A Life Defining Moment

If you could distil your entire life into one single defining moment as to who and what your are, what would it be?

Now that is a very big ask. I mean where do you even begin to start with a question like that ?

Could it be the day you left school, or the day you got your very first job? What about the day you first met the love of your life, the day you got married, the birth of your first child? The list is endless. How do you choose? After a period of long consideration I chose, and I suppose I chose with feeling as my guide.

For me it has to be the day I felt the biggest impact on my life, something that shook me to the very core of my being, something that rocked me on my axis to the point that I went into serious depression and considered taking my own life, something that to this day, some twenty five years after the fact, still reverberates deep within my psyche.

Somebody once said that if, by the time you reach forty, you do not know who or what you are, you need a lot more help than I could ever give you. But I don't believe it's an age or maturity thing, I think it's an event thing, an experience thing, regardless of age or maturity.

For me it was something which forced me to step out of my comfort zone, to step out of the bubble I had construed around myself and my loved ones. Something which, as uncomfortable as it was, forced me to to take a long hard look at the harsh reality of who and what I was. After that, life could never be the same again. And it never has been nor never will be.

At that point in my life, after an inauspicious start in little more than an urban ghetto, I had reached a decent position in life. I was a successful writer with a lovely wife, three beautiful children and a really nice place to live. What more could anybody ask. It took a lot of hard work to get into that position, but it was all worth every second of the grinding slog it took, drawn out over some twenty five years, to get there.

As well as the writing I was what they called a house husband. My wife went back to work whilst I worked from home. I took to the role with relish. We got into the routine of me getting the children up for breakfast and ready for school. After the school run I would head back home just in time to kiss my wife goodbye for the day. Then I simply got on with household chores, washing and cleaning clothes and the house. Shopping, gardening, washing cars, repairing broken taps, going into town to pay some bills. After that I would get stuck into some writing project in my attic man cave retreat.

Before long I would be off to collect the children from school. I got them changed out of their school uniforms and we did the homework. Then it was on with cooking their evening meal and washing the dishes, just in time for my lovely wife's arrival home from work.

I was both a happy chappy and a happy pappy, fulfilled with both my work and bringing up my children. I really wanted for nothing. Then life threw me a curveball that caught me on my blindside.

I discovered that my lovely wife was not just having an affair but was actually living a double life. I went into all the gory detail of that experience in a previous article, so I will bore you no more with that side of it all. What I am writing about here is a single defining moment, the one thing that acted like pulling out that single brick that brought the whole edifice of a successful life tumbling down.

It wasn't so much that my lovely wife was being unfaithful, it was the manner of discovery that set me off along a path of self emasculation and destruction.

I would imagine that anybody being unfaithful would want to keep that a secret. For whatever perverse narcissistic reasons, my wife and her lover decided otherwise. They chose to rub my nose in it, to totally humiliate me to my face. This was an act of personal cruelty in order to settle some sort of score for whatever imagined slight I was supposed to have been guilty of.

Maybe I was too wrapped up in my dual role of providing an income, bringing up our three children and keeping house and home ticking over. If that were the case, and I can think of no other, then it seems to me harsh in the extreme.

Whatever it was it was at this point that I realised that I meant nothing at all whatsoever to the woman I had loved for almost twenty years. I was a convenient pay check, childminder and chief cook and bottle washer, and not a jot more. I was, not to too fine a point on it, totally and absolutely dispensable. And ensuing from this was the feeling that I was totally un-necessary, worthless, better off dead. That was my defining moment.

To live a life of open ridicule and humiliation, of insults and cruel barbs right to my heart, about what a useless piece of rubbish I was, this was simply not an option I cared to consider. There seemed to be only one way out of this unholy mess, and I got far too close to it for comfort. Thanks to a little angel sent by Mother Nature, the lord, my wonderful mother and a good friend, I got through it. It wasn't easy, but without that help it would have been impossible.

At one point in the early hours, at my sisters house, I couldn't sleep. I simply sat on the sofa staring out into the rear garden feeling more and more depressed. I felt that apart from going through the motions of physically breathing, my life was over.

I began to hallucinate, seeing moving shadows in the garden. Those shadows were simply the birds stirring from their nests to catch the worm. But to me they were demons, waiting for me to do the decent thing, for the worthless thing I had become, to end it all. I rose from the sofa and went upstairs to the bathroom. I took off all my clothes and opened the window. I would leave this world in the same way I came in, naked and afraid. I stood and I wept buckets for all the sadness and pain I might cause to the ones that I loved with what I was about to do. But I felt that I had no other choice. I tearfully hauled myself up onto the window sill. I was at the point of pushing myself forward down into the dark, cold abyss when something broke the spell I was under.

At just that moment my very young niece, with her angelic curly blond hair and deep blue eyes, knocked on the bathroom door. "Uncle Liam, I need a pee, can I come in please?" At that moment I was dragged back into some sort of reality and climbed back down off the window sill. I stepped back from the edge of the abyss I had been about to leap into. I put my clothes back on and went back downstairs and I wept myself to sleep.

From the start to this day my ex played, and continues to play, the victim and portrays me as some sort of villain. Apparently I made her do what she did to me. After the fact, she once tried to pathetically excuse her behaviour with "It's just that I wasn't happy at that time." I hope she's happy now. I also sincerely hope that her feelings for vengeance are fully sated, if only for the sake of any other poor soul who happens to cross her path. I do believe that to intentionally and maliciously, joyfully even, drive somebody to the point of suicide, or indeed to suicide itself, is despicable in the extreme. It really is unforgiveable. And to do it with the excuse that it was simply because you weren't very happy with your own life at that time is quite frankly inexcusable.

The three children I once doted on and brought up in the early days of their formative years want no more to do with me. They don't bother me and I certainly don't bother them. That is the price we have to pay for a nonsensical madness on the part of their mother and her erstwhile neanderthal lover, and her malicious family and friends, who poisoned their young hearts and minds against me.

Am I happy? Oh yes, and then some. And that is because after that defining moment and the attempt to destroy me, I re-learned to value myself for what and who I really am. Slowly but surely I rebuilt my life. I regained my confidence and self respect, my dignity and my honour. I am a fool no more. Love me or leave me, I cannot and will not change who and what I am. And it was that defining moment all those years ago which led me right to who, what and where I am, telling you this story, right here today. A story that might never have been written had I leapt into the darkness of certain death all those years ago.

For those who are, for whatever reason, in need of help and support, please call the Samaritans. Remember, you are not alone, never.