‘Add a couple of years…’

It has been over one year since I blogged and wrote ‘A Brief Testament’. In that blog I described how I was mainly the sole child-rearer, almost from the day both my two sons were born, and my subsequent marriage disintegration and how I felt wrongly cheated. It was me who was the primary parent during the day; doing the main tasks (changing nappies, taking to nursery and school, doctors appointments and so on – all those little essential, important things) whilst my ex-partner was at work, progressing her career, which she did remarkably well. Not wanting to tread old ground here, but yes, later a feeling of being housebound was making itself present in my life, a form of frustration that I could be offering the world more, earning money and using my skills. It was not anger against her (I am the least aggressive man you could ever wish to meet, truth), but it left me feeling a dreaded sense of helplessness against the direction my life was leading. Why this was so is probably because I was a professional IT worker, studying nearly two years for a Computing Degree – I considered myself a really skilled worker within the IT sector – but I never gained full time employment from it. I do not know why and it certainly was not through want of trying. I think that is another search deep within myself to find those, more or less, elusive reasons which led to my predicament. And there are many, so many.

In the twenty months since I have been separated, I have gone through the most brutal time I have ever known in my whole thirty-eight years of life. To find the reasons why this is so is no easy task, and it goes back a long, long way. To live with a Woman for fifteen and half years, being married for seven of them and producing two of the most gorgeous, happiest children I could wish for and then ending up in, quite frankly, a hell that I never ever want to discuss, really began to make me question everything I was and had become – and that is no small task for someone who had never had an easy life. When you begin to reminisce about your youth, your happiest times and see from beyond those years, in your mind, a time of wasted opportunities, then I think we start to become ‘unhealthy’, both in our minds and in our soul. What you perceived yourself to have been in those early, formative, character-making times and what you became before your life took a direction that was forced off the beaten path, then it does not become easy to fit the right jigsaw piece into place. They become two different opposites, pieces from two different puzzles, two alternate directions; the one path screaming at you, the other enticing you into certain demise and ruin.

And I suppose we are all guided by our own instincts, or our own moral code, with our behaviour and personality being the main character formers. Looking back, it sometimes seems as if I was led down that wrong path with deliberate intentions to ruin, becoming misled and ending up being misguided. For me however, it is pure conjecture on the reasons why I ended up in such a messed up state. Again, as I mentioned above, it becomes unhealthy to dwell on these matters and alcohol addiction does not help things either. So, nearly two years since I split from my wife and I am left asking the question where does it go from here? I have had one failed relationship since then – it lasted all of about three months – and in view of that I have not really looked for anyone else. Perhaps I feel too hurt with what has occurred in my life since 2008, possibly I find it hard to trust anyone anymore? Maybe I don’t know how to form a relationship because I still am reeling from what happened to me? Whatever the reasons, whoever the culprits, I feel deep down that I am really, utterly hurt with what has gone on. I feel a wreck.

We have just had an election over here in the UK. Thirteen years of New Labour has now ended with a hung Parliament with the Liberal Democrats forming a new Government with the Conservative Party. If this was the correct thing for the Lib Dems to have done, I don’t know. In my opinion, I see rifts and divisions in the future – I think that is certain – but how they deal with the economy will, I think, be the key factor to their success. I may blog a bit more on this. Perhaps it may give me something to focus on.