There is an old cliché that whenever parents announce that they’re getting divorced, they rush to tell the kids that it’s not their fault, to reassure them that their entry into the world didn’t somehow transform their parents from two people who loved each other into two people who find each other’s early morning mouth noises so irritating that they’re googling how long you usually serve for murder.
It’s a nice sentiment, to reassure your kids, make sure they know that it’s not their fault. But it’s largely not true, as singer Paloma Faith pointed out in an interview over the weekend. Faith, who recently split from husband Leyman Lahcine, said: “You either grow together, adapting to one another like expandable foam and filling the gaps where it’s empty – or one person grows and the other stays the same. And I think for me, becoming a mother was such a massively life-changing experience that for the first time in my life, I needed more than nothing – and the expandable foam just wasn’t there.”
Being brutally honest, she added: “Our relationship ended because we have those children. And I think that was worth it.'”
Look, it might not be a nice sentiment to express, but I guarantee you that people, especially women, all over the country will be nodding along with every word Faith says. My marriage ended a few months after I had my daughter, for a variety of reasons. It’s not terribly fair to detail the exact reality of the situation, suffice to say that having a baby is one of the most trying things you can do, and if there are already fault-lines in your marriage, then having a baby will burst them wide open. In my case there were significant issues which I’d been able to emotionally whitewash for a number of years. But doing that took a lot of time and effort and a fair amount of self-deception, and once I became a mother I was no longer willing or able to do that.
I wince slightly when people talk about motherhood making them unselfish, because there are plenty of unselfish child-free people. But in my case, it did force me (for the first time in my life) to think about more than just what I wanted in the moment, because I started to live for my daughter rather than myself.
Before, if I wanted to stay in a marriage which had some fairly significant issues, that was my choice. After my daughter was born I realised that my only important job was providing her with a gloriously boring, utterly stable, predictable childhood where she felt loved and safe at every single moment. The marriage she was born into wasn’t able to provide that, so it had to go.
Occasionally I’ll stumble into a corner of the internet where people lament divorce rates and express the idea that people “should” stay married for the kids, and I want to scream. The best and hardest parenting choice I ever made was to become single, and my God it’s been difficult. There is nothing to commend in protracting an unhappy marriage if it means that your children live in a war zone.
Recently a perfectly nice woman I was talking to pulled a face when I said that I’d been separated from my husband since my daughter was a newborn. “Oh you should never get divorced in the first year after the baby,” she said. “That’s what everyone always says.” I’m not familiar with that as an expression, but really, what a load of nonsense. If having a baby is making you want to get divorced that’s almost certainly because you know that your marriage is not able to support a traditional family structure.
My only objection to Paloma Faith’s quotes are that I hope her children understand the nuance to them. I’ve often wondered what I’ll say when my daughter clocks the timing of my split from her father, and asks questions about how and why that happened. I dread the idea of her thinking that it was somehow “her fault”.
In all honesty, I could imagine telling that same old white lie, that “it’s not your fault”, until she reaches an age where I can explain that while the timings might line up, there is no “fault” here at all. In fact, if anything, she was something of a saviour. I clearly wasn’t able to recognise that I deserved better, and I’d have put up with the same unhappy home for the rest of my life if I was the only one impacted. But because I so badly wanted more for her, I did the only really brave thing I’ve ever done in my life and I called time on my marriage.
Having kids can end your relationship, but that’s not always a bad thing
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18.03.2024
There is an old cliché that whenever parents announce that they’re getting divorced, they rush to tell the kids that it’s not their fault, to reassure them that their entry into the world didn’t somehow transform their parents from two people who loved each other into two people who find each other’s early morning mouth noises so irritating that they’re googling how long you usually serve for murder.
It’s a nice sentiment, to reassure your kids, make sure they know that it’s not their fault. But it’s largely not true, as singer Paloma Faith pointed out in an interview over the weekend. Faith, who recently split from husband Leyman Lahcine, said: “You either grow together, adapting to one another like expandable foam and filling the gaps where it’s empty – or one person grows and the other stays the same. And I think for me, becoming a mother was such a massively life-changing experience that for the first time in my life, I needed more than nothing – and the expandable foam just wasn’t there.”
Being brutally honest, she added: “Our relationship ended because we have........
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