Would you? Could you?
Men do it all the time, often regardless of their circumstances. Women: hardly ever. I'm talking about living apart from your children. I think there might be a double standard at work here, linguistically at least. Men "leave their wives". Women "walk out on their families" or "abandon their children". Question is - do women who leave suffer the disapproval of society for a good reason?
Personally, I think it would be impossible. Bear in mind this considered view is coming from a self-confessed crap mum who has thought about it on many occasions, whether it be dropping quietly off the back of the cross-channel ferry on the night crossing or running away to live with the Man Of My Dreams in a Minimalist, clutter-free apartment with lots of hot sex, gigs and galleries.
I miss the girls when they're not around. A week or so is fine, probably two would be manageable I guess, but going to live in another town, realistically only the school holidays to divvy up, I couldn't do it. They couldn't do it. And I have told them, because they asked, that once you are born, a mummy's love can never switch off. Doesn't matter what you do or say, or how very angry and cross mummy might be, the love is beaming out all the time like sunshine and there is nothing that can stop it. If you concentrate, you can feel it shining on you, any time, and you can pull that feeling around you like a cosy blanket and snuggle right into it.
It would be difficult, I think, to have said these things and then try and explain how the love will still reach them when you're hundreds of miles away shacked up with Mr Right-Now. It's the one commitment you can stick to, the one promise you know you'll never break. It stops you hurling yourself over the edge of the viaduct or under the wheels of a train just as much as it stops you from starting a new life in the shape you wish you'd fashioned the first one.
Earth Mother I am most certainly not, but leaving your children seems to me to be an unnatural act. I suppose men just don't feel the same. Their hearts don't appear to break open and howl with misery at their alternate-weekend visits. Interestingly, often neither do the children's. He has said to me on more than one occasion "I don't want to be a weekend dad". In the end, I pointed out that they probably wouldn't notice any difference, since he was barely around in the week anyway. Get up before they wake, come back at bedtime. Or after they're asleep. (That hit home, actually. An effort has been made, credit where it's due).
People who break ranks, who don't stick it for the children, throw us all into a fret. Don't they know the rules? You have to wait until the children have flown the nest for college, of their own volition, before you make your move. When it's a mother who goes, everyone hates it, really hates it. The men because it scares them: Christ! My wife might be next! And the women because it scares them too: You must be a monster!
There are situations when women leave their children in strength not in selfishness. The WWII evacuations, the Kindertransport. And what if you felt that you were such a bad mother they would be better off without you? That daddy would take better care of them? Perhaps that is what went through Sylvia's head as she set out milk and biscuits then sealed the kitchen door with a damp towel and put her head in the oven.
But generally, the children should have every chance to get through their formative years without any variant of relationship-hell being played out in front of them: whether horrible fighting, or the lonely absence of one parent. Grit your teeth, bite your lip, shoulder to the wheel, buckle under. Find your way to stick it out through the tick-tock-tick-tock waiting years until they are flown and you are free to spread your wings too.
I'm telling myself as much as anyone else.
