Learning To Love After Heartbreak

When I was at school in the 1990s, the phrase, ‘my parents are divorced’ still warranted sympathetic smiles and awkward glances.

I went to Catholic school and a teacher surreptitiously loaned The Suitcase Kid by Jacqueline Wilson to students she suspected were from ‘broken homes’.

Once, in a religion class, I argued that the church’s teachings on divorce were outdated and was kept behind after the lesson.

‘You seem quite passionate,’ my teacher said. ‘I just want to make sure everything is OK. Are you going through something like this at home?’ I told her I was fine and fled from the room with beetroot cheeks.

She thought she was being kind, but her message was that I should stay quiet. She suggested that parents who did not ‘persevere’ to stay together were people to be ashamed of.

My parents met in Sunderland, in the 1980s. My mother had a curly perm and wore men’s shirts knotted at the waist. She drank pints of lager and lime and shimmied around her room to T-Rex, spraying herself into a L’Oréal Elnett mist.

My dad sloped around in his bleached denim jacket, smoking Lambert & Butler cigarettes and scribbling misspelled poems in capital letters on the backs of old receipts. They went out dancing to Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, twisting across sticky dance floors together.

The recollections of their first meeting are vague and I can never quite remember the way the story fits together. I collaged my own version from boxes of photographs put away in the loft and a pile of damp records I found in the garage.

But the chance wonder of them meeting seems unimportant. The sadness that came later is so significant that it shaped their whole lives – and mine.

My father is an alcoholic and his drinking got worse over the course of my parents’ marriage. He went missing for nights on end, sitting in the pub until closing time and then sleeping under trees in the fields behind our house.

As a child, I believed he worked away a lot. My mother worked hard to fill the lives of my brother and me with love and care so that we wouldn’t see the shape of my father’s absence.

The three of us ran around the garden in the silver spray of the Crazy Daisy sprinkler and made shaving-foam sculptures on the kitchen floor. I sensed something was not right when I found my dad hunched in the garage with bloodshot eyes, or when my mother locked herself in the bathroom to cry.

My mother looked after my father for years. She put aside her own needs to care for all of us. She has since told me that day after day she felt herself wearing away, until she decided she couldn’t live like that anymore.

She didn’t want to be invisible and insignificant. She didn’t want her life to be trampled under the work boots of men like her own father, and generations of husbands and fathers before him.

When my parents got divorced, I didn’t feel sad. My dad had been leaving and coming back for years and my mother had long been curling up with me in my single bed. ‘Divorce’ was just a legal name for everything we already knew.

Today, a lot of my friends’ parents are no longer together, but then, against the backdrop of my Catholic school, divorce was regarded as failure. I looked up at the shelves my mum built in our kitchen and her paintbrush strokes on the bathroom ceiling and I couldn’t see the shame anywhere. I was thrilled that I had a secret to carry. It felt grown-up to have witnessed the weight of something as dark and adult as a broken heart.

After my dad moved out for the last time, my mother learned joy again. She came home from New Look with plastic bags filled with denim miniskirts and sequinned T-shirts.

She smoothed Rimmel instant tan onto her calves and I helped dye her hair at our kitchen table, rubbing rich chestnut colour into her scalp.

I was 13 and learning what it meant to move through the world with sexual currency, as my mother began to reclaim her body. I watched carefully as she painted her fingernails coral and crossed her legs across bar stools.

She went on dates with art teachers and construction workers, learning how to be cared for, after so many years of caring for others. When she wasn’t at home, I tried on her dresses, hoping that some of her bold beauty would rub off on me.

I had my first real relationship when I was 16. I fell in love with Sean, who was in the year above me at school. He rubbed kohl into his eyelids and got excluded for writing Smiths’ lyrics across the walls of the boys’ toilets in lipstick.

We went out dancing on school nights, goading each other into the electric wild. Sean sometimes disappeared for days at a time and I lay awake, sick with worry, until he eventually called to tell me he had been on a bender, or he had been arrested and ended up spending the night in a cell.

I thought our relationship was the kind I wanted, but really, I think it was the kind I thought I deserved.

If we imitate the relationship models that we see around us, then I was chasing a rumpled, rock-star version of my dad. I wanted the chaos, the drinking and the unpredictability. I hadn’t yet learned that there are other ways to love.

When I left home for university, Sean stayed behind. When he came to visit and saw that I had grown a life beyond him, he cut his wrists in the shower of my tiny student bathroom with a broken beer bottle.

The cuts were superficial and I put him to bed. While he was sleeping, I mopped his blood from the walls and wondered what my mother would say. She was living with a new partner who cooked her stuffed peppers and did face masks with her in the bath. The domesticity of that scared me, but it showed me that there are other ways to live. Through tearful kisses, Sean and I broke up.

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I have often thought about the parallels between the way my father treated my mother and how Sean treated me. I wonder what would have happened if my mother had not shown me, through her own example, that I didn’t have to settle for that kind of life.

By ending her marriage with my father and forging a new world for herself, she showed me that endings are part of living. She taught me that being able to leave when things are bad is a sign of strength; that ‘breaking’ a home that did not care for the women it housed was powerful, and not a sign of failure.

I had other relationships after Sean. Joseph, who was an architect and built miniature houses on our kitchen table. There was Charlie, who drove a moped and had special polish for his Dr. Martens. There was Ben, who slept in his art studio and made coffee in a mug from an old job that said, ‘I heart spreadsheets’ in red letters.

I never thought any of them were The One. I loved them, in different ways, but I had an understanding that things might not work out, that life is strange and transient, that we are growing and changing all the time and not necessarily at the same rate.

As a teenager, the books and magazines I read and films I watched told me I should search for one special person to spend my life with, but my mother’s experiences gave me realistic expectations. I’m hungry to love and be loved. I’ve felt the deep swell of longing and the raw ache of heartbreak. But I know that I will always be fine on my own – that is a vital lesson.

My mother has not forgotten about my father and, of course, neither have I. His alcoholism still shapes significant chunks of our lives, and the bruise left by their lost love still lingers, but she regained control over her life by choosing something different.

She taught me that I am allowed to choose, to change, to want different things at different moments.

My school religion teacher wanted me to stay quiet about the jagged edge of love when it is broken, but I don’t see it as a failure or a source of shame.

I’ve been through break-ups that made me feel devastatingly lonely, but they helped to form my identity and their breakdown gave me time to work out who I am.

My mother taught me that it is important to hold on to the people that you love, but it’s just as important to let them go.

Saltwater by Jessica Andrews is out in paperback now.

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