Despite my love for Nadine, and the connection we were sharing through our son, the love was never as strong as it needed to be.
It became apparent over time that it wasn’t going to last forever, and it was becoming clear that the relationship meant more to me than it did to Nadine.
That said, we did make it to almost eight-and-a-half years, the longest relationship I have had in my entire life – with every previous one measurable only in weeks or months.
There was no hate, nor any anger. We barely argued the entire time we were together, although there were frayed emotions when she decided to tell me it was time to move on from me.
I had felt it coming for some time, and in many respects we both tried really hard to keep a family together for our son – however because the relationship started in such a low-key way, just finding ourselves together one day, a lot of the things that form the basis of a strong and ongoing relationship just weren’t there.
The biggest problem I faced was that I didn’t know how to be in a relationship that was coming to an end.
Yes, I had been through the trauma of the time with the psychopath who tried to kill me, but in the end that was easy to walk away from. I wasn’t keen on being dead for her.
So a “normal” relationship coming to an end? I had zero experience of that, and it is fair to say that I didn’t cope very well.
I remember one Sunday afternoon when our son had spent the weekend with my parents, and tempers and emotions were high as I was getting ready to leave the house to collect him. I think it was the only time in the whole “death period” that voices had been raised.
I believe that was the moment we both understood that things had run their course. I cried and cried and cried the whole time I was driving the 40 minutes to pick him up, stopping only a few minutes before getting there to pull myself together.
We moved into separate rooms, and that crushed me. It felt like things were over, but I still wanted to try to sort things out until the last dying gasp of the relationship.
What hurt the most was that Nadine seemingly had no interest in trying at all.
To be clear – I blame neither myself nor Nadine for the relationship dying on the vine. Neither of us did anything “wrong” – (and we’ve always been friends despite it all) – and we’ll always be connected given we have a son together.
It just………..stopped working.
I didn’t move out straight away – I wanted to make sure I found the right place for me and our son, because it became clear pretty quickly that he was more interested in living with me, than with Nadine.
He still lives with me to this day, more than a decade later. We all still get along well, just that Nadine and I don’t work on an intimate level any longer.
When we did finally move, the only people who knew were our direct families. Mine and Nadine’s.
I didn’t even tell Maddie. We weren’t in as regular contact as we might otherwise have been, as I chose to respect the relationship Nadine and I were in – but we were casually in touch, mainly on Facebook.
I didn’t tell anyone for a good four or five months.
Despite things ending amicably, and living effectively as a single dad with my wonderful kiddo, I was torn apart inside. I cried myself to sleep most nights. Most days I simply just existed.
Out of bed, kiddo to school, off to work, collect kiddo from Nadine’s, and then home. That was my new normal, and I was so unfocused that I couldn’t break that cycle. I did nothing for myself. I hid myself away.
I didn’t talk about anything to anyone. I was in a trance, and I was not coping.
I hated being alone again.
Then one night, we were playing Wii Sports together in the lounge room, and something clicked in my head.
It was time to talk.
As soon as kiddo was in bed, I sat down at the computer and typed out a long Facebook post, restricted to just my most important friends.
Explaining where I was, what had happened – where I was inside my head and inside myself. I apologised for “going missing”. I bawled my eyes out the whole time. I had been holding it all in and now it was coming out.
Eventually I clicked “save”.
Before long, I got a bunch of “shocked emojis” and comments on how people were offering to be there whenever I needed an ear or a shoulder. No disrespect to any of those comments at all, but they kind of felt like “that’s what they are supposed to say”. It was appreciated though, of course.
Maddie of course was the comment I was looking for the most, and despite her being about the tenth person to respond, she was the first to not come up with the plain old “I’m here when you need someone” guff.
She proclaimed that she was proud of me, and that I was inspiring for tackling the whole thing head on and doing what was needed for me and kiddo.
That’s what I needed to hear, and that was the point I started coming back to life.