Here I am, sat down to write. The urge is gone, the sense of urgency that I had before has withered and died. Now I am back at home. Suitcases half-unpacked, I’m avoiding completing the task. My husband starts travelling again tomorrow, which is Saturday. It seems unfair that he is off to sunny Greece to sell wine, to shmooze with people at a fancy dinner while I am home in cold and grey Champagne with the kids. They deserve better than this, than me, right now. The winter vacances start tonight. I’d hoped we’d go skiing for the first time as a family this year. The kids are finally old enough to really enjoy it and we would do well to have the time together. Instead they will go to the centre de loisirs, sort of a day camp for people who must work and have no grandparents to look after the kids while they do so. That stings more than ever. Mine are both dead now, and his are unable or unwilling to do so. My husband’s father is on his third wife, third time’s the charm, as they say. No insult there, they are very happy. They are meant for each other, when you see them together it is clear. It’s also easy to be happy when you have no worries, no kids, in financial retirement. It’s hard though, that they are the only married couple in the family other that us, and we’ve been married the longest. We have no one to look to as an example of what it looks like to grow and change as a couple through thick and thin, though kids, moves, new jobs, life crises, loss, troubles, and most of all, our own growth and changes. We have only us, and other divorces, many divorces. When the going gets tough, you divorce. There is no working though, no making amends, no handholding though troubled times. There is just divorce, blaming the other for irreconcilable differences, no reconciling. There are kids torn away from their fathers, for at least part of the time. Broken families, and damaged children, left in the wake of their parents’ dissolution of whatever it was that they once had that made them want to make a family in the first place.