It was good to have a life after a painful divorce, my therapist said. When a father’s life came to a standstill, he was not a good role model for his children.
It just didn’t feel right when six-year-old Emi, dressed like a sad clown in a frilly skirt, striped socks, and sequins, cried in my arms on a rain-soaked sidewalk.
‘What can I do?’ she cried. ‘I can’t hug the babysitter!’
‘Why not?’ I said.
‘Because she’s not you!’
After more than eight months of living together after our separation, my ex-husband Simon had moved out of the family home and into a rented flat. He didn’t see the children much. And now I, the only one I could hug, was leaving my children to go have sex with my young, attractive boyfriend.
Earlier in the evening, knowing this date was coming up, I rushed Emi, 14-year-old Hector, and 12-year-old Maude through dinner, while they chatted about Minecraft and didn’t eat vegetables.
‘Are we bothering you too much?’ Emi said. “Because we can stop.”
‘Honey, no you’re not!’ I said, guilt forming a lump in my throat. But they were so slow that I was late to meet Eliot. She’d been looking forward to meeting him all week, only now Emi was rocking against the radiator and not brushing her teeth.
My daughter told me that women in their forties never starred in anything, but here I was, at the center of my own melodrama, writes Annabel Bond.
‘Come on!’ I said.
He had already drunk a large glass of wine. In the mirror my face was feverish. I wasn’t the mother I wanted her to remember. Furious, impatient, amazed that it had come to this: me doing all the baths, all the hair-washing, all the dinners while Simon could spend his evenings in the pub.
The doorbell rang, the babysitter was here. I told Emi that she had to go and she started crying.
‘Wake me up when you get home. Pinch me to wake me up. Promise me you will!’ I promised, feeling horrible. How could I leave a girl so sad? And why wasn’t her father there to comfort her? But my desire to see Eliot trumped everything. On the street the babysitter had to take her away.
When I got on the train I could still feel Emi’s handprint on my thighs. But I deserved to have a young, beautiful boyfriend after the horrors of my divorce: to have the best sex of my life!
The train was when I changed from a mother of three to an older, attractive woman. I looked out the window as the dark tunnel flashed by; I applied my new red lipstick on my phone’s camera. My situation seemed to be written all over my face. Maude told me yesterday that women in their forties never starred in anything, but here I was, at the center of my own melodrama.
When I arrived at Eliot’s flat in north London I was still self-conscious, dragging on my old life, trying too hard. I stood on tiptoe to kiss him, leaning too far forward. I tilted my chin and narrowed my eyes. It smelled like Sauvage, so he had made an effort too, even though he was only wearing a pair of shorts and a white t-shirt.
I had dressed carefully in jeans and a French linen shirt, with sexy, uncomfortable underwear underneath.
But I wasn’t complaining: underneath the shirt, Eliot’s abs were solid. His chest was getting bigger every day, because of all the weights he lifted. After we kissed, the transformation was easier: I was dizzy with desire.
We ate the dinner he had prepared (curry from scratch) sitting together at his little table, hoping his roommates wouldn’t come home early. I watched his big, beautiful hands, with bitten nails, while he ate. I thought about them in my body. Finally, she held out her hand to him. ‘Let’s go to bed.’
In the bedroom, Eliot stripped me down to the matching red underwear (found triumphantly in the mess of my bottom drawer) and touched me. I looked into his green eyes. He had once told me that men had told him that if they weren’t straight, the color of his eyes would make them fall in love.
“I’m hurting for you,” he said. She leaned her head towards my breasts. I felt her shoulders, his neck strong. We fell on the bed. When she pressed her weight onto me, into me, I felt like I didn’t exist.
My orgasm was so intense that I had to turn my face so he wouldn’t see it. I said, ‘I’m glad it’s dark.’ I feel scattered all over the place and now I need to pull myself together.’
He said, ‘What does it look like when you rebuild yourself?’
I thought: Self-awareness is creeping through the cracks again and here I am again thinking about the dishes waiting for me and Emi crying herself to sleep. But I answered: “A ship, a sail, mended.”
We said goodnight at the bus stop, kissing like only lovers do. I put my arms around him and tried to lose myself against him, I managed it for five minutes before the bus arrived.
And then I turned around crying with rage at being in his harsh clutches and having to return to my life.
Annabel Bond is a pseudonym. The names have been changed.