DIG DEEP DIG ON

[Ambivalent]

This one is for those who are dealing with flash backs and triggers.

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Twenty-one years ago, Ryan ran away with another woman, a colleague he'd been having an affair with for some months. He left his wife of twelve years, Caroline, alone with their ten-year old daughter, five-year-old son and six-week old baby daughter. The baby had been born on Christmas Eve.
Caroline filed for divorce.

Ryan returned after two years in which the couple had functioned awkwardly as co-parents. After a year they remarried, and the family has been reunited for nineteen years.

Last Christmas, however, the family, along with in-laws, was having a drinks party and the youngest daughter's 21st birthday and Caroline drank too much. With no apparent trigger, she began talking about the period of separation. Before long she found herself weeping and ranting about the pain of those years, what a bastard Ryan had been and how miserable the kids had been.

Ryan remained pretty quiet, sorrowfully saying that he didn't feel this was the time to have this discussion.

But Caroline continued that it hadn't been a convenient time either to be left alone with three little kids. It wasn't her fault he'd had an affair and run off with his mistress and yet she felt her older daughter in particular had blamed her for the abandonment and not Ryan.

One of the underlying problems here was that the couple had had problems with their oldest daughter ever since the family break-up. A sweet girl, far from difficult or off the rails, Hannah has nevertheless been distant from her mother growing up because she resented her accepting Ryan back into the home and then remarrying him. She had been convinced by Caroline's frequent assertions that, as a family, they would never take him back and then Caroline U-turned and did take him back. Hannah had felt betrayed or fooled by her mother ever since. Ironically Hannah and her father get on very well.

A second problem for Caroline is that their only son developed a fixation about fathers and fatherhood when Ryan left the family. This continued after his return and, direct consequence or not, the boy became a dad himself at 18 and gave up his plan of going to university.

A third issue that surfaced on that Christmas Eve was Caroline's continuing resentment of the other woman. She lives in the same area and with the same husband and now has children of her own that she didn't have at the time of the affair with Ryan.Caroline remains angry at the other woman and bitter that she went on, in Caroline's view, to build a nice little family that has never known the grief of separation or divorce. She resents too that the other woman has never had to find out what it's like to be abandoned with three small children.

Even where a husband in midlife crisis returns to his wife and the family remains re-united for twenty years it is still clearly possible for old wounds to re-open. The extent of the fallout between a couple and within a family after midlife crisis affairs and divorce is unforeseeable. It can last a long time beyond the acute crisis phase. "