Six Months to Get a Life Read Free Page B

generally drink too much London Pride. I made another of my vows when I moved in with them. I wouldn’t just use their house as a hotel. I would make the effort to continue spending quality time with them. This isn’t proving easy.
    ‘Quality time’ these days seems to mean sitting around a kitchen table littered with empty London Pride cans and prosecco bottles, picking my life apart. Now anyone over the age of two would probably be capable of picking my life apart. But my mum and dad consider themselves uniquely qualified to do the job with a forensic precision. They were both social workers in their former lives. My mum used to do something worthy with the parents of children with disabilities and my dad used to manage a ‘family services unit’, whatever that means.
    There is only so much frowning over my previous life choices or suggestions about future life choices that a man can take. I reached my limit today. Mum cooked a traditional Sunday roast, beef and all the trimmings. We washed it down with our usual beverages. Our plates were empty, our stomachs full and our tongues alcoholically lubricated when mum asked me where it all went wrong.
    ‘What do you mean ‘where did it all go wrong’?’ I asked.
    ‘With your life, Graham. How did it come to this?’ Sheeven did that palms up, arms outstretched hand gesture thing when she said ‘my life’, presumably meaning everything. Where did everything go wrong? Thanks mum, build me up, bolster my confidence.
    I thought about going for a glib response but the earnest look on mum’s face made me change track.
    ‘I don’t know mum, I guess my marriage just wasn’t meant to last.’ OK, so it wasn’t exactly an insightful answer but it was the best I could do.
    ‘That’s nonsense and you know it, Graham,’ mum continued. ‘Marriages need to be worked at. It wasn’t as if either of you had an affair or anything that drastic. Surely you could have worked through your differences?’
    ‘You didn’t even see a marriage guidance counsellor,’ dad chimed in. We did actually but I hadn’t told them about it because they would have had a go at me for walking out in the middle of a session.
    And so it went on, two against one, tag-team wrestling. My parents still seem to think the sun shines out of my ex’s backside. They act as if she is their daughter rather than me their son. They still hold out a hope that my perfect ex will have me back. I wouldn’t go back even if she would have me back. Which she wouldn’t.
    I have told my parents time and again that my ex and I split up because of our terminal irritability with each other, our mutual intolerance of each other, our irreconcilable TV viewing schedules. We just didn’t like each other. I tried to explain that to my parents but, to them, not liking your other half doesn’t constitute grounds for divorce.
    ‘You should have paid more attention to her when you had her,’ dad advised. Why didn’t I think of that?
    ‘Those poor children,’ mum offered. Why didn’t I think of them too? I was on the ropes by this point, being seriously double-teamed by my parents, but wasn’t about to submit.
    ‘Bloody hell, will the two of you just leave me alone? I have had it with your sniping at me. You might have been married for ever but all you ever do is sit on your arses watching crap on the telly. I’d prefer to be single and living than married and dead.’ The ‘atomic drop’, the ‘full nelson’ and the ‘gorilla press’ all combined into one move. That told them.
    ‘Happy mother’s day,’ mum muttered as I was heading for the door. Shit.
    At this point, I think I should make a confession. Being divorced, separated from my kids and my marital home (not to mention my ex) is quite stressful. It is quite a large upheaval in my life and may just have caused a slight emotional imbalance in my otherwise rock-solid equilibrium. In other words, I may be a bit self-centred at the moment, even a bit