F**king Joey in Work In Progress

As he’s affectionately named by my friends. Every time they ask how things are with him, there’s ALWAYS been an issue or drama.

I don’t even know where to start with this tale, it’s so long winded and convoluted.

Basically it was a case of:
Girl meets boy....
Girl falls in love with boy....
Boy discloses infertility after a few dates....
Girl says no big deal, we’ll cross the bridge if/when we come to it....

Not quite the fairytale ending we all grew up expecting right? Although historically the Brothers Grimm stories were far more gruesome than the watered down Disney version we’ve come to know and love, so maybe it is a fairytale for the modern era.

The dark twist in the tale was when a few too many drinks at the weekend, which could be given up with ease to begin with, became a massive issue that couldn’t be controlled and he decided to completely implode our life as we knew it. After I’d put myself through IVF for his medical issue. While I was 8 months pregnant.

Do you ever wonder how and when something happened without you even noticing? That was Joey and the drinking. We’d had plenty of conversations over the years about it but he always managed to rein it in to a level I felt comfortable with and it never seemed like an insurmountable problem, just a bit of an immature response to stress when we could have just talked.

And then one day he couldn’t control it any more. Or didn’t want to, who really knows. He became someone I didn’t recognise. He later told me he thought I’d never leave so he could just do what he wanted. I think in his head he thought that because we were having a baby, that was it, we’d just stay together forever and be a family regardless of what he did and how he treated me. His family certainly think the same, his brother in law recently asked me if I’m ‘still in that flat?’ I’m not entirely sure where else he thought I would be given that I’ve been in the flat for almost a year, and it’s my home, it’s where I live, it’s where I’m making a life for me and my daughter.

It’s like they all think I’ve spat my dummy out and moved out to prove a point, but that I’ll be back at some point. They’re very much small town mentality, going 10 minutes down the road is a long journey, they only seem to really socialise with each other, and the fact that anyone can make a decision independently just seems to completely blow their minds.

Essentially, his drinking spiralled out of control during my pregnancy. He was mean and selfish. I was crippled with SPD, a hip and back condition, and instead of looking after me he would just expect me to drive him around so he could drink. The bulk of my pregnancy was over summer and if we went to my parents my Dad would offer him a beer. If I said I needed him to drive he’d sulk like a baby and drink anyway so I had no choice but to drive. He spent his spare cash on beers, I was spending mine on things we needed to prepare for the baby coming.

Ultimately, he drank and lied and cheated. He was fired from work for gross sexual misconduct, he had been messaging multiple female colleagues with sexually inappropriate messages, he’d definitely slept with one person behind my back, and it all came out in the wash when they all went together to complain about him. He then went on that very same day to get arrested for drink driving after going out to ‘clear his head’. I have never been so ashamed than answering the door to the police at 8 months pregnant, it was excruciating. I did originally think they’d come to tell me he’d killed himself, that was how bad things had become.

I didn’t know what to do, I was trying to keep stress to a minimum, I stayed even though deep down I knew it was the beginning of the end. I didn’t want to believe my baby had a father who could behave in such a way, who very clearly didn’t love either of us.