How being dumped can drive a woman to madness
The righteous rage of a woman scorned cannot be fathomed, says Yasmin AlibhaiBrown. Unless, that is, you’ve been there...
THERE is nothing unusual about husbands walking out on their wives of many years to set up another home with a younger model. One with fresher skin, glossier hair, a youthful body full of ripe promise. It happens all the time. It happened to me. Back in the old marital home, the discarded, shattered woman is left behind, surrounded by objects and memories of a marriage, echoes and voices of a family life cruelly cut short.
And then there are the children: shocked, angry, hurt, bewildered. As the betrayed woman, society expects you to take it on the chin, accept that men do this from time to time, let them walk away and, above all, be dignified.
Meanwhile, all you want to do is express the agony raging within you. Many want to exact a quick and vicious s revenge. Jenny Forsey, for example, , exposed the dodgy dealings of her r ex-husband Fred. Last year, the former r Fine Gael deputy mayor of Dungarvan, who had left Jenny and their three children for a woman 17 years her junior, became the country’s first politician n to be jailed for corruption.
He was found guilty of taking €80,000 0 in bribes from a developer and is now w serving a three-year sentence.
And across the water, economist Vicky y Pryce was also recently deemed to be a ‘woman scorned’. Her determination to o exact revenge on her husband for leaving her resulted in her revealing how she had taken his speeding points — and it was a move which ended up destroying both their lives.
In Britain, the case received widespread attention and inevitably, she has been pilloried by many, mostly female, commentators for becoming the living embodiment of the popular ‘hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’ cliche.
For the sake of the children, it has been argued ad nauseam, she should hahave suffered in silence, let it all go. Been dignified.
Yet the defence still used the old ‘hell hath no fury’ line in what must have been a bid to detract from her credibility, or at least to take the edge off the compelling evidence she gave that landed her ex a four-year jail sentence.
It’s so easy to say a woman ought to keep her poise and avoid striking out — until you become the woman
abandoned by a spouse to whom you’ve given every ounce of your youth, love and devotion.
I for one feel that Jenny Forsey was right to testify, and her spite for Fred’s younger model, Karen Morrissey, doesn’t diminish that.
The grief and rage you feel when your husband of many years dumps you and your children without a backward glance is enough to send any woman mad. It almost did for me. I was a basket-case for nearly two years — and I’m not alone.
It may have been almost 25 years ago, but I can still picture the scene in our bedroom, as my then husband of 17 years, Mo, delivered the devastating news that he had fallen in love with one of his students, a young woman all of 22, with a head of cascading blonde curls.
IREMEMBER feeling as if all my insides were crumbling into a heap of rubble. My skin was hot and feverish, my throat dry and my heart throbbing so hard I felt it might leave my chest. My thoughts were deafening and out of control, as if there had been a terrible car crash.
I was sobbing, hysterical, making no sense because I couldn’t make sense of what he was saying. Watching me break down, his eyes first panicked, then grew increasingly cold and contemptuous.
He wanted the scene over with quickly so he could move on, move out, make the decisions that needed to be made. Mo was in control and knew the script.
He said he’d fallen in love, couldn’t live without her and was going to leave me and our ten-year-old son. It was like being beaten up, each word a blow to the face, the head, the chest, the stomach.
My role was to be a smart, independent and modern woman. To realise marriages die, maybe even enjoy being free after so many years with one man.
That certainly would have suited him and his paramour well. But, like Vicky — and Jenny, whose husband hadn’t even paid her the courtesy of telling the truth, but had lied and left her to find out — I couldn’t, wouldn’t, oblige.
The day Mo left, he found time to iron his shirts, pack his bags neatly and leave instructions about bills. I wept through it all, begging him not to go. Our child was bewildered and upset by my tears but didn’t really understand what was about to happen. And so it was that one dark January day in 1989, when I was 39, my university lecturer husband traded in his old life for a new one with a woman half his age. I descended into what I can only describe as a kind of maddening sorrow. Only those who have been through it can understand the depth of grief and the temporary insanity that befall such wives when collective histories, marriage vows and hopes are suddenly deleted by the husband who decides he wants a new life and love.
One such wife I know started cutting herself at the age of 43. It was, she said, to stop her slashing the face of her ex. She has since recovered from that trauma, but the scars remain all across her arms.
A woman emailed me to say how, 30 years ago, her husband’s ‘lifechanging betrayal’ left her ‘unhinged with misery’. She still feels the loss of him, even though he has since died.
Stella, another friend, divorced against her will, and became a recluse. She was so disabled by grief her children were taken into care for a time. They have never forgiven her.
I, too, was completely grief-stricken. There were days I vomited blood. My doctor diagnosed a stress- induced ulcer. I didn’t plot revenge — I was too sad for that — but I did talk to his family, colleagues and our friends about his betrayal. This, of course, made him furious. I started smoking.
A Mexican friend suffering her own ordeal — her baby son had died in his cot — gave me whiskey to ease the almost physical agony. Soon, I was drinking a bottle a night. One of my friends, Ann, moved in with me because I was, at times, suicidal. She cooked for us, prayed, and counselled me: ‘Don’t let a man own your life.
‘You’re more than a wife. You have your son ,’ words I could neither hear nor heed.
I lost weight quickly; my hair fell out in clumps. I could think of nothing else. Somehow I had to find the strength to look after my child, whose world had also collapsed.
My marriage had been a love story. Mo and I met in my native Uganda, and married in London in 1972.
We were students, penniless but ecstatically happy. He was my best friend, the nucleus of my life. I confess I felt less worthy since he was so
handsome, but in most other ways we were equals. I came from an unhappy family. He was my escape from that, too.
We bought our first flat in 1978, after our son was born — our marital home where I still live.
Both of us were determined to give our child more love and security than either of us had known.
I gave up on my dream of writing so Mo could pursue his studies, fulfil his dreams. I taught English as a foreign language, and we lived on my money. I felt noble, appreciated, a martyr to love.
And we were madly in love. We danced and laughed, entertained friends. I hardly recognised the man who destroyed all we had in the flicker of an eye.
And I hardly recognised the person I became as all we had been and built came tumbling down.
Sometimes when I look back I am still ashamed I was so badly affected by the break-up.
Pathetically, I visited psychics, trying to find out if one day the pain would pass.
They were mostly charlatans, but I hung on tightly to their absurd predictions, swallowed the powders they gave me, chanted the spells they sold, all supposedly guaranteed to bring back errant spouses. People who see what I am now will find all this hard to believe, but it is true.
My darling mother, who’d been through so much i n her l i fe, helped with my beloved son, who needed me to be strong so he could cope. It was the only time in my life I failed him badly and I feel guilty to this day.
For the first year, Mo and I still saw each other — he came to our home to be with our son. These were the hardest times, especially when he left.
Then, adding insult to injury, my ex suggested we should be friends. This was a few months after he had walked out. ‘ Friends,’ I replied, ‘are not treacherous.
‘Unlike you, they don’t destroy me, tire of me and go off to find younger friends. You and I will never be friends.’
He had the gall to say he was hurt by my rejection. We have not spoken since. He married his lover and they went on to have more children, as so many men do.
I know there are countless dumped women who will identify with my feelings and understand all too well why we ‘scorned women’ can become so very consumed with sorrow and fury. So much so that we are prepared to ruin our husbands’ lives — to ruin even our own lives — all in order to wreak revenge.
YES, maybe Vicky Pryce shouldn’t have taken her husband’s speeding points and, however bad and mad she was feeling, maybe she should have realised what would happen when she went to the Press to expose him.
But those who have savaged her have gone way beyond that.
They can’t forgive this women for her hellish fury, her refusal to let her husband go quietly, for wanting to punish him.
Well, sorry, but why does no one ask these philandering men not to stray for the sake of the children? They waltz off with a new woman on their arm, leaving chaos and misery behind them.
It i s time to challenge the hypocrisy that surrounds men who break up their families.
These abandoned women need to find their voices. That won’t stop men from discarding old wives and families, but they will at least have to acknowledge the pain and chaos they cause.
Though we haven’t spoken for two decades, my ex-husband has certainly heard my voice through our family and friends, and I’m sure he will read this article, too. I bet he hates the fact that this old bag won’t play by the rules.
My boy is a fine young man in his 30s now and I have found real happiness with my tender second husband. But I still wish my first marriage had not broken up, that my son’s dad hadn’t dumped us.
Twenty years after my agonising divorce, after decades of feminism, that inequality, those double standards remain in place.
And no one will be feeling the injustice of that more than Vicky Pryce as she ponders the wreckage of her once happy life from a lonely prison cell.