Single Father, Better Dad. Mark Tucker
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and take them out for Chinese? All these hideous visions went through my head and seemed to dwarf the more realistic and equally appalling fact, that the main thing he would be doing if he came to stay was boning my wife.
But back to Brett Lee. It was a good ball—short, fast and snorting off the pitch. But no more Gladstone Small, timid tailender, for me. I rocked back on my heels and hit it clean over the boundary. I became Allan Lamb (he is sort of English after all). The look on the cover fielders’ faces as it sailed over their heads was priceless.
“I’m not moving out,” I said. “If you want to be with this guy that’s up to you—but I’m going nowhere.”
It was one of the best decisions I ever made. Much later my lawyer told me that the first thing she asks her clients is “have you moved out?” hoping they haven’t. For most men it’s too late. They do the ‘traditional’ thing, pack their bags and move into an apartment. Here’s a top tip for men going through separation—if you are able to stay put in your own home, then do it. The person living in the family home holds all the aces in the tough months of negotiations and arguments to come.
So the die was cast and the big decisions made. My wife had decided, because I was being so unreasonable about the living arrangements (i.e. not doing what she wanted me to), that she would be the one to move out and that she and her soul mate would find somewhere new to live so that they could be together. How lovely for them! This made things a lot easier for my daughters. They chose to live with me. They were unhappy and angry with their mother for the pain that she had caused us all and were ashamed of the nature of her affair—and they certainly weren’t interested in living with some guy who they hadn’t met and had no intention of meeting. Being able to stay in their familiar home and surroundings with me, when so much of their world was changing, was the best outcome for them and the best outcome for me.
Time raced by and a few weeks later the September school holidays were upon us. Months before, in the time before separation which now felt like years ago, we had planned to go back to England during these holidays as a family to see my father. He didn’t live that long, but the children and I decided we would go anyway; they needed a change of scene and I needed to spend some time with my UK family now that they knew what had happened. I needed some family support. But it would be another bitter-sweet moment—this trip would mark the end of our own time as a family unit. My wife would move out while we were away.
My wife drove us to the airport and we said our final goodbyes at the Singapore Airlines check-in desk. Lots of other people around us were also saying their goodbyes—ours were just a little more final. Sophie, Annabel and I were, officially, a threesome. It was a massive, life changing moment and yet I couldn’t stop thinking of the Genesis album And Then There Were Three and the beginning of the track Many Too Many which kept coming into my head—“Many too many have stood where I stand, many more will stand here too”. Fortunately the vision of Phil Collins proved to be only fleeting and passed once we were on the plane. It was going to be a long, hard flight to London and I didn’t need Phil with me every step of the way.
As many people know, flying with children can be challenging—but it is much more so in my case. My youngest daughter has a fear of the claustrophobia brought about by long haul flying, which is a little inconvenient when I have family on the other side of the world. It means that, at some point in the flight, she will start being sick and then continue in this vein at regular intervals until the end of the journey—at which point a bottle of Gatorade will result in an immediate and miraculous recovery. As she has got older, the onset of the air sickness has been delayed and, on our last trip from the UK a few years earlier, she actually managed to get halfway to Singapore before filling my shoes with chicken or fish (it was hard to tell which it was when it was on the meal tray—and even harder to tell once it had been regurgitated).
We boarded the plane, gently clunked the heads of a few of our fellow passengers with our rather generous volume of hand luggage, and took our seats. I sat in-between the girls in the row of three seats, which would be home for the next twenty-four hours. Tonight’s trip would be my third in four months to the UK and I had become something of an expert in economy class sleeping. This new found ability was not the result of any significant scientific research or analysis, it was simply that I got off my trolley by speed drinking several glasses of wine and passing on dinner. Sleep was then an inevitable consequence. I was pretty sure that my daughter would make it to Singapore in one piece and, in any case, she would wake me up if she felt sick.
Hours later I woke in a slight panic from a dream, in which I had been hog-tied and put in a sack by some strange cowboy, hillbilly type characters, to find that I couldn’t move. I swear I could hear the sound of a banjo being tuned up. However, as my eyes groggily opened, I realised that everything was okay—I had just fallen asleep with my head on the tray table and as a result my back and neck had gone into spasm. I half lay and half sat, bent over the tray table, paralysed but with my eyes open and with a little pool of dribble forming under my cheek. As I remained in my inert state, willing my body back to life, the woman sitting across the aisle caught my eye.
“Your daughter’s been sick,” she growled, looking at me in disgust.
She was right. The poor thing had started her vomiting only forty-five minutes into the flight and had spent the last five hours regularly puking into a sick bag and then going to the toilet to clean up. She didn’t want to wake me and, unfortunately, my well-practiced economy class sleep routine had ensured that I was oblivious to her distress. In hindsight it was fairly obvious that the stress brought on by our final goodbyes at the airport, combined with her fear of flying, was likely to cause her vomiting to start much earlier into the flight than normal. But at the time, her ‘caring’ father, who had not really thought this through, was ‘un-contactable’ in the grip of an alcohol-induced coma.
I maintained unpleasant eye contact with the woman across the aisle, my head still stuck on the tray table, trying to work out how I could get my body to straighten while hunched up in the cramped seat. She continued to stare at me no doubt assuming, perhaps correctly, that I was some drunken, pathetic, incompetent father. I finally managed to rouse myself, gasping in pain, and somehow achieved the feat of standing up while doing a fairly good impression of Quasimodo. Great start to my new life, I thought to myself.
Our holiday in the UK was a very emotional time for all of us. My dad wasn’t there, and for the girls their mum wasn’t there. But at least the conflict and tension that had blighted our last month wasn’t there either. It was a great environment for me to start bonding with my daughters. For the first time ever I was responsible for them twenty-four hours a day. We didn’t talk much about what we had been through or what was to come, we treated it as a holiday. I was amazed how happy my girls seemed. Sophie, my eldest, was, unusually, a little bit clingy. She became slightly anxious when I left her and Annabel at my sister’s house for a night while I went to my mum’s house to go through my dad’s financial affairs. She wanted to know how long I would be gone and when I would get back, and she called me a couple of times to make sure that everything was alright. Other than that, life seemed quite normal. Or perhaps it was just the calm before the storm.
When we got back to Australia three weeks later there was no one at the airport to meet us. The three of us stood waiting for a cab in the dark, rainy Melbourne morning. It was a quiet journey back to the house. Each of us was tired and lost in our own thoughts about the reality we would face when we got home and how our new lives were going to turn out. I was wondering how I would cope as a single father—and I have no doubt that the girls were thinking the same thing. I also had the vain hope my wife might have changed her mind and would be waiting for us at home and, again, I was sure that the girls were quietly hoping the same thing.
An hour later we pul ed into the driveway. The house was dark and quiet. It didn’t look as though anyone was home. I went into the bedroom and opened the wardrobes. It seemed impossible, but they were empty. Her clothes were gone. She had moved out. It was the beginning of my new life as a single dad.
I was happy my children had chosen to live with me, rather than my wife. I didn’t want to miss out on living with my daughters and their growing up just because my wife had decided that she wanted to live with someone