After Children, There Is Marriage Again
Sometimes we talk about the ones that have left us, passed away, moved on to glory. I was fond of Uncle Norman who grew too many tomatoes. The crop he was so proud of was a great reason to turn up on people’s doorsteps and invite himself in for lunch. He appointed himself unofficial photographer. We’d get an album a few weeks later with all the same shots as the official photographer but from a slightly different angle. Great Aunt Annie was one of the few that could carry off a hat. We boiled gammon and blended soups in the stock pot she bought us until it no longer worked on an induction hob. Greta brought her camera too. She was widowed on the same day I entered the world. Her funeral was limited to the four daughters she’d raised on her own, their spouses, her sister but her horse-drawn carriage stopped the traffic in a small County Down village in the second month of the first lockdown. Jack who never spoke and Dorothy who spoke for him are no longer here, nor are Roberta and Sidney who always held hands. When the wedding cars took a detour to Sarah-Jane’s nursing home on the way to the reception, the other residents were more enthused than she was. She’d always preferred her grandsons. She would die six weeks later on my new husband’s birthday.
No-one gets married in February but we were on a tight budget. There was 20% off on Saturdays so we booked a venue that wasn’t a hotel. I paid most attention to choosing meaningful hymns, proofreading the order of service. I wore the first dress I tried on, picked a dramatic red for the bridesmaids. They’d wrap fleeces around their shoulders to prevent hypothermia. The man I was marrying still had puppy fat, I was half a stone lighter thanks to Carol Vorderman. I’ve never been minus that half stone since. I refused to be that hungry ever again. I declined to obey, the florist was burgled in the early hours of the morning, my dad and I circled the block three times because the street I grew up in was only a short walking distance from the church, the harpist came down with the flu. She was replaced by her daughter who would go on to specialise in musical comedy and appear on Britain’s Got Talent. I ran up the aisle so fast that the organist had to skip the last few bars of Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring. We sang “past put behind us, for the future take us” but I changed my name by deed poll anyway. I drew the line at double-barrelled, added my maiden name into the middle in some sort of attempt to hang on to the girl I’d once been. I had no idea how hard this would turn out to be, how distant she’d become. “She left without a sound, nobody noticed she wasn’t around”¹ defines my thirties. I did not throw my bouquet.
It is twenty-one years ago now. We celebrated our anniversary child-free watching avatars at ‘ABBA Voyage’. I was conscious of time rapidly passing, that young dreams become middle age become the post-climacteric years in a blink of an eye. Both of us can definitely feel the autumn chill. I hope we are slightly worn but dignified². “Here’s to us,” I said. I know he’d go anywhere with me - book launches, prayer meetings, IKEA, anywhere I don’t want to go by myself. I’m not sure it’s reciprocal. I’m not quite Midnight Train To Georgia. I realised that after children, there is marriage again. I wondered are we prepared for that, have we salvaged enough from the last two decades. There are pieces of ourselves we need to pick back up.
We never talked about what our life would look like together — how we’d balance babies with careers. We fell into a naïve ideal of what marriage would be. We were ok, sure we had a joint account for bills. I became angry. The minister had given us not an ABC but a DEF for married life - Die to self, Express your love, Forgive each other. It was excellent in theory. I’d tell my husband many times that those first ten years weren’t what I had signed up for. I liked him because he shared his dinner with me on our first date. We were full of grand plans. We’d travel. We studied brochures, Australia, the Far East, but I was pregnant by our first anniversary. It wasn’t possible to eat together and have a conversation. We battled over childcare, clashed over diaries. I came from a long line of mothers who provided physically but were emotionally absent, who struggled with the mundanity of it all. Sarah-Jane had checked herself into a psychiatric hospital the day before my mother’s wedding. She was ready to be collected with her suitcases by the end of the evening reception. I wanted to break that cycle but I wanted to maintain a sense of self too. There is a photo of us. We are clasping champagne glasses to our lips. It’s the eyes. I call it the ‘What have we done?’. I can’t remember if we made any decisions other than we wouldn’t open the floor to speeches. When I left the job I’d fought hard to cling on to whilst raising four children, I eventually understood what had caused all my resentment. It wasn’t that I aspired to have the same success as him nor especially needed that professional equality. It was that I had lost his full attention.
“I want to write about marriage,” I told my friend. I wasn’t sure if I could do it. I didn’t want to seem smug. I didn’t want to write some ghastly love story, I didn’t want to be presumptuous. We weren’t celebrating our silver or gold. I don’t have the secret to a happy marriage. It would have to be an essay, I said, 2000 words at least. I wasn’t sure how far to go, which taboos to cover, whether to mention the benefits of separate bedrooms. I’d text her from London, tell her the hotel was worthy of a special occasion but far too expensive to book a suite each. She was thinking about a cruise. I told her she’d be stifled in a cabin, better to get a studio apartment on dry land. We agreed romantic breaks are not for us, that we like to do our sleeping in private. But, I never want him to stop holding my hand in public. I guess we do what works for us.
There were 89 rules for life in The Times - “Romance: overrated. Companionship: underrated. Thinking that somewhere out there ‘the one’ is waiting for you only generates heartache. Find someone you can respect and rub along with, and miss when they’re not there,” it said. Marriages don’t usually end because of some sudden cataclysmic event, it’s much more subtle than that, a slow growing apart, a PhD in ‘I told you so’, a knighthood in ‘I’m not listening’³.
“I feel like I haven’t seen you for a couple of days,” he said as I was completing my pre-sleep cleansing routine. I reminded him we’d watched an episode of The Spilt together the night before, him at one end of the sofa, me at the other. We’d drunk a cup of tea in companionable silence. We’d learned lots about divorce, how it’s never a failure, just an ending. I wondered why he felt my absence. We’d been busy. I hadn’t regaled him with my usual morning digest, my latest ideas. We hadn’t sat down at a table together. Maybe he simply missed my full presence, the sound of my voice.
If I could go back, I think I’d change one thing about that day, twenty-one years ago. I’d ditch the sentimentality, Wet Wet Wet, the love is all around us nonsense. I’d pick a realistic wedding song, one that reinforces the vows, that acknowledges the until death us do part bit. I’d explain marriage is really only ever about being aware of time passing and about never becoming invisible to each other.
Now I’m older and I look at your face.
Every wrinkle is so easy to place.
And I only write them down just in case.
That you die⁴.
*I have a new publication on Substack called ‘Days Like This’. I will be consolidating my writing and monthly newsletter there and winding down on Medium. If you would like to connect with me there plus engage with a wider community of people interested in the topics I write about, you can find me on Substack at https://deborahsloan.substack.com/.
[1] Patti Austin The Girl Who Used To Be Me
[2] ABBA When All Is Said And Done
[3] The Beautiful South Don’t Marry Her
[4] The Beautiful South Prettiest Eyes
