‘I wonder why I was brought up to be so bloody independent’
Encouraged by her mother, Lucy Cavendish developed a successful life and career – but at a cost. If I’d known what a struggle life was going to be financially, I would have stuck with my first ever boyfriend, who was perfectly lovely and loved me. anthony and I met one night at our local pub. I was 17 and he was 19 and handsome. When he bought me a drink and started chatting to me, I was ecstatic. We ended up becoming each other’s first love and were together for years. I ended our relationship when I was 24, mainly because I thought he was a bit strait-laced and he wanted to settle down and I didn’t. I wasn’t “programmed” to marry my first love.
I wasn’t in fact “programmed” to marry anyone. all through my childhood my mother told me how important it was I had a career and became economically independent. the idea that I’d marry the first boy I’d ever loved and become a wife and mother was absolutely “verboten”. and, although it is unfashionable to say this, I think she was wrong.
It wasn’t that my mother was against first loves. My brother is still married to the woman he met 40 years ago. but she was against me following anthony around as he trained as a lawyer and then started work in london. I think my mother felt nervous because I’d set off to africa to teach for my gap year and anthony had made it clear he was unhappy about it, so I almost didn’t go. Even though my mother was also concerned about me going, she didn’t want anyone to dampen my spirits. but it was more than that. I think she saw how my life might pan out – me married to a lawyer, hosting dinner parties and being a “plus-one”.
My father was a vicar’s son who’d made a lot of money as a publisher and my mother, a physiotherapist, had given up work when she married. He was a tricky alcoholic with all that this entailed – too many highs and lows. With no job and no income, I think my mother felt horribly trapped. Every time she tried to get a job my father kiboshed it, saying he needed her at home.
I think the reason why she impressed on me so strongly that I needed to have a career, work hard, remain independent and be very wary of marriage was so that I could avoid the pitfalls she had tumbled into. she wanted me to live a life unfettered by the demands of a difficult man, stuck in a marriage that wasn’t working.
so, for many years, I worked hard and I appreciate how independent I am and how successful I have been. I have enjoyed my career as a writer, journalist and now psychotherapist.
but it has been a struggle. I have four kids by two men and I have brought them up, a lot of the time, >>
‘Mum warned me to be very wary of marriage’
as a single mother. Now I’m 52, it occurs to me that maybe there’s something not totally brilliant about having done so much of this all by myself. sometimes when I see longmarrieds or women who are hooked up with solvent men, I see people who are having a far easier life. I imagine how amazing it must be to not go to work every day, to not beaver away counting the pennies wondering if we can afford to replace the freezer that’s just broken down. It must be incredible to wake up and not worry so.
What if something happens to me? the children need paying for and looking after. the father of my eldest son, now aged 22, hasn’t paid me a penny. the father of my other three children contributes. but imagine if I’d married anthony. Gosh, I’d be eating plover’s eggs for breakfast. Instead, I only married two years ago, and although I love my husband and we are happy together, he is absolutely penniless. He knows I love him for who he is and, if he had any money at all, I know he’d be super-generous with it. but he hasn’t.
so sometimes I have a secret yen for men/boys in my past. I recently found out from someone I bumped into that anthony went on to become the head of a huge law firm and now lives in great splendour. the first boy I ever kissed aged 12 is the head of a highly successful record company, owns a pub in somerset and has a life of country fun and a town pad
(from what I’ve found on the Net).
another boyfriend has earned a fortune and now lives in a mansion in Devon with his lovely wife, and we re-met the other day and I couldn’t help but think... why was I brought up to be so bloody independent? It has left me struggling and exhausted and moving money around, robbing Peter to pay Paul as it were.
so what I know now is this – you don’t need to be quite so independent as I have been. If I’d known then what I know now, I’d have held out for marrying a solvent man. I’ll tell my daughter, now aged 11, that she should accept help as and when, for the idea that she will work as hard as me makes me shudder.