Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Do you take the dog?


Two people I love a lot are breaking up. It is all so sad, it makes me want to cry, cry, cry. On paper, everything should be perfect, they are both beautiful, carry around doctorates in the sort of science that makes me go cross-eyed and have the world's loveliest, plumpiest, one-year-old daughter. They are healthy, creative, have thousands in the bank and live in a rural idyll.
Like so many other modern marriages, this one has lasted just two years. It's on the canvas and being counted out. Maybe it will all come right, maybe the fairytale wedding will have a happy ending or maybe not. At the moment, there are great puddles of hurt everywhere. Today, the wife moved out and took the child with her. The dog is the child's best friend. Does the mother take the dog for the sake of her child - suddenly displaced and daddyless? When the poor hero of this sad tale gets home tonight, it will be to a house turned upside down and emptied out of its family. As he boils the kettle for a cup of tea, he will be staring into a new and lonelier future. His child will wake up tomorrow and go to bed without a kiss from her father. In his absence, a suited developer went round the house deciding whether to buy it.
I hope when she goes, she leaves him the dog.

7 comments:

St Jude said...

This is so sad, and you have written about it with great feeling.

On a different note, I would just like to say how much I have enjoyed reading your blog.

Anonymous said...

I think that he will do better to talk to a friend like you and to keep reading your heartwarmingly grumpy blog. I think we will all do better to keep u with our daily posting from the mysteriously glamourous-in-wellies wife in the north.

Anonymous said...

Alas, women tend to be utterly vicious in divorces, so your male chum will need all the luck he can muster.

Geoff said...

So sorry to hear about the breakup perhaps you could suggest http://www.mkp.org/ for the husband involved. I found it very useful indeed.

Anonymous said...

he needs to get a new dog for himself.

libby said...

Gosh this sounds so familiar, the key in the door and that empty hollow sound. The sound of a woman who cannot have the courage to tell the poor husband what she is doing, the sound of a woman who has decieved the husband for so long and the sound of a woman who with her family have found her a new home in the city so she can grieve for a day for the guilt she carries around with her and then never cry again for the husband. The sound of a woman who found someone else for a short time but discarded him as callously as she did the father of her child.
It sounds all too familiar and sad. Hopefully the father sees lots of his child teaching her all he knows.

Judith said...

Unfortunately divorce is so prevalent in our society that people like me have even been able to make a living out of working for those with relationship difficulties. Net result being I see divorce when it isn't really there and when I get home at night end up reading other people's blogs about marriage breakdown! You write brilliantly though.