How to Kill Your Husband (and other handy household hints), Kathy Lette [books to read to increase intelligence .txt] 📗

All week she catalogued my father’s shortcomings. ‘He’s always timing things. “Oh, that walk took ten minutes and seventeen seconds”. The man would time a guilt trip, Cassandra, if he could. Except of course he never goes on any!’ she bawled.

My kids took to their beds. Jazz potty-trained her son early and had him into a bed by the age of two, while I had kept lowering my cot bases so the kids couldn’t get out and wake me in the traditional toddler way – by pulling out my nostril hairs and singing ‘Come on everyone get happy.’ I’m a believer in kids taking long afternoon naps – but not when thay are at the age of puberty. This was not healthy.

Jamie had become so delinquent that I had to attend his parent-teacher evening under an assumed name. As for Jen, the only words my twelve-year-old daughter had addressed to me for the last six months were, ‘I need money.’ She was at that stage of locking herself in her bedroom and not coming out again until she leaves for University. Although the way her grades had been going since the summer, I think she was laying the foundations for a fabulous career in hamburger-flipping in some fast-food joint. And it was all my fault. I was a bad mother. My mother report card would read Must Try Harder.

Things had become so morbid, it was a wonder Vincent Price didn’t drop in. Mum and I numbed our mutual heartache with alcohol – something I would normally have done with my girlfriends. But after the second bottle I started convincing myself that I was better off without Jazz and Hannah.

‘I never liked either of those bossy-boots,’ my mother confided, calling me to the dinner-table, just as she had done when I was a child. Oh, and just look at what I’d achieved and how I’d matured since then!

But shedding friends is harder than shedding pounds. There may be fifty ways to leave your lover, but leaving your mates is much more difficult.

‘Sorry, guys, I don’t want to play with you any more,’ just doesn’t cut it once you’re out of the school playground. ‘I think we should start seeing other people,’ didn’t really hit the spot either. Nor did, ‘Look, I just don’t want to see you any more.’

‘You’re better off without them, dear,’ Mum concluded.

‘Gggwwwhhhfffgh,’ I replied.

‘And you’re better off without that lazy bugger of a husband of yours too, love.’

‘FFFFFghwwwwaaach,’ I added, before keeling over.

No orgasm, no husband, no mind and now – no friends. As soon as I sobered up, I vowed to leave my brain to medical science. Unlike me, it had obviously never been used.

23. You Are Going to Enjoy This Marriage Even If I Have To Divorce You to Do So

Beginnings are easy. We know how to fall in love. Our bodies tell us what to do. We have all those pop songs, arias, poems, films and books which celebrate the euphoria. No, it’s endings that are hard. What about the times when love no longer casts its spell? When joy has evaporated and we’re filled instead with bile and blame?

‘What if you crave passion, sex, friendship and children – all with the same partner? Can such miracles occur?’ I asked the woman in the food-splotched bathrobe in the mirror, only to discover, to my horror, that it was me.

The realization that life hasn’t quite turned out the way we thought it would hits us all at some time. It is prompted by many things. A lover leaving, the kids flying the nest . . . other people’s gazebo extensions. For me, it was waking up alone in my marital bed with images of Bianca’s spandex bikini thong between my husband’s teeth, to find myself surrounded by wine bottles and chocolate boxes, watching I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. You’d think reality TV shows would have helped to remind me that there are people out there who are even sadder than me. But without Rory or the company of my two best mates, I too could hear the jungle beasts growling and prowling as my little campfire flickered down to its embers.

Now that the friendship with Hannah and Jazz had evaporated, I wondered how many of our conversations had gone by, casually, taken for granted, unembraced? How I ached for one of those light-hearted chats about boot-leg jeans and body waxing. Girlfriends share secret lagoons of knowledge about each other’s moods and dreams. One evening, unable to bear the empty skeletal coat hangers on Rory’s side of the cupboards, I began to fill his space with my possessions, and found a card Jazz had given me at teacher’s college.

Friends, you and me . . .

You brought another friend and then there were three.

We started our group. Our circle of friends.

And like a circle, there’s no beginning or end.

On any normal day, I would have rung the cliché police, but tonight instead, found myself blubbering.

In the dentist’s waiting room the next day, I picked up a mag and flicked to an article on health. It said that friendships between women not only fill the emotional gaps in our marriages, but also reduce the risk of disease by lowering blood pressure, heart rate and cholesterol. The receptionist called my name but I kept on reading, riveted. I could have been in a hospital casualty ward cradling my severed arm in a Waitrose bag and still wouldn’t have moved. It went on to say that not having a close friend was as detrimental to a woman’s health as heavy smoking.

Oh great. With so little time left to live, why bother with fillings and flossings? I got up and left the surgery, unseen.

For the first time ever in my life, work was no salvation, although I tried to maintain an aura of zeal for the sake of my