They saw her as a quite separate being…unconnected in every sense from her children. An unbeing….not someone whose emotional wellbeing even figured.

At the end of yet another trial at which she was found not guilty, the Etonian was asked whether he would like any restraining orders put in place. As though being offered a cup of tea. Yes! Yes he would like that! And so, despite her innocence, eight new restraining orders were made against her, for his entire family, none of whom she had ever contacted and most of whom she had never met.

And then she got it. They had worked out the madness of the system. That you could be given restraining orders for people you had never met and it was legal. Their determination to criminalise her, their fury when it didn’t ‘work’. There’s no family court in the land that would hand a woman’s children back to her with… what is it now….nine restraining orders to her name…..she must be a lunatic. No matter that they were for people who had they appeared at her front door she would have looked at blankly. The criminal court was being used to play the family court and it was quite quite brilliant.

And he poisoned the children. Gaslighting they call it these days. Telling people, even your own daughters, that what they see is wrong. Mummy is actually mad and bad and dangerous even if she seems lovely to you. If you exchange even a single cross word with her, even though you are a perennially cross teenage girl who barely sees your mother, you must walk straight out of her house and come back here and I will ensure you don’t see her again for weeks. Months if I can orchestrate it. In fact my darlings, for your 16th birthdays I will take you to court to have you legally separated from your mother. So that she is gone forever.

It’s potent stuff.

He wanted her entire family removed from the girls’ lives too, not just her. Back in his office working days people had joked that his desk looked like that of the just-fired guy. Not a single piece of paper in sight. Everything thrown or filed away. He was ruthless and loathed disorder and mess. She and her family represented mess. He had left her. Which meant he wanted her gone. And her family too. The endless compromises and muddles of separated families were not for him. He wanted a completely clear desk.

And so her children’s childhoods were built on the shifting sands of lies. The biggest of which was that daddy is perfect and mummy crazy. And in the crazy crazy world she now inhabited she had to support this thesis to protect her children. This was the only certainty in their lives. Wobble that, tell them the truth and the whole rotten stinking edifice which was their childhoods would come tumbling down and then where would they be. This central lie was the one certainty in their lives. So she never said a bad word about him or his family to them. Ever. It was her gift to them, the only maternal selflessness she could bestow, so absolutely was she cut out of their lives. To preserve the fragile status quo. Otherwise they’d be screwed.

When her daughter started a new school he filled out the forms without reference to a mother. She wasn’t even mentioned. He left that section blank.

When the pressure built and she emailed him and others or left messages demanding, sometimes screaming, that he provide her with information about and access to her children he stored those up as evidence of her madness. He had plenty of it. The one thing she had was time. And righteous anger. He said he didn’t consider her to be their mother despite the fact he had seen them leave her body. And he was right. People told her you are still their mother you will always be their mother and she despised them for patronising her as she knew as did they that mother was more verb than noun and she was left only with noun and it was not enough not even close.

And then he got a job with one of the biggest charities in the country, certainly the shiniest and funniest. And was seen on BBC sofas talking about the importance of the family and helping those with mental illness and she had to bite so hard into the pillow. At the gulf wider than all the oceans and all the seas and all the deserts and it could never be crossed and she wondered for the millionth time how she was even alive without her children, them around the corner. It was the surest form of torture as all the mothers know.

She tries not to remember that she has missed her children’s childhoods for reasons no one can nor has ever attempted to explain. Because it is inexplicable. She has with them no routines nor customs to which they will cleave in the future. She has passed on almost nothing of her take on family life nor the glories and rot of humanity. None of it good or bad has she passed on. Her own childhood was the diametric opposite of this — endless traditions and nightly suppers and people everywhere. She tries not to think about it.

Her children haven’t spent a night with her for ten years. Had she been a heroin addict, an abuser, she would have had better and more access to her children. He has played a blinder. If keeping your children from their mother entirely is winning. She has apologised a thousand times for her part in the carnage. She has offered a million olive branches. He is entirely contemptuous. Things have worked out just perfectly for him. He has the life he wants, without compromise or sacrifice. The fact that his children have had to sacrifice a mother and their mother sacrifice motherhood to provide him his perfect life, is entirely irrelevant.

And a female barrister she met (for her world is peopled by them and their million pound bills) told her that of the few women she had known in this situation — their children gone from them — they were either “dead or living abroad. I‘ve never heard of one living around the corner facing down the pain everyday because it’s not doable”. She didn’t get paid much for that observation. Because it is doable, just laughably, unendingly painful.

And when she can’t breathe for the grindingly suffocating pain of it all, she tries to imagine him releasing the pressure of his hands from her neck for just a few seconds, maybe sending her a little information about half term, something transformatory like that. But instead she feels his grip tighten and she knows in her heart that he will only stop when she gives up, entirely. And she knows that this is melodramatic but it’s also fucking true. Sometimes people marry the wrong guy.