How it is....

The alarm goes of at 6.45am and I don’t want to get up. I sleep for another 15mins before dragging myself out of bed. Breakfast and off to work. Work pressure is high but I try to study in my lunch break. I make it home for 6.30pm and take Grace while the long suffering wife cooks. All being well by 7.30pm we have eaten. I then need to work on boxing up the flat and taking things over to my mother's. We are moving in under 14 days.

I have cancelled all the direct debits, cancelled the mortgague payment, cancelled all the bills – the letters will soon rain down on me, the final demands – but I haven’t got the money to pay the bills. Paperwork needs looking at but I haven’t the will or the time to do it. At 1am I crawl into bed, at 3am grace wakes to feed. At 6.45am the alarm goes of and I don’t want to get up. I sleep for another 15mins before dragging myself…and so it goes on.

It is the long suffering wife's birthday on the 27th. Grace’s dedication on the 1st. So much to do and right now all I want to do is sleep.

Last night the wife asked me how much I think her stomach will recover. If how it is now is how it is. She is doing the exercises from the physio – we are a long way off from where things will be but I see her struggling and there is no easy comfort I can offer. The long suffering wife was always going to struggle with a post birth body – she is a recovering annorexic on the wagon for some 10 years now. The tear of her stomach muscles though has made things so much harder, so much worse than they would have been otherwise. She has never had a positive body image and now I see her walking on a thin wire high above the world trying so hard not to fall, trying to cling on.

In a brief moment between feeds, between changed nappys, between packing boxes, between Grace with wind, I catch glimpse of my wife and daughter's eyes, brief moments, the merest hint of a smile and for a moment I lose myself in it and everything seems okay – and then I remember that there are things I need to be doing and so I drag myself out of my chair and continue the battle for survival.

Today I am struggling.

Yours as ever,

The Broken Man.

Christmas - In A Box

I am a reasonable man. Really I am. Some might, at a push, describe me as someone who is reasonably in tune with women. I know that the best cure for a broken heart is chocolate. I know accessories matter. I am not insensitive to these things. Yet, having spent another evening in a stifling hot loft trying to pack up boxes and mark them with whether they will be needed in the next three years or not, I found myself truly stumped by a conversation I had with my wife:


Wife – What are you doing with those Christmas Decorations?

Me - I am putting them all into one box.

Wife – They don’t go in one box.

Me - They haven’t in the past, no, but we are trying to minimise the amount of boxes we have.

Wife – The decorations are different colours and we rotate them. They need to be in different boxes so they don’t get muddled up.

Me - Surely if the decorations are different colours, it will be easy to identify which ones go with which colour scheme?

Wife – If they are in the same box we might be tempted to use them together and mess up the scheme.

Me – But you decorate the tree, and you won’t be tempted to use the two colour schemes together so there wont be a problem…

Wife – They go in different boxes…

Me – We also appear to have six sets of Christmas fairy lights; which ones do you want to keep?


Dear reader, I am sure you can imagine how the rest of the conversation went. It seems in two areas my wife is obsessional – Christmas tree decorations (with the attached insistence on a real tree that will drop pine needles around the entire house by magic - I swear I found one on top of a wardrobe last week!) and wrapping presents. I am certain that my wife spends more money each year on wrapping paper than I do on gifts. It’s my brothers birthday – I will get him a bottle of wine, on the way to his flat, three weeks after his birthday. My wife’s sister’s birthday will involve a three month scouring of the shops followed by a further two weeks searching for suitable wrapping paper, followed by an afternoon of careful wrapping and tying of bows.

Really, I try to understand, but I struggle; the wrapping doesn’t matter, surely it doesn’t...

As I write that line for a moment my mind drifts to (avert your eyes, bashful reader) my wife’s lingerie, and some of the, quite frankly, stunning “wrappings” she has covered herself in…hmmm…okay I can see that the wrapping can be worthwhile, I will let that one slide for now…but surely the Christmas tree decorations thing is a sign of mental instability?

Yours as ever,

The Broken Man