Happily Ever After_ - Benison Anne O'Reilly [85]
‘What do you want me to do to save our marriage?’
‘Is that really what you want?’
‘Yes…I told you that before, but you don’t seem to want to believe me.’
‘Well, I’m sorry but your behaviour in recent times has suggested you want to be anywhere else but with me.’
‘So you said - and I’m offering to change.’
‘I don’t know…You’ve taken me by surprise here…You could start by spending more time with us - Issy and me - and being a bit more involved.’
‘Tell me how then.’
‘How about dropping off or picking up Issy from preschool when you’re around or even taking her to swimming lessons. You always leave that all to me, even when you’re home and I’m the one at work. Issy is so proud of her daddy and would love to show you off, you know.’
‘Okay, that’s a start, but what about you?’
‘Me?’
‘Yes, you - that’s the big issue here, isn’t it?’ he said, looking at me as if I was talking in some rare regional dialect from an obscure Baltic state, but then we’d long ago stopped speaking the same language.
‘No, not completely, actually…Anyway, where to begin? We could start by talking occasionally. And we never go out as a couple these days, only with your friends.’
‘Maybe we could start going out for a date night when I’m home.’
‘Yeah.’
‘I could ask Mum if we can move around the night Isabel goes over to her place to fit in better with my schedule, rather than just Wednesdays.’
‘Oh no I think that would upset Issy’s routine. Children like routine,’ I said, scrambling to find excuses, ‘and then your mother does have a fairly active social life.’
‘Yeah that’s true.’
‘The young girl down the road is very keen to babysit. We could ask her.’
‘Okay. So should we try for this Saturday?’
***
It was magical. Over the next few months we witnessed the blossoming of a great love affair. Not between Tony and me - I would prove a much harder nut to crack - between Tony and Isabel, of course. I knew, I just knew, if he spent more time with her he would fall head over heels, and he did, so easily in the end. First he started picking her up from preschool and taking her to swimming lessons on Mondays if he was around. Issy was on cloud nine and the preschool workers were all in a fluster. ‘My, your husband is nice looking Ellie. We had no idea,’ gushed Mrs Walker, the preschool director one day. ‘Now we know where Isabel gets her good looks from.’ Gee thanks, I thought and she must have seen the look on my face because she quickly added, ‘Oh I mean both of you, of course.’ Yeah.
Then, in a moment of divine inspiration, I included a coloured foam cricket set amongst the dolls and mini-kitchen appliances I bought for Issy’s fourth birthday and dad and daughter spent an hour that first afternoon practising in the backyard. Tony came back inside saying, ‘You know I think she has a bit of natural talent there,’ and wandered off, I’m sure imagining his daughter opening the batting for the Australian women’s cricket team in 2026. And it’s just as well daddy did become more attentive because mummy was definitely off her game for those few months. I let Issy watch far too many DVDs on weekends, and while previously at swimming lessons I would watch her in rapt attention, now the poor child had to constantly sing out to attract my interest as I’d inevitably be off in some quiet reverie about Alex.
As for playgroup, well while the other mothers were sitting around, chatting about the best toilet training methods or bitching about the mum who let her kids drink soft drinks all the time, I’d be quietly dying of boredom and wanting to shout out:
‘I’m having the best sex of my life and it isn’t with my husband!’
***
Whilst remedying the Issy situation turned out to be remarkably easy the newly instituted date nights proved a lot more awkward proposition. How could it possibly be that you could be married to someone for seven years but have almost nothing to say to them? I suggested we start off by going to the movies for this very reason, just like we were teenagers again. He even held my hand in the old fashioned way.
However, our sex life actually