Six Months to Get a Life (3 page)

Living with my parents isn’t easy. Having your old bedroom back more than twenty years after you left home and sharing the house with your parents is a big change from having your own kids, house, garden, telly and wife (yes, in that order). This significant step backwards in my life has taken some getting used to. I have to remind myself to abide by my parents’ rules while in their house. Rules like washing up straight after a meal rather than when there aren’t any clean dishes left in the cupboard, and cutting my toenails in the bathroom, not in front of the telly. Talking of the telly, I also have to make sure that the next time I watch Playboy TV when everyone else has gone to bed, I turn the channel back to BBC before I turn the TV off. Mum is still getting over the embarrassment of having her Women’s Institute friends thinking she watches porn.

Having me as a lodger isn’t easy for my parents either, especially at their age. They are both approaching their seventies. They are physically fit but my dad had a hip replacement last year and needs the other one doing too so he is temporarily less mobile than he would want to be. Mum could probably still climb a mountain faster than me and both of them can drink faster than me.

Before I moved in, they were very set in their ways. They
had a routine for what rooms in the house they would sit in at different times of the day (kitchen in the morning, conservatory in the afternoon, front room in the evening). Meals were served at one o’clock and six o’clock and after dinner they would listen to The Archers then move from the radio to the telly in time to watch the soaps. They would go to bed straight after the ten o’clock news.

Except for a short but explosive teenage stroppy period, I have always got on with my parents. We don’t do cuddles and all that stuff, but pre-divorce, I used to go round there once a week with the family, have dinner, play board games and generally drink too much London Pride. I made another of my vows when I moved in with them. I wouldn’t just use their house as a hotel. I would make the effort to continue spending quality time with them. This isn’t proving easy.

‘Quality time’ these days seems to mean sitting around a kitchen table littered with empty London Pride cans and prosecco bottles, picking my life apart. Now anyone over the age of two would probably be capable of picking my life apart. But my mum and dad consider themselves uniquely qualified to do the job with a forensic precision. They were both social workers in their former lives. My mum used to do something worthy with the parents of children with disabilities and my dad used to manage a ‘family services unit’, whatever that means.

There is only so much frowning over my previous life choices or suggestions about future life choices that a man can take. I reached my limit today. Mum cooked a traditional Sunday roast, beef and all the trimmings. We washed it down with our usual beverages. Our plates were empty, our stomachs full and our tongues alcoholically lubricated when mum asked me where it all went wrong.

‘What do you mean ‘where did it all go wrong’?’ I asked.

‘With your life, Graham. How did it come to this?’ She
even did that palms up, arms outstretched hand gesture thing when she said ‘my life’, presumably meaning everything. Where did everything go wrong? Thanks mum, build me up, bolster my confidence.

I thought about going for a glib response but the earnest look on mum’s face made me change track.

‘I don’t know mum, I guess my marriage just wasn’t meant to last.’ OK, so it wasn’t exactly an insightful answer but it was the best I could do.

‘That’s nonsense and you know it, Graham,’ mum continued. ‘Marriages need to be worked at. It wasn’t as if either of you had an affair or anything that drastic. Surely you could have worked through your differences?’

‘You didn’t even see a marriage guidance counsellor,’ dad chimed in. We did actually but I hadn’t told them about it because they would have had a go at me for walking out in the middle of a session.

And so it went on, two against one, tag-team wrestling. My parents still seem to think the sun shines out of my ex’s backside. They act as if she is their daughter rather than me their son. They still hold out a hope that my perfect ex will have me back. I wouldn’t go back even if she would have me back. Which she wouldn’t.

I have told my parents time and again that my ex and I split up because of our terminal irritability with each other, our mutual intolerance of each other, our irreconcilable TV viewing schedules. We just didn’t like each other. I tried to explain that to my parents but, to them, not liking your other half doesn’t constitute grounds for divorce.

‘You should have paid more attention to her when you had her,’ dad advised. Why didn’t I think of that?

‘Those poor children,’ mum offered. Why didn’t I think of them too? I was on the ropes by this point, being seriously double-teamed by my parents, but wasn’t about to submit.

‘Bloody hell, will the two of you just leave me alone? I have had it with your sniping at me. You might have been married for ever but all you ever do is sit on your arses watching crap on the telly. I’d prefer to be single and living than married and dead.’ The ‘atomic drop’, the ‘full nelson’ and the ‘gorilla press’ all combined into one move. That told them.

‘Happy mother’s day,’ mum muttered as I was heading for the door. Shit.

At this point, I think I should make a confession. Being divorced, separated from my kids and my marital home (not to mention my ex) is quite stressful. It is quite a large upheaval in my life and may just have caused a slight emotional imbalance in my otherwise rock-solid equilibrium. In other words, I may be a bit self-centred at the moment, even a bit emotionally unstable. Not to the extent that I am about to charge around Morden with a lethal weapon killing random strangers, but enough that I may snap at my parents from time to time.

I need to put an end to alcohol-influenced conversations about my life.

My mood was bolstered this afternoon when I found out that my ex had a stomach bug.

I miss my children. Just writing those words doesn’t do the feeling justice. On the days that they aren’t with me, i.e. most days, the first thing I think of when I wake up is what are they up to? Are they out of bed yet? What are they watching on the telly? What are they having for breakfast? Particularly at weekends I wonder whether they are out with their mates having fun, or sitting at home bored and wondering what their dad is up to.

I have been quite a good dad up until this point. As you will have gathered by now, I can be moody. I can even be angry and have absolutely on occasion been known to shout at my children. But generally, on balance, I don’t think I have done a bad job as a dad.

I have always spent lots of time with the kids, going to watch countless football, rugby and cricket matches and taking them on loads of days out to the latest ‘must-do’ theme park. In our marital home I was in charge of holidays and we did the Florida Disney thing and had lots more fantastic holidays besides. I also genuinely enjoy Jack and Sean’s company on rainy days in. I am telling you this so that you realise that, for me, undoubtedly the worst part of
being divorced is being away from your children. So I was pleased my ex was ill because it gave me the opportunity to spend time with the kids when I got home from work. You didn’t think I was just gratuitously pleased that she was suffering, did you?

Like most parents divorcing, I have had my fair share of heartbreaking conversations with the kids. The conversations with Jack and Sean were far more heart-wrenching than the conversations with my wife, which probably explains why we got divorced. We had another such conversation tonight.

I took my boys to Frankie and Benny’s in Colliers Wood for tea. I needed the space away from my parents and thought the kids deserved a treat. We had a good time discussing everything from football to computer games to what fancy things we would buy if we won the lottery (Sean would have a waterslide going from his bedroom window to our own swimming pool and Jack would have a full-size football pitch with proper goals ‘with nets and everything’). As the boys devoured their huge chocolate-laden puddings, Jack steered the conversation in an altogether more serious direction.

‘Things are never going to be the same again, are they dad?’

‘What do you mean, son?’ I asked, even though I suspected I knew exactly what he meant.

‘I hate us all not living together as a family anymore,’ Jack explained. ‘I hate the quiet in mum’s house when you aren’t there. I hate watching the telly without you. I even hate eating tea without you taking the mickey out of us trying to hide our vegetables under our knife and forks.’

‘I hate going to bed without you mixing me up a story,’ Sean joined in. I hadn’t made up a bedtime story for him in years but I didn’t bother pointing that out.

‘I even hate it that you aren’t there to call me smelly or Jackie,’ my big boy said. ‘Can’t you come home?’

Both boys looked at me expectantly. They have asked me that question a few times before. I never know quite how to answer it. On one occasion I remember saying something along the lines of, ‘Your mum and I don’t love each other anymore so we can’t live together.’ That seemed like a perfectly reasonable answer to me but I don’t think the kids could really get their heads around it.

The next time the question came up I tried emphasising the benefits of having two happier parents even if they lived in different houses. That response seemed to tick some boxes for Sean but even the prospect of getting double the amount of birthday and Christmas presents didn’t sway Jack.

Tonight I went for the blunt approach because I had run out of alternatives.

‘Your mum doesn’t particularly like me anymore, boys, so I can’t move back in.’

‘She told us you don’t like her,’ Jack said.

‘Maybe we don’t like each other very much,’ I conceded wearily.

And that, in a nutshell, is why we split up. Both answers are true. My ex doesn’t really like me. I don’t really like my ex. And when it comes to talking to the kids about it, we both find it easier to heap the blame on the other party.

Without wishing to get all defensive, I feel the need to justify my answer and I suppose by implication my ex’s answer too. I can’t tell the kids I don’t like their mum because I don’t want to give them permission not to like their mum. I suspect my ex’s rationale is the same. She is generally a really good, conscientious parent who wouldn’t want to give the kids tacit permission not to like me.

Life is hard. Divorced parents have to walk a real tightrope when trying to do the best for their children. I can only imagine how hard it must be when you throw anger into the mix. Luckily, there wasn’t much anger when my ex and I
split. It sounds hard to believe after fifteen years of marriage but we were too worn down to fight. We didn’t care about each other enough to get angry.

I paid the bill and took the kids back to my parents’, tucked them in to bed and mixed them up a story about a boy who won the lottery and built lots of fancy things in his garden.

Whenever Jack and Sean stay with me, my parents’ house bursts at the seams. They live in a decent-sized terraced house with three bedrooms, but even before I moved in, the house was cluttered with the detritus that people accumulate over the course of their lives. There aren’t enough drawers for the kids’ clothes, they haven’t got a wardrobe to use and as a consequence stuff gets strewn everywhere. Worse than that for the boys, they have to share a bedroom. Lots of children share bedrooms but my kids aren’t used to it and them sharing normally ends in trouble.

As for the bathroom situation, the house only has one bathroom. We are all on a tight schedule during our morning routines. Why, then, does my dad, who is retired and does nothing but sit about all day, insist on having a shower at precisely the time that the boys and I need to use the bathroom? This morning I ended up being late for work and had to shout at the kids to hurry up.

When I got home my mum warned me that Jack was still in a mood.

‘What’s up with you?’ I asked him when I eventually found him throwing a tennis ball at the wall behind my dad’s shed.

‘I got two detentions at school today,’ he informed me.
‘Two. I have never got a detention in my life and today I get two.’

When I asked him what he did to deserve the detentions, he went off on one.

‘What I did to deserve a detention was be born to parents who couldn’t keep their marriage together. Instead of living in a happy family, sometimes I live somewhere where I can’t get into the bathroom until nearly lunchtime which makes me late for registration. That’s detention number one. And then when I eventually get to school I realise that because I live in two houses I have forgotten which house my geography book is in. It’s at my mum’s but because I am already late for school I don’t have time to go to mum’s to get it. So I get given my second detention for not doing my geography homework because my stupid geography teacher doesn’t believe that I have actually done it but left it at mum’s.’

And breathe. I could have told Jack that he should have got up earlier to get in to the bathroom and checked his school bag the night before school to make sure he had all his books but sometimes you need to give a kid a break. I accepted full responsibility for Jack’s predicament and apologised to him. I want to be there for him when he needs a shoulder to cry on.

I know I shouldn’t have on a school night but I took the kids off to watch Gravity at the cinema (it might have won Oscars but we got bored with watching Sandra Bullock floating around in space).

When the kids were born, my parents fully embraced their role as grandparents. They used to spoil Jack and Sean rotten, buying them presents, feeding them sweets, letting them stay up late on sleepovers at their house and generally leaving any disciplining that needed to be done to us.

At some point over the last few months the dynamic has shifted a bit, to the extent that Jack and Sean sometimes could be forgiven for thinking that they have got four parents.

‘What’s for tea?’ Jack asked within five minutes of getting back from playing football in the park with his mates.

‘Kippers,’ my mum replied, ‘and I hope you are going to shower first.’

‘Kippers, yuk! They stink. Can’t we have something else?’ he protested.

‘You can eat what you are given,’ dad snapped.

And things didn’t get better as the evening progressed. The boys were variously told off for playing football in the garden and breaking most of mum’s daffodils, walking mud into the lounge, not flushing the toilet and leaving lights on. At least they didn’t cut their toenails in front of the telly. My parents are running out of patience after being around the kids for the last few days. As far as I am concerned, the boys’ misdemeanours this evening were all fairly low level, but it
isn’t my house so I couldn’t really intervene with my parents on their behalf. Eventually Jack snapped at my dad.

‘I hate you. I hate your stupid house and I hate your stupid kippers. I wish I didn’t have to stay here.’

I was with Jack on the latter part of his outburst at least.

The boys and I had another of our man-to-man chats. I told them how hard it must be for my parents to go from living on their own to having us rabble invading their space and routines. I then told them of my intention to get somewhere to live where we could have our own space.

‘I know we don’t stay with you as much as we stay with mum but it isn’t easy when you live here,’ Jack said. ‘We will stay with you more when you get your own place.’

Jack has always been worried that I would take the fact that he and his brother were spending more time with their mum than with me as an indication that they loved her more than they loved me. To be honest I struggled, or maybe that should be struggle, not to see it that way. I try my best not to show it to the kids, though.

‘You will take the PS4 with you when you go, won’t you?’ Sean added. Nice to know where I stand in the order of priorities.