Single Father, Better Dad. Mark Tucker
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thing. I hated it. The shock and stress made me feel constantly sick. Seventeen years of marriage over—just like that. “Do not pass Go”, “Do not collect $200”. I couldn’t move that quickly.
I simply didn’t understand it. I drove myself mad as I ran mental laps through my head. What had I done wrong? I thought I was a good husband and a good father. I had a good job, I was helpful, I did the washing up, mowed the lawns, ironed my shirts, took the bread out of the freezer—more than a lot of men did I was sure—and, most importantly, I did my bit with the children. I was a ‘fun dad’. I refereed the endless games of Monopoly, froze my dangly bits off wading into the sea so that my daughters could swim, sacrificed Saturday mornings to go to netball with my eldest daughter and Saturday afternoons to watch my youngest learning gymnastics. It wasn’t always a barrel of laughs but it was what I did. Wasn’t all that good enough?
Turns out that it wasn’t. Although I was useful around the house, I had not, it was pointed out to me, been a good husband for some time. I had become the marital equivalent of a high-end vacuum cleaner. I was reliable and rarely broke down, I was capable and did what was expected of me, but I wasn’t exactly fun to use. Practical, but not exciting or inspiring. My wife didn’t want a vacuum cleaner, even if I was Dyson-esq in my dust sucking abilities. She wanted something special, an upmarket espresso machine or pizza maker, with sufficiently heart-aching aesthetic appeal to be an object of desire amongst her friends, combined with the capability to nonchalantly knock out a mouth-watering delicacy at a moment’s notice. She wanted the man who could do it all—and apparently her soul mate could, even though he was still in his warranty period and unproven over the long term, and apparently I couldn’t.
To be honest, I was a mess. It was all so sudden and so quick. My nice, predictable, stable life had been replaced with one built on total uncertainty and fear. It felt as though the world had become one huge out-of-control fairground ride. My head was spinning and I wanted to get off. I needed something solid to hold on to.
I was desperate to save my marriage. Partly because I was scared (I didn’t know what a future on my own might bring), partly because I liked my life (it wasn’t always a bed of roses but it was pretty good), but mostly because I didn’t want my family to break up. I loved my family and I was proud that we were still together and our children happy, especially when we knew so many other couples who were unhappy or had split up.
I had seen the problems family breakdowns caused, for children in particular—living in two houses, becoming pawns in nasty disputes between their parents, believing they were to blame for their parents’ problems and so on. Also, one of the ex-partners always seemed to come off worse and end up bitter and twisted. I didn’t want my kids to go through all that grief and, if I was honest, I didn’t want to be the ex-partner that came off worse and ended up bitter and twisted.
Over the next few weeks we talked openly, and maybe honestly, about our feelings. We talked more than we had done for years. Was that part of our problem? I earn my living as a management consultant—so I’ve been trained to solve problems through the analysis of facts, logic and carefully constructed arguments. But the more we discussed the whys and wherefores of what was happening, the more I recognised that my logical approach was falling on deaf ears. This was an emotional argument. Logic didn’t count for anything.
“I’ve given you everything you’ve ever wanted,” I argued.
A rather bold opening gambit I have to admit. There probably should have been an ‘almost’ in that first sentence but, undeterred, I continued in a similar vein, listing our achievements.
“We have a good life, we live in a great house, I’m supportive of you, I moved the family from England to Australia for your sake—doesn’t all that count for something?”
“It’s all true,” my wife replied, calmly deflecting my finely thought through argument. “You have been a good husband— but you don’t know what I really want or what I really need.”
“But we get on so well. We rarely fall out or argue. People say that we make a great couple,” I countered.
A nice piece of consulting input from me—bring in an external market reference for validation of the argument.
“We’re a good team,” she admitted.
An acknowledgement from her, but not in a very positive vein. I kept trying.
“I have always looked after you and put you first.”
“You do look after me—but you don’t make me feel special,” she replied.
We were getting more and more subjective and I was getting more and more desperate. I wanted to get the argument back to the facts again. Surely I couldn’t lose with the facts?
“I thought we were happy—I thought you were happy.” Now I was getting emotional.
“I am happy—but not happy enough,” she offered. Was that subjective or factual? I was starting to get confused.
God it was hard. Who was this stranger? She looked like my wife but what had happened to her? Why was she talking about our marriage being over? Her words were like bricks. Why was she saying these things? She was so certain, so cool, so sure it was the right thing to do. I wanted to grab her and shake her— to make her see the madness of what she was saying. To make her see reality, or at least my reality.
I was desperate. I only had one card left. I knew that it was all or nothing but I also knew that I had to play it.
“I thought you loved me.”
“I do love you—but I’m not in love with you.”
Fuck—that last one hurt. My all or nothing card had been trumped.
I imagined that this exchange was a bit like facing the fiery fast bowler Brett Lee. It was only a matter of time before one of her deliveries hit me in the nuts—and that last one had hit me hard. Really hard. And it probably had the same effect as being hit in the privates by Brett—a hot, intense streak of pain followed by my eyes welling up, feeling dazed and confused, and completely losing the ability to think clearly or string a sentence together. I could imagine the ball rolling down the inside of my leg and knocking the bails off of my wicket. Was I going to be out? And in such a pathetic fashion?
I had always imagined that, if our marriage were to end, it would be because I had lost my life performing some heroic act to protect my family from a painful and premature death. You know the kind of thing—leaping in front of a runaway truck and pushing them to safety, or saving my children from a house fire only to lose my life when re-entering the burning building to rescue my youngest daughter’s hamster. But this? Outdone by some stranger who was better than me in the ‘making my wife feel special’ department? This wasn’t heroic at all.
We continued to talk and talk for day after day. We talked about the impact on us, we talked about the impact on our children and we talked about the impact on our wider families. It was tiring and emotionally exhausting. But worse for me— because I was losing the argument. My attempts at ‘logic’ were proving futile. I was communicating on the wrong level. This wasn’t a factual argument, weighing up the pros and cons of alternative ways forward; this was about emotions. All my efforts to appeal to my wife’s brain were of no use. I needed to aim for her heart but someone else already had that. With a steadily building sense of frustration, sadness and fear, I realised that I wasn’t going to be able to change her mind—a ‘solid’, ‘practical’ marriage is no competition for a love affair.
*
Unfortunately, there was even more than this calamitous event going on in my life and the other thing was right up there on the emotional pain meter as well. Five months earlier my father, who lived in the UK along with the rest of my family, had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of pancreatic cancer. Typical life expectancy for this vicious form of cancer is six months from the time of diagnosis and so my poor old dad was about to enter the ‘living on borrowed time’ phase.
Two weeks after the discovery of my wife’s infidelity, I made the long trip