Before You

Before you the house was tidier

Before you I had time to fill

Before you I looked at kissing couples with rolling eyes

And wore my cynic’s coat with pride.

Before you I was OK and not quite myself.

Before you I got enough sleep

Except on nights I thrashed under sheets with strangers

And woke up sore and unlovable.

 

Now your shoes are in my hall

Now your head sleeps on my pillow

Now there’s more washing up

And not enough time to do All The Things.

Now I smile at love songs

And look at myself differently.

Now my eyes wear stars,

And sleep, and housework, can wait.

 

In time, best case scenario,

I’ll trip over the shoes

Sulk over the dishes

Tut at snores and stains and the unmade bed,

And try to remember when

The shoes the plates the songs the head

Were new and endearing, in the time

Just after the time before you.

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Rorschach

‘It looks like two bears dancing,’ I say eventually.

The shrink, who doesn’t like to be called that, has held up a whole series of these things before I decide to speak. Image after image, smudged across two pages, black symmetrical formless blots – or are they?

Wait, there’s a bat, a beating heart, my mother’s vagina, I don’t know what the hell it is he wants me to see and say. I decide the bears are safe and he strokes his chin, I swear he does, and says, ‘Interesting.’

The pages continue to turn and I don’t tell him that all I can think of is a piece of paper from another life, splodged with primary colour paint on one side, folded over and SPLAT – a butterfly appeared to a squeal of delight. A butterfly with two long antennae, red wings, two green eyes. A shimmer of yellow at its edges. I don’t tell him I think of chubby fingers dipped in blue, pads pressed onto the page to make dots on the wing, drops of sky.

He keeps asking for my answers but all I can see is a lump of coal, a black hole, an endless well, an abyss.

All I want to do is ask him: where has the colour gone?

Splinters

We remember who we met

who was born

who died.

This is how we mark the years.

In the calendar are empty pages when

it seems nothing happened.

A year without a summer, no

menthol cigarettes and rose in pub gardens,

cardis wrapped round when the sun went down.

No picnics in meadows or bobbing with a buoy

in a green-blue lake. No flowers. No,

this was a year of broken glass.

Of splintered feet and hands, of

drinking alone. It was autumn all the time,

crisp and brittle. The bottle a friend in the storm.

We remember who we met

who was born

who died.

 

Write yourself well?

Creativity for wellness seems to be a hot topic right now. In 2018 the APPGAHW (the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Arts, Health and Wellbeing – catchy huh?) published the results of their three-year study. Just the other day, it was reported that the Great British Creativity Test – commissioned by BBC Arts in partnership with UCL – has explored for the first time how creative activities can help us manage our mood and boost wellbeing. Everywhere we look, there seem to be newsflashes telling us what many of us feel we’ve known for ever: engaging with the arts is good for us.

 

The idea of creative writing as a form of therapy, of writing as catharsis, is not new. As a precocious, pretentious teenager, I liked to christen new notebooks with the following quote from 16^thcentury French writer and philosopher Michel de Montaigne:

‘Writing does not cause misery; it is born of misery.’

(I know; I was insufferable). The stereotype of the tortured artist conjures images of laudanum-addled poets as well as depressed artists and angst-ridden musicians. There’s a commonly-held belief that any kind of creative expression, though perhaps writing in particular, is driven by some sort of need to exorcise one’s demons.

 

When I trained a few years ago as a psychotherapeutic counsellor, I came to recognise that creative writing, which I’d practised since childhood, and to a lesser extent journaling, were important tools for my own self-care. I became increasingly curious about ‘joining up’ my two chief areas of interest: writing and therapy, but for something more positive than exorcism and expurgation. I wondered whether I could help others use writing as a tool to protect and maintain, perhaps even improve, mental and emotional wellness.

 

In 2017 I started to explore how this might look in a workshop setting, and ran a few trial sessions in a local wellbeing centre. I had recently started facilitating women’s writing groups for So:write (http://artfulscribe.co.uk/blog-category/women-s-writing), and as the trust within those groups was building, I noticed some of the sessions were starting to feel a little like therapy, as voices were found and stories shared.

 

Since 2018 I have been running Writing for Wellness programmes at Farnham Maltings. A lot of people coming along for the first time, or contemplating joining the course, might wonder how a ‘writing for wellness’ workshop will look and feel. The Great British Creativity Test research shows there are 3 main ways we use creativity as a coping mechanism:

1. A distraction tool – using creativity to avoid stress.
2. A contemplation tool – using creativity to give us the mind space to reassess problems in our lives and make plans.
3. A means of self-development to face challenges by building up self-esteem and confidence.

 

Funnily enough I think the workshops hit these three marks. Exercises roughly fall into three categories:

1. Writing for joy / playfulness (distraction) – remember as a kid playing ‘Consequences’, that game where you wrote a line and folded the paper over and passed it to a friend? We do things like that.
2. Writing linked to particular emotional ‘themes’ eg relationship difficulties; grief and loss. This might include journaling or letter writing (contemplation).
3. Writing for its own sake. We look at different types of writing, perhaps less well-known forms of poetry or fiction, discuss them and have a go ourselves. We share words with each other; we pick random prompts from a hat and see where they take us; we write without concern for grammar or spelling or punctuation for a set period of time with no other purpose than to feel the scratch of pen on paper.

Of course sometimes a bigger ‘purpose’ is discovered and we might create a longer piece, or consider working towards performance or publication. Whether that occurs or not, these exercises deliver on self-development.

 

No-one is forced to read their words aloud, although they are encouraged and supported to do so if they wish. Exercises are generally short and, I hope, inclusive and accessible. Writing for wellness is about first of all giving yourself permission; and next, being heard and not judged.

The feedback from participants last term included benefits such as:”more willing to be open and share” / “gained confidence in my own voice” / “more confident in my abilities to be creative”.

 

From my own perspective, I was compelled to start these groups to try to help others, but of course they help me, too. The following 3 facts are completely personal and true:

1. Writing is one of the things, if not the thing, I most enjoy doing. (OK often the joy comes from having written, but sure, sometimes the process is fun)
2. Writing is the thing that makes me feel most like me.

And yet:

3. Writing is the activity I most often put off, relegate to the bottom of the priority list.

 

So for me, part of the value of a Writing for Wellness class is the feeling at the end that goes a bit like this: YES. I just spent 2 hours doing something that is all about self-expression, that (mostly!) brings me joy, and that makes me feel better about myself and the world. And it’s a virtuous circle because the more I write, the more I want to write, and am reminded of all the benefits it brings.

 

One thing on which I still agree with my old pal Montaigne: writing does not cause misery. In fact writing well, and writing for wellness, can do just the opposite.

 

Useful links:

Writing for Wellness

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/h0Wf2JL3GnG52jLp7j1ydk/take-the-feel-good-test-to-improve-your-wellbeing

https://www.culturehealthandwellbeing.org.uk

Bride

 

The doors were supposed to be always open, so it’s funny that when I picture them now they are firmly closed. They were made of wood, I think, a heavy sort of wood I couldn’t name, several inches thick and standing many feet above head height. Our small hands couldn’t reach the black iron fittings; we would have to wait to be admitted.

I stood in the cold spring sunshine, my knees turning pink as they protruded between the white satin hem of my dress and the tops of my socks. I envied the other girls their longer, lacier, shop-bought confections. Kathryn Bartlett’s dress even had a train. My ringlets, painstakingly created with rags the night before, were held in place by a circle of white satin rosebuds and a small veil. I felt sorry for the boys, so plain in identical grey trousers and red ties, knowing that once the doors were opened no one would really look at them. Not compared to us girls. Like angels, my auntie had gasped.

Finally the doors creaked open and the organ began its refrain from way up in the gallery, making me feel for a spinning second that the music was coming from heaven itself. I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment and offered a prayer: please God our Father, Mary our Lady, and Jesus our Lord and the Holy Spirit and all the saints, let me make it up the aisle without tripping up and falling over.

I held Andrew Rafferty’s hand, because that was how we were to do it, two by two like Ark animals. But my palm itched to be free, and each passing step brought greater certainty, my brand new rosary bobbing against my heart, that once I reached the altar, I would at last be married to God.

Fifty Minutes

 

 

I don’t recognise her immediately. Why would I? I’ve never seen a photograph. She gave me only her first name when she booked in, and it’s not an uncommon name. It’s the first word I say to her, my voice rising into a question, as I come out into reception to greet her. There’s no-one else there, so of course she nods, and I give her my most professional smile, which is supposed to convey empathy but stop just short of friendliness, and I say, ‘This way, please.’

In the years I’ve been doing this I’ve learned to simultaneously make judgments and discard them. First impressions can be useful, it’s important to acknowledge them, but a good therapist will then shake them off as best she can and start with a clean slate. First impressions usually tell you more about yourself than the other person. So I let my initial observations trickle across my mind as we walk down the corridor: she strikes me as brittle, as so many people who come through these doors are, and nervous. But there’s something else too, a kind of heat radiating from her, a barely-suppressed…what? It feels like anger. She’s attractive, a little older than me, and too thin, but I check myself as I notice this, because I know myself well enough to know this is my own chubby-girl envy rearing its head.

‘Please, take a seat,’ I gesture with my right hand. My treatment room is sparsely furnished: there’s a small table and two chairs, carefully positioned at gentle angles, so as to be non-confrontational. She immediately corrects this, moving her chair so that both her bony knees point at me, dead on, and I make a mental note. On the table are a jug of water and two glasses, and a box of tissues. They don’t usually cry in the first session, but it happens sometimes. There’s a bed in the room too, one of those adjustable ones with a hole for the face, because I share my practice with Therese, a massage therapist. I rarely use the bed, although I have had clients who prefer to lie down.

I offer water, which she declines, and take out my notes. I tell her the session will last fifty minutes.

‘I see you’ve been referred to me by your GP,’ I say, ‘but I don’t have very much history here. I’d like to start, if it’s okay with you, by gathering a bit of background information.’ She nods; she’s not looking at me, she’s staring at the nail on her forefinger, which she’s worrying at with the thumbnail of her other hand, using it as a kind of file. Every now and again she brushes invisible nail shavings into her lap. I run through the basics: age, general health, any meds, eating and sleeping habits. I ask if she works.

‘Part-time,’ she says, ‘In a garden centre. Blooms. Do you know it?’ The first shiver of recognition runs through me and I think maybe I’ve seen her there. I nod. ‘We don’t really need the money, but it gets me out of the house.’

‘And who’s we? Can you tell me a little bit about who’s at home?’

‘I live with my husband and two kids. Well, the kids are grown up now, but they come and go, you know. And two dogs and a cat.’ She gives a little sharp laugh.

‘Sounds busy,’ I smile. ‘Tell me, have you had any kind of therapy before?’ She rolls her eyes.

‘Every kind,’ she says, ‘Hypnotherapy, psychotherapy, CBT, you name it. Not to mention AA and NA. Group therapy. Tell me,’ she leans forward, ‘What is it you think you can offer that all these others haven’t managed?’

I don’t flinch. I’ve come across this so many times before, this defensiveness, although it’s important to treat it each time as though it’s new. I call it the ‘Fix me if you dare’ position, and I know that what it really means is ‘Help’. I put my pen down and rest my hands in my lap, palms up.

‘Well, let’s see if we can find that out together. You know, everything you tell me here is in absolute confidence.’ I repeat the stuff I tell every client when they book in with me on the phone, code of ethics, boundaries, and so on, then I ask, ‘Why don’t we begin with you telling me what brings you here today?’

‘It’s my husband.’ She looks me dead in the eye. ‘I’m afraid I might kill him.’

Now, there are different ways a person can say they want to kill someone. There’s the jokey, embarrassed way; the exasperated, end-of-patience way; there’s the way that’s shouted or screamed in the heat of an absolute rage. But this is none of those. I can still feel anger seeping from her, for sure, but her words are cold, and measured, and as though she’s really thought about it. I get that sensation you get when you reach the top of the climb on a rollercoaster and you’re just about to tip over the edge. I feel the need to slow things down a bit, keep us in the moment even just for a second, because I’m afraid of the drop.

‘I see,’ I say. ‘Tell me a bit more about that. Your husband-‘

And then she says a name.

Your name.

 

 

 

We first met at a charity ball, when we were both the best-dressed, shiniest versions of ourselves. We would never look that handsome or feel that confident in each other’s company again, but a spark was lit, and that was that.

You were – are – the kind of man who tops up a glass before it’s empty, and without asking. I’d come to the event alone, having been ditched last-minute by the friend who was to accompany me, due to a non-specific sickness bug (in her dogs; not her. Her two terriers were puking all over the carpet and she couldn’t leave them, she said.) So I had a space to the right of me, and to the left of me was you.

You wore your tuxedo in such a careless way that I could tell you were very wealthy. You captivated the people at the table, none of whom you’d met before, as far as I could tell, with self-deprecating anecdotes, and you were polite to the waiters. You were interesting, and more importantly, interested. You directed most of your interest towards me, the sad single middle-aged woman, and I did everything I could to appear wholly unimpressive.

‘Why do you do that?’ you asked, your eyes amused, your hands tearing a bread roll into small pieces and covering each one in butter.

‘Do what?’

‘Put yourself down. Make yourself seem…I don’t know. Small.’

I smiled. ‘I amsmall.’ I pushed my chair out slightly from the table, and waved a hand up and down, head to toe, to illustrate my lack of height.

‘You preface everything you say about yourself with words like “only” and “just”. But from what I’ve learned about you so far, you should be proud. You’re a self-made woman. You’re capable. You’re helping people, so you’re obviously kind, too.’ You popped a butter-laden crumb into your mouth. I stared at you, not knowing what to say, waiting for you to swallow.

‘You say “if”, “I think”, and “maybe” a lot too,’ you went on, swilling red wine around in your glass. Then you leaned in and added, ‘I’d like to hear you say definitely. I’d like to hear you say you know. I’d like to hear you say yes.’

I got up from my seat then, walked away, but was sure to give you a little glance over my shoulder, let you see that I was blushing. I’d noticed the wedding ring, of course I had. The most successful cheats never take them off; they don’t need to. I guess there are plenty of women like me, who either don’t care or see it as a positive. I was playing you, of course I was: this is my thing, you see. Married men. It wasn’t a deliberate strategy, not at first, but its advantages soon became clear to me. But you have to be careful: so I do the dance, I act all coy, I let them run and I pull back, run and pull back. I play them like violins, I pluck, pluck, pluck at their strings. When you asked me to dance, I said no the first time, and yes the second.

I didn’t really think I’d see you again, but you handed me a business card, saying ‘If you ever need any financial management’. I laughed and told you there wasn’t much to manage, then fished my own card, curled at the edges, out of my bag and pressed it into your palm, saying, ‘And if you ever need counselling.’

Two days later you called, and not for counselling.

 

 

 

‘You’re not married.’ It’s a statement, not a question. It’s obvious, of course, because I don’t wear a ring, so I agree with her. I’m not married. I pour a glass of water for myself; my throat is suddenly dry.

‘Have you ever been married?’ She cocks her head, a toddler waiting for a fairy story, a dog expecting a treat. I don’t give out details of my personal life, it’s not appropriate; I sometimes have to remind clients about the boundaries of the therapeutic relationship.

‘I’m interested in why you’ve asked me that question,’ I say. She narrows her eyes.

‘Fucking therapists. You always answer a question with a question.’

‘It wasn’t –’

‘It wasn’t a question, I know.’ She sighs, ‘It doesn’t matter, I suppose. I just wondered if you could understand…what it’s like. What it’s like to live with someone, day in, day out. What it’s like to know their habits, to see them at their best and worst, to know them, really know them, under their skin. Do you know?’ I make a head movement that is neither a nod nor a shake, but it seems to satisfy her. ‘I’ve been with my husband since we were seventeen. It’s crazy, how much you change in that time. How you can drive each other insane, too. But you can’t imagine anything ever separating you. Except death.’

I don’t say anything, so she adds, ‘I was wondering if you were still listening.’

‘Of course. You were saying you can’t imagine being separated, except by death. Is that right?’

‘Is it unusual, in your experience,’ she says the word as though she doubts I have any, her eyes scanning the room as though searching for certificates on the walls, diplomas and testimonials, ‘to feel homicidal towards one’s spouse?’

‘Well, that depends,’ I say. ‘It’s not unheard of. Perhaps if you wanted to share a little more about the feelings, the reasons, behind this…this impulse.’

‘Oh yes, of course,’ her face lights up as though just about to share a juicy tidbit of gossip with a friend, ‘You see, he’s cheating on me. He’s a lying, cheating bastard and that’s why I want him dead.’

 

 

 

It was weird at first, dating married men. If you can call it dating. The knowledge that they’re out there, living another life, a life you never really know however much they ‘confide’ in you, and you can’t call them or interrupt in any way. But quite soon I realised it was liberating. I could do whatever I wanted. They could ask nothing of me. They’d no right to. It was easy. Jealous, insecure men are soaccommodating. Add in guilt-ridden and you have pure alchemy.

They’ve got guilt coming out of their pores, these men. They feel guilty about The Wife, even if it’s clear they don’t really love her but just feel sorry for her / have too much ‘invested’ in the relationship / don’t want to hurt her / delete as appropriate.

They feel guilty about the kids, too, which has always struck me as weird. I mean, they’re not cheating on the kids, are they? And then they feel guilty about you, The Mistress. They can’t pay you enough attention, they expect you just to wait around for them, drop everything when they call, they can’t do this or that, oh it’s terrible, agonising and hand-wringing, then whoops looks like they can do it because they’re in bed with you.

The first time I slept with you, you said, all surprised, ‘oh, you’re nervous,’ and I smiled and looked up at you through my hair, laughing inside because you had bought it. Men love the vulnerable, little-girl bit. Makes them feel powerful or something, I suppose.

Eventually, inevitably, you started talking to me about Her. She was a drunk, you said. Not an alcoholic; a drunk. I said I thought your choice of words was interesting. You said she was a nightmare to live with. When she wasn’t incoherent or comatose, she was short-tempered and miserable with withdrawal. I asked you what you thought caused her to drink and you said, ‘Are you saying it’s my fault? It’s not my fault.’

You said if she ever found out about us, she’d probably kill herself. I said I for one had no intention of telling her. ‘Of course, she’ll kill me first,’ you said, and then, as an afterthought, ‘And you.’

 

 

 

When you train to become a therapist, you learn how to deal with suicidal ideation. Homicidal, not so much. I’ve talked a lot of people down from metaphorical ledges, though, and I reason that this can’t be so different.

‘You say you want him dead,’ I reflect, ‘Have you taken any steps towards…this?’ You can’t give someone the idea of killing themselves just by talking about it, that’s what they say, and it’s best to get it out in the open. I’ve always been able to judge the severity of the risk clients pose to themselves by the level of preparation they’ve done. Sometimes they’ve identified the means they’ll use, maybe even done a trial run. Perhaps it’s the same with murder. ‘For example, have you thought about how you’ll do it?’

She looks at me strangely. ‘When I say I want to kill him…I mean, I’m not serious. It’s a figure of speech, right?’

‘Is it?’

‘Maybe. I could run him over in the car. He bloody loves that car. It would be sort of perfect. Hoisted by his own petard, isn’t that what they say? I wouldn’t want to stab him – too messy. I thought about smothering him in his sleep, but he’d be too strong for me.’ An image of you flashes inside my head and with it, a sensation, the feel of your weight on me, so real in this moment that my breath catches in my chest.

‘Are you ok?’

‘Perfectly ok. Please, go on.’

‘Most of all I just want him to suffer.’

‘How certain are you?’ I ask. ‘About the infidelity, I mean.’

‘I’m certain,’ she says, ‘and I’m not surprised. He’s done it before, you know. Lots of times.’ This is new information. I keep my face perfectly still. She sighs. ‘That’s why I hit the bottle.’

‘And how would you describe your relationship with alcohol now?’ I look closely at her face for the telltale signs, the dry skin, the wrinkles, but in the low light of the room they’re hard to spot. I recall your stories, of her banging into walls, throwing up down the side of the bed.

‘I don’t have one,’ she says, ‘I’ve been sober for almost two years.’

‘Really?’

She leans closer. ‘Now that’sinteresting. Why would you doubt me?’

 

 

 

You told me I was the first, of course you did. ‘I’ve been with my wife for over thirty years,’ you said, ‘and until tonight I’d never even kissed another woman.’ I didn’t believe you, of course, but there’s little satisfaction in being proved right. You said she’s a drunk; she says she’s been on the wagon for two years. You said you don’t sleep together; she says your sex life is ‘vigorous’.

You said her body is hard and flat, like a boy’s, and she holds no appeal for you anymore. You like my soft skin, you told me, and my curves. I’m a real woman, you said. She’s a shell, its outer layer cracking. I don’t care for these comparisons but I’ve let them ride. Why would I have cared if they were fair and truthful or not?

 

 

 

Work with what’s in the room, that’s how I was trained. Leave your own stuff at the door. That’s easy enough, usually. It’s often something of a relief. I like emptying my own head and letting others pour their problems in. But today my stuff walked through the door, dripping with anger. I haven’t trained for this.

‘You know, you’re just what I expected.’ It’s her voice but it could just as well be me speaking. We form a picture in our minds, a kind of photofit of our rival, our enemy, and while I didn’t recognise her at first, now that she’s coming into focus her face makes perfect sense to me.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I chose you.’

I frown. ‘You were referred…’

‘I was referred, yes, but I chose you. I knew it was you I wanted to see.’     ‘I see.’

‘I found your card and I knew it was you.’

‘OK.’

‘I think you know my husband.’

‘I’m not sure I do.’

‘I think you should have declared a conflict of interest.’

I say nothing.

‘I’m not sure you continuing to treat me is strictly ethical.’

‘I don’t share those concerns. I’m happy to work with you, if you wish.’

‘Are you really?’

‘I don’t believe I know your husband.’

 

 

 

I’m not in love with you. Would it make the story better if I said I was? We couldn’t help ourselves, that’s how the narrative is supposed to go. A seismic romantic pull that couldn’t be resisted. But it was baser than that, for me anyway.

‘I don’t want him,’ I tell her, ‘I never wanted him, not permanently.’ She sits back, a triumphant look on her face. Is this what she came for: an admission? Only that? She’s shaking her head.

‘So you’re telling me that you’ve dropped this bomb on our lives and you’re not even in love with him?’

So we’ve moved now, from your fault to mine. I want to tell her that it wasn’t me that set off the bomb. I wasn’t the one cheating. I want to shut her stupid mouth by telling her how you pursued me, and why, as well – because she had no time for you, because she had no affection left having poured it all into the kids, the church, the bloody PTA; because she’d changed and grown miserable and bitter and drunk.

I don’t tell her any of this; I stay quiet and listen as she calmly tells me precisely how much of a bitch I am.

This is what women do: we blame each other. So much for the sisterhood. It should be you that she is hating, but it’s me, of course. Women compete, turn on each other, pull each other down. We’re raised to do it. We’re alley cats and the wiliest will survive.

 

 

 

I have a practised move for looking at my watch. I used to have a clock on the wall, positioned just behind the client’s head. But it was distracting and I worried that in any moment that I wasn’t engaging in eye contact they would suspect me of checking the time. Also there was the ticking. A lot of therapeutic work is done in silence, in the spaces you leave. The clock was an intrusion.

So I’ve learned to glance discreetly at my wrist, and when we have ten minutes left I let the client know. I look down. Fifteen minutes to go, but are we playing by the usual rules? I think about the keys in the handbag at my feet, keys not just to this office but the entire building, because she booked the last appointment of the day and there is no-one else here. There’s no-one at home either, not for me. No-one would notice, I don’t suppose, if I went missing. I suppose, too, that she knows that.

‘I thought because of what you do,’ she says, ‘you might be a good person. In some way.’

If she did think that, she was wrong. What if I became a therapist not to help people, but because it makes me feel clever?

You know those patterns you keep repeating in your life? I can see them and I can see why they happen. You know that tangled mess in your head that stops you from ever feeling truly happy in the moment? I can take the threads of it and unravel them, pull out the knots. I can give you clean lines. I have wisdom. I am a kind of guru.

I tell every client ‘This is all about you’ but really it’s all about me. They are just absurd marionettes and I am the puppeteer.

‘It’s all the lying,’ she says, ‘That’s the worst part.’

‘Really?’ I try to keep my voice impassive but it comes out incredulous. Does she really not know? Everybody lies.

I look at my watch again, but don’t try to disguise it this time. She starts to rummage in her bag. For a delirious moment I imagine she might pull a knife. I feel strangely safe while we are lodged in these chairs, but once we move, what might she do? She’s petite but she looks wiry, strong, to me now. She might wrestle me to the ground, throw a punch. She extracts something small and white from the bag: my business card. Curled at the edges. She studies it.

‘You’ve got a lot of letters after your name.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘I could add a few more.’

‘I’m sure. Look,’ and she does look, looks up at me as though I might have some sort of answer, but all I have are questions. All I ever have are the questions. ‘What is it that you want?’ I ask.

‘I wanted you to know, first of all.’ She holds up a hand and flicks at one brittle-nailed finger, as though counting items off a list. ‘To know that I know, and that you are not all that clever.

‘I want you to be lonely, and so depressed you drink yourself to sleep at night because poison in your veins beats your pathetic reality. And if you do find a man who isn’t married to someone else, I want him to grind you into the dirt with his criticism, his loathing, and to go off and fuck younger women at every opportunity.’ She smiles. ‘That ought to do it.’

I’m already lonely, but I don’t tell her this. Instead I say, ‘I’ll stay away from him.’

She laughs, a sound like pans being clanged together. ‘Him? I couldn’t give a shit about him.’ She starts to gather her things together, looking for all the world like any other client at the end of a session. Correction: looking like a client at the end of a great session. Looking somehow lighter. ‘I mean, I might still murder him,’ the laugh again, ‘or I might just divorce him and take all his money. Come to think of it, that would hurt him even more.’ She sits back, bag on lap, and looks at me, and I swear I can hear the tick of the discarded clock, sounding out interminable seconds.

‘Oh one last thing,’ she says, and drops the agreed £50 onto the table. I stare at it as she gets up. I don’t move, don’t do my usual handshake, perhaps a comforting pat on the arm, show them to the door. I am small in my chair.

‘I don’t want it,’ I whisper. ‘I don’t want your money.’

‘Oh, do take it.’ She beams. ‘I feel so much better now.’

Having babies can seriously damage your relationship

There are certain things the ‘baby books’ don’t tell you. For instance, that you might not fall instantly in love with your child; that your body will almost certainly never return to its pre-childbirth state; and that having babies can seriously damage your relationship.

 

I’m a slow writer. Not so much with the actual writing, which when it finally comes, comes pretty fast, but with the germination of ideas. The first idea for Hush Little Baby, a story about the impact on a family when their injured baby is removed from them, came in 2010.

It was the first year of my own son’s life, and two things happened that set the pulse of a story beating: I read a feature, in a Sunday supplement, entitled ‘What it feels like to be accused of hurting your baby’; and I attended infant and toddler First Aid training. In among the standard anxiety-inducing advice about choking, burns, etc., someone asked about broken bones. The nurse replied: ‘Babies and young children hardly ever have fractures. Their bones are too soft.’ He went on to say, heartbreakingly, that any time he read of an abuse case in which a young child’s bones had been broken, it upset him because he knew real force must have been applied. We all shuddered and I gave my sleeping son a few extra kisses that night.

 

By the end of that first year, by the time he was ten months old in fact, I had other breaks on my mind. My son’s father and I had separated. Our seven-year relationship (clichéd itch, anyone?) and three-year marriage were over. Our still-tiny son was no longer the member of a family unit; he was the subject of ‘shared access’.

 

What led us to that point? Our relationship had been far from perfect, at worst stormy, at best ill-matched, but what caused it to splinter when it did?

When our baby was born (before, in fact), I read all the books. I know they say babies don’t come with an instruction manual, but that’s what I do, what I’ve always done when I’m stuck: I find solace, guidance, in the written word. We had The Baby Whisperer, What to Expect…, The Contented Little Baby, a veritable library stacked up at the back of the bed, but none of them really offered answers. And I needed answers.

I needed answers to why I felt so broken. Why I adored my new son but failed utterly to understand him or read his cues. Why I couldn’t seem to feed him; why he wouldn’t sleep; why he cried, it seemed, all the time. Why I cried quite a bit too, for that matter. Why none of it seemed to ‘come naturally’.

I have friends who endured post-natal depression. I don’t believe I had PND but I was in shock, I might even go so far as to say I was traumatised. It’s my belief now that a lot of new mothers go through this, but they don’t talk about it to anyone. Worst of all, they don’t talk about it to their partners.

 

We both changed in that first year of parenthood. I became Not-Me. And it was Me my husband had fallen in love with. To be frank, the main things that had drawn us together at the start were sex, and going out getting drunk. There aren’t much of either in the first year after childbirth. That might sound glib, but it’s true. And we stopped communicating, except in games of one-upmanship (let’s play “who’s the most tired?”) or resentment-fueled arguments driven by a total lack of understanding of what the other was going through. We looked only at each other’s behaviour, without pausing to wonder what might be behind it. I thought he was selfish and immature and couldn’t handle the new responsibility and the fact that someone was more important than him now. I never considered that he might be anxious too, might feel threatened or inadequate when I seemed to be coping, or frightened when I didn’t. We slipped into the classic, sad cycle: I didn’t want to have sex because I wasn’t getting any tenderness or affection; he didn’t feel like giving me affection because I wasn’t ‘giving’ him sex.

 

I eventually found and ordered a book (of course!) about the impact of having a baby on your marriage. There aren’t many books of this type, I suppose because it feels a bit like blaming the baby for your problems, which is grossly unfair, obviously. It’s not the baby’s fault; it’s the fault of the two people you have become, who have failed to grow together at this crucial stage and have instead grown apart.

Unfortunately, by the time my latest manual arrived, my husband had already moved out. And in all too short a time, he was in love with someone else.

 

The greatest pain of that time, and the only part of the pain that endures several years on, was the fact of being separated from my son. In among my gratitude that his dad, unlike some divorcing parents, wanted to be involved to the extent that he demanded 50/50 access (and, to his credit, became a better parent post-separation), was a deep, yearning sense of loss.  In the throes of the divorce I remember saying angrily, ‘However unhappy we were, the difference between you and me is there is nothingyou could have done in our marriage that would have made me choose to cut my time with him in half.’

 

I didn’t write at all during that period. Friends thought I would, that it would be cathartic. But I’d stumbled from Baby Fog to Divorce Fog and there was no clear space for my writing brain. In time, though, the idea of a family breaking, a hurt child at their centre, solidified and became a cast of characters, and a story I had to tell.

That story became Hush Little Baby. It’s not ‘about’ what happened to us, but it is honest. A lot of the feelings in it are real. Thankfully our son was never hurt, or taken from us; but I did feel the pain of the empty cot. Even now, on the nights he’s with his dad, and I know he’s happy and safe, I stand and look at his made-up bed and feel sad, and miss him.

 

It sounds funny, but my divorce is among the things I’m most proud of in my life. Not in itself, because it’s obviously not what anyone hopes for when they get married, but in the way we handled it and, in the end, put our son at the centre. The way we continue to share access, communicate, and don’t badmouth each other or use him to score points. Out of an awful situation, the best possible result for our son emerged. He has two loving families now and we both put his needs ahead of our own. As it turns out, in the end, that part did come naturally.