© 2006-2008 John C. Beresford

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First family

The family you grow up in sets your expectations of 'family' for your first solo flight.  I'm not talking about extended family here.  My experience of uncles, aunts and cousins (I had two of each) was that they didn't really impinge that much on my childhood, and since I entered the world of work thirty years ago I've only kept in touch with one cousin on a regular basis.  No this section is really about close family (see boxed definition).

Living in a regular three-bedroomed urban semi in the 60s and 70s, with my Mum, Dad and Nana (on Mum's side), my expectations were set thus:

I could go on, but you get the picture: it was a stable, warm, loving environment with few surprises and a lot of fun and freedom to be myself.  Despite the usual childhood nightmares about coming home from school to find everyone had moved house without telling me, I knew in the real world they would always be there.  My parents were more in love than anyone I ever knew, and almost everything they each did was in some way "for" the other.  Even things they did only for themselves were mutual decisions.  When my Mum was having a hard time with her boss, or looking after her Mum, my Dad was there to lighten the load.  When my Dad was made redundant during Thatcher's "bust" years, my Mum was there to sit up with him drinking tea in the small hours and tell him that they would be OK.  I wasn't jealous of this mutual support and respect: I was in on it.  I could always rely on them for help, advice, or just to listen.

What I didn't realise at the time, was that this would be a very hard act to follow.

Second family

A very small unit this - just the two of us - and it didn't last very long.  I met my first wife shortly after I abandoned my university education and while she was still going through hers.  We shared a bedroom for a year or so, then a flat, and eventually bought our first house together.  The next step was "inevitable" and we took it just that way: inevitably.  Without discussing it much, as I recall, or even apparently thinking about it.

But for me, it was the final attempt to put things right.  It sounds mad now, even to me, but with a 25-year long retrospectoscope it's easy to be wise.  Anyone with any sense would have walked away from the relationship long before marriage was even contemplated.  Two things always stopped me: fear of admitting failure; and fear of causing hurt.  So I staggered blindly on through the last three of the five years we were together, looking for reasons for our problems and ways to fix them instead of simply giving up.  Getting married was the ultimate solution (?!!) and a year later I had to admit, at long last, that it hadn't worked.  All my attempts at papering over the cracks and avoiding hurt had only led to a much worse hurt: divorce.

My understanding of "integrity" being considerably less well developed in 1982 than it is now, when I moved to a new office and found myself strongly attracted to a colleague I didn't resist the temptation.  Since in my head I'd given up on the marriage, I convinced myself it was OK to see someone else before finally breaking with my wife.  Naturally that just made things harder on her.  I don't waste a lot of time on regrets; brooding about how things might have been different doesn't change what's already happened, but I've always been sorry for not having the courage to end things properly before taking up with the woman who was to become my second wife.

Third family - the main event

The years immediately following 1982, although initially fraught with divorce proceedings, seemed to be bathed in sunshine.  My career went from strength to strength; after squatting in a dingy flat for 18 months until the decree came through, I bought a lovely house in Alsager; Alina moved in almost immediately; we had smashing holidays in the Isle of Wight and Portugal; got married and finally in 1988 discovered that we were about to become parents.

Despite having bought the Alsager house from a family of four (or was it five?) we decided it would be too small for us and a baby.  On top of that, our jobs had been relocated to Manchester three years earlier and we were both pretty sick of commuting, so we started to look for a bigger place closer to Manchester.  It didn't take long to find the house we wanted, but it was five months before the sale went through, owing to the previous owners having split up and the wife insisting on remaining in the house until she'd found somewhere she was happy with.

Within a year of moving in to a house that had been a stretch financially to start with, our first daughter Natalie was born and mortgage rates had shot up to 15%, virtually doubling our repayments.  For the next two years we lived on a knife-edge as interest rates stayed at or above 14% and we juggled changes in our financial fortunes: benefits in one area being negated by losses in another.  By the time our second daughter Blythe was born at the end of 1993 rates were down at a more affordable 6%, but Alina had cut her working hours in half.  I had a company car, but had lost overtime and standby payments.  Things were still tough, but I'd become expert at budgeting by this time and we were keeping our head above water.

Even now with almost six years of perspective and countless hours of navel gazing behind me, I can't put my finger on exactly when I first began to think that things were going wrong between us.  It was imperceptible at first.  The kind of little thing that makes you think "well, everyone has their off days" or "marriages need a bit of give and take."  Only trouble was, as the years wore on, it seemed to me that it was me doing most of the giving.  And once I'd started to notice those little things, well they started to pile up in my mind until eventually (and we're talking probably five years after I first woke up to it) every little thing just irritated the hell out of me.

"So why didn't you talk it over?  Sort it out?" I hear you ask.  To which my reply is a wry smile.  I'm an intelligent guy: I don't take as much training as Pavlov's dogs.  When supplied with enough negative feeback I quickly learned that certain conversations were not to be had, especially when they involved me doing something that I wanted to do for myself.

It's not my intention to go into a blow-by-blow account of the disintegration of my second marriage.  It's ancient history and the telling of the story would not solve anything now and may stir up the embers of long-dormant arguments.  In some ways the reasons mirrored the first break-up, so maybe I'm not that intelligent, or good at learning relationship lessons.  The situation was complicated by two main factors: the presence of my children, which caused me to go through endless soul searching and agonies of indecision wondering whether I could bring myself to leave her when that would mean having to leave them too; and the fact that for eighteen years I had laboured under the misapprehension that she and I were soulmates.  Shortly after the break-up I discovered this short poem by Wendy Cope.  Such a poignant verse and so ultimately concise and precise.  It is widely quoted on the web, so I can only assume that it also sums up the feelings of many other people whose marriages have foundered.

Eventually, having spoken (either face to face or via chat) with several people who had, as children, endured parents' break-ups, I was convinced that to stay would harm my wonderful kids more than if I left.  The atmosphere in the house would only get worse.  More rows for them to listen to while crying in their beds; more frosty silences; more emotional fall-out for them to deal with even though it was never aimed at them.  So finally .. finally, I took my courage in both hands and, hating every minute of it and hating myself more for doing it, I left.

Fourth (and final!) family

Four is a lucky number for Nikki and me, so it's both significant and appropriate that this is my fourth attempt at "family", and this time the second of the two definitions at the top of this page really holds true - at last!

Having left the marital home, I camped out at my cousin's (yes, the one I'd kept in touch with!) for seven months.  I will be forever grateful for the chance to rest in that oasis of calm and recharge my emotional batteries, but by the end of my time there I knew it was best to move on.  It would have been all too easy to take root, and that wouldn't have been fair to any of us.  So I found a flat in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, my old stomping ground from my university days.  That too was an emotional salve.  Returning to the source of so much fun and so many good memories was like stepping into a warm pool: at once comforting yet hardly impinging at all on the senses.

When the divorce (and maintenance) was finalised and I was in a position to once again enter the property market (more of a cold pool to step into!), I bought a lovely new-build property on the outskirts of Chorlton and Nikki & I moved in in June 2002.

At last I've found someone with whom I can talk about anything and everything, share my hopes, dreams, aspirations and fears.  This is the kind of love that my parents had and which I've been trying to emulate my whole life.  A love that is accepting of faults, gentle of tone, positive, supportive and enriching.  It's taken a while, but I finally feel free to be myself, to pursue my personal ambitions and help her realise hers.  What better definition of family?

Around the middle of 2006 we found the house we'd been looking for for almost two years and towards the end of the year we moved into it.  It's a big old Edwardian semi on one of my favourite roads in Whalley Range.  At the moment it needs a lot of work, but you can already sense the wonderful warm, friendly family home it will become as we slowly put our mark on it.