Thinking about this house, and garden, as I started to do on Sunday, and about ‘what was I doing 10 years ago’, as in La Spice’s tag, has set me off an a train of thought about why we moved here, and what my expectations were. From this distance, I can see a little more of the pattern.
But I need to go back a couple more years to set the scene, to 1996, when life was very different, but maybe I was not so different as I sometimes think.
I was still working on my PhD, not knowing really when it would be finished, or what would happen afterwards. Still very much in love with the man I’ve referred to elsewhere as my ‘Erstwhile Male Best Mate’, and I believe, in retrospect, that he was in love with me, but I knew it would never lead to anything beyond what we had at that time because a) he would never leave his wife and b) we would never work out as a ‘couple’, we would drive each other crazy. (Though there was one wild night, in the middle of a thunderstorm, when we were in my car, and he said: ‘Let’s just take off right now, head off across Europe, go anywhere, leave it all behind, start again, just you and me’ and it seemed like it was a possibility of a different life, of love and excitement and ecstasy, a life which would crash and burn probably in a matter of days, but at least would be alive for that space of time…)
The one thing I was sure of, though, was that I didn’t love Hubby any more, and that was when I told him, that he would always be the father of my children and that I’d always be grateful for so many things, but that I wasn’t happy with him. And against his silence, I asked ‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’ And the answer I got was: ‘What is there to say?’
So, the plan was made, I was looking for jobs for after my PhD, jobs anywhere in the country, it didn’t matter. I would find the right job, establish my independence, then I would be off, away from him, away from the EMBM, into a new life.
Now we need to wind forward eighteen months, to the early summer of 1998, ten years ago. I was still applying for jobs, still hanging around the department, writing funding proposals, doing odd bits of contract work, like survey interviewing. My mother and mother in law were both dying of cancer, and I was going up to see my Mum and Dad in Lincolnshire as often as I could.
I had created some degree of emotional distance from the EMBM, but this had had the effect (as it inevitably does) of making him more persistent than ever. He was now in the final stages of HIS PhD, also applying for jobs, with no more success than I was having. We talked about putting in research proposals together, of starting a consultancy, he was full of ideas of how to make it work, though I could see that personally it would be a nightmare.
This started as an explanation about how we came to live in this house. But I’ve written over 500 words already, and I’ve barely set the scene. Oh well, maybe tomorrow.