By When I first consulted a solicitor about divorcing my husband, I did so with great sadness. I’d been married nearly twenty years, and it had taken me nine of those years to make that decision, not least because I had married as a Catholic and we had always known that divorce would not be for us.Haydn, my husband, was a lovely man, but unknown to us he was suffering an undiagnosed illness, compounded by ever-mounting work pressure. He was self-medicating by consuming ever-increasing amounts of alcohol, and I … well, I was self-medicating the emotional effects of a long-delayed but finally diagnosed gynecological condition and series of operations that left me unable to have children. My drug of choice was work.
Haydn was an alcoholic, I was a workaholic. The only difference between us was that mine was a more socially acceptable condition. As he drank more, I worked more to be able to cope with what was happening to us. Finally, I knew it couldn’t go on. For the sake of our individual future health and welfare, we needed to be apart.
And so I found myself sitting in the solicitor’s office, listening as he began to give me the wisdom of his years of training and experience.
“You’ve given him the best years of your life, you’re entitled to …”



