When my kids go to live with their mother my house becomes a museum. I walk through it with hushed steps, bowing in quiet reverence before the many delicate proofs of their existence. It’s like they’ve always been here; it’s like they’re never coming back. The quiet – the unnatural, empty quiet – entombs the house. It’s heavy; dark; like night falling in daytime. I could say it’s as quiet as a library, but my boys paint even libraries in bright, bold textures of laughter and mischief. Their noise can make your ears ache, but it’s nothing compared to the dull, hollow ache its absence leaves behind.
I wander into their bedroom and look around. Their room is the dinner table on the Mary Celeste; it’s the perfectly preserved plaster shapes of children in the petrified ash of Pompeii; it’s a vault that contains the world’s most sacred and irreplaceable treasures: there, on the floor, a tiny pair of jeans is the Turin shroud; on the cabinet, a blank vista planted with stick figures is the Mona Lisa. I touch the exhibits, and in so doing make conductive elements of my hands, completing the circuit between tactility and memory. A flood of sentiment flows through me, rushing to fill the empty basin of my heart. Everything I touch contains a message: Braille only I can decipher in the soft contours of a teddy bear, or the hard spine of a picture book.
If their room really were a museum the placard on the wall would read: ‘This is a faithful reproduction of a child’s bedroom circa 2021, accurate right down to the details of the gently unmade beds and the arc of toys curling out like a tail from an upturned perspex box. If you look closely, you might still see the imprints of their heads on the pillows; soft, ephemeral mementoes of little lives suddenly frozen by circumstance; theirs to continue elsewhere, their father’s to stop. At least until they return.’
Parenthood can be a perpetual source of guilt and commiseration – the fear of never knowing how the threads you pluck and pull might shape the tapestry of your children’s lives, and whether for good or ill – but it’s also a source of light and warmth so fierce and brilliant it can plunge the rest of your world into shadow. I never realised quite how much of my identity was wrapped in my children until I couldn’t see them every day; until I felt how cold and helpless and rudderless I was shorn of their auras. I’m half of their template for making sense of the world, but it’s become abundantly clear to me that they’re 100 per cent of mine. I need my children like Tony Stark needs his artificial heart.
I know in some respects I’m privileged. Very few separated or divorced dads enjoy a fifty-fifty split on custody. Hell, some married dads with jobs abroad or offshore don’t see their children for weeks or even months at a time. But these comparisons only provide intellectual perspective. It makes no difference to the heart. Other people may suffer more, but their suffering, though deeply regretted, is abstract to me. I suppose, like everything in life, it takes time. A skeletal platitude, perhaps, but the only one I have to hold on to.
My wife and I separated just before the dawning of Covid. We were forced to co-habit in the same house for a year, living together but separately. In retrospect, this period of transition, as tough as it was for the adults in the house, probably helped the kids to come to terms with the changed dynamic and their new reality. Thus, when their mother did move out, it seemed less of a short, sharp shock to them, and more of a logical culmination of the process.
As parents we sometimes wish for a break from our kids – hell, sometimes we need it – but we’re safe to wish such things because we know – and not even deep down but right there on the surface – that we couldn’t exist without them. These are fleeting thoughts, situational, with no real substance to them. And they can be tamed or quelled, usually by something as simple as coffee with a friend, a long walk up the hills, or an occasional evening in the company of good friends and fine wine. I’m a highly-strung person, or else can be when faced with the possibilities of either failure or letting someone down. My anxiety goes into overload. One such occasion came back to haunt me as I sat thinking about the kids after they’d gone.
Years back I’d had a writing deadline, and was feeling overwhelmed. I paced around the house, and though the kids were asleep and didn’t hear me, I said, in a fit of rising adrenalin: “Do you know what, I’d get a whole hell of a lot more fucking writing done and wouldn’t find myself in these positions if I lived alone and could just focus entirely on it.” I didn’t mean it any more than a young child having a tantrum means it when they tell their parents they hate them. But those words still lodge in my heart like an arrow, one fired by my own hand. I said those things because I was stressed, and my body was using my mouth as a vent. I said those things safe in the belief that not for a second would there ever come a time when I might be living alone; that I wouldn’t be able to see them first thing every morning, and last thing every night.
That first night the kids went to stay at their mother’s, I wandered through the house, which was by then half-empty of furniture and possessions, and fully empty of other people. I sat in my former bedroom (now mine again and mine alone) on the bare floor, surrounded by emptiness, and I cried. I’m a sentimental fool, so I leak often – every time a movie tugs at my heart-strings – but I rarely cry, not the kind that shakes your shoulders, and makes your face a mute mask of anguish. I called my mum. I didn’t know what else to do. I sobbed like an infant. “I’ve lost my family,” I told her. It hit me then. It all hit me. A dam of worry and stress and recrimination and irritation and anger broke , and from it rushed waves of sadness that completely engulfed me. I didn’t want my wife back. I knew that would never happen. But that room held the weight of all that had been, could have been and should have been, and I was now trapped and drowning inside of it.
Throughout my adult life, thoughts of suicide have occasionally flitted through my head. It comes with the territory when depression and anxiety are your life-long bed-fellows; when your coping skills operate on the cross-roads of ‘fuck it’ and ‘fuck that’. Fortunately, both the frequency of such desperate, morbid thoughts and the ferocity with which my body responds to anxiety have lessened over the decades, perhaps a case of my brain learning how not to be an asshole, perhaps down to something as simple as a decrease in testosterone production. In any case, such thoughts were always abstract in character, like visits from Scrooge’s three ghosts. I was mired in ideation, not channelling intent. Ultimately, my thoughts were a mechanism to help me identify and explore a problem in my soul or psyche; a reminder that beyond that hot fog of adrenalin or the empty scorch it leaves behind are the pillars of peace and hope, however much time it may take to reach them. My malaise was always curable, or at the very least manageable, and the courses of treatment I recommended for myself – though often far from salubrious – were always less extreme than self-extermination.
But a short while after my children left, I felt possessed by something far less abstract. I never acted, or tried to act, on any impulses, but they were disconcertingly strong. Suicidal ideation has sometimes felt, for me at least, cinematic; a looped narrative of flashbacks and angry what-ifs, accompanied by a rollicking roller-coaster of blood and adrenalin – other times an extreme manifestation of grief or sadness that blocks out all else. But it was never cold.
This feeling was cold. Clinical. Precise. Like all else had been stripped away: all feeling, all options – leaving only suicide’s inarguable truth. I couldn’t see a happy ending. All of my actions would lead to disappointment. I couldn’t safeguard my children from the intra-familial tussles, battles and wars that might be ahead – the very conditions in my own past that made me at least half the basket-case I am today. I didn’t want them to be like me. I didn’t want them to be burdened by my inevitable failures. I didn’t think I could give them the life they needed: spiritually or materially. I didn’t think I was good enough for them.
At once I understood two things. One: that all of my ideas about suicide being a selfish act had been wrong. When those thoughts took over my brain, the world seemed distant to me. Alien. I felt emotionless. Devoid. I knew that my non-existence would be a mercy not just to me, but to everyone else, because I wouldn’t be the wild card that might make things worse. I clearly wasn’t in my right mind. And two: that if I’d been American I probably would have blown my own head off (an act that would have suited my impulsivity, and removed that period of regret, and desire to undo, that undoubtedly falls upon even the most committed of self-exterminators).
Whatever configuration my mind fell into during those dark days has been reset. I pushed through the fog. Started seeing things clearly. I can see that my kids are happy. They don’t cry when they leave their mother to come to me, and they don’t cry when they leave me to go to their mother. While they undoubtedly miss whichever one of us they aren’t with, they’ve always got one of us by their side, and I’m happy that the bulk of the burden of loss is upon my shoulders, and not theirs. I feel like a good dad again; someone who can make a positive impact on their lives.
Outside of my boys I haven’t achieved much in this life that’s truly good – practically, morally, or spiritually – but those incredible little people make me feel as accomplished as Leonardo Da Vinci and Michaelangelo rolled into one. While it’s hard to divest one’s self-interest and ego from the things and people to which and to whom you’ve given life, my love for my children isn’t the same as that which a painter feels upon finishing a masterpiece, or an author feels when their worlds start to gather and bloom inside other people’s heads. It’s greater. Infinitely so. But it’s also restrained; tempered with respect and a sense of duty. I care about the little people they are, and the big people they’re destined to become. I don’t want them to be little carbon copies stomping robotically in my wake; I only wish for them to be inspired by me: to be free to take my triumphs and eject my miseries, and make for themselves a life that’s been shaped, but never moulded by my presence in their lives. And where they are like me, I want them to be better: to leave me in the dust, both figuratively and literally. I never want them to forget that they were and always will be loved. Fiercely. By me, and by their mother.
I’m going to indulge myself to quite a horrendous extent by ending on a particularly twee cliché: that what happened to our family wasn’t an ending, but a new beginning. And one that’s going to work because all the love that matters is flowing through our children.
That I believe.