Shameless: The unrepentant mother who walked out on her five children and husband and began a new family



Marie walked out on her husband and five young children to be with a man she met on a university course. Far from being repentant, she claims many other mothers would love to do the same

To see Marie Cartwright playing with her two-year-old son amid the toys on her sitting-room floor, you would think she was the very image of a devoted mother. Indeed, she would argue that she couldn't love her son any more than she does.

Ask her other five children, however, and you might get a very different opinion about her fitness as a mother.

Because the dramatic events which led to the 40-year-old conceiving her son Alex have driven a wedge between Marie and the rest of her family - who simply cannot understand how she could be so callous.

Marie Cartwright with new partner Nick Boardman and son Alex. She walked out on her husband and five children to begin a new life



So what did she do that so enraged them? In short, she abandoned her husband and five children for the sake of a younger lover whom she'd met on a degree course in York.

Incredibly, Marie feels she was simply being brave in setting up home with her lover Nick, a 35-year-old civil servant, and will not accept that she was selfish to leave so many children effectively motherless, even though her youngest child at the time was just a baby of 18 months.



Having also left behind Chloe, then one-and-a-half, Emma, five, James, 13, Susan, 15, and Jonathan, 17, Marie immediately fell pregnant with her sixth child.

'People find it very hard to understand that I have sacrificed my children for Nick,' she says. 'Some people will accuse me of being selfish, of putting my own needs and desires before those of my children.

'Not a day goes by that I don't feel guilty for what I have put everyone through. But I know deep down that I made the best choice - for them and for me.'

It's certainly hard to see how leaving home could have been the best choice for her children. Marie's own parents and her four brothers have cut her off.

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Meanwhile, her daughter Susan, overwhelmed with bitterness at her mother's betrayal, has accused her of abandonment.

And yet Marie claims she is simply misunderstood - that it is important for women like her, who feel trapped by marriage and motherhood, to rediscover their own identities without their children.

'Even today, the idea that a mother can leave her children, especially when they are so young, is severely frowned upon,' says Marie.

'People often say I am brave to have chosen to live my life without five of my children. I think it is something many women consider - and they might be happier if they did it - but they fear the reactions of others.

'Women are supposed to be so closely bonded with their children that they would never consider leaving them. I believe this is changing and more mothers are realising there is another way.'



It is, to say the least, a provocative view, and one unlikely to hold much sway with the majority of parents. Marie questions why it is that a mother leaving her children is so much less acceptable than a father doing the same. But then it becomes clear, as Marie tells her story, that she is not like other mothers.

In the early days of her marriage, living in Pontefract in North Yorkshire, she thought she was cut out for family life. The daughter of deeply traditional parents - her father worked in the coal industry while her mother stayed at home with the children - Marie looked set to follow in their footsteps when she left school and first married aged 17.

Her husband Steve, an engineer, was 12 years her senior, but seven years after their church wedding - and having had her eldest children, Jonathan, Susan and James - the couple realised they'd grown apart, and divorced.

Left behind: Marie with her then husband Roy and four of her five other children

Four years later, she met bar manager Roy and then became pregnant with daughter Emma. The couple married in 2001 and two years later, Chloe was born. At the time, says Marie, she was happy enough, and she and Roy began planning for the future.

Believing she had finished having children, Marie decided to go to university and become a teacher. When Chloe was a year old, Marie was offered a place to study literature at university in York. This was the turning point in her life.

'I'd felt more alive than I had done for years,' she says. 'I adored the quiet times in the library doing research, and the debates with fellow students.'

One of these students was Nick. Marie admits she found him attractive and enjoyed their intellectual sparring, but adds: 'My mind was always on the children and Roy.' Gradually, her home life began to suffer.

'The journey to York was about 45 minutes. Often, it meant I was barely home to put the children to bed. It put my relationship with Roy under terrible stress. He felt he was having to do too much and we began to argue.'

Seen here pregnant with baby Alex

The couple decided to move nearer to York, and so the family bought a beautiful four-bedroom house close to the university. It was then that her eldest three children, Jonathan, Susan and James, decided to move back to their father Steve's home.

'The older children were welcome to come with us when we moved, but they didn't want to leave their friends and schools,' she says. 'The house would have been a little cramped with seven of us, so they decided to stay with their dad because he lived nearby.

'I didn't feel guilty about this because I felt they were old enough to make their own choices. They were welcome to stay with us and came to visit most weekends and I would speak to them during the week on the phone.'

But any chance of the move helping to ease the situation was ruined when, to help with their larger mortgage, she and Roy took on a lodger. Marie says: 'I asked around the university and Nick said he was looking for a room.'

You might expect her to have thought twice about taking in a man she found attractive, but within days Nick was living under the same roof as Marie, Roy and the five children.

Not surprisingly, the arguments between Roy and Marie escalated. Marie's studies increasingly became an escape from the chaos of domestic life.

'Roy couldn't understand why I spent so much time buried in my books, but because life was so hectic and noisy at home, I had to write in the library.'

Meanwhile, her relationship with Nick flourished. 'We had lots in common. We would discuss the books we were reading and essays we had to write. Perhaps Roy was jealous, but the studying pushed me further away from him and caused terrible rows.' ,

One day in 2006, after a fierce argument, Roy stormed out, taking their two daughters with him to stay with his mother. Marie sought comfort from Nick, confiding in him about her unhappiness and even, a few days later, attending a Valentine's ball with him at the university.

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'He thought it would cheer me up to go,' she says. Before the night was out, she had fallen for him. 'When Nick found a little flower and presented it to me, I suddenly looked at him and felt a shiver of excitement that I hadn't felt for anyone in years.

'Over the next few days, while Roy was with the children at his mother's, my feelings grew stronger, and when a couple of weeks later Nick kissed me and we made love, it felt so right to be doing it.'

As if betraying her husband with another man wasn't bad enough, the fact that Marie admits to enjoying that her children were no longer with her is even more disturbing.

'I would wake up and begin to relish the fact that for the first time in my adult life I didn't have to get up to see to domestic chores and children.

'Although part of me was devastated that the children weren't with me, another part of me loved the freedom, the fact I could study for as long as I liked and that no one was rowing with me about it.

'I wasn't just someone's wife or mother - I had my own identity and I didn't want to lose it again.'

The couple kept their affair secret. But when Roy told Marie he wanted to try again to make their marriage work, Marie told him she didn't want to go back to her old life with him and the children. 'I remember I was in such turmoil because I knew then I loved Nick,' she says. 'But I also knew leaving my family for him would devastate everyone.'

The mother-of-six pictured with Alex two days after giving birth to him



Discovering she was pregnant with Nick's child convinced her she had to be with him - though many women will ask what one earth a mother of five was doing allowing herself to get pregnant with a sixth child at 38.

'It was such a shock,' she says, with some understatement. 'Telling Roy was absolutely terrible and he was devastated. But by then I'd made my choice.'

With Marie's blessing, Roy took their two children and moved back to Pontefract. Not surprisingly, the fallout was catastrophic.

'My mother thought it was "shameful" that I didn't want to make another go of my marriage, fight for custody of the children, or move back to Pontefract to be nearer the children. While part of me longed to do that, the other part didn't want to give up my degree.

'And while Nick said he would support me whatever I did, we both felt that with me pregnant and both of us doing our degrees, having the children to live with us would be very unsettling for them.'

One can only imagine the utter bewilderment of her children. Yet Marie insists Roy, who has now divorced her for adultery, and her children were better off without her.

'When I visited the children, I felt they were fine. Roy is a good father and the others had become more used to him caring for them than me.

'He had managed to put the girls back in their old schools and they were surrounded by extended family to care for them while Roy worked.'

Even so, it is hard to comprehend how Marie could have believed that her children were better off without their mother - or that they would be able to cope with knowing that she was expecting another child.

Eventually, the enormity of what she had done did came home to her.

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'Roy said the girls didn't want to see me, and then when Emma came to visit one day she wanted to know why her Mummy didn't live with her. She asked: "Is it because I was naughty?" It was heartbreaking and it did make me feel very guilty about what I'd done to her.'

Not guilty enough to make her want to come home to them, though.

'By then, months had gone by and I felt trying for custody of the children would be more selfish than leaving them with Roy, where they were happy,' she counters.

In 2007, Marie's sixth child Alex was born with heart problems. The greatest irony of all perhaps is that she blames the stress of caring for him, combined with the guilt over leaving her children, for forcing her to give up her studies.

'Alex needed a life-saving operation and I lived at the hospital. It meant I didn't see my other children for two months,' she says. 'On our visits, when I finally began seeing them again, I'd feel incredibly nervous. I wondered if they wanted to see me.

'Although my older sons didn't seem as affected, my relationship with my eldest daughter was incredibly strained. We would have enormous rows, where she would accuse me of abandoning her and everyone else.

Marie says she has no regrets



'That word "abandon" would upset me terribly because although I accept I left my children, I never felt I abandoned them. I always saw them regularly, even if it wasn't as often as I'd like.'

Today, Marie sees her younger girls, now aged ten and six, once a fortnight, on birthdays and over Christmas (although they spend Christmas Day with Roy). She speaks to them most days on the phone.



'It is hard,' she says. 'I ask them lots of questions, what they are doing at school, but they're not always forthcoming. I realise I am missing out on all the day-to-day events in their lives.

'I do worry as well that as they grow older they will miss having a mother more - although Susan, who's now 20, has taken over a motherly role in many ways.

'Another concern is that they will grow to resent me in their teens, and I quite expect them to accuse me of abandoning them, as Susan does.'

In her new life with Nick, Marie prefers, understandably, to let people think she is a mother of one.

'Although close friends knowhe circumstances, I find people can be very judgmental, which is upsetting,' she says.

'They automatically assume I must be very cold-hearted. The best way to cope is to grow a thick skin.'

Just how her children have tried to cope without their mother is another matter. Yet Marie believes that her actions were justified.

'I could not stay in an unhappy marriage, waiting for 20 years until the children had left home,' she insists. 'And I still believe that in leaving them with Roy I put them first.

'I hope that one day the children can forgive me, and see that I didn't do this lightly,' she says.

That is, it must be said, a very big hope.

• Some names have been changed to protect the children involved.