Voices: Everything in my life seems to have gone wrong at once

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The Independent’s agony aunt Victoria Richards is here to help. Email [email protected] for advice on love, work, family and relationships

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Dear Vix,

I met and fell in love with my amazing partner in 2000. We married eight months after our first date, moved back to our home country – Canada – and had two children (now 15 and 16). But getting pregnant with our second son ended our intimacy and things got worse after I became a stay-at-home mom.

I began to get resentful – I felt I had zero support and my kids were suffering. My husband started to put his attention elsewhere with a colleague 22 years younger than him. Fast forward seven years and he left me and my boys for her, just before Covid hit. I had my kids full time, while also being an essential worker – a postie – with no support. As my ex and his new partner were pregnant, they didn’t want any chance of exposure, so I had my boys pretty much full-time for a year.

Fast forward to now: they have a new family, but I’ve crashed and burned and lost everything. I’m now living in a shelter and see my kids once a week. I am trying my damndest to find housing and to get my boys back. I am on medication and in therapy to manage my severe anxiety and recently returned to work (and am excited about it).

The problem is that my ex and his (now) wife aren’t remotely supportive. He has, on numerous occasions, told our kids (who are also struggling): “Your mother is irrelevant. Nothing she says or does matters”. My heart is broken because he was the love of my life. Please help if you can. Everything in my life seems to have gone wrong, all at once. I can barely make sense of it myself.

Heart and Life Broken

Dear Heart and Life Broken,

I think my own heart broke a little bit, reading your letter. What an awful, heart-rending time you’ve had. How resilient you are, for getting through so many awful moments – and yet you are still pulling yourself back to work, into therapy and to the doctor to seek medication. Please give yourself some credit for your strength and determination. I can see that determination in the way you talk about getting your boys back, too.

I’ve had to cut your letter down a little, but rest assured that while I was reading, my main takeaway was this: you were badly let down by the man you loved. Not only were you dealing with the grief of having a premature baby (Princess Beatrice recently talked about how new parents of “preemies” feel, saying she felt “incredibly lonely”), but you then encountered a loss of interest from your partner (his words to you when you were trying to initiate intimacy were cruel).

You experienced a further loss of support when you became a stay-at-home mother – and finally, the ultimate betrayal, when he had an affair with a junior colleague more than two decades younger than him. I’m surprised that he’s not the one writing to me, filled with guilt and remorse for the horrible way he’s treated you – but then, men like this often experience little (to no) empathy at all. If they did, they wouldn’t be able to treat anyone like this in the first place. (And for what it’s worth, I think it’s disgusting to talk about another parent the way he talks about you. There is no excuse – ever – for badmouthing the mother of your children).

So, what to do? Well, I want you to take one thing away with you today: because you are already doing it. I know it feels like you’ve reached rock bottom – living in a shelter, fighting for custody of your kids. But this is temporary (and you have to hold fast and believe that).

Just look at what you’ve already fought so hard to achieve: you’re back in work and with a positive attitude about it; you’re making sure you see your boys consistently, every week (and I would urge you never to miss that slot – the routine will help all three of you get back on your feet). When it comes to visitation, you will be able to prove these giant steps you have taken to prove yourself a fit and capable parent. Keep moving. Keep believing.

The thing you seem to be struggling the most with, right now, is the grief and loss around the man you once considered the “love of your life” – and the heartbreak that comes when the person we thought we knew, changes beyond recognition. This is a heartbreak, it is a grief and a loss, no matter how many years it has been. Treat it as a bereavement. Go easy on yourself. Give yourself time to mourn it – but do mourn it... openly, if you like. Cry and wail and weep and rage and read about the best ways to deal with a breakup– and then pick the pieces of your heart up from the floor, put them together and know that one day, they’ll be whole again.

The man you loved might not be here anymore, but the love that made your boys remains. It’s inside you and it’s inside them – and nobody can ever take that away.

Do you have a problem you would like to raise anonymously with Dear Vix? Issues with love, relationships, family and work? Email [email protected]

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