Our House(13)
I thought, or at least tried to think, how it might feel to have those precious pink petals open for someone else next spring. No, it was unthinkable. It would split my heart with a violence no adulterous spouse could achieve.
A ‘For Sale’ sign at our gate? Over my dead body.
#VictimFi
@SharonBrodie50 She’s a bit intense, isn’t she? I don’t get how people are so obsessed with their houses.
@Rogermason @SharonBrodie50 Money. At least she’s honest.
8
‘Fi’s Story’ > 00:30:10
Yes, the custody arrangements were crucial to the crime, I would say, because they gave Bram access to both the house itself and the documents he needed to sell it – not just the shared homeowners’ stuff, but my personal papers too. No, I didn’t think to keep them separate from his after we parted, though obviously that’s the first thing I would urge other women in that position to do. Keep your passport taped to your body, even when you sleep!
Irony doesn’t begin to cover the fact that the solution I came up with was intended to let me keep the house. Bird’s nest custody, it’s called, and like all good ideas, it rang true from the very instant I heard it. I read about it first in the Guardian and then on parenting sites online; well past the experimental stage, it’s a US-originated arrangement growing in popularity. The way it works is that the children remain at all times in the family home and the two parents take it in turns to be there with them. ‘Off’ time is spent at their respective second homes or, in the case of tighter budgets like ours, a shared one. Some couples even manage without a second residence, using their parents’ spare room instead or the sofa of a friend.
For Bram, the offer was less an olive branch than a whole sun-drenched Puglian grove.
‘Why?’ he asked me, not daring to believe my sincerity. ‘Why are you giving me this?’
‘It’s not for you,’ I told him, ‘it’s for the boys. I don’t want them to lose their home. I want as little to change for them as possible. You betrayed me,’ I added baldly, ‘but you didn’t betray them.’
Of course, the internet had told me that not everyone bought into this interpretation, that many women insisted that by betraying the mother of his children a man betrayed them too, but I didn’t agree with the internet. Husband, father: the roles were linked, but they were still distinct. Whatever I’ve done as a husband, I’m not that person as a father. And he wasn’t. As I say, he was excellent, acknowledged by other parents as the one the kids gravitated towards, the one who built dens and treehouses (and playhouses) and who came up with Dodgeball Day and the Lawson Olympics and who assembled the street’s kids one Sunday to help him pull down a dead tree with ropes, when the other dads were probably lying low with their phones, trying not to catch anyone’s eye.
‘If you’re committed to making it work, there is no better set-up for the child,’ our bird’s nest counsellor told us.
Except a happy marriage, I thought.
Her name was Rowan and she was precise and courteous, modelling the painstaking niceties we would need to practise if our reconfigured union was to succeed. ‘Bird’s nest custody offers exactly what you would expect from a real bird’s nest: strength, safety and continuity for the chicks. With the best will in the world, it can be unsettling for them to shuttle between two homes, especially if those homes aren’t in the same area. This completely negates that disruption. In the best-case scenario, they’ll hardly notice anything has changed.’
She guided us through the nuts and bolts – or twigs and feathers, as she joked. We would have a trial period in which I handled the weekdays and Bram most of the weekends. Handovers would be 7 p.m. on a Friday and noon on Sunday, giving us each weekend time with the boys. He would also visit on Wednesday evenings to do the bedtime routine. ‘It works best if you can keep separate bedrooms in the main house,’ Rowan advised. ‘It helps with establishing boundaries.’
I’d already given this thought, grateful that the house’s size and layout suited our new purposes so readily. There would be no uprooting of the boys and no modification costs. ‘We can do that. We have four bedrooms, so we can use the spare for one of us and there’s a study downstairs that can become the new spare.’
‘You’re very lucky,’ Rowan said. ‘Some couples have to take turns in the same bedroom. You’d be surprised how many negotiations I’ve had involving who changes the sheets.’
‘You keep our room,’ Bram told me, ‘since you’re going to be there more nights than me.’
Our room. Setting up new sleeping arrangements was one thing, adjusting the language of our home, our life, was another.
‘The trick is to think of both places as your home,’ Rowan said. ‘Your house is your primary home, the other place your secondary. No one has the greater claim to either, you are co-owners and co-tenants. Above all, you’re co-parents. Equals.’
She showed us a diary app she recommended. ‘This is where it all goes: who’s in the house, who’s in the flat, who’s away for work, who’s picking up from school. The clubs, the playdates, the birthday parties: all colour-coded.’
As for the financial arrangements, they required little adaptation in the short term. Bram and I earned similar salaries, contributed the same amount to the joint account, from which we paid mortgage, utilities and all the kids’ expenses. This pooled figure would now increase to cover the rent on the second property in Alder Rise, most likely a studio or a room in a shared house, and left little to spare. For this reason, I suggested that the other expense, divorce lawyers, should be postponed for this trial period.