‘Think of it as part-time unencumbered,’ my workmate advised. His own marriage is in a shambles, and he doesn’t have the guts to do anything about it. Unlike Maggie, who is dismantling this relationship as if it were an Olympic sport. I’m hit with a jarring memory of last week’s disastrous handover. The way Parker clung to me while Maggie, with tears in her eyes, prised her gently from my arms.
Compartmentalise, Fraser. Get out of the car.I shove the phone into my jeans pocket, on a mission to collect the last few things for tomorrow’s expedition, over six thousand kilometres from the epicentre of this chaos.
‘Work always comes first!’ Maggie accused in Wednesday’s mediation session. ‘Could you have chosenanywherefurther from us?’
Could have gone to the Arctic, I’d thought, but I’d already been chastised for using humour to deflect from our problems. I wasn’t about to mansplain geography.
‘I applied for the research grant eighteen months ago,’ I reminded her. ‘Our breakup wasn’t on the radar then.’Not technically.But this marriage has been on life support for years. Sometimes I wonder if our focus on Parker was an unconscious attempt to glue together frayed ends, only for the weakened connection to sever in the middle.
Inside the shopping centre, a teenager slams into me, swallowed by a giant puffer jacket as if he’s the one heading south. I barely understood the various subspecies of teens when I was in high school myself, despite knowing my own confirmed place in the ecosystem: science nerd. I try not to fast-forward to this phase of parenting with our daughter. She’ll be drifting between two houses whileeveryone else’s parentsgreenlight vodka-fuelled parties and Schoolies on the Gold Coast. Our biggest negotiation with her now is whether or not she can have Minecraft on her iPad.
Surely I can’t be the only person in this shopping centre running on empty? What’s that word?Sonder.That idea that everyone you pass has a life as complex as your own and you’re just a background extra in theirs.
It’s one thing being irrelevant in the lives of strangers. Another when it’s your wife. With every passing legal document, Maggie and I are shifting roles, casting each other in fewer scenes. I can’t work out how to assign her a minor part, when she’s been the main love interest all this time. Her playing ‘mother of my child’ dooms us to stress fractures and jagged edges. A lifetime of papering over rifts because this can never be the clean break we really need.
My phone pings. It’s her.Did you get the email about the consent orders?
Her need for certainty is driving this divorce at warp speed. We’ll blink and it will all be signed off and done, everything parted and separated and settled, the three of us ensconced, no doubt, in some wretched new normal.
‘Everyone finds parenting hard,’ my mother chimed in last night. ‘Your father and I slept in separate bedrooms for two years after your brother was born! Can’t you give it another shot? Have some counselling? It doesn’t look good …’
And there it was. Mum’s obsession with How Things Look.
The boys are hugely successful!I imagine she boasts.Joshua is a renowned conductor of a symphony orchestra. Fraser’s a scientist. Blissfully happy with Maggie—she’s a talented psychiatrist, no less! Oh! And my grandchild! Here, let me show you the brag book …
As she dished up roast vegetables and whisked the gravy, she carried on as if it had been me who took an axe to the marriage. ‘How is fracturing your family in Parker’s best interests, Fraser? Why don’t you fight for Maggie?’
Fight for her?
In that moment it dawned on me that my wife is right. You can’t fight for something you no longer want. There’s no battery left between Maggie and me. The harder we work to rewire things and the more we solder over our brokenness, the higher the risk we take that this quiet desperation will destabilise and mutate into something more explosive.
‘Mum, the relationship is complete.’ That’s how Maggie had put it. She’d said it was easier for the brain to accept than saying it was over.
‘But we don’t do divorce in this family!’ Mum wielded the brag book as evidence, as if her precious bunch of photos could save us from years of corrosion. In frustration, I ripped it from her hands.
‘You have to stop shoving this at everyone!’
‘I don’t!’
‘Dad said you showed photos of Parker to some woman at the print shop yesterday.’
‘She was interested, Fraser. Parker is glorious!’
‘She was collating a job application,’ Dad added, quietly, never very keen to enter the fray.
I’m not normally so short with Mum. Or with everything. ‘I’m sorry we can’t retrofit our story to match a perfect narrative,’ I said, more kindly. ‘I wish we could.’
By the time I gather my wits at the shops, I’ve delivered myself to the outdoor adventure store and seem to have paused beside a display of soft toys that Parker would love. They’re all bundled up in cute little scarves and beanies and mittens, and the fact that I’ve gravitated here can be easily explained: I desperately miss my almost eight-year-old.
A trifle more ambiguous is why I’ve subconsciously bypassed all the seals and orcas and Parker’s personal favourite, the polar bears, in favour of the plush penguin that has found its way into my hands.
It could be a loaded gun, the way I place it carefully back on the shelf and back away. The ink isn’t dry on the divorce papers. I cannot entertain …penguinsand their flirtatious associates. I’d only wreck things for some other woman while my head is still scrambled. I need to compartmentalise this, too.
‘What are your three things, Daddy?’ Parker asks as I dump the shopping on the dining table an hour later. We’re on our regular afterschool video call, and she’s asking what three things I am grateful for today—a list I’m finding increasingly hard to assemble lately.
‘Well, I have an incredible little girl,’ I start. It’s how this always goes, and she giggles.
‘You’re going on an important trip,’ she reminds me. ‘You’re fixing the world.’ I really should sit her down and explain that there’s only so much that one scientist can manage. Our narrative—Maggie’s and mine—has always been thatDaddy wouldn’t just leave for several months at a time unless it was veryimportant work. And here I am, going away again, wrestling with familiar guilt, but it’s worse now when my time with her is already halved.
