The Janergy Effect e-book link
So, how does it feel to have to live with your ex for a period of time when you really don’t want to? Well it isn’t great.
We put on a brave front for a long time, not easily finding a way to share our split and luckily, he was the travelling salesman and that meant he would come and go for a week at a time and I had some space.
We were living mostly civilly even with his ongoing tantrums and we still did things together such as breakfast with friends, dinners and occasional outings, but there was no love to be shared. We became a one car, non-family after the beautiful Volvo was written off and that meant he would still drop and pick me up from work when he was home, but eventually his need to travel became less, so his staying home became more. He claimed I was still his best friend and even when our living arrangements came to an end, I tried. I tried to be his friend, but it’s hard when you have so little respect for the person you had spent the past 10 years of your life with.
One of the things we had done over the past few Christmas breaks was to go camping and we would pre-book a site for the following year. It was nearly the end of 2014 and it was definitely the end of the marriage, but we were going to spend Christmas and New year at the beach, because one, it was already booked and two, who doesn’t love the beach.
Part of my camping requirements included some luxuries. And by luxuries, I don’t mean a comfy beach chair or an esky full of champers, I mean an espresso machine, a full-size fridge and laminated Mariah Carey Christmas decorations that I hung around the perimeter of our campsite. It was Christmas after all and I wanted to be in the Christmas spirit. He kindly got me a comfy blow up bed and we cohabitated in the small space. Him mostly outside drinking and me inside reading.
This man was a time bomb and from moment to moment I never knew if he would be in a happy or angry mood. If he was happy – great. And if not, then run for cover.
We had friends who wanted to come and visit but things were so tense, I begged them not to come. Even my mother wasn’t welcome and when I said she wanted to drop in as she passed through on her travels, he was very threatening and said she wasn’t welcome. So be it. It was a miserable old Christmas, but I knew it was the last one I’d ever have to have with him.
It still blows my mind that his need to “punish” was at the top of his values list.
For some reason, we decided to pack up and left to go home from our camping trip a day earlier then we had planned.
I was still carless and had been searching for a replacement Volvo for some time and found one at the Gold Coast and we stopped in to have a look on our way home. It was exactly like the one that had been written off, but in shiny silver. I knew I wanted this same car, so with part of my insurance money, I agreed to buy it, gave them a deposit, arranged to get the car checked over by a mechanic and planned to come back during the week to pick it up. I was finally going to be on the road again.
(Also with our insurance money, I thought we would split it 50/50, but the car that I helped pay for over the past few years, suddenly became his and the ratio of the payout shifted considerably. Thankfully, I did have enough to buy my car and had some left over to replace items that had been damaged).
On the day after we got back from camping, we decided to go to lunch at one of our favourite Indian restaurants and during lunch my ex-husband kept saying that he was having trouble swallowing. I gave him my medical opinion which was that maybe he was feeling stressed and it could be causing tightness around his neck area. What I really wanted to say, was, stop being such an angry white man and relax, but I didn’t.
He continued to have this feeling for the remainder of the day and I suggested that we go to the hospital if it was really bothering him. He said he would wait till the morning to see if it had improved.
My holidays were now officially over and it was time to head back to work. My ex-husband said he was still having the same funny feeling in his throat and the next day as I was getting ready for work and about to get in the shower, he asked me to help him with something. I said I'd just be a few minutes and would help when I was finished. He was annoyed that I didn't drop everything for him' but figured that what he needed could wait a few minutes.
After showering and getting dressed, I went to help him, but couldn’t find him anywhere. I searched the house, the yard, called his phone, but he was nowhere to found. The usual interactions when he didn’t get his way was to storm off in anger and avoid speaking to me, or sometimes the opposite, confront me and yell at me, but this time, there was radio silence.
It was very
strange and I figured he’d surface after he calmed down, so I left for work and
continued to call throughout the morning but wasn’t able to reach him. I then reached out to my son and asked if he
could try and make contact. My son
eventually connected with him and told me that my ex-husband was at the hospital. In his annoyance at not getting my attention,
he called a taxi and went to the emergency department to get his throat looked at.
He had spent the morning in emergency while they did some tests and was admitted later in the day with a mystery illness. Of course, as soon as I found this out, I went to the hospital to support him. He had no other family to call and regardless of how horrible people can be, you don’t like to see them suffer.
By the time I reached the hospital in the afternoon, he was in a very bad condition. His inability to swallow meant that he required a hand held machine to suck out the saliva and fluids that collect in the mouth and throat as part of the normal functioning. His condition worsened rapidly and paralysis was setting in and with that, he became bedridden. The speed at which he deteriorated was quite scary.
He was given more tests during the day to try and find a diagnosis and a switched-on doctor decided to test him for something called Guillain-Barre Syndrome. This is a very rare illness where the body’s immune system attacks the sheath surrounding the nerves, and messages from the brain to the body get blocked, making it difficult to perform normal function. Although it hadn’t been confirmed, they began what was a very expensive and probably lifesaving treatment. This illness normally begins with tingling in the feet, but in his case, it started in the throat and the doctor was spot on with deciding to treat him for this.
As the paralysis took hold, they decided the best place for him was in the Intensive Care Unit. It was likely that he would no longer be able to self-manage clearing the fluids from his throat and being put into a medical coma and onto a ventilator was the likely outcome if he continued to deteriorate. It is an illness that is rapid and fatal if left untreated
He begged me not to call his family who lived overseas as he didn’t want to worry them, but eventually decided that this was the end and managed to make some calls to people telling them that it might be goodbye. There was definitely a level of fear that had overcome him.
He spent four nights in the ICU and for anyone who has had been in one, or had friends or family there, it is a very confronting place if you visit. And if people do leave the ICU, they often require a long period of rehabilitation.
When he was well enough, they returned him to the neuro ward where people who had brain injuries or strokes were cared for.
This was a really challenging place to be, because the patients were people who found themselves there after either an illness, or through an acquired brain injury.
One of the patients there – a middle aged man - had been out with a friend and after a few too many drinks, they got into a physical fight and his friend king hit him which resulted in him hitting the concrete and getting a brain injury that was likely to keep him in the ward and to never resume life as he knew it.
Another patient was a young man who was just out walking and decided to have a bit of fun and stepped up onto a brick fence that he was going past and as he walked along it, he fell and hit his head and his injury was so significant that he required 24-hour monitoring and care, and for his own safety had to be restrained. He was always trying to escape the ward and was continually yelling and screaming. It was pretty hard to see and to hear.
There was a car accident victim and another man who decided that he didn’t want an operation that might save his life and then, there was my ex-husband who after having a sore throat, found himself in a place that neither of us would have ever imagined and he still had quite a road ahead of him.
I ensured I visited him before work, lunch time and after work every day and when friends were allowed, they came to support him. This did take a bit of pressure off me, because apart from showing care to another human, I had no obligation to help him, given we were no longer a couple. I helped with everything from feeding, showering, to holding his hand when he thought he might die.
After a period of time in the ward, he was sent to a rehabilitation unit at the hospital for a few weeks. He had to learn how to eat, swallow, use his arms and legs again and be able to cope at home independently. Did you know there is such a thing as thickened water? I tried it and it was nasty.
People do recover from Guillain-Barre Syndrome but it does take a period of time. He was very weak, so I did everything possible to ensure he was looked after and comfortable. We were even able to have some small periods away from the hospital and I took him to our local coffee shop and he was allowed a short visit home dependent on whether he could walk up and down the stairs to get there. But these things were so tiring for him.
It was another few weeks before he was allowed home and his recovery went well and quite quickly. That was kind of amazing, considering the state he was in when I first saw him at the hospital.
He also said that this life changing event had a very profound effect on him and I thought it might have been one of those moments where you hear about people facing death and deciding to implement life changes to their mindset and way of living.
In a weak moment, I even thought that if he is capable of making some great changes, then maybe we could consider trying to rebuild our relationship. Oh that was another “what was I thinking” moment.
He wasn’t one of those people whose visit to deaths door had any impact. If anything, I think he became more frustrated and angrier.
What struck me about the day when he went to hospital, was that he chose to be angry because I didn’t give him immediate attention. If he had of said, hey, this is an emergency, please take me to the hospital, then I would have dropped everything to help. Even in that moment, the ego was bigger than ever.
One great thing about this time, was that I picked up my car and that gave me the freedom I needed.
As the months went on and my ex made a full recovery, life became a bit more independent for both of us and he would spend more time with our mutual friends and obviously was bad mouthing me in ways that saw most of our friends drop contact with me. And I think I became a bit of a joke between them because he told me how funny they thought it was when he shared with them that he had lost 80 kilos – meaning me. Maybe I was 80 kilos, maybe I wasn’t, but regardless, it isn’t and wasn’t a funny joke.
The reality is that none of our friends knew the shit I had been going through in this relationship and maybe our friends might not have thought it was so funny if they had. I had been showing grace under pressure.
I was pretty occupied for the first six months of 2015 which was great and I wasn’t really mourning the loss of my marriage - apart from the moment when he was sick and I wondered whether I had made a wrong decision when I saw a sliver of change come over him, but there wasn’t much idle time for my mind to wonder about the what ifs, and the freedom that came with this decision was starting to bring life back into my soul.
Isn’t it funny how our mind plays tricks on us and tries to keep us connected to the things that we know aren’t good for us. For me to be having even momentary feelings of wanting to reconnect with the man who I knew wasn’t right for me just didn’t make sense, but the level of guilt that was showered upon me when I ended it may have had something to do with it.
Although I had checked out of the relationship a long time ago, I was now starting to think about dating, in between all the other things I was doing. Our living arrangements weren’t really conducive to this, but I did share with my ex that I was ready to move on. He wasn’t too happy about this, but what to do when you had spent so much time trying to fix something that the other person didn’t want to fix.
I didn’t actually go on any dates because what I wanted from dating and what my capability was, just didn’t align. I did join a couple of dating sites and did the messaging ping pong, but I quickly learnt the ropes of dating when I went into the next chapter of my life.
I did manage to have some more time away from this shitty environment, as one of my sisters suggested a few years earlier that we to do a collection for Fiji Fashion Week. We did our first one in 2012 and it was so much fun and so much hard work. We collaborated from afar and designed and sewed our own collections for the shows we did. Sewing has been in our family for generations and my mum went back to college in her 70’s so she could do pattern designing and help us with the technical elements needed to create our own designs.
We wanted our clothing to be for the everyday woman so we stepped away from the smaller models who have always been the norm in the fashion world and we did a collection that was inclusive for all. Although we weren’t able to show clothes to the full range of sizes we would have liked, we did have a platform to show something different.
We showed collections in Fiji Fashion Week for four years and during this time also had the opportunity to take part in some other plus size events.
One was called Full Figured Fashion week and was held in New York in 2013. My passport has lots of Fiji stamps in it and I was there relaxing on a gorgeous tropical island when we got news that we had been accepted into this event. I remember my sister screaming with delight as she ran to tell us that we were off to New York to take part. This event also included my other sister who lived in New York and between us all we put together a collection and headed to the big apple.
Our next real plus size fashion show was in Melbourne in early 2015 and it was called Curvy Couture. We got our creative juices flowing, put a collection together and had a ball in Melbourne showing our styles to an audience of people who would appreciate that there was an event in Australia that embraced the diversity that was so lacking in the fashion scene.
A highlight of this event was getting to meet Tess Holliday, who has forged the way for plus size women in more ways than just fashion.
I loved having a change of scenery in Melbourne and catching up with my family who flew in from Fiji. It was a nice breather away from life back in Brisbane where things were still chugging along, and now, our house had a giant “For Sale” sign out the front.
We continued to showcase at Fiji Fashion week until 2015, which was our last event, and I took another trip to there in early June for what was to be the final collection we would show. It was here that I got news that we had a serious buyer for our house.
Now this wasn’t just any house, it was a renovators delight and even though we had a thorough inspection on the property by a reputable firm before we signed on the dotted line, they failed to pick up not only severe termite damage that eventually required us to prop our house up with scaffolding, but actual live termites chewing their way through our money. It was a horror.
There had been a few offers on the house, all of which we had to turn down, but we got an offer that we decided to take. It was going to be a relatively quick settlement and one that would leave us both without any financial gain from the property, but we had to move on and be free of the chains that bound us.
As this change was unfolding, I was thinking about where I would move to and what I would do. During a conversation with a friend at work, I was told of a job in Melbourne working with some people who I had previously worked with.
I thought what the hell and applied for the role. I received a call from the manager of the team asking if I really wanted to make the big shift and when I explained my situation, she agreed for my application to go through the merit phase of recruitment.
The house was due to settle, I was looking for a place to live, my ex-husband had now moved out and in amongst it all was a dream job working with people I liked and living in a city where I had always wanted to live.
I was right in the middle of another perfect storm whereby I literally had a small window to either find a place to live or hope that I was successful with getting the job in Melbourne.
The waiting and anticipation of what was to come kept my head spinning and it was the strangest feeling to have a foot in two places – one keeping me in Brisbane where I was planning my next steps and the other so close to the biggest adventure of my life. I kept wondering why it was taking them so long to let me know about the job and had come up with the decision in my head that they had chosen someone else. As I water cooler talked this out with my colleagues at work, a friend said “don’t kill it before it is dead”. Those are words that stick with me all the time now, as in my mind, I was literally of the belief that this job wasn’t going to happen, even though I had no idea what was going on behind the scenes with the recruitment. As it turned out, I was the right candidate for the role.
There was so many takeaways during this time and on looking back, some of mine were:
- When you make a major life decision, and you question whether you've done the right thing, to remember that you made the decision for a reason. Don't look back and don't second guess yourself.
- Kindness
matters. Would you rather be right than kind? I could have easily
chosen to step away from the man who was in need, but kindness mattered.
- And as always, if an opportunity presents. Take it. Whether it be to follow a passion, apply for a job that is at the the other end of the country. Know that it has presented for a reason.
- If you are going to buy a house, make sure you get the best inspection possible to ensure that termites aren't using your house as a buffet.