Happily Ever After_ - Benison Anne O'Reilly [44]
Anyway, although I didn’t know it at the time, the night of Mark and Janelle’s dinner party did turn out to be the low point. My husband was never again cruel enough to say to my face he regretted marrying me, although what he was thinking to himself over those years is another matter altogether.
One of the gifts my parents bestowed upon me, one I never properly appreciated until recently, was a happy childhood. I think it has given me an essentially optimistic outlook on life, one that has helped me to bounce back from adversity that might have felled a less resilient soul. With time I found I adjusted to my new reality: living in an unhappy marriage where the parties were only staying together ‘for the sake of the kid’. The statistics suggested we were hardly alone.
A few events helped to hasten the adjustment process.
First, a welcome side effect of my hectic, working lifestyle was that I finally started shifting the kilos that so offended my husband. My baby weight had way overstayed its welcome and when it finally decided to wave ‘bye, bye’ I couldn’t shove it out the door fast enough.
Yes, yes, I know a woman’s sense of worth shouldn’t be linked to her attractiveness and maybe I will reach that conclusion myself someday when I’ve evolved further, but at present there remains a clear correlation between my weight and sense of wellbeing.
And by way of partial explanation, here is an interesting graph I’ve collated over the years:
This is not to imply I’m some crazed sex-addict (although there have been times). For a while I thought I would never recover my enjoyment after Tony’s affair; it’s hard to abandon yourself to the moment when you keep getting a crick in your neck looking over your shoulder for the other woman. It’s just that it was the only sort of positive attention I was getting from my husband at this time, and like a flea-bitten stray which has been handed a stringy old ham bone at Christmas time, I was taking what I could get. And while there were no guarantees, if he was coming to me I thought it less likely he was shopping around elsewhere for his kicks.
Poor old barren Auntie Margaret then provided a helpful circuit breaker by following her husband to the grave and leaving her not insubstantial inheritance to her nieces and nephews, including Tony. It was enough money to complete the second bathroom and open up the back of the house with bi-fold doors to a landscaped barbeque and entertainment area. More valuable to me was that it provided a shared interest: something my husband and I could talk about. It’s amazing how much time people can spend talking about the unimportant if they truly put their minds to it. We visited tile showrooms together and compared hundreds of paint swatches and agonised for days over the design of our custom-made vanity, all the while avoiding the big questions like whether we should even be together anymore.
One night around this time David was in town for a conference and Mum and Dad organised a family dinner at their place. He and Amrita had bought a big house with a pool in Adelaide and looked to be putting down roots. In fact, I had begun to detect a touch of parochialism creeping in. He went on a little bit too long at dinner about the superiority of South Australian reds (he’d brought a couple of bottles as evidence) and got decidedly huffy when Dad made one of his ‘boring Adelaide’ jibes. However, the wine was excellent - so excellent in fact that I had three largish glasses of it.
Big Brother had been watching me and took me aside later in the evening to lecture, ‘I don’t want to sound like a wowser, but you might want to cut back on your drinking a bit. It doesn’t mix too well with the antidepressants