The bedding change happens on Fridays.
Being a bachelor for 11 years changes one’s attitude.
My 21-year marriage ended abruptly in 2009 when I was 41 years old. I think divorce attorneys are schooled in imitating the old anecdote: revenge is a dish best served cold. Over the following years, the proceedings imposed a reinvention of my life in numerous ways.
Apart from the inevitable financial outfall, the challenges with three teenagers were fraught with unavoidable feelings of guilt and failure as a dad.
At the separation, I was a contract pilot working in Africa on five-week rotations, which allowed me room to think, and lick my wounds.
Physical absence might not have been the ideal solution for the emotional support my children needed so much during those initial years. However, the books say a divorced parent needs to heal, thus allowing the children to witness the new norm and replenishing some of the lost security in their shattered, young lives.
I ended up in a tiny lock-up-and-go when in Cape Town and ran a lean and straightforward operation: one cooking pot, one frying pan, a single bed, a laundromat account… you get the notion.
The idea was simple. A modest routine and minimalist approach allow one’s brain the time to digest the more significant challenges. Eventually, I acquired a Persian rug that added sorely needed vitality to the apartment.
Somehow, and all due to absolute divinity, they and I survived the transition somewhat intact.
It took all 11 years to prepare me, and my children, for my second wedding. They willed me along and enthusiastically partook in changing me from a brooding single dad to being the other half of a very bonnie and headstrong Scottish-South African woman.
By sheer chance, or intervention, she, too, had been single for 11 years, ensuring solid mutual understanding.
For a contract worker to get hitched at 52, and in the first year of an epic epidemic, careful planning and unconventional tactics were required. Suffice it to say that we pulled it off commendably and in no small part due to a healthy dose of Scottish tenacity.
The pigment had scarcely dried on our marriage certificate and blissful union when my Algerian employer decided COVID-19 was a fantastic time to restructure his company. His rationale instantly made the company’s foreign labour more or less redundant, unwanted, too expensive… or something along those lines.
I promptly, and conveniently, received the retrenchment notice the day after my return from the Maghreb.
Mercifully, my better half raised to the occasion in a truly admirable way and continues to burn her medical-writing career’s candle on both ends.
Her phenomenal contribution leaves me with the space to try and reinvent a calling and change the bedding on Fridays.