“I’VE BEEN WAITING A LONG TIME TO TELL MY STORY..”

It was me that cared for them.

Our eldest son of seven years and the twins at two. I got them up, fed them, took them to school, played, read, bathed them and got them off to sleep at night. I did this because my wife was bullemic. An illness she had since she was a girl and whose secrets she guarded as her own life depended on it. It was her illness and the problems associated with it that drove me to the brink.

It was halfway through the marriage when I discovered her with her head in the toilet. It chimed with the frequent exits from our bed. Foodstuffs depleted overnight. Hollowed out jars of jam and peanut butter. Emptied containers of sugar. The contents of whole boxes of breakfast cereal suddenly gone.

She said she was obese as a child and bullied at school. She blamed her parents. Despised her strange self too. She didn’t actually tell me. I asked her and asked again and slowly fit together the piecemeal responses. I created a sort of a shape.

The bulimia explained only some of her behaviour. The contempt she expresses for people. Disregard for friends or family. The phobias. The anger and aggression. Bouts of hibernation into the bedroom for days on end. The blank expression on her face when trying to talk with her. The deep self hatred that simmered constantly beneath her surface.

The fury at finding herself a single kilogramme over her ideal weight.

I should have spotted the signs earlier if I’d known what to look for. The stretch marks from an early forced starvation. Suicide attempts – glass to the wrist, rushing over a balcony – and her post natal isolation, inability to mother our first born. His crying and her ignoring him was heart breaking. The devastation to our bedroom – bed upturned, drawers everywhere and shelving pulled – and the rocky hunched body I found in the corner I was unable to communicate with.

We travelled to her homeland and as we neared her persona morphed. Darkness inside washing the world with her own perceived evils.

Tall and handsome in womanhood, she showed me a photo of herself as a fat girl. I felt a renewed surge of empathy and pity for her. I suggested she look at it often. Try and forgive and care for her old self. I offered love in the present day to compensate for the lack of it in her childhood past. Worked towards rebuilding a shattered self esteem.

But she wouldn’t walk with us on family outings in the woods preferring to sleep in the car. Took to her bedroom for days to alight at night and watch horror movies into the early morning. Vacant when the twins demanded baby attentions. She refused the healthy options I returned from the supermarket with. Kept to her choices of gummy bears, chocolate and coffee. She really believed she could live like that. Told me she had lived on a diet only of chocolate before. That it worked.

This toxic mix kept her ‘high’ but led inevitably back into the depressions. A return to her raids on the midnight fridge to binge and purge again. It was this cycle – unbreakable I now realise – that I felt threatened the children. The impact of her lifestyle on them, their health and self esteem and on their future and her aggressiveness when challenged too.

My most immediate worry – was of one of them coming across Mum in the bath. The shower hose inserted anally after another substantial laxative fix. There was the effect her lifestyle was having on family life. The kids eating alone at tea time. Dad eating later when they were all tucked up in bed. And how to explain Mum’s foul moods, her angry behaviour or her lengthy absences?

There are events we mark our lives by that all families cherish: Christmas time, birthdays, holidays, family gatherings. These were to be navigated like minefields. Combining as they did her twin hates of food (on display) and crowds. My then wife’s behaviour was at its most appalling at such times.

On the previous Christmas she took a handful of clotted cream and shoved it into the face of our two year old son. I was standing with a tray of roasted potatoes in my oven gloved hands. She smeared the cream into his shocked face wiping it to and fro. Mocking me in my vain attempts at trying to create a family meal, a special occasion. I dropped the tray, scooped up my son and delivered him into the front room. Cleaned the mush from his pretty little face and gently comforted him.

We’d been together just shy of a decade. I’d spent all that time in the management of her behaviour – struggling vainly with the pathology or mental illness that lay at the bottom of her condition. Grieving over the impact it has had on our relationship – where intimacy, trust and open communication did not exist – whilst acting as a buffer between her and our children.

Christmas would also see the end of our marriage. Me taken forcibly from the house by the police. Charged with domestic violence and 24 hours later bailed over not to return home to her or the children.

She told when she left that morning “I’m going to the police station now, to report you..” I nodded back at her and said “okay”. She had a friend staying over and he went with her. I had picked him up from the bus station only a few days before. He looked sheepishly back at me as our front door closed behind them.

I packed my eldest boy off to our next door neighbour to play with his best friend. I asked if she might take the twins also as I was due to visit our Doctor that afternoon. She told me she had the cupboard doors off and foodstuffs all over the floor. An elaborate lie that she felt countered my own. She knew ahead of me the police were on their way that afternoon. My wife it transpired had told her in advance.

They arrived at our terraced front door in TV style drama. Four flack jacketed officers, twinned one each of men and women. I pointed to our kitchen, at the big table we could sit and talk things over. My youngest boy was on his back on the sofa with a stinky bottom and his legs waving in the air. His sister sat upstairs on the first floor loo.

“I’m afraid you’re coming with us..” the female Officer said straight from an episode of an ailing TV cop show. My three year old daughter peered down from the top of the stairs. “I’ll go get her..” I said breaking away from the encircled camp surrounding me in our front hallway. I placed her with her brother on the settee. “I can’t just leave them..?” Their Mum she said was in another police car around the corner waiting for me to leave.

The young male copper took great pleasure in shoving my feet apart. With my belt around my ankles my trousers were slipping. He wouldn’t let me pull them back up again. I grabbed at them falling and he shoved me hard. He wanted to do to me what he imagined I had been doing to my wife. What she and her male friend had told them at the police station. What I had been doing on a daily basis to her for the past eight years of our marriage. After the fingerprinting and the DNA sample I was taken to a cell.

You can’t sleep in a police cell. Not unless you’re hardened to it already. The lights stay on. There’s a slim blanket and no pillow to prop your head up on. The wooden bench is not what you’re used to. In the next door cell a war of attrition was being fought. The occupant yelling and kicking repeatedly against his own door. I was equally appalled and impressed by him. He wasn’t letting them cage him. He had capacity. Or maybe it was the whizz still in him that kept him going. They ignored him I bloody well couldn’t.

My interrogation took place in the early hours. I’d seen off one Solicitor already – a woman who I felt thought I was guilty. The second took so long in arriving I would have taken anybody at all. And that pretty much described what I got. Criminals and the rich know to have a tame Solicitor to call on. The rest of us – the guileless and the clueless – accept a ‘Duty’ Solicitor. Head towards the black joke that is Magistrate’s justice.

I was interviewed at length on tape about an incident that took place a week before. Prior to our Christmas day celebrations. One day before the arrival also of our regular visitor ‘Uncle Pete”. A male friend from my wife’s home city of Stuttgart in southern Germany. I questioned the date. The alleged assault had happened on a Saturday not a Wednesday. It happened after our son’s Aikido lesson. One of those events that brings people and food and celebrations together. A bulemic’s nightmare.

It was me picked up the giant sized plastic container of Quality Street. Handed it to my wife who popped it in her rucksack as we left. Our eldest son was proudly displaying his yellow belt as we said our goodbyes. She went straight to bed when we got home. I fed the babies put them into their bunk bed. I headed downstairs to spend some time with our eldest. I looked around for the rucksack that held the sweets.

The bedroom was dark and she was asleep. I found the bag on the other side of our double bed. In the light of the hallway I noticed the reduced contents of the jar. I turned back to ask her why. I could hear her gorging on a handful of them. Shoving them into her mouth feigning sleep. That’s when I did the unforgivable thing; I tipped the whole lot onto our bed and said “Here have them all..”

The woman police officer didn’t want to hear about her bulemia. Her female partner reminding me I must stick to the incident of that night only. My female Solicitor agreed with them also. Talking about our marital history would only lengthen the whole event. The fact my wife had gone through two boxes of chocolates in as many days. The incidentals that of an eating disorder and her own violence towards me.

I attacked her in the bedroom they said. Out of the blue. Railed against her. Shoved chocolates into her mouth. Split her lip open. Then I beat her up in the hallway afterwards.

I told them my wife had hurled herself at me. Had followed me down the upstairs hallway. Caught me outside of the bathroom and punched and kicked me. It was a dumb thing for me to do. Throwing the sweets. Stupid too. Like provoking a sleeping wild cat.

I regretted it instantly. I wanted only to calm my wife down. Her back against the wall I held tight her arms. She slumped to the floor and cried out like a wounded beast. I wanted her to quieten for the children’s sake. She retreated into our bathroom. Which is where I discovered even more credit card bills she was unable to pay.

The Officer returned again and again to the fight between us. Where my hands were, what I did. Asking if I had twisted my wife’s arm, sat on her, punched her. I told her my wife was the violent person in our relationship. That for years I’d put up with physical attacks, verbal assaults. Her crazy behaviour, hitting the children, attempts at suicide.

The first words that left my lips on my statement were “I have been waiting a long time to tell my story..” I knew that by not speaking out before I had created a false sense of family, never sharing with anyone else my marriage difficulties, the problems my wife had and especially not the one secret that I dared not tell. I told the police Officers and the duty solicitor too that I believed my wife was mentally unsound. That before she met me she had been incarcerated in prison and for a very long time in Germany.